Chapter 1

Nobody understands. Except Chrissy and she can’t do anything about it.

I’m Mallory, Mal for short, and I’m tired of people looking at me “like that” and stereotyping me. So I’m going to tell the story of how things got the way they are. Then maybe people will understand.

And if they still don’t? Well, then fuck ‘em. Because I’m happy about how things turned out, whether other people like it or not.

Chrissy was my best friend growing up. We weren’t like other best friends, who got in fights and chose new best friends. We stuck together through thick and thin. I grew up in her house, and she grew up in mine. I bet we spent more time together than real sisters would have.

So of course I knew her parents. And when her mother got cancer and died, it hit me just as hard as it hit Chrissy. We were only eleven at the time, and it wasn’t fair. It shouldn’t have happened.

But it did.

People said things like “That’s life,” or “It’s too bad, but things happen,” and “We have to go on.”

And that’s important, because other things shouldn’t have happened, but did. And nobody said “That’s life,” or “Things happen ... just go on with your life.” Oh no. When the things happened that I’m talking about, people would have screamed and shouted and thrown a fit.

If they’d have known. Which, of course, they didn’t.

Until now.

I bet a bunch of people are going to just have a cow when they read this.

Chrissy’s last name was Carter, and her dad’s name was Bob. It still is Bob, but I’m talking about back then, so past tense seems more nearly correct. And back then I called him Mr. C.

Anyway, we grieved together, and Mr. C. let me grieve with them. He was the only one who understood that I was feeling the same kind of pain. True, she wasn’t my mother, but she had been my friend for years, the one adult who talked to me like I wasn’t some stupid kid. I loved her, and I missed her.

So we grieved together and we healed together. I didn’t understand it then, but I fell in love with him.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I was eleven, and too young to know what love is. And maybe you’re right, except that I think an eleven year old can love her parents, and her siblings, and her dog. So why can’t she love her adopted father too?

I still went to her house, and she still came to mine, and time passed, and eventually that big, fancy place they had seemed almost normal without Mrs. C in it. And that feeling I had for Mr. C. kind of sank deep into my bones.

He never did anything wrong. Not back then. He hugged me, but they were just hugs. Sometimes he kissed me on top of my head, but so did my aunt and uncle and who knows how many other people.

Before Mrs. C. died, our families had this agreement about sleepovers. I’m not talking about her staying all night at my house, or me at hers. We did that all the time. The way we defined “sleepover” was when you invited five to ten girls and made a party out of it.

If Chrissy and I had had our way, we’d have slept over all the time. It wouldn’t have mattered where to either of us. But our parents didn’t see it that way, and they restricted us to four sleepovers a year - two at my house and two at hers. We could invite as many other girls as we wanted to, to those four sleepovers, but those were the only ones we got during the year. We had the summer and winter sleepovers at my house. So the spring and fall sleepovers were at hers.

When Mrs. C. died, Chrissy and I were scared to death that we wouldn’t be able to have any sleepovers at her house any more. But nobody said anything, and when it came time for Spring Break from school, and Chrissy asked her dad if she could invite twelve girls to the spring sleepover, he just said “Sure.” Now that I’m older I’m surprised that the other girls’ parents didn’t react to the fact that there would be no adult female supervision at the Carter home. But they didn’t.

So nothing changed until I was fourteen. Two things happened that year that had a huge impact on my life.

The first was that I passed the certification course for babysitting and immediately got four clients. Two of them were infants, which took almost no care because all they did was eat, poop and sleep. Another family had two kids, a boy three and a girl two. The girl was trouble, but only for about an hour after the parents left. Then she calmed down. The last family had a five year old boy named Nathan. I sat for them more often than the others. Nathan and I got along fine.

The other thing had to do with the sleepovers.

At that age girls begin to be a bit more particular about who is and is not a “friend.” By “friend” I mean who might get invited to a sleepover. You might say hi to somebody at school, but that didn’t mean they were invited to a sleepover. And just because you had been invited to a sleepover in the past didn’t mean you automatically got invited to the next one. I know it sounds bitchy or whatever, but that’s the way teenaged girls are, and we were teenaged girls. So for the spring sleepover that year, when we put the list together, there were only five girls that we liked enough that we wanted to invite them to the sleepover.

It was more intimate with fewer girls.

And we were older ... our interests more ... um ... sexually aware, perhaps?

Don’t get me wrong. Chrissy and I and all our friends had been thinking about sex for years. I know this because it came up at every sleepover. But by the time we were fourteen we had more and better information about things sexual, and talking about it kind of happened in a deeper, more intimate way.

For example, Cheryl Jackson just came right out and asked us all if we masturbated. Just like that!

I’m not going to say more than that about what we talked about. We had a rule about secrecy, and I promised. It doesn’t matter how much time has passed. A promise is a promise.

Anyway, it was just a different atmosphere.

It’s important to say here that all five girls who came to that slumber party had been to ones in the past, either at my house or at hers. So when Suzie Wilkins got embarrassed about where the discussion was going, she changed the subject and said, “So are we playing Sardines this year?”

Sardines, for those of you who don’t know, is a game of hide and seek. There are different ways to play it, but the way we played it was for somebody to be chosen “it.” Then that person went and hid, while the rest of us stayed where we were. After two minutes, or whatever, the rest of us scattered to the winds and started hunting for “it.” Now the point of the game was that, if you found whoever was it, they pulled you into wherever they were hiding, and you both tried to be as quiet and unfindable as possible. If somebody else found you, they were pulled in. And so on. If it was a small hiding place, you were packed in there pretty tight. And each additional person who found the hiding place made it an even tighter fit. Hence the name Sardines. You were sometimes packed in there like sardines. You didn’t want to be the last person to find the sardines, because that person had to do a dare that the group thought up. Like run next door and TP a tree.

I know. It was a goofy game. But we were kids, and it was a fun game too. There was something special about being all packed into some closet or behind a couch or whatever, everybody trying to be quiet, which, for girls, is next to impossible anyway. And each year the dares got more and more interesting. At the last sleepover at my house, one of the dares had been for Jillian Marsh to moon traffic on the street through the bedroom window. She had to stay there, with her bare butt against the glass until ten cars had passed. It was a riot.

So Suzie, who wanted to avoid talking about masturbation that she might or might not have been engaged in on a routine basis, suggested it was time to play sardines.

But there were only seven of us. You can pack seven fourteen year old girls into almost anyplace, especially in a big house like Chrissy had.

And then Marnie Filkins said something that ended up changing my life.

“Why don’t we ask Chrissy’s dad to play. That might make it more interesting.”

Everybody looked at Chrissy. She had a funny look on her face.

“Okay,” she said.

I didn’t think anything of it then. But I agreed that it would be interesting to be cooped up in a closet with him. I thought he was gorgeous.

Mr. C. was, at that time, thirty-two years old. I knew this because every year Chrissy and I made him a cake for his birthday, and we had a great time putting all those candles on his cake and then setting a fire extinguisher on the table beside it. We always called him old man, or over the hill or whatever, and he always laughed. He was the owner of the company his dad had started, and he had grown up in the house they still lived in. He had two brothers and three sisters, but of course they were all married and lived other places. But they had all grown up in that house, which was why it was so huge.

Which meant there were a ton of places for “it” to hide.

Chrissy said “Mal, go find him and get him to agree to play.”

So I took off. I was wearing fuzzy bunny slippers, and my Minnie Mouse PJs, which were my favorites, but were getting a little small for me. I was going to have to give up wearing them soon. I found Mr. C. in his bedroom, lying on his bed reading a book. He looked up at me when I stuck my head in his doorway.

“What’s up, Mal? You guys need something to eat?”

“No. We’re getting ready to play sardines, and we need you to play with us.”

He smiled for some reason, like there was a joke in there. I know now what “play with us” sounded like to him. But not back then.

“I’m kind of big to play sardines,” he suggested.

“Yeah, but we need you. We only have seven without you, and it will be more fun if you play too.”

He looked at me for a long time, and I got this funny feeling in my stomach. I mean he was staring at me, not saying anything. It just felt different.

“Okay,” he said, closing his book. “One game.”

He went back to normal, by which I mean he just looked like Mr. C., instead of a guy staring at me. I took his hand and pulled him to Chrissy’s bedroom.

I’ll be honest. While I can remember what I was wearing, I have no idea what any of the other girls had on. I know they were pajamas, but nothing else. I don’t know if any of them were “sexy” pajamas or not. In later years, I’d pay more attention to that, but not then.

Marnie started telling him how the game was played and he held up a hand. “Girls have been playing sardines in this house for years and years,” he said. “I know how to play.”

So of course we made him “it.”

He disappeared and Linda looked at the second hand on her watch go around the dial four times.

Right away I knew this would be different. There were seven girls, and six of them melted into three teams of two. I don’t know if that was instinctive or not. Maybe down deep each of the others thought that finding Mr. C. and being pulled into some dark, close space with him would be scary or something.

Not me, though. I wasn’t scared of him in any way, shape, or form.

But they sought the safety of numbers. Chrissy wasn’t scared of him either, but Marnie took her arm and wouldn’t let go, so there she was.

But it left me on my own.

We looked everywhere. Well, everywhere normal. We had played the game in this house for years, so everybody knew all the normal hiding places. There were a lot of them, but everybody knew where they were.

And he wasn’t in any of them.

I was the first one to think of the garage. You got to the garage by going through a door in the kitchen. It was a two car garage with a work bench in it, and shelves with all kinds of interesting stuff on them. Nobody had ever hidden in there before, because it smelled greasy and was dirty and all that.

But Mr. C. was a guy ... so ... I opened the door and went in.

The only reason I didn’t scream my lungs out when he grabbed me was because at the same time one arm went around my middle, the other hand covered my mouth. I struggled like crazy for just a second or two, because I was scared so bad I almost peed, but then I realized it was him, and relaxed.

“Is that you Mal?” he whispered right in my ear. His warm breath caused me to shiver once, from the tip of my head all the way to my toes. I nodded.

“Good,” he whispered. “I’m going to take my hand away from your mouth, okay?”

I nodded again and his hand left my mouth. He was still holding me with his other arm, though, my back pressed against him. His hand was on my stomach, his fingers all spread out. I suddenly felt like I was so small, and he was so big and strong.

“You scared the shit out of me!” I whispered.

He chuckled and the hand that had been over my mouth came to join his other one on the other side of my stomach.

“You’re fine,” he said.

“I almost peed myself!” I whispered.

“Shhhh,” he warned.

When I told Chrissy about all this, much later, she asked me if I thought it was odd that he kept his hands on me, pulling me against him like that. I didn’t. Think it was odd, I mean. It was wonderful, being there in the dark with him, with his strong hands on my belly like that. I didn’t pay any attention to what I was pressed against, because his hands felt so good. I mean there wasn’t any need for us to be pressed together. The garage was huge.

But I didn’t think it was strange or uncomfortable for him to hold me like that.

Suzie Wilkins found us next. She opened the door and stuck her head in. Mr. C. and I were behind some coveralls or something that were hanging on the wall by the door. She was being really quiet, and she stepped down onto the floor. I felt his hands move me over to his right, away from her. Then he ambushed her just like he had me. She squealed too, just as scared as I had been. He told her to be quiet too. He told her to stand in front of me and be quiet. She whispered that Debby was going to freak out, because Debbie had told her to stay in the kitchen while she went to the bathroom.

Then he moved behind me again ... and put his hands back on me, just like before.

I didn’t think anything about it then either. And I didn’t think anything about it when we caught Debby, five minutes later. She wasn’t stupid, and figured that the only place Linda could have gone was in the garage. So she opened the door and whispered “You guys in here?”

I don’t know how Mr. C. could move that fast, but he had an arm around her and his hand over her mouth so fast that I couldn’t believe it. She told me later that if she hadn’t just gone to the bathroom she’d have peed for sure, because she let go. There just wasn’t anything there to come out.

It was that delicious kind of being scared to death when you know nothing bad is really going to happen. And it was that way for all of us.

Chrissy and Marnie were next. Chrissy figured it out when three of us disappeared and she never heard a thing. Usually when a girl gets scared in sardines, she screams or squeals or something, and others hear it. That kind of steers them toward the hiding place. So Chrissy figured like I did, that her dad had gone into the garage. But she also knew he’d try to scare them. So what she did was open the door and stick her arm in to turn on the light. Then they charged in, making enough noise to wake the dead.

Mr. C. let go of me when the lights went on, and when I next looked at him he was standing a couple of feet away from me. I honestly didn’t think anything was odd about that, either.

Cheryl and Suzie turned up within thirty seconds, having heard the ruckus, but we pronounced them last.

Then we had a powwow to come up with a dare for Cheryl and Suzie to do.

Mr. C. knew about the dares, but he wasn’t aware of the specifics of past dares. Linda, having just spent ten minutes in the dark garage with him, and having enjoyed the excitement of it, lost her head.

“Dare them to kiss each other, with tongue!”

There were squeals as people realized Mr. C. was standing right there.

“No kissing with tongue,” he said gravely.

Marnie, always the bold one in the group, said “Okay then, they have to kiss Mr. C.”

That got silence. I didn’t know it, but every girl there had thought, at one time or another, about kissing Mr. C.

“No kissing Mr. C. either,” he said. “These slumber parties are supposed to be light fun, not Bacchanalian orgies,” he said.

“Bach-a-what?” asked Marnie.

“Never mind,” he said. “Bad choice of words anyway. Think of something else. Something the police won’t arrest me for if they find out about it.”

“Well that’s no fun,” said Suzie.

“I have an idea,” said Mr. C. Everybody looked at him. “They can sneak next door, in their jammies, and turn Mr. Wilson’s bird bath upside down on his lawn.”

Seven pairs of female eyes stared back at him. It was something only a male would think of to do.

But we loved it. After four or five seconds of shocked silence, there was much squealing by five of us girls, while the other two pretended to be horrified. But all of us had been outside the house in our jammies before. Trust me on that.

So we all gathered in the window, with the room lights off, and watched Cheryl and Suzie scamper over to Mr. Wilson’s yard, tip over his plastic birdbath, and then roll it on its top. I could hear them laughing through the window as they ran back, but no lights came on in his house.

I did notice, when the two girls got back, that their nipples were spiked. We had discovered years ago that doing something that felt dangerous made that happen.

I wondered if Mr. C. noticed too.

We begged him to keep playing and he made a big show of being reluctant about it, but he agreed. We played two more rounds of Sardines that night. The second time we played, Marnie was “it” and this time everybody went alone to try to find her. I saw Mr. C. several times, going here or there, or standing and listening. I knew Marnie liked a particular bedroom on the second floor, because it had a big four poster bed in it with a roof over it. She called it the princess room and couldn’t understand why Chrissy didn’t live in it. I knew Chrissy thought it was old fashioned and ugly.

Marnie was under that four poster bed.

And Mr. C. was the next one to find us.

He scooted under the bed, right behind me and, like it was the most normal thing in the world, put his arm around me, with his hand on my stomach.