Growing up, I had two best friends—Margaret, whom I had known my whole life, and Eleanor, with whom I was in love, though for years I had no reason to tell my feelings for one apart from my feelings for the other. Both were fervent.
Eleanor asked me for advice about her Sims, then never took it. Margaret asked me in which of a series of nearly identical photos I thought her boobs looked best for the internet, so I told her. I kept the clothes Eleanor lent me for too long, and I kept the clothes Margaret lent me for too long. Eleanor didn’t borrow anybody’s clothes, and Margaret never gave mine back at all.
We chose each other’s outfits. We slept in each other’s beds. I had a near constant awareness of both my friends as existing in parallel to myself. And that awareness became tender when we were apart, painful when I was apart from them and they were not apart from each other. This happened often enough. They both had a great deal more freedom than I did. Margaret because she was lawless and Eleanor because her parents never made any laws.
Until the summer before our sophomore year of high school, I thought my love for Eleanor was my love for Margaret. Distinctions between ways of loving are fuzzy, and I couldn’t name them, didn’t even know I felt them, and least of all suspected I would soon ruin my life learning to distinguish them—learning I wanted more than one way to love my friends.
On an early, empty afternoon in June, I told my mom I needed to walk over to Margaret’s house. I didn’t explain my urgency because if I said I had to hear Margaret’s gossip in person, she’d ask me what the gossip was about.
At fifteen, I was allowed to walk most places. Doan, our neighborhood in the upper right-hand corner of Ohio, was residential, majority populated by white people, the neighbors all apparently heterosexual. Massive hundred-year-old trees lined its streets, announcing stable affluence. A number of main boulevards stroked through the neighborhood in straight, cardinal directions. Between them ran a network of snaking circuitous avenues that met in irregular, asterisk-like intersections. Cars often lingered too long at stop signs, uncertain who held the right of way. None of these things prevented my mother from being afraid for me all the time, though I was aware that was their purpose. I didn’t know how to accommodate her fear, and I didn’t know how to assess its validity. Very few bad things had ever happened to me. She saw precarity where other people’s parents seemed to see regular life. But then, she was smarter than everyone else. There was no one I trusted more than I trusted her.
The walk to Margaret’s took between five and ten minutes depending on my mood. My mood depended on the weather. The weather that day was humid, my pace languorous. Dense air blurred my skin with sweat by the time I arrived at her house, a friendly rectangular building with a large front yard and a screened-in porch out back. The porch was old and heavily used, with mesh panels for walls that bowed outward like the knees of well-loved pants. I walked directly up the driveway to the back of the house and opened the screen door.
Margaret lay face down on the large white wicker couch in the middle of the room with her shirt off and her chestnut hair pushed up above her head, so it fell over the edge of the armrest. Eleanor straddled her back, her legs folded on either side of Margaret’s bare torso. Bent over, her face hovered inches above Margaret’s skin, a tissue fixed between her fingers. I raised my phone to take a picture of them. Margaret held up a thumb. Eleanor righted herself at the sight of me.
“Totally standard,” I said with pleased sarcasm.
“As usual,” Margaret sang.
Eleanor extracted a pimple from Margaret’s right shoulder blade using her gel-polished fingernails and dismounted. Margaret pulled her shirt back on. I sat down in an adjacent chair. The porch looked like every other space in Margaret’s house, crowded with belongings and evidence of feminine inhabitation. Spare cushions sat in tipping piles pushed up against the room’s mesh perimeter. Potted plants on stands dripped green vines onto the tiled floor, and baskets of decade-old magazines featured the faces of girls we knew only as the women they’d become and instructions about sex we recognized as outdated but couldn’t help occasionally reading aloud to each other in the guise of a joke.
“Mar refused to tell me anything until you got here, no previews, even though you’ve already heard,” Eleanor complained.
She removed herself to the far side of the couch and sat down with her legs folded beneath her, her elbow on the armrest and her pointed chin in her hand.
“Mar needs her whole audience—” I said.
“—and phone tellings only half-count,” Margaret finished, her skin dewy with sweat and the pleasure of having gathered us for a purpose.
Margaret had recently given head for the first time. Hence my need to come over right away, lest she tell Eleanor in person without me. Neither of us had ever made it past anybody’s pants. Margaret’s having done so seemed a near mythical achievement, an announcement of the dawning of a new era of our lives in which we might possibly put our hands and mouths on the bodies of other people. Because she did things first among us. She did them on purpose, and she did them repeatedly in order to get better. She’d climbed in and out of all the possible second-story windows of her house before she’d ever had reason to use them.
Oral sex represented a box that she had wanted to check, so she checked it with a boy who went to a different school than us, who was good-looking but not importantly so, who was seventeen and therefore would go to college in a year and forget that Margaret existed. All of these attributes qualified him for a contained life experience, an experience whose significance would be determined by Margaret. If she didn’t tell anyone, no one would know. Well, we would know, but we wouldn’t tell anyone else because the only people we needed to tell anything to were each other.
“Wait,” I said.
I wanted to see a picture of him first. I’d seen pictures of him before, but I wanted to remember exactly who I was supposed to imagine being fellated. Also, the request lent an air of pomp and circumstance to the telling, which was our preference—anything to enhance our sense of life as genuinely underway instead of just preparing to be. Eleanor pulled up his profile and handed her phone to me because if we let Margaret choose the photo it would take twenty minutes. Eleanor’s oval nails had tiny rhinestones glued into sky-blue polish. She’d painted them herself. She could be very patient in pursuit of getting what she wanted, the way she wanted it.
“He doesn’t photograph well,” Margaret said, the standard caveat.
“Boys never do,” I answered.
I slunk down into the chair. I was tall for my age, my arms and legs long. In this weather, they felt heavy. I used my elbows to prop my hands and the phone just a few inches from my face while I scrolled.
Margaret felt exposed by this moment of judgment and so began to tell Eleanor what she’d already told me, that one of her hundred and five thousand friends other than us had said that one of her friends had said that the boy had a normal penis.
“Which I found comforting in the lead-up, but also like, how do I know that she knows what’s a normal dick? I don’t. However, I can now report that it was fine, a totally nice starter penis.”
“Great news,” Eleanor said. “Thrilled to hear it.”
Eleanor often sounded sarcastic both when she did and didn’t mean something—a point of pride for her, the control of tone, the possibility of a private humor, which I found to be either annoying or delicious.
While they spoke, I scrolled. Pictures of the sky took up half the boy’s profile, but a series of group photos revealed a tall, slim boy with shaggy hair, most often wearing a hunter-green bucket hat with a white swirl embroidered on the front. He could have been better-looking and he could have been worse. The main thing was that he had the bearing of a teenage boy who had definitely already hooked up with at least five total people, which limited risk of a certain variety. A baseline of experience existed.
Copyright © 2026 by Sonia Feldman. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
