We kissed, more and more roughly, until he grabbed ahold of some of my belly fat and pinched it hard. “Oh,” I said, hot and embarrassed. “Sorry.” I was apologizing for the fat. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You’re beautiful.” I wasn’t. You couldn’t pinch beautiful, at least not in the waist. But I didn’t care. He was beautiful. He was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I’ve since learned that—if you’re lucky—you get to go to bed with maybe three or four people in your life who are so big and so brilliant and so perfect they blot out the sun. They become the sun. He was one of them, for me. Even though his bed was narrow and he was inexperienced. Even though he thought I was a chubster. Like he said, it didn’t matter. You don’t get to choose when or by whom you are going to be illuminated and maybe even eclipsed—deliciously, filthily eclipsed. It just happens and who knows why. Who even knows what to do about it, except fuck and fuck until the whole thing blows up.

We had a lot of sex that spring, though I was still nominally dating Matthew, whatever that meant. He had always been withholding, so there wasn’t a big change when I began to spend all my time with Cassie, learning what it’s really like Down There. I liked the badness of it, but felt a curious sense of detachment from the sex act itself. What I really wanted to learn was her coolness, her remove, her ability to seem as if she didn’t care. She would fling herself at me, practically tear my clothes off, send me out of my head with her little fingers, and then roll over afterward and look at me with cool Antonioni eyes, like, Who are you again?

The spring grew hotter and more fecund-smelling. We lay in bed one night in late May, saying goodbye. She was getting ready to go back to San Francisco, to spend the summer with a despised stepmother, the latest in a string.

“Are you going to see Matthew this summer?” she asked.

“Probably,” I said. “I hope.”

And she started to cry, and I was so surprised.