Chapter 1

On a balmy summer night, in a little mid-western town, the lives of three teenage siblings were poised to change in both dramatic and permanent ways.

None of the kids would have said anything really dramatic was going on. Exciting, perhaps. Thrilling, perhaps. Wild and a little dangerous, perhaps. But not dramatic or life-changing.

Bobby, Julie, and Barbie Carpenter were on a triple date in the family van. While that might seem strange or unusual to someone outside their family, none of them perceived it as being odd at all. Triple dating was the norm, for this family. It was something required, in fact, if the two girls were involved. The father of this little family had decided that big brother would chaperone his little sisters on dates until he graduated from high school and went to college.

That might also seem strange to an outsider, but a review of how they all got to this balmy night might make things more understandable.

Bob Carpenter met Olivia Radcliff in college. Practically everything about them was as normal as normal could be. They dated, fell in love, and then got married. She graduated with a degree in early childhood education, and he got his sheepskin in history. Both found jobs in the same little mid-western town, which had a hard time luring teachers to low-paying salaries.

With little money, and few entertainment options to spend it on anyway, they did what many other young couples have done. They had sex. They had a lot of sex. It wasn’t unusual for them to have sex three or four times a day, every day.

As a somewhat expected result, Olivia got pregnant, and had a son. They named him Robert Junior, but called him Bobby. They continued having lots of sex and a year later Olivia delivered a girl. As Bobby suckled one breast, and little Julie drank lustily from the other, the young couple counted the blessings they had. Both children were good babies, and good siblings. A year later, after lots more sex, another girl baby came along. This one, they named Barbie, after Olivia’s grandmother, who was named Barbara.

This time, when Olivia was able to have lots more sex, there were two differences. One was that they decided three was enough, so she went on the pill. The other was that somehow, three was a lot harder than taking care of two, so she was tired more often and less interested in sex anyway.

It turned out she wasn’t tired from taking care of three kids. She was tired because she had a type of cancer of the blood, and her body made too many of the wrong kind of white blood cells. Being young and what they both thought of as healthy, she didn’t go to the doctor regularly, and didn’t have lab tests done regularly. These lab tests would have caught the disease in time for something to be done about it, but she didn’t have them and by the time it became obvious something was wrong and she did go to a doctor, it was too late. The medical folks tried hard, but she died before their treatments could halt the progression of her disease.

Bob was devastated, but he had to soldier on. Neither he nor Olivia had family, which was one of the things that drew them together in the first place. So Bob was basically on his own. Bobby, Julie, and Barbie were 4, 3, and 2 years old, respectively, when they lost their mother. All of them knew something was wrong, but the impact on them wasn’t as awful as what Bob felt. Olivia had filled his heart, which was now gapingly empty. His children eventually took up all that empty space, though, and he never looked for another woman to be in love with.

Being a daddy was pretty instinctive for Bob. It helped that the kids all liked each other and played well, most of the time. There was a small tendency for the older two to gang up on Barbie, but Barbie was sharp and somehow learned how to be devious. For the most part, though, the kids did basically everything together. Most things, up to this point in time, had been engaged in together, with no reference to age. When the kids wanted a tree house, for example, all of them helped Bob build it, and it was designed such that all three could access it without help. It wasn’t so much an intentional nod to young Barbie being included, as it was the normal thought process that said all three kids should be involved in whatever was going on. The only proviso Bob made was to tell Bobby, on multiple occasions, to “take care of your sisters.”

The first real competition among the siblings, in fact, didn’t surface until Bobby’s driver license (and driving experience) was a year old and he was allowed to go on dates in the family car. That was something that was both planned by his father, and which resulted in something Bob would never have even dreamed might one day happen. The car was a mini-van, something that was purchased as soon as it became known that Barbie was on her way. It was just too much trouble to try to fit a big family into a sedan. When Olivia passed, Bob saw no reason to downsize. He planned to (and did) take his kids to see some of America’s breathtaking scenery, and the van gave them plenty of room to travel in comfort.

We’re not talking romance machine, here. There were three rows of seats, and none of them could be configured to make a bed. It was just your normal soccer mom type vehicle, and Bob felt like it would be safe and protect his son in the event of an accident. That was the “planned” part of Bob’s thought process.

The girls didn’t like it when Bobby went off alone with a girl. They had both gone to well-chaperoned school dances, where being next to a boy was exciting, but also awkward and uncomfortable. It wasn’t fair that he got to go do something that was mysterious and mystical in their minds, but no doubt fun and exciting. They petitioned their father constantly to be allowed to go on dates, too. His routine response for about a year was, “I’m thinking about it.” This is a good example of how a father can discriminate against some of his children, while feeling somehow justified to do so. Letting Bobby go out alone with a girl was very different in his mind than letting his daughters be alone with some horny boy.

Parents often say, “If I had known then what I know now, things would have worked out a lot better.” Lots of people say that, in fact. It’s normal and inevitable as well, because when we’re young we haven’t learned a lot of the lessons that will change our lives in the future. In Bob’s case, though, it was more a case of cultural ignorance that led him to come up with a solution to his nagging daughters. Bob taught history at the high school level, and his classes were normally filled with juniors and seniors. He was familiar with the “hormonal situation” with kids in that age range. Because he had nothing to do with students until they were at the 11th grade level, the only thing he knew about kids younger than that was what he knew about his own kids. In this case, it was his own daughters. And they weren’t full of raging hormones of the type that he fondly remembered sharing with Olivia.

His little girls weren’t horny sluts, like some of the girls he interacted with in his classes. So if they were allowed to go on dates in the company of their big brother, all together in the family van, then nothing could get out of control. It might even keep Bobby’s hormones at a manageable level.

After all, what could he do in front of his sisters? He couldn’t do much of anything, except maybe exchange a few kisses. He’d be too afraid they’d tattle on him.

It was a rational, logical assessment. Seventeen-year-olds, like Bobby, were interested in sex and needed to be managed. But fifteen and sixteen-year-olds weren’t there yet. His own daughters certainly hadn’t displayed any interest in having a steady boyfriend. They didn’t dress in sexy clothes. They simply didn’t appear - to Bob - to have started exploring sex.

In Bob’s defense, we must remember it was a small town, with a slow-paced lifestyle, and little crime. Girls weren’t popping up pregnant all over the place. Most parents in town, in fact, thought that the dates their children went on were only mildly passionate.

And, for the most part, the kids in town were only mildly passionate when they got some privacy. They were as normal as the town they lived in. Of course “normal” can be a relative term, so perhaps we should define “normal” before the story proceeds. In this case, “normal” means kissing, and boys trying to cop a feel, and girls maybe letting the boy touch and see her naked breasts. In a minority of cases, a girl might let a boy put his mouth on her breasts, and in a small minority of cases, the sky was the limit.

Which brings us to that balmy night in June when Bobby was out with a girl named Sheryl Bennington, Julie’s date for the night was Danny Caldwell, and Barbie was on a date with Nathan Bisby.

It wasn’t the first time the kids had triple dated. They had done this five or six times previously, in fact, and it had been perceived as successful in a ‘if-this-is-the-only-way-we-can-do-this-then-I-guess-I-can-put-up-with-it’ kind of way. There was a bowling alley in town, which was where almost everybody hung out. The five summer league softball teams provided a lot of entertainment, and walks could be taken beyond the brightly lit field. Bobby had kept an eye on his sisters, who had behaved themselves. When they were in the van, parked somewhere, there had been more soft talking than kissing. And kissing was all that had happened, since the girls hade come along on Bobby’s dates.

Until this night.

Sheryl, it seemed, was in that very small minority of girls who let boys do a lot, while making out. She had let them do so much, in fact, that she’d missed her last period and was convinced her life would be over when her mother found out. Before she learned this, she’d broken up with Tim Hoskins, who promptly started going out with Linda Finley. They were a couple, now, and in any case, the last person she wanted to be forced to marry was Tim Hoskins, even if he was the father of the baby. Then Bobby Carpenter had asked her out on a date. Bobby was a much better prospect, in terms of being a life mate. His dad was her history teacher, and seemed like a nice enough guy, for a geezer. More importantly, he wouldn’t want a scandal, so if she went to him and said Bobby got her pregnant, he wouldn’t make a fuss.

Sheryl, like some young girls, believed her fantasies could become reality with no bumps or burps along the way. That was why she got pregnant in the first place. She believed she wouldn’t get pregnant and since she believed that, she ignored reality.

Sheryl’s “plan” took a hit when she got into Bobby’s van (Yay! A van! There will most certainly be a bed!) and found it to be occupied by his two sisters and their childish dates. She persevered, though, and, once they left the bowling alley, she convinced Bobby to park at the far end of the teacher parking lot at school, where it was almost dark, and commenced to try to get Bobby’s penis in her vagina. It needed to happen as soon as possible, because she was already at least a month pregnant.

The van had bucket seats in the front. Sheryl looked in the back and determined nothing back there would meet her needs, so she told Bobby she wanted to go for a walk. When he got out and closed his door, she stayed where she was long enough to turn to those in the back and say, “You mind your own business and keep your eyes inside this van. Do you understand?” In Sheryl’s fantasy all four of them back there were terrified of her “elder” status, and would obey her without question.

It was a short walk. At the edge of the parking lot, where somebody had quite recently mowed the grass into a flat, soft looking carpet, she stopped. She pulled Bobby down, and commenced to let him get away with anything he tried.

As a virgin, who had been hamstrung by the presence of his little sisters on dates, Bobby didn’t try much. He hadn’t minded all that much, really. It was nerve-wracking to try to slide your hand here, or there, while worrying about how a girl was going to react. If she blew up, the date was over and so were the prospects for another one with that girl. Their school wasn’t running over with girls to choose from. If you didn’t try that stuff, and just kissed, it could be a ton of fun. So, that’s what Bobby did.

After at least five minutes had gone by, during which all Bobby did was French kiss her, Sheryl took matters in to her own hand and pulled his hand up to where the only thing that separated it from her naked breast was the thickness of her T shirt.

In fairly short order, the shirt was pulled up and Bobby got his first feel of soft, warm, naked breasts. Her hand urged his to explore inside her loose shorts, as well.

It was at that point that Sheryl’s fantasy took its first mortal hit. None of the kids in the car were afraid of Sheryl Bennington in any way, shape, or form. About all they’d done, in fact, since she and Bobby left the van, was watch them. It was fascinating to all the younger kids. Eventually, Danny whispered, “That looks like fun,” and his hand brushed Julie’s right breast. It looked like fun to Julie, too, so she kissed Danny and let him cop a feel. She liked Danny. He was funny, and cute.

It wasn’t long before Nathan and Barbie played monkey see, monkey do.

Not long after that, the teens in the van saw Sheryl take her shirt off. They didn’t know it, but she was also moaning in Bobby’s lips that she was on fire, and that she wanted more. Her hand was squeezing his hard cock through his pants when she said it.

Bobby was feeling overwhelmed. He wasn’t stupid. She was obviously willing to let him fuck her. Had she spaced all this out over two or three dates, she might have gotten exactly what she wanted, but it was a little fast for Bobby. He had asked her out because there were rumors that you could get farther with her than with other girls, but he wasn’t ready to go quite that far. Unlike Sheryl, Bobby did think about the risk of pregnancy, and he hadn’t come prepared to go that far. Bobby had yet to procure his first condom, and anyway, his sisters were right over there in the van.

It was for that reason that he suddenly broke apart from her and stood up. He didn’t know what to say. This was very awkward. So he simply went back to the van to check on his sisters.

When he rolled the passenger side door back, the dome lights lit up Danny Caldwell’s hand in Julie’s cargo shorts, and Barbie’s pink nipples, exposed because her shirt and bra were pushed up to her neck. Four pasty, white, guilty faces turned toward Bobby.

Chaos and rage ended the date. Bobby took all of his non-family-members home. The chaos settled down - initially - but the rage persisted.

Bobby’s anger was complicated. He was angry with himself for being too chicken to go all the way with Sheryl. He was angry at his sisters for being sluts. He was angry with himself for characterizing them as sluts, particularly since they raged at him about if he could do it, why couldn’t they do it, and he didn’t have a good argument to come back with. They were angry that he thought he was the boss of them. They were further unhappy that he had interrupted what had been very exciting and interesting, a vast departure from the relatively staid dates they’d had in the past.

To boil it all down, though, while Bobby wasn’t aware of it in a conscious way, his real anger was that those guys had touched his sisters ... who were his, in some abstruse, undefined way. And as far as the girls were concerned, what Bobby could do to stupid outside girls, he had to accept would be done to them by stupid, outside boys.

It might have blown over, had not Bobby’s anger been so great that he did something that couldn’t be undone. Had he cooled his jets, twenty years later they could have all sat around reminiscing about this date and laughed together.

But Bobby was royally pissed off. He told the girls they had to tell their father what they had done, and that if they didn’t do that voluntarily, he was going to rat them out. They sassed back that if he ratted on them, they’d just rat on him. He went into pornographic detail of what he planned to tell their father, and by the time they parked the van, both girls were terrified of what Bobby might say, and raced each other to be the first to confess their sins and seek absolution.

Thus it was that chaos returned to vex the family again.

Bob was totally blindsided by the uproar that his living room became. Anticipating a much longer period of quiet solitude, Bob had skipped supper, stripped down to his boxers and poured himself four fingers of reasonably good Scotch. He’d sat back in his recliner and turned on an action film on Netflix. It was way too violent to let the kids see. There was maybe an inch left in his glass and he had just decided he shouldn’t have skipped supper, because he was d-d-d-drunk, when two loud, babbling girls rushed in and tried to talk over each other. Julie actually climbed onto his lap in her attempt to be first and her knees sank down between the arms of the chair and his outer thighs.

The mayhem pummeled his tipsy mind for fifteen seconds until he yelled, “STOP!“

Julie stopped, because he’d basically yelled right in her face, but Barbie went on. That was when Bob heard the words “bare breast” and he jerked his mind away from trying to establish order. He did look at his younger daughter and yell, “Stop!“ again, but it only resulted in her trying to start at the beginning. About then, Bobby came dashing into the room and yelled, “I tried to stop them, Dad!”