And Daddy’s girl was sprawled and hugged up, all at once mind you, sprawled and hugged up with Danny Stuyvesant, who was the more upwardly mobile among his cousins who had also courted Liliane since puberty. But this was getting to be almost grown-up and her panties were wet and her legs had thrown off her crinoline petticoat so that Danny Stuyvesant’s leg could get between hers. Liliane’s lips ached. She imagined she must be smiling too much, but that was impossible cause Danny’s tongue was always somewhere in her mouth and his hands were everywhere, like hers, discovering all kinds of new rhythms. And Garnett Mimms sang on and Liliane’s daddy strode on down Spring Street in the Twee-twee-tweedlie-dee of a Friday night, pausing here and there to chat and flirt. Some men feel women’s looking at them a certain way demands at least a casual response: you know, sorta like noblesse oblige. Tickling little girls’ necks while you talkin’ up they mamas, blowing on a grown-lookin’ sixteen’s shoulder cause that’s where your mouth happened to be leanin’, smellin’ on it the perfume of youth.

Liliane smelled herself and this was not dirt. This was more like she imagined first blood smelled if it had no color and capillaries fused from your lover’s body to yours. This was the smell of fusion. Liliane exceled in physics, but was a dramatically pathetic biology student. Fusion, she knew. Biology, well, Danny’s hands were explaining hers to her, how no one had ever even so much as touched. And cause it was dark in the cousin’s aunt’s bedroom, still no one had seen.

Liliane’s head swirled. Her hips cried with every wail of Garnett Mimms on automatic downstairs where the rest writhed on two feet. Here in the dark with the one boy she’d gotten past Papa, Liliane saw the flowers from the hushed, just-bout-made-it wallpaper wandering her body like Danny’s hands or thighs. When his mouth pounded on that muscle in her throat where every general practitioner in the world swore was a goiter, Liliane thought Danny was sucking her up the way the canal by Bellevue Avenue sucked up little ashy black boys in a flood. Liliane was floating. She was fallin’. Her dress was gettin’ in the way of her tongue’s trips cross Danny’s cherry bronze cheeks. And Daddy kept movin’ up Spring Street, ever so genteel.