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his face from up close—so close I couldn’t recognize his features. I brought my lips to his in a cool smooth kiss…a kiss which could never touch. I squirmed against him, frustrated by the limits of reality…and broke the delicate web of fantasy. The mirror was just too smooth and cool and flat.
    I backed the lower half of my body away and saw that the other boy, too, could no longer restrain himself. He had gripped himself, and his balled fist was a furious blur. I concentrated upon his face and watched it go through all the usual stages: first, an intent, serious look, the pink tip of his tongue visible between biting teeth; then the stupid slack look as the tides of pleasure rose, the eyelids growing heavy; then the silly smile as the rapid approach was glimpsed, the sap rising till a trickle leaked from the brimming tip; and then the teeth bared like a growling dog’s, the neck muscles corded in tension, the nose wrinkled, the entire face contorted as if wracked by acute pain; and finally a momentary blankness as my whole body was jolted by spasms of the purest, most delicious pleasure…spinning rainbows out into black, black space; and immediately after, the face visible again, looking pale and drawn, ashen and wasted.
    My heart pounding violently, I dully watched as several fat gobs of pearly spit slowly crawled down the surface of the mirror. Inside my mind, the thunderclap’s echo was rolling away, dying, but my body was still tingling and shivering from its violent galvanization.
    The boy in the mirror, guilt stamped on every feature, rushed into his clothes with an urgency that bordered on panic.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation
     
    I was up in the Fort with my cousin Bobby. The Fort was a tree house in my backyard I’d built with the help of my dad. Actually, my dad had started out by helping me build it, but growing impatient with my incompetence, had taken over the job himself, grimly, expertly hammering the boards into place, stepping back to survey his handiwork while I stood off to one side watching it get built. I’d never been mechanically minded, nor handy with tools, and I only felt in his way whenever we worked together on something.
    Ever since it got built, the Fort was the place I liked to escape to, especially in the summer. I even slept in it sometimes, feeling like a boy drifting on a raft downstream. Naturally, whenever Bobby came for a visit, we would come up here as much as possible.
    Every June, at the start of summer vacation, it was a custom for his family to visit us for about a week before proceeding on to the coast. His mother and mine were very close as sisters, and our fathers had gone to the same college. Bobby and I were exactly the same age. He was the brother I’d always wanted, and we played together like long lost siblings during the one week allotted to us each summer. Every year we picked up our friendship as if there’d been no interval since the last visit.
    Safely ensconced in the Fort’s shady solitude, soft drinks and comic books on the wooden floor beside us, we gazed down upon the rooftops of the neighborhood through a shifting curtain of leafy green, pretending we were on the swaying deck of a ship at sea or in the gondola of a fabulous lighter-than-air balloon which was just skimming the treetops. It was easy to shut out the entire world, simply by pulling the canvas flap at the door shut, and sitting cross-legged on the creaking floorboards.
    Bobby kicked his legs out over the side. We’d been talking about our just-finished first year of junior high school, and how different it had been from elementary school.
    “I don’t know about your school, Guy, but it seems that the boys in my school only have one thing on their minds: girls. Yuck.”
    “I know. It seems like that’s all they care about anymore. Last year they wouldn’t be caught dead talking to them.”
    “Everybody’s changing so much. Getting so stuck up and stuff. I wish we could go back