My act of heroism? Retrieving a football from a neighbor’s roof where her brother overthrew the ball showing off his arm. I also brought back down an extra Nerf ball I found while I was up there but I scraped my leg pretty badly on the gutter on my climb back down. So when the other guys showed up and they all went to the park down the block for a game of smear-the-queer, I stayed behind with the little sis’ and she helped put peroxide, Neosporin, and an oversized band-aid on my leg.

She was eighteen but still a Senior in high school and had just finished taking her Spring exams and was looking forwards to graduating in May. I asked her about her Spanish class and offered to help. She told me a weird anecdote while dabbing peroxide on my leg with a cotton ball. “Well,” she said, “my girlfriend and I were supposed to be studying but she got sick the night before with really bad cramps and she spent most of the time in the bathroom. I spent most of the night worrying and comforting her and holding her rocking back and forth on the bed. I hardly got any sleep and absolutely no studying done. But I still did ok on the test. I didn’t get an A plus but I did well enough to get the A minus. I like Spanish. I always have. The only trouble I have sometimes is conjugating verbs.”

She looked at me with those long eyelashes and smiled in a way where I instantly quit looking at her as my friend’s little sister and as someone I could see holding all night rocking her back and forth on the bed. I stammered something inane like “I am always here to help” and she smiled and pressed on.

“I did not know when I got back from the exam that my bathroom was a mess. My girlfriend’s period was heavy and clumpy and she used up my last two tampons. I spent over an hour cleaning up all the blood.”

Why all this talk about her girlfriend’s menses was such a turn on to me I had no idea. But I have an inkling that the titillation stemmed from the intimacy of the subject, the adultness and maturity of the talk, the images conjured in my mind. I couldn’t help myself but to look directly at her crotch, her tight blue jean shorts, the slight indication of camel toe, the neon orange bikini bottoms protruding from the top of the low cut shorts with the first button undone and rolled down. The white sun bleached fuzz traveling up to her navel. Was this a thing? To unbutton the top button of the shorts and roll them down and show a perfect umbilicus?

She lowered the back of the lawn chair and adjusted her sunglasses towards the sun. She smirked and stuck her chin up and with a lazy motion untied her bikini top. Her areolas were small and perfectly round. Her pink nipples surprisingly perk. Her shoulders were pushed back into the reclined lawn chair. Her back was slightly arched. She rubbed her legs together like a cricket. She stretched. She let the bikini top dangle from her upturn left hand. She looked away and shielded her sunglasses with her other hand. “I wish I had some baby oil,” she said.

By this time I was standing up and nervously twisting my baseball cap in my hands. Her comment about baby oil, or maybe she said tanning lotion, completely flew over my head. For some reason I focused on her glistening lips and wondered if they were moist because she kept licking her lips or because of her fresh lip gloss or both.

See, my problem, the psychological obstacle between us at that time was too many Sunday school sermons. Too many talks and speeches where my parents instilled this shyness and fear in me. Not fear of females or of sex, no. But the fear of not acting honorably, of not being a gentleman, of disrespecting the woman I liked. They told me that if I pushed myself on a girl and that if I didn’t wait for exactly the right time and had sex under exactly the correct circumstances, only disaster would follow. Problems would arise. The girl I liked would end up hating me, we would have a bad breakup, she would get pregnant, my life would be ruined, only disasters would follow.

So even though I had a raging boner and I was a rarin’ to go and get lost in the willing flesh of this girl, inside my monologue told me to slow down, do the right thing, ask her out, feed her dinner, get to know her, buy some condoms, choose a more private place like the downstairs den or one of our bedrooms with candles and soft lighting and music to set the mood. Heavy petting in an open backyard with her mother banging pots and pans in the kitchen indoors a few feet away and her brother throwing a football in a park down the street was not the way to go, not honorable, not what a real man would do.

Oh the naïveté of youth.

Still I had to say something, with a topless squirming girl in my sights and at hands’ reach, something had to be said. I managed a “Gosh, you are truly beautiful. I have to go now but do you mind if I call on you tonight or later this week? We can go out, do anything you want.” She slowly lifted her sunglasses and looked at me with a stunned look on her face. “Sure. Call me tonight. Call me anytime.”

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We never got together. I called her that night and she had already gone out. I called her the next day and she was too busy and said she would call me back. I called her for the next two weeks and never got to talk to her. That summer, I came over several times to visit her brother and with the anticipation of getting just a glimpse of her and she would walk rapidly by on the way to her room or to the front door and wiggle her fingers at me whenever I said hello. I couldn’t tell if she was also greeting me or waving her fingers goodbye. Finally one day her brother blurted out, “Why do you keep bugging my sister? Do you like her or something?” I left her completely alone afterwards.

She attended Rutgers and I would look for her on campus. I think I saw her once surrounded by a gaggle of girls but I was too self-conscious to approach her. Then I never saw her again. I heard she studied Animal Sciences in the hopes of becoming a vet but since New Jersey does not have a college of veterinary medicine, she ended up transferring to Tufts University. In Boston, she met and married a foot doctor.

Gradually, I heard about that busy summer, how most of the guys in our group were able to have sex with her. Apparently, and unknown to me, she had emancipated herself sexually somewhat, by going to a different doctor than the longstanding family practitioner and also putting herself on birth control pills. I can only guess she felt a bit liberated from the usual social constraints, I don’t know.

One guy told me that she once said, “I’m tired of giving beastly blow jobs and having anal sex with high school boys and I want the real thing.” “I want a bona fide orgasm with a real man. A toe curling screaming orgasm,” she said. “And did you give her what she wanted?” I asked. The guy shrugged. “I don’t know. She was always better at giving head.”

I befriended her recently on Facebook. She has a big gorgeous house and a kidney shaped pool with a smooth pebble deck. She owns her own pet grooming service but, from what I can tell, she doesn’t really work. Her husband has a thriving podiatry practice at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, best in the country according to her. She has two teenage daughters and a younger boy. She just bought a Tesla as her personal car and has been “oil free” since last December. I asked her what she meant by “oil free.” Her Tesla is an electric car and doesn’t need gas or oil changes. We don’t have any Tesla car dealerships in New Jersey so I’d never heard that specific detail. She still looks great, constantly tanned, wrinkle free, dazzling teeth, maybe one or two breast sizes bigger.

From a recent chat on Facebook:

Me: “Next time you come to Brunswick to visit your parents, we should get together and have coffee or something and catch up.”

Her: “Sure. Anytime.”