Paul took Paula to an abandoned shed and showed her an adult magazine. They looked at it and talked about it. I can’t tell this story in any detail, but as it turns out they weren’t the only ones. Quite a few young people who didn’t think it safe to view such material under the same roof as their parents also used the shed for porn-viewing. Specifically, Fred Conyers and Frida Dayton, both having turned fourteen years old in June, used the shed for exactly this purpose, and I can tell you about them.

Special Magazine

4:54 P.M., Sunday, March 1, 2015

Honolulu, HI

“OK, now you can’t tell anybody about this. Not anybody.”

Frida nodded. “I won’t. Not even Tammy.”

Fred looked around, which was silly because they were in an abandoned shed. They weren’t supposed to be here of course, but some kids in the neighborhood used it as an unofficial clubhouse; Fred had just been clued in. With nobody else here, it made the perfect meeting place.

“OK,” the boy said, almost whispering, “Now I snuck this here from Waipahu and I ain’t showed it to anybody in this neighborhood. You’re the only one.”

Frida nodded. She didn’t know what the Big Secret was, but if Fred hadn’t even shown Greg it was something huge. But when the boy opened the box he had with him Frida felt a sting of disappointment. Nothing against Conan the Barbarian or surfboards, but a comic book about the first and a catalog for the other didn’t seem all that special and secret to her.

“OK,” the teenage boy told the teenage girl, “now look what I got hidden here.”

Fred set the two objects on a box, lifted the over-sized Conan comic and opened the surfing catalog. Inside the cover was no catalog, but instead a magazine with a picture of a sexy girl, naked but turned in a way that nothing “forbidden” could be seen. Part of the magazine’s title was obscured by the girl’s head. Words on the cover promised secrets of oral sex and nude cuties.

Frida’s eyes were huge.

“That’s a...” she glanced around before whispering, “a porno magazine?”

“Sure is,” the teenage boy answered.

Suddenly Frida felt that she shouldn’t be nearly as interested in this as she was.

“Well, it’s not that big a deal,” she said with an utterly unconvincing pretense of indifference. “Why would I want to look at naked girls? If it was naked guys maybe, but if...”

“There’s naked men in here,” Fred assured her.

“There are!?” No more pretense for this teenage girl. “Well show me, show me!”

Grinning like an athlete on the medal stand Fred started to open the magazine, but then he hesitated. Was his friend really ready for this? What if she thought it was disgusting?

“Frida,” he warned her, “these guys ain’t just naked. They’re with girls, naked girls, and they’re doing, um, sex stuff together.”

“I want to see that! Open it, show me!”

Thanks to long practice the fourteen-year-old opened Hustler to exactly the right place, where the hardcore sex scene between a man and a woman began. In the first picture the two adults were fully clothed, but by the end of the page the woman’s breasts were bare. Frida moved to stand next to Fred, staring wide-eyed at the treasure before her. The young boy glanced up at her, and she motioned for him to turn the page. He did and heard his friend gasp.

“I didn’t know a penis was that big,” she whispered, almost awestruck. “Is it really going to fit inside her, um, her...” The teenage girl took a deep breath before whispering, “inside her vagina?”

“Well he doesn’t stick it in her vagina right away,” Fred said, feeling like a schoolteacher. “First, she does stuff to make sure he’s excited and hard, and he does stuff to make sure she’s excited and wet. If he’s hard and she’s wet it goes right in, no problem.”

“How the hell do you know these things?” she asked him. Fred was surprised; he’d never heard Frida say “hell” before. She didn’t say it often, but would sometimes when talking about adult things. And sex, that was about as adult as it gets.

“I learned it reading magazines like this one,” he told her. “You wanna see how she gets him hard?”

“He’s not hard already?”

“Nah,” the boy shook his head. “Well a little bit, but not much hard. You can see it’s still mostly hanging down. When he’s hard it’ll stick out like, well here I’ll show you.”

He turned another page and the girl leaned forward. In the first panel the adults were kissing. Their mouths were open and their tongues were touching. Frida nodded: French kissing. She’d seen that in person. There were two sixteen-year-olds who liked to make out in the park, and they didn’t care who watched, so Frida watched them. Not up close where they might say something to her, but close enough to see that it never went further than French kissing and rubbing up against each other. The whole tongue thing had grossed her out at first, but she was OK with it now. She didn’t really want to do it herself, but it was OK if other people did it. The two older kids were always in shorts and T-shirts, not NAKED like the two adults in the magazine.

All this flitted through the teen’s mind in a few seconds, because the next panel was a close-up of the woman’s hand fondling the man’s penis. This made sense to the teenage girl: if it was going to go up inside of the woman, the woman would want to feel of it with her hand first. Frida wondered what it felt like. Was it actually hard like metal or a rock? Would it be warm or cool?

The next panel made the teenage girl’s eyes go wide all over again; the woman was licking the penis and in the next panel she had her lips around it. The way her cheeks were pulled in let Frida know that she was sucking. Wasn’t she afraid of getting pee in her mouth?

Fred was watching his friend closely. This scene was his favorite, which is why out of the more than a dozen magazines his friend in Pearl City had rescued from the trash, this was the one Fred had risked getting caught with so he could have it with him in Honolulu. The way Frida kept leaning in to get an ever-closer look meant that she was pressing up against him in a way that had never happened before. He could feel the warmth of her skin against him and he could almost tell which panel she was looking at.

The panel she was looking at now was the last on these two pages. The picture was a close-up of the woman’s crotch, and young Frida studied this as closely as she had the penis pictures. She had a mirror in her bedroom for dressing, but a couple of times she had used it to look up between her legs. What Frida had there was nothing like this; where the teen’s crotch was fairly smooth, looking a little like her butt, this woman had wavy bits of skin and a pink inside. There was a hole, maybe two holes, and a little bump at the top; Frida knew she had nothing like that. Or maybe she did, actually; the magazine woman was using her fingers to pull herself open, an idea the teen hadn’t thought of before. The next time she was in her room and was sure nobody would barge in, she was going to take another look.