HORSE!” HE BELLOWED. He stuck his face in hers and grinned with great superiority. “You lose, Livy. Again.”
She wiped the perspiration from her brow on the hem of her T-shirt and gasped for air. “You’re taller than me. It’s not a fair match anymore.”
Being a healthy fourteen-year-old, Brian wasn’t impervious to the flash of smooth bare skin he got when she raised her shirt. But he was careful to remind himself that it was Livy’s stomach—not the warm, naked, raw flesh of a real girl. Which isn’t to say that it didn’t send his hormones hopping. It did. But then, so did just about everything else in those days. Half-dressed girls on TV commercials, the steamy fragrance outside the girls’ locker room at school, the very idea of topless go-go girls dancing somewhere, underwear ads in the Sears catalog!
Sometimes, not always, but sometimes… once in a while, his hormones just plain embarrassed him. But Livy didn’t need to know that.
“Hormones, Livy,” he said, hoisting himself up to sit on the retaining wall along his mother’s driveway, quickly downing a third of the Miller beer he’d left there thirty minutes earlier. It was warm, but that didn’t matter; it was wet. “You got those wimpy girl hormones that start to peter out at thirteen, while I got male hormones that’ll be good for at least another two years, maybe three.”
He could boast now, but he hadn’t forgotten the whole year that Livy was a good three inches taller than he. He’d died a thousand deaths that year.
“Oh, God,” she groaned. She liked to use swear words—for effect, she said. She pulled herself up to sit beside him on the wall. She was tall for a girl. Five-eight and three quarters. But he was taller. “Three more years. Will that be the end of it then? I won’t have to listen to any more of this crap?” She flopped back on the grass behind them and stared up at the intensely bright and infinitely empty blue summer sky. “You used to be such a sweet, shy little boy,” she said wistfully. Then she scowled at him, saying, “Now look at you.”
He did, and he liked what he saw. One hundred percent prime U.S.D.A. Grade A male. Ready for high school. Ready for women. Ready for a driver’s license in eighteen months. Ready for more women. Ready for anything. He sighed contentedly and looked back at Livy. He liked what he saw there, too. Her hormones might not have been as satisfying as his own, but they hadn’t done a half bad job on her. She had great long legs and breasts he’d kill to touch… if they belonged to some other girl.
Well, truthfully, he wouldn’t have minded touching them on Livy, except that something inside him told him he’d regret it if he did.
She was his friend, the best he’d ever had, and he never wanted that to change. He’d rather die of chronic hormonal overload than do anything that might jeopardize their friendship. Great breasts or no great breasts.
His gaze followed the softly rounded female curves of her body until it reached her face. He was a man now, but deep inside there was a lot of the first grader who still loved Livy’s face. How many times had she sat perfectly still, an action against her nature, while he’d tried to draw that face? he wondered. And how many times had she told him that he was getting better and better, when it was plain to him that he never got it quite right?
“I suppose if the coach asks you to play forward on the varsity team next year, there’ll be no living with you,” she said, her eyes closed, a smile on her lips. He’d thought about kissing her, too. She had a great mouth. Soft, full lips.
“You got that straight,” he said, lowering himself down beside her so he wouldn’t have to look at her. “But they almost never ask freshmen to join the varsity team, so I might have to settle for being the star junior varsity player this coming year and the lone sophomore on the varsity team after that.”
“You’re an egotistical idiot.”
“And when I do make varsity,” he said, ignoring her, “the first thing I’m gonna do is ask Cathy Dixon for a date.”
She groaned. “Cathy Dixon?”
“Yeah,” he said on a sigh of pure, unadulterated lust.
Livy sighed, helpless and hopeless of his salvation. “Well, if you’re going to college with me, you better be careful. You know, get some of those rubber things Miss Crawford told us about in P.E. Remember, I told you? They keep girls from getting pregnant?”
He chuckled. “Loverboy Larry bought me a carton of ’em.”
She gasped and rolled up onto one elbow. “You’re kiddin’ me!”
“Nope.” He grinned. “My Mom found those magazines I showed you. She made Larry go back to the drugstore after supper and then have a little talk with me.”
They snickered and laughed. Adults—you just had to love them sometimes. He sat up and finished off his beer while she watched.
“Does he know you’re drinking his beer?” she asked, more curious than concerned. It wasn’t as if drinking your parents’ alcohol was a big deal anymore. Not really. Practically everyone they knew had at least tried it. Livy had been one of the first. It was no big deal.
He shook his head and grinned at her. “He brings a six-pack every time he comes over. He drinks two. Mom has one. I think he thinks she drinks them when he’s not around. Want me to get you one?”
She wrinkled up her face. “How can you stand the taste?”
“You get used to it,” he said with a shrug. He’d liked the taste from the beginning. “And it’s great for my free throw. One or two of these, I’m all relaxed. Nothing but net every time.”
“Do you think she’ll marry him?” she asked. The courtship of Brian’s mother by the new pharmacist at the drugstore got more publicity in Tolford than the new TV series The Addams Family. Apparently, it wasn’t loathsome enough that your own mother taught at the high school where she could actually speak to you in the hallway between classes in front of your friends—it now looked as if he’d belong to the only family in town that possessed three last names.
He shrugged. “Don’t know.”
“You like him.” It wasn’t a question.
“He’s okay.” He wasn’t the problem. “Beth hates him.”
“Why?”
“She likes the way things are, I guess. She’s eight. Who knows why she thinks anything?”
They were quiet for a moment, remembering Beth’s father.
A year ago, Brian might have told Livy that he wasn’t too keen on the idea of changing things either. He didn’t like change. He didn’t know why, he just didn’t. He didn’t even like the idea of growing up. However, now that he had the muscles and the height and the fascinating patches of hair appearing on his body, he thought it somehow less manly to talk about feelings he couldn’t begin to explain. Even to Livy.
“I can’t believe your mother,” Livy said, starting to chuckle again. “What kind of woman would turn someone like you loose on the female population with a whole carton of rubbers? What could she be thinking?”
“That it’s useless to fight the inevitable?”
“Are those extraordinary hormones of yours ever going to kick in with some humility?”
“I hope not.” Then he remembered. “Gary Wymer wanted me to find out if you were going to Debbie Richie’s swimming party.”
She shook her head slowly. He saw disappointment and pain in her eyes before she lowered her lids to hide it from him. His eyes automatically fixed on the cause.
She’d taken to covering her birthmark with makeup. It was still visible. True deep purple was a hard color to cover with commercial makeup. But she’d toned it down a bit and seemed pleased with the results—except that it washed off with water.
The makeup had worried him at first. She’d argued that people weren’t staring as much and teased her less when she covered her birthmark. And he’d held fast to the notion that their peers, like them, were maturing and growing more sensitive and didn’t feel the need to razz her about it anymore. Everyone at school knew she had it; covering it up was silly.
His concern had finally taken him to his mother, who wisely advised him not to be concerned. She’d told him that for Livy, part of growing up would be experimenting with her hair and clothes and with her birthmark until she found the right combination, until she accepted what she looked like and who she was.
His mother had gone on to say that he was doing the same thing in his own way. He’d yawned and turned off. He hadn’t wanted a human-development lecture from her, just some reassurance that what Livy was doing to herself was okay.
At the moment, however, it was his opinion that refraining from summer water sports and swimming parties down at the lake was unhealthy and not at all okay. There were all those female forms in tiny wet strips of cloth to be seen and touched and… well, it was mind boggling. And he didn’t want Livy to miss any of it. But all he could do, it seemed, was to hope that his mother was right, again, and that Livy would someday come to her senses.
She did.
By the time they went to visit Granddad Hubbard in August, Livy was back to normal and, for Brian, “the long hot summer of ’64” began—not in the ghettos of New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, where television newscasters were telling of riots, fires, and looting. Or even in Memphis where more of the same was reported almost daily in the newspaper. No, it all began in Granddad Hubbard’s clover field.
“… and poor Patty Coleman hasn’t even had her period yet.”
“What? Her what?” Brian’s whole body felt sunburned, though only his torso was exposed to the light.
“You know. Her period.”
“Livy!”
They were walking back to the house through a field of clover after delivering lunch to Mr. Hubbard and his hired hand, Walt Lippman, in the fallow field the men were tilling for fall planting. They’d only just arrived the day before, and they were soaking in all the warm sunshine and sweet earthy smells they could. Most everywhere they looked corn stood tall and green and almost ready for harvest.
“Well, no one would call her Pancake Patty anymore if she’d start having her period. Then she’d start to develop like the other girls, and the boys would stop laughing at her,” she said, in both her own and Pan… Patty’s defense.
“I wasn’t laughing at her. You asked me to give you a list of girls I wanted to take out next year. And I did. Then you asked if I wanted to ask Patty Coleman out, and I said no. I didn’t laugh and then say no. I just said no.”
“Well, why not? She’s a nice girl, isn’t she?”
“Nice enough.” Really nice. Too nice. Very, very nice and he wouldn’t get anywhere with her.
“Then why won’t you ask her out?”
“I don’t know.” Because her body was as flat and sexless as a pancake.
“I know why,” she said, using a manner she had of sounding intellectually unparalleled in her present company. She walked ahead of him.
“You don’t know anything,” he said to her back. He brutally flicked a ladybug off his bare chest with his index finger. Women! “Maybe I just don’t like her.”
She stopped and turned to face him.
“What do you think of me?” she asked.
“What do you mean, what do I think of you?”
“Well, look at me.” He did. He saw Livy. “What do you think?”
“About what?”
“About me. How do I look?”
“You look fine.”
“No, no. I mean really think of me,” she said, scanning the stupid look on his face. “Pretend you’re not you. Pretend you’re just a regular boy.”
“Okay.” He pretty much was a regular boy, ah, man.
“Now, look at me.” He did. He saw Livy. “What do you think?”
“About what?” He held out his hands in frustration.
“My body.”
“What?”
“What do you think of my body?”
“Livy!”
“I’m serious. And you’re just a regular boy. You don’t even know me.”
She put her hands on her hips and waited for him to answer. She was wearing white shorts—short shorts—and a pink middy shirt that buttoned up the front. Her movement raised the middy up to reveal the smooth, tanned skin above her navel and pulled it tight across her breasts.
Now, among the many things that a fourteen-year-old boy has no control over are ocean tides, an eclipse of the moon, the national deficit, Halley’s comet, and the wild thing in his pants.
“Well?” she asked. He couldn’t breathe, much less speak. “Do you think I’m too fat?”
“No.”
“Do you think I’m too skinny?”
“No.”
“What about my butt?” she asked, turning sideways. “Does it stick out too much?”
“No.” Was he sticking out too much?
“Do I have bird legs?”
He shouldn’t have looked, but he did. “No.”
“My waist looks okay, doesn’t it?”
“Sure.” But what did it feel like?
“What about my breasts?”
He tried to swallow, but his mouth was too dry.
“Well?” she asked.
“What about your… them?”
“Are they too little?”
“Livy! I don’t know.” He had a sudden urge to pull out all his hair.
“Are they too big?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can breasts ever be too big?”
“No. I mean, I don’t know. Why are you asking me this stuff?”
“Because I want to know. You’re a boy. And you’re my friend. I want you to honestly tell me what you think of me.”
“Livy, I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because.”
“Great answer.”
“Because… I don’t know what to tell you.” And because his heart was beating so fast he thought he was going to have a heart attack.
She stared at him for a minute and then slowly lowered her gaze to the ground.
“It’s my face, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“There’s nothing really wrong with me except my face. Isn’t that right?”
Oh, God.
“No, Livy. That’s not it. There’s nothing wrong with you or your face.” He could tell she didn’t believe him. “It’s me.” She looked at him. “I… oh, man…”
He turned and walked away. He needed some space—and a lot more air. Was this the hottest day ever made, or what?
“It’s all right, Brian,” she said in a soft, comforting voice. “I understand.”
He turned to look at her.
“No. You don’t understand.” He sighed as if resigned to walking on the hot coals of hell. “Livy, sometimes I want to touch you so bad I could die.” She watched him without speaking, and he would have given anything at that moment to know what she was thinking. “I know. We’re like brother and sister… only better. It’s sick. I know. But…”
“Is this one of those times?”
He could barely nod his head.
“When you and Cathy Dixon met at the movie that time, did you touch her?”
Damn. He’d never lied to Livy before, but he sure wanted to now.
“No.” Old habits were hard to break.
“Did you want to?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Yes or no?”
“Yes!” Okay. Enough. “I’m sick of this. Let’s go.”
“No, wait.” He stopped and turned back. “You can touch me if you want to.” He felt dizzy and sick. “No, I mean it. You can practice on me. I want to know what it feels like, too.”
He looked from one corner of Ohio to the other for a rational excuse not to do it. Trouble was, he had his irrational glasses on and couldn’t see a thing.
“This isn’t like practicing basketball, Liv. It’s… different.”
“Not so very. You want to score with some girl without looking clumsy and stupid, you practice.”
Okay. She had half a point there.
“It’s more than that. She has to want to be touched.”
“I do. I told you that. I want to know what it feels like.” There was only the slightest hesitation before she glanced down at the front of her shirt, her fingers making fast work of the buttons.
“Livy,” he said when she stepped before him, his voice a breathless whisper. “I don’t think…”
“I know,” she said, cutting him off. “But I’ve gotten used to that in you.” She laughed. “Come on, Carowack. It’s me, Livy. Relax. You’ve touched me a thousand times. Maybe two thousand times if you count all the times you’ve hit me playing basketball.” She pulled the front of her shirt open. “Take your best shot.”
First he looked at her forehead, between her eyebrows. Then gradually into her eyes. They were as warm as the sunshine on his back; they seemed to soak in the light and shine like molten gold. They were so familiar and trusting and frank. There was an expectation that he didn’t want to disappoint and a… a certain dreaminess, an illusion he was reluctant to shatter.
He was about to refuse, tell her no, start to cry… when he felt her left hand close around his right. Something in her eyes changed, a reflection from the pit of her soul perhaps. He watched it, mesmerized, as she placed the palm of his hand over her breast.
And then there was fire. In him. In her eyes.
He snatched his hand away and looked down.
Her brassiere was so white against her summer sun-darkened skin, it almost blinded him. It was plain, not silky and lacy like the ones he’d seen in the magazines he had rolled up behind the towels under the sink in the bathroom. Not a huge bazooka like his mother’s. Smaller, simpler, less intimidating—and much more inviting. And under it was the smooth, soft-looking flesh that he did recognize from the magazines.
As if his hand belonged to someone else he watched it mold itself to Livy’s breast. Soft. Full. Consuming. Enthralled, he discovered the warmth and texture of her skin on the gentle curve with the pad of his thumb, and he imagined the whole of it, bare, in the palm of his hand, what it would taste like, what it would smell like.
“Were you telling the truth when you said you haven’t kissed anyone yet?”
He looked at her. Then focused on her mouth. He’d always liked Livy’s mouth.
“Yes.”
“Not even Cathy Dixon?”
“No.” And a guy would never lie backwards about something like that, you know. Pretending to be more inept than you really were didn’t even make sense. This was kissing, after all. Was there another fourteen-year-old boy alive who hadn’t kissed a girl yet? He doubted it. But if she was even half-thinking of… Oh, God. His hand slipped from her breast. “Liv.”
“Shhhh,” she said, moving closer. He felt the front of her against him in several different places, and his hands went to her waist. “We drink out of the same pop bottle sometimes. Sometimes we eat off the same fork. Our germs get along. And I want to know what it’s like. Don’t you?”
“Yeah, but…” He knew Livy. She wasn’t a cruel person. She was fair and honest and caring. Clearly, she had no idea what she was doing to him.
“Please. Just once.”
For crying out loud! He did it quick and got it over with.
“Not like that, Carowack. I can kiss my dad like that. Do it like Sean Connery in From Russia With Love and Goldfinger. Like Cary Grant in Charade. You know.”
He didn’t know, but he was getting the pictures in his head. Sean Connery and Cary Grant? Hard acts to imitate. Why didn’t she like those old movies where no one really kissed, they just sort of cheeked each other when the film was over?
“You better not laugh if I do it wrong.”
“I won’t. Cross my heart.”
He was feeling so strange. As if he were going in to have a cavity filled—and couldn’t wait to get started.
He took a better, firmer hold of her and readjusted his stance.
“Mama says it all comes naturally, like it’s built into you already, but you just don’t know it,” she said, reassuring him.
“What?”
“Sex.”
“What?” He stepped two feet away and pretended not to know her.
“Kissing and sex,” she said, showing a little of her exasperation with him. “She said that there’s no right or wrong way to do it. It just comes naturally, and your body knows what to do.”
“You talk about this stuff with your mother?”
“Not all the time. But that one time. When I started my period last year. Remember?”
“Livy! Don’t talk to me about that stuff. I don’t want to hear it. I told you that.”
“I’m just telling you what she said. Kissing and sex are easy. Now are you going to kiss me or not?”
He glanced down at her open shirtfront, at the shallow valley between her breasts.
“Not. This is crazy. You’re my friend. It’s like trying to kiss Beth or my mother. It’s worse than that. It’s like trying to kiss Jimmy Lowe.”
“Fine,” she said, shrugging as she looked down to button her shirt from the top down. “I’ll find someone else to teach me how to kiss. Jimmy, maybe. I don’t think he’d mind.”
Mind, hell! Jimmy never talked about Livy; she was part of their gang, one of the guys, a pal. However, more than once he’d noticed Jimmy watching Livy walk away, seen him glance down at her chest.
They were both surprised when Brian grabbed her. Surprised and determined to get the damned kiss over with. She flung her arms around his neck and pulled his head toward hers.
“Close your eyes, stupid,” he said, all but growling at her.
She did—another surprise, as she rarely responded to that name. She must really want to be kissed, he thought, softening a bit. If he did it right, he’d only have to do it once. And he was… well, a little curious.
He lowered his face to hers. Her lips were parted, and he could feel her breath on his own. He brushed against them softly. And again because it felt nice. He applied a little pressure and a little suck like he’d practiced on Beth’s plastic hand mirror. That felt nicer.
This must have been where the “natural” kicked in. His mind began to spin and he felt like he could eat her alive. His mouth pressed harder against hers; he could feel her teeth against his, touch them with his tongue. Her tongue came out to meet his, and every nerve in his body stood up and screamed.
Her breasts. He touched them once more. Squeezed and pressed. Pushed the bra up and liberated them. Stroked and caressed them. He marveled as the soft nipples grew hard. He felt her pelvis pushing hard against his. Her mouth was warm and wet and sweet. The whole lower half of his body was pounding for a release, and the rest of him didn’t seem to be there at all. In a slow, detached frenzy he lowered his mouth to her breast. He licked the nipple to taste it, took it into his mouth because… because… he wanted to.
The sound that came from Livy’s throat was like nothing he’d heard before, and yet he knew it, felt it, rejoiced in it. She trembled in his arms, and he sucked a little harder—and just a little harder until she went almost limp and he had to hold her tighter.
Their lips came together again. He pressed her hips tight against him. He wondered if she could feel him throbbing. Wondered if she had a pulsing need in her. Wondered if he could feel it if he touched her there. There in that secret place of hers. That secret place he hadn’t allowed himself to think about until now. The only secret he and Livy had from one another.
His hand slid from its new home at her breast and drifted down her belly. She pressed it between them, stopping the progression. Like a baby taking his first steps, one after another, without intent or clear direction but simply because he could, he pulled back a bit and slipped his hand into the top of her shorts. And a little lower, until the tips of his fingers felt coarse hair.
She rocked in his one-arm embrace and suddenly pushed away from him with all her might. They stared at each other, eyes wide and frightened beyond belief.
“Maybe…” she said, trying to catch her breath and arrest an entire body blush at the same time. “Maybe you were right this time.” A concession rarely made. “Maybe this is different.”
Maybe?
“I’m sorry, Livy.”
“No, no. God, don’t be sorry. Don’t ever be sorry. I’m not sorry.”
“You’re not?”
“No.” She looked away, then back. “I just… don’t think it’s for us.”
“Me either.” Wow. What a relief. Sort of.
“Well, good then. We won’t do it anymore. Okay?”
He nodded. “Okay.”
“Okay. Let’s go.” She pulled her bra down over her breasts and finished buttoning her shirt.
“Um. You go ahead. I, ah, I think I’ll just hang around here a few more minutes.”
Mercifully, she didn’t ask any questions. She nodded and said she’d see him later. She walked perhaps thirty feet before she started running back toward the farmhouse. Brian fell onto his back in the clover, wishing a swarm of bees would come along and sting him to death. He was miserable. Even his hair ached. The sky was blue and empty, like him.
He lay there a long time, thinking about what they’d done, thinking about everything and nothing. When he felt he could face Livy again, he walked back to Granddad Hubbard’s house to find her. To say he was sorry. To make it all right between them.
He couldn’t find her. Not for hours.
When she showed up for supper with a few stray pieces of hay in her dark hair, he knew where she’d been—and why she hadn’t answered when she heard him calling her.
Things between them had changed. He knew this. He felt it. Neither of them spoke of it.
Everything was as before. And everything was different.
Livy was bold and outspoken and determined. She was motivated and idealistic and a pain in the ass sometimes. And Livy was fragile; she made mistakes. She was susceptible and trusting. She needed him to protect her.
They didn’t talk about that day in the clover field for years and years and years. But it was always there. Standing out, bold and ever fresh, among the many memories they shared.
Whoever coined the phrase “Sweet Sixteen” didn’t know Livy. By the time she turned sixteen, she wasn’t sweet anymore. Certainly not if sweet meant dewy-eyed and romantic. While some of the girls in her class were beginning to experiment with sex, she had already come to the conclusion that it was vastly overrated.
It had to be.
Two years earlier, on her granddad’s farm, she’d kissed Brian on impulse, a crazy, self-indulgent whim she wasn’t likely to favor again. People were very immature at fourteen. Even she was a little overly dramatic at that age. Imagine, believing she’d probably die before she was kissed by a boy, believing no boy would want to kiss a girl with a purple stain on her face. Consider, thinking she might be in love with Brian. Not that she loved him—that was never an issue; she did, always had, always would, she couldn’t help herself—but was in love with him because of the way he’d made her feel that day.
Immature and dramatic.
Two years later, she knew differently. Boys would kiss slugs if they thought they could have sex with them. And she’d kissed enough boys by then to know. Frankly, she didn’t get what all the fuss was about. She thought she did, at first. That kiss with Brian had turned her inside out. She’d staggered away to hide in the barn until she stopped trembling and the ache inside her, in private places she didn’t know could ache, had diminished to a strange hollow sensation.
The rest of that month she’d done everything, short of tying him down, to get Brian to kiss her again. She touched him whenever she could make it seem accidental. But he wouldn’t have anything more to do with it. He wouldn’t even sit close to her when they were alone. And he spent an awful lot of time with her granddad that summer, avoiding her as if he thought she might attack him or something.
Immature and dramatic.
By the time they got home, just before Labor Day and the beginning of school, she wanted so badly to be kissed again she could hardly think straight—which explains why she let Jimmy Lowe kiss her behind the bleachers after the Tolford-Christmasville football game a couple of months later, which they lost. No surprise. Tolford didn’t win at anything.
She’d kissed him over and over again, waiting for the leg-bending thrills she’d experienced with Brian to kick in. She even let Jimmy touch her breasts through her shirt, in the hopes of jarring loose some of the same excitement.
Nothing. She got bigger chills kissing pictures of Paul McCartney.
After a while, she tried it again. Larry Estes conjured pictures of fat-lipped fish, and Gary Wymer had a tendency to gag her with his tongue. Charlie Monroe was too shy to kiss her like Sean Connery and Cary Grant, but his little pecks weren’t unpleasant.
The most telling kiss was probably Steve Donovan’s. Instead of watching him covertly as she had since junior high school, she mustered the courage to smile at him, to stand in his line of vision whenever possible, to be where he was and engage him in senseless conversation—he was drop-dead gorgeous but not too smart.
Over and over again she managed to be caught alone with him. Outside the drugstore, in detention; once she rode all the way to Nashville with him on a field trip to the state capital. No easy thing. It was a challenge to make the seat next to her appear to be taken until the kids who smoked cigarettes in the bushes on the far side of the school finally got on the bus and were forced to take what seats were available—like the one next to her, suddenly.
It took a while—nothing great coming easily, you know—but a few tutoring sessions was all it took. He was failing English, her best class. So when their teacher approached her with the idea of helping Steve pass the final exam, she had magnanimously agreed to fit him into her busy schedule.
Three afternoons a week they stayed late in the school library under the watchful eye of Mrs. Elman, the school librarian. She was a large, gray-haired, no-nonsense type of woman who generally had a pencil sticking out of the tightly wrapped bun on the top of her head. And she was tall. You could always tell where Mrs. Elman was by following the pencil-speared bun of hair above the racks of books.
The first couple of weeks were nerve-racking. All they did was diagram sentences and punctuate paragraphs. They sat close, heads bent over the same book. Habit always seated her on his left, so he didn’t have to look directly at her birthmark every time he turned his head. Sometimes their shoulders and arms brushed, by accident or by design, and they’d smile at each other. Once, when she was writing out a sentence for him, she would have sworn he tried to smell her hair.
The scent of lilac did that to people.
But by the third week, Mrs. Elman had clearly surmised that they were trustworthy students and could be left alone in the library for up to twenty minutes at a time. Twenty-minute windows of opportunity, to Livy’s thinking. The week before the final exam, she took one.
“Okay, now in this sentence, is worn-out used as a verb and preposition or as an adjective?” she asked Steve in a whispery library voice, watching Mrs. Elman’s bulk waddle out the door. She glanced back in time to see him frown and shake his head. Then he looked to her for the answer. She hesitated. “You know, you have really nice blue eyes,” she said, as she’d been planning to for some time. Her heart was pounding like jungle drums in a Tarzan movie. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen any quite so blue.”
“Oh, yeah?” He looked surprised, then scanned the room for Mrs. Elman. Relaxing, a lot, he gave her a cocky smile.
“Yeah. They’re a very distinct blue.”
“You like this stuff, don’t you?” he said, motioning to the English book. “You’re real brainy, huh?”
“Not so very. But I like school, so I guess that makes it easier for me.” Her hands started to tremble. She hid them under the table.
“What do you like about school?”
She shrugged and smiled. He glanced at her mouth.
“Everything, I guess. Learning. Being with people my own age. Experiencing new things.”
“What kind of new things do you like to experience?” he asked, scanning her mouth again.
“All kinds. I’ll try most anything once.”
“Is that so?” he asked, moving his head a fraction of an inch closer to hers.
This was it! He was going to kiss her at long last. She could see the intent in his eyes, feel it in the pit of her stomach.
“Oh, sure,” she said, afraid that she’d start to babble and say something stupid when his face came closer. “Experimenting and experiencing new things is the best teacher of all, they say.”
“They who?”
“People,” she said, fidgeting into a straighter position for a better alignment. She didn’t want this kiss to miss its target.
“Experimenting.” How he made a sterile, scientific word like that sound like a detailed account of the faded-out part of a love scene, she’d never know. But he did. It was the sexiest word she’d ever heard. Thrills ran up and down her spine.
She sat perfectly still as he came close, afraid that the tiniest movement would make her jump out of her skin. Her eyelids lowered as she watched his lips draw near. She closed them and felt the first gentle, tentative touch.
Nothing.
She leaned into the kiss, parting her lips by a breath. The tip of his tongue tested her lips, and a great swelling of anticipation rose within her. The warm palm of his hand touched her left cheek and neck when their mouths met open and inviting. She touched his tongue with hers.
Nothing.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him tight against her. He was… enthusiastic. He fondled her breasts.
Nothing.
She pulled away. Something was horribly wrong. Where were the bells? The thrills and chills? She glanced around the room. Maybe it was the setting. How conducive to excitement was a dull old library?
She smiled at him nervously.
“This probably isn’t the best place for this,” she said.
“Elman’s out having a smoke in the parking lot,” he said, locking his mouth to hers.
“She smokes?” she asked, ignoring the broken suction sound when she freed her lips. “I didn’t know she smoked cigarettes.”
“Baby, there’s a lot you don’t know.” The way he made a sweet, innocent word like baby sound dirty and nasty confused her.
He was eager to continue but… well, the library was closing in on her and she was nervous that Mrs. Elman might return and catch them and…
“Would you like to come over to my house tonight?” she asked, holding him off with one hand.
“What for?”
“Ah, well, we could study some more. Or watch TV or listen to music or something.” She was picturing the swing on her front porch, stars, a big full moon.
He did think about it, but with an expression that indicated that it seemed like a lot of trouble for nothing.
“I don’t think so,” he said, turning away from her and back to the book on the table.
“What about Friday? Maybe we could go to a movie or something?” It was generally understood that a boy and a girl didn’t go to the movies together just to see the movie.
“No, thanks.”
Maybe he had plans.
“Saturday then. We could do something on Saturday.”
He looked at her as if it were just then occurring to him what she had in mind, and in the blink of an eye he broke her heart. He took a quick peek at the stain on her cheek.
“Look, Livy, you’re a nice girl and all… You’re real smart, and I appreciate you helping me out… but…”
She laughed and looked away long enough to blink the tears from her eyes.
“Relax, Romeo. I was kidding. I have to edit all the articles for the school newspaper before Monday, and I promised to stuff envelopes for the Young Democrats League. I don’t have time for a movie,” she said, forcing herself to smile into his dull, ordinary blue eyes. “But if you change your mind about coming over for an extra lesson or two, I won’t mind. I’ll squeeze you in somewhere. Finals are coming up fast, and we could use some extra time, so… well, think about it. Okay?”
She nursed that blow to her pride for a long time. Kept it a secret. Attended to it frequently. She also contemplated giving up kissing altogether, attributing Brian’s kiss to a weird fluke of circumstances—the first kiss, the overexcitement of a new discovery, a little fear of the unknown, that sort of thing. And if kissing left you feeling flat—or in pain—then it stood to reason that sex couldn’t be much better. So what was all the fuss about?
Brian, on the other hand, had clearly enjoyed their kiss far more than she, for he seemed determined to rekindle those emotions with everyone he met. He kissed anyone who came near him. He had an attraction to a new girl about every fifteen minutes. He was shameless.
“That’s why guys are guys and chicks are chicks,” he said simply, grinning proudly, all but strutting as they walked to their next class together. “It’s hormones, Liv. Great hormones.” Oh, not those again. “They get guys stirred up faster than girls. I read an article about it in one of Loverboy’s magazines. Girls get too emotionally involved with it. They can’t relax and enjoy it like we do. It always has to mean something.”
“Like what?”
“Like you want to get married or you want to have a baby or you want the guy to do something.”
“Like what?”
“Like take you somewhere special or…”
“You mean, to get him to do what I want.”
“Yeah.”
Her mother had told her sex was special and wonderful, that it felt good most of the time. It didn’t feel all that good or special or wonderful to her. Of course, her mother had said all those things and added “with the right person,” so maybe Mr. Right would make a difference.
Or maybe not.
In the meantime she’d kissed everyone in Tolford she’d cared to kiss, and it wasn’t a big deal anymore—or so she told herself. She concluded that with sex being what it was, and with her birthmark being what it was, her greatest asset was still her brain, and her key to the future would be… brainpower.