sure they will tell you all about it at school soon.’
I was fast approaching my teens, knowing most of the mechanics of sex but nothing of the emotional turmoil it might bring. With our lack of communication about the subject, my grandmother had never even mentioned the concept of periods to me, although I knew that I would one day start them because there were already girls in my class at Middle School who were having them. Then my best friend Jennifer came on with her periods before me and, in probably more detail than I might have wanted, insisted on telling me all about it.
My own periods started when I was 12, in the holidays between leaving Middle School and starting at High School. I remember I was wearing blue fishnet tights under a denim skirt and had been shopping with my grandmother. When I got home I discovered I was bleeding but, of course, I had no pad or tampons to use. I talked to my grandmother who had nothing for me either. ‘Isn’t that odd,’ she said, ‘I was thinking today when we were out that I should have bought something for you because you would be due around this sort of age, but I didn’t actually get anything at all.’ That was not actually much help to me at the time but my ever-resourceful grandmother made up a kind of pad out of cotton wool and gauze and then bought me proper pads after that.
And so I celebrated my thirteenth birthday knowing little more than I had picked up in playground gossip. I was vaguely interested in boys and I think I must, by then, have discovered masturbation. It was a secret pleasure to be enjoyed under the bedclothes at night and increasingly often in the morning before dragging myself out of bed to face another day at school. My day-to-day life, however, was still largely devoted to the twin pursuits of coping with becoming a teenager and with sport at school.
Unfortunately for my moral welfare, the same could never have been said about my best friend Jennifer. Although still a virgin, Jennifer was crazy about sex and boys, any boy, of any shape or size or age. Now, don’t get me wrong, I too was curious about boys but just not on the same industrial scale as Jennifer. I used to spend a lot of my time at her home because both her parents worked and we would often have the run of the house before they got back in the evening. She could always get into her parents’ bedroom and I was soon introduced to her father’s collection of soft-porn girlie magazines. More intrusively still, Jennifer would delight in peeking through her mother’s wardrobe and showing me her ‘kinky underwear’. We would sometimes dress up in them and show off in front of the bedroom mirror. They were all rather innocent, Anne Summers-type outfits rather than seriously kinky fetish wear but it seemed terribly naughty at the time. It was certainly hard to imagine my much older ‘mother’ buying anything remotely like that.
It was sometimes hard to get Jennifer to think or talk aboutanything else other than boys and so there was certain inevitability about what was to happen next. My friend’s voracious appetite for meeting men, and my naïve willingness to follow, led us both into danger one day.
We regularly played a game after school in which we would head for the local shops and straightaway hitch up our school uniform skirts shorter and shorter. The game was to see how many car drivers would beep their horns and how many men might try to chat us up on the way. I loved the attention and was every bit as keen as Jennifer, but we were both about to learn a valuable lesson: that you can take such teasing too far. On one sunny afternoon, we were walking to the local shops as usual and happily collecting our requisite quota of ‘beeps’ from the passing cars. Suddenly one vehicle pulled into the side of the road right in front of us. A young Asian guy got out and stood smiling in front of us. I could see a couple of older men in the back of the car.
Smiling and friendly, this
Sarah Castille
Marguerite Kaye
Mallory Monroe
Ann Aguirre
Ron Carlson
Linda Berdoll
Ariana Hawkes
Jennifer Anne
Doug Johnstone
John Steinbeck, Richard Astro