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would never say this) to touch them, to explore their bulk and shape, the buoyant slope of them, their quiet yet absolutely incontrovertible presence. My own breasts had grown only a little so far, and could not possibly equal this capacity to command the center of a room. At night, in bed, I stroked my own breasts and wondered at their fresh swells, the soft-then-firming nipples, and, as I did, I wondered what Romina’s breasts would do under my fingers, how they would curve, how the supple skin would respond. The only thing more unbelievable than Romina’s breasts was her own reaction to them. She barely seemed to notice all the new attention. She had always been the kind of girl who stared out of the window and chewed her pencil to shreds and looked perfectly comfortable lunching alone, and her new reknown left that unchanged.
    As it turned out, Romina’s experience had nothing to do with breasts, not talking about them and most certainly not touching them; it was nothing more and nothing less than the philosophical and aesthetic expansion of her world. She had begun exploring her parents’ bookshelves. That was all. I tried to hide my disappointment. That afternoon, she walked me back and forth in front of them, pointing out the spines of Kierkegaard, Sartre, Storni, Parra, Baudelaire,Nietzsche, Vallejo, pulling out the volumes and spilling them open in her hands as if they had wills of their own. She had been sleeping with them under her pillow. She had been waking in the middle of the night and opening them to arbitrary pages, imbibing words, and then reciting them in her head as she drifted back to sleep. She had been rolling words around her mouth, consuming them like food, even instead of food. She had been thinking—and this, I realized, was a very concrete and important action in Romina’s world: her father, after all, was a philosopher, which meant that he had forged a life out of thinking, and that the university even paid him to do it, a notion that amazed me, far as it was from anything I had seen in my own family. Imagine! A man who is paid to think! What happens in such a mind (and such a household)? As Romina spoke, the sun gradually faded from the living room, casting huskier light along the books, and I touched the spines, with their embossed titles and names, wondering what it would be like to draw so passionately from a mere printed page, or, for that matter, draw so passionately from anything at all. By the time night had fallen, my disappointment had given way to curiosity: there was something hallowed and ecstatic about Romina’s relationship with the books that I had never seen before. I wanted to feel what she felt.
    That night, I stayed for dinner, and Romina introduced me as That Girl Who Wrote the Story About the Disappeared, with a glow in her voice that surprised me and made me blush. It had been a year since the story had been published, and she had never said anything to me about it. The parents exclaimed, A wonderful story, we loved it, how brave of you , and a hot shame ran through me at accepting praise for this story that had brought so much trouble at home, that I had willed myself to renounce, because surely it was a bad story, wasn’t it, and I had been bad for writing it? Wasn’t it an embarrassment? Hadn’t it been woven out of lies? Romina’s parents did not seem to think so; the father grinned, the mother served me more potatoes, delicious potatoes, perfectly salted, crisp around the edges. At this table, I realized,it was not my story that was embarrassing but something else, other parts of my life, the things my parents said. Even things they had done. It was a confusing thought, surrounded by cacophonous thorns. I pushed it down and said nothing so I could stay at this table and eat potatoes without breaking the spell.
    We began to spend hours together after school, after homework was done, exploring books, ideas, poems, life’s great questions. We pillaged her