In One Person

said; she was crying.
    Elaine was lying on her side at the foot of her bed, facing the window, and I stretched out behind her with my chest flush to her back; I could kiss the back of her neck that way, and (with one hand) I could manage to touch her breasts under her untucked shirt. The heartbeat in my penis was still pounding away. Through her jeans, through my corduroy pants, I doubted that Elaine could detect the pulse in my penis, though I had pressed myself against her and she’d thrust her small bum into me.
    Elaine had a boy’s nonexistent bottom, and no hips to speak of; she was wearing a pair of boy’s dungarees (to go with her boy’s shirt), and I suddenly thought, as I kissed her neck and her damp hair, that Elaine actually smelled like a boy, too. After all, she’d been sweating; she wore no perfume, no makeup of any kind, not even lipstick, and here I was rubbing myself against her boyish bum.
    “You still have a hard-on, don’t you?” she asked me.
    “Yes,” I said. I was embarrassed that I couldn’t stop rubbing against her, but Elaine was moving her hips; she was rubbing against me, too.
    “It’s okay—what you’re doing,” Elaine told me.
    “No, it’s
not
okay,” I said, but I lacked the conviction I’d heard in Elaine’s voice—when, only a moment ago, she’d said the same thing to me. (What I meant, of course, was that I was thinking of Kittredge, too.)
    Miss Frost was a big woman; she was broad-shouldered, and her hips were wide. Miss Frost did
not
have a young boy’s bum; by no stretch of my imagination was I thinking of Miss Frost while I rubbed myself against Elaine Hadley, who was quietly crying.
    “No, really, it’s okay—I like it, too,” Elaine was saying softly, when we both heard Kittredge calling from the quad.
    “My sweet Naples—is that your blue light burning?” Kittredge called. I felt Elaine’s body stiffen. There were other boys’ voices in the quadrangle—in the area of Tilley, the jock dorm—but only Kittredge’s voice stood out distinctly.
    “I told you he wouldn’t watch the end of a Western—that bastard,” Elaine whispered to me.
    “Oh, Naples—is your blue light a beacon for
me
?” Kittredge called. “Are you still a maid, Naples, or a maid no more?” he called out. (I would realize , one day, that Kittredge was mock-Shakespearean—a kind of
faux
Shakespeare—to his core.)
    Elaine was sobbing when she reached to turn off her lamp with the dark-blue shade. When she thrust herself back into me, her sobs were louder; she was grunting as she rubbed against me. Her sobs and grunts were strangely commingled, not unlike the yelps a dog makes when it’s dreaming.
    “Don’t let him get to you, Elaine—he’s such an asshole,” I whispered in her ear.
    “
Shhh
!” she hushed me. “No actual talking,” she said breathlessly, between her half-strangled cries.
    “Is that
you
, Naples?” Kittredge called to her. “Lights out so soon? To bed alone, alas!”
    My dress shirt had come untucked from my corduroys; it must have been the incessant rubbing. The shirt was blue—the same color as Kittredge’s boxers, I was thinking. Elaine began to moan. “Keep doing it! Do it
harder
!” she moaned. “Yes! Like
that
—God, don’t stop!” she cried loudly.
    I could see her breath in that cold razor of air from the open window; I was grinding against her for what seemed the longest time, before I realized what I was saying. “Like that?” I kept asking her. “Like
that?
” (No actual talking, as Elaine had requested, but our voices were being broadcast to the quadrangle of dorms—all the way to Tilley and the gym, where the returning team buses were still unloading.)
    The flickering light from the movie projector had stopped; the windows of the basketball court were in darkness. The Western was over; the gun smoke from the shoot-out had drifted away—like the Favorite River boys, drifting back to their dormitories, but not Kittredge.
    “Cut it out, Naples!” Kittredge called. “Are you there, too, Nymph?” he called to me.
    Elaine had begun a prolonged, orgasmic scream. She would say later: “More like childbirth than orgasm, or so I imagine—I’m never having any children. Have you seen the size of babies’
heads
?” she asked me.
    Her caterwauling may have sounded like an orgasm to Kittredge. Elaine and I were still straightening out the bedcovers when we heard the knock on the door from the dormitory hall.
    “God,