I did not initially tell Bunny about these encounters, even as they became ongoing and dominated more and more of my mental field of play. In part, she seemed to me to be from another world where such things simply didn’t happen. But I also had a sense that I could continue with my actions only if they were entirely unexamined, and I needed desperately for them to continue, even if my interactions with these men were unfulfilling and bizarre. I once had sex with a man in a Starbucks bathroom at ten o’clock in the morning on a Tuesday. I can still remember vividly the electric thrill of going to algebra afterward.

I spent a great deal of time in the apartment of a man named Ed, who was Chinese and tall and worked in finance, whatever that meant. What indefinable loveliness, to feel the mountain of him shaking beneath me. To learn his smells, the vaguely sour yeast of his balls, the sweet and dark smell of his bum. It did not matter to me at all that though he was in his forties, he seemed to have the emotional maturity and insight of a teen girl, and not even a real teen girl, but the stereotype of a teen girl. Sometimes he would say shyly, “I think you’re really cool.” He was insecure about the size of his cock. “Everything else about me is big,” he said in a gloomy Eeyore voice, clearly expecting to be told that no, his penis was fine, was average. “I’ll have to punish you for having such a puny cock, then,” I said. And I made him lie down across a big black leather chair in his living room, and I spanked him with a whisk I found in the kitchen.

How could I tell Bunny I did these things? I could scarcely admit to myself they were happening. Where had the impulse in me to hurt Ed come from? Why had I enjoyed it so much, making his muscular little ass red and welted? Was it related to watching the way my father had once spanked my sister with a hairbrush? What was wrong with me? It was much better not to investigate it at all.

In every other sense, my relationship with Bunny became one of intimate confidences, though we avoided each other at school, where she belonged to a flock of similarly sporty girls who carried great duffel bags of kneepads hither and thither, and where I belonged, however peripherally, to a group I had privately begun to think of as the “Revolting Youth” (do you like the pun?) that included goth girls and stoners and metalheads and also some guys who just really enjoyed Magic: The Gathering. But in the evenings, or on the rare afternoon she didn’t have practice, Bunny and I convened in her empty house to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race—which, to my surprise, Bunny had loved even before I met her.

Drag queens for me glittered the same way all queer cultural artifacts did, with an intoxicating, radiant, ultraviolet dust that indicated they were secretly for me. For Bunny, I think the allure may have been the deconstruction of the artifice that is cultural femininity. As often as I was failing to pass as a straight boy during those years, Bunny was failing to pass as a girl. She was built like a bull, and she was confident and happy, and people found this combination of qualities displeasing in a young woman. She had no mother or sister to teach her how to do her hair, or how to dress, or how to do her lipstick, what was “too much” and what was “just right,” and so she felt like a clown attempting any of it.

I became her confidant as she explored the girliness she had been too shy to explore on her own: face masks and what to do about her cuticles and how to pluck eyebrows. And she became the one person in my real life, my regular life, my non-Craigslist life, around whom I could practice being gay. RuPaul’s Drag Race was oddly central to all of this, and we culturally appropriated the shit out of those drag queens. Every catchphrase, every piece of slang, we immediately fell in love with and began using as our own, not with other people, but only between ourselves. It was like a secret code that expressed everything: who we were, and who we wanted to be.

After watching RuPaul’s Drag Race, we would usually go for a swim in her pool. Bunny was a terrific swimmer, and she liked to roughhouse in the water, which scared me, and several times she almost drowned me. She liked to lull me into a false security by claiming she was going to swim some laps, and then, when I was floating peacefully on my back, she’d suddenly surface directly under me and grab me by the middle and drag me down and roll me around like she was an alligator. Every single time she did it, I swore I would refuse to swim with her ever again, and every single time she promised she would never do it again, and then of course she would.

At first I wondered if Bunny was gay, given the obsessive cutting out and arranging of images of female athletes into collages and scrapbooks, as well as her general size and disposition, but her heterosexuality was so fervent and tender that it caused her much pain. When would she get a boyfriend, would she ever get a boyfriend, what was wrong with her that no one wanted to be her boyfriend? Once she asked me to look at her naked and tell her what I thought.

I had just finished plucking her eyebrows and her entire forehead had turned bright red, the blood rushing to the surface at having been so assaulted.

“I don’t need to see you naked,” I told her. “You’re a sixteen-year-old athlete. Your body is unfathomably perfect. There is nothing that seeing it naked could tell me that I can’t see when you’re in a bathing suit.” (This was a weensy lie: There was something overdeveloped about her abs that made her look like a Ninja Turtle, in my opinion.)

“I think my nipples are weird,” she said. “I think the areolas are too big and, like, pale.”

“Your areolas are fine,” I said.

“You haven’t seen them.”

“Even if your areolas were purple and covered with hair, boys would still want to suck on them,” I said, and I considered it to be true.

“Do you watch porn?” she asked.

“Of course,” I said. “Do you?”

She nodded. This surprised me.

“Well, at first it was scary,” she admitted. “But then I figured out how to really only see the kinds of things I liked.”

“What do you like?” I asked, even though I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to know. That was a character trait of mine, the kind of curiosity that killed so many cats. I was always sniffing rotten food in the refrigerator too.

“Bigger girls,” she said, unable to look at me. She squinted her eyes shut and forced herself to go on. “Girls who look more like me. Just having, like, normal sex. That isn’t, well, mean. With, like, gagging or choking or hitting. I don’t like that stuff.”

Oh, Bunny, I thought, of course you don’t. And I pictured her, alone at her computer, so desperate to understand sex, so desperate to have it, to touch and be touched, and then to stumble across videos like that, where women’s heads are hoisted by their ponytails in blow jobs so violent they gag and throw up. Or who were throttled, their faces turning red and ugly, or who were spit on, or who were slapped. And brave, quizzical Bunny, wondering: Will I have to do that? Is that what I am supposed to do? To be?