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her.
    â€œI’m guessing you haven’t been spoiled by other men yet. I’m guessing I could still teach you something.”
    â€œGo to hell,” Rachel whispered. She liked the feel of saying “hell.” She also liked the sensation of her own long hair brushing her neck and shoulders. Rachel knew her mother would be so mad, madder than ever before, if she knew what was happening.
    â€œDo you know this is the oldest barn in Greenland?” Johnny whispered and slid his warm hands beneath her flannel shirt.
    Rachel felt she might vomit, but her skin rose in bumps to meet his hands.
    â€œMy great-great-grandfather built this barn,” Johnny said, “chopped down his own trees to make the lumber. Where the guy got the energy for that shit, I don’t know. I guess he stayed soberlike George, the damn dull, penny-pinching son of a bitch. Me, now, I can relax and be generous.”
    Rachel was thinking of saying “What do you got to be generous with?” but she was no longer sure what Johnny did or didn’t have. She was considering that a person’s body was something to know the way a stretch of woods or a sandy place was something to know.
    When Johnny slid his arms out from around her, she felt bare. He stepped through and around the rail, and Rachel grabbed his arm to pull him toward her on the other side. Johnny laughed and unbuttoned Rachel’s shirt. He unwrapped her shoulders to reveal the hint of breasts. She didn’t help him undress her, but neither did she resist. Johnny rubbed his whiskers against her flat chest, and when he kissed her mouth, Rachel did not kiss him in return, did not even know how, but just kept concentrating on slowing time, on lengthening all those seconds in which she might become accustomed to his smell. He yanked off his cowboy boots, tossed one, then the other, into the straw. A chicken squawked and flew up.
    â€œMaybe I should wait for you to get a little older.” Johnny dragged his pants off. “But I’m the sort of guy who might not be around here long.”
    Rachel gasped as he laid his warm body on hers on the barn floor, gasped not because the man was too heavy but because he was moving too fast. She had the sense that weight and speed were somehow the same thing, that even a small woman could lie with a giant, just so long as he moved slowly. Despite his experience with dozens of young girls, Johnny didn’t understand the way a girl needed the adventure to progress more slowly. For Johnny, such girls were like the illegal swimming holes he used to sneak into as a teenager—even as he was undressing and diving in, his mind was set on getting away without being caught.
    Johnny was not as muscular as Rachel, and when she felt his ribs slice against her chest she placed her hands on his sides to protect herself. Rachel never closed her eyes and neither did Johnny.He stared into her face, while the brief stab of pain she felt inside dissolved into a kind of easy weightlessness. Johnny’s hair fell forward, his face relaxed, and some drool on his lip gave the impression of melting. When Rachel screamed “No!” she was not expressing pain, and she was not afraid of what was happening to his face, nor was she alarmed at the cool sensation of a blob of chicken shit that had soaked through the straw beneath her. She screamed because the footsteps approaching were those of her mother, now standing in the doorway with the .22. There would be hell to pay, Rachel knew. As Johnny moaned, “Oh God, girl,” the air exploded. Feathers flew up, and Johnny’s body slammed hard onto hers as though another man had jumped onto his back.
    â€œYou animal!” Margo yelled.
    Rachel tried to pull away, but her mother fired three more times and Rachel felt a bullet drive her shoulder into the barn floor. Her lungs emptied beneath Johnny’s weight, and she had to fight for the strength to push him off her.