I saw things happen on the hammock of my aunt’s front porch. In the dusk with the smell of hot summer. I hid behind the vine and watched my cousin with her boyfriends. When the hammock stopped squeaking, I’d squint to see if he put his tongue in her mouth. I’d listen for a sinful word and taste the musk-brown excitement I felt but didn’t understand.

Then I had my first monthly period, and the lady across the street explained I was a woman now. Childhood was behind me. I felt a tinge of regret and put on shoes instead of going barefoot as usual.

I walked near the porch in a light summer rain and nearly stepped on the scrawny neck of a baby cardinal. I picked it up and climbed to the first branch of the cherry tree next to my aunt’s house. The tiny bird’s skinny bones trembled in my hand a little, just a mass of something without feathers. It seemed not a bird, but a thing I had complete control of, its life up to me. I set it gently into a crook of the tree.

I noticed pale light trickling out the living room window into the mist. Through the window I saw the sag of the black leather chair still indented from where my uncle sat. That I saw distinctly. The naked figurine Art Deco lamp cast a dim light, but I could see everything plainly. The light on the massive mahogany baby-grand piano, the white of the ivories, the sharp glistening violin strings, the chair and the flowered chintz sofa. And my cousin on that sofa, her chestnut hair askew, her red dress to her neck, and on top of her a youth with his jeans slipped down to his knees, his bare bottom milk-white.

I was twelve, my cousin sixteen, and I had to know what this meant, because everything my cousin did I wanted to do, too. I lived with my aunt and uncle in the shadow of my cousin, my idol since my mother left me at three. I felt the night wind on my face, the bark of the cherry tree scraped at my legs. I shimmied closer to the window, straining, squinting, focusing.

That boy going into my cousin’s body didn’t know of the nights I went from my bed to hers, felt her soft face against mine, made my body a part of hers as close as a kangaroo baby in its mother’s pouch. Red. Even her nightgown and slippers were red, and I wanted all my clothes red like hers.