Because Wheeler was too afraid to be alone with her, he always dragged me along. But the more I fucked off around S.D., the more she smiled. Then one day I received an ornate, cutesy-pie, amazingly folded note via one of S.D.’s friends inviting me up to the Girls School for a Saturday night Sadie Hawkins wingding. Wheeler was stunned. I felt sort of bad. Even suggested that maybe I should blow it off. He told me to go, though, “just to see what she wants.” We both figured it was a subtle ploy aimed at making him jealous.

S.D. and I went out during April and May. She was one of the two or three most popular girls in the school, and at first I was happy about her liking me but for some reason I couldn’t maintain the feeling. S.D. Stuart had a four-year-old’s nose, well-bred cheekbones, a sturdy if large toilet, and those naturally pouty lips earned from years of practice. She was extremely cool, rarely was impressed enough to laugh, wore a batch of wonderful-smelling perfumes and makeups, never let a hair fall out of place, and had nothing in common with me. What I called an alley, she called a cul-de-sac. I wanted to go out in the woods and drink beer, she’d just as soon sit in her room and read The Bell Jar for the seventeenth time. S.D. claimed to be “averse to premarital intimacy.” (At this point, I was told, she was a virgin. “The furthest anyone ever got with her,” Jonathan Wheeler said, “was when Les O’Neill stink-fingered her at a movie last fall.” Wheeler knew this because he’d sniffed O’Neill’s finger during intermission.)

Every few days we’d stroll into town for crescent rolls and Italian coffee and discuss fashion trends with a handful of S.D.’s small-nosed friends. The girls were constantly trying to outdo each other with tales of twenty-thousand-dollar expense accounts at Bloomie’s, Saks, and so on.

Our dates would conclude with the two of us violently sucking each other’s tongue moments before she boarded the bus back to the Girls School. It was as if the bus spewed some kind of magic exhaust. Every time that big, yellow monster came rumbling into sight S.D. would lean into me with a passionate, grinding embrace, I’d have just enough time to pop a woody and slide my hand over her bullet-proof bra, and then the bus would carry her and the other laughing girls away, roaring over my pathetic pup tent.