Pure by Rebbecca Ray

Details:

Published in 2000 by Grove Press.

Best guess, I read it in 2002.

From the Publisher:

A sensational and accomplished novel that made its young author one of the most talked about in Britain last year, Pure is about fourteen -- the age when you know everything, except when you don't know anything. It's about first love and the end of innocence in all its passion and absurdity. It's about the raw transition between loving your parents as a child and understanding them as an adult. It's about the cool friend for whom everything seems effortless, and the impossibly embarrassing friend you're nice to when your cool friends can't see. It's about the struggle between desire and duty, and about a chance meeting with a twenty-seven-year-old man. And it's about what happens after. Pure has the shocking immediacy that made Less Than Zero so indelible. It evokes the brutalities of adolescence with the lucidity of Two Girls, Fat and Thin. It is sure to establish its author as one of the most remarkable and fearless young writers to emerge in recent years.

First Line:

I was about 13 when I started letting the boys feel me up.