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.

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!”