The tall grass hides us, she and I. We lie on bath towels in our bikinis because we can’t go to the beach. She says, “I could never love someone that wasn’t young.” Though she loves that man, twice her age, living up the hill in his dead father’s sagging farm house. All summer she’s been gutter-borne, climbing out her window to meet him.

The mosquitoes are making fat bumps on my legs. I can’t see because I’m high off her weed and the trees are blurred and funny.

His dog announces him, a red terrier. Then he comes down the hill path, that man, his face a smudge. He has curly hair kept under a baseball cap, spectacles, and a retired race horse he lets her and I take turns riding. “Girls,” he says, in shy greeting. We glare up at him, and shield our faces with our magazines, and he looks down at us. She says, “What?”

Later the two of us take Dad’s gator into the big field where the horses graze. I climb on  Elliot’s white back, and she climbs onto Jupiter, the little chestnut. The two of them are grazing nose to nose, close enough for us to pass the wine bottle back and forth. The horses know we want a little fun. They spook at the moon off the grass and bolt. I hold Elliot’s neck and he kicks out and up and I nearly fall and hold on some more. Until the horses stop, their breath is big and excited. She and I slide off their backs, legs shaking, laughing. The bottle was dropped and we walk through the dark field to find it but can’t. Our hands smell like sweet grass.

Later still, when I hear her latch open and the sound of her legs shifting over the ledge, I feel betrayed. “Where are you going?” I ask.

“Out,” says her cat voice.

Winter comes. A boy from my class, this one young and happy, teaches me to shoot a gun. The soda cans are smacks of metal and they fall one by one when he takes his turn.  He shows my hands how a gun should be. It makes a pleasant weight. I aim but the bullets hit nothing, go nowhere and become an invisible sound in the woods behind the fence. I have sex for the first time on the bench seat of his truck cab.

On the way back from the grocery store, she and I drive past that man’s farm house. “Fucker!” she yells, blaring by his driveway.  She doesn’t tell me sex and love are different even though she learned it for herself.

It goes like this: our house, barn, fields, then the Carols’, then the path edging on the scraggle wood and that man’s house and small barn and lonely horse. I thought she hated him now, but one night her window is open in February. There is the red flare of the fire engine. The next morning Mom lays the county paper on the table: Local Teen Saves Pony from Swimming Pool. She does not ask why my sister was out walking in that dark hour.

The pony had broken out of the Carols’ barn and ran. He mistook their pool cover as ground and fell through it. And somehow my sister saw, from across the dark, the chaos of drowning. She held the pony’s head above water for over an hour while she waited for the firemen to arrive. I imagine the hot, panicked pony breath and my sister numb from the chest down holding up his scoop dish head, cooing, “It's all right baby, it’s all right.”

Maybe my love and her love are different. Hers is wilder, braver–the kind that takes her into winter country; so on that quiet, tramping night she could see death coming from across the field and run towards it.

Rachel St. Ours is a writer from Baltimore who now lives in Brooklyn. She is currently pursuing her MFA from Stonybrook University.