When I was around 14, I was in like with a girl named Jill. I admired her name, her thick cooperative dark blonde hair, the faint freckles on her face, her athletic medium-sized body. I liked her woodsy home and her casual parents. I enjoyed her conversation. If I’d been oriented toward my own gender I have no doubt my admiration would have grown to a crush. As it was, I recall a few enjoyable times with her, and zero about sex.

Jill’s family had an ice cream maker. It was an old-fashioned machine, the type you had to pack rock salt around and crank, and it produced divine vanilla ice cream. I’m so for chocolate that I suspect friends who favor vanilla might be secret aliens, but that ice cream would convince anyone that the elegant simplicity of vanilla cannot be surpassed.

Even so … one day Jill and I decided to try to improve upon perfection. We attempted lemon ice cream in the most face-forward and foolish manner. We figured we’d just layer the two items: ice cream, lemon juice, ice cream, lemon juice.

Maybe it’s easier to understand when I remind you that our houses were developed in lemon groves. We were surrounded by the trees. We climbed them and we made forts in them and we sucked so many lemons our teeth sometimes ached. Straight lemon juice didn’t put us off.

Even so. To this day I recall the profound clash of creamy vanilla ice cream surrounded by unadulterated fresh lemon juice. Worse on the tongue than fingernails down a blackboard.