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happened to people stricken by such perversions. Their families put them into institutions, where the cures were as bad as the sicknesses. There were shocks and ice baths and metal picks through the brain that caused people to come out wrong, if they came out at all. Some could no longer speak. Some did nothing but stare into space for the rest of their lives.
    If I told anyone the thoughts I was suffering, the sensations Ariel aroused in me, it would be the last of me. I would survive, more than likely, but as something other than myself. That was the punishment for thinking and feeling such things, the destruction of one’s ability to think and feel.
    C oming to a stop in the garden, on the same bench on which I realized what I felt for Ariel went beyond what I should feel, that my body yearned for her in a way it had never yearned for the boys who tried to get beneath my sweater, I decided too much had happened. With the war and Edward and Nan and then Scott. Everyday life needing so much tending, none of us were paying attention to me, and something went wrong. I got broken somehow.
    Since there was no one I could ask to fix me, not without telling them the truth, a dangerous truth best kept to myself, I knew I had to find a way to control it. If only I could tell myself to stop. If only the parts of me that turned what I felt for Ariel into something ugly and ungodly would turn them back into something pure. If only my punishments worked, like the flagellants who beat themselves with whips to atone and avoid sin. Maybe I just needed to find something more painful, I thought, something that inflicted greater damage, without leaving marks behind that others would surely see.
    When Ariel found me, because I was too dumb to have run far enough away, when she sat down beside me, her hand warm on my back through the fabric of my dress, despite my desperation to make it stop, all I wanted was to turn into her and see how much warmer she felt closer.
    “I’m sorry you had to see that,” she mistook my personal torment for compassion for Nan. “I know it had to be upsetting.”
    “It was,” I said honestly, but it was Ariel’s hand on my back that was most upsetting, because it felt so sinfully good.
    “She’s old,” Ariel said, and I wished Nan’s age could be the worst of my problems. As much as losing her frightened me, though, and it did, it was the natural order of things. What I felt as Ariel’s hand stroked my lower back and I willed it to places beneath my clothes that would turn us both into deviants was anything but natural.
    When I said nothing, Ariel’s fingers beneath my chin were so gentle, I thought she might have realized I was unwell all on her own, but, as she rotated my face toward her, her concern looked different than I expected. In her eyes, I saw a world of something I couldn’t understand, but that I knew would make everything better, at least for a moment.
    Falling forward, I heard Ariel’s gasp in the instant before our lips touched, and, feeling everything I expected to feel and more, I melted into her. Her lips were as soft as the petals of the flowers I used to stop to smell on the way to school. They tasted like peach tea, or nectar, and I knew whatever I had was incurable. In the moment, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be cured.
    I didn’t know how long I stayed that way, drinking from the well of Ariel’s lips, but it was too easy to get lost in the feel of her, to believe that it was okay, that what I felt for her was right instead of wrong, that it should make me smile.
    As it hit me what I had done, how it made me feel, how much more I wanted to feel, I pulled away at once, and, as Ariel’s eyes slowly opened, she looked positively stunned.
    I knew she must hate me, that she must be thinking how she could tell my family, how she had to tell them so they could take care of my problem. Then, Ariel’s hand slid up my arm to my neck, and, instead of shoving me away, she pulled me