DESCRIPTION: A weekend spent watching romance movies with her granddaughters stirs secret memories and regrets within Susan, thoughts about a warm spring day in 1969 when, as a virginal high-school senior, she found herself pinned down beneath a quartet of classroom bullies whose skillful touches and smoldering desires awakened something desperate and needful deep within herself. EXCERPT: “Nice,” someone said above her knees. It took her brain a moment to recognize Pete’s voice, and then another moment to connect the thought of him to the digit that pressed down between the top of her thighs, that dragged slowly against a firm, vividly pulsing node of awareness riding just beneath the crotch of her panties and then drew tight circles around it. Then he braced the crook of his finger against that subtle bulge and began to rub up and down, tracing his fingertip along the warm cotton cleft between the bands of her crotch. “Jerk,” she repeated, her eyes closed and her cheeks burning. “I know,” he murmured, and she didn’t know what to do with that sort of reply, or with the brush of his lips across her crimson cheek, or the fingers that slipped past her shoulder and stroked her honey-blonde hair even while he kept his other hand moving beneath her dress with a relentlessly slow, insidious rhythm. Susan opened one eye to look at the boy pinning her wrists down over her head; Will, she saw, and somehow his worried, bespectacled face staring down at hers, even as he held her down, stung her even more than the sneering lechery of the other boys. And then she yelped and pressed her face down against her left shoulder, hiding it from the bullies as all three of their hands shoved beneath the front of her panties. Their fingers and palms tangled through the straining fabric to stroke her naked folds, to trace the gleaming crease between them, to brush and strum the stiff throbbing bead riding above them all at once.