“Her hair is like plastic.”

“I know,” he said. “It’s hair spray.”

She smelled like flowers. Her legs were smooth and slick with baby oil. She had blondish hair that always seemed damp, and intoxicating whiffs of floral chemical clean issued from her when she ran her fingers through it.

Lucas sat beside her on the beach, while I crouched jealously in the shallow water, grasping fistfuls of sand and squeezing so the sand squirted out. Lucas could hardly look at her but I did. She liked to sit with her arms behind her for support, her head thrown back, and her eyes closed, offering up the defenseless hollow of her throat and the perfect scoops of her breasts.

Once I saw her with Lucas in the bathhouse at Tame Jaw Beach. The door was locked, but I climbed up on the seat of a bicycle parked nearby and looked through the tiny screened window. They were sitting side by side on the bench, Lucas’s eyes were closed, while her hand moved inside his bathing suit.

He would be mortified if I brought this up with him now, even though it’s the most normal thing in the world, for a thirteen-year-old boy to mess around with a pretty girl. It wasn’t normal for him, though. It wasn’t normal for us. A funny thing happened to me as I watched them that afternoon in the bathhouse. I can’t even say what it was exactly—a kind of disassociation. As if I were floating. I went back to the water, I remember, and poked blue crabs, which moved sideways, suspicious, through the sand and into the water as if to drown themselves. But even though I was in the hot sand, in the shallow water, I could hardly feel the sun, the water. Part of me was back in the bathhouse perched on the window like a spider, watching Katrina’s awful hand moving.

Now, I stood with my back against the closed door of my bedroom, wondering why I was thinking of Katrina at a time like this. But I knew. It was because that was the first summer that desire confused things for us. And desire can be such a heavy, unwieldly thing, too big to conceal, the thing that makes you visible, public, as the poem goes, like a frog. And yet, it’s also the thing that makes you somebody.

Fuck this, I thought. And I meant fingernails on skin. I meant the warm hand around my foot on the couch. I meant crows and train whistle. I meant mother. Brother. Stranger. I was angry that my mother had kept secrets from me, and that Cole had secrets, too. I was angry that Cole had distracted me from finding the answers I needed. But most of all, I was angry at myself—because alongside the anger, I felt something else blooming—a longing as terrible as thirst, but tender also.