“When you want to break up with someone, you’re going to get blamed for it—no matter how it happens, sweetie,” my mother told me. She had a point, but I took her advice on this aspect of love with a grain of salt—as Dottie said they were always saying in Maine.

In poor Sally’s case, I was not trying to break up with her when I took her to my attic bedroom and she saw the spirit of punctuation perfection. Sally was my first girlfriend. I was very fond of her. I didn’t want to break up with her. I just wanted to make out with her, and I knew Nana and Dottie wouldn’t intrude; those two were fussing around in the kitchen, where my grandmother was struggling over one of her mystery casseroles. “When you’re in your attic bedroom, I’m leavin’ you to your own business, Adam—if I need ya, you’ll hear me hollerin’ from them attic stairs!” Dottie had told me.

I suppose I was hoping to impress Sally. I’d told her that my grandfather was a ghost; she said she wanted to see him. She wasn’t challenging me—she sounded like she believed me.

Nora had a way of compartmentalizing my girlfriends—“the overweight one” was Nora’s shorthand for Sally. “Didn’t Sally get stuck in a shower?” Nora was always asking me—thus pigeonholing one awkward moment as the epitome of my “fat-girl infatuation,” as Nora referred to my first girlfriend experience.

This seemed unkind of Nora, who was (as she’d always been) a big girl. But I’d already noticed—at fourteen, going on fifteen, when I was a first-time student at the academy—how overweight girls were discriminated against, often cruelly. I took their side; I felt sorry for them, but I was truly attracted to them. Did their bigness in juxtaposition to my smallness have something to do with my attraction to them? My mom said she thought so.

“Duh!” Nora said, when I asked her about it.

I met Sally at a high school dance. There were dances in the gym at Exeter High School on the weekends. The students were the same kids I’d known in elementary or junior high school, but now that I was attending the academy, I felt ostracized at those dances. The high school kids either ignored me or they treated me as if I’d snubbed them.

The pretty girls were always with someone; they were already dancing. Before I went to my first dance, the snowshoer warned me about cutting in. “The townies who go to the academy are not very welcome at the high school dances, Adam—just don’t cut in,” Elliot had told me.