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Ruth’s partner was Cindy, a slender girl (“Flat as a board,” sighed Sandra, the night they all tried the pencil test) with heavy glasses that kept sliding down her nose and a waterfall of coffee-colored hair.

Sandra instructed each girl to give her partner a hickey on her upper arm.

She turned out the lights. “So we won’t be self-conscious.

” Cindy put her mouth on Ruth’s arm and sucked.

Ruth breathed in the strawberry scent of her hair.

After a bit, she touched it. It felt silky.

Cindy made a little noise as if to say, “Do that again.” Ruth did that again.

Cindy made the noise louder this time. Ruth put her own mouth to Cindy’s shoulder.

Cindy moved hers to Ruth’s opposite shoulder.

Then to Ruth’s neck and up to her jaw, brushing her lips along Ruth’s skin.

Ruth’s breath came faster. She pressed herself against Cindy, who sighed and pressed back.

The lights blazed on, and Sandra yelled, “Freeze!” Ruth and Cindy bolted apart.

But the other girls were too busy inspecting their arms to notice.

Four of them displayed fresh purplish-red bruises on their arms. “Ruth and Cindy, you didn’t suck hard enough.

It needs to leave a mark,” said Sandra. When the lights went off again, they diligently suctioned each other’s upper arms. Cindy put her hand on Ruth’s breast, and Ruth, bold in the darkness, slipped her own beneath Cindy’s sweater.

Cindy gave a muffled moan. This time the floor creaked as Sandra moved toward the light switch, and they separated before the lights came on.

“Much better,” said Sandra when they displayed their arms for her approval.

Cindy hosted at least one sleepover a month.

They ate popcorn, styled each other’s hair, gossiped about which girls hadn’t yet gotten their period, and who liked whom, until, at last, Sandra announced the night’s research plan.

Ruth always tried to station herself near Cindy.

The other girls were boring partners. They stuck to the task at hand and never improvised.

It was okay to improvise, she told herself.

She was just figuring out what boys might like by figuring out what she liked herself.

At home, as Ivy breathed steadily in the next bed, Ruth sometimes imagined a boy touching her the way Cindy did.

This required concentration, because Cindy’s silky hair and smudged glasses kept floating into her thoughts.

The only boy she could get to “stick” there was Frank Jr. He was blond like Aunt Helen and rangy like Uncle Frank.

She and Ivy had known him since they were babies.

The three of them had spent mornings bickering over toys while their mothers sipped coffee and chatted.

Evenings watching TV in their pajamas while their parents sipped martinis and played bridge.

Summer afternoons running naked together through the sprinkler.

“Only in the backyard,” insisted Aunt Helen. “We’re not trashy people.”

When Ruth pictured herself with a boyfriend, she always imagined Frank Jr. She fantasized that he’d be her first real kiss—Cindy obviously didn’t count. But Ivy, typically, got to him first.

A dinner party. Their father home for an extended stretch.

Grandma Adele in Oklahoma City for an auto show.

Apparent peace reigned between the Rutledges and Bridlemiles.

George and Tom and Helen and Frank all dressed up.

“We’ll be at the Wilkinsons’ until late,” said her mother.

“You children go on to bed when you get tired. The guest room’s made up, Frank Jr.”

“He can stretch out on the sofa if he’s tired,” said Uncle Frank.

Aunt Helen said Frank Jr. was much too tall to stretch out on that dinky sofa—why, anyone could see it was more of a love seat—and he was growing so fast, he needed his sleep.

Ruth mentally awarded her double points for managing to boast about Frank Jr.’s height and disparage the Rutledge sofa all in one go.

Uncle Frank told Aunt Helen not to baby the boy, and Ruth’s dad said they had all better get in the car or they’d be late.

“All the more fashionable,” said Aunt Helen. “Frank Jr., you sleep in that bed, hear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Frank Jr. Ruth was glad he didn’t argue—anything to get their parents to leave already.

She and Ivy were fourteen, and Frank Jr. was fifteen—all of them past needing a babysitter, though Aunt Helen still had to make some ridiculous point about Frank Jr. being in charge.

Every minute their parents lingered at the door was pure torture.

“The Wilkinsons’ number is right by the phone,” her mother said, for a third time, and then, finally, four car doors slammed, the engine turned over, and the tires hissed down the driveway.

“Just to be clear,” said Ivy, “we’re each in charge of ourselves.

No one’s babysitting anybody else here.” Frank Jr. cocked an eyebrow but didn’t argue.

Earlier, Ivy had complained about Frank Jr. coming over.

Why did the three of them have to hang out just because their parents did?

They weren’t friends with him at school.

Now that he was a freshman, they didn’t even go to the same school.

“And Aunt Helen acts like he does us some big favor, gracing us with his presence,” said Ivy.

Yet her sister had changed into her tightest sweater.

The one that clung in all the right places and showed so clearly that Ivy’s places were righter than Ruth’s own.

She couldn’t compete with Ivy’s sweater, but she did spend half an hour in the bathroom with her mother’s hot rollers getting her hair to curl just right.

George didn’t allow makeup yet, so the field remained level there.

They made popcorn, pulled bottles of Coke from the fridge, then plopped down on the sofa.

Frank Jr. held the bowl, so he sat in the middle.

And perhaps the sofa really was more of a love seat, because there seemed to be very little space.

And no way for Ruth to avoid brushing against Frank Jr.’s arm as she reached for the popcorn.

He weighed down the middle of the cushion, which meant both girls pitched toward him, their legs coming to rest against his.

None of them mentioned this unusual contact, and no one jostled the others for more space.

They watched Wanted: Dead or Alive and Lawrence Welk and Gunsmoke .

Ivy went to get them more Cokes. Ruth had certainly been alone with Frank Jr. before.

She had certainly been alone on this very sofa—love seat—with him before.

The warmth of his leg against hers. The way her shoulder met his upper arm just so in the groove between his arm muscles.

He shifted his arm out from under hers. She cringed, mortified that he must sense how much she liked leaning against him.

She inched away, then felt a weight across her shoulders.

He’d put his arm around her! It left a gap into which she could lean toward him, rest against his rib cage, and she was allowing her body to fill that gap, slowly, so that it would seem accidental, like something that just happened, when Frank Jr.’s arm retreated, just as Ivy returned with three more bottles of Coke.

After the second Coke, Ruth needed to pee, but she was determined to hold it in, to maintain physical contact with Frank Jr. It was warm on the love seat.

The three of them drowsed in front of the set.

Jack Paar was boring, and soon the national anthem would play and the screen would just be bars of color.

From the kitchen, the jangling complaint of the telephone stirred them all awake.

“You get it,” said Ivy. “I got the Cokes.” Ruth had no argument for that.

Plus, she could barely hold her pee anymore.

“That’ll be our mom,” said Ivy to Frank Jr. “She thinks she has to check up on us.” This was said in the world-weary, exasperated tone Ivy had taken to using lately and that Ruth hated.

But Frank Jr. curled his lip in amusement.

After she’d assured her mother that everything was fine, yes, they’d had a snack, yes, they’d go to bed soon, yes, the parents should stay out as late as they liked, no problem; after she’d relieved herself, praying that Frank Jr. couldn’t hear the thundering, unladylike stream; after she’d considered and then decided against spritzing herself with her mother’s perfume—(a) she didn’t want to seem like she was trying too hard, and (b) she didn’t want Frank Jr. to think she smelled like her mother—she made her way back to the living room.

No sound of laughter, no conversation, just Jack Paar saying, “I kid you not.”

And there, on the sofa / love seat, Frank Jr. had one arm curved tight around Ivy’s back and the other wedged between himself and the front of her tight sweater, where his hand was clearly getting a good sense of her rightness. They were kissing, and it was obvious tongues were involved.

At the next sleepover, they all sat in a circle, and Sandra proposed they each take turns saying which boy they liked.

Sandra went first and named the cutest eighth-grade boy.

Linda went next, then Diana, each picking a boy just a notch down in popularity from Sandra’s choice.

Then it was Ruth’s turn. The only boy she liked was one her sister had gotten to first. She tried to think of which eighth-grade boy would rank fourth, but it was hard to focus with Cindy trembling beside her. “Earth to Ruth,” said Sandra. “Hello?”

Ruth punted. “Well, I know who Ivy likes. Frank Bridlemile!”

Ivy glared at her. “Why jump ahead to me, Ruth? You and Cindy in a hurry to turn out the lights and start your research ?”

Ruth stiffened. Cindy exhaled in a loud whoosh. The other girls goggled at them. “No!” Her voice had never sounded so shrill. “That’s ridiculous!”

Ivy smirked, then opened her mouth as if she had more to say, and Ruth wished for once her sister could let something go.

The wishing must have worked, because Ivy just shrugged.

“Whatever you say, Ruth.” Her tone implied she neither believed Ruth nor cared enough to argue.

Cindy stared at the carpet. The other girls looked from Ruth to Ivy and back.

Finally, Ivy rose and said she wanted more soda.

Sandra, Linda, and Diana followed her to the kitchen.

Cindy trotted after them, saying there was more out in the garage. She never hosted a sleepover again.

That fall they started high school, and slowly their group of six fractured.

They each drifted off to new sets of friends and, especially, to boys.

Even Cindy had a boyfriend. In the halls, she sometimes gave Ruth a shy smile or a half wave, but she never sat with her at lunch or sought her out.

And Ivy, after they exited the school bus each morning, managed to avoid Ruth almost entirely.

Ruth tried not to care. She made friends of her own.

She tried to keep from looking for her sister, but her brain was like a radar she couldn’t turn off—always sweeping her surroundings, searching for Ivy’s ping.

Was that her down the hallway? Up ahead in the lunch line?

Getting into a car with that football player?

By sophomore year, Ivy had a date almost every weekend.

Ruth heard from her friends—who heard from their brothers—that her sister was fast. She didn’t want to believe it, but Ivy returned home seconds before curfew, her eyes bright, her cheeks flushed.

Ruth didn’t need a mirror to confirm that her own eyes and cheeks didn’t look like that after a date.

She didn’t go out as often as Ivy did. But for school dances or other occasions that required an escort, she had Patrick Healy.

Treasurer of the chess club, second clarinet in band.

A boy she could rely upon to compliment her on her dress, dance with her and fetch her punch at socials, and never try any funny business in the car. A boy who required no research at all.