How does the author use symbolism in the story, We Didn’t?

The author uses the drowned woman to symbolize the divide between the adolescent experiences of men and women. Because readers do not receive any information about who she was, her role in the story is primarily to showcase how the young narrator and his girlfriend respond to the experience of seeing her body in radically different ways. The narrator is repulsed by the drowned woman's body and continues to lust after his girlfriend and the prospect of losing his virginity; the young girl is haunted by the drowned woman in a way that prevents her from becoming intimate with the young narrator. The drowned woman comes to represent a psychological burden that the girl carries with her, while for the young narrator she is merely the reason he is not having sex.