“It’s just because my legs are so much longer—you’re a good snowshoer,” Maud had told me nicely.

“Maud really is a nice girl, sweetie,” my mother went on whispering in the kitchen. The handful of condoms I’d stuffed in two pockets of my jeans seemed to contradict how nice Little Ray thought Maud was.

Maud was very shy at dinner. She became more animated when she started talking about Jane Eyre. Molly remembered reading the novel in high school, but my mom hadn’t read it. When Molly said she remembered Grace Poole getting drunk, my mother thought Grace was someone Molly had known in high school—not the nurse hired to look after the mad wife in the attic. When Maud carried on about poor Helen, who died in Jane’s arms, I could see my mom was confused. Little Ray was thinking of the Helen who’d been thrown out of school, the girl Maud didn’t get to sleep with—not the Helen who dies in Jane Eyre. Because my mother wasn’t a reader, she became agitated and distracted when people talked about characters in novels as if they were real people.

It is hard to know where to hide half a dozen condoms in a TV room, so I just left them in the front pockets of my jeans. There we were, on the futon in our underwear—we hadn’t even kissed—when Maud (lying as still as a cadaver, on her back) said to me, “You know, I just love Molly and your mom. I love your stepfather, Mr. Barlow, too.”

“I love them, too,” I told her, as clueless as ever.

“You know, I’ve never done this,” Maud suddenly blurted out; she sat bolt upright, whipping off her bra. “I’ve been dreading doing it the first time, with a boy or a girl—with anybody,” she said, sighing, and lying down again. Maud arched her back and wriggled out of her panties. She was once more lying as motionless as a cadaver, but her eyes were tightly closed and she was grimacing. “I might hate it, you know—you may have to stop, if I hate it,” Maud told me. “Just go kind of slow, at the start—I’ll let you know how it’s going,” she said.

“We don’t have to do anything, Maud,” I told her—hoping this didn’t make her feel that I found her unattractive, because I thought she was very attractive.