“Bobby! Bobby!” Mom was calling me just as I was heading out the door.

I turned back to answer her. “Mom! I’m fifteen. I don’t like being called ‘Bobby’ anymore.” I’d objected before to the nickname, but it never seemed to do any good.

She laughed, and I tried not to let her see me roll my eyes. “Sorry, Rob. That’s what you prefer, isn’t it?” She didn’t wait for confirmation. “You’re going down to the public park to play basketball? It’s only 9 a.m. — what time do you expect to be home? Your father wants to take us out for Mexican tonight.”

“Oh. Uh… I guess I could be back by six?” I’d been planning to go with the guys to grab pizza, but Dad didn’t spring for meals out that often.

She made a face. “You’ll need to wash up, so make it five if you can. After eight hours of running and jumping, you will need a shower. Have you got money for lunch?”

I nodded. Dad had left an envelope with my allowance that I had snagged off the toolbox in the garage after doing my chores and putting the weed whacker away. There was usually a food truck parked nearby downtown, or I could go to the food court in the mall a few blocks away, plus a diner a block from the park.

Now Mom was smiling as she tugged at my collar, which didn’t need straightening. “Your brother is going to be in town tonight, and he and Cynthia will be going with us to dinner.

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.” That’s why we were going out for dinner.

Johnny and his wife Cynthia lived in family quarters at the air base about twenty miles away. But he’d be leaving on deployment overseas in a few weeks and Cynthia would be staying with us until he came home. It was a one-year assignment somewhere in the Middle East, and Mom and Dad were sort of nervous about it. It’s not the calmest or safest part of the world for someone wearing a US military uniform.

John was my big brother, eight years and five days older, but we hadn’t really been close since he graduated high school, joined the Air Force and married Cynthia. It’d be nice to see him before he went overseas again.

I said as much to Mom, then got out of the house before she could think of some other reason to delay. One thing I didn’t want to hear again was Mom’s lament about when would Cynthia provide her with a grandchild? I probably wasn’t as tired of it as Cindy was, or John, for that matter.

I’d gotten my chores out of the way early so I could be sure to be one of the first to arrive at the park, and I’d put my bike out front in anticipation with my ratty old roundball in the basket. I’d already checked the inflation, too, so I hopped on the bike and started pumping.

Kabarker is a pretty flat town in the south end of the San Joaquin Valley, but there’s a bit of a rise before you get downtown, and I always liked to be going as fast as I could at the crest so I could just coast the rest of the way. The morning was still cool, and in early May, it wasn’t likely to get very hot, but I wasn’t wearing any more than I had to. A cartoon t-shirt, khaki shorts with cargo pockets, and my Van’s low-pros made up my usual Saturday get-up this time of year.

The breeze I made on my bike smelled of flowers from the desert around the town and avgas from the planes that passed overhead all day long. Sometimes, they caused a lot of noise, too, and people complained, but the town had depended on the nearby airbase for forty years, and that wasn’t going to change. People either worked civilian jobs on the base or in businesses that sold goods and services to the airmen.

What else would you do? Dig borax out of Muley Flats like people had done a hundred years ago? No, Kabarker still existed because of the Dromedary Lake Air Base and a lot of kids from the high school, like my brother, joined the Air Force after graduation. I wasn’t planning on it, but it would be an available option.

I didn’t have any decisions to make about the direction of my life at the moment, though, because I knew exactly where I was going. Sierra Boulevard is the main business district of Kabarker, eight or ten blocks long, with Sierra Park at one end and City Hall at the other. I rode by the park to make sure no one had already claimed the basketball courts, then steered for the alley behind the businesses facing Sierra.

My friend Josh Merrit lived above one of the shops with his mother, the owner and manager of Merrit Bridal, Lingerie and Dry Cleaning. Even on Saturday morning, Mrs. Merrit would be downstairs running her shops and managing her employees. Josh would be sleeping in because he worked the late shift Fridays and Saturdays at Muley’s BBQ Joint.

But the storage rooms behind the shops made a good place to leave my bike. I didn’t have to knock or anything. The back door was unlocked, and I soon had my bike stowed among the cans of cleaning fluid and the boxes of frilly underwear. I stuck my head into the office to say hi to Mrs. Merrit, but she had her head down over some paperwork and hardly gave me a glance or a grunt.

I waved at Luna Marquez behind the dry cleaner counter, and she waved back. She rolled her eyes upward, signaling me that I should go wake up Josh. I grinned at her, then climbed the interior stairs up to the Merrit apartment. Josh’s mom’s employees all treated Josh like a lazy nephew.

Upstairs, and again, I didn’t knock because nothing was locked. Pretty typical for Kabarker doors since everyone in town pretty much knew everyone else, so crime and security were both low. Inside the apartment, I made my way to Josh’s bedroom door and discovered it open. In the room, Josh lay sprawled across the full-size bed…

Naked.

I blinked loudly several times as I realized what I was looking at. I’d seen Josh naked before. We’d both been on the JayVee basketball team and had gym lockers in the same row. But….

Well, the way it works in a guys’ locker room is you try to avoid looking at the other guys’ junk. It’s rude and could even be considered queer. Or gay. Whatever. You didn’t do it.

But there Josh lay, not even a sheet across his naked body and in the middle of that flesh stood his—well, his penis. Red and swollen, stiff as a rod and most of a foot long. I guess. I wasn’t going to measure it.

But I did stare. I don’t think I’d ever seen someone’s…dick…so flagrantly aroused. It looked huge. Josh is a pretty big guy. We were in the same grade at school, but he turned sixteen last October, and I wouldn’t have my birthday until late August. He was most of a foot taller than me, too… lying down or standing up.

I didn’t know what to do. Wake him up somehow? Call his name or knock on his door? Wouldn’t things be a little awkward? Maybe I should just sneak away and wait for him on the courts?

But I couldn’t leave. I stood there staring like a rabbit frozen by the sight of a snake. Images, ideas and thoughts crowded my brain. Could I get closer without waking Josh? Why would I want to get closer? What would it feel like if I touched it? Warm? Rubbery? Hard as wood?

His hand, Josh’s hand, appeared from his other side and wrapped itself around the base of the fleshy spire.

And suddenly, I was running, out of the apartment, down the stairs and out into the alley. Breathing hard, feeling my face flushed, bending over with my hands on my knees, I threw up the Cap’n Crunch cereal I had had for breakfast before doing yard work.

“Oh, God,” I whispered. “I’m gay…!”

“You two are practically joined at the hip, most of the time.”

I took a walk around the downtown area. I went as far north as the bike shop and browsed the shiny metal and black rubber of the bikes. There was a five-speed that I just might be able to afford if I got the money I was expecting for my birthday in three months. It was red with a white leather seat and had the sort of road tires you find on a touring bike. It wasn’t for racing or mountain climbing, it was for going a long distance on a highway.

Somewhere far away from Kabarker and the image in my head of Josh’s …equipment.

I sighed because looking at the bikes did not really keep me distracted from my thoughts.

Josh was my friend, had been my buddy since fourth grade when we moved here from Oklahoma. I’ve always been small for my age, I’m fifteen and about five-foot-three, and Josh is and has been a big guy. Six-one or so now and maybe 160 pounds.

I don’t even weigh a hundred pounds and haven’t grown any since seventh grade. Josh has always been my shield and protector from the sort of bullies who pick on the smallest kid in the class. In return, I helped him with his homework. The guy can’t spell sith.

My reaction to seeing him naked scared me. I felt like my insides had turned to ice cream, and someone had poured red ants all over me. My face burned, and my chest itched. I thought I might start crying.

I wanted things to be the same as they always were. I left Sierra Boulevard and walked two blocks over to Kern Avenue, a residential area with churches and a few medical offices. I didn’t know what to do. I ended up walking slowly back toward the basketball park. If I came up on it from this side, I could see who was on the court before they saw me.

I desperately wanted to see Josh and talk to him, but the idea also scared the sith out of me. It had been almost half an hour since I ran away, and the feelings I had for Josh were even clearer to me. My heart ached. People died for feeling about someone the way I felt about Josh right then.

I trudged along the shady length of Kern Avenue, so green and cool with overhanging trees and older buildings. Most of Kabarker was newer, browner and dustier. Ahead of me, going in the same direction, I saw a figure I recognized. Chud Fugate. Really, his name was Charles, but he wasn’t a Charlie, a Chuck, a Chaz or a Chad. If you knew him, you called him Chud. Even some of the teachers used the nickname.

Chud had been the center on our JayVee basketball team. He was tall, with long arms, seldom missed a free throw, and had an uncanny ability to know who was free to receive a pass. Okay, he wasn’t fast, he couldn’t do a layup, and his dribble got in the way of his feet, but he took up a lot of room on the court, and as an outside shooter, he wasn’t half bad.

Opposing players were often intimidated by his size. Especially if he snarled at them. But he wasn’t a bad guy at all. Kind of shy, friendly if he wasn’t making a game face, and a little funny cause you didn’t know what he might be about to say.

I’d forgotten that he lived on Kern Avenue. His dad was a minister in one of the churches. He was probably headed to the basketball court, too. I wasn’t sure I wanted to overtake him, but even walking slow, I probably would. Chud didn’t do anything quickly.

I had a lot of thinking to do, and continuing efforts to distract myself kept getting in my way. It was obvious that my feelings for Josh had been taking an increasingly alarming direction for some time. But what could I do about it?

All of the things I knew I wanted to do would just make matters worse. Now that I was aware of how I felt…. Seeing him naked with a hard-on was like what I’d always supposed taking drugs would be like. Mind-blowing.

Oop!

First of all, there was the size. His size. I didn’t get a hard-on very often, and…and never like that! Nearly a foot long, it looked to be. Okay probably not. Maybe three times my size in length times girth? Maybe four? I tried not to compare such things, but I knew I was built small. On the basketball court, I made my small size into an advantage.

But thinking about Josh’s physical being was having some weird effects on me. I thought I might be getting a hard-on myself, and my chest itched, my face burned….

I looked up and discovered Chud standing right in front of me. The big guy looked confused.

“What are you doing here, Robin?” he asked. “Don’t you live on Aviation Way? You should be coming from the other side of the park. And where’s your bike? And your ball?”

I shrugged. “In the back of the shops. Josh was sleeping in. I didn’t want to wake him up, so I took a walk.” I started around Chud, who was still blocking the sidewalk.

“Huh,” he said. “You two are practically joined at the hip, most of the time.” He sort of leaned to one side, so he was still in my way. He grinned at me as if what he had said were funny.

I felt my face burning, and I stepped onto the grass to continue around the big lump he made in the universe. “Just…. Don’t…” I said, and my voice went up like it does. My voice hadn’t changed yet, but stress made me a bit squeaky.

He gave me room to get back on the sidewalk by stepping onto the inner grass himself. “Lover’s spat?” he asked. “Josh taking someone else to Prom?”

He was still grinning, not scowling. I realized he was just joking, but something in my expression caused one of the trained badgers he used for eyebrows to arch its back. “Hey?” His grin got a bit wider. “Did you two really have a fight?”

“No,” I managed to say. “I haven’t even talked to him.”

Chud snorted. “You went up to his bedroom and caught him jerking off?”

“Crap,” I muttered, not loud enough to be heard. All the wind had gone out of me. It got quiet.

He swung in beside me, walking on the grass and letting me have the sidewalk. “I bet you saw his dick, and it scared you.” His jaw moved like he had found a forgotten gumball. “He’s like a Mack truck down there. More like a Peterbilt.”

I was ahead of him now. I thought my head might explode. I turned and punched him just above where a human would have a navel.

“Ugh,” he said mildly. I knew how to throw a punch, but it might have been a butterfly’s kiss for all he seemed to feel it. His expression changed a bit to show that mean face he used to intimidate opponents on the court.

I turned and ran again. I’d just hit Chud, the biggest guy in school. I knew I could outrun him, though, so I took off.

“Hey!” he said, only a little louder than his grunt. “Are you telling me this was the first time you’d seen it? We’ve all been in gym class together for, like, half a year?”

His laugh followed me, but I kept running.

He was so damn beautiful.

When I reached the basketball courts in the park, Josh was already there, playing Horse all by himself. He had his own newer ball and my old worn one lay against the pole holding the basket up. He took a shot, and the ball went cleanly through the hoop.

If there had been a net, it would have made that sweet sound a good shot makes when the ball’s pebbly hide just kisses the cords.

He must have heard me running because he turned as he reached for the ball coming back at him, and he smiled. He had on gray gym shorts that I knew said Kabarker in purple letters above the left knee. And the Grateful Dead T-shirt his dad got at a concert in Calaveras showing Jerry Garcia in psychedelic colors.

His shoes were the worn-out pair he liked to wear when horsing around. No socks. The fine hairs on his legs were black like the hair on his head and chest, and the shadow around his chin and upper lip. His eyes were that bright brown; I think they call it hazel.

In the distance, a helicopter rattled above the desert, probably on a training flight. Somewhere further away, a jet engine purred and growled like they do when being tested on the ground.

Josh smiled at me, and I smiled back. I wondered if he could hear my heart beating. He was so damn beautiful.

*

Other guys arrived, including Chud, and we chose sides to play 3-on-3 half-court ball. Shirts versus skins, the usual, but suddenly, I didn’t want to take off my shirt. I had felt my nipples crinkle up looking at Josh, and there was no way I was going to play skins.

Josh had already pulled off his shirt, but I looked at Chud who still wore his, and I said, “I’m on your team, big guy.”

He nodded, but he had a sort of secret smile that worried me. The other guys who had all been on our JayVee squad picked sides, so it was Josh, Benny Marquez, and Ali Shah; all bare to the waist, versus Chud, me, and Dan Seaborg with our shirts on.

Keeping score was optional, the idea of the game was moving the ball constantly, taking shots, and making passes. The morning had lost any chill it had had, and we all were soon sweating. The light gleamed on Josh’s muscles, and I tried not to think about it.

About what? I didn’t want to think about what the about was about.

The game was rowdy, with lots of shouting and grunting, but it stayed friendly, and everyone was allowed to take their shots without getting fouled. The routine typically began with taking a pass in a forward corner, dribbling to backcourt, passing defenders, and then coming upcourt to take a jump shot or a lay-up. A successful goal meant you earned another circuit, but you had to make two more shots before starting the cycle again.

It was a pleasant way to work on ball skills and hang with your buddies at the same time. Two more guys arrived, and we switched to 4-on-4 after a break. Two hours of this went on, and we were ready for a longer rest, some Gatorade, and sharing a big bag of Cheese Curls.

The paperbark eucalyptus lining the Kern Avenue side of the park provided nice shade, and I sat with my back against a trunk, smelling the spicy menthol of the leaves and thinking vaguely of koala bears. I’d heard that they ate eucalyptus and wondered why we didn’t have any locally since we had tons of such trees planted in public spaces.

Chud levered himself onto a concrete bench, facing away from the picnic table it was sort of attached to. He seemed amused, and I kept an eye on him while trying to watch Josh horsing around with Gary Swopes, a long, tall senior from our school who had played on the Varsity team and was slumming on Saturday morning with us juniors and sophomores.

Josh and Gary were pushing and shoving and trash-talking each other; Josh, as a Skin, still bare to the waist, while Gary was supposedly a Shirt player for the moment, but he had pulled off his tee to cool down. The hair on his head was brown, but his body hair was red.

“You got it bad,” Chud said, and I felt my face turn red.

“Is it just our man Joshua, or does Snake turn you on, too?” Snake was Gary’s nickname, not just for his lanky shape but for his habit of making poisonous remarks just to get a rise out of people. He spent a fair amount of the school year in detention when he got so careless as to use his talents on members of the faculty.

I shook my head, not answering Chud’s insinuating question, so he asked another.

“How long have you known?”

“What?” I hadn’t meant to say anything and regretted it immediately.

“How long have you known that you’re gay?”

“I’m not!” I protested. I wasn’t looking at him now but knew his smirk had turned into a grin.

He scoffed, a noise like a boxer dog coughing up a Chihuahua. “I’ve known since I was nine,” he said.

I did turn then and stared at him. “What?” I asked, not sure what it was he thought he had known for nine years. “You… Me? I mean…?” I got to my feet, confronting him. “What?” I repeated.

His grin got wider. “Maybe you’re a slow learner?” he suggested.

I looked away to where younger kids were playing softball on one of the diamonds at the other end of the park. I got closer to him while making motions to brush grass and twigs off my shorts. “You’re gay?” I whispered.

He barely nodded. “Imagine my surprise,” he murmured. “All those wrestlers on TV that Abuelito and I watched.” He shook his head. I knew that Chud’s Mom was Hispanic and that Abuelito meant Grandpa in Spanish, and the local Spanish-language TV station was full of wrestling programs. It was like the national sport of Mexico and for a lot of Mexican-Americans, too.

“How…” I began, but I couldn’t think of what question to ask.

He laughed. “I’d try to teach you the password and the secret handshake, but you really are a slow learner, ain’t you?”

I frowned at him, and he laughed again.

“You’ve got a cute pout,” he said. “Does Josh like it when you beg?”

I glanced away to where Snake and Josh had been, but they had moved to the free-throw line of the nearer half-court and seemed to be starting a new game of Horse. Josh was facing me, and my gaze went to the crotch of his gym shorts and the bulge there.

“You’re going to have to learn not to do that,” said Chud. “Your turkey-timers pop right out when you do.”

I glared at him, but I had no idea what he meant until he grabbed me and pulled me closer. I couldn’t get away from his big hand around my upper arm while with his other hand, he grabbed first one nipple, right through my shirt, and twisted. Then he did the same to my other nipple. “These!” he chortled.

It hurt— a lot. I staggered when he let me go then, for the second time that day, I ran away.

“You’d better get out of there. Snake is coming this way.”

I made it to the restrooms in the center of the park, but no one had followed me. It wasn’t that long of a run but I stood there, just inside, gasping like I had finished a half-marathon and staring at my reflection in the stainless steel mirror.

My face was flushed but pale around my mouth. I could see my chest, and my t-shirt had two wadded-up spots right over my nipples, which still ached from the twisting Chud had given them. I started to lift my shirt but changed my mind and pulled down and out on the neck to look inside.

The view was unsatisfying so I glanced around to be sure I was alone and lifted my shirt after all. In the mirror, I could see that the flesh around my nipples looked angry, red, and swollen. I touched one and it felt hot and puffy, also tender.

I pulled my shirt down and stared at myself in the mirror. The little chest lumps were clearly visible, each coming to a small rounded point. I had little titties like some of the girls had started growing back in seventh grade.

Was Chud the only one who had noticed? How had I not noticed before now? Would they get bigger? My eyes were stinging as I tried to imagine a future starting from this point.

The big guy’s voice came from outside the restroom. “You okay in there?”

I made a noise, a grunt or maybe a sob.

“I’m sorry, Robin,” Chud apologized. “Sometimes I’m just an asshole.” He paused. “Did I hurt you?”

I nodded but he couldn’t see that, so I grunted again. In the mirror, I saw that my eyes had filled with tears.

Then Chud spoke again. “You’d better get out of there. Snake is coming this way.” Meaning Gary Swopes, a senior who often played basketball with us.

The restroom had stalls but no stall doors, just that they didn’t open into the main part of the room and were set at a ninety-degree angle. Not stopping to wonder why I should want to hide, I moved into the stall farthest from the door. I even sat on the stool and lifted my feet so my shoes couldn’t be seen.

Outside the restroom, I heard Chud greet Snake with a terse grunt, and get a similar response.

Gary came in, whistling something between his teeth, another reason for his Snake nickname. I tried to stay quiet while listening to Gary pull his shorts down, and then use the urinal with much splashing. I found myself wondering if he was particularly snakelike down there, too. This made me smile, and smiling made my nose itch because of the tears I had shed before.

Right in the middle of Gary’s relief break, I sneezed.

Gary cursed loudly., ending with a demand, “Who the fuck is hiding in here?”

I got down off the stool and took some tissues from the dispenser. Blowing my nose, I stepped out of the hidden stall. “It’s me,” I admitted.

Gary still stood in front of the urinal but had taken a step back, now missing his target. If the smell of the open urinal wasn’t enough, the reek doubled its potency as a yellow pool spread across the cement floor. “You made me piss on my shoes!” he said, pointing at his feet.

I couldn’t help it. I didn’t look at his feet; I looked at his hand and then at something else pointing down. It was a bit snakelike, in a general sort of way, and that made me smile again.

Gary glared at me, then looked down. “You little queer!” he accused. He shook his “snake” and put it back in his underwear, then pulled his shorts up while I stood there, holding my snotty tissue in front of my face to hide my smile.

I knew Gary was mad and that I shouldn’t smile, but I had noticed that the curly hair of his groin was almost black, darker than the hair on his head and not like the red stuff growing on his chest, arms and legs. So, smiling was required. Gary was a calico.

Once he had put things away, Gary got back to cussing and calling me names. He waved his arms around, too, yelling that he would make me pay for a new pair of shoes.

When I saw Chud looming in the doorway, I decided I should get out of there. I yelled, “Chud!” and tried to dodge around Gary when he turned to look at the door.

“You little cocksucker,” Gary protested, swinging his long arms to try to block me.

I did the small forward moves I used on the court and avoided him, but Chud was still filling the door. I bounced off his belly, and Gary grabbed me from behind.

“Let me go!” I screamed. There are no referees in bathrooms, so I retaliated instead of waiting for a foul to be called. I grabbed his big hand in both of mine and dug my thumbnails into the web between his fingers.

And suddenly, I was free, and Chud backed up so I could go around him. Chud stepped sideways as I sped past him. “Go home, Robin,” he warned me in a loud voice. Then he stepped back into the doorway, slamming Gary against the doorframe with his bulk.

“Get otta my way, Lardo!” Gary screamed.

“Oh, y’shunna said that,” Chud commented mildly.

I didn’t look back. They were about the same height, but Chud outweighed Snake by at least fifty pounds, with the tactical advantage of not really trying to go anywhere while Gary was still inside the toilet.

I headed straight for the back door of the Merrit family businesses, intending to retrieve my bike and get out of Dodge. Or at least out of the park and the whole downtown area. Snake was likely to remain unhappy, no matter how the struggle with Chud turned out.

Josh shouted at me as I ran past the courts, where everyone seemed to be taking a break to drink Gatorade. “What’s happening?” he asked.

“I dunno,” I lied. “Ask Gary! He and Chud are going at it in the restroom.” I didn’t feel proud of the misinformation, but if Snake got free, he could still probably catch me before I got my bike out to the street. Maybe a conversation with Josh would slow him down.

I dashed through the backdoor of the Merrit shops, ignoring the stairwell leading to the living quarters, and dodged into the storage room behind the bridal shop. The heavy outside door had swung closed behind me, making maneuvering the bike backward into the hallway and holding the big door open while exiting difficult.

Usually, I had Josh’s help with this part, but I could hear his voice from across the courts; he’d apparently gone toward the restrooms, probably to try to break up the fight.

I had the bike into the alleyway between the business block and the park now, but it had taken too long. I could hear and see Snake roaring toward me, with Josh shouting in pursuit. I didn’t see Chud at all, which worried me a bit. He and Snake were both known for being dirty fighters, and I hoped the big guy hadn’t been hurt.

I got on my bike, figuring I could come back for my basketball. Once on my wheels, I could evade Snake so I headed for home.

The last I heard was the laughter of the other players as Gary shouted at Josh, “Your girlfriend was spying on me taking a piss! And she bit me!”

I hadn’t bit him, I’d used my fingernails, but I wished I hadn’t heard that and pedaled harder.

“You like being upsy-down?”

I got onto Aviation Boulevard and followed it out to the side street where we lived in a tract full of ranch-style homes built in the 1950s. The lots were bigger than more modern areas of town, with deep backyards and detached garages.

It was barely noon, and Mom wouldn’t expect me home for hours. If I showed my face, I could expect her to find some chore for me to do, so I turned left on Harmony instead of right and headed for the playground around my old elementary school. That’s where I had met Josh, back in the fourth grade. Maybe not the best thing to come to mind.

I parked my bike under a grove of the standard eucalyptus trees, wrapping my chain around a volunteer growing up from the older tree’s roots and already fifteen feet high with a trunk at least five inches thick. The smell in the grove had that mediciney tang and I thought again of koala bears, wondering if they really did smell like coughdrops like I had heard.

I had things to think about more important than imaginary medicine bears. What was happening to me? Was I really turning gay? Or was something weirder happening to me? Bored with ordinary news, sometimes Mom picked up one of the tabloid newspapers in the supermarket. Publications like Weekly Weird World had stories about Bigfoot, Elvis sightings and alien abductions featured on the cover, but inside were smaller reports about odd things happening to ordinary people.

A frequent reoccurring story involved some unsuspecting teenager suddenly changing sex. There was always some medical reason given, but I had never bought into such stuff any more than I believed in batboys or ancient reptile civilizations. Was something so strange happening to me? I made a face. Maybe being gay was not the worst thing that could happen.

I guess everyone wonders at some time what it would be like to be the other sex, but it’s always seemed to me like another country with border guards and strange customs. I was a boy, and girls didn’t even speak the same language. You can’t talk to them about basketball or cars; what they want to discuss is usually about clothes or the crush they have on some boy band singer.

I peeled some of the papery bark off a eucalyptus and crumbled it into strings and shreds in my fingers, making a face as I thought about girls. Josh had a girlfriend, Mallory Jesperson, a perfect example of the foreignness of the gender.

Mallory had a head full of reddish curls and the latest gossip about celebrities, including the British royals and other people who had not the slightest relevance to her own life. She had opinions about fashion trends in Paris and Milan and an encyclopedic knowledge of brands of mascara.

I made another face, thinking about her. She had curly brown hair with red highlights and eyes that were either blue, or gray, or green, unknown for sure because she had contacts. She wore colorful blouses over tight jeans or sometimes wraparound skirts. She was slender and probably the best-looking girl in sophomore class. Josh seldom took his eyes off her if she was anywhere around.

But even Josh didn’t seem to be able to carry on a conversation with her. She and I had never really got along. If she didn’t ignore me, she hit me with little verbal barbs that Josh never seemed to notice. One of her recurring topics was my height, which was kind of weird since, unless she was wearing heels, we were both about five-foot-three, with neither of us weighing more than a hundred pounds.

I stayed under the trees for a while, watching a group of kids playing softball on the diamond in the far corner of the field. Closer to the buildings on that side were the gym bars and other fixed playground equipment, and no one was using those, so eventually, I wandered in that direction.

Ten minutes later, I was hanging from the high bar by my knees, and looking at the world from a different point of view. I wasn’t sure it was helping.

Just the sight of Josh’s…uh…member had pushed me out of my own feeling of being myself. Then Chud stuck his fat fingers into the problem. Then Gary….

“Whatcha doing?” someone asked.

I looked around. A girl, maybe eight or ten, stood at one post supporting the bars, looking up at me with what might be the stick of a Tootsie Pop in her mouth.

“Just hanging around,” I said, knowing that I would probably get a smile from her.

More than that, a giggle. “You like being upsy-down?”

I revised her estimated age downward. “Sometimes,” I said.

She wore a short pink dress that looked like she might have been attending a kiddie birthday party. “How do you even get up there like that?” she asked, leaning her head sideways and moving the stick from one corner of her mouth to the other.

“It’s not hard. I’ve been doing it for years.”

“Could you show me how?”

“Not unless your parents say it’s okay. You could get hurt if you fall.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “‘Sides, I’m wearing a skirt,” she noted. She stepped sideways then a step back, and took what surely was a Tootsie Pop out of her mouth with one hand while tugging on the skirt with the other.

I was getting a crick in my neck trying to look at her, so I reached up and grabbed the bar, did a flip and landed on my feet.

“Neat!” she exclaimed, waving the Tootsie Pop at me.

I sort of squinched my eyes at her. I’d landed a bit harder than I intended on the compacted dirt and clay under the monkey bars. Harder than some of the rocks in the local desert.

She laughed at my expression, I guess. “Good thing you weren’t wearing a skirt,” she said. “It woulda flown up over your head.”

“I don’t wear skirts,” I told her. “I’m a boy.”

“Nuh-uh!” she laughed. “You got little boobies like my sisters, and boys don’t got boobies.”

I glanced down at my chest. The t-shirt cloth Chud had twisted still lay oddly, emphasizing whatever I had there.

“If you’re trying to make people think you’re a boy, it’s not working,” the little girl observed. “Maybe if you wore two shirts to hide your boobies.” She added a really obnoxious giggle to the advice.

I rolled my eyes at her instead of strangling her because there was nowhere to hide a body on a school playground. Then I bounced on my toes a bit to stretch myself out and headed over to retrieve my bike.

The little girl followed me. “I’m Elf. What’s your name?”

Elf? Who names their kid Elf? “I’m Bobby,” I said. And immediately regretted it. But I’d been known by that name when I attended school there.

She crowed. “I knew it! Bobbie is a girl’s name!”

I ignored her, got on my bike and made my escape.

Maybe I could sneak into the house without Mom finding carrots for me to peel or weeds to pull up. Two shirts? Did I really need to do that?

There was no help for it...

I came at our house the back way through the alley, but Mom was there, chopping at some weeds with a long-handled hoe. The back gate made of pigwire stood wide open. At least I didn’t have to get off my bike to open it.

“Bobby,” she said as I rolled past her. “Grab the garden rake and help me here.”

“Sure, Mom,” I agreed. “Lemme lock the bike up first.” I rolled to the clothesline umbrella, which had a stout iron pole sunk in concrete that I wrapped my bike chain around before clicking my lock. With the gate open, I wanted my bike secure in case we went into the house.

I retrieved the heavy garden rake from the passage between the house and the garage and joined Mom at the patch of weeds near the back gate. I offered her the rake and took the hoe when she accepted. “What are we doing? It’s springtime; the weeds will just come back in a couple of weeks, won’t they?”

Mom made an agreeable noise and pointed me to where I should start working. “Well, we don’t want them growing under the trailer,” she said.

“Trailer?” I began chopping at the nasty, nasty, goat’s head vines that lay flatly on the ground near the fence. The thorns on those things can go right through a bicycle tire or most shoes, and it’s almost impossible to get rid of the plants.

“For Cynthia, while she’s staying with us,” Mom amplified. “She’s not going to share a bedroom like you and John did when you were little.”

“I hadn’t thought about it, actually,” I admitted. “Huh? Well, it’ll keep her out from underfoot.”

Mom snorted and kept using the rake to pull weeds into a pile that would later be dumped into a barrel to be burned. She and Cynthia got along well enough, but it’s like the legendary Chinese symbol for trouble: two women under one roof. Best to avoid that. Mom used the middle bedroom since John moved out for knitting and crafts, and for an office for her bookkeeping business, letting Dad have the tiny den for his model car collection.

We worked quietly for a bit, and the effort kept my mind off why I had come home early from the park, which Mom hadn’t asked about, for which I was grateful.

With what Mom had done before I got home, we’d cleared a fair bit of the area before I had to ask something. “Where’s this trailer?”

“Oh,” Mom paused to pull some weeds loose from the tines of the rake. “John and your father are going to bring your Uncle David’s Spartan down from the mountains tomorrow. Will you go with them?”

I hesitated. It could be fun, but my current problem took up a lot of space in my head. I didn’t really want to involve my family yet. I needed to work some things out for myself. “I dunno,” I stalled. “Sounds like work,” making a joke of it.

“Well, if you stay here, Cindy will be coming over with her mom and a station wagon full of their stuff. John and Cindy’s. We’ll be sorting what goes into storage and what gets moved in here. Somewhere. And Antonia will be making dinner.” She rolled her eyes. Mom actually hates sharing her kitchen with anyone. Antonia was Cindy’s mom; she ran a restaurant out in one of the little towns on the coast, which kind of made it worse.

Going with Dad and John began to look better. I sighed.

Mom stopped working and stared at me. She made another statement, “You look like the wolves have caught your scent.”

That was kind of how it felt. Are all moms telepathic? I waited too long before answering, and Mom leaned her rake against the fence, pulled off her gloves and stuck them into the fence, too. “Let’s go inside, have some orangeade, and you can tell me all about it.”

I took a long breath, then tried to defuse things. “It’s…. I…no?”

“Yes,” she countered, pulling the hoe out of my hands and leaning it next to the rake.

She led the way to the backdoor of the house, and I meekly followed. Our house is painted a milky yellow with gray trim, with those overlapping horizontal boards called clapboard, I think. It’s a nice place, built back when the air base was new for offbase housing for service families.

Three bedrooms, 1-3/4 bath with another half bath in the detached garage. The extra bathrooms were added later, plus the den and the little breakfast nook that stuck out into the backyard, The backdoor opened into a laundry room, which had also been added. Unlike the rest of the house, the laundry room had a cement floor instead of oak.

It wouldn’t really be crowded to have an extra person living with us if Mom hadn’t turned John’s old room into an office and crafts room. She did bookkeeping for some local businesses, including Josh’s family, so having the office was handy. Then again, maybe Cindy wanted to have the illusion of her own place in a trailer out back.

My brain tried to seize on distractions to avoid thinking about the impending interrogation from Mom. I knew she wouldn’t give up prying until I told her everything. When Mom wasn’t looking at me, I squinched my eyes up tight and tried teleporting, but that trick never works.

We have fruit trees in the sideyard and Mom makes orangeade from our own oranges, lemons and grapefruit. I guess it’s citrusade but if I call it that, no one knows what I’m talking about. The oranges have more color, so they win the naming contest. She poured us a couple of glasses while I got a small plate that I loaded with the cheap vanilla creme sandwich cookies that aren’t so sweet and go really well with orangeade.

They were fresh out of the bag and the room filled with the scent of vanilla and citrus and I smiled in spite of my worry because of the lovely smell.

Mom smiled back, took a sip of her drink then moved in to eviscerate her youngest child, me. Mom would have made a good police detective.

“So you came home to avoid getting in a fight with someone,” she stated.

How does she do that? “Uh….”

She nibbled a cookie. “Josh….”

I shook my head.

“Someone else then. Not one of your teammates, so someone I don’t know.”

“G-gary,” I stammered. “Gary Swopes. He’s a senior at school. Sometimes plays with us in the park.”

“Tall kid with a sly look and a lot of sass,” she noted.

I nodded. So she did know him. Huh? I wondered how.

“You did something he didn’t like.”

I made a noise. “He blamed me for scaring him so that he pissed on his shoes.”

Mom blinked. That was unusual. Or maybe she was trying not to smile. “There’s more,” she prompted.

“Uh, I was hiding in the latrine, and he came in to pee, and when I came out of the stall, well, he didn’t know I was there, and he started to turn and, uh, peed on his own shoes.”

“Well,” said Mom. “You were hiding in the latrine.”

“Because, because…because of Chud!” I sort of squeaked that out; we were getting close to the things I didn’t want to tell her.

“Chuckie Fugate. He chased you into the latrine.”

“Not really,” I admitted. “But he gave me two purple nurples, and they really hurt.”

Mom closed her eyes but took another bite of cookie. “I bet,” she said. She opened her eyes and stared at me for a moment, chewing thoughtfully. I knew she wanted to know what purple nurples were, but if she didn’t ask, I wasn’t going to tell her.

She dislodged a crumb of cookie from the corner of her mouth and took a sip of her golden drink. Then she looked at me as if she were prepared to be disappointed. “Show me,” she said.

I swallowed a dry bit of cookie and took a sip of orangeade myself. She waited patiently. There was no help for it. It had been at least half an hour but…things still hurt. I stood up and lifted my shirt to show her the mounds on my chest.

“This has been going on for some time.”

I hadn’t known how Mom would react to my showing her my chest, purple nurples and all. “Hm,” she said flatly. “I bet that did hurt.”

I glanced down. The left one still ached and might be turning red, if not exactly purple. I nodded and pulled my shirt back down. What did she think she had seen?

“This has been going on for some time.” A patented Mom non-question that demands an answer.

I made an effort to steer things. “Huh? No, Chud isn’t really a bully.” I frowned. “He just thought it was funny.” I didn’t want to tell her what we’d been talking about.

“He thought it was funny,” she said, repeating what I had said. I hate it when she does that. Dad says she took lessons from Joe, Friday, but she does it every day.

“Um.” I tried to stall, but she just looked at me. I had to say something. “He called them, ‘turkey timers.’”

Her eyebrows went up. “Turkey timers,” she repeated.

“My —uh— my nipples.” I could feel my face turning red again.

“They must have been standing up, showing through your shirt.”

I nodded.

“It wasn’t that cold, but you know why they were doing that.”

I nodded again. It was because of what I’d seen in Josh’s bedroom, but I sure as shooting couldn’t tell her that.

“Speaking of cold,” she said. “Go get a bag of frozen peas from the freezer. You seem to have some swelling you need to take down.”

I shivered just thinking about it, but it looked like a chance to escape, so I hurried off to find a bag of peas. We had a big chest freezer full of meat, but things like veggies were usually in the upper compartment of the refrigerator. Mom wandered off while I was digging a bag out, but when I turned around, she had a narrow roll of yellow cloth in her hand. I recognized it from her sewing supplies, a tape measure.

“That can wait a moment,” she said, gesturing at the bag of peas. “I want to take some measurements.”

I blinked but stood there, juggling frozen produce from one hand to the other, while she wrapped the tape around various parts of my body. My fingers were beginning to get too cold to grip well when she left off. “Measurements?” I repeated stupidly.

She waved the tape at me. “C’mere and stand with your elbows away from your sides.”

I did so but remarked, “My fingers are cold.” I waved the bag of peas around a bit.

“I don’t need to measure your fingers,” she pointed out. “Just stand still, and I’ll be done in a couple of minutes.”

“Okay,” I agreed. I didn’t ask why she wanted to measure me. It was something she did. Not just to me but to other people, too. Once, after measuring me when I was about ten, she had sewn a couple of new shirts, one decorated with license plates. It had been my favorite shirt for a year or so. She had made Josh a shirt from the same material, and the memory of us in our matching clothes made me smile.

She measured twice around my chest, then my waist and hips, writing the numbers down on the pad from the little shelf under the kitchen phone.

“Go ahead and use the peas on your bruises,” she said when she finished.

“Bruises?” I repeated. I wondered if I got that habit from her.

Putting the icy bag of peas on my chest without taking off my shirt, I shivered. Little critters with frosty feet seemed to run up and down my spine, sending cold shocks along my arms and legs and even up to my ears and scalp. It sounds unpleasant, but I had to stifle little yelps and giggles.

I hate it when I do that. I used to giggle a lot when I was small, but since getting to high school, I’ve tried to go cold turkey.

Mom glanced at me, apparently amused. Then she took the bag of peas from my frozen fingers and handed me a piece of paper with numbers on it. Like this:

• C B
• C 31 28.5
• B 32.5 29.5
• b 30 A/B 28 A/AA
• W 27 25.5
• H 34 32.5
• H 64 63
• W ~110 ~98

I took the paper and looked at it. “Um?” I couldn’t make any sense of it. There were two columns labeled C and B and two rows also labeled C and B with another lower case b row—also, two rows of Hs and Ws.

“I don’t get it,” I told her. “What’s this mean?”

“The first column is Cindy’s numbers, and the second is yours.” Mom put the bag of peas on the kitchen table where it could be forgotten.

I frowned. If the second column was for me, it should have had an R at the top. No use mentioning that. I decided I didn’t like these numbers. “What do the letters beside the numbers mean?” I asked.

She looked at me blankly for a moment, exactly as if she had forgotten what we were talking about. Then she said slowly, “They mean you could wear Cindy’s clothes, and they would fit pretty well.”

The hair on my head was too long to stand on end, but it tried. “Why would I do that!?” I yelped, putting the paper back in her hand and stepping away.

She cocked her head sideways, half an inch, looking at me. “Bobby, those numbers mean you’re shaped more like a girl than a boy. The numbers with letters after them are bra sizes.”

A bolt of lightning might have hit me because I’m sure that my hair did stand on end. Part of it was a strange thought that maybe, just maybe, Josh liked girls shaped like me. I don’t know what my face looked like, but Mom took a step toward me and pulled me into a hug.

“We’ll take you to see the doctor on Monday, honey,” she said, but that wasn’t comforting at all.

Don’t let it be Josh, I thought as I opened the door.

We only worked a little more in the yard; it didn’t have to be perfect. The trailer would cover it all up, anyway so however much we cleared away would just have to do.

Some of the dust we stirred up was the alkali sort so common in Cabarker; it sticks to your skin, turning your sweat into streaky gray mud. We were putting the tools away when Mom said, “Go get your shower and be quick; I’ll need one, too.”

I knew what she meant. Mom and Dad have their own shower in their bedroom, but there’s only one small water heater. A cool shower sounded better, anyway. Considering some of what I’d thought about, maybe a cold one.

I trudged into the house, and Mom followed with some advice. “Pick something nice to wear. Your father is taking us all out to dinner at Las Fuentes. And don’t wear those ragged sneakers.”

I protested. “It’s too warm for long pants or leather shoes.”

I heard her roll her eyes behind me. Well, I didn’t hear them, but I imagined the clicking sound they would make. “You’ve got those nice walking shorts your grandma gave you and your sandals. And a polo, not a t-shirt,” she continued.

“Uh-huh,” I murmured. The shorts are kind of loose. I always feel like I need a belt to hold them on. And they’re a strange shade of blue-green, almost turquoise. I had a white polo with a collar almost the same color.

“The thicker material of the polo won’t show your—what did you call them?—turkey timers so much,” she said behind me.

I hunched my shoulders, embarrassed, but I had to hope it would be true. She wasn’t done, though; she had to add. “I suppose you could wear a training bra under your shirt, but we don’t have one of those.”

“Mom!” I squeaked.

She laughed, a giggle, really. “Just teasing you, kiddo.”

I ran inside to get away from her.

*

I had gathered the clothes I meant to wear, including a sleeveless t-shirt I thought would be good under the polo even if it would be a bit warm, when I heard someone at the front door.

Don’t let it be Josh, I thought as I opened the door.

It was Josh.

He stood there staring at me and I realized that I was a mess, with dirt and sweat, and even weed seeds in my hair. Neither of us said anything for too long, just standing on either side of a screen door staring at each other.

Finally, he spoke. “I wanted you to know that Chud and I took care of Gary. I knocked him down, and Chud sat on him.” He smiled because Chud sitting on people was an old joke going back to grade school.

“Oh, well, uh—” Gary hadn’t actually done anything to me, just scared me and called me names and he kind of had a reason for that. I felt my face turning hot.

“Really, seriously, Gary promised to apologize to you at school. He thinks it was funny what happened now.”

“Oh, yeah, well it sort of was,” I said smiling at him.

“Looks like you had some yardwork to do at home, huh?”

“Yeah, well, I guess so. Um, I was just about to take a shower.” And now I knew my face was red.

He stood there a moment nodding. Our front porch has a roof about eight feet wide and ten feet long so he was completely in the shade with the front yard and street kind of glowing in the late afternoon sun behind him. And I realized that his face was turning red too.

“After…?” he began but I cut him off.

“We’re going to dinner,” I said quickly. “And tomorrow we’re going to move a trailer into the backyard for my sister-in-law to live in while John is overseas.”

“Huh,” he said. “My mom is going out with friends tonight so I’m alone. I thought maybe we could hang out?” He looked…hopeful?

“Huh,” I said. I wanted to ask about Mallory, Josh’s stuck-up sometimes-girlfriend, but if didn’t mention her, I sure wasn’t. She might be punishing him for being insufficiently adoring by refusing to be avaiable for a Saturday date. I shifted one foot then the other and I knew I was still smiling.

He smiled back.

That felt nice but confused the shit out of me.

“Watch tv, movies?” he suggested. “Saturday Night Show is at eleven. Late show on channel nine at 12:30?”

I was nodding. It sounded like fun. We’d done it before, and stayed up even later. “Late, late show?”

He shrugged. “At 2:30? If it doesn’t suck.” Seventeen was PBS which was a weird channel, either very good or so bad it was hard to believe. Thirteen was Spanish language but they sometimes had late movies in English.

We both nodded. We could check TVGuide, but there weren’t as many channel options in our part of California as there were in the coastal cities.

“Here, not my place,” he suggested. His bedroom is right next to his mom’s and there’s another apartment through his bedroom wall. My folks’ bedroom is at the other end of the house from the living room. We usually did such late-night things at my house. Sometimes, we stayed up all night.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “We ought to be back from eating by nine.”

He looked off into the distance for a moment, rubbed his neck, looked at the floor of the porch, then looked back at me and smiled. “Okay,” he said.

I smiled back.

He turned and started off the porch. “See you at nine,” he mumbled. Then added, “Go take your bath. You look like you need it.”

I glared at him, but he wasn’t looking, so I shut the door and glared at it. “Why did he have to say that last part? Did he think I needed a bath because he could smell me through the screen door?

I put a hand in my armpit and sniffed beside the hand. Did I smell bad? “Yagh!” I snarled.

I looked at myself in the big mirror on the back of the door.

I carried clean clothes with me to the shower. My bathroom opens off the hall, so I’ve always done it that way. John, when he was still living here, would forget and have to run back to his bedroom in just a towel. I’ve always been kind of paranoid about someone walking in on me, too.

But the bathroom door has a lock, so I flipped the lever before I got undressed while I let the shower run to get hot. Or warm, at least. Mom wanted a shower, too, so I’d better not use all the hot water.

Naked, I looked at myself in the big mirror on the back of the door. I’m fifteen, short, and sort of scrawny compared to Josh or even my brother. And I haven’t changed much since I started high school. Except for the puffiness in my chest, which I had started noticing around Christmas. Back then, there had been hard little nodules inside the puffy tissue around my nipples. Like a cookie with a nut in it.

Now, there was some noticeable bruising from Chud’s joking around, but even more noticeable and kind of alarming was the definite—shape!— of the mound of flesh. Like small titties, girl titties….

There was no good reason for me to be growing titties. No reason at all, but certainly no good one. Yet there they were. Mom’s little chart said A/AA, and that was a bra size. If they kept growing, would I need to wear a bra?

I was afraid to touch them. They didn’t hurt, really but they kind of tingled thinking about them. And then I thought of something else. What I’d seen from the top of the stairs through Josh’s door. It felt a bit like electricity when I thought of it. In my groin and my nipples.

Damn.

I grabbed a towel and dry-scrubbed my skin until the sensations went away. After putting the towel aside, I got under the water, turning it almost completely cool. And found some relief from where my imaginings had been going. I sudsed my hair with shampoo, then soaped my body, rinsed and repeated, then rinsed again, keeping with the cool stream.

It was a warm enough day that I didn’t shiver. Being clean felt good and I used deodorant where I thought it would do some good. I wrapped a towel around my hair to soak up some excess water.

Then, on a whim, I got out one of our big beach towels and wrapped it around me the way I had seen girls do in movies. I stared at my reflection, adjusted the towel again and did some more staring. The towel made it look like I was wearing a dress, one with broad stripes, sideways palm trees and surfers on vertical waves. I’d fitted the towel tight just above my nipples and it pushed up some of the excess flesh there into a couple of half-hidden mounds.

I felt my face get hot. I knew I looked pretty good—for a girl. And odd idea that probably should have been more disturbing. But I wondered, what would Josh think?

*

I got dressed in the shorts and polo Mom, and I had discussed. The shorts needed a belt to snug them up. Had they always been so short? My legs looked good, though. Was the polo opaque enough? Maybe not. I’d better wear a T-shirt under the polo, too.

I fussed with my hair a bit. I was getting shaggy, my last haircut had been before Christmas. Maybe Thanksgiving? I never seem to be able to keep it combed and the barber always teases me about just buzzing it all off. Yikes!

On my way back to my room, I heard Mom call out that she was starting her shower. “Yeah, okay!” I shouted back. I’d left my dirty clothes, towels and washcloths in the bathroom hamper, but now I had nothing to do until Dad and John arrived.

I spent some time in front of my mirror. I even changed clothes a few times but ended up back in the outfit I’d picked out before: turquoise shorts and white polo. I debated with myself about putting on socks to wear with my sandals. Maybe if I had a pair of thin turquoise socks; thick white socks would look too dorky.

Cindy and her mom would be here tomorrow. What would Cindy be wearing? Her folks owned a bed-and-breakfast place on the coast, and Cindy always dressed nice to serve as hostess in the restaurant. But at heart, she was a horse-person and owned a championship dressage horse named Petula, a cream-colored mare with black mane and tail. Beautiful horse, and Cindy looked good on top of it.

She favored tight jeans and Western-style shirts in bright colors and turquoise jewelry. Her boots had high heels and colorful inlays, and each pair probably cost more than my whole wardrobe. She wasn’t just pretty, she was glamorous.

Cindy’s mom was an older, more elegant version of her daughter. Something about Antonia rubbed my mom the wrong way. She sounded British but was from someplace in Maryland. She was what Mom called “a Santa Barbara-type,” meaning Mom thought she was a phony. She had platinum blonde hair no longer than mine but worn in a sort of helmet tightly fitted to her head. She once confessed to wearing green contacts.

It might be unpleasant to be around Mom and Antonia tomorrow, but going with Dad and John to fetch Uncle David’s trailer didn’t sound like much fun either. They both thought that since I played basketball, I must like all sports. The college roundball tournament would be starting soon, and I didn’t even really care about that.

Besides, getting Uncle David’s trailer out from under the fir trees where I last saw it parked would probably involve hot, dirty, itchy work that didn’t appeal to me. Maybe if I stayed here I could sneak off and spend part of the day with Josh.

Why was I blushing?

“Try not to give anyone a silhouette view.”

I got dressed in the clothes I had picked out before, then changed my mind and tried on something else. Long pants and I don’t really get along unless it is cold out and my part of California is seldom really cold, even in winter. I think the temp today might have reached 85 or 90, not unusual for March.

So I had lots of pairs of shorts. But I kind of needed something a bit dressier than, like, gym shorts. A khaki-colored pair with belt loops looked good, but the jeans shorts with cuffs looked…. Um. My legs looked really…. good. I had a pair of white jeans cut-offs, too, that made my skin look very tan.

I finally ended up back with the original set, turquoise shorts with a belt and a white polo shirt with a turquoise collar. Dressy, but casual, too. And…damn?

My nipples kind of showed through the shirt. The polo material was a bit thicker than any of my t-shirt-type tops but not thick enough, it seemed. I pulled the shirt off and found a t-shirt, put that on, then pulled the polo on over it.

No visible nipples but the sleeves bunched up and the collar of the t-shirt was visible at the neck. It looked…dorky.

Mom knocked on my door about then, calling out, “Bobby?”

I unlatched the door and opened it for her. She had got her own bath and wore something akin to what I had on: calf-length tapered cream-colored jeans and an orange and white blouse. She looked good, and I told her so. Mom will be forty before I get to college, but she’s beautiful in a mom sort of way.

“Thanks,” she said. “You look…cute,” she finished, and I could tell she was looking at my chest.

“No, I don’t!” I protested. “Wearing two shirts makes them bunch up, and it looks stupid!”

“Yeah,” she admitted. “It looks awful. Do your nipples show in just one shirt?”

“Uh-huh,” I moaned. “Maybe I’ll stay in my room tonight.”

“I’ve got something that will help, I think,” and she went back down the hall to her room. “Be right back.”

I had this horrible feeling she was going to show up with a bra for me to try on.

I pulled off both shirts and sat on the bed, glaring at my reflection. What was happening to me? Was I turning into a girl? It sounded like something from one of those supermarket tabloids that were filled with Elvis sightings and the love children of Sasquatch.

Mom came back in, holding something that looked a bit like a pale beige sleeveless T-shirt. She blinked when she saw me sitting on the bed without a shirt. I blushed.

She handed me the item. “Put this on under your polo,” she said.

I took it a little gingerly. “What is it?” I asked. It felt light as nothing, just plain smooth cloth with no decoration.

“It’s a chemise, opaque and skin color, and it’s made for exactly your problem, …things showing through clothing.” She was staring at my chest.

I squirmed a bit, glancing down, but I didn’t want to think about what I was seeing.“Huh?” I said. “What’s it made of? It’s so light.”

“It’s silk,” she said.

“Silk!” I don’t think I’d ever worn anything made of silk before.

“Put it on,” she urged. “Just like a T-shirt.”

I pulled the delicate fabric over my head and put my arms through the straps. It felt like cool nothing, so smooth and light as to hardly be there at all. I hadn’t realized how long it was, until I had it on. The lower edge fell below my waist, covering the belt and belt loops of my shorts. The translucent color was a light, medium tan, only a bit darker than my skin. I giggled, as I settled it in place, I don’t know why.

Mom grinned at me. “Put on your other shirt. I don’t think anyone will be able to see anything through it now.”

“Um, okay.” I glanced at the mirror and had to take a quick gulp of air. Even if my little boobies were less visible, I looked more like a girl than ever. But the delicate fabric had a kind of, dart, I think it’s called, under my…boobs. “Uh, Mom?” I hesitated with my polo in my hands.

“You can’t go to the restaurant wearing only the chemise as a top, honey,” she said as if that were at all a reasonable guess as to what I was thinking.

“Um, hah? Yeah….” I dithered a bit, then pulled the polo on, too. It turned out to be at least an inch or two shorter than the…chemise, which hung below the white shirt.

“Tuck it into your shorts,” Mom directed me. “Leave the polo out.”

I followed instructions.

“There,” Mom said, motioning toward the mirror.

I stared. The combination worked, more or less. The inner shirt had no sleeves, so it didn’t bunch up at the armholes, and the straps and neckline didn’t show under the polo. Nor did my nipples, but the shape of my chest was not really like that of a boy.

I put my hands over the slight mounds and blinked at my reflection.

Mom snorted. “Don’t do that while anyone is watching, and I think no one will notice you have small tits.” She thought a moment and added, “Turn sideways a moment, dear.”

“Um?” I did, and she gave me another piece of advice. “Try not to give anyone a silhouette view.”

I winced. Mom can be blunt. She once thanked an old man, Brother Culpepper, for his snoring in church that kept her from hearing the sermon and falling asleep herself.

“This isn’t going to work!” I complained.

“You sound like a nine-year-old Brownie when you whine,” she warned me. “We’re going to get you to a doctor on Monday, so try not to go supersonic till then.”

“A doctor?” I said. Okay, yes, a doctor. It wasn’t a stupid idea.

“I’ve actually heard of boys temporarily growing boobies when they start high school, so maybe he can do something about it.”

“Huh? Oh! Huh….” I said with all the stupidity I could find in me. Something … could be done?

Mom cocked her head, listening. “I think I hear John and Cyndy outside.”

My brother and his wife…. Oh, boy.

"I spent half an hour picking out what I’d wear..."

Mom went to the door to greet John and Cyndy, and I stayed in my room for a while longer. John was eight years older than me and had been in the Air Force for two years and married to Cyndy for over a year. His first overseas assignment would be coming up at the end of the month, but as a lowly sergeant E-4, he didn’t qualify to take Cyndy with him on the Air Force’s nickel.

Which made things complicated, hence the plan to bring down Uncle David’s camp trailer for Cyndy to stay in while John was gone.

I heard Mom squeal. John is a big guy, and he likes to pick people up in order to give better hugs. One of the reasons I was lingering in my bedroom.

I heard them troop through the house and realized they were all going out to the yard to see where we had cleaned things up for parking the trailer. Nothing for it, I decided, and left my room to trail along behind them.

But Cyndy had lingered at the door, and she turned to face me as I entered the hallway. “Oh, there you are, Bobby, and… and….” She trailed off, almost glaring at me.

She was wearing a turquoise shirt and white shorts. I glared back at her.

She made a motion with her hand. “Bobby…” she began.

But I responded before she could finish. “No,” I said firmly. “I’m not going to change. I spent half an hour picking out what I’d wear, and this is it.”

Cyndy rubbed her lips with a fingertip, then laughed. “At least you’re not wearing matching nail polish,” she said, holding up her hand to show her beautiful aqua-and-white manicure.

I relaxed a bit. “They look great, Cyndy.”

“I did them myself,” she said. “And I brought the colors along in case of chipping.” She held up her purse. Then grinned wider at me. “I could do yours before we leave for dinner.”

“Uh, no,” I declined. She’d made the offer to do my nails before. She had a state license and sometimes did manicures for guests at her mother’s bed-and-breakfast down in Solvang.

“I could just do clear coat,” she offered. “Matte finish so they wouldn’t be shiny. I’ve done John’s for him.”

I shook my head, and she giggled. She enjoyed teasing me.

John’s voice came through the door which was still open. “Honey?” he called. “Wanna come see?”

“Not really,” she whispered to me, but answered her husband in a louder voice. “Coming. There aren’t any bees or yellow jackets this time, are there?”

Oh yeah. I remembered that the first time she had visited, last summer, a yellow jacket had chased her back inside. I followed her out.

John was saying, “Your own fault for being so sweet,” he told her. He reached for her, but she dodged his hug, laughing at him.

“You can pick on Bobby,” she offered. “He looks so cute today!”

John looked from one of us to the other. Cyndy’s ginger-blonde hair was actually shorter than mine and neatly shaped like something Tinkerbell might wear. A tiny furrow appeared between John’s eyes. He pointed at me, then Cyndy. “Which one of you did I marry?”

Cyndy poked him in the ribs. “Doofus,” she accused.

Mom had obviously already noted that Cyndy and I were wearing the same colors, but just rolled her eyes.

John responded by picking Cyndy up, spinning around before putting her down, then giving the same treatment to me. I may have squealed louder than Cyndy. I staggered back from my brother, him laughing his ass off. I know I turned red, I could feel the heat in my face.

Because…in the whirlwind of John’s attack on decency, I found myself imagining Josh picking me up like that. He could do it, too. He had more than maybe an inch in height over my brother and gave away what was probably less than thirty pounds.

While Cyndy laughed and tried to poke John in the ribs in retaliation, I just gasped and found one of the ratty old lawn chairs to collapse into, mainly to hide whatever was happening to my face. Some of it must have shown on my face, because Mom came over to ask if I was all right.

“I’m fine,” I told her. “When I was younger, he used to hold me upside down before he let go.”

She laughed. Cyndy laughed a lot; she was easy to like, even if she did tease me.

The back side of our property was only an empty lot away from the road into town off the state highway. This end, near the turnoff toward the airbase, had several motels, mainly for families visiting their sons and husbands in the Air Force. It did mean a little more road noise than neighborhoods deeper in town. The hedge of palmettos and oleander bushes broke up the sound, and living here, I hardly noticed it.

But I saw Cyndy frowning in that direction when a particularly big truck passed a block away. “You get used to it,” I assured her.

She pointed her frown at me and admitted, “I guess I’ll have to if I’m going to live here for two years.”

A thought occurred to me. Why couldn’t Cyndy get a room or small apartment somewhere to live in while John was gone? Money, I suppose.

“This is where we’re going to park the trailer,” John was saying. “Cyndy, look…you’ll have your own space with a kitchen, bedroom and bath right here.”

“Huh,” she grunted, not sounding at all as enthused by this idea as John did. She turned back to me. “I know you all don’t have bears out in the desert here, but what about lions and coyotes?”

“Coyotes, yes,” I said. “But lions stay away from people. And the desert dogs aren’t interested in you, just your trash. They sometimes get into it with raccoons or possums over the best garbage, though.”

She shuddered, and I grinned.

“I hear your father’s truck pulling up out front,” Mom announced.

“Good,” said John. “I’m starved.”

“We can leave as soon as Karl cleans up and changes his shirt,” said Mom. Dad’s workshirts all have advertising on the back and the pocket. “Karl’s Equipco.” He rents out equipment, from small power saws to big road graders.

“It’s not even five p.m.” I protested weakly. Josh would be coming over at nine and I had begun to worry a bit about timing.

“If we get there early,” John advised, “we can get the good table beside the fish tank.”

Cyndy looked confused. “This is a fish place? I thought it was Mexican.”

“The fish are for looking at, not for eating,” I told her. “It’s called Las Fuentes, the Fountains, and, yeah, I guess they do have mariscos, which are Mexican seafood.”

“It’s good food,” John assured her. “You’ll like it. And they’ll like you.” He waggled his eyebrows, and she giggled, glancing at me for some reason.

“You think we’d plan to dress like each other?”

Dad came in, scooped Mom up for a hug and a kiss, then turned toward Cyndy, who dodged behind her husband. It’s not hard to guess that John inherited his affectionate behavior from his dad.

“Anybody hungry?” Dad asked, heading toward the hall to the back bedroom, already pulling his shirt out of his waistband. He paused to give me a curious look, flicking his glance back to Cyndy for an instant, then back to me. An eyebrow went up, but he didn’t say anything.

“We’re all starved,” John assured him. “Hurry up and get changed, old man.”

“Watch it,” Dad warned. “I still outrank you, boy.” But he hurried on down the hall, followed by Mom.

John and Dad have always had this mock-insulting way of relating to each other. It never seemed to work for me. John and Dad were close, but Mom and I were probably closer, and we didn’t treat each other like pretend enemies.

John looked again at me, then at Cyndy, frowning. “You guys didn’t plan this, did you?”

Cyndy scowled. “You think we’d plan to dress like each other?”

John shrugged, “How do I know? Women and little brothers are mysteries.”

“Do you want to ask Bobby to change?” Mom suggested.

I frowned at that, and Cyndy laughed. “Nah, if it doesn’t embarrass him to look like me, it won’t embarrass me to look like him.”

“People will ask if you’re twins,” John teased.

I pointed at Cyndy, “She’s the older.” People always ask that about twins.

They all laughed, and Cyndy poked John in the ribs again. “As long as you can tell us apart.”

“Well, I have slept with both of you, but it’s been years.”

I winced, but everyone else laughed again. It had been years since John and I had shared a bed, back before I started school, and Mom and Dad’s new master bedroom had been built as an add-on. Cyndy pointed out that if John went overseas, it might be years before he slept with either of us again.

More laughter and Dad, coming down the hall, still tucking his clean dress-shirt into his waist, asked, “What’s funny?”

John pointed with both hands, crossing his arms in front of himself. “Twinsies,” he said.

Dad rolled his eyes. “Don’t let them know you noticed. They hate that.” He started to say something else, glanced at me and then Mom and instead announced. “Let’s eat, I’m starved.”

*

We took Dad’s big crew-cab pickup to the restaurant at the far end of Cabarker’s little eight-block-long downtown, John and I sandwiching Cyndy between us in the backseat. “Hey,” she protested, “scoot your fat ass over a bit. I need room.”

I edged over without saying anything, though it was obvious which of us had the fatter butt.

Mom, in the front passenger seat, turned around, more or less, to talk to Cyndy. “I think you’ll like this place. There really is a fountain in a garden on the side, and there are tropical fish in aquariums throughout the place. The owner has a shop in the same block where he sells fish and supplies.”

“I can understand someone living in this dusty desert wanting to feel cool by looking at some fish,” Cyndy observed.

“It’s only May,” John mentioned. “Wait till July for some hot weather. And the wind blows in June and all winter for some extra dust.”

She made a face. “You make it sound so inviting.”

“Don’t worry,” he added. “The trailer we’re going to fetch for you has an air conditioner on the roof.”

“I haven’t seen it in years, but it was in good shape then. Cozy,” Mom put in.

“Cozy is real estate agent language. It means small,” Cyndy said.

I was nodding when I caught Mom glaring at me and stopped.

“Wait till you see it. It’s got a kitchenette and its own bathroom with a shower. The bedroom is in the back with a couch up front that also makes a bed.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“John and I will go up to David’s place to bring it back tomorrow,” Dad said from the front. “You and Bobby can go along if you want; we’re taking this truck. Although,” he paused as if thinking about something. “Maybe you shouldn’t dress alike, David would surely say something about that.”

He and John laughed, and Mom rolled her eyes. Cyndy and I just glanced at each other, and I shrugged.

*

We parked in a shady spot; drivers get in the habit of doing that in Cabarker. We exited the vehicle, with John giving an assist to Mom and Cyndy, while Dad held the door and watched me struggle not to fall off the high seat. “Thanks,” I said, and he nodded, as if.

There were people lined up at the entry; Saturday night, it got busy for dinner at all the good places to eat in town. But there were shady benches to sit and wait in the garden that Mom had mentioned while Dad went to get us a table.

“Five of us,” he said unnecessarily before setting off.

John called after him. “Dad,” he said with a sort of fake energy. “There’s five of us.”

Dad ignored him, and Mom, Cyndy and I giggled.

I was still blushing about the giggle when an older woman on another bench said loud enough for me to hear. “I would never have dressed like my older sister when I was that age.”

“She’s my sister-in-law,” I said, matching her loudness. “That makes it all right.”

“Hmph,” said the lady while her husband winked at me.

Cyndy snorted, and John commented, “It’s only hard to tell them apart in the dark.” Which caused Cyndy to choke and slap at him. She missed, but I put a knuckle under his shoulder blade and pushed and twisted. I knew exactly where to do it, too.

He tried not to wince, but his ears kind of wiggled.

Dad came out of a side door with a waiter. “It’s so nice, I thought we could eat outside.” He gestured for us to follow, and the waiter hurried ahead to open a gate into another part of the garden, where large round tables sat under wide umbrellas. The place’s trademark aquariums separated the dining spots, providing a bit of privacy, with their gurgling pumps and aerators complementing the soft Mexican music rather than competing with it.

We were met by two more waiters who quickly cleaned and set the table, then held chairs out for Mom, Cyndy, and me to sit down.

Everyone looked at me, smiling. “What?” I asked, wondering if they had heard my stomach growling.

“You’re flirting with the waiters.”

I could swear the waiter winked at me as he passed out the menus. I ignored him but pretended to need to see what was available. I didn’t really, I always order the carne asada burrito with guacamole inside, and rice and beans for the combo. Mom always gets a chile relleno and recommended the same to Cyndy. Dad got biftek mexicano in red sauce, and John got the chile verde pork carnitas.

“Won’t be able to get good Mexican in Turkey,” John commented after gathering our menus to hand back to the waiter.

“Not even if you order guajalote?” teased Dad. Guajalote is Mexican Spanish for turkey, the bird.

John snorted.

“I’ll send you a care package, like I did your father,” Mom offered. “If you can get cheese and onions, you can make your own tacos.”

“Man, was I popular when those packages came in,” Dad remembered, smiling at Mom. “Those two Texas boys in my unit would do almost anything for a share, so I made them do the cooking.”

“I dunno,” said John. “I’d probably have to cook it myself.”

Mom groaned. John’s cooking disasters were legendary in the family.

“You don’t let him cook, do you?” I asked Cyndy.

“Not after the first time,” she said. “I had to borrow a stepladder to clean the kitchen.”

We all laughed, even John.

Drinks and chips-and-salsa arrived, and again, I was sure the waiter had winked at me. Later, I noticed him and another waiter watching us. Their voices were almost loud enough for me to hear, but Cyndy was sitting closer to them, and I saw her face go red.

I frowned at her, and she shook her head. “What are they saying?” I asked her.

She shook her head again and stifled a laugh.

The food arrived quickly—big plates of color and amazing smells. Warm tortillas in a basket, bowls of fresh salsa, little limes tucked into curls of lettuce. Everyone made satisfied noises as the dishes were set down, but I noticed two of the waiters lingering longer than they had to. One gave me a quick smile. The other looked from me to Cyndy, then back again.

When they left, Cyndy leaned in across the table and grinned at me. “You’re flirting with the waiters.”

My stomach dropped. “I’m not!” I hissed.

“Oh, totally,” she said with mock seriousness. “They’re checking you out. Both of them. And you’re giving them eyes.”

“I am not giving them anything,” I said, practically choking on my water. “Stop it.”

Mom raised an eyebrow, looking at us from the end of the table. “What’s going on?”

Cyndy smiled sweetly. “Nothing. Bobby’s just making friends with the staff.”

John caught on and laughed. “They think you’re a girl, huh?”

I stared at him. “Shut up.”

“Hey,” he said, hands up.

Dad gave him a look. “John.”

“I’m just saying—” he began, but Mom cut him off with a single glance.

Cyndy leaned closer again, whispering, “One of them winked at you. He’s super cute, too. You blushed so hard I thought your head was going to explode.”

“I hate you,” I muttered.

“You love me,” she whispered back. “And admit it—you kinda liked it.”

I didn’t answer. I just looked down at my food and tried to disappear.

But I couldn’t help it—my ears were burning, and I could still feel those looks. I’d caught one of the waiters saying something in Spanish as they passed behind me. My Spanish wasn’t great, but I caught enough: “La hermana menor es la más bonita.” The younger sister is the prettier one.

I didn’t know how to feel. Embarrassed, obviously. But also…a little proud? Confused? What if they knew I was a boy? Would they still smile at me like that?

The conversation at the table shifted, thank God. John and Dad started talking about the trailer logistics. Mom explained to Cyndy how much help I'd been in the yard earlier. I just ate my food slowly and kept my eyes down, trying not to exist too much.

The meal was good—my carne asada burrito was tender and juicy, the guacamole rich, and the rice cooked just right. Cyndy ended up loving the chile relleno and said so loudly enough that the same waiter came back, smiling, and offered her a dessert menu. He glanced at me again. Another tiny smile.

No one wanted dessert, no room, but the waiter lingered a moment with more glances shared between Cyndy and me.

“Oh my God,” Cyndy whispered again. “He’s trying to get your number through me.”

“I’m going to throw myself in the fountain,” I whispered back.

“You’d ruin your cute outfit,” she teased, and I groaned.

Dad tried to make a joke about how the waiters were probably just being friendly, but his voice didn’t carry the laugh. I could tell he was watching me more closely now, trying to figure something out. John even tried to smooth it over with more jokes, but the mood shifted to something...quiet. Not bad exactly, just awkward. Like everyone was trying not to say what they were all thinking.

The check came. Dad paid in cash, and we all headed back out to the truck under the garden lights and hum of insects.

Back at home, we scattered. John and Cyndy disappeared to talk about the trailer setup, and Mom stayed in the kitchen fussing with Tupperware, maybe to send a lunch with whoever went to fetch the trailer. I made it to my room and changed into my softest shorts and a plain tee, brushing my hair out in front of the mirror. I had the chemise on under the t-shirt. My cheeks were still pink. I didn’t know if it was the heat or everything else.

Did anything show through the layers of cloth? I couldn’t tell. I was still staring at myself when the doorbell rang.

Josh. Why did I feel nervous?

I let him in, and he stepped just past the doorway, looking around like everything had changed since the last time he was here. Maybe it had.

“You look different,” he said.

I shrugged. “Took a shower.”

He smirked. “Yeah, but...I dunno. You just look…different.”

I felt my face go warm again. “Maybe it’s the shirt.”

His eyes glanced past my shirt. “Maybe.”

We stood in the living room for a second, not sitting down, not going to the kitchen, just standing.

Then Josh said, “So, uh...Gary's been running his mouth.”

I tensed. “What about?”

Josh hesitated. “He’s telling people you’re my girlfriend.”

I blinked. “What?”

“He says you were spying on him in the bathroom. Says you ‘bit him’ and you’re my girlfriend.”

“He…?” I couldn’t repeat what Josh had said, not even as a question.

Josh scratched the back of his neck. “He says...you look like a girl.”

I didn’t know what to say. My whole body tensed up.

Josh looked at me. “Do you care what people think?”

I opened my mouth but didn’t answer.

The silence was heavy, like the thick tule fogs we get in winter. We stood there with it swirling around us, uncertain what came next.

He smirked. “I don’t wear anything.”

Josh sat down on the couch like it was his throne, arms thrown wide across the back cushions. I flopped beside him with the remote and started flipping through the local channels. The Saturday night Creature Feature had just started on Channel 9, hosted by a guy in a Dracula cape and a sparkly bowtie.

“Tonight,” he said in a dramatic Transylvanian accent, “we bring you terror… mystery… and a house full of haunts…”

“Anything but Jaws again,” I muttered. “Last time we watched that, I almost peed on myself.”

Josh grinned without looking at me. “When was that?”

I didn’t answer. It was last November. Six months ago. I still remembered how my leg twitched every time the music started: da-dum… da-dum…

“Okay,” I said. “This one’s called House on Haunted Hill. Vincent Price. Black and white. It’ll be dumb and creepy.”

“Perfect,” said Josh. He grinned, and I made a noise that might have been a giggle, wincing as I did so.

Before the movie could really get going, Dad stepped into the living room, jingling his keys.

“Hey, Bobby,” he said. “Your brother and Cyndy are going to take your room tonight. So you’ll be out here on the couch.”

“Okay?”

Dad looked between Josh and me. “Bonus for you two — means Josh can stay as late as he wants.”

Josh raised his eyebrows. “Cool.”

“Cool,” I echoed. Not really sure I meant it.

Dad turned to leave, but stopped at the doorway. “Oh—and don’t forget. No school on Sunday, but we’ve gotta leave early tomorrow if we want to make it to your Uncle David’s and back. He’s in Peterborough, fifty miles out. Be ready by seven.”

“Okay,” I said again. Seven. Jeez, what happened to sleeping in on Sunday?

Dad nodded and left the room.

“I guess I better go grab my pajamas,” I said.

Josh looked over at me. “You wear pajamas?”

I rolled my eyes. “Sometimes.”

He smirked. “I don’t wear anything.”

“I know,” I said automatically, and then froze. “I mean—I didn’t—I mean, you told me that once, I think.”

His brow seemed to twitch. Did he know I’d seen him naked in his bed just that morning, like twelve hours ago? Josh was grinning now. “Did I tell you that?”

I didn’t answer. I was already halfway down the hall.

⸻

In my room, I stood in front of the dresser, door closed, lights off. I reached under my shirt and touched the chemise. It was smooth and light, making me feel somewhat safe. But I thought about sitting next to Josh, buttons on my pajama top maybe pulling open, or him catching a glimpse of the straps. The satiny fabric would be a giveaway.

I pulled it off and folded it carefully before stuffing it under a pile of socks.

I put on a thicker pair of navy blue pajamas with little white dots and a long-sleeved top that didn’t button tightly. It was warm, maybe too warm, but I didn’t want to think about that.

Back in the living room, Josh looked me up and down once and snorted.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said, eyes on the screen. “You want popcorn?”

I blinked. “I was gonna ask you that.”

He grinned. “Then yeah.”

I popped a big pan on the stove and poured some lemonade from the fridge into two tall glasses. Josh adjusted the couch cushions and tossed a throw blanket to the side. The popcorn smelled like movie theaters without the jujubes stuck to the floor.

We sat close, sharing the bowl between us. I already regretted the butter I’d melted to put on the popcorn, as usual, I’d used too much. We’d both have greasy fingers.

Josh kicked off his shoes and stretched out, taking up most of the couch. I slid down to the floor, cross-legged, leaning back against the cushion near his knees.

The movie was old, weird, and full of creepy music. Vincent Price walked through dusty halls while doors slammed shut on their own and women screamed like tea kettles. We both laughed at the obviously fake skeletons and dramatic lighting, but every now and then, something actually scary would happen, and I’d jump a little.

At one point, I looked up and caught Josh watching me. His face didn’t change.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said. I could see the reflection of the TV screen in his eyes.

⸻

Later, I got up to refill the lemonades, taking a moment to use a paper towel to wipe butter off my fingers.. When I came back, Josh had melted into the couch, one arm behind his head, one leg across almost the whole seat, the other right where I had been sitting.

“I had that spot,” I said.

He didn’t move. “You snooze, you lose.”

I looked at him, then at the TV, and then at the couch.

“Make some room.”

He shifted a little, patting the cushion between his legs like it was the most natural thing in the world. I hesitated, then sat. My hip bumped against his thigh. One of my hands landed on his leg as I adjusted the popcorn.

I left it there.

The movie reached its climax — creaking noises, screaming, the house shaking before it disappeared into Hell. I gasped. Josh laughed. People died horribly.

Then it was over.

A commercial came on for a used car dealership, featuring a guy in a cowboy hat riding a rhino. “I’d do anything to sell a car,” the voiceover proclaimed in a West Tulsa drawl.

“Does this make a bed?” Josh asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “But it’s a horrible bed. Better to just sleep on it as a couch.”

He nodded. Neither of us said anything else.

I felt Josh shift beside me. I still had one leg pressed against his thigh, and my hand resting near his other knee. My heart was pounding.

He reached down and lifted my chin.

I looked into his eyes, seeing my own reflection this time.

And then he kissed me.

It didn’t last long — just long enough to know it happened, just long enough to make everything inside me tilt and spin.

And suddenly I was sitting on the floor, stunned, popcorn spilled somewhere under the coffee table, and Josh was halfway out the front door like Vincent Price was chasing him with an axe.

The door clicked shut.

The rhino on the TV charged through a flaming hoop while the cowboy screamed about rebates and zero percent financing.

I just sat there feeling the greasy fingerprints Josh had left on my chin and the cool fire in my lips.

Right on the lips.

I made up a bed on the couch. It was still a couch — lumpy, narrow, with that one spring that pokes your back no matter how you lie — but I managed to throw a sheet over it, add a blanket, and steal a real pillow from my bed before Cyndy and John took it over.

But I just lay there for a long time, staring up at the dark ceiling. Somewhere, a long block away, traffic flowed on the highway. Some big truck hissed, the driver applying his air brakes to negotiate that one turn that was sharper than it needed to be.

Josh had kissed me.

Right on the lips.

I’d never been kissed like that before. Not a joke, not a dare, not some weird middle school game. This was real. Or at least, it felt real. The memory ran down through my body like heat lightning.

I squirmed under the blanket.

My nipples ached again, tight and itchy like they were trying to push their way out of my chest. I didn’t dare touch them. I barely dared breathe. I could still feel where Josh’s hand had tilted my chin. The weight of his leg against mine. The look in his eyes right before—

I finally drifted off, sometime after midnight, tangled in the blanket and my own skin.

I dreamed of kissing.

Of mouths and hands and bare shoulders. Of Josh. Of wanting and not knowing where to put it all.

Then—“GOOD MORNING!”

Dad’s voice boomed through the room like a shotgun.

I flailed and nearly rolled off the couch, feet tangled in the sheet, heart slamming in my chest like I’d been shot out of a cannon.

Dad stood in the kitchen holding a mug of coffee like a trophy. “Come on, time to roll. We’ve got a trailer to requisition, remember?”

I rubbed my eyes. “Yeah. Okay.”

“Peterborough’s not getting any closer,” he added.

As if I didn’t know exactly how far it was. Maybe I could nap in the truck on the way.

——

Dad had made toast and poured a cup of coffee for John, who came stumbling out of my bedroom, sleep still on his face, tugging his gray Air Force jacket over a wrinkled civilian work shirt.

I didn’t usually drink coffee, but I poured myself half a cup and drowned it in milk. It was warm and bitter and didn’t help me feel any more awake. I debated adding sugar, but I’d have to get the box down from the cabinet. No one in our family used sugar in their coffee, so it wasn’t out on the table. The sweetness probably wouldn’t improve my mood much, so I decided to heck with it and sipped my milky concoction.

Dad, of course, was already bouncing around the kitchen like he’d been up for hours. He whistled while buttering toast, clinked mugs too loudly, and kept cracking jokes no one was awake enough to appreciate.

Even John complained. “Do you have to be like this in the morning?”

Dad just grinned like it was a superpower.

Mom and Cyndy stayed in bed, wisely avoiding the cheerful maniac while they could. I wished I could’ve stayed behind too, but I had been drafted for the trailer mission.

We actually made it out of the house before seven. The sun was barely up, painting the sky in soft bands of orange and gray. It smelled like springtime, and Dad and I both said, “Bless you,” at the same time when John sneezed. My own hayfever stayed quiet, for which I counted at least one blessing.

John got the front seat in Dad’s big crew cab pickup. I crawled into the back, curled up against the door, and tried to fall asleep again. The vinyl was cold against my cheek, and the truck smelled like dust and motor oil and old leather gloves.

The radio was already on — country music, of course — but low enough that I could tune it out if I tried.

I closed my eyes and hoped no one asked me anything.

— —

I must’ve drifted off again.

In a dream, Josh was in the back seat with me. The truck rumbled along the road, but we didn’t care. He pulled me into his lap and kissed me — slow and deep, like we had all the time in the world. His hands were warm on my sides, and I melted into him like I was made to fit there.

I must’ve made a noise.

Because suddenly I was awake, blinking at the ceiling of the cab, with Dad laughing and John snorting beside him.

“That must have been some dream,” Dad said over his shoulder.

“Yeah,” John added. “You were whimpering and carrying on. Sounded pretty intense.”

I sat up fast, face burning. “Shut up.”

They just laughed harder.

I didn’t say much after that. Embarrassed. Angry. Confused. I pressed my forehead to the cold window and tried not to feel anything. The scene outside had already changed from the flat fields and green orchards of the southern Kern Valley to brushy desert hills and then to more trees and greenery as we approached the town.

The two jokers in the front seat couldn’t resist a few more pokes in my ego, but thankfully, before their ragging could really get going, we pulled off the road.

Uncle David’s place was just outside of Peterborough, tucked back behind a long gravel drive and a row of ancient oak trees. The truck crunched to a stop in the shade, and Dad killed the engine.

The silence was a relief.

Uncle David’s friend Mason waved at us from behind the white rail fence. Mason was a stringbean of a fellow, lean and sallow, with straight black hair receding from a high forehead. Maybe ten years younger than Dad or Uncle David, he looked even younger —almost John’s age— despite his early baldness.

Mason was telling Dad that he might as well pull the truck out and back it up the driveway all the way to the end, where he could just hook up to the trailer, easy-peasy. John and I got out on the right side while Dad put the truck in reverse and backed out toward the highway again.

Mason stretched a hand over the fence to shake with John, but when he looked at me, his head tilted.

“Bobby?” he asked.

I hadn’t seen him since last fall, when he and Uncle David came down to Cabarker for Thanksgiving dinner. Didn’t he recognize me? Had I changed that much in six months?

“Sure,” I said, lowering my voice for some reason. I stuck out my hand, and Mason shook it, grinning. When we let go, our fingertips brushed just a second too long.

Then he winked — with the eye away from John’s view.

What the heck did that mean?

Wasn’t that what they were calling it these days?

I’m probably not the densest member of the family, but it took me a while to work out what had surely been going on for years. Mason wasn’t Uncle David’s neighbor or a friend who sometimes came along on family get-togethers; they were obviously closer than that. Mason was Uncle Dave’s partner. Wasn’t that what they were calling it these days?

I watched as David waved to guide Dad in backing up the driveway to put the truck’s trailer hitch near the tongue of the camp trailer. Mason said something to John, and John glanced my way and shrugged. In reverse, the truck made enough grinding noise that I didn’t hear the exchange.

The shaggy oak and sycamore trees made a kind of green tunnel of nearly the whole driveway, and the little trailer had a layer of leaves and twigs on the roof — the sort of thing my grandfather, Mom’s dad, would call bug-scratch. We’d have to clean that stuff off and hope it hadn’t allowed any holes to form in the roof. Cyndy wouldn’t like getting rained on.

Uncle Dave signaled Dad to stop, though the coupling was still several inches apart. John looked up at the trailer after moving closer, and this time, I heard him. “I thought this was a Spartan,” he said.

“Nah,” said Dave, brushing some of the bug-scratch off the triangular structure of the trailer tongue. “It’s an Airstream, see the rounded corners? A Spartan is square-built.” He reached out and patted the bulbous front end of the trailer. “They both have polished aluminum skins, but an Airstream is easier to tow, and a Spartan has a tiny bit more room inside.”

“Hunh,” said John.

Dad joined the little group, and Mason moved closer to Uncle Dave. I hung back as they talked about…where the trailer had been built and by whom. Apparently, some aircraft manufacturer made Airstreams on their assembly line when they didn’t have enough airplane orders to stay busy. Mason disputed this politely. “No,” he put in. “That actually was Spartan did that. Airstreams were designed by airplane engineers but were built in their own plant. Still are, I think.”

I rolled my eyes, glad that Mason had stepped in to put the kibosh on a discussion that could have gone on for an hour between Dad and his older brother. They both loved trivia about anything mechanical.

A division of labor was quickly arrived at. I, being the lightest, would go up a ladder and use a rake and pushbroom to get rid of all the bug-scratch. “Won’t it just blow off when we tow it down the mountain?” I suggested.

“Maybe,” said Uncle Dave, “but it’s not legal to tow something without everything secured. You could get a ticket for anything that blows loose.”

I nodded. That made sense—traffic safety-wise.

Mason and I went to fetch the ladder and tools while Dad, John and Uncle Dave inspected wheels, tires, brakes and electric running lights.

“You and, —uh—, Uncle Dave been friends a long time?” I sort of asked.

He grinned. “About eight years. I think you were in first grade? I baked you a cake for your birthday that first year.”

“You did?” If anyone had asked, I would have assumed Mom made the cake.

“Yeah, lemon zest icing on chocolate fudge cake,” he replied.

“Oh, yeah! That’s my favorite cake! Mom makes it every year for my birthday.”

“I gave her the recipe, your uncle likes it too.”

Mason dragged an eight-foot ladder out of the tool shed, and I carried the broom and rake over my shoulder back to the trailer. The job of cleaning the roof went quickly, me with a broom and rake on the third-to-top rung, and Mason holding it steady. We moved the ladder twice to get at the whole surface and didn’t see any rust or corrosion. Lotta bird poop, though.

We were almost done when Uncle Dave came out of the interior, sneezing four times quickly. “Dusty inside,” he said. “Go get some rags and buckets. We’ll mop and wipe everything down first.”

Naturally, I got that job after Mason showed me where the mop and buckets were stored. The dust was pretty bad, and Mason gave me a scarf to cover my nose and mouth before I went inside. The trailer must seal pretty tight, despite dust getting in. I found very little evidence of insects throwing parties or spiders building webs.

“Quick job, all we need,” Uncle Dave told me. “Your mother is going to want to do it her way when we get it down to Cabarker, but no use putting her in a bad mood, showing up with it as dirty as it is now.”

I laughed. “Yeah, I get it,” I said. “Let’s stay on Mom’s good side.”

While I worked inside, Mason wiped the outside down with the broom while Dad and John dragged wooden chocks away from the tires. “There’s planks under the wheels,” I heard John say, almost right under my feet.

“Leave ‘em,” said Dad.

Uncle Dave sneezed some more, and Mason ordered him to go in the house and take a quick shower. “You don’t want to be itching and scratching the whole night.”

Coming out of the trailer about then, I blinked. That exchange, complete with Uncle Dave grousing, “Yeah, yeah,” sounded so much like an exchange between Mom and Dad that I surprised myself with a giggle.

No one noticed; Dad and John were over, messing with the wires, hooks, and cables of the trailer hitch, making sure it all worked and the safety chain was in place. Mason had taken the ladder back to the shed but had leaned the broom and rake against a tree in case we needed them again.

The tree trunk had a little bench built around it, and a yellow tomcat had claimed one end of the bench for himself. I meowed at the kitty, and he replied the same, so I sat down beside him to see if he was friendly enough to pet. He head bumped me to say, “Yes, please,” and I was scritching him behind his ears when Mason returned with a six-pack of cold sodas.

He handed one to me, set the rest on the other end of the bench and sat down a foot or so away from me. We popped the top of our drinks and dropped the tabs into a tincan nailed to the tree already half-full of the silvery openers. The cold fizz went down right, and we smiled at one another.

“So,” said Mason after another sip and a negotiation with the cat who wanted to look into the soda can himself. “Am I reading things right?”

“Huh?” I said intelligently.

He laughed. “Maybe I’m not. Let me ask another way. I haven’t heard one word from you about a girlfriend, but you’ve mentioned some guy named Josh three times.”

I felt my face turn red. I didn’t remember mentioning Josh at all. The cat climbed into my lap and flicked its tail under my chin.

“Leroy,” said Mason. “Behave. Just push him away if he turns into a nuisance.”

I didn’t say that, rather than being a nuisance, Leroy had saved me from answering a question that wasn’t actually a question. I stroked the good kitty from head to tail, pausing to rub a knuckle into the tail joint. “M-more,” said Leroy.

I looked at Mason from under my brows. My face twitched like it does when I’m embarrassed.

Mason smiled slowly.

I shrugged, dislodging Leroy from the perch he was trying to settle into on my shoulder. “Josh is a friend. We play basketball together.”

“Night basketball,” Mason asked, still smiling.

I laughed, shaking my head. But Mason was as good as Mom at getting information out of you without asking real questions. He knew, I knew that he knew, and he knew that I knew what he knew.