Mary-Alice was her name and she was a cheerleader, though not the one the sports fans looked at most; she was shorter than the rest, and chunkier, which was revealed when she leaped into the air squealing and shivering her pompoms, and the maroon pleats of her skirt swung out to flash the yellow satin underpants. When not cheerleading she liked to wear white blouses just a little too tight, a dear little roll of pudge at her waistband and the ghost of a sweat stain under her arm, all through those suffocating days of early fall. Her little pink nose turned up like a pig’s, and a small gilt crucifix hung in the hollow of her throat, which, I admit, I sometimes thought of slashing.

The Mom-thing was pleased that Terrell was finally dating—pleased and relieved and, when she looked at me, triumphant, it appeared. She cut at me with her smug regard, huffing out smoke from her two nostrils, her whole head a bundle of curlers wrapped in a frizzy polyester kerchief—shooting the look toward me through the smudged cat’s-eye glasses, leashed to her skinny neck with a beaded chain.

So I went out and let the screen door bang, the whine of the spring and the whine of her voice behind me. Through the haze of autumn heat, the window above the garage seemed to shimmer, wrapped in vine like Ouroboros strangling, hatching its egg. What he’d want that she could give him, I couldn’t very well conceive.

He took her to the movies, to the Pullman diner for burgers and shakes. They were making plans to go to the prom, when it was still eight months away, and by God, he even went to church with her family! … though that was only a time or two; he didn’t make it a habit. Then he started taking her parking at night, up into the woods to the dead-end turnarounds of the unfinished subdivision, at the edge of where it was still wild back there.

He left me, then, to my own devices—which he and I had been at pains for me to master.

To be sure, there were others than my brother, beginning with his comrades on the swim team. Somewhat to my own surprise at first, I discovered I had what it took to work my way through a number of these. There was nothing to it, really; nothing in it. Even the ones who liked to play tough, or the ones with some veneer of real meanness—once I punched through the crust there was nothing much but jelly inside.

Unlike my brother, those other boys didn’t know the value of a secret—as if whatever I did with them could have a secret value. So presently girls in the school hallways began to nudge one another and shoot me cutting glances, like the ones I got from the Mom-thing at home.

I didn’t listen to those living whispers. I heard spectral voices, across the aeons, calling me by my name. If anything ever got back to Terrell, he gave me no sign.