Mrs. McNulty was a bitch about the sound I made when I tore pages out of my notebook. I stopped writing in spiral notebooks. I began to use a loose-leaf notebook, the kind with rings. If you were careful, you could open and close the rings without making a popping sound. Mrs. McNulty had nothing better to do than watch me when I opened and closed the rings, in her hawklike anticipation of the pop. It took me a few weeks to get up the nerve to write Rose the note about the attic bedroom in my grandmother’s house. “It’s on the third floor,” I felt it was necessary to say. I’d still not seen Rose walk. I didn’t know if she could manage stairs.

“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.