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matchbook to the floor. As I reach down to pick up the matches, I can feel my face turning red, though I’m not sure why.
    “Ouch. Geez. That hurt,” she says, rubbing the back of her head and letting out another little laugh. “That’ll teach me. For a minute I thought you were someone I knew.”
    “Sorry,” I offer as I hand her back the matches.
    “You didn’t do anything. What’d you do?”
    “Nothing, I guess I didn’t do anything.”
    “Esssaaactly,” she says as though we’ve just had some big philosophical discussion. She looks at me from my top to my bottom.
    “You got a smoke on you?”
    I do. In fact, I have two stale Marlboro Golds that have been banging around in a flip-top box and stuffed into my back pocket for a month. I stole them from Doug. I’ve also kept a condom in the flip-top box—just in case. I figured I’d meet a girl and we’d have sex, and then afterward, while we’re lying togethertangled and exhausted, she’d look up at the ceiling and ask me for a smoke. Naturally, I wouldn’t want to disappoint her.
    “You don’t smoke, do you, baby?”
    Anyone can tell by the way I’m coughing up my lungs that I’m new at this sort of thing. Serves me right for trying to imitate the way Doug takes long, hard drags on his cigarette as though his life depends on it.
    “It’s okay. It’s not for everyone,” she says, and then she takes a puff. “In fact, smoking should be for no one. But what’re you gonna do? It gets you and then … gross, right?”
    She’s careful to blow the smoke away from me, and then she asks, “How old are you anyway?”
    “Fifteen, almost sixteen actually.”
    “I’m seventeen,” she replies. “My name is Angela, but I’m going by the name Marta right now, because … well, because Marta is my real name. My true name. What is
your
true name? No! Don’t tell me. I’ll tell you. You are … you are … Alexander. Like Alexander the Great. What about that? Do you feel it?”
    I wonder if the planet Pluto could feel the change when it was assigned a number instead of a name. Did it matter to that mass of floating rock spinning at the very edge of our solar system that it was being called by some other name, a number? But I don’t mention Pluto, because I have a hunch that talking outer space with this girl will get me nowhere.
    “Um,” I say, “I guess it’s—”
    “Or maybe Alex. We all have true names. If you don’t likethat one, you pick another. No big deal. As long as you like the name and it feels true to you. This cigarette is stale.”
    She throws it down and stamps on it with her sandal. Then she stands up and shakes out her hair.
    I’m in love.
    “So where are the others?” I ask her, looking around.
    What the hell is wrong with me? My whole life, I’ve been praying to end up in a secluded place with a beautiful girl like Angela (or Marta), and then just when it actually happens, all I can think of is
the others
.
    “I mean, I heard there were others,” I add, feebly trying to regain my ground as a guy who knows what he’s talking about. “This guy I know, Chad, he told me there were others.”
    “Not all of us can get away so easy. You know. The moms. They don’t want us running off and getting into trouble in a town they don’t know too well. But what they don’t understand is that we need private time and we need people our own age. Right?”
    “Right.”
    “That’s why we started the club. So we have someplace to go, people our own age to talk to.”
    “The club?”
    She pulls back a bit and gives me a crooked look.
    “The Virgin Club,” she blurts out, and then she pushes a fallen mess of hair away from her eyes as if she’s trying to start over. “I mean, isn’t that why you’re here?”
    “Um … yeah,” I assure her. “I mean, I guess. Actually, Ididn’t know about … um … the club. But I heard. Naturally.”
    We stand there while the sun rises and then sets and then rises and then