“No, please, tell me,” she said. “What will we be targets for?” When Walter didn’t say anything, she leaned forward provocatively, one slender finger resting against her bottom lip. “Are you talking about…sex?” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

“Kate…” he said in what he hoped was his best warning voice.

“Walter…” she said, mimicking his tone.

“Kate,” he said again, softer. They locked eyes. He could feel her daring him to look away, but he held her gaze, determined not to be the one to break eye contact. Not this time. She straightened her back, jutting her chin forward, a hint of a smile on her lips. Then he felt her foot touching his leg under the table, travelling up along his calf. He jerked his leg away. Kate went back to her Coke, sipping demurely through her straw, hair falling over her shoulders and onto the greasy tabletop.

“You need to relax,” she said. “You’re such a prude.”

“I am not.”

“I bet you haven’t even had it yet.” She picked up a fry. “You know. Sex.”

“Like you have.”

“Sure I have,” she said. “It’s no big deal.” She slid the fry into her mouth while Walter’s world swiftly came crashing down around him.

“With who?” he finally managed to whisper.

“Billy Hamilton. In the woods behind the Texaco on Highway 61.” Saying it as though they had done nothing more intimate than talk about the weather. “It’s pretty great. You should try it.”

Walter wanted to scream. He felt his insides coil with frustration, for all the things that he was unable to say and unable to do, for being so immobile, so weak, for wanting what was apparently the wrong kind of life. Kate just watched him, as if she knew what he was thinking – a trait that he had often attributed to her, even though he knew now that it clearly wasn’t true, that there was no goddamn way she could possibly know him at all.

Enough is enough, he thought.

Two nights later, Walter went to a party out at Oliver Lake, where a bunch of guys from the track team were slinging back beer and skinny-dipping with some girls from the cheerleading squad. Walter ended up having sex with Frances Halliday in the front seat of his truck, their bodies still wet from the river, cold and clammy and sticking together in all the wrong ways. When it was over, Walter drove her home to Riverdale, and they bounced along the dirt road in silence. Walter hoped that Frances had used him in the same way that he had used her, that there was someone else on her mind while her hands were on his body, but when she turned around and smiled shyly at him as she skipped up the front steps of her house, he knew that there hadn’t been.