1 - A Walk in the Woods

Eric

Andy and I are standing on a bridge over the small stream that comes from a wooded area past the houses on the street.

We’re both dressed in jeans, long-sleeved shirts and hiking boots. Being late June, it was too warm for that even at nine in the morning, but we’d both ended up with ticks on one of our outings and we don’t want to repeat that experience. She’s got her long hair tied back in a ponytail while my shaggy, shoulder length hair is just loose.

I turn to her and ask, “Ready to do this?”

She turns to look at me and grins. “What are we waiting for. Lets go.” Then takes the lead down the right side of the bridge into the brush along the stream bank.

Andy was what people called a tom-boy, loving to explore the woods, not afraid to catch frogs or garter snakes. She was maybe an inch taller than me, but mom had told me that boys get their height a little later than girls do so I didn’t worry it. Besides, she was my best friend, I didn’t care if she was taller, just as long as she still liked doing things like this with me.

We’d been best friends as long as either of us could remember. Our mothers had been best friends since their high-school days. Both were nurses who somehow worked the same shift and same days. Andy and I were less than a week apart in age, but we celebrated our birthdays halfway between the official dates. Andy’s parents had a house across the street and three down from my parent’s place. We’d grown up together as when we were younger, our parents shared a sitter who watched us from the time our moms left for work until one of the dads got home.

We’d also gotten into exploring when we were five. Started with the thin strip of woods between the houses on my side and the railroad tracks, or the same distance behind the houses on her side of the street. At nine, our parents had cleared us for the entire hill behind her house. It went all the way to the water towers at the top, then back down to the houses on the west side of Stores Street, across from the plant that our dads worked.

At twelve, the railroad tracks could be crossed, so that opened up the pond on the grounds of the Catholic School. Tadpoles and frogs became bait for the bullheads and occasional bass that swam up the stream from the lake. We never got into trouble and the restrictions kept getting removed. Last year is was to let us go swimming at the lake on our own and even to the movie theater which was the other side of the plant our dads worked.

This year we could go as far west as Grove Street. That opened up Nick’s Woods to our explorations as it was in the triangle formed by Holden, Shrewsbury and Grove Streets.

Once we’re past the yards the woods spread out. Sometimes we had to go a little ways from the stream, but we keep following it.

“It’s like we’re Stanley and Livingston,” Andy says. We’d learned about them last year in history class.

“Which one of us is which?” I ask

“Does it matter?”

“Guess not.”

I take lead maybe ten minutes in, we do that all the time, switch off who leads. Ten more minutes of forcing through brush and I’m sweating buckets from the late June heat, and my legs and feet are sore from the rough ground. “About ready for a rest?” Andy asks, reading my mind again.

“Ya, looks like it opens up a bit further, might be a small clearing. Should we check it out?”

“Ya, if it is it’d be a perfect place for a snack.”

We were both wearing small day-packs our dads had gotten us for our explorations. They weren’t very large, but a pear, a PBJ sandwich and a bottle of apple juice took up less than half my pack. I’d stuffed a towel in as well so we had something to sit on besides the ground.

We break through the last bit of brush and stop dead. Andy looks at me and says, “Wow.”

“Ya.” There was a pool in the stream, not that large ... maybe twice the size of our bathtub. Around it was an area of grass and moss big enough to spread a beach towel or two. “Too bad we didn’t bring suits,” I say.

“Why?”

“We could take a dip in there and cool off.” She’s sweating as much as I am, bits of her hair stuck to her neck and forehead.

She chews her bottom lip for a moment then looks at me with a grin. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

“You mean ... just in our underwear?”

“I’m not walking around in wet panties, that’s groody. I’m talking about treating it like a bath. Remember when we were younger?”

We’d taken our baths together until she’d asked her mom a question, then our moms decided that we should take them separate. I still missed having her soap up my back, and I think she missed me doing it for her.

I do have a worry though. “When they made us take baths separate, mom said it was because girls and boys shouldn’t bathe together once they got to a certain age.”

“My mom said the same thing, but it’s not like we haven’t seen each other before. Besides, we’ll make it a DSS thing.”

Double Super Secret. When we talk about something or do something that no one else would ever know.

I don’t even have to think it over. “Why not,” I say and take the pack off and set it on the ground. “I only brought a towel to sit on, can’t dry ourselves off with it and use it for that.”

She points at a rock a little bit from the pool that’s flat-topped and about half the size of mom’s couch. “We can sit there and air dry, it’s warm enough.” Then Andy starts unbuttoning her shirt.

“That works,” I say and start unbuttoning mine as well.

Then something comes into view as the front of her shirt opens, I pause and ask, “You wear a bra?” Then I slip my shirt off as hers comes off too.

She huffs while looking down at it. “I don’t like wearing it, but mom insists. Says that a good girl wears a bra even if she’s not large.” The bra comes off and she drops it on top of her shirt, then sits on the rock to take her boots off. I notice that her boobs were about the size of a large apple cut in half. It may only be Andy, but they’re the first real boobs I’ve seen.