“They’re laughing at us because I’m small,” I said to Sally.

“They’re laughing at us because I’m fat,” Sally told me, without hesitation.

“I don’t think you’re fat, but I know I’m small,” I told her.

“I know how to shut ’em up,” Sally said, pulling my head to her breasts and holding me there. This was when I got the idea of making out with her in my attic bedroom; this was also when the disc jockey decided to switch from slow Elvis to fast Elvis.

First my face was pressed against Sally’s boobs, and we were dancing to a dead-dog dirge; then Elvis was singing “Blue Suede Shoes” or “I Got a Woman,” and I was trying to hang on.

Fast-dancing with Sally was an exercise in staying out of her way. I soon realized Sally was intent on doing damage to the couple who’d laughed at us the quickest and the loudest. Sally hit the couple hard, mid-twirl, hipping them across the gym floor, where they fell together in a tangled heap. “Oops!” Sally said, twirling back to me. I realized she was more agile than she looked.

I liked her so much, I even introduced her to my mother and the little snowshoer—this was in the fall, before the ski season, of course. But there was nowhere Sally and I could have made out in Mr. Barlow’s faculty apartment; it was a small apartment in one of the academy dormitories. I would have had to bring Sally into the dorm, where all the Exeter boys could get a look at her. I was afraid of the comments one of those cruel boys might have made. I was brand new, as both a faculty brat and an academy student. Many of those Exeter boys were smarter and more sophisticated than I was. I felt I was an outsider among them.

I liked how clear Sally was about the rules for making out; she was exceptionally clear about the guidelines. Compared to Sally, my later girlfriends would be vague or misleading or self-contradictory about the regulations regarding touching or no touching. “We keep our underwear on—there’s no touching anything that’s inside our underwear,” Sally told me, as we were going up the attic stairs. “Rubbing is okay—we can rub against each other, anywhere we feel like it,” Sally said.

“Okay,” I said. At fourteen, who wouldn’t be okay with that? And what if I hadn’t said a single word to Sally about Granddaddy’s ghost? What if the never-a-headmaster had just shown up, blathering about punctuation marks? It’s hard to imagine that would have turned out any better. Exeter is a small town. Everyone knew Lewis Brewster was dead; everyone had heard how he’d died.

Like many things, ghosts are a cultural problem. People who haven’t seen a ghost expect to see their prevailing fantasy of a spirit: a gauzy shape, a vague presence, or the mere sensation of a spiritual life; a bodiless voice, a cold draft, a chair that moves. People who don’t know ghosts aren’t expecting a person who seems real.