Chapter 1

The first time I ever set eyes on Eileen Chandler, I was fourteen and she was thirteen. It was my fourteenth birthday party in fact, and she was Bill Terry's cousin. Bill was a good friend of mine, from back in my Little League days. He was the team catcher, and I had played first base and done some pitching for the team too. On the day of the party, Bill had called me to let me know that his cousin had just moved to our town, and he had to entertain her all that day. Her parents and his were busy moving all of Eileen's family's stuff into their new apartment. Bill was calling to explain why he wasn't going to be coming to my party.

"You can bring her to the party with you, Bill. There are going to be at least five other girls here, counting my sister. If we gotta have girls anyway, one more won't matter."

My parents had insisted that I invite my twelve-year-old sister and some of her friends too. We had a large finished basement where the party was going to be held, and my mother had set up the record player down there with a big table, folding chairs and everything. She insisted on there being dancing at my party.

My mother was a dance teacher. All of the girls invited were her students. My mother was helping her business with my party. It was harder to get twelve, thirteen and fourteen year old boys to take dance lessons than it was to get girls. I had to go to dance lessons all the time. I had taken lessons with my mom since I was about eight or nine years old.

Bill asked me questions about which girls were coming. I told him the two I knew about, other than my sister, and told him the other two were from my mom's dancing school.

"Is your mom going to try to make us dance again?" Bill had always avoided having to take lessons from my mom, because he was always busy playing lots of different sports. His dad helped him get out of it by saying that he didn't want Bill turning into a damn ballerina. In the late 50's or early 60's, if a boy took dance lessons willingly, his masculinity was very suspect. I had gotten into several fights at the school playgrounds and on baseball fields because of my having to take dance lessons.

"Bill, there's lots of ice cream and birthday cake. My mom told me I could eat as much as I wanted if I let her play some records and try to get people dancing. She can't force you to dance if you don't want to. I'm going to be dancing, it's fun, and you can cop lots of feels if you do it right." I was exaggerating about the feels part. I had brushed up against girls while dancing though, and unless you made it real obvious, so they couldn't just ignore it, the girls didn't seem too upset by it. Bill left the phone hanging on the wall while he went to check with his cousin and the grown-ups. When he came back, he said they would come with two conditions. I asked what the conditions were.

"I have to bring Jane with us too, and Jane and Eileen won't have any presents for you." Jane was Bill's sister. She was Kate's age. Kate was my sister. I told him that would be fine. He came back on the line in another couple of minutes, and told me that they'd be there at two that afternoon. I went to tell my mom about the two new guests, after I was done talking to Bill.

"Larry, I know Jane, but how old is Bill's cousin?" I told her I didn't know because Bill didn't say. I figured she had to be pretty young if they had Bill watching her.

By the time Bill showed up with his sister and his cousin, our basement was getting filled with kids. My mom had let me invite ten boys from school. All of them had shown up for my party. We had eighteen kids in that basement, plus my mom and my Aunt Agnes as chaperons. My mom let us separate into two groups at first, boys and girls. She had the records playing in the background, but we all just stood around talking to each other.

Bill's cousin, Eileen, was tall and very pretty. She was thirteen years old, but already had noticeable breasts. Most of the other girls at the party were either flat-chested, or else just starting to get breasts. Eileen definitely had them already. She was on the thin side, which just made her chest development that much more obvious to everyone. She was over with the other girls. They were all bunched together, doing their best at pretending that us boys weren't in the same room with them. It was an awkward age for all of us. The girls were more advanced than the boys when it came to being interested in boy-girl interaction. Most of my friends hadn't started showing any real interest in girls yet. We might tell sex jokes to each other, or say something about a girl's figure, but we weren't hormonally driven yet. I was just starting to be interested right about this time.

In school, I'd already had a few girls show some interest in me. One had even asked me to go over to her house after school, telling me that she liked me. I had made an excuse, and I think I embarrassed her by not accepting her invitation, because she avoided me after that. It was an uncomfortable time because none of us really knew how we should be acting around the opposite sex. My mom and my Aunt, who were partners in their dancing school, finally made me dance with some of the girls.

My parents were Hungarians, they expected their kids to help them out whenever they wanted or needed help. My mother had a thing she did, with her eyes, where she squinched them up until they were about half shut. She would do this whenever she was not getting the cooperation that she either wanted, or felt entitled to. I saw the look, and my Aunt had her eyes set the same way as my mother. I went and asked Clara Townsend to dance. I'd danced with Clara at least a hundred times before. We took a lot of classes together, and had danced together as partners at several class recitals. She was thirteen and was my height, about five-foot seven. She might have weighed ninety-five pounds. I weighed about one forty. Clara was a friend of Kate's, and hung around our house a lot.

I danced two dances with her, but none of the other boys asked any girls to dance. Kate started dancing with Lydia, one of her other friends, when a fast dance came on. I thought my mother and my Aunt were going to be upset soon, but Eileen walked over and asked Tommy Lampkin to dance with her. Tommy was already fourteen, and probably the most physically mature boy there. He had dark hair and big, brown eyes that the girls all mooned over in school. Tommy had a girlfriend already too, a tenth grader named Laura. As soon as there were three couples out dancing at the same time, my mother and my Aunt relaxed a little. The next record, a slow one with Elvis singing, three other girls went over and asked boys to dance. I was going to take a break, but Eileen came over and asked me to dance with her. We started dancing, and then we were talking too.