“I am a virgin.”

Leslie flicked on the windshield washer. She didn’t have the nerve to ask but I couldn’t stand not knowing.

“But what about—” I hesitated, because it wasn’t a name to be said lightly in our family: “Kellen?”

“He never fucked me.”

“Wavy! Watch your mouth.” Leslie’s perfect impersonation of Mom. I ignored her.

“But the police report. Your deposition—”

“His alibi.” Wavy hugged her knees more tightly, her white skirt bunching over her black-stockinged legs. That was the first time I realized that while Leslie and I were growing up, Wavy was staying the same. Staying fourteen. Not even that. Staying thirteen. In three years she hadn’t grown at all.

“But your blood on the desk blotter.” Why was I arguing? To say, No, you can’t be a virgin? The police report said so. Kellen pled guilty.

“He broke my hymen with his fingers,” Wavy said.

“See? Really, you’re still a virgin.” Angela leaned over the backseat, trying to help.

“I wish he had fucked me.”

“You don’t mean that,” Leslie said, half-sad, half-disapproving.

“No one could take that away.”

I didn’t blame Wavy for feeling that way. The bike and the ring, they were just things. Donal and Kellen were all she cared about, and they’d both been taken away from her.

In bed that night, I said, “What was it like?” It makes me sound like a morbid ghoul, but why else had Wavy offered that secret? She wanted to tell someone.

“Wonderful. His hands are big and rough. He slid his ring finger into me. It burned. There was blood, but I wanted to have him in me. He wouldn’t.”

“But your deposition.” I kept coming back to the Gospel. Wavy spoke in Apocrypha.

“He wouldn’t. He was scared of hurting me and he wanted to wait until we got married. Rubbing against me made him come. On the desk. Between my legs. Not in me. He never fucked me.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I lay there and listened to the whisper of covers moving over her flannel nightdress. Tiny sparks leapt like lightning in a petri dish meadow. Wavy sighed and shivered and hiccupped. After sharing a room with her for three years I was used to the sound of her masturbating. I never got used to the sound of her crying.

*   *   *

I lost my own virginity at a party four months later. It involved a nice guy named Marcus, who thought he was in love with me, and too much alcohol. I felt like such a coward about that. Instead of going into it with my eyes open, I lied to myself. I thought if I was drunk it would be this magical thing that just happened.

I’d had a huge fight with Angela, who was going to a different college on a track and field scholarship. She kept saying, “We’ll visit each other,” but then I found out she was getting back together with her ex-boyfriend, who was going to the same school. Her ex-boyfriend who hated me. I knew we would never visit each other if she was dating him. When I told her she deserved better, she got mad.

“You don’t own me,” she said.

I felt like my heart had been ripped out, and when Wavy and I got to the party, Marcus was there. I wanted it to be wonderful, like Wavy said, but it was awkward and painful and embarrassing. I was so drunk that after Wavy and I got home, I was sick. We managed to sneak past Mom and into the bathroom, where I vomited my guts up and cried.

“I don’t love him,” I sobbed. I liked him, but I didn’t love him. I wasn’t even attracted to him beyond the fact that he had good hygiene. I thought it meant something that he was in love with me, but it only means something if you love the other person. And I loved Angela.

“It’s over,” Wavy said, as I lay on the floor with a cold washcloth on my forehead. I thought she meant the puking, but she said, “Nothing left to be afraid of.”

I’d been afraid of so many things: sex, graduating, college, leaving home, falling in love. Life. Now I’d fallen in love, gotten my heart broken, and had meaningless sex. Those scary things were over. In three months I would leave for college. There would be other things to be afraid of later, but lying there, drunk and hurting all over, I wasn’t afraid.

I wondered how it was for Wavy. She’d fallen in love, had her heart broken, almost had sex, and had her whole family taken away from her. Did she still have things to be afraid of?

That Kellen wouldn’t love her long enough. The years were adding up. Mom thought Wavy would get over it, but she was wrong. Wavy still loved him, but when he got out of prison, would he still love her?

Wavy made her way as best she could, found ways to fit in on her terms. For instance, she didn’t go to her senior prom, but she was the chairperson for the decoration committee. The prom was Valentine’s themed: red and pink, with hearts and hundreds of hand-tucked crepe-paper roses with green sisal stems. Things like that always looked effortless in Wavy’s hands.

She strung elaborate garlands along the edges of the bleachers, and in the corner where prom pictures would be taken. The garlands were pink and red with bits of gold foil, alternating reversed hearts. Everyone assumed they were hearts, until halfway through the prom, when one of the parent chaperones admired the decorations at just the right angle. That year none of the prom pictures could be used in the yearbook. “Obscene,” the school board called them.

Instead of hearts, Wavy had very skillfully alternated between erect penises and curvaceous rumps that narrowed to delicate but well-defined vulvas.