My cheeks were flushed, and my eyes too bright, like I had bitten an electric wire and now it lit me up. I thought I had better go inside and hide for a little while until I was more composed. The party was on the back lawn, and the Botley house, even with all the windows thrown open, was humid and still. Looking for a quiet place to lie down for a quarter hour, I instead found Botley Sr.’s treasured map room, and there, paging through the maps in their enormous racks, was Helen.
She was two years older than me, unfashionable, but the Archers were so wealthy that she became a kind of fashion all on her own. She pulled her spectacles out of their tortoiseshell case, and when I came in still overwarm from the kisses and the sticky weather outside, she slid them down her nose to peer at me.
“Come here,” she said at last. “Mr. Botley has a very fine map of Tonkin.”
Helen had a fortune and a kind of roundness to her that made me think of Christmas ornaments and buns dusted with large sugar crystals. Her dark thick brows were as straight as the trolley rail, and I saw that her nails were bitten down to the quick where she traced the rivers of Tonkin, hovering but too respectful to touch.
I didn’t care much about the map, but I suddenly wanted very much to stand by her as she spoke of mountains and city centers. It was as if kissing Thomas had laid me open to a world where anyone might be kissed, and standing next to Helen as she recited the names of those foreign cities, I became aware that she had a mouth as well.
At some point, she realized I was looking at her instead of the map, and her words trailed off. With a confidence I had never had before, I reached up to cup the side of her warm neck with my hand. For just a moment, it was enough to feel her pulse under my palm and to feel the way my touch made her swallow hard.
It might have come to no more than that, but then we both heard the door slam somewhere, and a bubble of unwelcome voices echoing through the halls of the house. The voices were young and light, tumbling like a tide towards us, and I acted without thinking.
I seized Helen’s hand and pulled her with me into the narrow closet close by. We fought for space with the mop and broom and with each other as well until we got the door closed behind us. Then her hand clasped mine hard, and we didn’t even have to lean towards one another before we were kissing.
We didn’t fit each other, but the small space made it seem as if we did, and there was enough room at least to touch each other’s faces, to make an utter ruin of our carefully set hair. Her fingers ended up in my mouth somehow, and she half-shrieked, half-giggled when I bit. It was hellishly hot and sodden in the closet, and I felt as if I would surely melt when I pressed my cheek to hers or when my hands slid up her bare wrists.
Somehow, we were not caught, and eventually, we came out of the closet holding hands and with our eyes gleaming. We just looked like girls who had taken a turn with the Botley boys behind the pool house, so that was all right, and when the party adjourned for the night, I went home to the Archers’ house with Helen.
After that, I became the most elegant kind of vagabond. I stayed almost three weeks with the Archers, who thought I was the most clever thing. Then when Helen and I fell out, I was only a few days at home before I finagled an invitation for a visit with the Featherstones, where Alicia Featherstone and I enjoyed almost a month together before I decided I could not stand her snoring. Under the auspice of his sister Paulette, I passed some time with Victor Reed before he was old enough to enlist, and he was a better kisser than Thomas, though less thoughtful than Alicia had been.
Being a guest suited me. I ate with the family and slept in the same beds with the girls I liked best, and as I went along, I was turning into a marvelous mimic. I copied the Featherstones’ polished manners, the Banners’ Mid-Atlantic accent, and the Wilkins’ easy command of those they deemed their social inferiors, which was to say, everyone.
I learned the trick of simply assuming I was welcome wherever I went, and for the most part, I was. I was clever enough to know that it was my exotic looks and faintly tragic history that made me such an attractive curiosity, and I was not yet clever enough to mind when they prodded at my differences for a conversation piece at dinner.