Living Room Read Online Free PDF

her in a way that had won him votes from boys and girls and that inspired adult compliments.
    “We’re friends, aren’t we?” said Harry, wondering what she looked like without her clothes.
    Shirley, who had not trained herself to respond with comments that were expected of her, reflected on friendship. A friend, she thought, was someone you could depend on. Perhaps she had no friends. Her father? Harry was not someone she could count on. Nor could he count on her. Shirley realized that he was pulling down the zipper on the back of her dress.
    “Would you like some help?” she asked, immediately sorry. Perhaps Harry would interpret her offer of help as an insult. Actually, what Harry was thinking as Shirley pulled her dress over her head was that she was sure a lot faster than he had thought.
    Harry stared at her breasts.
    As she removed her garter belt and rolled her stockings down, she said, “Do you want to go into the bedroom?”
    “My room,” he said, his voice snarled in the traffic of his nerves.
    She gathered her things, and summoning resolve, followed him. Shirley was standing in front of the dresser mirror and he could see her front and back at the same time.
    “Aren’t you going to get undressed?” Shirley asked.
    “Jesus,” he said, suddenly remembering the book left lying open in the living room. He retrieved it. When he returned to his room, Shirley was lying on the narrow bed, up on one elbow like an odalisque she had seen in an illustration.
    “Just in case the folks come home. Don’t want this lying out there,” he said.
    He got undressed. Shirley thought he was built well, as she had expected, but looked strange standing there nude except for his socks. He noticed the direction of her gaze, and blushing, took his socks off.
    “You got a diaphragm?” he asked.
    “Sure,” Shirley lied.
    “You look terrific,” he said.
    “You don’t look so bad yourself.” Was he really to be the first?
    Harry looked down at himself as if he was unfamiliar with his own body.
    She held her arms out to him, hoping they weren’t shaking. He clambered onto the bed awkwardly. Shirley wished her mind wasn’t whirring. Harry’s body felt warm. She looked down at the most visible part of his excitement. It looked different from the pictures in the hygiene book, redder, bigger.
    “You know,” she said, “this is illegal.”
    “Yeah, makes it more exciting. Come on,” said Harry, anxious to get on with it.
    “I think you should wear one of those things,” she said.
    Harry’s hand fell from her breast. “I don’t have any.” Then, “I thought you said you had a diaphragm.”
    “Sure,” she said, “but I don’t want you to catch V.D.”
    Harry, who hated even the chance of catching a cold from kissing, remembered that he had kissed her, and now had almost… He dressed with speed, wordlessly motioning for Shirley to get her clothes back on. He walked her downstairs in silence.
    In the street she said, “Maybe another time, Harry.”
    Harry said nothing. He let his virgin date go home alone. She didn’t mind. She had learned there was a lot more to sex than she had imagined; what a vast area of human skin each person had, how pleasant it might all feel being made love to.
    Not this time. She suspected that people were given their sexuality so that they might more easily learn who their friends and enemies were. Harry was no enemy, but he was not someone she could depend on. Someone else would have to teach her to drive a car.

CHAPTER THREE
    ONE SUNDAY MORNING when Shirley was fifteen, Philip Hartman persuaded her to put a place marker in Sense and Sensibility and take a walk with him in the park.
    He had always thought of May as the ideal month. On the thickest oak trees, the newborn leaves uncurled like sleepers waking, their delicate forms a fragile green against the strong brown trunk. To Hartman, they portended hope, just as in late autumn, when the same leaves, the size of a large man’s