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my age, stunted. At fifteen I’d had a kiss, yes, but a disastrous one, delivered badly by sweet and puny Patrick Fettle, a neighbor boy in Bakersfield who might as well have been my brother.
    When I was growing up, Patrick and Myron Fettle had been my only real friends, particularly during the summer months when other friends were far off and September was farther still. The Fettles’ house sat within a mile of a reservoir, which was banked by levees made of pebbly gray dirt. Myron loved to hunt bullfrogs there, the BBs from his Daisy rifle raining down on the green water, skittering then sinking fast. Patrick didn’t like to shoot; instead, he and I poked holes in the mud with pointy sticks and collected polliwogs in metal coffee cans stripped of their labeling. We collected lots of things in those coffee cans: algae-slicked ferns and pussy willows, white quartz stones with rough edges, and bait worms and kissing bugs. Kissing bug was Berna’s term for a box elder bug, even though they didn’t kiss anything. They bit and bit hard whatever they landed on, thegrayish skin around a knee, the lightly furred lobe of an ear. The bugs were red-edged, eyeless, with legs like filaments and antennae like black thread. They were everywhere in the summer months, which was why, I suppose, we collected them. It was either that or collect their stings, from which would rise itchy pink anthills of skin.
    Then, when I turned eleven (Patrick was my age, in my grade at Truxton Middle School, and Myron was two years older), something irrevocable happened. I began to grow breasts. Suddenly, I no longer resembled a girl. I was one. Myron shunned me overnight and altogether, forgetting me as one does a mangled toy. Patrick, always more sensitive, was slower to give in to the obvious: boys and girls were retreating from each other everywhere, on playgrounds and ball fields, in neighborhoods in towns all over the map and even out in the sticks, where no one was looking. Patrick and I could have stayed friends in secret, I suppose, but we didn’t.
    One summer afternoon, I put on a T-shirt that was two sizes too big and went looking for Patrick. It was a hot, dry day. By the time I finally found him in the vineyard that bordered the main road, there was a yellow film on my legs and arms, and collars of dust around each of my sockless ankles. Patrick was down on his knees in one of the furrows, digging in the loamy dirt with his hands. He didn’t look up as I approached, but I braved ahead anyway, shaking my T-shirt out and blousing it around my waist.
    When I came nearer, I saw there was a dead partridge on the ground next to his left knee. It was an adult male, about the size of a small peahen, with a bluish ruff.
    “He’s beautiful,” I said. “Where’d you find him?”
    Patrick grunted something I couldn’t decipher and went on digging methodically, the mound of dirt to one side growing slowly. The soil on top was darker and damper, and looked cool to the touch.
    I sat down near the dirt pile and watched him dig. It was nearing dinnertime, maybe five o’clock, and the light was changing. The grape leaves around us glowed, backlit, and I saw, under a heavy swag of vine, a spider’s egg, netted and white and so fragile-looking it seemed to be crocheted out of air.
    When he’d cleared a two-foot-square hole, Patrick reached over for the bird, lifting it gently with one hand under the plump body and one under the head so the neck wouldn’t bow. I was amazed by the delicacy in his touch. Once he’d placed the partridge in the hole, he covered the body with grape leaves before he scooped the earth back into place, tamping and pushing with the flats of his palms. When he’d finished, the plot was level with the furrow; only his handprints showed that anything had happened there at all.
    Patrick stood, brushing his hands on the knees of his jeans. “Now the coyotes won’t get him,” he said, looking at the ground near my shoes. Then: