I delivered the old Philadelphia Bulletin after school for five years, from the summer before eighth grade, when I was twelve, until my graduation from high school five years later. I owe the job a lot. It made me wealthier than the average teenager, won me a partial college scholarship, and introduced me to a few lifelong friends. It also taught me about sex — not technique, though there was some of that, but the way girls and women exert their sexual power over young boys, especially a bookish boy without the strength or the experience to handle it.

I was a prime target, too — the kind of kid who would later be known as a geek, though, in my own little Catholic boys’ school hell, that haven of Christian love, I was known by the all-purpose putdown “faggot.” It was bad enough I got good grades and had a vocabulary that I didn’t have the sense to suppress, but when I let slip that I liked Beethoven, my life was over. Nothing offends the teenage demand for conformity as much as a dissident taste in music, and I never heard the end of it. Between the name-calling, the occasional beating, and the secret shame of masturbation, I led an isolated life.

Mindy was the first girl on my paper route to notice me, though Risa, her childhood friend and next-door neighbor, wasn’t far behind. Both of them overheard me talking to their parents, who approved of me as a bright, articulate young man, and both of them realized I could be teased and experimented on without repercussions. I was a classic “good kid,” and they knew instinctively I could be counted on to keep my mouth shut. We had no friends in common, so I couldn’t ruin their reputations. If they subjected me to the occasional sexual experiment, who could I tell?

Or whom.

It was a cool Saturday afternoon in October. I had just finished my deliveries and was trolling back through my route, my empty canvas bag hanging from my shoulder, my payment book in my back pocket, collecting money from the few customers I had missed when I made my rounds on Thursday and Friday nights. It’s hard to remember after so many years just how old I was, but I had probably just started my freshman year of high school, which would have made it a week or two shy of my fourteenth birthday.

I don’t know if Mindy planned the encounter we were about to have, or if she improvised it. Her mother might have told her I’d be stopping by, or she might not have thought it important enough to mention. In any event, she — Mindy’s mom — had promised me someone would be home to pay me my seventy-five cents for the week’s deliveries.

Like many of the homes on my route, Mindy’s was a twin, divided from Risa’s by a party wall, their front doors sharing a concrete stoop and a front walk that led past their short lawns to the sidewalk. I climbed the steps, stood with the storm door propped against my shoulder, and rang the bell. Nothing happened. I got up on tiptoe and peered through the fanlight in the main door. The inside vestibule door was open, and the place looked empty. All I could see were the back of a loveseat, a grandmother clock that stood against the party wall, and beyond that, the stairs to the second floor.

So I rang the bell again. Again, there was no answer. I knocked loudly, with no result, and I was finally turning to leave when I heard a window go up and Mindy’s voice calling out, “Who is it?”

The front door was set into a kind of brick projection surmounted by a miniature, slate-covered saddle roof. The upstairs window, blocked by the mini-roof, wasn’t visible from the stoop. To see Mindy while I shouted up at her, I had to stand on the front walk.

“Paper boy!” I called out. I took a leaping stride off the bottom step, turned around and saw Mindy leaning out the upstairs window, her arms folded on the sill.

She was light-skinned, with a permanent blush in her cheeks, as though she had been pinching them just before you arrived. Her shoulders were bare, partly hidden beneath her frizzy blond hair. The expanse below her neck was naked, too, bordered by the falls of hair, and my heart sort of bounced as I imagined that her folded arms blocked my view of her naked breasts, which, from what I had observed through her T-shirts and sweaters, were quite luscious for a girl our age. Life being what it was, it probably wasn’t true. But it didn’t need to be. The suggestion of nudity alone was enough to set me trembling.

“Just leave the paper in the railing,” she said. I had already done that. The thin Saturday edition was tucked in the cast-iron curlicues that were bolted to the stoop.

“I’m collecting,” I said.

“I don’t have any money,” she said.

“Your mom said she’d leave it for me.”

“I can’t come down right now,” Mindy said.

“Why not?”

“Because I haven’t got a stitch on.”

So it was true. Those white mounds were pressed behind her arms, just beyond my sight. With the way she was leaning, her back must have dipped in a gentle hollow that rose again with the rounding of her bare butt. The idea was almost too stimulating to contemplate.

I pressed for clarification.

“Meaning—?”

“I’m naked, “ she said. “What do you think it means?”

“Sure you are,” I called back, trying, geek that I was, to sound nonchalant, as though the sight of a nude girl was a daily occurrence for a man of my sophistication. But I hardly knew what I was saying. I just wanted to keep her in the window, to look at her shoulders and her neck and wonder if she really had no clothes on.

“I am,” she insisted. “Why? Don’t you think I am?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “But I don’t see why that should keep me from getting paid.”

“OK!” she said brightly, with a mischievous music in her voice, and she pulled her head back into the room. Something round and white jiggled as the sash went down, but so fast I couldn’t tell if it was anything that belonged to a girl’s naked body. Bright clouds were suddenly reflected in the window, turning it opaque, and the dream was gone.

I was still looking up at the window, hoping to catch another glimpse of heaven knows what, when the front door swung open into the empty house. There was no other movement. I walked up the steps again and looked through the storm door, cupping my hands around my face to block the glare. The place was just as dark as before.

“Hello?” I called, pulling the storm door open and raising my foot to the threshold.

Silence.

“Mindy?”

Nothing. I stepped inside the vestibule, and the storm door closed behind me with a hiss and metallic slap. This was a lot of work for seventy-five cents.

“Hello?”

I had stepped past the coat closet, into the living room, when the heavy inside door swished shut behind me. I turned around, and there she was, smiling in an oddly innocent way that told me I should never doubt her word again.

My reaction to my first live nude girl I was complete and instantaneous. It was like plunging headlong into the icy Delaware. A frigid wave swept over me from head to foot, pausing just long enough to contract my scrotum. My skin stood up all over. My arms went numb, and I could no longer hold on to my collection book. The sound of it hitting the floor seemed far away. Heaven only knows what my face looked like, but Mindy easily read the expression.

“I thought you said it wouldn’t bother you,” she said.

“I didn’t say it wouldn’t bother me.” I said. “I just said it—” I couldn’t say another word. Suddenly my mouth was full of dust.

Her back was against the door, which took all her weight as her legs angled in front of her, wedging her against it. The vestibule was dim, but the sunshine pouring through the fanlight made a blazing yellow arc of her hair. Somewhere on her way downstairs she’d pulled it into a ponytail that rested on one shoulder in a mass of corkscrew curls, leaving her breasts exposed. And her breasts. Her breasts were high and full, with white concave slopes and rounded undersides and pink wall-eyed nipples turned slightly away from one another. The hair at the inverted V of her legs was darker than the hair on her head, and deep beneath the amber tangle I could make out a pair of puffy white lips pressed together in a dark cleft.