She’s sitting cross-legged on the bed with my left foot in her lap, painting my toenails a deep shade of pink. I have just finished spilling my guts about Leo, the entire humiliating story complete with the sordid details: the music, the posters, the holey underwear, and the unfortunate confession of love that I still don’t know how to feel about.

“I totally choked,” I agree. “But I’m over it. I’m ready now. I’ve got a plan.”

“Are you sure you still want to do it?” Afton switches to my other foot. “I mean, there’s a case to be made for waiting. No need to, like, rush these things.”

“You did it when you were sixteen,” I point out.

“Yes, but it was in a garage, remember, with this boy I hardly knew whose sister was in my ballet class. And it—the sex, I mean—wasn’t very good.” Afton sets the bottle of nail polish on the bedside table and leans back against the headboard, remembering. “But at least he spread a blanket out on the floor next to the washing machine.” She smiles almost sadly. “And he said I was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.”

Yeah, yeah, she’s beautiful. Tell us something we don’t know. I’m already familiar with this story—Afton told me right after it happened. I also know that Afton’s second time had been later that same year, with a college boy at a party in San Francisco. Afton didn’t say much about that, but afterward she seemed to form a negative opinion of college boys in general, and she and I took the bus to a Planned Parenthood in Blossom Hill for Plan B. The third time was with Logan, Afton’s current boyfriend. Logan counted for sexy times three through like a hundred, over a year of hooking up regularly, usually at his place or the back of his car, but one time they apparently did it in Pop’s camper trailer parked next to the house.

In other words: Afton is well-versed in sex.

Right then we hear the garage door opening. Mom coming home. I glance at the clock; it’s after eleven. Abby has been asleep for hours. Pop read her stories and then went into his den downstairs and shut the door. He likes to read, comic books mostly, a bit of high fantasy thrown in now and then. It’s one of the ways we connected, early on. He heard that I liked art and let me borrow these old-school graphic novels about elves, but not like cutesy Santa elves—sexy badass elves who rode wolves and were descended from aliens. I loved it.