“Here, just . . . just come here,” I said. I pulled him across the seat, and we awkwardly held on to each other. His face was so wet with tears and snot and drool and sweat. But he’d said he wished he was dead, so I held on to him. And then he kissed me, his mouth so salty. There was a little blood inside his mouth, maybe from biting his tongue while trying to murder his father, and I could taste that, too. I wanted to stop, to just listen to him breathe normally. If he could just regulate his breathing, I thought it would be okay, but he kept kissing me, rougher. He was pushing his tongue into my mouth, and I hated this instantly. I just kept thinking, Don’t die don’t die don’t die don’t die don’t die. But was I talking to myself now? Or Zeke? Both of us? It was hard to do anything else but let him kiss me and not die.

And then he started crawling onto my side of the car, pushing me against the door. And his hands started touching my body, and no one had ever touched my body. And I had wanted to keep it that way for as long as I could. I liked Zeke so much. But I didn’t want him to put his hands in my pants in an empty parking lot in Memphis right after he’d yelled at his father because he’d been having sex with some lady in the afternoon. There is maybe no right time for someone to put their hands under your shirt, or there wasn’t for me, but this was a really bad time.

“Zeke, please,” I said, but he kept kissing me so hard, trying to take off my pants, and it was difficult for me to breathe, and he said, “I like you so much, Frankie. I like you so much.” And I started to go deep inside of myself for a second, to make it quiet, and he said, “Do you want to do this? Could we do this?” and it was like I was sinking beneath the surface of a lake, not leaving my body but going deeper into it, and then I just . . . I don’t know what I did. But I filled up my body again, my skin tightening around whatever it was that made me a human being, and I pushed Zeke away.

“Zeke,” I said, “please don’t. Okay? Please don’t do that.” And he seemed to kind of snap back to being that weird little boy I’d first met at the pool.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He started crying again, which I could not handle. He could cry about the other thing, but not this.

“Zeke! Please. Okay? It’s okay. You didn’t do anything. You didn’t hurt me. You stopped, okay? We’re okay. You’re okay.”