In One Person

must be too nervous,” I told her.
    “Don’t be nervous. We’re just kissing and touching, right?” Elaine asked me.
    “Right,” I said.
    I could feel a razor-sharp draft of cold air from the cracked-open window when Elaine kissed me, a chaste little peck on the lips, which must have been as disappointing to her as it was to me—because she said, “Tongues are okay. French kissing is allowed.”
    The next kiss was much more interesting—tongues change everything. There is a gathering momentum to French kissing; Elaine and I were unfamiliar with what to do about it. Perhaps to distract myself, I thought of my mother overseeing my wayward father kissing someone
else
. There’s a
waywardness
to French kissing, I remember thinking. Elaine must have needed to distract herself, too. She broke free from our kiss and breathlessly said, “Not the Everly Brothers
again
!” I’d been unaware of what was playing on the rock-’n’-roll station, but Elaine rolled away from me; reaching for her night table, she turned the radio off.
    “I want to be able to hear us breathing,” Elaine said, rolling into my arms again.
    Yes, I thought—breathing is very different when you’re French kissing someone. I lifted her untucked shirt and tentatively touched her bare stomach; she slid my hand up to her breast—well, to her
bra
, anyway—which was soft and small and fit easily in the palm of my hand.
    “Is this a …
training
bra?” I asked her.
    “It’s a
padded
bra,” Elaine said. “I don’t know about the training part.”
    “It feels nice,” I told her. I wasn’t lying; the
training
word had triggered something, though I wasn’t sure exactly what I held in the palm of my hand. (I mean, how much of what I felt was her breast—or was it mostly the bra?)
    Elaine, as if heralding what our future relationship would become, must have read my mind, for she said—as always, loud and clear—“There’s more padding than breast, if you want to know the truth, Billy. Here, I’ll show you,” she said; she sat up and unbuttoned the white shirt, slipping it off her shoulders.
    It was a pretty bra, more pearl-gray than white, and when she reached behind her back to unfasten it, her bra seemed to expand. I had only a glimpse of her small, pointy breasts before she put her shirt back on; her nipples were bigger than any boy’s, and those darker-colored rings around the nipples—the areolae, another unpronounceable plural!—were almost as big as her breasts. But while Elaine was buttoning her shirt, it was her bra—now on the bed, between us—that captured my attention. I picked it up; the soft, breast-shaped pads were sewn into the silky fabric. To my surprise, I instantly wanted to try it on—I wanted to know what it felt like to
wear
a bra. But I was no more honest about this feeling than I’d been about those other desires I had withheld from my friend Elaine.
    It was only the slightest deviation from the norm that signaled to me a fallen boundary in our emerging relationship: As always, Elaine had left the top two buttons of her boy’s dress shirt unbuttoned, but this time she’d also left the bottommost button unbuttoned. My hand slipped more easily under her untucked shirt; it was the real thing (what little there was of it) that fit so perfectly in my palm.
    “I don’t know about you, Billy,” Elaine said, as we lay face-to-face on one of her pillows, “but I had always imagined a boy touching my breasts for the first time as
messier
than it actually is.”
    “
Messier
,” I repeated. I must have been stalling.
    I was remembering Dr. Harlow’s annual morning-meeting talk to us boys, concerning our
treatable afflictions
; I was recalling that “an unwelcome sexual attraction to other boys and men” fell into this dubiously curable category.
    I must have repressed the annual morning-meeting presentation of Dr. Grau—“Herr Doktor” Grau, as we boys called Favorite River’s school psychiatrist. Dr. Grau gave us the same lunatic spiel every year—how we were all of an age of arrested development, “frozen,” the Herr Doktor said, “like bugs in amber.” (By our frightened expressions, we boys could tell that not all of us had seen bugs in amber—or even knew what they were.) “You are in the
polymorphous-perverse
phase,” Dr. Grau assured us. “It is only natural, at this phase, that you exhibit infantile sexual tendencies, in which the genitals are not yet identified as the sole or