In One Person

have been trying to throw her off the track; I might have been worried that Elaine somehow sensed I was given to those homosexual yearnings Dr. Harlow and Dr. Grau sought to treat “aggressively.”
    At first, Elaine didn’t believe me. “You just said what?” she asked me. We had been flopping around on her bed—certainly
not
in a sexual way. We were bored, listening to a rock-’n’-roll station on Elaine’s radio while keeping an eye out her fifth-floor window. The return of the team buses meant little to us, though this nonevent would mean that Kittredge was once again at large in the quad.
    There was a reading lamp with a dark-blue shade on Elaine’s windowsill; the lamp shade was made of glass, as thick as a Coke bottle. Kittredge knew that the dark-blue light in the fifth-floor window of Bancroft was coming from Elaine’s bedroom. Ever since we’d been in
The Tempest
together, Kittredge would occasionally serenade that blue light in Elaine’s bedroom, which he could see from anywhere in the quadrangle of dormitories—even from Tilley, the jock dorm. I had not spotted Professor Tilley in my search of the faculty photographs in the yearbook room. If Tilley was a professor emeritus at Favorite River, he must have taught at the school in more modern times than those school days of yore—the ones old Bancroft had once whinnied in.
    I didn’t realize how much Kittredge’s infrequent serenades meant to Elaine; they were, of course, mocking in tone—“Shakespearean patois,” as Elaine described it. Yet I knew that Elaine often fell asleep with that dark-blue lamp on—and that when Kittredge
didn’t
serenade her, she was unhappy about it.
    It was into this rock-’n’-roll-radio atmosphere of idle waiting, in the loneliness of Elaine Hadley’s dark-blue bedroom, where I introduced the idea of my
wanting
to fool around with her. It wasn’t that this was such a bad idea; it just wasn’t true. It’s not surprising that Elaine’s initial response was one of disbelief.
    “You just said
what
?” my friend Elaine asked.
    “I don’t want to do or say anything that would endanger our friendship,” I told her.
    “You want to fool around with
me
?” Elaine asked.
    “Yes, I do—a little,” I said.
    “No …
penetration
, is that what you mean?” she asked.
    “No …
yes
, that’s what I mean,” I said. Elaine knew that I had a little trouble with the
penetration
word; it was one of those nouns that could cause a pronunciation problem for me, but I would soon get over it.
    “Say it, Billy,” Elaine said.
    “No … going all the way,” I told her.
    “But what kind of fooling around, exactly?” she asked.
    I lay facedown on her bed and covered my head with one of her pillows. This must have been unacceptable to her, because she straddled my hips and sat on my lower back. I could feel her breathing on the back of my neck; she nuzzled my ear. “Kissing?” she whispered. “Touching?”
    “Yes,” I said, in a muffled voice.
    Elaine pulled the pillow off my head. “Touching
what
?” she asked.
    “I don’t know,” I said.
    “Not
everything
,” Elaine said.
    “No! Certainly not,” I said.
    “You can touch my breasts,” she said. “I don’t have any breasts, anyway.”
    “Yes, you do,” I told her. She had
something
there, and I admit that I wanted to touch her breasts. (I confess to wanting to touch all kinds of breasts, especially small ones.)
    Elaine lay next to me on the bed, and I turned on my side to look at her. “Do I give you a hard-on?” she asked me.
    “Yes,” I lied.
    “Oh, my God—it’s always so hot in this room!” she suddenly cried, sitting up. The colder the weather was outside, the hotter it was in those old dormitories—and the higher the floor you were on, the hotter it got. At bedtime, or after lights-out, the students were always opening their windows, albeit only a crack, to let a little cold air in, but the ancient radiators would keep cranking up the heat.
    Elaine was wearing a boy’s dress shirt—white, with a button-down collar, though she never buttoned the collar, and she always left the top two buttons unbuttoned. Now she untucked the shirt from her jeans; she pinched the shirt between her thumb and index finger, and, holding it away from her stick-thin body, she blew on her chest to cool herself off.
    “Do you have a hard-on
now
?” she asked me; she’d opened the window a crack before lying down on the bed beside me.
    “No—I