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.

“Right,” I answered her. She sat on the edge of the bed, slowly taking her clothes off. I didn’t watch her; I had my eye on that spot under the skylight where you-know-who had a habit of just appearing. When Rose and I were kneeling together on the bed, she was still taller than I was—even on her knees. When we were lying down and kissing, and feeling each other up, I truly thought Rose was the right girlfriend for me—certainly not because I pitied her.

I mistook the muscle spasm in Rose’s right calf for her first sighting of the infant emeritus. Rose emitted a bloodcurdling cry, worthy of a first-time ghost sighting. Her right foot flopped crazily all around, and Rose grabbed the back of her right thigh—then, suddenly, the right cheek of her buttocks. She’d not told me her muscle spasms had a ripple effect on the right side of her body; the ripples ran from her calf to her hamstring to her gluteus maximus. Rose had writhed off the bed and was propelling herself with her heels, on her back, across the bedroom floor. I was looking everywhere for the diaper man, but I couldn’t see him. I had no doubt that Rose must have seen him.

As with Sally, I would only belatedly learn the gist of what Dottie and my grandmother were saying in the kitchen, where Rose’s piercing screams had reached them. “Heaven have mercy—they can’t be having sex, can they?” Nana asked Dottie.

“That sure as shit don’t sound like sex to me, Mrs. Brewster—not in any of the usual positions I can think of,” Dottie answered her.