I don't know if I should tell you this, about Gail and Tom. Well, it has been a long time, and I'll try to avoid last names. I guess it's OK. It all had to do with Uncle Ted's garage, and I'll have to explain that. Stanford's one of those crossroads towns. In this case, it's state route 92, where it crosses Blue Jacket Creek, and county road 23, which runs more or less along the creek, but on the higher ground. The respectable part of town runs from the bridge, Miss Tina's Tea Shoppe, west along 92, up toward the Stanford Central School. Uncle Ted had a garage, auto repair and general blacksmithing, between the county road and the creek. It was an old brick building. I guess it was once a stable. Ted continued to run his garage until he died, and it was boarded up. I guess it was for sale, but who would buy such a place?

The summer when I was going into eighth grade, and my brother, Tom, who was fourteen, was going into ninth, I used to hang around with Tom and his friends. I suppose they were a gang. The co-leaders were Carmen and his brother, Frank, who was sixteen, going on seventeen, but Frank had just finished eighth grade with Carmen and Tom and the others, because they had held him back. Carmen had the brains in the family, and Frank was the enforcer, about six foot two and built like a bear. Anyway, we used Uncle Ted's garage as a sort of clubhouse.

Like I said, it was all boarded up, but out in back was a big old oak tree. It wasn't hard to climb, and if you shinnied out one of the big branches, you could drop down onto the flat roof, which had a kind of brick parapet around it. When I was younger, my friends and I used to play Beau Geste and Robin Hood up there. Anyway, there was a skylight, which let in some light, even though the windows were all boarded shut, and, over in the corner, there was a hatch, like an upside down box, all tarred over. If you opened the hatch, there were iron rungs set into the brick wall, and you could climb down. It was full of old car stuff, and there was an office in the back, with a storage loft over it. There was a pit for servicing cars, stuff like that, and an old blacksmith's forge along one wall, with a big iron chimney that went up and out through the wall. In the summer, the place was kind of warm and stuffy, with the windows and doors sealed shut.

One summer day, Steve and Nick and George came by our house, and Tom went with them. I tagged along after Tom. Steve said Frank had some new girlie mags, and we could see 'em down at the clubhouse. We met Carmen and Frank, and the bunch of us went down along the bank of the creek, so as not to be conspicuous.

Frank had a bag under his arm, and we were all anxious to see what was in it. I don't know where he got those

magazines, but they weren't just your ordinary Playboy. In the garage, we had stored Penthouse, London Gallery, Swedish Erotica, even a copy of Spanking Times, and some really weird ones in German. Tom says he thinks Frank got them out of the dumpster behind the barber shop. They sure as shit didn't sell them in Stanford.

Anyway, one by one we went up the tree and onto the roof and down the rungs in the wall. Pretty soon, we had the magazines out, and we were leafing through them and making comments: "Wow, look at the tits on that one." "Shit, there's no hair on her cunt." "How can he put it in her in that position?" "How can they get some woman to let them do that to her?" "It's faked; the guy stands there with a whip and they draw the streaks across her ass with lipstick or something."

All of a sudden, Carmen says, "Quiet! There's someone on the roof." We dropped the magazines, and we all hid in the dark office. Couple of seconds later, Gail, the English exchange student, starts down the rungs in the wall. First we see her sneakers, and that she's wearing jeans, then her tee shirt, and finally her long, brown hair. She's a good looking girl, slim, with perky little tits. All the guys I know would love to get in her pants, but I don't think any had really tried. With that English accent and all, well...

Anyway, she gets down, where we can't see her, or I couldn't anyhow, and I hear her walk across the brick floor and start messing with the magazines. We could hear her flipping the pages. Carmen's crouching there with his finger to his lips, and we're all quiet.

We hear Gail pause. She strikes a match and goes through the cigarette ritual: sssss, inhaling, hhhhhh, blowing out the smoke. She shouldn't have been smoking; she was only fifteen. Then we hear her ripping up magazines, and we all crept out of the office and watched. Her back was to us, and she was ripping up the dirty pictures and piling them in the forge, as if she was going to burn them.

Carmen and Frank grabbed her before she knew what was happening, and Frank, who was a foot taller and weighed twice what she did, had her on her back on the floor in a second. He got behind her head, had her arms out like a crucifix, and pinned her elbows to the floor with his knees, so he had both hands free. She squealed and screamed, but Frank put his left hand over her mouth. Nobody could have heard her, anyway, not through those brick walls, unless they had their ear against the door or something.

Carmen picked up the cigarette she dropped and waved it in her face. "You make any more noise, and I'm going to stub this out on your cheek." She stopped trying to scream. The look in her eyes was wild, like the girls in those slasher movies, just before they get chainsawed.

"You tore up our naked lady pictures," says Carmen, "so we'll just have to look at you, instead." He grabbed at the waist of her jeans and started to undo them. Boy, did she struggle, flopped like a newly landed fish, kicking and all that. George and Steve each grabbed a leg and pulled off a sneaker, so, with her legs pulled out straight, it didn't take Carmen long to work her jeans down over her hips and down her legs and off over her feet. She had on pink hip-hugger panties, and they came off in seconds. Carmen grabbed her tee shirt and pushed it up around her neck, and then he got out his pocket knife.

Gail got real quiet when she saw that blade in front of her face. Carmen cut the shoulder straps of her bra and then he slipped the blade down between her breasts and sawed at the bra, between the cups, until it came apart and practically flew off. She had really nice tits, for a fifteen year old. Carmen put his knife away and put one hand on each breast. Gail just stared at him. Then Carmen got up and took one of her feet. He pulled it up -- she wasn't strong enough to prevent him -- and handed it to Frank, who grabbed her ankle. Then the other leg, so Frank had her elbows pinned beneath his knees, with her head practically in his lap and her legs up in the air, in a vee.

"OK, guys," said Carmen. "Everybody gets a look at the real thing." Her rump was up off the floor, the way Frank lifted her ankles, and you could see everything, asshole and all. Carmen took hold of some of her short hairs and pulled so that her cunt came open. "Take a look."