the world’s shortest person at twenty-three inches tall, I heard the back door bang open. I heard the unmistakable sound of Johnny hammering his boots against the door sill, a habit Mom had drilled into each of us, and then faintly, Stacy’s laugh. This surprised me—since Stacy was only welcome in our house if Mom or Dad were there. And even then, she wasn’t truly welcome.
Straining, I could hear the winter undressing sounds associated with snow—hats and scarves and gloves peeling off with a whack, coats unzipping, feet working their way out of boots. Then two sets of footsteps on the stairs. I held my breath.
“Shh...shh!” Stacy’s hissed whisper.
“We don’t have to ‘shh.’ No one’s here,” Johnny said, whispering anyway. “Mom’s at work, and Dad’s out of town for the day.”
“What about your sisters?”
“Emilie’s at band practice and Kirsten’s probably in the hayloft or something.”
“Are you sure?”
Johnny laughed. “Are you kidding me? If Kirsten were here, she’d be hanging all over you by now.”
That was mean, I thought, my cheeks hot. But not as mean as Stacy’s laugh of agreement. I would have expected her to protest, to say that I wasn’t a pest, that she loved talking to me.
Instead, she hollered, “Hello! Helllllloooo! Emilie and Kirsten! Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
They laughed as if this was the most hysterical thing ever.
Quietly, I folded my legs and brought my knees to my chin. I heard Johnny’s bedroom door squeak open, then thunk as it caught on something, a pair of shoes, maybe, or a football.
“God, your room is such a sty,” Stacy said. “No wonder you’ve never let me in here before.” She laughed again, and I remembered Stacy’s bedroom from her party: the white bedspread, the neat line of books on her shelf.
“Jeez, Lemke. Let it go.”
There was the sound of metal coiling, and I realized they were on Johnny’s bed. My little hideout was situated between the linen closet and Johnny’s bedroom; I might as well have been perched in his closet. Listening to Stacy’s giggles, my hearing suddenly felt very sharp. I plugged my ears and counted to twenty, then unstopped them and listened to their quiet sucking sounds. This was kissing—real kissing, late-night TV kissing, not the short pecks my parents planted on each other’s cheeks on their way out the door or the dry forehead smacks Mom gave us when we professed to have fevers, kisses that were more thermometer than affection. Once, Emilie had shown me how to practice kissing, and we had sucked on the insides of our arms until they were covered with purplish hickeys. It had taken a full week for mine to disappear, and Mom had frowned, noticing my arm as I got ready for bed. “You must be playing too hard in the barn,” she said. “You’re all bruised up.”
Now I imagined Johnny and Stacy burying each other’s bodies in hickeys, a more private version of what Mom termed their “make-out sessions” when Johnny walked Stacy to her car. I wondered if her pink lip gloss, which she reapplied constantly from a little tube that bulged in her back pocket like a strange tumor, had transferred onto Johnny’s mouth, his neck, leaving sweet raspberries on his skin.
I’ve got to say something now, I thought, make some noise, get myself out of here. I had a basic idea of what was happening—anything from necking to going all the way, which I’d learned about from Katie and Kari Schultz, twins in my grade whose college-aged babysitter had filled them in on everything from periods to where babies came from.
Then I heard something else—a zipper?
“What are you doing?” Johnny groaned, loud and low.
Stacy laughed again. “I thought you might like that,” she whispered, a throaty sound that didn’t sound like Stacy at all, but more like an actress in a love scene the moment before Mom changed the channel.
What would happen if someone came in now, like Grandpa with one of his shirts to be mended, or Mom, released from her shift early?
“You are such a tease,” Johnny moaned, and Stacy laughed again.
“Good?” she asked.
“Mmm...”
I started to count in my head again, just wanting this to be over. One, two, three... Something soft like a sweater smacked against the wall, and then there were more sounds, like someone tugging off a pair of jeans. Were these, I wondered, the pale blue jeans with heart-shaped appliqués on the back pockets?
All of a sudden, the sounds stopped, and Johnny said, clear as anything: “I don’t know about this.”
Fifteen...sixteen...seventeen...
“I told you, I’m ready,” Stacy whispered.
“But I just—I don’t want you to think you have to—”
“I don’t think I have to. I know I want to.”
“You’re sure about this? I mean, really sure?” Johnny’s voice was husky, too. All of a sudden I realized it was a man’s voice, not a boy’s.
Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine.
“I told you, yeah. I’m sure. What can I do to get you to believe me?” She laughed then, and Johnny groaned.
“But what about...?”
“Don’t worry about it. We’ll be careful.” She gave him a light smack, her voice teasing.
“Everyone always thinks they’re being careful.”
“I never thought I’d be the one who had to convince you,” she said, sounding almost annoyed for a second. Then she switched back to her throaty, teasing voice. “I mean, most guys wouldn’t mind...”
Johnny’s voice then was husky. “All right, you’ve convinced me.”
There were more kissing sounds, the bedsprings creaking. Even if I wasn’t hiding in the linen closet, I would have heard this. I started again. Forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty... My cheeks burned. The bed frame rattled against the wall.
Katie and Kari had illustrated the process for me in a notebook, behind pages of multiplication tables. It didn’t make much sense until I equated her drawing with bulls and heifers. “So the man puts this—” a crude mushroom-shaped object “—into this—” a petal-shaped fissure I only vaguely equated with my own body “—and the woman gets pregnant,” Katie had told me.
“And then her breasts get really big because they’ve filled up with milk,” Kari added. I suspected they were missing a few steps in between, but still, I was unnerved to realize that this scene from the animal world in our barn translated so closely to human life. It shocked me to think that this happened all around me, to my parents, to my married cousins, even to people from church.
Johnny and Stacy were panting now, and it was as if they were breathing directly into my ear. I got stuck for a second: Seventy-one, seventy-one, seventy-one...
“Ouch!” Johnny’s voice. “Did you just bite me?”
Stacy laughed. “Go ahead, bite me back.”
Eighty-six... There was a rhythm to the bed creaking, the groans. I could hear—or was I imagining it?—two pairs of lungs, breath heavy, in sync. I hit one hundred and started working my way down. Ninety-six, ninety-five...
“Oh, Stace, Stace, Stace,” Johnny said, his voice high-pitched and rapid.
What if I stood up, announcing my presence right then? I wondered if I could sneak out of the closet, down the stairs, out the screen door and then in again with a slam, the world’s smallest superhero, here to save the day. I’d come charging up the steps and bang on Johnny’s door, yelling, “Stop—or you’ll have a baby!”
Seventy-five, seventy-four...