realize at this point there are two key facts I haven't told Shelly yet. The first is that my family didn't rent the whole house. The place was broken up into two different apartments, one upstairs and one down. My family always had the upstairs one, and some other family was always in the one under us. The second very key fact is that my family's upstairs apartment, if that's what you call it, had a wooden patio out back, with a plastic picnic table and a hibachi grill. It was my dad's favorite spot. He'd stand out there every night around sunset with a cigarette in one hand and a paper cup of whiskey in the other, looking out at the other A-frame houses like he was trying to figure out what was going on in them.
None of this is what's important about the wooden patio, though. What's important – and this is what I figured out that summer when I was eight or nine – is that it had the house's outdoor shower stalls, like all beach houses have, right underneath it. Smack dab. I also figured out that if I got down on my hands and knees and pressed my face to the boards, I could see through the cracks between them right into the showers.
I tell Shelly this, and she barks out a laugh and says, "You little pervert."
"What?" I say. "I haven't told you what I did."
"I don't think you have to," she says, and actually looks genuinely disgusted for a second. She takes the last swig of her Rolling Rock and wedges the empty bottle between her thighs. I try not to notice this. She says, "I guess I should've expected as much."
"What?" I say. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Nothing," she says.
I go on with the story, since it's on my mind.
So this particular year, I tell her, the family underneath us had a couple kids with them. At least I think there were a couple; I only really remember one for sure.
"The one you spied on in the shower," Shelly says.
"All right," I say. "You're right. You're right." Might as well admit it so I can go on with the story.
I keep talking. The girl, the kid, I spied on in the shower, I tell Shelly, was probably ten or eleven. A little older than me. What little kids call a big kid. So one afternoon, probably the same day I made my discovery about the house's little design flaw, I was out on the back porch playing with my Star Wars figures or some such shit when I saw this girl walking up the flat dirt road from the beach, her towel dragging on the ground beside her, her hair still slicked back and wet. I got excited then, because I realized
