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Win wood, asking if he'd seen this one in her tight little skirt or that one in her black velvet top. Tracy had been a staple of our gossip for well over a year at that point. It was easier than you might imagine to forget she was fifteen. Spend enough time in a high school, and you forget what fifteen
means
.

TRACY FLICK
     
    WE TOOK RISKS. Jack had lots of keys and more free time than I'd realized. He wrote me passes out of gym and study hall and we unbuttoned each other in musty storage rooms, surrounded by musical instruments, audiovisual equipment, shelves of mysterious chemicals. We did crazy things right in his classroom, in a corner you couldn't see from the door. I gave him a hickey one day under the stairwell, then painted it over with some cover stick. We fooled around in the darkroom, the handicapped elevator (this was after school, when thewheelchair kids had gone home), and backstage, behind the curtain. We kissed and licked and rubbed, driving each other crazy with our tongues and fingers. Twenty minutes of that and I'd walk around the rest of the day in a zombie daze, smiling at everyone I passed. It was the same for Jack. He forgot how to teach. He'd be standing there at the board and his face would just go blank. He'd tap the chalk against his forehead, leaving a cluster of faint white dots.
    “I'm sorry,” he'd say. “Where the heck was I?”
    I was a sophomore. He was my first real boyfriend.

MR. M.
     
    JACK WAS SIMPLY not functioning on a rational level. You saw him in the hallway with Tracy all the time, and he looked as love-drunk as any sixteen-year-old in the whole school. I expected to turn the corner one day and find them making out in front of her locker.
    “Jack,” I said. “This has got to stop. It's getting out of hand.”
    “I can't,” he told me.
    “You've got a wife,” I reminded him. “A baby on the way.”
    “I know. But there's nothing I can do.”
    One Friday night in the middle of it all, Diane andI had Jack and Sherry over for dinner. Sherry was big all right, but she seemed radiant and self-contained, stroking the hard dome of her belly as she spoke in a bright, authoritative tone about the pros and cons of midwives, birthing chairs, Pitocin, and epidurals. Jack sat beside her, jittery as a kid in church, his expression alternating between mild interest and profound boredom.
    “Poor Jack.” Sherry laughed and patted him on the knee. “He's heard all this a hundred times.”

TRACY FLICK
     
    IT HAD TO HAPPEN. The sex, I mean. It was our destination. We talked about it all the time as we touched each other under and through our clothes.
    “I need to make love to you,” he whispered. “I'll go crazy if we don't.”
    “Okay.”
    “Do you want it?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Say it.”
    “Say what?”
    “What you want.”
    “I want to make love.”
    “When?”
    “Soon.”
    “Now?”
    “Soon.”
    We came within an inch of it in the darkroom one Wednesday afternoon, but I made him stop. I didn't want it to happen like that, on a cold floor in a room that reeked of developer. We decided to play hooky the next day, to do what had to be done in a safe, private place.

MR. M.
     
    SOMETHING HAPPENED , he never told me what. I guess Tracy came to her senses and decided to break it off.
    Jack couldn't handle it. He put his hand through the windshield of his own car and ended up in the emergency room. He told Sherry he wanted a divorce. She was eight months pregnant at the time.
    Despite Diane's vehement objections, he spent that night on our living room couch. I heard noises around three in the morning and went downstairs to check them out.
    “Please,” he said, in a voice not really his own. “I'm a friend of hers. I have an important message.”
    I turned on the light. He was sitting on the kitchenfloor in his underwear, a bottle of scotch cradled between his knees. His right arm was in a sling, the phone in his left hand.
    “Jack,” he said in that same harsh,