It was less a decision to have sex and more a decision that, if everyone called them sluts anyway, why should they stay virgins? He climbed into her bedroom window long after her parents went to sleep; they crawled under the sheets, he put on a condom, she parted her legs. It was all very mechanical, and they tried to manufacture the artificial sex they'd seen in romance novels (Bebe) and pornos (Kenny).
Kenny fell asleep afterward and Bebe slid out of bed and shuffled to the bathroom, where she finished herself off with her hand. She stared at her reflection in the vanity mirror afterward: the makeup she'd applied directly before Kenny rapped on her pane was smudged, and it got her thinking of other things her classmates had to say about them: Bebe was the kind of beautiful you pay for, and Kenny was the kind of trash that you throw away. Suddenly fatigued, she didn't bother to wash the makeup off, though she knew it would clog her pores and give her zits and make her look grimy in the morning; she just crept back into bed and stared at the expanse of Kenny's back. He had so many scars, which was why he always covered himself in cotton and polyester from head to toe. Kenny pointed them out to her, once: here was where the teeth sunk in, here was where the bullet cleaved the flesh, here was where the half-empty whiskey bottle collided with the skin. Bebe always thought it would have been perfect and romantic if Kenny had brought her hand to his chest and said "Here's where the arrow struck my heart"—but he never did.
Bebe reaches out but stops before touching his shoulder, wavers, then tucks her hand back into her body and curls into the fetal position. Bebe isn't afraid of waking him up, but rather, of not waking him up—she fears that she'll touch him and he'll be cold, that what should be their bed will be his deathbed. "Don't be the lover of a leaver," her mother told her once; Bebe wants to be a lot of things: popular, smart, good-looking, but more than anything else, a someone worth staying for.