“Do you like having sex with those Maxwell Academy boys?” Julie asked.
“I do,” Penelope said. This wasn’t a lie, though technically what they did was not sex. There was a rumor that Amy Brear let boys put it in her butt because that way she was still a virgin. Penelope considered asking Julie about this technicality, but her brain was too fuzzy. All of her energy and power seemed to be in her nipples. Amazing. Amazing that so much could be centered in such a small part of her body. She remembered when she broke her baby toe, back in junior high, how she couldn’t believe how much a tiny thing like that could hurt. For days, all she could think about was that toe, as if all of her blood and nerves were in that one place.
“Your toe?” Julie asked.
Penelope laughed. Had she said it out loud?
“I broke it,” Penelope said, trying to stop laughing. “And all I could feel was my toe.”
“That’s why I hate pot,” Julie said. “It makes you stupid.”
Julie pressed the glass of wine, now half-empty, to Penelope’s lips. “Have some,” she said. And when Penelope gulped some wine, Julie whispered, “Good girl. Good girl. Does anyone ever call you Penny? Hmmm?”
Penelope wanted to explain that she hated that name, that her mother called her that. The one time she could remember seeing her father, he’d called her Penny.
“I want to call you Penny,” Julie was saying. “Penny. Penny. My Penny.”
Penelope’s head was spinning ever so slightly. She liked having the spins, liked lying on her back and watching the lights and walls and faces spin past her.
“Not here,” Julie said, laughing softly.
She was tugging Penelope to her feet when she had not even realized she’d lain down. Walking into the bedroom, Penelope bumped into the walls. Like a pinball machine, she thought, which made her laugh again. Hard.
“Use similes,” she said.
“Okay,” Julie said, nodding her pretty head. She had curly hair, like Slinkys. Penelope reached up and touched it, and told her that.
“Your hair is like Slinkys,” she said.
When Julie pulled off Penelope’s shirt, her small breasts pointing into the air because no one wore bras anymore, Penelope said, “I like boys, you know.”
“Absolutely,” Julie said. “There are no lesbians on this bed.”
“None,” Penelope said, yanking her jeans off, and her little yellow panties, too.
Julie’s tongue began to trace the same path her fingernails had. Hair, neck, collarbone, nipples. She hummed “Penny Lane.”
“Because,” Penelope said, “I don’t know how they do it, you know?” It was something the girls discussed. How did lesbians even have sex? There were theories, but none of them made any real sense.
“I don’t know,” Julie murmured, Penelope’s left nipple in her mouth. “The only thing I know is that whatever one woman does to another, the other woman has to reciprocate.”
“Uh-huh,” Penelope said, not understanding. All she could really concentrate on was the electric buzz that seemed to emanate from her nipples to down there. She wished she could explain it to Julie, but her words were so blurry.
She watched Julie’s Slinky hair bounce as her tongue moved down Penelope’s ribs, and belly button, and then down there.
“Whoa,” Penelope said, or thought she said. Her thoughts were getting even more jumbled. No boy had done this, and why not? she wondered, because surely this was the thing she’d been waiting for, maybe her whole life, this tongue making light circles, around and around, until Penelope’s back was arched and she was pulling on those Slinkys and she was making noises like she was an animal.
“What?” she said when her body stopped shaking. “What?”
“I don’t know,” Julie was saying into her mouth, kissing Penelope with her mouth tasting of . . . tasting of Penelope. “Maybe they do that?”
Penelope couldn’t make sense of what she meant. Until Julie said, “My turn, Penny Lane.”
“PREGNANT?” PENELOPE’S MOTHER SAID. They were driving down Route 95, heading south toward Rhode Island.
It was the sunniest, bluest-sky day ever, Penelope thought. Her head pounded. Her body felt bruised and sore, but in a good way. She woke up this morning and decided that she would have sex with the next Maxwell Academy boy she was with. All of it. She would have sex with every boy who kissed her. She was not a lesbian. She would prove that.
“A girl gets pregnant,” she said, looking out the window and enjoying shocking her mother, “and she has no choice. You think they want that baby? I mean, she’s seventeen years old.”
“And the boy?”
Penelope shrugged. “The same, I guess.”
“Do you think that’s what happened with my parents?” her mother said softly. “Too young. No options. Sure, they would have kept me if they could, but how could they?”