B: (presumably he nodded)

E: Then you know. My boyfriend stole the master key from the janitor, or else he bribed him for it. He closed the classroom door. It was winter, and our parents were home. We needed a warm place. By then we had already had sex twice, but it wasn’t that good. He didn’t exactly have an aptitude for the delicacies of the female body, if you know what I mean. He was like an industrial driller. Actually, it even hurt, but I thought I had to put up with it, that it would get better over time, I just had to get used to it. I wish girls knew that isn’t true, that they can say no any time. Anyway. We went up to the classroom when the last band had almost finished. I tried to drink as much as I could, hoping that it would help. It didn’t. Then someone said through the mic that there was going to be another band: Fogtown would play at the end. I really wanted to see them, but he dragged me with him. He wasn’t sober, and I was a bit scared of him. I thought if I gave it to him quick he would let me see the rest of the show. We went up to the classroom. He threw me onto one of the benches, he ripped off my clothes right away and started with his usual business, hammering away as hard as he could. Then the concert started downstairs. I can’t describe to you what it was like. He stopped too. Even though the music was coming through the walls, from one floor beneath us, muffled, we couldn’t focus on anything else.

B: What genre was it? Rock, alternative, heavy metal?

E: I don’t know. It was constantly changing, but at the same time . . . like, it didn’t change at all. We only heard an approximation of it, you know. The music echoed through the corridors, it was filtered by layers of concrete. It must have been so much better for those who saw them up close.

B: But in the end, you didn’t go down.

E: Of course not. He seemed to adapt to the rhythm of the music. It didn’t hurt anymore, quite the opposite. It felt like we were in a dream. We kept on doing it as long as the concert went on. I have no idea how long it took. It felt like days, I swear. Years, aeons even. The next day I couldn’t walk. Nothing ever was anything like whatever happened on that bench. It wasn’t just sex. That was the least of it. It felt as if we had changed along with the music, I don’t know, like we were many things, not only ourselves, but light and time and thought, all drifting though some infinite space . . . This sounds stupid, but it was like we were the entire world. It was perfection itself.