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neither. Our situation never bothered Babs, who seemed completely satisfied with the feeding habits of bivalve mollusks, but the isolation ate away at me. I dreamed of joining the cool girls at the lunch table, at the shops, at the weekend parties we knew must be taking place but we were never invited to. I would stare at myself in the mirror at home for hours, wondering what it was that made me different.
    The fast girls, the ones with all the dates, steered well clear of us. Babs and I heard of the others’ boyfriends and what the girls were doing with them—blow jobs in the bathroom and all that—but we assumed that we would be ignored by the male species until college, if not beyond. Then, while I was serving cinnamon cake at the Christmas fair, a boy named Sean with large brown eyes and freckles came over and asked my name.
    His ears, I noticed, were inordinately delicate—fine and white as bleached seashells.
    “Tabitha Deacon,” I said.
    “You make this cake?”
    “What?”
    “The cake?”
    “Oh. No. Got it from the store.”
    “Isn’t that cheating?” he asked, seemingly serious. “Aren’t you afraid of hell?”
    “I’m a Jew. We don’t have hell.”
    “Lucky for you.”
    I looked at the cake, wanting to die. “It’s just for charity. The money. And it’s—it’s good cake.”
    “You’ve had it?”
    “Sure.”
    He grabbed a piece and crammed it in his mouth, then screwed up his face and pretended to choke.
    “It’s awful. Fucking God. I’ll take four pieces.”
    “Four?”
    “Sure. There’s loads of girls I hate here. I’ll give it to them.”
    The next few afternoons, Sean was waiting for me at the school at the end of the day. Babs politely hung back while the other girls fanned out beyond us, smirking and jealous. What exactly Sean and I talked about is now a mystery. Movies? Algebra? I can’t imagine. After a while I would tell him it was time for Babs and me to go home.
    The fourth day, Friday, Babs looked at me brightly.
    “Taz, I can’t walk you home today.”
    “Why not?”
    “I’ve got a project at the lab.”
    “On a Friday?”
    She didn’t bother to answer, just turned on her heel and retreated into the school building, ignoring my braying protests.
    Sean, who was waiting by the gate, didn’t ask where Babs was. We headed out, shoulder to shoulder, toward Soldier’s Field, a place we’d eventually take to visiting nearly every afternoon. There was a green hollow at the edge of the woods where we would sit, even in the winter, when the ground was hard and frozen. He was a great planner, Sean. If it was raining he brought plastic disposable ponchos; if it was cold, he gave me hand warmers, the kind that heat up after you shake them back and forth. What could they be made of, those chemical concoctions? The next day I’d find them in my pockets, formed into the shape of my inner fists, hard as ancient bits of chiseled stone.
    My first thought, as I followed Sean to that field behind the post office, was that he wanted a touch of this or that. And he did, really. But he also fancied himself a poetry lover. He would arrange us comfortably, then pull out a book and start to read. I would sit there on the plastic tarp, smoothing the plaid skirt of my uniform over my wool stockings, rather at a loss. How is a girl supposed to react to Keats? Does she gaze at the reader adoringly? Lie back seductively on one arm?
We will drink our fill
Of golden sunshine,
Till our brains intertwine
With the glory and grace of Apollo!
    “It’s good, yeah?” he’d ask later.
    “Yeah! Oh, yes. ” I’d try not to look bored, waiting for him to either kiss me or give me a Guinness out of his bag.
    When I heard the other girls at school describe their first grapplings with sex—on the floors of garages, or pushed down on the hood of a car at thirteen—I knew that I was lucky. Sean was my first, and it was a truly lovely event, the details of which I would never share with anyone, even