Chapter 1

You know how particular memories get kind of stuck in your brain, and they hang around for your entire life? You don’t think of them all the time, but something happens and that memory pops into your mind?

Well, one of mine is of watching Valerie Carter running across the vacant lot toward our house. Part of that memory is the entirely silly aspect of it that I remember being amazed, and I always imagine that my eyes were bouncing up and down in their sockets as they watched her breasts bouncing up and down under the checkered shirt she was wearing.

As memories go, I know that’s a stereotypical kind of guy thing, but I’m a guy. It’s just the way I am and I don’t feel at all guilty about loving the memory of her breasts wobbling around under that shirt.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been amazed, seeing as how Valerie was within a few months of being seventeen, and was as grown up as I was. I was a week older than her, and I’d been feeling like I was a real man for some time.

But seeing Valerie as “grown up”, back then, was something I still wasn’t used to.

Valerie and I were best friends. It wasn’t by choice, exactly. We lived next door to each other, if you didn’t count the vacant lot between her house and mine. And we’d lived next door to each other since we were babies. Our parents played cards every Saturday night, which meant that Valerie and I were thrown together each week for a couple of hours to entertain each other while our parents entertained themselves.

Plus my mom and Valerie’s mom spent a lot of time together during the week. While the husbands were off finding bacon to bring home, the moms got together and shared recipes, and watched soap operas, and who knows what else. Valerie and I didn’t know, because we were always put together in the play pen, when we were young. When we graduated from the play pen, we were together in either her bedroom or mine, depending on which mother was hosting the other at a given time. As toddlers we had great fun chasing each other. I don’t remember that, but there are home movies to prove it, and the moms thought it was cute, and told our fathers all about it when they got home.

Because our moms were both stay at home types, and because the school we were supposed to go to was twenty-five miles away, it was decided that we would be home schooled. I think it had more to do with them being unable to take the idea of watching their tender young five-year-olds get on a big yellow bus and disappear all day, than the quality of the school. But, of course, they taught us together, so we might as well have lived together for the first decade of our lives. We had two sets of parents, instead of only one each, and we didn’t sleep in the same house, except for sleepovers.

Speaking of sleepovers, those started when a card party went late into the night, and they put us to bed in either her bed or mine. When the party broke up, if it was cold, or the father who lived next door had imbibed enough to be a little tipsy, they just left us where we were. The next morning we’d get up, wherever we were, have breakfast, and then go home. We even had clothes at each other’s houses.

Later (or maybe earlier, for all I know) the excuse to leave us cuddled in the same bed was that whoever got to go home without their child had the house to themselves and could get frisky. Of course we kids had no idea about that kind of thing back then.

I suppose you could say we were raised almost like brother and sister, though we knew that wasn’t the relationship. We also went to the same church, so we knew lots of other kids, and knew what real brothers and sisters were like. We even asked about that one day when we were six. Our moms were making cookies, which demanded that we stay near, because if you begged just right you got one that was still hot and bendy and the chocolate chips were still a little liquid. Those were the best.

We’d been playing dress up, using a bunch of old clothes that my mom had in a trunk. She said they were my grandparents’, who didn’t need them anymore because they were angels in heaven and wore pure white robes now. Valerie liked to play dress up more than I did, but we had long ago gotten used to trading off what we were going to do. She picked, and then I picked. And on this day she had picked dress up.

What that entailed was us stripping down to our underwear, which was underpants in both our cases, and then finding something in the trunk to put on so we could play imaginary scenarios. Like Beauty and the Beast, or The Little Mermaid, or one of the other stories like that. We were both rich in imagination.Of course the clothes didn’t fit, but you could roll up the pants legs, and pull up the sleeves and put rubber bands around the wrists. In her case, she didn’t care if the skirt was too long, because she loved walking around with the dress dragging behind her like a train.

On that particular day, we were pretending I was Kermit and she was Miss Piggy. I had on a green vest and nothing else, because that was the only thing in the chest that was green. She had on a blue dress that had a lace collar on it. She was lamenting the fact that we had no little sister or brother to be Gonzo. So she pulled me into the kitchen, where the cookies were still only a bowl of dough at that point, and marched up to her mother.

“Mommy? Where do babies come from?”

“Oh, good grief,” said her mother. “I didn’t expect this. Not this early.”

My mother was laughing, which made me mad, because they weren’t taking us seriously.

“We need a baby,” I said, sternly.

My mother stopped laughing. That was a good sign.

“Well, we brought you home from the hospital when you were a baby,” said Mrs. Carter, who looked at my mother and shrugged for some reason.

“Why haven’t you gone to the hospital to get any more?” asked Valerie.

“Well, your father and I decided you were so perfect, we didn’t need any more babies,” said her mother.

I looked at my mother, who was looking at Valerie.

“Am I perfect too?” I asked.

She started laughing again, and it was Valerie’s mother who answered my question.

“Yes, Bobby, you are just as perfect as Valerie. We’re very thankful that we have two such perfect children.”

“But we need a baby to be Gonzo,” complained Valerie.

“Gonzo?”

“Yes, Bobby is Kermit, and I’m Miss Piggy and we need a little brother or sister to be Gonzo,” Valerie explained, patiently.

“I wondered why Bobby wasn’t wearing anything except that vest,” said my mother in that voice that was almost a laugh. “Why doesn’t he have on any underwear?”

“Because Kermit doesn’t wear underpants,” said Valerie, still patient.

“I see,” said my mom. She looked at Valerie’s mom. “I’m going to have to get Tim to play Muppets with me tonight.”

That started both moms laughing. Valerie and I were both grumpy. There were no cookies yet, and it sounded like there might never be any little brothers or sisters. I thought about misbehaving, so I wouldn’t be so perfect, but didn’t want to have to go to time out just so my parents might go get another baby to be better than I was.

Anyway, that all blew over and the years went by. Valerie and I became pretty much inseparable, even when we weren’t in “class” with one of the moms. We didn’t think anything about it, back then. Like kids everywhere, once class was over, we tried to escape to go outside, or play video games or whatever. We just did all that stuff together. It was just the way things were.

Of course we didn’t agree on everything, but when that happened we allowed each other (were taught to allow each other) some intellectual space to believe whatever, and there were no hard feelings. As a result, we could talk about anything, and that became important as we crashed into puberty.

She got there first, and it changed our whole world, if incrementally at first.

It started when we were playing slip and slide one day. Our mothers were watching. In the summer we played on the slip and slide and her bikini top always fell off. She didn’t care, and tossed it on a chair. The moms tried to make her put it on a few times, and then gave up. Both our back yards were fenced in and nobody could see in there, so maybe that’s why they didn’t really care that much.

Of course that was back when we were eight or nine, or something like that, and our chests looked identical. I’d seen her topless hundreds of times. She’d seen me that way too. It was no big deal to us.

Anyway, on this day, Valerie’s top had gotten loose, as usual, so she took it off, as usual. We had gone down the slide together, laughing and holding on to each other, and came back to the start, when I heard my mother say, “She’s getting boobies, Judy.” Valerie’s mother said, “Do you think so?” And, of course, I looked at Valerie’s bare chest. I knew what boobies were. I was all of ten years old and had found out just recently that babies weren’t manufactured at the hospital, where parents could go to pick one out, to take home. I’d learned that from another boy, at church. He said babies grew inside of the mommy and they went to the hospital for the doctor to get them out. If the hospital wasn’t involved, that meant the mother had to puke up the baby, and even at ten we both knew that puking up a baby would be a traumatic experience for a woman. He was also the one who told me that babies drink milk from the mother’s boobs. So of course when the concept of Valerie getting boobs came up, I was interested in that.

Of course our moms had no idea what I was thinking, but I stared at her chest, and I think that fact started the end of our life as little kids, though I can’t prove it. All I know is that, after that day, she wasn’t allowed to go topless any more, and we weren’t allowed to sleep in the same bed during sleepovers. We could still have sleepovers, but we had to sleep in separate rooms.

Naturally, we didn’t understand it then. Well, we got it about her wearing tops. We had a long discussion about whether my mother was right or not. We had it in the woods, where she could take her top off and we could poke and prod her chest. We had already talked about what Randy Simms had told me about at church, but this brought new meaning to things. We had both looked at our mom’s breasts, but they’d always had them and that seemed normal. The idea that those things might grown on Valerie’s chest, however, seemed foreign ... impossible ... weird!

We compared nipples and then I put my chest right up next to hers as we stared down, trying to decide if the very slight swells on her chest were, in fact, boobs starting to grow.In a while, a matter of just a few months, it became obvious. Those little starting boobies grew fast, and when her breasts undeniably started to swell out away from her chest, she was horrified. To her, they were alien bumps that hurt sometimes and which she couldn’t get rid of. Her mother kept telling her to be proud that she was growing up and becoming a woman, but she was in no hurry to grow up. It took most of a year before they didn’t intrude on her consciousness all the time.

She kept showing them to me, of course, even though we both knew, vaguely, that was probably against the rules. Together, we gauged their growth and examined the alien affliction. She’d find some private place and bare them and ask if I thought they’d grown since the last time I saw them. There was nothing sexual about it, either in her mind or mine. There also wasn’t anything sexual about the wisps of hair that started growing between her legs. I didn’t get to see those, but she told me about it.

So she got used to her boobs and the hair, only to have her world turned upside down by her mom bringing home a bra. She hated it (as well as all the others her mother kept getting for her), and when we could manage to get away from the house on some exploration of the woods behind our houses, the first thing she did was take her shirt off so she could take her bra off. She stuffed it in her back pack and didn’t pay any attention to it until we were close to getting back home. Then she took her shirt off and put her bra back on, because if she didn’t - and there were a couple of times she forgot to - her mother yelled at her.

Then one day she was sitting on the pot, and when she got up, the water was all red. She’d had the talk about how periods would show up pretty soon, but it still scared her. It scared my mom too, because it happened at our house. Maybe “scared” isn’t the right word, but that’s how it looked to my young eyes back then.