April pointed to the sign. “See that? I lost my virginity when I was fifteen up there in that little town. I was supposed to be at my girlfriend’s house from noon until night church, but I went with my boyfriend up to an old barn, and we had sex.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Nessa asked.

“You asked what I’m hiding,” April said.

“I’m sure you’ve had sex with other guys since then, right?” Nessa asked.

“Nanny Lucy found out that I wasn’t at my girlfriend’s house and grounded me until the end of the school year. Then it was summer, and she extended the punishment for three more months.” April kept her eyes on the wipers going back and forth across the windshield.

Nanny Lucy had met her at the door, Grandpa’s old leather belt already in hand, and the punishment had been twenty licks for sneaking around. She could almost feel every single lick she’d felt then as the doubled belt slapped against her bare legs and back.

“You’re not hiding it if she found out,” Nessa told her.

“She didn’t find out about the sex, because I wouldn’t tell her. But she ranted at me the whole time she whipped me with a belt, saying that if I wasn’t at my girlfriend’s house, then I had to be out with some worthless boy. She accused me of being just like my wild mother and told me if I’d gotten myself pregnant, I could go live in a box under a bridge,” April said. “When I asked her why she hadn’t kicked my mother out, she said a mother didn’t throw her kid out in the street. Then she reminded me that I wasn’t her child, and she would throw me out.”

“‘What would God think if I did that?’ Or ‘What would the people in Blossom think?’ she said each time she swung that belt. She said she’d hoped that I would be a godly child to make up for my mother, but that it looked like the devil was going to get another one.”

“You didn’t get pregnant, did you?” Nessa asked.

“No, but I sure sweated it. I skipped two periods and was making plans to run away so that Nanny Lucy wouldn’t have to even know about it when I finally started just before I’d missed the third one, and from that day until I left home, I didn’t have sex again,” April said.

“That first time isn’t what it’s cracked up to be at all, is it?” Nessa pulled into the Home Depot parking lot. “I was pretty disappointed. It was far more of a thrill knowing that I was doing something that I shouldn’t on the sofa in my dad’s study at the church than the actual sex.”