Chapter 1

"Dad? When can I start dating?"

Bob Thurlow looked over his shoulder at his daughter, Amanda, who was supposed to be doing homework at the kitchen table while he prepared their supper.

"Which class, exactly, requires you to contemplate your dating future?" he asked, dryly.

"None of them," she said. Mandy was a very practical girl, and didn't go in much for sarcasm. Actually, she had a hard time recognizing sarcasm. She took everything literally.

"Do your homework now. We'll talk about what decade you can start dating in, while we eat," said Bob.

"Decade? You can't be serious, Daddy. The next decade doesn't start for five more years!"

"Precisely," said Bob, smugly.

"I can't date until I'm twenty?!" The outrage in her voice was genuine.

"Finish your homework and we'll negotiate during supper. I might let you out of the house with a boy when you're nineteen. Maybe."

She finally got it. He didn't tease her all that much, like Jennifer's father did. Jennifer was her best friend, and her father teased her all the time. Most of what Amanda had learned about teasing in her relatively short life had come from Jennifer's dad. But her own daddy didn't act like that very often. In fact, in Amanda's opinion, her father wasn't like "most men", at least not like the fathers her friends all described. Nor did he match the description of men she kept hearing about from other sources. She had heard the phrase "men all just want one thing" many times, and she'd seen evidence of that in most of the boys she knew. There were also several men she was acquainted with, who displayed those qualities that most girls get warned about in one way or another. Those were the men who looked at her in ways that made her get shivers down her spine, now and then.

But not her dad. He didn't date. He didn't go out to bars and pick up women, or try to meet them in any other fashion. As far as she could tell, he had no sex drive at all. Other than being a teacher, all he ever did was go out to that dirty, nasty Boggy Creek place, where he worked with other volunteers to "reclaim" it. He always came back filthy and stinky, which was why she always said, "No thanks!" when he invited her to come along and become a volunteer too.

She still had questions, but she knew he wouldn't answer them until he was ready. So she got back to her algebra and finished the problems Miss Thompson had assigned. She found those problems ridiculously easy, which was probably why her mind had wandered off to think about Jack Ross. Jack was in her social studies class, which Mister Hardy taught. Mister Hardy, in fact, was one of those men she knew who did display all the traits of the "horny male" she'd heard so much about. He was forever checking out the girls in his class. He also flirted with them, though that was as far as he took it, at least as far as she knew. He also loved to talk about how different cultures looked at sex, and went on and on about that in class.

She'd found boys interesting for years. But not like Jack Ross. Jack made her stomach feel funny, when he smiled at her or said "Hi" in the halls, or in class. Just today she had found herself wishing he was in her physical science class, so they could be lab partners.

And that was what had made her think about dating.

"You about ready?" asked Bob.

"Done!" she said, slamming the book closed. She scooped up all her books and stuffed them back into her back pack. She dropped it by the door, where she would pick it up on her way out the next morning.

Without being told to, she slipped easily into her role in the two person family that she belonged to. She quickly set the table as her father scooped the hamburger helper from the skillet into a bowl. The microwave beeped, and she went to it to remove the green beans she hadn't heard her father put in there. Next she snagged the bread from the counter, leaving it in the bag so it wouldn't dry out, and dropped that in its accustomed place on the table. Finally she got the butter from the fridge and set it by the bread.

They sat down at the same time, automatically reaching to hold hands as they bowed their heads and Bob said grace.

She ate a few forkfuls of each thing on her plate, and buttered a piece of bread, before she judged it was safe to probe again.

"So ... when can I start dating?"

"What brings this on?" he asked.

"I don't know. All my friends are dating already."

"Well, all your friends shouldn't be dating," he said. "Not at fifteen. That's too young."

"Why?" she asked. His opinion didn't upset her, exactly. She just wondered why he felt that way.

"When boys and girls get together in private, Mother Nature has plans for them," said Bob.

"You're talking about procreation," said Amanda. While sarcasm might fly right past her, she wasn't stupid by any stretch of the imagination.

"Exactly," said Bob.

"But I don't want to procreate," said Amanda. "I just want to go on a date."

"Why?" asked Bob.

"What do you mean? Why does anybody want to go on a date? To have fun with a boy I like. Duh, Dad."

"What boy?" asked Bob. "I haven't heard you talk about any boys before this."

"There has to be a first time for everything, Daddy," she said.

"What boy?"

For the first time she felt nervous. Her young mind recognized that this moment was important. Things could go in different ways. When she had brought the subject up, it had been an amorphous, foggy kind of subject. "Dating" hadn't mean much at that point. But now, things were getting specific. What if he didn't like Jack? Was Jack in any of the English classes he taught at Pine Valley Junior High School? What if he said no? Suddenly, it mattered. She felt the pressure of making a decision that could have consequences she wouldn't like.

"What difference does it make?" she asked, evasively.

Bob had always tried to shoot straight with his daughter. She had only been a month old when her mother, Trudy, presumably because of post-partum depression, had taken half a dozen too many sleeping pills. The death certificate said "accidental" on it, but she had been much too intelligent to overdose that way by accident.

In any case, he had been left to raise his daughter and, without a mother to help, he'd had to fill both roles in the little girl's life. Because of that, he'd been very open and frank with her. He hadn't hidden anything from her about her mother, or life in general. It was his opinion that a child forewarned was a child more likely to succeed.

There was one exception to this rule. He had never had "the talk" with her. When she'd started having periods, he had told her what that meant, and what to do about it, but it had all been very scientific, going so far as to look everything up on the internet so she could see what ovaries, and a womb, and everything associated looked like, and where they were, and how they fit into her life as a female.

But he'd never talked to her about erotic intimacy. It was the one area of life that was "too hard" for him to take on.

That didn't mean he wasn't aware that, sooner or later, he'd have to discuss such things with her. He just kept making that later. Even now, he tried to push that discussion further down the road.

"It matters because if you like this boy, and he's the wrong kind of boy, that can turn out badly."

"What does that mean?" she pressed.

"It means that kids your age, when given time alone, are tempted to explore things they aren't emotionally ready for," he said, frustrated.

"So you mean, like, I should group date?" she asked.

Bob blinked. This was a term that was new to him. He hated to show his ignorance, but glossing over things might turn out badly in the future.

"What is group dating?" he asked.

"Well, duh. It's when a bunch of kids all go out together."

"In pairs," said Bob.

"Well ... yeah. I guess so," said Amanda.

"So instead of two kids being tempted to explore things, there are five pairs of them all setting a bad example for each other," said Bob.

"Well, none of them are alone," her literal side pointed out.

"Have you ever heard the word orgy?" asked Bob, being sarcastic. It had been an impulse, and he immediately wished he hadn't given in to it.

"Daddy! Ewwww!" she squealed.

"Group dating is not what I meant," said Bob, secretly elated at her response. "My point is that when young people are paired up, and there is no adult supervision to guide them, they usually find it tempting to explore things that even a lot of adults control poorly. You've heard of the underage drinking parties that go on in town, right?"

"Of course," she said.

"And have you ever been invited to one?"

"Of course," she said again.

That took him by surprise. He'd been on a roll, but it was one of those rolls where a pebble starts downhill and then gets out of control.

"You have?"

"Sure, Daddy. They usually have one somewhere every Friday night."

"Shit," groaned Bob.

"Don't curse, Father," said Amanda soberly.

"Sorry," he said.

Images were going through his mind. Amanda wasn't allowed to date yet, but that didn't mean she was kept a prisoner in the castle. She went on sleepovers at various friends' houses frequently. And that meant she was out of his sight, and he wouldn't know if the group of girls she was with attended such parties. With a sinking feeling in his stomach, he asked the inevitable question that, as a parent, he was required to ask.

"Have you ever gone to one of these parties?"

"Of course not," she said immediately. "You'd have killed me if I did."

"Thank God," he sighed.

"Did you think I'd do something like that without telling you?" She sounded upset. "Don't you trust me?"

There it was ... the question that, sooner or later, every teen asks of every parent. Don't you trust me?

Bob gave the same answer that most parents give.

"I trust you just fine," he said. "But sometimes peer pressure and other circumstances can cause things to happen that nobody intended to happen."

"Are we still talking about dating?" she asked.

"I don't know," he sighed. "Look, here's the deal. If you like the boy and he likes you, it's just natural for the two of you to push the envelope and explore ... um ... things."

"You mean sex," said Amanda.

He swallowed. "Uh ... yeah," he admitted.

"I already told you. I don't want to have sex with Jack. I just want to go on a date and have fun with him."

"Jack?"

"Jack Ross. He's in my social studies class."

"Jack Ross," mused Bob. "I think I know him. He's not in any of my classes. I know his mother. She's a member of the Boggy Creek Restoration Project."

"I don't know about all that," said Amanda. "We're just in social studies together and I like it when he says 'Hi' to me. I just think it would be fun to get to know him better."

"Did he ask you out on a date?"

"No. He's never actually talked to me."

"Does he have a girlfriend?"

"I don't know. Why would you ask me that?"

"Because I don't want you to get the reputation as a home wrecker," said Bob.

"A what?" Amanda sounded confused.

"Never mind. It's not cool to ask a guy on a date when he already has a girlfriend, okay?"

"You mean I can ask him?" Amanda looked elated.

"Hold on there, Pumpkin," said Bob, holding his hand up. "I did not say you could start dating."

"Don't call me Pumpkin!" she said, clearly unhappy. "That's a little girl nickname, and I'm not a little girl anymore!"

"Sorry," he said. "But that illustrates my point. You're not a little girl any more. You're a young woman, and the kind of urges that young women and young men have are difficult to control even when those kids are seventeen or eighteen."

"I have to wait until I'm seventeen to go on dates?!" screeched Amanda.

"I didn't say that either," said Bob. "I just don't want you out with a boy alone, unsupervised. Not yet."

She sat there, mute, but gears turned in her head.

"Okay," she said, finally. "So what if you were there to chaperone?"

Bob blinked. His first reaction was played out in his head in a short fantasy. He saw himself standing in his kitchen, tense, saying, "Shit! Shit! Shit!" because she'd worked him into a corner he couldn't get out of without looking hypocritical. He looked at his daughter, sitting calmly across the table from him. He had been backed into a corner.

And he did not want his daughter to see him as a hypocrite.

"That's a possibility," he hedged, carefully.

"If you were there, I wouldn't be alone with him," Amanda reminded him.

"I know, I know." He had always been truthful with her. Something told him not to change things now. "I'm just trying to think of some reason I can still say no. You're still my little girl, and I don't want you to grow up."

She didn't get angry. Instead she got up and came around the table to him. She made him scoot back and plopped down on his lap, her arms around his neck.

"I'll always be your little girl," she said, softly. "But I have to grow up. This isn't Never-never Land, Daddy."

"I know," he sighed. "I just don't know what I'll do when you meet some boy and fall in love and leave me to start your own family."

"Let's not get ahead of the game, here, Daddy," she said. "All I want to do is go out with Jack Ross and see what that's like. I'm not planning on falling in love, or any of that other stuff." She kissed her father on his forehead.

"Nobody ever does," he sighed.

"Hey!" said Jack, as he dropped his book bag on the floor by the hallway that led to the bedrooms, his included.