Whom I did on my summer vacation A season of sweet betrayal BY STEVE ALMOND

THIS WAS THE summer after my high-school graduation and I was seeing four girls at the same time, one of them my steady.

It wasn’t quite as dramatic as all that. These were flings of the suburban-teen variety, ice-cream dates that drifted awkwardly into make-out sessions in parking lots. Still, I was cheating on my girlfriend of two years — a perfectly sweet girlfriend — with three different women. She had no idea (though my friends did), and I ran around all summer in a state of nervous exhilaration.

Why not? This was summer, the official season of transgression, when the skin turns toasty brown and the body hurtles dumbly toward its desires, and the rules seem to apply only to someone else. What a God-awful little prick I was. How glorious it felt.

I worked downtown, as a shipping-and-receiving clerk. I wore thrift-store wingtips and skinny ties I could never knot convincingly. My first fling was Emily. She worked at a health-food restaurant around the corner and lived in the swanky part of town. Her family was the WASP archetype: big-jawed, quietly bigoted; they belonged to a club. I must have been her Jewish Starter Kit.

She didn’t like me much, actually. That was probably what got me all moony about her. I figured she had taste. One night, we snuck into the pool at Rinconada Park and went swimming in shorts and T-shirts, which felt dangerous in a French-movie sort of way. But when I tried to touch her boobs, she just laughed.

Anne was a friend of mine, so it took me a few months to accept the idea that she was interested. She had a lot of boyfriends, too, entanglements. She invited me over to her house and made me chicken and rice, and we sat side by side on her mom’s sofa and looked at the catalogue for the dinky little college we were both flying off to at the end of August. She would have slept with me, too, if I’d picked up on her cues, even the least little bit. But I didn’t, and had to settle for necking every few weeks. I did this mostly out of a sense of aesthetic duty. She really was such a babe, way out of my league. Her eyes were the size of half-dollars.

Nadine was Anne’s best friend. I’d gone steady with her way back in junior high, and something of that awkward, juvenile magic was still in the air when we saw one another. I don’t remember the precise engineering, but we wound up in a hot tub late one night and groped one another ineptly. It was pure decadence, boredom, our duty to the sultry blue night.

Then there was my actual squeeze, Ali, who knew nothing of my adventures and looped her pretty freckled arms around my waist whenever I came near. We were going to be apart soon (she had another year in high school). We were doomed. She clung to me with a fierce devotion, and I scorned this devotion, which was easier than admitting to my own.

I barely saw my family that summer, my parents or brothers. I didn’t know this quite yet, but I was preparing to leave them, too, for good. I was heading off into exile, and this required a new identity. That’s what I was after, I guess: reinvention. I was going to make my way in the world as a lady’s man. I was going to be debonair.

It was this mission that put the depth charge of terror in all my penny-ante philandering. Such danger! On those illicit porches, those yellow boulevards, in the dappled shade under trees. So many stolen kisses. The sun beat down on me constantly that summer, on my shoulders and narrow chest, and there was always some girl there, with her sweet-smelling hair and her lips, reaching toward me with gentle hands, as if I were a child she might hold long enough to rescue once and for all.

Steve Almond can be reached at sbalmond@earthlink.net