Free The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer

way, like quarks, and then, to her shock, her vagina became part of it all; yes, “vagina” was the only word for it at this moment, for you couldn’t say “down there” anymore, which was too dumb and vague. Specificity was required now; precision.
    She felt as if she were unfolding, unclasping, being saturated, falling to bits, intensely whirled around like someone blindfolded and about to smack a piñata. Truthfully? It was exceptionally great, though there wasn’t a free moment in which you could even reflect upon the greatness, for you were too busy. Your body just kept experiencing. It was no wonder that people not only liked to do sexual things, but also made entire multimedia presentations of themselves doing them. It was all fun in the way she used to think a water park was fun, or cawing with laughter with her friends at a joke that would have been hilarious to no one else.
    Willa was a shy girl, easily startled, and now she saw that apparently she was easily excited as well, given the right circumstances. Eli was more than the intense new boy, the drama teacher’s son, her father’s favorite student, a boy who loved books. He also apparently loved breasts, or anyway, he loved hers. He had called them—her—beautiful. “This feels really good,” she said.
    “Intensely good,” he whispered into her neck, beneath the ledge of her hair, and she noticed that he smelled of doughnut and milk, which was exactly the way she smelled too. Willa lay back against his narrow bed and felt the lump of folded pajamas beneath her head as Eli loomed over her. Pleasure and dread fought for primacy inside her crowded, pickled brain, but then dread lost out to pleasure—dread just became inert, and disappeared, and then Willa was oddly fearless, wanting to know what would happen next. Eli took off his shirt, too, lying beside her so they faced each other. His chest was broad and pale with a light scatter of freckles and, again, some fur. She knew that soon they would be making all kinds of leaps: they had already gone from no kissing to kissing ; soon they would go from kissing to touching, then one day in the near future from touching to “going the distance,” as Marissa Clayborn had referred to her own involvement with two different boys. “Going the distance” seemed a good way to think of what it would be like. It —sex, actual sex—created a distance between you and everyone except the other person. You were in a hot-air balloon, and you waved goodbye to your sweet but clueless mother and father, and even your dazed and innocent old dog. Goodbye, goodbye, you called as you went the distance.
    For now, though, there was only kissing. Eli cupped and held her small breasts, and put his mouth on each of them too, and Willa knew that there was no one in the world she could tell about this, no one at all. It seemed inappropriate to tell Marissa, and definitely inappropriate to tell her mother. But then she thought: I can tell him. I can talk to him ! Somehow, she had forgotten.

6 .
    M s. Heller told her drama class the name of this year’s play, and then Marissa told me what it is, but it went out of my head,” Willa said to her parents after school one extremely cold day. She’d wandered home late, as she often did since she’d been seeing Eli. Seeing . Dory Lang disliked that word, though it was accurate. Willa and Eli did in fact see each other, and they saw almost no one and nothing else. Willa often looked past Robby and Dory at home; she seemed impatient with their slowness, their literalness, their demands on her time. So now, whenever Willa was willing to initiate a conversation with them, to engage fully, Dory was overly happy.
    “You don’t have any idea what it is?” she asked Willa.
    “It’s definitely something Greek.”
    “Well, that narrows it,” Robby said.
    The play, they learned after Willa texted Marissa to find out, was Lysistrata , the Aristophanes comedy, first performed in 411 B.C.,