My younger sister had brought friends home for
sleepovers for years, but it wasn't until I was about 16 that I started feeling
weird about it. I mean, some of these girls were starting to look attractive to me, and not just as
volleyball teammates or
dodgeball targets. Attractive as in
cute and
pretty and all the stuff that separated girls from
girls .
Marybeth was not the first of those girls, but she was the one I remember-she and Ginny were dancing and singing in her room to some obnoxious Madonna stuff and I was down the hall in my room trying to listen to a ballgame on the radio. Then they started a pillow fight that moved its way down towards my room. I waited until Ginny's head was turned and smacked her with my Boston Bruin pillowcase.
Thwap!
Soon it was a three-way, deathmatch and for a while it was just some regular push and shove. Until there was that awkward moment when Marybeth rolled over on top of me and flashed her little metal smile at me. It sorta froze me. Ginny, who didn't notice, went running down the hall-
"Popcorn time-Last one downstairs is a rotten egg"
Marybeth rolled off me and just lay there for a second, bare midriff and all, checking me out-waiting.
I didn't know what to say, so I tried something smooth:
Hey
She kicked me once in the stomach as she rolled over and raced down the stairs.
That was the end of that.