My first time, my penis bender with Caroline, prompted my mother to whisper to me twice, as she had at the time—“You shouldn’t have sex with a girl on crutches” and “You don’t have sex with someone who’s just had surgery”—but the old ski patroller, with her emergency medical training, provided Grace with the more comprehensive details of my penis injury. It was not a permanently bent penis that needed a surgery, Molly assured Grace, as the ski patroller had once assured me.

My mom took over telling Grace about my next time, when it was Maud’s turn to lose her virginity. I had to interrupt my mother when she got confused about the two Helens, as she’d been confused before; the Helen who was thrown out of school, the girl Maud wanted to lose her virginity to, didn’t die. She wasn’t the same Helen as the one who dies in Jane Eyre, I explained; she was just a girl Maud didn’t get to sleep with. “You don’t have sex with a girl who thinks she may like girls,” my mom told me, again, before she gave Grace the details of Maud’s contradictory behavior—the way Maud wrapped her long legs around me as she clubbed me with her cast.

“Maud was in a cast?” Grace asked; my mother had overlooked Maud’s broken arm and the cast, but she’d not forgotten Maud’s Yes!-No! cries. Molly mentioned the bloodstains she’d painted over on Maud’s cast, while my mom was putting the antiseptic on my face and ears.

“The Yes!-No! cries went on and on—it was not the next time I hoped you would have, Kid, after your penis bender,” the old ski patroller told me.

Grace would tell me later that she made up her mind about me that New Year’s Eve. “The way your mother and Molly teased you, and the way you went along with it—that’s what made me trust your good nature,” Grace would say. “You were all so good-natured,” she said.

I didn’t doubt Molly’s good nature, or—most of the time—my mom’s. My good nature wasn’t that reliable. Grace may have misjudged the way I was happy to take a teasing from Molly and my mother. With everyone having such a good time, it was possible for me to do what writers do—we’re always imagining a future story; we’re already writing it. That New Year’s Eve, I drifted away. I was no more present at the loss of my virginity, or Maud’s, than I was at the ball drop in Times Square. I was already in Aspen—alone, at the Hotel Jerome. I saw myself there; it was a movie I was already writing. I was not yet plotting when a window of opportunity might come—the plotting, and the window, came later.