She looked at me a long moment. I had that sudden feeling one has in the moments before a first kiss, that everything is narrowing to one small point. I felt breathless again, though I’d stopped running some time ago. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

She continued to her car. Neither of us had said anything about my taking her hand, about the palpable current between us. It is so hard to talk about the body.

That is, I suppose, the nature of the flesh. When one is a boy, like these boys at Chelsea, one’s flesh is so insistent—it is constantly in the way, constantly asserting its dictates. Feet too big, arms gangling out of jackets, hair appearing overnight on parts of your body where there was none before, genitals over which you have no evident control, spurting and rising at odd, inconvenient times, at the sight of some longed-for skin, the turn of a head, the back of a neck. You might share a dance with a girl, have a short conversation, and her presence is stamped on you indelibly part of your flesh. The fingers that brushed your arm. The careless laugh that entered your soul. The eyes the color of moss-covered stones underwater that softened briefly as they looked at you. All those moments sink into one’s flesh. I could tell you exactly where the moles are on Jennifer Hargraves’s back. I could tell you the texture of Alice Murray’s hair—she was the girl who sat next to me in sixth-grade English. I could tell you of the iron smell of my mother when she came home from a day’s work, cleaning powder and fatigue and the sour tang of effort ill rewarded. And now, like a boy again, I could tell you about the play of dark and light through Jana’s hair, the rings, just two, that she wears. One is amber, shot through with some small white lines the color of vanilla ice cream, and one is a small, ruby-colored stone that shines slightly as she pushes a hand through her hair. I have spent so much time, so much effort, setting my flesh aside. I don’t even look at myself as I step out of the shower. It is as though I am afraid to see my own flesh. I suppose I am afraid to see it as it is, unused, untouched, unloved. I sometimes feel that if I could rip it from my bones, I would. I would leave only what’s clear and pure there for others to see. Not this flesh that covers me, but the muscled heart that beats within.