In One Person

the school laundry pressed everything—not just your trousers and dress shirts, but even your underwear and your stupid socks. (This was talked about with a derision almost equal to that assigned to the advice of Dr. Harlow and Dr. Grau.)
    Notwithstanding this social history, my first erection inspired by Elaine Hadley (or by her bra) was stiffening in a tight-fitting pair of Jockey briefs, which were threatening to cut off circulation to my “inspired” hard-on. Elaine—with an aggressiveness I was unprepared for—suddenly put her hand on those very genitals that Dr. Grau had told us we’d “not yet identified” as our own goddamn sexual organs! There was no question in my mind concerning what and where my “sole or principal sexual organs” were, and when Elaine grabbed hold of them, I flinched.
    “Oh … my … God!” Elaine cried, momentarily deafening the nearer of my ears. “I can’t imagine what having one of those is like!”
    This was sexually confusing, too. Did Elaine mean that she couldn’t imagine what having a penis
inside
her was like, or did Elaine mean that she couldn’t imagine being a boy and having her own penis? I didn’t ask. I was relieved that she’d released my balls from her not inconsiderable grasp, but Elaine held fast to my penis, and I continued to fondle her breasts. Had we resumed the French kissing where we’d left off, there’s no telling what the aforementioned “gathering momentum” might have led to, but in fact we’d just begun to kiss again—tentatively, at first, with only the tips of our tongues making contact. I watched Elaine close her eyes, and I closed mine.
    Thus I discovered that it was possible to be holding Elaine Hadley’s breast while I imagined I was fondling an equally permissive Miss Frost. (Miss Frost’s breasts would only be slightly bigger than Elaine’s, I had long imagined.) With my eyes closed, I could even conceive that the fierce grip of Elaine’s small hand on my penis was in truth Miss Frost’s far bigger hand—in which case, Miss Frost must have been restraining herself. And, as the French kissing quickened—both Elaine and I were soon breathless—I fantasized that it was Miss Frost’s long tongue thrusting against mine, and that we were entwined on the brass bed in her basement hideaway in the First Sister Public Library.
    When the diesel fumes from the first of the returning team buses reached the cracked-open window of Elaine’s fifth-floor room, I managed to think I was smelling the oil-burning furnace next to Miss Frost’s former coal bin of a bedroom. When I opened my eyes, I half expected to be face-to-face with Miss Frost, but there instead was my friend Elaine Hadley, with her eyes tightly closed.
    All the time I’d been imagining Miss Frost, it had not occurred to me that Elaine might have been imagining, too. Not surprisingly, the name on her lips, which she somehow managed to say in my mouth, was “Kittredge!” (Elaine had correctly identified the diesel fumes from the returning team bus; she was wondering if it was the wrestling-team bus, because she’d been imagining Kittredge while I was imagining Miss Frost.)
    Elaine’s eyes were wide open now. I must have looked as guilty as she did. There was a pulse in my penis; if I could feel it throbbing, I knew that Elaine could feel it, too.
    “Your heart’s beating, Billy,” she said.
    “That’s not my heart,” I told her.
    “Yes, it is—your heart is beating in your penis,” Elaine said. “Do all boys’ hearts beat there?”
    “I can’t speak for other boys,” I answered. But she’d let go of my penis, and had rolled away from me.
    There was more than one parked bus at the gym with its diesel engine running; the flickering light from the movie projector was still blinking from the basketball court, and the meaningless shouts and whoops of the returning jocks echoed in the dormitory quadrangle—the wrestlers were among them, maybe, or maybe not.
    Elaine now lay on the bed with her forehead almost touching the windowsill, where the draft of cold air from the cracked-open window was the coldest. “When I was kissing you, and holding your penis, and you were touching my breasts, I was thinking of Kittredge—that bastard,” Elaine told me.
    “I know—it’s okay,” I said to her. I knew what a good and truthful friend she was, but—even so—I couldn’t tell her that I’d been thinking of Miss Frost.
    “No, it’s
not
okay,” Elaine