All I do is compare times to other times. Though they’re not the same, not at all. You could look at it either way. Everything is fundamentally the same and fundamentally different. These men are both exactly the same and completely different. It means the same thing. It means the exact opposite thing. There’s probably some kind of explanation for that in physics.

He said, “Do you want my critique of your pussy?”

“Your critique?”

“Yes.”

“Okay?”

“I love the taste. The smell. I love the lips, the clit, the hair. I love the way it feels inside. I love your asshole. I love all of it. The whole thing.”

I’d like to remember it all somehow, though I know how dangerous that is.

Trying not to think about what came next in high school, right after I told J I would just make out with all my friends, or rather, right after I went about kissing a few of the girls. The way those soft-lipped things each decided I’d talked them into something sickening afterward. The way everyone started turning their backs on me as I walked by. It was the first time I realized whole years can be awful. Not sure I learned a single thing that year. I wish they had just sent me away, instead of letting me slowly unravel in front of everyone, all alone. It wasn’t until I tried to slit my wrists in the lunchroom that anyone said they might have overreacted, that anyone noticed anything was really wrong. And by then none of their moms would let them talk to me.

Something awful is going to happen.

10

IT WAS EARLY JUNE AND THE SPRINKLERS WERE OFF AND ON IN playgrounds across the city, depending on the temperature that day. I watched the girls from Marymount, nearing the start of their summer break. The time of year when the sun makes children agitated and jovial. They spent their recesses at the playground. Sometimes I saw them at the one kitty-corner to their school, next door to the Metropolitan Museum. Sometimes they ventured north, as William and I did, to the playground at Ninety-Sixth. They were easy to pick out, those Alice-blue skirts giving them away. They came with nannies and organic chocolate milk after school. The game I played—which little girls were most like Lonnie? Where did Lonnie fit into this configuration?

Two girls were perched atop a pyramid, not letting the other children climb up the internal ladder that led to the top, laughing and kicking at anyone who tried. Was she withholding as a child? Was she mean like this? Was she territorial? Did she assert her dominance with force?