The first nude body I ever saw was Joey’s. As children, we took baths together until I started sprouting pubic hair and insisted on solo showers. In the summertime we ran naked through the sprinkler as my mother shouted at us to put our clothes back on; we yanked each other’s swim trunks off in the ocean, threw our wet underwear at each other, showered outside with the hose when we came back from the beach covered in sand.
I know his body as intimately as I know my own. He has a small freckle on the inside of one butt-cheek, just under the fatty part that would fit so perfectly in the palm of my hand. There’s a scar low on his left hip where he got twisted up in the swing set outside of his elementary school—the chains of the swing caught in his shorts, pulling them down, then cut through
