Chapter 1

It was by serendipitous chance, a Sunday. November 30, 2003 to be precise. Morgana was confirmed in the old Pine Isle Community Church on the actual morning of her fourteenth birthday. Lilith teased her before the service that by a careful reading of the rules she should have to wait a week— it read “the first Sunday following a graduate’s fourteenth birthday” and this was the graduate’s fourteenth birthday. But Morg just laughed and accused her friend of being jealous, saying that Lil had been whiny about having to wait a mere twenty-four hours, just twenty-five days ago.

Lilith’s fourteenth birthday had been on Saturday, October 24th. And after cake and ice cream, Morgana and the other guests, most of whom were also on the Pine Isle Girls Volleyball Team— and or the Basketball Team, Swimming Team, Cross Country Team, Softball Team, Track and Field Team— went down to the basement and watched the Florida Marlins beat the New York Yankees— in the Bronx no less— and thus win the ‘03 World Series. The way Morg embellished, she had been completely unable to truly enjoy the game because Lil was “forced by cruel, cruel fate to wait— a whole day.”

“It’s not like you were Gertrude Ederle, or anything,” Morgana said.

“What, who?”

“She was the first woman to swim the English Channel, back in the nineteen-twenties. Twenty-years-old, give or take, it was her one moment. Then she waits around eighty or so years just to die on my fourteenth birthday.”

“Uhm, Morg, I doubt she did nothing other than swim the channel in a hundred years on this planet. And I’m certain that she didn’t plan to die on your birthday.”

“Look at Coach Middleton. Lil, she leveraged being the only scholarship athlete to ever escape from Pine Island High School into four years at THE Ohio State University. To end up back at piss (as she pronounced P. I. H. S.) trying to teach us ‘the pick-and-roll,’ and working for an overweight athletic director who doesn’t know Track and Field from Cross Country.”

Lilith’s mom, Louise Michaels, was the town doctor, and had told her daughter that if you just looked at and listened to people without interrupting them, they usually let you know why they are acting strangely.

“I don’t want to look back at my life, when I am Coach’s age, and wonder what might have been.”

“Well, Morg, I have to hand it to you,” Lilith said. “Fourteen years and zero days, a new record for having an early mid-life crisis.”

Morgana’s dad, Aaron, ran A. M. Pizza, a sports bar and pizzeria that was a popular hang out facing Main Street and ‘The Green,’ the big town park across Harbor Street from the wharves and piers. Lots of festivals and events were held on The Green to attract tourists. That afternoon, Morgana’s birthday party was held on the “family side” of the pizzeria which occupied one of two connected storefronts. They watched the Toledo University Rockets beat the Bobcats of Ohio University 72 to 66 on one of the big screen televisions.

“They should have let your brother, Adam, play,” Morgana said as the final seconds ticked off the game clock. “He could have scored seven points.”

“They don’t play freshmen at Ohio. Even walk-ons where scholarship money isn’t involved.”

After Morgana’s birthday party broke up, Lilith went home with her friend. Following dinner with her family, including her hilariously boisterous and usually bickering grandparents, Lil agreed to stay the night when invited to. They made great friends in that “opposites attract” sort of way. Morg had this huge crazy, but loving, family all of which had lived for generations in Pine Isle. While Lilith’s parents had moved away from their extended family when her mom took a job as a small town General Practitioner.

The two were chatting about school, which became a discussion about all the broken things there, then specifically about a broken bathroom stall— whether it was the door or the lock— then about locks on bathroom doors, and finally locks on bedroom doors.

Lilith made the comment that she didn’t need a lock on her bedroom door. That her parents always knocked before opening a closed door.

“You know, so they won’t accidentally walk in on me ‘a rubbin’ the nubbin.”

“They ... Know...” Morgana said. Her astonishment apparent.

“My mom’s a doctor,” Lil said. “So, yeah ... She knows that teenagers masturbate.”

“Wow, you’ve talked ... I mean of course you talk. But you’ve talked— talked?”

“Yeah, Doc Michaels prescribed ‘wo-man-ual masturbation, daily as needed.’”

“No.”

“Pretty much. I mean she didn’t write it on a script pad. But she told me that it ‘would help (me) to be in tune with my body.’”

“Wow, I mean ... My mom knows that women have sex drives too. But she always frames things in this annoying, confusing, qualifying, self-questioning, double-negative format. ‘Many experts on the subject say it isn’t wrong for teenage girls to masturbate.’ So is that a yes ... Or what?”

“That’s what makes her a great politician.”

“No,” said Morg, “she isn’t a politician. She’s proven herself to be competent where most are not, but that’s besides the point. What makes her electable is the fact that the corporate boundaries are geographically quite small and if all of our relatives turn out to vote for her she wins. Mayor Mommy could never get elected at the township or county level.”

“Don’t you love it,” Lilith said, “that the clitoris is the only part of the human body that exists solely to give pleasure to its owner.”

“Boys like their penises an awful lot.”

“Yeah, but penises are multi functional too, Morg. Like my father’s penis...”

“Eww, let’s not talk about Aaron’s penis. He makes my pizzas—”

“Not with his penis he doesn’t,” Lilith said.

Then, smiling an evil smile, she added, “and he almost always washes his hands— with soap— before making a pizza. I mean IF there is any soap in the bathroom. But, you know saliva—”

“Fuck, Lilith, I need to keep you away from Kim and Tim.”

Kimberly and Timothy were twins, Coach Middleton’s children, who delighted in grossing out adults.

“Mom says that masturbating might make monthly cramps less severe.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, some university somewhere did a study. But like mom says, ‘if it can’t hurt and it might help, why not? Even if it doesn’t really make the cramping less severe it might work to take your mind off of them.’”

“Yeah. You know, Lil, I wonder what she’d think if she heard us.”

“She’d probably just join right in our conversation and embarrass the hell out of me with her encyclopedic knowledge of everything.”

“Yeah. She is pretty cool.”