It was summer when Lee and Cory appeared at our farm in a Pinto that looked as though a small family had been calling it home. They both reeked of cherry-scented car air freshener, as did everything they owned. How old were they—twenty-two, twenty-five? No one seemed to know where they came from. And I, at least, have no idea what happened to them after they left us, but in between they spent time secretly hiding out in our garage. Lee was fat and sloppy. Cory was slim, neat and blond. I didn’t know the phrase “fucked up” back then, but if I had I certainly would have had the opportunity to use it. Even now, with years of reading and studies behind me, I can still only best characterize those drifters as fucked up.

Our house was the neighborhood attraction, as we had a deep, lovely in-ground pool that rivaled the public pool in town, Seneca. My brother and his friends were in and out of the pool all day, and my slightly younger friends and I watched from the hedges. Older kids from our street, fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds, would volunteer to “keep an eye on” the rest of us so they could swim and lounge poolside. This development, my brother and I being left at the mercy of the older kids, came at a time when my parents finally acknowledged that our family babysitter was a hateful woman married to man that, in another era, would’ve happily lynched us. Since it was mid-1980s Bucks County, her husband simply banned us from the dinner table, and we instead ate on the couch. Our ex-sitter’s name was Megg and her husband’s name was Troy. I used to imagine these names as verbs—describing a harmful or potentially disastrous action to someone else: She was megged until she could no longer stand up. Or: You could tell, by the deep scars along the entire right side of his face and body, that he had been damn near troyed to death. I scarcely knew their oldest son, Jimmy, who one evening sat in his girlfriend’s driveway and blew himself into the upholstery of his Chevy Nova with a shotgun carefully wedged against the steering wheel. Megg was relieved of her duties as our caretaker, and we held raging pool parties in her absence.

Hooting and hollering, flinging ourselves off the diving board into jackhammers, can-openers, backflips—how any of us negotiated our way through that summer without injury or death is now a miraculous wonder to me. On the day Lee and Cory arrived, I was feeling lucky because I had managed to score a cigarette from Jeremy. The trade for the smoke seemed strangely simple, even easy—typically getting a cigarette required an impossible or unmentionable task. On this occasion, all I had to do for the cigarette was give Jeremy a blow job. The fact that I was eleven and didn’t even smoke had nothing to do with my logic. This seemed to be a great trade, in my favor, and I wasn’t about to pass it up. How hard, after all, could this “blow job” be? Jeremy took out his gnarly bluish-grey penis and it bobbed a little while I stared. Let’s see … blow job, blow job … the job is to blow. I tried frantically to figure out what I was supposed to do, and more importantly—what his open pants had to do with it. He held his crotch out to me in one hand and the cigarette in the other. I bent down, rounded out my lips and blew on the top of him like I was making a wish on a dandelion or a birthday candle. I popped my head back up, grabbed the smoke, and trotted off. When I turned around Jeremy was standing very still, his fly, and his mouth, wide open.

I clumsily lit my smoke and puffed in the bushes, watching the pool frenzy and my secret crush: Ritchie Sounder. Ritchie was to become the first of many people that I would silently, distantly, long for. He was carefree and reckless, his sun-fried hair falling into his face, his pale skin tanned to the edge of his shorts. He had a huge, brilliant smile, and could spit a clear stream of saliva straight through his perfectly squared teeth. I had no way of knowing, nor did he, that his life would change forever that summer. He could never go back to a time before the events that later unfolded, stripping certain joys from him, leaving his wild wide eyes pinched into ugly slits.

Ritchie and his cross-eyed older sister, Cookie Sounder, were the idols for all the other boys and girls in the gang. Fifteen-year-old Tony Ryder was Cookie’s on-again, off-again man, and one lazy afternoon Tony detailed to me how, starting slowly with his fingers, he’d finally managed to stick his whole fist deep inside Cookie while she had her period. During the telling of his tale, Tony dragged longingly on his Marlboro, blew out the smoke and said that when he pulled his hand out it made a suction-cup sound, and a large blob of blood splattered on the floor. Who knows why desire presents itself as it does, leaving logic and reality in the dust a few miles back?

A large part of the Sounders’ allure was the fabric softener their mom used to wash their clothes. It smelled like lavender and you could tell (glory of all glories!) when one of them had sat on your couch at any point in the last few hours. Heaven for me was the day Ritchie left behind a sweatshirt, which I whisked away with a deftness of a pickpocket. Later that night, in my room, I concocted the most romantic scenario my young mind could fathom as I huffed away at the fabric. Aside from whatever magic that resided in their looks and smell, Ritchie and Cookie had another thing going for them—their mom was “cool,” she drove anyone anywhere, and let whomever hang out at their house. This is most likely how Lee and Cory came to live in the Sounders’s attic.

How strange as a child to understand that you and a grown man have a crush on the same boy. How could I ever compete? Why would I want to? The whole affair did more than just confuse me—it opened up a vortex of whirling scenarios that were a total overload to my hand-holding, sweatshirt-whiffing idea of romance. I was clued in to things in a moment when I least expected them, though no amount of warning could’ve prepared me for the unraveling that was about to take place. As a shy, brown-skinned, kinky-haired waif, all my crush-related activities had to be stealthy and covert. Who, without being threatened by my brother, would even pretend to find my attentions appealing? Seizing an open opportunity as I lurked about poolside, I snuck Ritchie’s cut-off jean shorts from the picnic table where he’d left them while he swam. If discovered, we both would be teased to shreds—me for daring to like him, and him for somehow having snagged me as an admirer. I spared us both the shame by slipping around the yard like a spy. In the excited blur of getting his shorts into the quiet, empty sun porch, I didn’t stop to plan just what I’d do with them once there. After trying the shorts on over my suit (baggy) and sniffing away at the tell-tale scent, I foraged through the pockets looking for some token of Ritchie that I could keep for myself.

What I found instead was a long note, hand-written in a careful, hard-pressed script. It described, in very specific terms, what “friends” did to, and with, one another to show that they cared. Ritchie, the letter’s first sentence began, you should hug me each day to let me know that we are friends. I will hug you, too. I think about you each day and I am so glad we are friends. Are you glad we are friends, too? If so, you should tell me that you love me each day and kiss me when you do. If it’s okay, I will sometimes do special things just to let you know how much I love you. It went on for nearly two pages, full of requests for Ritchie to visit the letter writer nightly in his attic room, finally ending with: Ritchie, don’t tell anyone, because no one else would understand ... and there might be trouble. Remember, I am your friend forever. Lee. The note was incredibly detailed, yet somehow simple in a way that was hypnotizing. Even though I knew what Lee was proposing was deeply wrong, the way he laid out his maze-like plan left me confused. So, this was love? My heart was thumping so loud in my ears it seemed like someone was knocking on the door. I was filled with such a sudden and complete sense of danger that I scarcely knew what to do next. If discovered, would I get into trouble? I felt that, having stolen the shorts and read the note, I was in on the conspiracy. Would Lee kill me? Would Ritchie hate me? Is this really how friends showed they were friends? I realized, with a certain amount of sickness, that I was experiencing an impossible mix of jealousy and terror. I was jealous of a grown, strange-smelling fat man and his relationship with a boy I dearly liked. I was also terrified by that very same relationship. My mind was spinning. I carefully refolded the note and placed it back in Ritchie’s pocket. In the distraction and squeals of the next cannonball, I slipped his shorts back onto their spot on the picnic table and went upstairs to lie down for a long time under my bed. Ritchie turned fourteen the following week.

Grubby, cherry-scented Lee continued his friendship with Ritchie Sounder for at least the rest of the summer. In a flash of delayed instinct and motherly protection, Mrs. Sounder finally demanded Lee out of the attic room and her children’s lives. I remember Ritchie crying, and I wondered, then, if it was because he was happy or sad that Lee was finally leaving. Lee and Cory left as quietly and suddenly as they came, and once gone, the only thing left behind was the memory of Lee’s note burning in my mind.

Several weeks later, fall was approaching and the dreaded school year was about to start. Ritchie and Cookie, along with a few other neighborhood kids, were at our farm for a game of hide and seek. In round two of the game, Ritchie and I were on opposite sides, and he sought me out, ran me down, and jumped me. While I was pinned beneath him, he giggled and let a spitball dribble out of his mouth until it nearly touched my face—I squirmed and he slurped it back in. He did this a few times and, aside from my squeals, we were silent, eyes locked. Finally he said: I saw you take my shorts that day. I just kept looking at him. I felt myself flush and couldn’t even imagine speaking. Then he said: Did you read the note? Unable to be honest, unable to face the feelings that soared through me that day in the pool yard, I simply lied. I thought I was saving him from embarrassment, and I was saving myself from having to tackle a subject I couldn’t handle. I realize now—just as sure as I realize that Jeremy wanted something other than me making a wish on his dick—that Ritchie wanted to talk to someone about what had happened with Lee. And I was safe, because I was quiet, I listened. And most importantly, I didn’t tell. He tried one more time, telling me there was a note, and he asked if I saw it. Again I scrambled for a lie and told him I picked up his shorts thinking they belonged to my brother and that I didn’t see a note. With this, the spell was broken; the softness of the conversation slipped away, and Ritchie purple-nurpled both of my tender tiny nipples and jumped up shouting, “I got one!”

That day, that note, and the summer of Lee and Ritchie was never spoken of again. Ritchie gained a lot of weight and when, a year later, three of his teeth were knocked out in a fistfight, he refused to have them replaced. Ritchie no longer carried a huge comb wedged in his back pocket ready to whip out and to feather his shaggy hair. I watched, in awe, as the beautiful sleek boy I so desperately desired became a fat, nasty mess. I changed, too. By the time I grew to a young woman that some began to consider “pretty” in that tiny town, I was on my way out of it forever.