“You were that kid with the boner. Back in high school, right? Freshman biology?”

Lying on the lounge chair by the pool at the Ardent Gardens Mobile Home Court rec center, you’re looking up at whoever it is speaking to you. The sun, directly behind her, blinds you. You can make out that it’s a woman because the crotch of her bikini is right at eye level. The camel toe makes it official.

“You’re that guy, right?”

You shade your eyes. Now you can make out the face. Which is—your science teacher, Mrs. Nicks. From high school. Like from fifteen years ago. Holy shit. You didn’t realize you were fixating on your science teacher’s vagina.

You remember Mrs. Nicks as a slender, serious woman, maybe in her early thirties back then, with tortoise shell glasses and a smoker’s voice. She kept her wild, curly brown hair cut in a loose, jaw-length bob, went bare-legged in belted shirt-dresses, and wore penny loafers without socks. Seeing her in a skimpy two-piece swimsuit is somehow unnatural.

She’s standing over you, running a towel over her hair, the water droplets dancing off your chest.

There’s a little bit more to her now than you remember, but not much.

“The boner kid? Every class. That whole semester. Right?”

Of course it’s you. How could you forget? You’ve still got the scars on your psyche. But you had no idea Mrs. Nicks ever noticed.

You give her a cocked grin. “Freshman year is still a blur,” you say. Which is not in the least bit true. It’s crystal clear and still fresh enough to make you cringe every time you think of it.

That whole year, you could not get your mind off sex. Freshman Biology was the absolute worst. Mrs. Nicks kept a model on her desk at the front of the classroom, a transparent figure of a naked woman with the skeleton and all the organs visible through the clear plastic skin. Your seat assignment put you right in front of it.

At one time or another, you imagined every girl in your class displayed naked, full-sized as a transparent plastic figure.

By the time class ended, you had a huge hard-on. Every time. It felt enormous. And not in a good way.

When the bell rang, you hunched over in your seat until everyone else left the room so they wouldn’t see, wouldn’t laugh at you. If a couple of the girls hung around by the door, you wouldn’t move. Better to be late for the next class than have everyone talking about the useless boner you always got in biology.

“Kevin, right? Kevin Winchell?” She’s holding out a beer to you.

“Mrs. Nicks?”

“It’s Miz now. Mister Nicks gone bye-bye.” She waggled fingers of farewell with the hand holding the beer. “I’m back to Waxworth. I’m surprised you don’t remember.”

You don’t remember, but you say you do, making noises about old wounds or something. You’re not fully here. You’re back slogging around in the sludge of despicable memories.

“You might have missed it. But it felt like everyone was making jokes about us.”

She waggles the beer, drops of condensation hitting the crotch of your swim trunks. Like she’s aiming. It’s cold on your folded-up pecker. So you take it.

“That boner of yours kept me sane. Least I can do is buy you a beer.”

She stretches out on the lounge chair next to yours, crossing her legs at the ankles, then takes a pull from her own beer.

There’s a faint whiff of something familiar and you realize it’s the same fragrance she always wore in the classroom. Something ferocious is stirring in that dark cave of memory.

You realize she’s been talking, and all you’ve done is stare at the texture of her thigh.

“—like, do I come right out and thank you for having a hard-on in my class?”

You’re not listening closely. Your science teacher, in a wet swimsuit, is talking about your penis.

“Feels odd bringing it up, but we’re both adults, right? Some of us a lot longer than others.” She leans over the arm of the lounge chair and dips her sunglasses to look at you. “You don’t mind me talking about your penis, do you?”

“Not at all,” you say, because you don’t want to come off as a dipshit prude, even as you stare in on the freckled bosom in her swimsuit top spilling toward you.

She re-sets her sunglasses and settles back on the lounger. “I didn’t think so, but you know how it is. Old habits, I guess.”

Old habits sound okay right now.

“At first, I assumed it was one of the girls in class.”

You’re about to say you can’t recall any of the girls in that class but she keeps on talking before you can lie to her.

“I tried playing Sherlock and catch who you were watching,” she said, “then I realized. Every time I looked? You were watching me.”

Which you were. You were terrified she’d stop the class and make you go see the nurse or something. You’d have to walk out of the classroom with that boner of yours leading the way.

“If my marriage wasn’t breaking up, I’d have reported it to the assistant principal and let the office handle it. But. That asshole Frank was fucking the girls’ P.E. teacher. You may not remember her.”

“Miss Gantz?”

“Miss Gantz. She always smelled great. Like she was sweating Giorgio or whatever it was she was wearing. Made me feel like shit.”

She takes a pull at her beer, quenching a fire not quite dead.

“But—there you were, with your little pecker all hard in my class, watching me. For that, I am grateful.” She salutes again with her beer. “Good thing you weren’t eighteen.”

You chuff a laugh, non-committal, leaving it there.

“What was going on in that overheated adolescent brain of yours? Like, was I naked? Right there in class?”

It makes you feel bad how she’s built up this idea about you and your boner. As far as you recall, she never got a turn on your fervid mental merry-go-round. She wasn’t the one keeping your adolescent brain sautéed for the entire hour.

“Some days, I’d be so depressed. Then I’d come into class, and there you’d be with that super erection aimed right at me.”

Again, you laugh, like something shared. But really. Who imagines their science teacher naked?

“I couldn’t think what to do about it. Can you imagine? Frank is fucking Miss Gantz and I’m going to the office to report an unauthorized boner in my class.”

She laughs. You laugh. It does sound ridiculous.

“So I let it go. Besides. It was an emotional pick-me-up.”

She swirls the last of her beer and knocks it back.

“Seriously. Between us. The age difference didn’t bother you?”

You give her an embarrassed smile and a shrug, but she waits for you to speak.