Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t a delinquent. I didn’t start fights, but I didn’t back down from them either, so I had some pretty good scraps with girls I wasn’t even sure how I’d offended. Some of it was about my plans for the future, I guess, my grades and West Point ambitions. Some people will tear you down for no reason other than that you’re trying to build yourself up.

And the sex? I never actually went all the way, not back then. Like many girls, I protected my reputation by making the distinction between giving head and giving it up. If my generation didn’t invent the idea of “oral sex isn’t sex,” we’d popularized it, and I wasn’t reluctant to show a guy I liked him in that way.

And maybe on some level I was competing with CJ, who was going through my female classmates at a truly amazing rate. Because while I was becoming somebody different, my cousin was, too.

All the Mooney kids adapted to California-their accents softened, and they called the freeway “the 246,” not just “246,” and so forth. But it was CJ who went native in a big way. In his freshman year he’d started going to the ocean with friends who had driver’s licenses, and the sun and salt water brought out gold lights in his reddish-blond hair, which he let grow out to his shoulders, smoothing out the tightness of its curls. He traded in his checked flannel shirts and dark-blue jeans for T-shirts and faded, ripped Levi’s and casually unlaced basketball shoes. Though I could always spot him in the halls because of his height, sometimes I barely recognized the skinny country cousin I’d first met.

In our second year of high school, CJ got his driver’s license, and not long after he bought a twenty-year-old silver BMW that he’d seen advertised “for parts” and rebuilt it from the ground up. He also won a starting spot on the baseball team, where he vexed opposing batters with the deep sinker and nasty screwball that Porter had taught him.