“Of course I’ve asked him. But I’m serious this year,” Serena said. “I’ve been preparing for this for a long time. This is the summer we’re finally going to do it. We just have to convince him first.” She pulled my hair tight against my scalp. “And now we have an inside man, which can’t hurt.”

There was a sour edge to the pride I felt at this. Was this the only reason they had chosen me? “How are we going to convince him?” I said.

“Just ask yourself,” Laurel said. “What do we have that he wants?”

“He doesn’t want anything,” I said.

Laurel laughed, throwing her head back against the plastic. “Of course he does,” she said. She pushed the waistband of her shorts a little lower. I closed my eyes, concentrating on quelling the prickling in my throat.

“In case it’s not clear, Laurel would like Serena to prostitute herself,” Janet said.

“In case it’s not clear, it’s a win-win,” Laurel said. “Sleep with an extremely hot guy. Learn to literally fly. Where’s the bad?”

“Where do I start,” Janet said.

“Obviously you wouldn’t understand,” Laurel said, and I leaned forward, because this was a partial answer to something I had been wondering, something important that couldn’t be asked directly. Laurel had obviously had sex. She had told us already about screwing the pastor’s son under the high school’s bleachers after church one Sunday that spring, the way his crucifix kept hitting her in the eye as he pumped and strained, until she caught it and ripped it off. Fake silver on a cheap chain. He followed her around for weeks afterward, laden with flowers and misspelled poems (“I miss your sweat body / I miss your sweat face”), but she wouldn’t suffer a repeat performance. He kept saying the same stupid thing to her: You look like an angel.

In truth, I felt that I would have known this about Laurel even if she hadn’t talked about it openly. It was something in the way she held herself. But her jab meant that Janet was, like me, well, unversed in the ways of men, as my mother would have put it.

fig. 1: the closest I had ever gotten to sex was the time I built myself a bedmate. I stuffed a matching set of pajamas with dirty clothes and topped it with an old pillow printed with Mickey Mouse’s insane grinning head. I’d seen the movies, or some of them. I was desperate to know what it would feel like. I nestled into my soft monster’s armpit at night. I reached into the fly of the pajama pants and pulled out a handful of stuffing. I climbed up onto him, rubbed against the little semi-soft cone. I did more. I acted out the things I’d seen, heard of. Needless to say, this illuminated almost nothing.