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sensuous piano lessons. I didn’t want to have more to miss when he was gone.
    When I’d finished the nectarine and buried the pit in the sand, I went back up the porch steps. I stopped and peered in the sliding door. Stephen wasn’t at the piano, he was helping my mother sit down in a chair by the dining table. She was wearing her purple scarf, and some red bangs, fluffed up to look thicker, poked outover her forehead. She turned her face up to Stephen and smiled weakly. He touched her, his fingers resting on the side of her neck, his thumb grazing her earlobe. I decided not to go in and went back down to the beach. I walked along the edge of the waves—not looking ahead where I was going, but down at the seaweed, shells, and foaming water at my feet, thinking eventually they’d lead me somewhere.
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    I sat on the cement wall that lined the public beach strip, watching the swarms of tired, sweaty families carrying coolers and umbrellas and L.L. Bean canvas bags. I kept an eye out for the teenagers, strutting in tight groups back and forth from the general store, some of the boys playing volleyball with a fierce energy. I saw one boy, tall and spare, with tan shoulders, and hair in a thick ponytail like Stephen’s. He played volleyball well but nonchalantly; he had a cigarette propped in the sand by his feet and in between serves he picked it out and dragged on it. He looked older than me, maybe seventeen, and confident—the type that would look straight into your eyes for a while before he kissed you. I lit a cigarette and watched him play.
    â€œMan-hunting,” my mother would have called this if she’d been there. Flirting was something she liked and knew she was good at. But this thing I’d been doing since my body had gone berserk with strange longing felt like something else entirely.
    It had started with dreams. Not dreams about being with boys or anything specifically sexy; those dreams didn’t come until Stephen moved in. In these earlier dreams I’d be alone, usually sitting on a park bench, and between my thighs this bubble would begin to grow, a swollen, living thing that was frightening even though it felt so good, because I was not sure if the bubble was a part of me growing outward or something dangerous trying to get in. Eventually, even the fear didn’t matter and I would press my thighs together, trying to keep the bubble from escaping, willing it to move harder against me. I’d always be struggling to keep a straight face because people would be walking by with their dogs. Occasionally,some man or boy would sit down and try to talk to me and I would close my eyes and wish him away so that I could finish alone. Often I would wake with echoes in my stomach and thighs, my underwear slippery.
    I knew what it was. I’d read Our Bodies, Ourselves; I’d had many explicit conversations with my blunt mother. I wanted to find that feeling when I was awake. I tried touching myself, late at night with my covers pulled up over my head like a tent, my underwear down at my ankles, wetting my fingers in my mouth and probing around. And sometimes I’d manage a minor explosion, a muscle spasm, that was so unlike what I’d dreamt that I’d end up crying, feeling stupid and disgusting. I’d fall asleep smelling myself on my fingers.
    Then, last year, after Stephen moved in and I started having dreams about him, I fooled around with a few boys. But the only time I felt anything was before they touched me, when I was anticipating their touch, imagining it. Passion, I decided, wasn’t this gropey sex stuff, it had nothing to do with a tongue in my mouth or fingers plunging around in my pants. Ecstasy, or the closest thing I could get to it, came right before a kiss, in the swollen bubble of space between lips that crackled and pulled, when I could still imagine the feel of a boy’s mouth, before it actually clamped down, real and slimy,