“If there’s a banister, I can do stairs—no problem,” Rose wrote me back.

The first night I walked her home from the town library, I did my best not to gawk at her limp. There were academy boys who imitated the way she limped, Rose told me. Her parents’ faculty apartment was only on the second floor of one of the student dormitories, but when Rose was limping upstairs, or down, there were boys in the dorm who purposely stayed behind her on the stairs—they watched her limp. Such cruelty was unimaginable to me. I found her very pretty—in a kind of literary, damaged, tragic way.

Rose was a year older, and a year ahead of me in school; she was fifteen, almost sixteen, but she didn’t have her driver’s permit. “I’m not allowed to learn to drive,” Rose told me. “My right foot is my accelerator foot,” she said, “and sometimes I get muscle spasms when I’m sitting or lying down.” I remember how she paused before she kissed me; she was more tentative about kissing than Sally.

There are things you hear that you only later realize you should have listened to more closely. The quiet way Rose said, before our first kiss, that her muscle spasms were worse than her limp; or the first time she let me touch her small but pretty breasts, when Rose told me she was a little behind girls her own age, socially. (She did not mean the size of her breasts, I would only later realize.)

I didn’t wonder, as I should have—seeing how she struggled with the steepness of the attic stairs—why Rose hadn’t stated what the rules were for making out. The “touch this (but not that)” business had not been made clear. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to imagine that Rose might not have made out before. She was such a pretty girl, and she was a year older than me.

Why risk spoiling everything by telling her about Granddaddy’s ghost? I was thinking. Weeks would pass without the punctuation maven showing up. I thought of reassuring or dismissive things I could say if the infant-brained spirit suddenly appeared. “Pay no attention to this tiresome fool” was too cavalier to say about a ghost. I decided it would be better if I gave the phantom English teacher a direct command. Such as: “Get out of my bedroom!” Wouldn’t my taking charge of the apparition be the most reassuring to Rose? Clearly, at fourteen and dying to make out with Rose, I’d not considered the unlikelihood of my taking charge of a specter. Granddaddy’s ghost, especially as an English teacher, was not in the category of a headless horseman—or so I thought. When you’re young and inexperienced, it’s easy to underestimate the power of the supernatural—or of muscle spasms.

I took off my clothes first, leaving my boxers on; Rose just watched me, doing nothing. “Our underwear stays on, right?” she asked.