Chapter 2

The next morning I woke up and went downstairs to get some breakfast. Mom was in the kitchen, humming as she did something at the counter. Emily was already in her usual seat, eating cereal while she looked at her phone. She looked up at me, smiled and then looked back at her phone.

Dad shuffled in. He hadn’t shaved yet, and his dark stubble made him look faintly like the picture of a hobo I’d seen one time.

“How was the dance?” he asked no one in particular.

“Great,” we answered in twin style.

“Did it help make up for me dragging you here?”

“Yes,” we twinned again.

“I will never get used to that,” he sighed.

The rest of the day was like that, just ... normal. Emily and I talked, but not about the kisses, and not about getting naked together. Everything was just ... normal.

The rest of the year was normal, too. Emily and I didn’t sneak off to dark corners to kiss again. By February, when Valentine’s Day was coming up, it was like it had all been just some strange dream.

Everything stayed normal, too, until October of the next year got there. Mom talked to us at supper one night.

“What are you two thinking about for Halloween costumes this year?” she asked. “My sewing room is up and running, now. I assume you don’t want to go as a flapper and a gadabout again.”

“A gad-a-what?” said Emily.

“A gadabout, a man who habitually seeks pleasure and chases women.”

“That’s what Bobby was last year?”

“He was dressed like a typical gadabout might have dressed in the twenties,” she said.

“I have a hard time visualizing Bobby chasing women,” laughed my sister.

“Just because you’re too young to date doesn’t mean he’s not interested in girls,” said our mother.

“I’m right here,” I complained.

“Don’t be rude,” said Emily. “Be quiet while we talk about you.” She grinned and cackled.

“I have an idea,” said Mom. “It might be a little juvenile for two high school sophomores, though.”

“What?” asked Emily.

“I have some gingham in my stash. I was thinking Raggedy Ann and Andy?”

“Perfect!” exclaimed my sister, without consulting me.

She and Mom made the costumes together. Mom was always trying to teach Emily how to sew and, before this, Emily had shrugged it all off. Now, though, she got into it.

The costumes had matching tops made out of blue and white gingham. The high-water pants they made for me were dark blue. A cream-colored apron went over a skirt made of the same dark blue material for her. Mom bought two cheap mop heads and they dyed them bright red. They kept falling off our heads until Mom sewed them onto the tops of two of Dad’s old baseball caps, with the brim cut off.

“Don’t tell your father we used these,” she said conspiratorially when we tried them on.

You could tell there was a hat under the “wigs” but it didn’t matter. It was just for Halloween, anyway.

Mom ordered some red and white striped stockings on the internet. They were one size fits all, but we were able to tug them on above our calves, which was all that mattered. She looked at us, critically, when we did a “dress rehearsal” for her. She’d gotten us red clown noses and we had circles in some kind of red paint on our cheeks.

“That material is thin,” she said. “Emily, be sure to wear a bra or your nipples will show through.”

Now this was a singularly odd thing for Mom to say, at least in front of me. Nobody had ever talked about nipples before. Not in “public”. She turned to me.

“And you might need to wear two layers of underwear. Or your jock strap. The one we bought you for gym when you were in the 8th grade? You still have it, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, wear it so you don’t have any embarrassing accidents,” she counseled.

That was a singularly odd thing for my mother to say, too. She had never discussed the possibility that I might “embarrass myself” in public. I knew what she was talking about, of course. And so did Emily.

I know this because when we left the room to go get back into regular clothes, she took my hand. She led me up to the attic. Then she turned to me.

“Do you think you’ll embarrass yourself this year, like you did last year?”

She was obviously talking about the erection I had showed her the previous All Hallows Eve.

“Are you likely to take all your clothes off in front of me again this year?” I shot back.

“Probably,” she said, carelessly.

“What?”

“But not until after the dance,” she said. “I don’t want you being all gross and icky in front of other girls.”

Remember, we were just fifteen. We still weren’t allowed to date. I didn’t have a ‘girlfriend’ at school, and Emily didn’t talk about any particular guy as being special. Our parents were big proponents of waiting until you were in college to date seriously and we had sort of absorbed that part of their value system.

So this was way out of character for Emily to say. And my response to that?

“Got it,” I said.

“We should keep these costumes in the trunk,” she said, standing on the bare floor of the attic.

“Yeah,” I said.

And, just like that, we stripped down and carefully folded up our new costumes, setting them on top of the previous year’s ensembles.

We didn’t get naked this time. She still had on her bra and panties and I still had on my briefs. But she bent at the waist, with her legs straight, and turned her head until she was staring at the front of my underwear. Then she turned her head even more, until it looked backwards on her neck, like an owl does. She stared up at my face.

“Just checking,” she said.

And then she stood back up and we went downstairs to our rooms, dressed only in our underwear, like that was the most normal thing in the world.

We didn’t touch those costumes again until Halloween night, when we went to get them to get dressed. We didn’t take them down to our rooms to put them on, though.

We did it in the attic, standing beside the trunk.

This time she got all the way naked. And she didn’t put either her bra or panties back on when she got dressed as Raggedy Ann.

I had brought my old jock strap with me. I hadn’t planned to actually put it on, but now I had another erection, thanks to Emily’s hot, naked body having been on display. She had matured even more over the last year and her breasts now had a shape to them that went beyond firm cones. Now they were round and there were shadows under them. Her pubes were puffier, too.

So by the time I started to put on my high water pants, I needed that jock strap.

I was behind, and Emily had been watching me. When I got the jock strap up to my knees she spoke.

“Here,” she said, kneeling in front of me. “Let me help.”