Chapter 1

The word was out on Johanna and I must have heard about Saturday night's party at Scott's at least five times before lunch, each story getting even more lurid than the one before.

Johanna was one of the 'good girls' at our school. You know, one of those that were 'saving it for marriage' and that wouldn't give a guy more than a good night kiss and wouldn't let you cop a feel even over her clothes, much less let you have any bare titty. The only reason she ever got asked out was because she was so god damn gorgeous. That and the fact that every guy hopes that maybe he'd get lucky. Guys are such optimists.

Well, I knew something about her that the other guys didn't know, but then, they didn't live next door to her, nor did the have Kathy for a sister.

Kathy and I were the only two kids in our family and we didn't have any kids our age living out on the Werth Road when we were younger. Jimmy Johnson was the only other kid that lived out near where we were and he was five years older than Kathy and I, and five years is a huge age difference with kids.

Kathy and I are fraternal twins, by the way. She had mom's red hair and I got dad's rather lack luster blond mop. To look at us, you'd never think we were related, much less brother and sister. Like I said, there wasn't any other kids where we were, so we had to depend on each other for company if we didn't want to play alone. So we were much closer than any other brothers and sisters I know.

I won't go into how I had to play with her dolls if I wanted her to play catch with me, as it sounds kinda faggy. She read my Hardy Boys books and Tom Swift's and I read her Nancy Drew's. She got to be pretty fair with throwing a baseball and could bait a hook with a worm without getting squeamish about it. I found out what girls look like and she and I showed each other our fist pubic hairs when we finally got them, and she showed me how girls 'got their cookies' and I showed her how boys jacked off. We shared a lot of things that we never told anyone about, well, no one until Johanna that is.

When the weather was hot, we'd go down to the creek and take hookers, and she'd ask me about how this or that outfit looked on her and tell me that what I was going to wear looked dorky and neither one of us would take offence. Well, sometimes she'd be really grouchy and I'd know where she was in her menstrual cycle just by her attitude and go hang out by myself: no big deal.

Our dad was a traveling salesman, and no jokes, please. His territory covered five states and he frequently was gone for weeks at a time. Our mother was a nurse that worked mostly night shifts, so my sister and I grew up getting our own breakfasts, as she would get home after we left to catch the school bus and we damn well better be gone by the time she got back home from work. So not only were we playmates, we were also classmates and came to depend on each other more than most brothers and sisters did.

This had its ups and downs. As all girls do, she matured before I did sexually. I was jealous of her growing pubic hairs before I did, and that kind of is a weird thing to say about your sister, isn't it? We had been bathed together as kids and my mom, with that no nonsense about the body that all nurses seem to have, didn't worry about our comparing genitals when she walked in on us playing in the tub. She just figured that playing doctor was a part of growing up and didn't lay any guilt trips on us. So when Kathy or I was in the shower, it was all right if the other had to come in and use the john as long as we didn't flush. The house plumbing system would cut down the hot water when the cold was being diverted to the filling the toilet tank and we both had been scalded once or twice and wouldn't do it to the other. Whoever was in the shower would just flush the bowl when they got out and it was no big deal.

So why am I telling you all this? Because we told each other stuff, no matter what it was.

Johanna moved into our neighborhood when she was fifteen and my sister was overjoyed to have another girl to play with. Johanna's mom and dad had just gotten divorced and her grandfather had this house that he'd rented out for years to various people, none of whom had kids. But being family, he'd told the tenants that were there when her folks decided to break up that they would have to move because his daughter was going to need a place to stay. So out they went and we suddenly had a kid our age to play with. Or rather, my sister did. Hunky dory for her, but that left me kind of left out in the cold as far as having someone to hang out with.

The thing that finally made it okay was that I was about three months from my sixteenth birthday and that meant that I could finally get my drivers license. Getting your drivers license is a big deal in any teenagers life, but especially so in mine. My mom and dad had put aside some money for my first set of wheels, but it was a conditional loan. I'd have to get a job to pay them back for the three hundred bucks they shelled out for the old 58 Chevy.

As far as cars went, that old Chevy was a pretty cool car for the time. It had a big, gas guzzling 348 engine in it, a two speed automatic, a bit of rust over the quad head light rims that I would eventually Bondo up and repaint in a black that didn't quite match the rest of the car, but it was a two door hard top and that was really cool back in the mid sixties. For some reason, having a 'post' wasn't as neat as having a hard top when you were cruising the burger stand. Having wheels made me cool, as far as being able to get dates went. You have to understand that not having wheels and living out in the sticks made dating something of a problem and I didn't 'date' date until I was sixteen. I spent a lot of time flogging the dog, but I wasn't able to go out as I was too far out of town to get to the dances by walking or riding my bike, so I was a late bloomer. Suddenly having wheels, man, it gave my life a whole new meaning, to say the least!

Kathy and I had ridden the school bus since we were in kindergarten and this social handicap applied to her as well as me. No after school activities for us, no team sports, nothing but a few extra study halls at the end of the day to fill up our free time until the bus left to take us home. We quickly figured out in high school that if we didn't show up for the first one, our names wouldn't go on the seating assignments and nobody really cared if we skipped out on study hall, so we would have some free time and would try and get our classes so that we would have two study halls at the end of the day, which gave us some time to walk the four blocks to down town and hang out in a coffee shop, or go buy clothes, or browse the magazine rack in the drug store. Not much fun, but it was the only chance we got to do those things during the week, and we took as much advantage of it as we could.

I wound up becoming the chauffer to my sister and Johanna, as it was a lot cooler to ride to school in a car with the radio blasting out top 40 AM radio than it was to sit on a bus that meandered its way through the back roads and picked up forty or fifty kids. It meant that we could sleep in longer, which was a big plus, and Johanna's mom gave me five bucks a week for gas money, which was a pretty nice thing to do when gas was 29 cents a gallon. We could cruise around all night on two dollars worth of gas, so that was really generous of her.