Mitty couldn’t be certain if what they did was sex because she had nothing to hold it up against. She hadn’t yet learned what sex looked like between two girls, if sex was even possible without the burst of semen into the tip of an expired condom. With a boy, the act would’ve been obvious, marked by an inarguable start and finish, his initiation and completion. But with Esme, it ebbed and flowed so naturally, time stretching to meet them, that even the point at which their own bodies began and ended began to blur. Touching Esme made Mitty feel as though she was being touched back. She followed her instincts, searching the parts of Esme she’d only nervously hovered above until now, initiating acts she’d imagined solely in her most unfettered dreams. She felt like an explorer—starving and curious—and wondered briefly if this was how the boys felt too, moved not by expertise but by ambition, a confidence in their own will to discover.