Chapter 1: Girls

I LOVE SUMMER and I love Samantha. This is a story about us and our friends. I think it’s a happy one, but you’ll be the judge of that.

Can you smell the dawn on a summer morning? Dry, dusty hay, heavy, a little sweetish, perhaps, with an overlay of barn animals if the wind is just right. It’s the smell of promise, anticipation. The grass is a little wet and it’s cool right now, but you know the heat is coming.

Be still. Listen.

I woke up sweaty on that early summer morning. Feverish, too, but not because I was sick. Time for a shower. Up, stripped off underwear. Fast look down the hall. Sam’s door was closed. Go for it, now!

Quick stop for the necessary, then into the shower. Warm water, only a moment to soap up and stroke and spasm and spurt and empty myself over the drain. Relief from a tension I felt all the time. My morning routine.

Toweled dry. Wrapped myself and stepped into the hall. Sam, bundled in her own towel, approached. That half-smile I’ve been seeing now for a while. Moved to give her an elbow, but she dodged. She usually does.

“Nice try, pal. Better luck next time.”

And she was gone, but not before her towel slipped enough so I saw almost all of her left breast. Did she know? I was pretty sure she did, but she never gave any hint. I couldn’t stop trying to look even if I didn’t know what to make of it. Sam confused me.

I wasn’t totally new at this. I mean, I’d kissed girls before. Nancy Jacobsen and I even did a little more at an overnight a year ago, and Marisol Wang almost let me feel her up last summer after we’d been kissing for a while. We’d each kept one eye out for her ultra-conservative Grandma Wang, who definitely would have stepped in had she seen us. Grandma did not approve of what kids did these days. Not like back in China.

“I know she means good, Buddy, and my mom respects her. Sometimes it bothers me, you know, that my family comes from somewhere else, but I’m American. Other people can think what they like but that’s their problem. Grandma is Chinese and maybe I look like her, but Mom and Dad were born here, in California, and so was I.”

Grandma never appeared that afternoon and Marisol was ready to go further, I knew it. She would have, except her stupid little brother found us.

Girls. I couldn’t think about anything else those days. After last summer and our almost-makeout session, Marisol wore a dress with a square-cut neckline to school one day just before Christmas. During study hall she leaned across the library table to point out something in my book. Of course I looked down the front of her dress, but I couldn’t see enough. I really wanted to see it all.

Sam was a different story, almost my best friend even if she was a girl. We’d never known a moment without each other, and I was getting more and more interested in the girl who was also my twin.