I'm trying to be good, I'm trying not to do anything more than kiss, just kiss, for the longest time, this is all I wanted — to be kissed by a boy.

I kiss this boy, this boy from school, in the field behind his house, with the coarse long blades of weeds and grass brushing against me. The cool wetness of the field soaks into my feet while I look out for a sliver of moon and realize that the kiss fails to warm me. It is a coarse-lipped emperor of a kiss, it coolly reproaches and demands. Tonight it demands obeisance.

I do not obey. I spread my fingers like cards, I push against his body of sinew and stone, but he is a wall, he does not move. Instead, he pushes me against the trunk of the angsana tree, his head brushing the low-hanging golden flowers, his fingers moving faster, clawing the sides of my waist, seizing the underside of my cotton button-down shirt.

Okay, that's enough, I say, but my shirt tears at the shoulder seam and he says, Sorry, as he undoes the buttons from my neck down. I recoil and spring and kick before he stills me, pelvis heavy in mine, and says in a cotton-soft voice, It will be good.

Katydids kick their wings together in song against thrumming tree crickets and overhead bats and I could cry but no one would hear because I am alone with a boy in a cool wet

field and no one is home in his moon-shadowed home because I got what I wanted and I must not let anyone see or I will be undone.

Down into a burrow within my breast I go, folded up in a place where everything is festive red like a good-luck home, while up above colors drain from my skin and all that remains between the boy and the tree is a jellyfish shadow, translucent and spineless and dull. This will remain my hallowed secret because if they knew, they would talk festively — those neighbors and families and friends of families. They would talk now that I have spread more than fingers, now that I have been kissed by a boy, now that I am no good.