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again I ratcheted things up a notch.
    “I've never had sex with anyone in this room,” I said.
    Adam and Roberta clinked bottles, toasting smug coupledom.
    Then Doe raised her drink and gulped, eyes closed. “
Oooh
,” said one of the single men. I did the easy math, then inspected Roberta for her reaction. If anything, she looked ready to toast Doe's confession as well. Certainly it came as no surprise.
    “I've . . . never . . .” Flour thought hard, eager to fill the loud silence. We were eager to have her fill it. “I've . . . never . . . had sex with a married person.”
    “Good one,” congratulated one of her suitors.
    I was forced to drink to this, as were our sybaritic hosts—and, yes, Doe. Her long-lashed eyes remained cast down to the floor, or squeezed as if in pain.
    It was Adam's turn. “I've never killed anything bigger than a cockroach,” he said.
    Neither had I. Nor Roberta Jar, nor the woman named Flour or her two wannabe boyfriends. No, it was Doe again who had been trapped by the odd question, who raised her bottle once more to her thin-pressed lips. I wasn't sure she actually drank, but I wasn't about to call her on it.
    It's the nature of I Never, as in other of life's arenas, that though explanations aren't called for in the rules one often feels compelled to explain. I can't claim our circle didn't look to Doe for some gloss on her lonely confession.
    “I was five,” she began, and there was something ominous in the specificity: not
four or five
, or
five or six
. “My uncle had given me a new kitten, and I was playing alone in the yard with it, with some string. I hadn't even given the kitten a name yet.” Doe looked at Adam Cressner, as if the whole game had devolved to the authority of his eerie question. “There was a tree in the yard, it's still there”—she spoke as though hypnotized, and seeing the tree float before her—“my parents still have the house. I used to climb the tree, and I had the idea I would take the kitten up the tree with me. I tied the string around the kitten's neck”—here Flour gasped—“and tried to pulley it up with me, across a branch.”
    Her tale's Clint Eastwoodian climax having been telegraphed by Adam's question, Doe was permitted a graceful elision. “A neighbor saw the whole thing from a window across the yard. He thought I'd done it on purpose, and he told my parents.”
    “Did they believe you?” asked Roberta Jar, clinically impassive.
    “I don't know,” said Doe, raising her eyebrows. “It didn't matter, really. Every since then I think something broke inside me . . . when my parents made me understand that the kitten wasn't alive anymore . . . there's always been a part of me missing.”
    “That's
horrible
,” said one of Flour's men.
    “I mean, I still have a capacity for happiness,” said Doe, matter-of-factly, almost impatiently. It was as though she wanted to protect us from her story now, felt bad for telling it.
    We meditated in silence on what we'd learned. Someone guzzled their beer, not as a gesture within the game, just to do it: a quiet pop of bottle mouth unsealing from lips was audible in a break between songs, Chet Baker finishing “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” then, absurdly, beginning “Everything Happens to Me.” I'd have been tempted to put my arm around Doe's shoulders, or even lead her from the room, if she as much as met my eye. She didn't. Tears streaked Flour's ivory cheeks instead.
    Adam Cressner began speaking. At first it seemed a hollow gambit, an attempt to distract us from Doe's testimony by non sequitur. “When I was last in Germany, I visited the Glyptotek in Munich,” he said. “It's full of statuary the Europeans ripped out of the old temples. They've got a Roman copy of a Greek marble by Boëthus—the original's in the Vatican—showing a boy with a goose. The bird's practically as big as the boy, and they're wrestling. The kid's got the goose by the neck. A museum guard came up behind