Free radicals

About this book

The guy at the next table reminded her of her first serious boyfriend, but even as the word serious surfaced to the chattery part of her brain that was already watching someone hear her tell the story long since gone barnacle-encrusted as myth, already hearing her own voice run it out like Morse code on the quiet of a moonless, star-splattered sky, she realized as if pronouncing it for the very first time what a euphemism serious was, I mean it might have served some purpose in the early sixties when anyone would have understood that it meant the first boy she'd fucked, not loved, since in those days girls rarely fucked their first loves, assuming that girls back then loved for the first time at thirteen or fourteen the way they do now only more intensely, if anything, since girls back then not only didn't assume that the relationship, which they didn't call it, if any, would be consummated but, if they'd