“Sometimes,” I said. I did wonder, vaguely. Mostly I fantasized about having my first kiss with some debonair Prince Charming, and occasionally my mind would stray past that to things I’d only seen in movies. But Kane was used to kissing. He’d had girlfriends since fifth grade.

“So let’s do it,” he said.

I didn’t always blindly follow Kane Weeks. But he was my best friend. We didn’t have to swear blood oaths or cross our hearts; we trusted each other, the way you’d trust that your welcome mat would be under your feet the second you stepped to your front door. Whatever he was saying, I was usually thinking. We’d played doctor when we were kids, him groping under my shirt and making me giggle because I knew it wasn’t right but it didn’t feel all that wrong either. So I agreed.

“Here?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

Not that we would have gone anywhere else. The tension in my home suffocated me. His house was the only place we ever hung out. The door to his bedroom was closed. Even so, I could hear his dad down the hall, rattling the keys on the laptop in his office. His dad rarely left that office. Dishes piled up in a fortress around his desk, the smell of stale oatmeal and rotting fruit sometimes wafting down the hall. But Kane’s room was like a trophy showroom—dozens of little gold figures wielding baseball bats stared down at us, our only audience.

Kane untied his sweatpants. I undid the zipper on my jeans and pulled them off, hiding my panties in them as I neatly folded my pants at the foot of his bed.

“Now what?” I asked. I looked at his penis and started to get scared because I’d never seen one that didn’t include arrows pointing out the scrotum, the sperm duct, and other anatomical parts I couldn’t quite remember. He was looking at me too, at everything I didn’t have. Not in a lustful way, like in movies—he craned his neck and cocked his head to the side with scientific curiosity.

He told me to lie down, so I did. He climbed on top of me and told me to spread my legs. He weighed a ton. Suddenly, his body was so much more than a picture in a textbook. It was between my thighs, poking me. I had to stifle a giggle. I was pretty sure that while it was okay when I was seven and we were playing doctor, giggling wasn’t appropriate now. Having his skin against mine was no big deal because we were close, but he’d never been there before. “Is that the right place?”

“Um,” I managed. The right place for what? “I don’t know.”

“Geez, Hail. Haven’t you ever watched porn?”