The AC blasted, and my skin felt pickled. Through the window in the loft I could see the plane trees waving in a new breeze. The sun was drowning behind them, almost down.

I looked up at the ceiling. “Sorry, I think I put Bag Balm on my knees. They were really dry. Sorry if it tastes weird.” But he wasn’t at my knees.

“Are you kidding me?” His voice had the awe of weed, the hush of amazement at the cosmos, at the sound of my name. He was out of himself, brought down to his knees by my nakedness, and I should have realized some power there, but I didn’t. I just wanted it over with.

Soon, it was.

It didn’t hurt, like girls said it would, but it also didn’t feel like anything. Maybe because he kept falling out. He was nervous. He kept saying that: I’m so nervous. And I had to comfort him, telling him it didn’t matter, and it didn’t, but not for the reasons I pretended.

A few nights later we tried again. It hurt this time. He was ready. This was what the girls spoke of, trading cigarettes in the bathroom of the roller rink we would be banned from. Sharp, rending, tearing pain. Stabs, like fishhooks in my body. I felt like a bedsheet being torn, ripped into sections. There was a burning, and my stomach felt tight.

The pain came from where I imagined my soul might be, if I believed I had a soul: my center, that spot where I felt a heartbeat sometimes. Girls might tattoo a circlet of flowers or stars there, a landing pad for the tongue. The pain felt like I was being pulled to the ceiling—and I decided to stay there.

After that night, Lobo wouldn’t sell to the man’s daddy or his friends. One of the other men must have said something, or maybe the red-bearded man told them: how I had led him to my loft with the flowered sheets and the pink quilt my mama had made for me, how I had practically begged for it, how I hadn’t bled or cried.

Somebody said something. Somebody told. After that night, things changed.

Some of Lobo’s customers would stop by the lower field on their trip home and try the door of my shack, to see if maybe I had something to sell or give them, too. After the first surprise visit—a heavy-bellied pothead stumbling into my room, already taking off his belt; he was too stoned and drunk to walk straight, and he went out the door hard when I kicked him, surprise bubbling up like vomit on his face—I learned to lock the door. I would brace whatever I had against it: a bookshelf, cords of wood. I used bags of potting soil as sandbags. I stopped sleeping well.