“Oh,” she murmured, with her open mouth against his neck, as his body jerked, and warm, sticky liquid splashed out over her wrist and arm. Abby wanted to examine the slippery, bleach-smelling stuff. She thought that maybe she would even taste it, a desire prompted primarily by curiosity and only slightly by hunger （they’d served salmon for dinner, which was not Abby’s favorite）。 She wondered what would happen if she rearranged herself, lying on her back on the blanket, and took Mark’s hand and slid it under her waistband, down to where she could feel herself throbbing. Before she could try it, she heard Marissa hissing, “Incoming!” Mark hastily pulled a wad of paper napkins out of his hoodie’s pouch. Gently, he wiped Abby’s hand clean as one of the counselors came down the row of blankets, brandishing a flashlight, aiming its beam at each of the couples and saying things like “Hands above the equator, you two” and “Come on, guys, you know the rules.”
When the counselor was gone, Mark pressed warm kisses on Abby’s forehead, her cheeks, her neck, her lips, whispering, “I love you,” and Abby kissed him back, and said, “I love you, too.”
The next morning, after the final weigh-ins, the parents arrived. Abby went back to Pennsylvania, and Mark returned to Long Island. They each took their newly reduced selves back to their respective high schools. Abby found herself the object of a great deal of male attention, and a senior on the football team asked her to go to the Homecoming dance with him.
She broke up with Mark over the phone. He took the news well, sounding sad, but not surprised. Abby told him that she wouldn’t forget him; that she’d always remember kissing him under the blanket at movie night, how he’d gotten her fried chicken for her birthday, and how it felt when he held her, like no bad thing could hurt her.
After their last summer, they’d friended each other on social media. Abby had never unfriended or unfollowed. She had, however, muted Mark （probably around the time he’d posted his first picture of himself with a girl）。 She knew, through Marissa, who kept in touch with everyone from camp, that Mark had gone to Duke for college, then to California for podiatry school, but, beyond that, she’d heard nothing. She’d never looked. She’d let him slip from her mind, turning him into a sweet memory, a part of her past. Except Mark had set the standard for every subsequent relationship. It hadn’t taken Abby long to learn just how hard it would be for subsequent boyfriends to compare.
She’d lost her virginity the summer before college, in her bedroom in her dad’s house, when her father was busy teaching an adult bar mitzvah class. Then, six weeks into her freshman year at Penn State, she’d met a rugby player named Chris at a fraternity party. They’d both been a few beers past tipsy when they’d gone back to her dorm room, climbed into her single bed, and fooled around until Chris had passed out, snoring, beside her. When Abby woke up she’d found Chris looking at her in the predawn dimness. Instead of the awed pleasure she remembered from Mark’s face on movie night, Chris wore a look she recognized from her mother. Chris had looked displeased and disappointed. Possibly disgusted. Maybe even revolted. Like he couldn’t get away from her fast enough.
Beer goggles, Abby had thought, hating him. Hating herself. Remembering every joke she’d heard about how even a 2 becomes a 10 at closing time, and thinking that, in the black skirt and black top she’d worn to the party, in the dim light, she’d probably looked better. Thinner.
Chris, meanwhile, had lurched to his feet so fast it was as if the sheets had caught fire. Abby watched as he bent over, groping for his shoes and socks, which he’d abandoned on the floor. She noticed that the hair on his chest and shoulders kept going, covering his back and legs in what was more or less a pelt. “I gotta get going,” he’d muttered.
At five o’clock in the morning on a Saturday? “Do you have a paper route?” she’d asked.
Chris had blinked. “Huh?”
“Nothing. Never mind.”
Chris had nodded uncertainly. “Well. See ya.” He hadn’t even bothered to put his shoes on before he’d opened her door, looked left, then right, then left again, to make sure the hallway was empty, before making his escape with his sneakers in his hand.
Abby had flopped onto her back, dispirited and disgusted with herself. At least she would never see or hear from Chris again. Penn State was a big school, with thousands of students and a huge, sprawling campus, and Abby didn’t remember ever telling him her name or giving him her number, but she must have done one or the other at some point, because, two nights later, she’d been in bed at eleven thirty, doing the reading for the Intro to Bioethics class that she’d taken on a whim, when her phone had chimed with a classic U up text. It’s Chris, he’d added, and had attached a blurry picture of his face. Abby had toyed with writing back New phone who dis, but she’d been surprised, and curious enough to invite him back, thinking that maybe that unpleasant morning scene had been an aberration and that he’d reached out to make it up to her.