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“You’re here alone?” he said.

“Um, yeah. My friend went home early. I don’t know, I just wanted to hang around. It’s such a nice night.” Then she felt stupid.
It’s such a nice night
was something her mother would say.

But he just nodded. “Yeah, I like going on the rides alone. It kind of lets me think.”

She smiled with an instant, helpless adoration. “Yeah, that’s cool. I like that, too.”

“Only they make you sit with someone.”

“Yeah,” she said, inventing quickly, “I got stuck with someone’s kid on the Ferris wheel, and the kid kept screaming. I mean, he wasn’t even scared; he just wanted to scream to his sister.”

“That kind of thing.” He laughed, and looked at her with more interest. “I’d go on the Ferris wheel with you. We could just sit together and not say anything.”

“That would be great,” she said, trying to make her voice casual. “Yeah, we could just be quiet and pretend to be alone.”

The line moved forward in slow increments, and they talked about all the things they thought about while alone: fantasies about being interviewed on
Letterman
, about living in the woods alone with only a tent, about being rich and famous, about being a person who comes to the amusement park alone to escape from fans. He said, “And people are whispering to each other, ‘Is that Ralph Anderman?’ ‘No, it couldn’t be. What would he be doing alone in a place like this?’ ”

“But you’re in disguise.” She found herself laughing, getting a little breathless.

“Yeah. They don’t recognize me without my expensive suit. I’m just wearing this crap to blend in.”

Again, she fell into nervous laughter, thinking that there wasn’t anything wrong with what he was wearing—or was there? Maybe she just didn’t know the difference. She said, apologetically, “It’s not that funny.”

They got their ice creams and went to sit on a bench in front of the roller coaster. He told her that he was a freshman at Boston University, home for the summer. Next year he was going to get an apartment with some friends. While he described the friends, Valerie dreamed up an alternate history for herself, the history of a girl who was old enough, good enough, to be the girlfriend of a BU student, who could visit him on the weekends and look hot in front of his friends. She told him, “That’s cool. I’m going to UMass next year. I’m just going to stay in dorms, though.” She tried to look grown-up as she shrugged. “I guess that’s okay.” The lie felt harmless, though she had some qualms as she imagined actually visiting him in Boston and having to tell stories about her college life when she was actually still in high school. Of course, that would never happen, though. She would never see him after this night.

But by the time they got to the Ferris wheel, there seemed to be some kind of understanding between them. It was something unspoken, something in the way he walked closer to her than a friend would, something about the way he finished her sentences and she laughed too hard at his jokes. She started believing that he might actually like her. Might actually
want
her—if only she could keep him from finding out what a freak she was. As long as he never met Sondra and all those people, and saw the disgusted, jeering way they treated her. As long as he never saw her house, heaped with the junk from four years without cleaning, or met her drunken mother, or any of the series of “stepfathers” who ran the gamut from maudlin drunk to violent drunk.

If only he never found out who she was.

He got into the Ferris wheel car first and put out his hand to help her in. Taking it, she was flying on an impression of its warmth, its comforting strength. When she sat down beside him, he left his hand in hers for a second before retracting it with a smile. The ride’s attendant put down the safety bar on top of them and the car jolted forward, swinging them free of the ground, free of reality. They coasted up a long delicious step, and stopped.

“Now we’re not supposed to talk,” said Ralph.

They both laughed; she realized with a giddy thrill that he
wanted
to talk to her now. She said, “Yeah, we have to remain completely silent.”

“So what are we going to do?” he said lightly.

She looked at him, confused. Then he bent down and kissed her on the lips.

Immediately she felt as if the world was spinning around her. He had taken her in his arms; the leather jacket felt cold and masculine on her bare skin. There was an immediate, plummeting feeling of desire that was like being drunk without the sickness, an ecstasy so intense that Valerie knew she would do anything for him, do anything to be kissed by him. He passed his tongue over her lips and her lips burned and sang. She had shut her eyes and when the Ferris wheel moved again, she felt as if she was falling through herself, only being held clear by his arms and the magnetic pull of that kiss. As he slipped his tongue into her mouth, she thought,
This is it. This is what I always wanted.

Their ride on the Ferris wheel was a long flight of shut eyes, their tongues meeting and playing over each other, his hands caressing her back in gentle circles. Every sensation coursed through her whole body. Magically, the tiniest pressure of his finger on her shoulder blade made her blood sing all through her thighs and sent waves of elation through her heart. She never opened her eyes to see the lights, and when the ride stopped and he pulled away from her, she was painfully shocked. She wanted to make him promise that he would kiss her again. But the attendant was there, grinning knowingly at them. She stumbled out of the car and walked off through the crowds, forcing herself not to look back.

“Hey,” his laughing voice pursued her. “Are you running away?”

She stopped and took a deep breath. Just as she’d needed him to, he came up and hugged her from behind. He said into her ear, his breath hot on her cheek, “Will you go for a walk with me?”

She nodded, feeling her hair moving deliciously against his face.

The amusement park was fenced off from the surrounding woods. But there was one section where the woods were contained within the high chain-link fence. Valerie had heard stories about girls who went in there with boys, about condoms found there, and blow jobs interrupted by guards
.
Those girls were sluts, of course. They were easy, the kind of girls boys laughed at behind their backs. But this had to be different. It felt different, and, anyway, Ralph was in college. She had said she was about to start college—and college girls weren’t necessarily sluts if they had sex. It was different when you were older.

Still, she was silent, afraid of herself as she crept through the bushes with him, her legs weak from the desire that was now frankly pulsing between her legs. She could even feel the wetness in her panties, a mushy feeling as if her cunt was deliciously molten.
I’ll let him,
she told herself.
I’m going to let him touch me there.
As she thought it, a bright shock of anticipation shot through her pussy, making her stagger a little. He put out his hand to steady her, and then they were walking hand in hand, the pressure of his fingers over hers a delirious luxury.

Under the trees, it was darker than she’d expected. It was hard to see where she was putting her feet. When she put her foot down on a blanket, she flinched back from it at first, as if she’d stepped on flesh. He laughed and said, “That’s it. We can sit down here. It’s a little dirty, but . . .”

She tried to see his face in the dark, but he was a shadow. His dark form was silhouetted against a weaker dark. The boughs above were making a shushing sound, as if they were telling her to relax, relax. When he sat, her first impression was that he’d vanished; the dark shape was simply gone. But then she heard him breathing at knee level, and stopped to feel the blanket with her hands, settling on it with her sandaled feet out among the twigs and pine needles.

He said, “Did you mind me kissing you?”

She felt a sharp relief that was followed by an even sharper disappointment. He wasn’t going to make her kiss him again. They would talk and walk back together. “I liked it a lot,” she said. Then she remembered the role she was playing and said in a false, bold voice, “I like that stuff. I mean, sex.”

She could hear his sharp intake of breath. Before she could think about what it meant, he was kissing her again and bearing her onto her back with his body on top of hers. She could feel the sharp twigs underneath the blanket, digging into her back, and the pleasure of kissing was now made keener by impulses of panic. Her heart was racing, and she was going to tell him to stop. She was going to.

He was feeling her breast through her blouse and bra. Fleetingly, she was grateful for the thick material of the bra; that made it less dirty, less of an invasion. But then he had pulled her blouse down over her shoulder and was reaching inside the bra cup to take her nipple between his fingers.

The sensation hit like a bullet. She was holding her breath, holding still as if the waves of sensation might wash her away. The way he was pulling down her bra was uncomfortable, but above it her breast was prickling with the cold of the autumn air and receiving the attentions of his hand with an intoxicated alertness that made her fear seem small and stupid. When he bent his head to her breast and began to kiss it, she gasped. His lips fastened on her nipple, and he was licking its tip in tiny circles, making her breath come fast and weak.

Then he was pulling up her skirt with an urgency that made her feel powerless. How could she tell him to stop? What if he was angry?

He was pulling down her panties, his hand instantly, eagerly exploring the lush wetness there. His fingers were hard and confident, but the tingling and searing feeling was an invasion. She had to stop him. She had to get under control. Instead, she found herself arching her back, and she had only herself to blame when he slipped a finger inside her.
I let him put his finger in me,
she thought as it happened. The finger felt cold and unnatural. She was gritting her teeth against the desire, wanting him to move his finger against her more even as she needed him to stop.

When he moved back on top of her, that shadow silhouette over her, she knew. He had taken her here to fuck her. That was what was happening. She was going to lose her virginity here, unless she said something. But she couldn’t say anything. He would know she was a kid, a stupid kid who told lies to seem cooler than she really was. If she said anything, she would start to cry, and he would be disgusted with her.

When his penis touched her
there,
she caught her breath. This was real. He was really doing it. The tip poked once at her clitoris, a desperate, fearful pleasure. Then it found her slit and slid slowly, unstoppably, in. He was entering her; he was fucking her. She kept her eyes shut tight, thinking of broken hymens and blood. It was too big. It could never fit inside her. As he went deeper, it felt as if her flesh was being cranked open, farther and farther, until she wanted to scream that it was too much. She would die. But at last he was all the way in, held impossibly tightly in her cunt, a hard bar in her soft flesh.
That’s his penis,
she thought to herself, and at that moment, a sneaking pleasure insinuated itself into her pain and terror. It was a faint, cajoling pleasure; it vanished as he pulled out of her, only to come back louder when he thrust again. It warred with the voice of her torn flesh at first, but then joined it so that the pain became a different kind of pleasure, or the pleasure a different kind of pain.
Oh, my God, he’s fucking me,
she told herself. And her cunt suddenly gathered into a spasm of joy so strange and wild that she cried out, wanting to tell him to stop, but making only an unintelligible sound that could have been shock or gratitude. He moaned in her ear, his strokes booming harder now inside her. He must be doing some damage to her. He was
killing
her, but she half wanted to be killed. It was better to be killed by him than go back to her life. If this was the end . . . but as she thought this, he stiffened and moaned again. He fell hard into her, his cock straining up so deep that she bit her lip to keep from screaming.

He relaxed, his body growing heavier on top of her. She could hardly breathe as his weight settled. She measured the time that passed in the gasps she managed, thinking,
After twenty breaths, I’ll tell him to move. I’ll have to
. All the pleasure was gone, turned to a draining hopelessness and shame. There was a trickling sensation between her legs, and she thought of the fluids there with repulsion. She was disgusting. Everyone was right about her. All she wanted in the world was to be in a shower, alone. She wanted to be alone for the rest of her life.

At last he moved off of her; the cold of the night air was shocking, and she immediately scrambled to find her panties. She was sitting up, pulling her clothes back into place with clumsy panic. He said, “Hey, are you okay? Valerie?”

“Yeah, I’m great,” she said. As she buttoned her blouse back up, the world was beginning to return to normal. She was covered, hidden, safe. If she’d had a coat . . .

He said, “Did I go too far?”

“No, I’m used to it,” she said flatly. “It’s nothing.”

He laughed. “Exactly what a guy wants to hear.”

She stood, arousing a stinging reminder from her cunt. She felt warped out of shape down there, and miserably dirtied and wet. If only the blood didn’t show. She had to get home before she bled through. She said, “I got to go. I got to get home.”

“Okay,” he said, his voice a little colder. “Okay, I can go.”

This time it was only a few steps to get out of the woods. The amusement park seemed luridly bright, full of people who stared at her, who knew what she’d been doing. Music blared from loudspeakers on the rides they passed, the various tunes mixing into a grotesque din. He was walking a little distance from her, apparently put out. Well, it didn’t matter. She was never going to see him again. She couldn’t bear to see him again.