There we were, in our underwear in my attic bedroom, Sally and I, rubbing each other everywhere; we were kissing and touching everything, except those parts of ourselves that were inside our underwear. It was twilight, and we were writhing around under the skylight. This time, the late Principal Brewster was talking about commas.

“Boys, boys,” he began. (Trust me: Sally didn’t look like a boy.) “The poor comma can’t do everything, my dear boys—you expect too much of it,” my youthful-looking grandfather said.

I noticed that Sally had stopped rubbing herself against me; she’d stopped touching me, too. This could mean that Sally was sexually satisfied—more likely, she’d lost interest in me, I was thinking. I didn’t notice that Sally had stopped breathing.

“A comma fault, also called a comma splice,” Granddaddy’s ghost was saying, when Sally caught her breath and started screaming. Her screams were of no concern to the deceased faculty emeritus, who decided to sit beside us on the edge of my bed.

Sally ran screaming into the bathroom—a very small bathroom—formerly the attic closet. When I was born, there was no bedroom in the Front Street house to accommodate a live-in grandchild. Once there was a bedroom for me, in the attic, the closet was converted to a bathroom. It was too small a bathroom, to begin with; the shower stall was even smaller. “It doesn’t matter how small the shower is,” my mother told Nana. “My one and only is going to be small!”

It was too small a shower stall for Sally. What was she thinking when she got in the shower in her underwear? In the first place, Sally never meant to turn the water on; she wasn’t trying to take a shower. Sally was trying to get away from the ghost. She sized up the shower as entirely too small for the ghost to get in with her.

Sally’s nonstop screaming had started a debate between my grandmother and Dottie in the kitchen, two floors below.

“I hope that’s not a loss-of-virginity scream—that girl is much too young,” Nana had said. (Dottie would tell me—not then, but later—how she’d answered my grandmother.)

“That sure as shit sounds like too much caterwaulin’, and the wrong kind of caterwaulin’, for a loss of virginity to me, Mrs. Brewster,” Dottie told my grandmother. Sally’s prolonged screaming had sounded like “a toolbox situation” to Dottie, who was prescient enough to have brought her toolbox, when she called up to me from the bottom of the attic stairs. “Is there somethin’ or someone in need of fixin’, Adam?” Dottie called.

By then, the situation in the shower stall had worsened. Poor, overweight Sally had slipped and fallen; before she fell, she’d inadvertently turned on the shower. The cold water must have surprised her; then the hot water had scalded her. She’d contorted herself to get away from the stream. She lay wedged against the door—I couldn’t open the door because she was pressed against it. Her bra and panties were thoroughly soaked, and thoroughly transparent. “Don’t look at me, Adam!” Sally wailed. “Don’t let the ghost get in here!” she cried.