“Okay,” I said. And maybe if I were the me I am today, I wouldn’t have found that so compelling. But the idea of someone wanting to know me, to know the real me, to see me as I was when I was so invisible and so dedicated to my own invisibility—it was everything I’d ever wanted and always assumed I would never have.

“Can I take you on a date?” he asked. “A real one?”

* * *

—

The next day, I called in sick to Rite Aid. Anthony picked me up in his Porsche and took me to a lunch place in Santa Monica so fancy it made me queasy. I didn’t know what to order, I felt I had waited a beat too long to remember to put my napkin in my lap, I was having a full out-of-body experience, I squeezed lemon in my water and it squirted in my eye, blinding me. Anthony laughed and laughed. “Now you’re the one who’s nervous! Oh, I am so sorry. This was the wrong place. I don’t know why I thought this was the place to take you.”

I had my cloth napkin, which I had dipped in my water glass, pressed to my eye, but the pain was not abating. “This place is lovely. This place is like a dream of where a guy would take me.”

“That’s what I was going for!” he cried, and after that the lunch was easier. When we had finished and were driving back to North Shore, he asked if I had anyplace that we could go. Aunt Deedee would be at home sleeping before her bartending shift. But Bunny had given me the key to her house. While Ray was hardly ever home except late at night, and while Bunny’s whereabouts were dependably easy to track, she was at that volleyball intensive from seven to seven, there was always the risk that Ray, who spent his days going from house tour to house tour, from meeting to meeting, might swing by for something he needed or had forgotten, and it was a measure of my insanity that I took such a risk so confidently.

I let Anthony into Bunny’s house and showed him around. I did not mention that the house was not mine. I wanted Anthony to think I came from a place like this. “This is the living room,” I said. “This is the kitchen.”

“Who’s that?” he asked, pointing at a picture of Bunny.

“My sister.”

I led him to the spare bedroom, or as I liked to think of it, the “Madame Butterfly Suicide Sex Suite,” and I jumped on him and pushed him down on the bed. I loved how large his rib cage was, and I could feel his big lungs inflating and deflating in his chest, his big heart hammering inside him. I wanted to get his shirt off, so I could get as close to his skin as I could.

“Hold on, hold on,” he said, “I want to look at you.” He slipped my T-shirt over my head. He unbuttoned my pants, and I shimmied off my jeans. He marveled at my calves as he peeled off my socks. “Every inch of you is perfection,” he said.

“Stop,” I said, laughing, because the idea that I was perfection was ludicrous. My leg hair was thin and weird-looking, my skin Mariana-Trench-pale. His chest hair was a sparse constellation of tight little curls and he had two small moles on his neck, and I liked to rub my cheek on them. His skin smelled yeasty and good, and I wanted to drag my face across every inch of him.

The most disconcerting part of it for me was that I had never had the experience of being both sexually turned on and happy at the same time. I kept thinking something was wrong. I kept breaking out giggling. “What?” he would ask.

“I just can’t believe we get to do this,” I would say. “I can’t believe it is allowed for something so wonderful to happen.”

When we had tired each other out, and I was lying cuddled up to his chest, and he was running his fingers up and down my biceps lazily, he said, “Whose house is this?”

“Mine,” I said.

“I don’t think it is,” he said. “You’re telling me you picked out this bedspread?”

There was no way I could claim I had picked out this bedspread. It was maybe the first lie in my life that I had decided I couldn’t possibly sell. I didn’t know what to say and could only blush.

“It’s okay!” he said. “It’s okay.”

I think he realized I was going to cry before I did. “Oh, Michael,” he said.

I was so embarrassed. Embarrassed to have lied, embarrassed to be crying. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I said.

“Not a thing is wrong with you,” he said.

And then the truth spilled out, and I found it was all easy to say. That this was my friend’s house, that I lived next door, that I lived with my aunt because my mother had been to prison.

“What about your father?” he asked.

“What about him? I mean, he didn’t even show up at the hearing to get us. I think that bridge is pretty well burned.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” he said. “A father’s love for his son—it’s not such an easy thing to throw away.”

* * *

—

In retrospect, so much seems obvious, but it was not obvious to me at the time. I fell head over heels in love with Anthony. We saw each other twice a week. Sometimes more. I was in a fever.

Anthony sent me a Frank O’Hara love poem in an email, and I mistakenly thought that he had written it, and that he loved me, but then he hadn’t written it, and I got embarrassed that I didn’t even know who Frank O’Hara was, and so I didn’t know if he did love me or if he was just sending me a beautiful poem.

Anthony didn’t want to do anything dark sexually, and the one time I placed his hand on my throat, hoping he would choke me, he withdrew it as though I had burned him, and said, “I hope it’s all right with you, but I’m not that sort of fellow.” He was always saying old-fashioned things like that, and when he gave me presents they were usually novels. He gave me Giovanni’s Room and Maurice. He gave me Mrs. Dalloway and Sons and Lovers. I read these books in such a fever that I have feared to ever read them again, lest the golden, irradiating magic they held for me be replaced with dusty, actual words.

Still, every time I saw Anthony, I was filled with dread. Dread that he would tell me we shouldn’t see each other anymore, dread that he would do something to hurt me, dread that I would accept it, dread that we would be discovered, dread that I was doing this at all, that I was so hungry, so desperate for love that I would do anything to continue to meet a grown man I knew nothing about and then treasure my memories of the encounter, playing and replaying them inside my mind, so I walked about my daily life as a zombie, there but not there, a hollow vessel filled with only the charmed air of potentiality those borrowed novels granted me. One night I killed seventeen flies, and Jason ripped the flyswatter from my hands, marched downstairs to the kitchen, and cut the swatting part right off it.