damp with sweat, from fear or heat I’m not sure. Loosed beads trickle down my neck and into my shirt. I gather my hair into a fisted ponytail, but I have no elastic, so I let it fall back. I shift my jaw, sore from the stress of clenching my teeth the whole ride here.
I wait for us to get off the bike, but Max doesn’t, so I stay sitting, rest my cheek against the warmth of his leather jacket.
“Nice, right?” he asks. “Peaceful. Quiet. I can feel your heart beating.”
I close my eyes. “You can?”
“Yeah, I like it.”
I smile. What if I really do love Max Gordon?
“So, can I ask you something? A favor?”
My heart starts up again. “Sure.”
“Can I touch you? Just like this. Not looking, or anything. Just sitting here, like this.” He moves his hand back, behind him, and rubs my bare leg.
“Yes,” I say, even though I’m not exactly certain what he means. I just know that I want him to.
“You sure?”
I nod once more against his leather jacket as his fingers move inward, tracing their way between my thighs. Down to where the seat of the bike meets my skin. Slipping inside the loose, willing hem of my shorts.
“Just one,” he says, letting his thumb find its way in under the fabric, onto the outside of my underpants.
My heart ramps up so hard, he must feel it, and my breath comes in short bursts; the sound of everything all but disappears.
I want this. I want Max to touch me; I want to feel the way I made him feel.
His thumb circles—softly, gently for a while—then slips in under the wet cotton edge of my underpants.
“You feel so nice,” he whispers.
I take shallow breaths, feeling him there, my body quivering and electric, as if he’s plugged me into a socket. I try to relax into it, to him, my cheek against warm leather, his thumb on me, pressing softly, nothing between us, skin to skin. Moving in small, perfect circles.
And then I go light-headed, and I swear my heart flutters and stops, and my arms rise up and I fly away.
EARLY JUNE
TENTH GRADE
The next day Max invites me to prom.
We’re sitting on the wall after school, and Max Gordon asks me, Jean Louise Markham, to go to prom.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I ask, my eyes practically bugging out of my head. “You hate school. You hate convention. You hate prom.”
He laughs. “All true. So, will you?”
“Will I what?”
He laughs again, shakes his head, rakes his fingers through his hair, and kicks a small piece of cement out from between the low, large stones of the wall with his boot heel. It lands with a melodic little thunk.
Max Gordon is uneasy. Uncomfortable. I turn and squint at him.
“You heard me, Jailbait. I asked if you want to go to prom.”
“Seriously, though? I didn’t think you were serious.”
“Well, I am. Dead serious. No promposal, though, that shit is stupid. Consider yesterday in the field my promposal.” I punch his arm. “What? Wasn’t it good?”
My cheeks redden. “It was,” I say, embarrassed that just the thought of it sends a rush between my legs. “But why do you want to go?”
He jumps down off the wall, and kicks the landed cement lump across the sidewalk into the parking lot.
“Why not?”
I jump down, too. I need to see his face. I’m pretty sure he’s putting me on.
“Um, because you’re Max Gordon, and only a few short weeks ago you called prom something super obscure and poetic like ‘conformist bullshit geared at the pathetic, lemming-like masses’?”
He grins and says, “Yeah, I can be a dick, so I probably said that.”
“Also, you said you hoped those pathetic masses might, to quote you, ‘hurry up and wither and die.’ Or was that some line from a sonnet?”
Max throws his head back and laughs fully now. “You’re a trip, Jailbait, you know that?” I shift my eyes up to his. “Come here,” he says, pulling me in and hugging me. He kisses my hair, breathes me in. “You should know better than to listen to me. On anything. I just say stuff to sound subversive. Besides, I don’t know, with graduation coming, maybe I’m feeling a bit nostalgic.”
“Seriously? You?”
“Yeah. Why not me?”
“I don’t know, Max. Why not?” I give him a suspicious look.
“Or, okay, let’s suppose that a few of us got together and talked about things, and decided our prom-going can, and should, be a contrary political statement. Like