“No,” I mumbled. Had he? He probed and prodded against me, and I finally had to tell him I didn’t think he was in the right place after all. Frustrated, he moved his hand between us and guided himself closer, his eyes never meeting mine. He pushed again. This time, he got it right. It didn’t hurt. He sank into me like a hypodermic needle without the pinch, like the tampons I’d started using earlier that summer. Then he stayed there, bearing down on me for the longest time, until his heartbeat and the clattering of laptop keys all mingled together and I imagined being so flattened like Silly Putty that he’d have to peel me off his sheets later. The sweat coming through his T-shirt soaked my stomach.

“Oh shit,” he’d said before I could ask him what was supposed to happen next. More doubt crept in. I’d helped Kane on many of his adventures—trying to sail his raft in the retention pond out back, making barbeque-sauce-flavored ice cream, holiday caroling to make money for a trip to Disney (we made $3.50, and most of that was from our own parents)—but this was certainly one of our stupider ones. He pulled off me, looked down at his sheets, and grimaced. “Whoa.”

I could’ve asked him to kiss me. He would’ve, maybe, because I never asked for much. But for some reason, that seemed scarier than what we had just done. I knew his mouth much better than the part of his body that had been inside me. Those parts we could hide afterward—forever, if we chose. Go on with our regularly scheduled lives and pretend it had never happened between us. But as I scooted up to the headboard and reached out for my pants, I realized how backward it had been. I’d never had a real kiss, but I’d had sex.

But this was what everyone was talking about. I figured that if sex was that, then kissing probably sucked hardcore.

“Is that all it was?” I’d said to him breezily when he sat on the side of the bed and leaned over to retrieve his underwear. “Hardly seems worth the buzz.”

We never talked about it after that. It was like a footnote, something that I could almost believe hadn’t happened. After that, he went back to having a steady stream of girlfriends, so I guess it was worth the buzz, considering the way they lined up for him, and the way he never turned them down.

But to me, he was just Kane—nothing and everything at once.

Present Day: Thursday, February 14

I’ve lost a lot of memories, but not that one.