It hurt but I kept pushing up to her and trying to open my legs wider. So we lay there, twisting and rutting on the ground. I came. I’d never come before with something inside me. And my bud between my legs filled up until I felt ready to burst. I was panting, and she seemed to suck the air right from the center of my body. Taking my breath.

I came again and then she did. We were wet and sticky and a mess. My grandmother could call any time. Rohn held me.

I wanted to ask her, “How can you be?”

I could not comprehend.

Later that night in bed, I kept waking just at the edge of sleep, warmed by the soreness between my legs.

Carson McCullers wrote about “freaks” and “misfits.” Faulkner wrote about freakish habits, and then there was Huck and Jim. There is a strange kind of tolerance down south when it comes to personal habits. Just don’t involve politics. Just keep it behind closed doors so that it can be gossiped about. Fantasized about. Keep it under cover of night so that tales can grow.

I was your basic black adolescent tomboy with pigtails everywhere and a pointed chin. I looked from beneath long-lashed eyes without raising my head and gave tight-lipped secret smiles and rakish grins. I shrugged off the impossible.

What was nasty was funny to me, and I smelled of sweat and my jeans had grass stains. I masturbated to movie magazines and let boys feel me up because it felt good. My experiences had, in some twisted way, prepared me for Rohn.

I was told that I would burn in Hell if I did practically anything. I was inevitably going to Hell, but I was too terrified of that fact to give it much thought. So I ran wild like the heathen I was, amid flowers with odors sweet and heavy enough to drug you; ran with dogs and other beasts that copulated when the spirit struck through the tall grass on hot summer nights. This was as real to me as Bible verses. So Rohn was real to me.

Rohn was the bill for some long-ago charge that her mother—or her ancestors—had run up. Her mother accepted her as such.

She had not been made to go to school. Legally they got her declared an idiot or something. She was taught at home, better than the schools around here could teach her, most likely, because her mother was educated.

Her mother and her elder brother were the only ones who had anything to do with her. The others despised her. She told me that her younger sister had twice tried to kill her with rat poison. Her father beat her whenever he came home and found her there without the mother or the brother.