Free The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

appearing in our midst, and believed it counted for little until the girls we knew, along with their mothers, fell in love with Trip Fontaine. Their desire was silent yet magnificent, like a thousand daisies attuning their faces toward the path of the sun. At first we hardly noticed the wadded notes dropped through the grating of Trip's locker, nor the equatorial breezes pursuing him down the hall from so much heated blood; but finally, confronted with clusters of clever girls blushing at Trip's approach, or yanking their braids to keep from smiling too much, we realized that our fathers, brothers and uncles had been lying, and that no one was ever going to love us because of our good grades. Years later, from the onehorse detoxification ranch where Trip Fontaine had gone to dry out on the last of his ex-wife's savings, he recalled the red-hot passions that had erupted at a time when he was growing his first chest hair. It began during a trip to Acapulco, when his father and his father's boyfriend went for a stroll on the beach, leaving Trip to fend for himself on the hotel grounds. (Exhibit #7, a snapshot taken during that trip, shows a bronzed Mr. Fontaine posing with Donald, the two of them squeezed thigh-to-thigh within the palmy Montezuma throne of a hotel patio chair.) At the nodrinking-age bar, Trip met Gina Desander, recently divorced, who ordered him his first pifia colada. Always a gentleman, Trip Fontaine imparted to us upon his return only the most proper details of Gina Desander's life, that she was a dealer in Las Vegas and taught him to win at blackjack, that she wrote poetry and ate raw coconut with a Swiss Army knife. Only years later, looking over the desert with ruined eyes, his chivalry no longer able to protect a woman by that time in her fifties, did Trip confess that Gina Desander had been "my first lay."
    It explained a lot. It explained why he never took off the puka-shell necklace she'd given him. It explained the travel poster over his bed showing a man soaring over Acapulco Bay on a kite pulled by a speedboat.
    It explained why he changed his manner of dress the year before the suicides, going from schoolboy shirts and pants to Western outfits, shirts with pearl buttons, decorative pocket flaps and shoulder stitching, every item chosen in order to resemble the Las Vegas men who stood arm in arm with Gina Desander in the wallet photographs she showed Trip during their seven-days-and-six-nights package tour together. At thirty-seven, Gina Desander had envisioned the hunk of masculinity latent in Trip Fontaine's chubby Speedoed form, and during her week with him in Mexico, she chiseled him into the shape of a man. We could only imagine what went on in her hotel room, with Trip drunk on spiked pineapple juice, watching Gina Desander deal rapid-fire in the middle of her stripped bed. The sliding door to the small concrete balcony had come off its track. Trip, being the man, had tried to fix it. The dressers and bedside tables were littered with the detritus of last night's room party-empty glasses, tropical swizzle sticks, washed-up orange rinds. With his vacation tan Trip must have looked much as he did in late summer, circulating in his swimming pool, his nipples like two pink cherries embedded in brown sugar. Gina Desander's reddish, slightly creased skin flamed in age like leaves. Ace of hearts. Ten of clubs.
    Twenty-one. You win. She stroked his hair, dealt again. He never told us any details, not even later, when we were all adult enough to understand. But we looked on it as a wonderful initiation by a merciful mother, and though it remained a secret, the night conveyed on Trip the mantle of a lover. When he returned we heard his new deep voice sounding a foot above our heads, apprehended without understanding the tight seat of his jeans, smelled his cologne and compared our own cheese-colored skin to his. But his musky scent, the coconut-oil smoothness of his face, the golden grains of intractable