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smattering of sharp gravel against my back. Our friends' proximity alarmed me, and I tried to sit up; but Thibaud dismissed my attempt, silencing me first with his hand over my mouth and then with his lips on mine. Our adolescent fumblings fumbled onwards, but for me the sounds beyond our bodies now intruded. We could hear their shuffling feet, and the slap of their discarded clothing on the railing overhead. We could hear their whispers (might they not then hear ours?), then the cascade of splashes as they dived, with the expert timing of showgirls, one after the other. A few droplets splattered through the poolside slats and showered down on us.
    Thibaud would not be deterred. Fearing that one of them might slither underwater to the porthole to catch the view (another game of which we never tired), and might instead glimpse our entwined bodies, I advocated a remove, wanted us to tiptoe further seawards and plant ourselves invisibly in the undergrowth. But Thibaud, preoccupied with the buttons of my fly, would have none of it.
    "They'll hear us if we move," he hissed. And then again, more gently, his hand sliding from my navel, "May I?"
    "I don't know."
    "Don't know what?"
    "If you may."
    "Have you never—?"
    "It's not that," I said, although it was, at least in part.
    "Have you let other guys?"
    "Well, I—" There was, I felt, a right answer to this query, something between prude and slut, between "no" and "yes." Honesty didn't enter into it. "That's for me to know and you to find out," I said.
    "So may I? Go on?"
    "Sh." The others were clambering from the water, raining their drippings unpleasantly upon us, laughing aloud and jeering at Laure, whose clothes Thierry, in a gesture of love (poor Cécile), had thrown into the deep end. Wily Thibaud chose to take my silence as acquiescence: he slipped his hand uninvited into my underpants, and began, inexpertly, to mash his fingers in the folds of my sex, a maneuver he compounded by stopping my mouth with his ardent tongue.
    "That's nice, isn't it?" he muttered in my ear as his finger crept, snail-like, inside me. "You're not sorry?"
    His hip bone crushed my thigh. His fingers were cold in so warm a place, and his manipulations felt exploratory, even clinical; or perhaps it was merely the unlikeliness of this boy's hand in this position—of me, of us, in this position. It wasn't unpleasant, nor was it particularly arousing. "So this," I thought, "is what it's like." Afraid, above all, of disclosure, I didn't utter a sound.
    Our first awakening was the report of the gun. It burst, a massive cracking sound. We later learned that the bullet had struck the wooden railing just above us.
    This initial explosion bloomed into wild screams and symphonic wailing. I heard my grandmother shrieking, "My God, my God, Jacques!" and Cécile's voice, recognizable only by its pitch, a keening chant overlaying the others' yelps: "Fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck." I didn't hear my grandfather at all. His rage was concentrated entirely in the rifle blast; it had no other voice.
    Thibaud was off me, and I was struggling with my jeans, still angling and engorged. "Jesus," he said, and though nobody was listening for us, I waved him to be quiet. "What happened?"
    To my later shame, I didn't go to my friends. I couldn't. Doomed on all sides: by my parents, if discovered; among my peers, an assassin by association. Thibaud ran off, but not before he promised not to betray me. Incredibly, the black sea glittered ahead, its rising and falling unabated, and I lurked there, by the porthole, listening.
    "He's crazy. Completely crazy."
    "He'll pay for this."
    "You bet he will."
    "Christ, Cécile, you okay?"
    "I'm hit—on the arm"—Thierry, in tears—"I'm bleeding."
    "Look at Cécile's back, for Chrissakes!"
    "Are you joking? Can you see anything?"
    "Somebody get an ambulance! Call the police!"
    "Can you walk? She can walk, I think."
    "Just about."
    "Call the fucking cops. Murderer. I'll