We fucked for the first time in a horse field in Four Oaks, North Carolina. Jane liked to call it “making love” but I didn’t. A couple of my friends’ ex-girlfriends had used the term with an embarrassing smugness that gave me the creeps. Mousy Town said the phrase was introduced just so Catholic girls could start fucking and Jewish girls could start having orgasms.

After that morning in North Carolina, we fucked every chance we got. I wanted to use a rubber but Jane didn’t like them.

“They take the spontaneity out of it,” she said. “We’ll have to stop every time for you to put one on.”

I frowned.

“Seriously, you don’t have to worry about it,” she promised. “I’m like a clock. Every twenty-eighth morning at 8 A.M. We’ll just have to cool off on the fourteenth day for a few hours. And I’ll go on the pill when I get home.”

When we were in Key West, I said, “Just for the record, Miss Timex, what happens if you do get pumped up?” I was hoping that Jane had nothing against abortions.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “I’d take care of it.”

“I wouldn’t let you go through it alone,” I said. “I mean, you know, I’d help out, too.”

“You’re such a gentleman.”

I loved those ten days we spent down south. The girl was like a drug that made me feel great about myself. I felt good about the outline of my knobby knees in my baggy pants or my toes sticking out of the holes in my sneakers. I liked it better if I had a lopsided case of bedhead or if my eyes were swollen from just awakening or even if my pants were slung halfway down the crack of my ass. I felt more comfortable with Jane than I’d ever felt with anyone. Naturally she took advantage of that.

“’Ja ever play with yourself, Dunph?” Jane asked one late afternoon as I was lying on my back in shorts and a T-shirt on a deserted beach in Naples, Florida. She was sitting beside me, her smooth, tanned wheels crossed Indian-style, reading a Cosmopolitan issue that she’d plucked out of a garbage can. We both were wearing gangster hats I’d stolen from a Guys and Dolls production at school.

“It says here that ninety-nine percent of all teenage guys beat it.”

I lifted the felt brim and looked around to make sure no one had snuck up on us. Jane’s nose was buried in the magazine.

“Well it must be true if it says it in the distinguished medical journal, Cosmo,” I said. “But let me tell you something, Jane.” She finally looked at me. “Playboy Magazine claims that eighty-six percent of all teenage girls occasionally get kinky in the carrot patch—solo, if you know what I mean.”

I arched my eyebrows.