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I also feel like I can’t ever tell anybody about this. I can’t tell Natalie, although I really, really want to.

What happened has to be all mine.

I feel crowded by this. Like I need to go home and think about it for a week or maybe the rest of my life. How can I go to school in the morning? It’s already after midnight and I have to be up at seven-thirty to make it there by eight-fifteen.

Neil opens the closet door. Inside a tangle of wire coat hangers crowds the far end of the pole. There’s nothing inside except a camera hanging from its neck strap by a hook on the back of the door. He takes the camera and aims it at me.

My underwear is on backwards but I don’t care.

He shoots me as I button my shirt. I button it up almost to the top.

“I want to taste me in you,” he says, tossing the camera on the bed. He comes over to me and takes my face in his hands. He kisses me. His tongue running across my teeth, filling up my mouth, looking.

I look past his head at the wall. I want to pull away. It’s time to go. I have to get home.

He presses up against me. Mashing his pelvis into mine. My bladder is full; I’ve got to piss.

He pulls away. “Let’s go.”

We go.

Downstairs, his roommate is sitting on the sofa chain-smoking and watching TV. I have a hunch that she is his failed attempt at heterosexuality. “Hi, honey,” she says to me. “What are you, like seventeen?”

“Thirteen,” I tell her.

She is fat. She is fat in a way that suggests she always has been, always will be, fat. When she raises her cigarette to her lips, I see that her fingernails are dirty and chewed. Her hair is a ravage of tangles, shoulder-length and the color of straw. A tiny gold cross hangs from a dainty chain around her neck. She is too large for this cross.

“Beer?”

I tell her no. She strikes me as somebody who has tasted a lot of semen. I want to ask her if it all tastes like alfalfa sprouts, or if it’s just something funky with him.

Neil says, “I’ll be back in a while. I gotta take him home.”

“Pick me up some more smokes,” she says. She coughs. She takes another drag and turns her face back to the TV. Mannix.

Neil takes his keys off the kitchen table, crumbs sticking to his fingers as he swipes. He gives them a toss into the air and catches them. “Ready?”

Of course I’m ready, I think.

We walk outside. I can see my breath, so I hold it. I want to keep it inside. I feel exposed. Enough of me has escaped into the air for the evening.

Neil opens the passenger door for me, like I’m a girl. And suddenly, I feel like a girl. I am ashamed. The door isn’t locked.

He walks around to his side and slides in. He starts the car.

The seats are freezing. I move my legs together, then I slide my hands beneath them. I look back at the house. The window near the door provides a dull, yellow light, mixed with some blue light from the TV in the other room. All the other windows are dark. The house itself is dark; during the day it’s probably gray or brown. At night, it’s black. There is no lawn. Just dirt and gravel where a lawn could go.

“You okay with what happened?” Neil asks, pulling onto Route 5.

I say, “Yeah. Sure.”

“Good. I hope I didn’t hurt you.” He turns to me. “Because I didn’t want to do that, hurt you.”

I nod.

“I just wanted to show you, you know, what you were in for. Being gay and all.”

“Yeah,” I say. I say it softly. I hardly say it. Or maybe I don’t even say it. Maybe I only think it.

We don’t speak for the rest of the drive. My window fogs and this makes me feel like there is no world outside of the car.

Again, that feeling that everything has changed. And the sensation, very real, of spinning.

Hope is awake when I walk in the door. She’s in the TV room, sitting on the couch, her legs tucked up beneath her. “Hi there,” she says.

“Hey, Hope.”

“Did you have fun with Neil?”

I make a smile. “Yeah, it was fun. He showed me his photographs.”

Hope unfolds her legs and reaches behind her head to scratch. “Oh yeah? That’s great. Did you two talk?”

I step further into the room. The TV is flipping. Why doesn’t she adjust the vertical hold?