"Hey," he said. I was startled to see him there, taking his set break to seek me out. "Do you want to hang out?"

"Sure," I said. He offered a hand to help me off the ground. His nails were dirty, like he'd been digging around in the dirt.

I followed the bassist to a shiny, silver trailer. Inside we sat at the kitchen table, which folded neatly out of one wall.

"Who are you listening to?" I asked. A small stereo propped near the sink was producing leisurely piano runs.

"A friend," he said vaguely, seeming preoccupied.

"Right," I said. I was preoccupied, too. I knew why the bassist had asked me backstage. He wanted me to go on with the band. I didn't have my viola, of course, but I could sing. There was this one duet the band had recorded with a well-known country singer, and I believed the bassist was going to ask me to perform her part in front of ten-thousand people. After the show, my life would start. I would no longer be some ordinary girl in a do-nothing town whose plans were her parents' plans, her teachers' plans, her friends' plans — anyone's plans but her own.

"You are so pretty," the bassist said. It was a ridiculous statement, one that didn't belong in my fantasy.

"I don't feel pretty." I smiled good-naturedly. "I feel sweaty."

"Well, you are very pretty." The bassist examined my dark hair, auburn-tinged from the past year's experiments with various shades of blaring red. His eyes moved down to the dress I had purchased from one of the entrepreneurial girls at every show who stitched and hemmed the patchwork fabric into wearable sacks, flowers in their hair like it was still the sixties. I was jealous of these girls, who toured all year. They seemed totally free.

The bassist's trailer door opened and he nodded to the woman standing there.

"This is Cara," the bassist said. I smiled, relieved she was here. Things had been getting a little weird.

"Come hang out with me," she said. She sat down on the bed and patted the space beside her. I walked the two steps to her side and sat. The bassist shuffled over to us and positioned himself on my other side.

"Isn't she pretty?" he asked Cara. 

"Mhmmm," she replied, like her mouth was full of homemade chocolate cake.

I stared at my lap. I felt the bassist's massaging hand on my back. Cara's hand joined his. She kneaded my bare neck, her fingers occasionally reaching into my hair and tugging a little. It felt okay, even sort of nice in a dreamy way, like it was happening to someone who was me but not me.

"Hey," the bassist said.

I looked up and his face swooped in at mine. It was an endless, slobbery kiss. Even my very first, with Simon Riley in seventh grade, all braces and fumbling, ranked better. Luckily, the bassist eventually had to come up for air.

My sixteen-year-old brain had not yet quite caught up with the situation. But the bassist's urgent look, familiar from the faces of neighborhood boys, made everything clear: sex. And not just with me. Cara, too — the three of us.

I wasn't scared of sex itself. I'd already had plenty and liked it. And I did not see screwing and love as inextricably linked. I knew that sex's bedfellow was power, if you could have sex like a guy — that is, without falling in love with every boy between your legs. That was what made you one of the chill girls who got to live in guys' day-to-day world, not just in their beds. I imagined regaling my slack-jawed guy friends with a wild threesome story back at our camp site. I would be a legend.

Still, even though I was no quivering virgin, the turn of events confused me. Boys were simple: one small glimpse of your freckled flesh and you owned them. But grown men seduced differently, it seemed. With all that letter writing and question asking, the bassist had acted like he really wanted to know me. And all he wanted was to fuck me? This gave him all the power. I could see that clearly. And I wanted it back. In retrospect, there was something else I was protecting. To call it innocence would be insincere, since I prided myself on already have lost mine, but what I instinctively recognized in that trailer was that some fragile piece of myself still needed guarding, and I was the only one on watch.

"I have to go," I said. I pushed myself up off the bed. I fumbled with the latch to the trailer but didn't look back. Once I was clear of the band's circle of trailers, I started to run. I sprinted past the bouncers' bulging biceps, past my friends, past the VIP entrance. If I'd thought it was possible, I would have run all the way home.