“He wasn’t much fun,” she said, pouting. Then she lost the pout and squinched her eyes at him, saying, “How about you, Milo Hay? Can you be fun?”
“I invented fun,” he said, wondering what he meant. Wondering what she meant.
The woods opened up to port, revealing the castle. Tall stone walls, dripping with moss. Moat still and black, with leaves floating. Between tree branches, great spiderwebs caught the sun.
He let the gondola glide in, stopped her gently with a touch of the oar on the bottom, then shipped the oar and sat down on the stern bench. Let her float. He leaned back like Lord Byron, wicked and casual.
They didn’t say anything for a few minutes. She seemed absorbed by the image of the castle and by the way the sun danced through the leaves. Milo, too, let the quiet fall over him.
“How do you know you’re not a ghost?” asked Ally, still watching the castle. “They say ghosts don’t know. So how would you know?”
“Maybe you don’t,” said Milo. “Maybe we are.”
“I think ghosts go around thinking of all the things they didn’t do,” she said. “You know. Regrets. Like if you died right now, your ghost might go around regretting never being kissed.”
Now she looked at him.
“I’ve been kissed,” he almost said. Boys and girls in middle school did their share of kissing. But he absorbed the insult. The moment was like a boat you didn’t dare rock.
She lowered herself into the bottom and came to him and lowered herself over him, smelling like the river. And she pressed her lips against his, and he pressed back. At first he thought that was all she meant to do, and he was happy with it. Then something new happened. A new lip introduced itself, and he realized this was her tongue.
While they kissed, he was generally aware that her hand was busy between them, below their collarbones. But he was lost and mindless and didn’t think about it until she pulled away and sat up, straddling him, and he saw she had unbuttoned her shirt and unsnapped her bra.
Lord Byron would touch her.
He reached up with both hands, letting his knuckles stroke her belly. (Don’t go grabbing for them all at once, voices advised.) He felt her own hands at his belt buckle then, and his heart raced. She would feel, see how hard he was. Was that good? Would she be offended?
Standing suddenly, nearly upsetting the boat, Ally reached up under her skirt and pulled her panties down. Stepped out of them and straddled Milo. She worked her way down around him and he was inside her.
My God! His entire mind and body whizzed and sparked.
Immediately, orgasm approached like a surging, drooling beast. In that time, he was both frightened and astonished by Ally Shepard, who bucked with her hips and had a look in her eyes that, honestly, he didn’t like very much. As if she were striking out at someone.
And then everything was topsy-turvy, with a scream and a laugh, and he was underwater, in all that murk, with water up his nose and his pants around his knees. Ally had jerked them over sideways, capsizing them.
The moat was shallow. He found the bottom and stood, sputtering. Fumbling with his belt.
“Dammit, Ally!” he croaked.
She was sputtering, too, and still laughing. She had recovered quickly and was onshore, shoes in one hand, turtle in the other. Shirt and bra still open.
“At least you’ve got that much,” she said, “if you die in your sleep tonight.” And she walked off into the woods, toward campus.
He loved her and hated her.
The gondola floated, half sunk, on the dark water. He dragged it ashore, dumped it out, and rowed home.
He felt kind of like Lord Byron and kind of like Little Boy Blue.
He was, for the moment, a happily confused young man.
—
Dinner at his parents’ house was a stilted affair.
“You seem preoccupied,” said his father, glowering over the roast beef.
“Oh?” said Milo. “No. Not really.”
“Well, where are you?” asked his mother, laughing. “You’re not here. I think it’s a girl.”
Milo’s stomach lurched.
“There is something,” he said, “but it’s not a girl. It’s about the clubs.”
His father chewed ponderously, frowning.
“You’ve already taken on more than you should, for your age,” he said. “Extras can wait until next year, I should think.”
Dammit, thought Milo, Dad knew you got invited only once. You either got on board freshman year or you didn’t get on at all. Before he could phrase this in a way calculated not to piss his father off, though, the doorbell rang.
Maybe it was Ally Shepard. It would be just like her, he thought, to surprise him and make him uncomfortable.
It wasn’t Ally. It was two Christminster policemen.
“Milo Hay? Are you Milo Hay?”
“Yes.”
“You’re under arrest,” they said, and grabbed him and spun him around and put handcuffs on him.
“Milo?” called his mother from the other room. “Who is it?”
“Jesus Christ!” cried Milo. “For what?”
“Rape, Mr. Hay. This way, please.”
—
While he was sitting downtown in a jail cell, Milo’s ancient-soul voices tried to comfort him. The forms your life takes are illusions, said the voices. Happiness or jail—it’s transitory, like a dream.
“The truth will out,” said his father, when they let him see visitors and an attorney.
Milo died over and over again, describing what had happened in the boat, in the moat. His father listened like a great stone owl, arms folded across his chest. But when Milo finished, his father did something unexpected.
He reached out with one great hand and cupped the side of Milo’s head with something like affection.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “Stupid, but not wrong. Don’t let them convince you otherwise.”
Milo nodded.
The attorney, a young man with a ridiculous pouf of bleach-blond hair at the very top of his head, shuffled some papers and said, “Fortunately, stupid isn’t a crime. If you’re innocent, you’re innocent. Open and shut.”
—
It didn’t matter that he was innocent.
He thought about that on his way to the prison colony at Unferth, chained to a bunk in the belly of a warp transport. Three days with nothing to do but feel how unfair it all was and to be terrified.
What mattered, it turned out, was that Ally Shepard’s dad was a rich Spartan banker and could hire a whole team of Ivy League lawyers. Professor Hay’s powers, on the other hand, were confined to his classroom. His worldly salary covered only the expense of the single pouf-haired lawyer, who took one look at the opposing team and was almost sick on the courtroom floor.
Ally Shepard, said the opposition, had been seen by a hundred people, walking across the King’s College campus soaking wet, in what might have been a ripped-open shirt.