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By Root 774 0

experienced than I was. She took me under her wing, told me whose parents were famous and why, which girls were Legacy, and what the Social Register was. Most important, she made sure I never walked up Eighty-fourth Street to the two-block no-man’s-land ruled by neighborhood toughs. Chapin and Brearley had addresses on East End Avenue’s thin strip of privilege, but the half block west into old Yorkville was iffy. The toughs were just kids, really—kids who sat on stoops, who had knives, and whose favorite pastime was scaring nubile private school girls. “Why can’t the police stop them?” I asked her. We were huddled at the corner of Eighty-fifth Street. I was blocking the wind that tore down East End from the river so that she could light her cigarette. She shrugged. “It’s their turf. Besides, the fathers are all cops.”

My friend went everywhere on her bike, dodging traffic in a faded jean jacket, her stick-straight pale hair flying behind. She lived in a town house off Madison Avenue, and her parents were divorced. We’d sit on her bed after school and talk about boys. I’d never been kissed, and she promised to tell me the secret of kissing, but only if I was her slave for the year. She knew John. He went to Collegiate, the boys’ school across the park and brother school to ours. He’d been to a party at her house the year before and had left a black leather ski glove, which she kept hostage on her dresser. Part of learning the secret meant listening to her go on about how cute he was and how she would become Mrs. JFK Jr. Sometimes when she passed notes to me during Spanish class, she signed them that way as a joke.

At the end of ninth grade, the secret was revealed.

“Imitate what the boy does.”

“That’s it?” I said, my eyes widening.

“That’s it,” she said, tilting her chin and blowing a flawless smoke ring in my face.

By the next fall, I had been kissed, and that November one of the cool guys from Collegiate asked me out, although we never called it that. He and his friends were known as “the Boys” and they had nicknames that rang like handles: Sito, Wilstone, Johnson, Doc, Duke, Mayor, Hollywood, Clurm, Ace. He came with three of them to pick me up. All had long hair and puffy down jackets, and he whirled a red Frisbee upside down on his finger, mesmerizing my seven-year-old brother, who showed an excitement I tried to hide. “We’re going to Kennedy’s,” the whirler told my parents. “His mother’s home.” I kissed my father and promised to be home by eleven. I had never been to Kennedy’s before.

We walked up Park to 1040 Fifth Avenue, and when Lenox Hill dipped and flattened, they spread out—one across the street, another behind me, the one they called Sito short-stopping the divider—and they tossed the Frisbee across the wide avenue as we went. The boy I liked took my hand. It was cold that night, and soon the holiday trees would go up on the center islands that stretched north from the Pan Am Building all the way to Ninety-sixth Street. The sidewalk sparkled, the streetlamps catching bits of silver mica buried in the cement.

The elevator at 1040 opened onto a private foyer. There was a huge gilt mirror and the smell of paperwhites. The front door was unlocked, the rooms dark, and Kennedy’s mother wasn’t home. I followed them to the dining room, where girls from other schools—Spence and Nightingale and one in baggy corduroy from Lenox—lounged by a table near an Oriental screen. Some smoked. The boys stayed close to the open window, stepping on the drapes and making noise, and we watched as they lobbed water balloons and paper towels stuffed with Noxzema fifteen stories down to splat on the sidewalk below. They howled when they nicked someone. “Score!” they’d shout.

One boy was especially keen. He darted back and forth, cracking himself up. Skinny, his hair in his face, he seemed younger than the rest. And he was really into throwing those Noxzema bombs. “Nice one, Kennedy!” they’d yell. And if he seemed younger, it was because his birthday was at the end of November and he was still fourteen. But I wasn’t looking at