.

to think of that moment, when I pushed away from him and swam to the other side of the pool, as being where my fate changed, where I branched off and started living a parallel life that wasn’t supposed to be.

      In the other life, having lost my virginity at a young age in a hotel pool, I’m sexed and supple and swanning through a series of relationships, through life. The hang-up of losing my virginity would never have impeded me. It would never have started to worry me, only slightly at first, but then more and more as my friends each lost theirs and I got older and it seemed that I had lost some beat, some essential rhythm.

      It would never have been something that started to curdle inside me, that I started to think about all the time. I’m a twenty-four-year-old virgin, I’d think, as I hit my hip on a gate and sneezed at the same time. I’m a twenty-five-year-old virgin, staring at the tiles of a mural on a city street. I’m a twenty-six-year-old virgin, catching my reflection in a car window.

      Untouched. Like a flower suffocating in its own air. Like something pickling in its own juices. Something that badly needed to be turned inside out, banged right.

      I watched a bumblebee leadenly explore a rose next to the porch. In the distance were the faint sounds of construction, something grinding and then hammering.

      I thought, The further down this path I go, the more freakish I’ll become. The stranger of a species I’ll be, curling with my own horrible, weird hair. It was time to jam the key into the lock and force it, because I didn’t have time to step back and meditate my way onto the right path.

      I needed to make a plan for the summer, a surefire strategy. I had to shed whatever preconception I had before about how it was all going to be.

       Three

      I stood in a room in Viv’s house filled with hanging plates. There was a tall cabinet in the corner, and on top of that was a clock embedded in what looked like a porcelain flower bank. It ticked heavily.

      The plates were lined up in sets of four or five, and on each one was a meticulously painted scene. There was a jellyfish, painted in purples and pinks, gliding through the water toward the surface. It was part of a series that had to do with the ocean. Another one showed a craggy turquoise mountain under the sea. Another an underwater city, with clusters of towers and twinkling lights. A school of fish swam through, giving a sense of scale.

      A different group showed a bright, teeming garden outside some kind of ominous estate with dark windows. There were twisting rosebushes, sculpted shrubs, and orange paths; flowers spewed out of small pots and the tops of statues. The perspective was all off, as if a child had done it. It was like the ground leading up to the estate was tipped up, slanted wrong. One plate showed the property from a different side, where a gray wall cast a shadow across a birdbath, and it looked like someone had just left a picnic, a golden fork and knife strewn on the ground. They were meticulously detailed. You could see the designs, some flicks of a thin brush, on the pots, and the small wells of shadows on the statues.

      Other plates showed scenes of horses and cowboys, migrating bison and teepees on great plains, a Wild West theme. In another series was a line of camels following a colorful sultan across the desert, their bodies making long shadows across the sand.

      It wasn’t so hard to see why people would buy these. On each of them were Viv’s tiny initials, “VG.” My favorites, or the ones I stared at the longest, depicted two mice constructing a multi-tiered card house on a red carpet in a dark living room. In the last plate, a mouse was standing on its tiptoes, balancing the final one on top. You could see tiny dots on each card—spades, hearts; it must have taken forever. Next to each mouse was a gold goblet. I stared at them for a really long time.

      I then wandered with my laptop into the sunroom, a frayed, faded area with a row of windows you could crank open. There was a pouchy purple velvet couch and a glass coffee table with some craft books stacked on it.

      Here was the list I made:

      – Take some kind of community class

      – Hang around the university or audit a course

      – Internet dating

      – Go to a bar

      – Join a gym

      – Go to a sales conference or a convention at a local hotel

      – Join a singles-outing group

      – Take a language class

      – Get a job

      – Don’t think too much

      – Just be relaxed about it

      I studied the profile picture of a man with the screen name “TheMeeksShallInherit.” He was outside, at what appeared to be an electronics fair, standing next to a table with a neon-orange tablecloth on it. There was another picture of him against the Golden Gate Bridge. Then a picture of him holding a huge kite and giving the thumbs-up.

      “He sounds like an alien. Those are the kinds of pictures an alien would put up,” said Grace, my old roommate whom I’d lived with in Tempe and who was now my closest friend.

      “Really?” I said.

      “To convince you he was human and knows how to do things.”

      “Sure,” I said.

      I clicked through a few more pictures.

      “Well, at least he’s not holding a huge pencil at an imaginarium,” I said. “Like, ‘Look at me!’”

      “Totally.”

      After I’d left, she’d stayed in Arizona and gotten a job at the historic public library in Tucson. I’d been there once. As we talked, I could hear her heels click on the marble floor as she walked around in the giant, day-lit atrium.

      “He’s sent me a bunch of messages. Lots of exclamation points. He seems really jazzed about everything.”

      “Well,” she said, “that’s not a bad quality, necessarily.”

      I could feel her choosing her words. I’d let her think, over the years, by alluding to it or not correcting her when she made assumptions, that I’d had sex. That I’d been having sex. But there was something about the wide berth she gave the subject that made me think she knew the truth. Once, when she’d visited me, I told her about a flirtation I had at Quartz to keep apace with a story she was telling, and a troubled, questioning look had come over her face.

      “So what’s she like?” she said. “Your aunt?”

      “She’s nice,” I said. “She’s polite. She’s got a kind of inner poise. She’s very poised.”

      “Okay.”

      “She’s artistic. She has been to Orlando.”

      “Okay.”

      “Recently.”

      “Got it.”

      I heard the shrieks of children over the phone. A school group, bustling by.

      “You’re really painting a nuanced picture,” she said.

      “There’s a sort of hard quality to her. Like, if you said, ‘What do I do with this hen that’s bullying all the other chickens?’ and you were having all these qualms, she would take it from you and snap its neck, just like that.”

      “So she has leadership qualities?”

      “I’m not not saying that.”

      “I get it.”

      “I do think she’d be a good person to have in some survival situation. Like some kind of space mission that crash-landed on another planet and lost touch with Earth.”

      “I’d be like, ‘Might as well rampage through the dessert rations!’” said Grace.

      “Me