Helen's Eventful Summer

Just to make sure that those who only read this blog get the news as well:  I have just published a major chunk of the Helen story in Helen's Eventful Summer, which goes online at Smashwords tomorrow sometime.

The story starts with Helen out in Seattle for a longer-than-usual filming of a feature movie based on several episodes of the Galaxy Show (her regular TV series), in which the space ship The Galactic Voyager discovers a barely habitable planet, and decides to leave a colonizing team on it.  Helen has been cloned, and the infant's growth has been artificially accelerated so that she is a teenager within a few months.  (This will never be possible; that part is just bad science fiction.  If you like a more realistic version of this sort of thing, please read The Music Of the Stars, which is a story about another person called Helen, who has some of the same background as the Helen in this story, but is intended to be someone different.)

Anyway, Helen goes off the rails, and decides to hire a call girl.  But being Helen, she manages to get into a complicated relationship with this woman, and worse, shortly after gets into an affair with a girl in a restaurant, called Jana.

Unlike the other Helen stories where I managed to purge most of the explicit sex, this story has enough graphic sex to actually get in the way of the other action.  But I just couldn't see how to remove it, because of the plotline.  If you're Eastern European, I apologize in advance for the representation of Jana's English.  I wanted her to be very foreign, and so I had to tinker with her dialect.  She is a wonderful character, so I hope you forgive me for the liberties I have taken with the dialog.

Two other characters emerge in a very three-dimensional way:  Elly Kolb, the daughter of Helen's oldest Ex, Janet, and Tomasina Krebs, the daughter of Janet's mother, Old Elly.  While Elly has turned over a new leaf and become a good student, Tommy has decided to get into the porn industry as soon as she graduates.  In fact, she makes an adult video featurette over the summer break, in which she is a motorcycle babe who abducts a young bride from the altar, and gives her a night she will never forget.

Finally, there is an innocent college freshman, Crystal Baxter, whom Janet meets during a visit to Philadelphia.  Crystal is so obsessed with Janet that she walks to Minnesota from her home in Wisconsin, and takes a room close to where Janet teaches.  I don't think I have succeeded in making Crystal a believable love interest for Janet, but that's just too bad: Crystal and Janet will be a couple for the long term.

I've had a pretty eventful summer as well.

It started with Google and Facebook flooding me with ads for dresses, just because I happened to see a dress being modeled by a girl that looked attractive.  This model was everywhere I looked, sometimes with her eyes cropped out, often with only her mouth and below showing.  I started collecting pictures of the dresses she modeled, even though I could never dream of pulling off wearing one of them.  She was a classic summer model type: deep tan, bright red lipstick, big curves, lovely classic legs, narrow waist, long bleached blonde hair, beautiful hazel eyes (I managed to find a photo or two with her eyes in them).

I want to say that I stopped short of actually obsessing about her, especially because that wasp-waisted, heavy-breasted girl is not the type I go for.  (I prefer girls who look like serious competition swimmers, for instance.)  But this woman's face continued to haunt me.

Finally discovered that her name was Renee Somerfield, so I can relax now.  Somehow the magic is gone, but she seems interesting, at least in the few interviews I have seen on YouTube since I learned her name.  Australian models are interesting at least because of their accents; I love to watch Miranda Kerr on YouTube, with her sly humor.

So that was pretty exciting while I was still looking for a name to go with the face of Renee Somerfield.  She looks fabulous in dresses, but a little too 'Swimsuit Model' stereotypical in a swimsuit.  Stick to dresses, Renee, and who knows: I might buy one of those!!

Kay

A Brief Update

I forgot to report that the episode "Helen vs. Handel's Messiah" was re-published for the Holiday Season (or, more specifically, the Christmas season, since it's about Messiah, after all).  Please take a look at it.  For those who are queasy about too much physical sex, there's very little of that in the story!

The background to the episode is in another episode [yet unpublished], in which Helen sings at a performance in London.

Helen met an unusual and interesting girl at Westfield College, where Helen had taken up an Associate Professorship in music.  The other girl (a woman in her middle twenties, actually) was a language instructor, and  had introduced herself as Rain.  At this time Helen was single, because she and Michelle (her partner while she had been on the run [Helen On the Run--unpublished]) had split up, and her faithful friend Penny (Erin's mother) had died of cancer, and Helen was in fear of violating the Judge's exhortation to conduct herself in a manner suitable to a mother of two young children, on pain of being sent to serve her suspended sentence for kidnapping.  (The kids, of course, were her own, but that's another story.)

Rain and Helen were soon desperately in love.  Helen had a firm friendship with Sophie Cocteau, a tennis player, and of course Lorna Shapiro, who was Becky's girl, also had a serious crush on Helen, but Helen needed someone who could be a true partner, for the long term, and it looked very much as though Rain was the one.  In addition, Rain just adored the two youngest kids, Alison and James, and that settled it for Helen.

Some time later, Rain disclosed to Helen that her name was actually Evelyn Woodford, and that her father was a British earl.  Rain had not written or called home for more than a year, being in rather a rebellious phase.  But this new relationship seemed important enough that she wanted her parents to meet Helen.  As luck would have it, Helen was also invited to sing in a performance of Messiah in London, which was attended by Queen Elizabeth, who spoke to Helen briefly after the recital, in the Royal Box.  The following year, too, Helen spent in England in Rain's family home.

Another wonderful Christmas episode centered around Helen visiting Olive Gibson, the mother of Jeffrey Gibson (little James's father), on which occasion she was also invited to conduct the massed bands of the Armed Services on the Mall in Washington DC.  This was also an occasion in which she played tennis with Sophie Cocteau, and there was a brief romance between the two, which they decided, by mutual agreement, not to let get out of hand, simply because every major romance Helen had had up until then had ended badly.  Sophie wanted to be a constant presence in Helen's life, for Helen's own sake, and her theory was that it would be impossible if Helen and she became lovers.  By the time Helen and Rain (Lady Evelyn) had found each other, Sophie and Helen were merely good friends.  (But Helen was harder on Rain than on any of her other lovers, and the end of that relationship reflects more poorly on Helen than anything that happened before or since.)

Kay

Making A Cover for “On The Run”

I'm not sure who reads this blog (in contrast to the sister blog: Don't Wait for the Movie!), but I feel guilty about putting all the latest information about the Helen project on Smashwords over there.  In short, I'm publishing the entire Helen story in installments on Smashwords, which is essentially a self-publishing website.

Helen and Lalitha: The Lost Years was put up a couple of weeks ago.  It takes up the story after Helen gets back from ballet camp, (Helen at Ballet Camp), and describes how she meets Lalitha, an important, recurring character.  The book I'm working on now is Helen On the Run: The Lost Years 2, which describes how Erin joins the family, and little James is born.  In the first half of this story, Helen masquerades as a man, a construction worker.  In the second half, Helen is pregnant (well, she's pregnant pretty much the whole time).

When I made the cover, I first had a picture of a guy in a hard hat, and put it in a sort of Southwestern landscape.  But it looked rather dismal; I had put a lot of texture on it, because it looked so plain with just the picture of the gal in the hard hat.  Here is what it looked like at that point:

It is the head of a girl, and the body of a man, but I widened the hips, so that it looked more plausibly a pregnant woman.  But by the time I had finished with the texturing, it looked really gloomy.  People would have thought: she should jolly well be on the run, and she can stay on the run, for all we care!

But I thought we needed a softer image of a pregnant girl, so I added, behind the construction girl, a pregnant woman, lying on the ground.  It now looks like this:

I'm kind of proud of the lettering, which looks like a Wanted poster from the Old West.  Unfortunately, the pregnant woman looks like she's been amputated at the hips, which is really peculiar.  I guess more work is needed...

[To be continued ...]

Kay

What has been selling on Smashwords

I began publishing books on Smashwords last year, and so far I have published a total of 10 stories there (two of which were seasonal, and which I "unpublished".  They get put in the deep freeze, and I can thaw them out again as appropriate).

Out of these books, one is a complete, independent novel, Alexandra (328,000 words), three are short stories, Helen at Ballet Camp (48,000 words), Helen and the Flowershop Girl (less than 10,000 words), and Little John Finds a Friend (11,000 words).

Jane, 125,000 is a major part of another long story, which I put up for free, for no good reason, and it has been downloaded in its entirety almost 600 times (which I'm very pleased about, but of course, I have no idea whether anyone has actually read through it; that's the problem!), while Alexandra, which is the longest book I have published at Smashwords, has sold just 2 copies, at $5.99, which is on the high side.  At about 500 words a penny, it is probably not such a huge ripoff, and some of the words are pretty long!  Just kidding.

A stand-alone novella, to which I hope to write a sequel, is Prisoner (46,000 words).  I love this story very much, and I lavished a lot of care on it, and two copies have sold.  It isn't erotica, by any meaning of the word; the little sex there is in it is, I think, important to the plot.  I could probably take it out, but it would not be quite as powerful.

Then, there are two major episodes taken from Helen: Helen and Lalitha (74,000 words) and Sweet Hurricane (65,000 words), both of which are important chapters in the Helen story, but neither of them have sold a single copy!  So the story that is closest to my heart simply does not resonate with the readers.  Hurricane was the first story to get published, so there has been ample time for people to read the 40% sample.  Lalitha was published two weeks ago, and I suppose some of you are still laboring through the (enormous) 50% sample you can download for free.  I was tempted to just give it away, but in the end I priced it at $2.99, to find out whether anyone is actually reading it.  There have been eight downloads of samples, and we shall see how it goes!  No pressure, you all; please only buy it if you want to read it :)  I have a day job, and I'm comfortably off!!

My greatest loves are music, art and dance, which is why Helen is a musician, an artist, and a dancer.  A close runner-up is education, and Helen is a teacher as well, and a good one, unlike me!  I'm too impatient with kids who aren't interested; I understand that they're being forced to learn stuff they don't care about, but, well, you know, if you don't care, it is only a truly remarkable teacher who will go more than halfway with you.  But, the point is that the Helen story doesn't make sense to anyone uninterested in the world of classical music, so that is probably the biggest brake on the Helen series.

Well, thanks for enduring my rant, if you've read this far!  Happy reading!

Kay Hemlock Brown

Helen Among the Stars

Dear Friends,

I have written a number of stories, only one of which is complete, namely Alexandra, which I'm trying to edit quickly to be ready for release by Monday after next!  It is completely written, but since writing it sometime in 2004 or so, I have learned a lot about what to write, and to what degree I want sentimentality to intrude into my writing, and how to express ideas that are just a little trickier than popular authors want to write about!  So I have to go back and clean it up, because there are passages in Alexandra that are so utterly extraneous that nobody would enjoy reading them.  Well, anyway, I need to clear out at least half of the remaining pages; the rest is pretty well written.

Alexandra is a story about war, about cultural diversity, about idealism and society, in a minor way, and about love and lust, and the different ways people love each other.  I love that story, and despite the clumsiness of the writing early on, there are a few characters in that story that are types that I love dearly.  Some of them reappear as other characters in other stories, but they were first invented in Alexandra, so I feel that these are, in some ways, the originals.

Another story I wrote —the very first— is the story of Helen; a long, rambling saga of a couple million words, which begins when Helen is a teenager, trying to hitch-hike her way to college, and continues her tortured progress through cancer, amnesia, heartbreak, a secret existence as an underage adult entertainer, until she achieves fame as a singer and violinist, and musical genius.  Obviously this is a completely implausible story on the face of it.  But once Helen was out of graduate school, I got tired of making her so fantastically amazing in everything she undertook, and the story settled down into an account of someone who just barely could exist.

Well, quite incidentally, —and I don't have a clue what made me invent this subplot; it was around 2000— a new TV company, in the story, creates a TV series called Galactic Voyager, in which a spaceship is built in Moon orbit, in the early 21^st century, and sent into space with a large number of volunteers on board, including a dozen people, experts, who were in hibernation, frozen alive, like the crew on 2001: A Space Odyssey.  One of these is a brilliant musician and dancer called Cecilia.

I made this company invite Helen to play Cecilia on this TV series.  (There are excellent reasons why Helen was the ideal choice for the role, in the plot.)  As Helen's life goes on, on one weekend a month, she heads out to Seattle, to tape the segments in which she is to appear on the show on Saturday nights.  She isn't the star of the show, and lots of stuff goes on in the show, Cecilia's storyline being just one of many.  Of course I don't have to describe them all; I only bother to describe the storyline as it impinges on what Cecilia is asked to do.

A year or two later, it struck me that I might just be able to write a Science Fiction novel based on this sub-plot in the Helen story, but this time, it would actually be Helen herself.  (The Helen in this SF story is not exactly the same Helen as in her earlier story; in that, towards the end, she has another bout with cancer, which leaves her almost a total amnesiac, regressed to her late teens, totally unable to be a musician, barely a mother to her adopted children.  In the new story, Helen is a violinist and conductor who, after a traumatic breakup with her lover, impulsively offers to join the expedition as the first volunteer in hibernation.)

I feel, at this point, that this story: The Music of the Stars is the one most likely of anything I have written, to attract any significant attention from critics or readers.  Unfortunately, it is incomplete.  But I have several dramatic choices I can make; there is almost too much potential in the story.  If anyone reading this is familiar with Science Fiction at all, you must know that absolutely anything can happen.  So far, nothing in the story is at all fantastic; it is all boringly plausible from the scientific point of view, so as hard science fiction I suppose it rates fairly low.  All my energy has gone into exploring the psychological dynamics of shipboard society, and how some of the personalities respond to the conditions with a lot of grace, while others do not.

So, while I work at Alexandra because I want it published with the least embarrassment to me and to Smashwords, and because I have my pride, and I hate to find weaknesses in my writing which I could have fixed before it went into print, in a sense Alexandra is already finished.  But Stars could be more important, and I want to make sure I do right by it, to make the ending truly worthy of the setup!  I wish I could tell you more, but it is the sort of story where a spoiler could actually make the story not worth reading.

I guess I just had to get that off my chest!!  I should be working on Alexandra, but it's Stars  that I read just before I fall asleep at night!

Kay.

Helen has Come Out of the Closet!

Thanks to the encouragement that you readers have unwittingly provided, I have decided to publish stories from Helen on Smashwords!  Smashwords, some of you might not know, is a site that permits anyone to publish e-books.  It is well worth paying it a visit, because some of the e-books on Smashwords are available for absolutely free, while some of them cost as little as 99 cents.  (You have to register with them, to get any of this stuff, which--at present--means only that you will get the occasional promotional e-mail from them.  I get almost no junk mail from them, even being an author.)

So far, I have published two episodes on the site, namely (1) Sweet Hurricane, which is the story of Helen and kids at the beach, when --and where-- Helen meets Harriet, and shortly afterwards, in Philadelphia, Maryssa and Matthew Brooks, children of the elderly photographer Diane Elman.  (Note: this book was subsequently renamed Helen At the Beach.)  Both Harriet and Maryssa (and of course Helen, which goes without saying) are among my favorite creations, and though the greater part of Helen has been just thrown together, and only intended as --informal-- therapy for myself, and will require an enormous amount of editing to make it publishable, this episode begins the portion of the "book" where I write for an audience other than myself.  Secondly, (2) Little John Finds a Friend is the story of Little John, Helen's young half-brother, now in college, and Taylor Brown, the goth chick who takes charge of him over one Christmas break.  Taylor Brown is also one of my favorite characters, and I love her to pieces.  She is more of a real person than most of the people in Helen, who are really myself in disguise!

Both those stories have been priced very low (under $3), and are not selling at all!  This is not surprising; I'm told that it is rare for a typical writer to make it big on Smashwords, and even rarer to do so with their earliest offerings.

An image I featured on this site, and how
it was modified to be a cover for Jane.

One of my most recent stories (well, begun around 2002) is Jane.  I haven't serialized Jane for the simple reason that it contains an enormous amount of sex, and I essentially wrote it for very prurient reasons.  But, as I wrote, Jane evolved into a story far more accessible than the Helen stories.  Being an amateur musician, I made Helen a total musical phenom, and as a result I suspect that the typical reader will find it hard to relate to someone who comes across as impossibly gifted musically, and impossibly screwed-up psychologically. While Helen is considerate (for the most part) of her colleagues and her students, she is inept in dealing with her significant others--not because she doesn't care for them, but because she finds it so hard to resist temptation.  So, anyway, I did a serious amount of sanitizing Jane, and published it completely for free.  Obviously, this doesn't bring me any money at all, but, on the other hand, it has been downloaded some 80 times, which is great!  You can find Jane here, at Smashwords.  I'm in the process of cleaning up spelling and grammar errors, and I hope to have it exactly the way I want it by Thanksgiving.

Synopsis of Jane.  Unlike Helen, Jane is a college dropout, has broken up with her husband (or boyfriend; it isn't clear, and I don't care enough to clarify it), and lives in a big house in New York City, taking so-called glamour photographs which her ex helps her put on the Web.  He pays her a fraction of the money his website makes, but gradually Jane gets into painting, which is her main avocation.  She paints an erotic painting of two of her models blended into a single girl, nude, kneeling in front of an ornate mirror, looking at her crotch.  What an awesome picture that would make!  I'm sure someone somewhere has done it, but I certainly don't know where to find such an image.  Anyway, she sells limited edition prints of this, and makes a lot of money.  By this time, she discovers that several people she knows has contracted AIDS, including her lover Deanna, who gradually gets sick and dies.

Jane is devastated.  She barely survives for close to a year, occasionally checked on by some of her models, who are very fond of her.  Then she meets a pair of twins, who gradually bring her out of her depression.  A lot of the story is about other characters who are incidental to the main story, but whose little adventures make Jane a more real person.  (I just can't write a story with a straight-line "plot"; sorry.  Life isn't like that.  However fantastic my stories end up being, and however impossibly brilliant my characters, they live in a sort of real-ish world, where lots of things interfere with what might be considered The Plot.)  End of Synopsis.  Well, read it and check it out; after all, it is free!

I started writing because (A) I had these awesome fantasies that I got while driving long distances all by myself.  I just had to do something while driving for, like 6 or 7 hours at a stretch, which I had to do frequently.  Then, (B) I had some unhappy experiences with my partner at one time, and decided to move into separate apartments.  When I found myself spending hours and hours by myself with only my coursework assignments to do, I decided to actually put some of my stories down on paper, beginning with Helen.

As I gradually got accustomed to thinking of myself as a sexual animal, and less fearful about appearing so to the outside world, I began to think of a story where the sex was a little more objectivized, and Jane was born.  9-11 plays a role in Jane, but the excerpt I published is taken from well after that event, and is not concerned centrally with it.  Jane could end up being the only true book I write.

There is another book, called The Music of the Stars © 2012 , which is very promising.  In Helen, it so happens that our heroine is invited to star in a weekly prime time series called The Galactic Voyager.  It is set in the not-so-distant future, where an enormous space vessel, called the Galactic Voyager is launched from Earth, with several hundred volunteers on board, including a famous musician and artist called Cecilia.  Helen is to play Cecilia, who is put on board in a state of hibernation, which is to say in a deep freeze, to be resuscitated as needed.  But a couple of dozen years into the mission, the young people who were born in space are becoming disoriented, because they really don't have a context for living on board a space vessel.  I mean, imagine growing up in deep space, and being told that your parents had lived on an actual planet at one time, but now all you have is this cramped spaceship?  So Cecilia is revived, to provide them with some meaning in their lives.

Anyhow, I began to think that this story line might actually be better as the basis of a novel than almost anything I have written up to now, though of course, it is squarely in the area of science fiction.  So I began to write a new story, and in this one, it is actually Helen who is put in stasis, on board a vessel bound for deep space.  She is revived, and then they find themselves in the vicinity of a star system that has a planet that promises to be inhabitable.  Meanwhile, Helen's diabetes has taken a turn for the worse, and furthermore, she is the only diabetic on board.  In order to ensure that Helen's genes are preserved, they clone her, unbeknownst to her.  So, to make a long story short, this has been written at some length: some 225,000 words.

Most interestingly, one of the greatest difficulties I'm having with publishing on Smashwords is --you'll never guess-- creating attractive covers for the books!  I am pleased with the cover of Jane.  The cover of Little John is a goofy little thing I put together in PowerPoint, which captures the mood of the story amazingly well.  (The difficult part is to represent the characters not too closely, because that would spoil it for readers with a strong imagination, whose conception of a particular character might be at odds with the depiction on the cover.) The cover I created for Hurricane is probably the most awful cover ever created by man or woman.  Here they are!

Kay

Legs, Episode 1

This is a new story I'm in the process of writing.  I want this one to be a little more explicit, for myself.  You might choose to skip it, if it's offensive.

February

I woke up feeling tired and out of sorts.  My room-mate was up already, probably gone in to breakfast.  I dragged myself to the sink, and while I was brushing my teeth I remembered: I wanted to get to the Library before 8:30.  When I have to, I can get ready very quickly.  I managed to freshen up fast, and had my clothes on before I heard the quick knock.  (She always knocked before she came in.)

“You’re up early!  Where’re you going?”

“Oh …”  This was very unusual; she usually never asked me stuff like this.  “... I just woke up early, so … I thought I’d head in …” I improvised, giving my hair a few last touches, and putting on a little lip gloss.  She kept staring at me, and I could feel myself getting red.  If I tried to explain, I’d say something stupid, I knew.  I just glanced at her and smiled enigmatically.  My hair was getting to be a problem; there were tangles at the ends, and I’d broken them off.  The room-mate had long hair, too, and the room was full of long dark hair all over the rug.  Ugh.

It was a quick breakfast and I hurried to the library.  It was a little after 8.  I looked around in the library lounge, but there was nobody.  I took out the History text I had checked out on Friday, and started to read.     I noticed her as soon as she sat down.

She lowered herself slowly into the upright chair at her usual table.  I quickly looked away; I knew by now that she became uncomfortable if I kept looking at her.  She pulled out a folder and a textbook, and looked around again.  I was pretending to be absorbed in my book.  Somehow I could see her look at me a couple more times.  Pretty soon she was drawn into whatever she was doing –some homework, I suppose-- and she had forgotten about me for the moment..

I read for almost half an hour, and to my surprise, picked up a lot from the book.  I was forcing myself to be interested, and I was getting interested.  It was all that stuff about the Constitution, and the man had made it seem pretty logical.  I bookmarked my place, laid down the book, and slowly got up without getting noticed by the girl.  I strolled over to the coffee bar just outside the library, and got myself a small coffee.  I'm beginning to cut down, because it gives me a sour stomach.

When I got back, I walked over behind a tall rack of magazines, from where I could see her unobserved.  She had just noticed that I was missing, and spent a minute looking for me fruitlessly, of course.  She then noticed my stuff on the side-table, and taking a last cautious look around, bent over her notebook.  She was a left-hander, I knew.  Today she had worn a brief skirt with an irregular edge, which drew attention to her legs, and I could feel myself getting  warm under my heavy clothing.  I watched her writing for a while.  She wrote very slowly and carefully, printing.  I liked that!

I suddenly noticed the time; it was just a few minutes to my history class.

History went well; I had retained a lot from my reading, oddly enough.  After history, it was my music lesson.  I hadn’t practiced long enough, and I got a lecture from the instructor, and I left with my face all red.  I ran into her on my way back to the library, and we were both startled, and looked quickly away.  She was headed in the opposite direction, but I kept myself from looking back at her, because I had done that once before, and she had been looking back at me!

It was difficult to look for her during lunch, because Lisa, Julie and Matt insisted on eating with me, and were beginning to ask questions about why I was looking around so much.

“There.  She’s looking round again!”

“Who’re you expecting?”  Julie was always suspicious, and accused me of having a ‘secret friend.’

“Just looking, Julie!  People are all dressed up today, that’s all …”

“Oh. It’s dress-up day for the sororities, I think.  The Gammas are all dressed up.”

Julie was off about the Gammas, and I was safe for a while.

“What are you going to do for Spring Break?”

“Just … stay right here, I guess … I’ll be fine!”

“Oh.”  Julie felt she ought to invite me home for Spring Break, but she was too chicken to ask her parents.  My home was on the West Coast, and it was too far to fly out there just for a week.  My sister had had me over for Thanksgiving, but she was in Japan, and wouldn’t be back in time.  I had family in Georgia, but I didn’t feel like going.

My Dad ran a business in San Francisco with his sister, and was busy all the time.  My mom had died while I was in high school, and Dad was not quite over that.  College was in the Midwest, and I was pretty much marooned there until the semester was over.  I’m a sophomore, and English major, but I’m thinking of changing my major to something else, like, … I don’t know; art, maybe.  I got good grades in art last year, but I haven’t taken any art courses in a while.

This nameless girl I’ve been stalking is still a mystery to me.  I first noticed her in the Fall.  She’s a short-haired blonde with really blue eyes, a little heavy-built, but I like the way she’s built.  She seems to have no friends, and I feel as if I want to make friends with her, but I can’t quite loosen up enough to talk to her.  We just stare at each other.  I think she looks a little suspicious of me, which is why I’m beginning to watch her from in hiding.  This is not good.

Unexpectedly, a couple of weeks after, I walked into a hair place.  I like to wear my hair long, but I was beginning to get annoyed with all the split ends, and I’m thinking it’s time for a trim.  It’s late on a Friday afternoon, and I’ve got the okay from Dad, to spend up to $25.  If it costs more, it will be out of my allowance.

I went in and put my name in the customer list, and saw her!  She’s working as a hairdresser!  That’s the most unlikely thing I could imagine!  I mean, she isn’t a beauty freak, or anything; no makeup, no mascara, nothing!

I sat down, and pretended to read a magazine.  She hadn’t noticed me; she was giving a haircut to a man of about forty, and he was flirting with her.  Actually, I guess he wasn’t; he was just talking to her, and she was nodding.  I listened carefully, and I heard a soft Hm-hm? like wasn’t really paying attention.  Then he said something, and she blushed, and looked up to disagree with him, and saw me watching her.

She stopped for a second, startled, and then bent over his head, her neck was red!  She was blushing like mad!  Oh, she was so innocent… I wanted to find out what they were talking about, but they were talking too softly.

Before I knew it, she was done with him, and while I had been watching all this, the two women who were ahead of me had been taken, and once the man had paid her and she had thanked him for a generous tip, I guess, she looked at the book and blushed, and called, “Jennifer?”

I stood up and smiled, and she came out to meet me.

“Hi, I’m Kerry!” she said, and offered her hand.  I could hardly breathe, but she gave me a reasonably bright, slightly embarrassed smile, and led the way to her station.

“How would you like your hair cut?”

She had a soft voice, which I realized I had never heard before.  I had only imagined her voice; I thought it would be either low and muffled, or high and breathy.  But it was a medium voice, neither low nor high, and quiet, but clear. 

I was a little surprised; I had expected a remark about my hair, which was sort of customary.

“An inch or two off,” I began, and I could see her nodding at once, and her expression in the mirror was definitely one of approval.  I began to realize that she was not embarrassed; she had just been taken unawares.  “Just to get rid of the split ends, and stuff,” I continued awkwardly.

She fitted the cape that would keep hair fragments off my clothes on me, and began examining my hair.  I knew already that it was in bad shape, but she was very critical.

“There are some really bad splits … almost two inches!” she said.  This happened all the time; if you have long hair, hairdressers tend to lay a guilt trip on you.  She had almost forgotten that I was the girl who stalked her mercilessly.

She was very professional.  She knew exactly what she was doing; she shampooed the hair down, parted it in layers, put it up in clips, and started snipping confidently.  She was silent, and as I felt the pleasure of her competent fingers in my hair, my tension mounted higher and higher, until my nerves were humming.

“I’ve seen you in the library,” she said, finally, and smiled at me in the mirror.  I realized that she was really pretty, then; not just her legs, but her face.

“I know!” I exclaimed, turning red.

Minutes went by.

“How did you get into … hair … um …”

“Hair styling?”

“Yeah, hair styling?”

She paused, and brushed her bangs behind her ear and smiled again, blushing a little.

“Last summer, before I got in,” she explained.  “I thought I’d learn hair styling, just in case!”

I could see my eyes going wide.  I had thought she was an upperclassman, and a good student.  She just looked really intelligent, not at all the Beauty School type.

For a while, I lost myself in the sheer pleasure of having her fingers in my hair, trying not to stare at her face.  She offered to French Braid my hair, and I agreed.  Suddenly it was over, and I was paying her a modest tip, and I was on the sidewalk, walking back to my dorm.

This was very confusing.  I had gotten the urge to trim my precious long hair partly because I wanted her to notice me, and my hair was my best feature: long and silky and glossy.  But a professional hair stylist does not really notice hair, except as a part of their job, in a sort of objective way.  So I had taken a step in the wrong direction; instead of being noticed, she would now not notice me at all, because I would be, well, a customer.  It seemed very important to actually find out how she felt about me.  At this time, I had not yet thought out all the implications of how I felt about her.  I just knew that I liked her, despite not having spoken to her enough to know what sort of person she was.  In a sense, I had created a personality for her in my mind, and so far she seemed to fit it very closely, by some miracle.

The next day, I managed to escape my room so early that I wasn’t seen leaving by my nosy roommate, Lauren.  I had found that by taking my time getting some early morning coffee at the coffee bar in the student lounge, I could watch for Kerry walking in.

“A medium Latté, please.”

“Regular or Decaf?”

“Oh … Decaf.”

“A shot of anything?”

I was surprised.  No, I didn’t feel like any flavoring, and I said no thanks.  Then I saw a familiar blond head in the picture window.  The coffee girl (a religion major, I knew; she seemed nice, but we were not acquaintances, really) seemed to be taking longer than she needed.  Kerry seemed more aware of her surroundings than usual.  She normally walked with her head bent, deep in thought.  Today, instead of a backpack, she carried a shoulder bag, and she was wearing leggings, which was unusual.  Her hair was still wet from her shower, I presumed, and I felt a guilty pang when I realized I had gotten dressed without showering.  But wait; that was because I had shampooed after I got home yesterday.

Kerry.

A wave of warmth went through me, and I tried not to look as though I was blushing.  My blushes were not very noticeable, normally.  The coffee arrived, and I took a long sip, and tried not to look as if I was hurrying.  There she was, about thirty feet ahead of me.  I hungrily ate up the sight of her straight back, her wide shoulders, her gorgeous hamstrings, and the way she walked, which seemed sexy to me, even if it was a perfectly ordinary walk.  I realized that I was stripping her with my eyes, and felt a shock of amazement.  That’s when I realized how peculiar it was that I was developing what amounted to a physical attraction for another girl.  I wasn’t upset, but I was certainly disturbed.  I was still strongly attracted to guys, too; I often preened when one of them noticed me, but it was getting to the point where I was physically attracted to anyone who was at all good-looking.

Kerry had approached her usual table, and was putting her bag down and looking around.  I looked at my feet, and then looked up at her, just in time to notice that she had spotted me coming in behind her.  She was confused, and I could tell that she was beginning to feel awkward, being watched by me.  It was OK!  We were both acutely aware of each other, so I hadn’t yet become just a head with hair on it.

It was a few days later that we approached the tables from opposite directions at the same time, in the early afternoon.  I slowed very gradually, and we looked each other over.  She was wearing a very short denim skirt that made my pulse race; and she could see my approval even when I didn’t say a word, and glowed slightly with satisfaction as she laid down her books.  She was carrying them loose in her arm this afternoon.  She looked up again, and her eyes looked over my face, taking in everything.

She gave me a polite smile, and said, “Your hair looks real nice this afternoon!”

“Well … I guess,” I said, grasping for something more intelligent.

Her eyes drifted to my bare midriff, which had been left bare by the edge of my shirt creeping up.  I tugged down the retreating shirt edge, and she reddened slightly.

“Nice day,” she said.

“Yeah,” I replied.  “Cold!”

She nodded, looking momentarily out of the window, then took out her text.  She sat, tucking her leg under her.  She looked lovely, like a mermaid, or something.

“Are you going to the choir program?” she asked, in her quiet voice.

“You going?” I asked.  She nodded vehemently, in a cute way.  I was going anyway, but it seemed a good idea to make her think I was going because of her.  “I guess I’ll go!”

“Great!” she said, sitting down, and giving me a bigger smile than she had given me before.

We didn’t get to talk much after that for a while.  I went to the choir concert, of course.  I had gone once before, the previous year, but I had been preoccupied with something else, and did not notice the choir very much.  But to my surprise, Kerry was  in the choir.  She was an alto, and I could tell by watching her face that she was completely on top of the music, and probably knew it all by heart.  It was a varied program, with lots of old familiar songs (unlike the previous concert, where it was all songs I had never heard in my life), and I enjoyed it.  Kerry kept looking for me, but she didn’t recognize me.

The weather warmed up, and I started wearing my short spring dresses and things, too, and so did Kerry.  I just loved all her clothes, and I loved her in them.  I began to dream about her every night, and I was thoroughly disturbed.   But my school work wasn’t suffering; I was keeping a B average in almost every course.  I normally did better in some courses, but not this semester, apparently.  Finally, it was actually the Friday before Spring Break, and I had not made any arrangements.  I got a note from the Dean of Students, telling me I could stay on campus if I wanted to.  I had just got an iced Latté from the Coffee Shop, and sat down to drink it, watching the other students meeting their families.  I ordered a hot sandwich, and sat down to wait.  It seemed too much work to go down to the Cafeteria to get lunch.  The long lounge was deserted, except for a few students anxiously calling on their cellphones.  I was surprised and startled to see Kerry at the other end of the lounge, reading what appeared to be a novel.  She looked up right at me, and smiled slightly, amused that I had noticed her.  Obviously she had spotted me as soon as I had got into the lounge.  Kerry had two bags with her.

I had been thinking about Spring Break almost all the time for the last week or so.  On the one hand, it gave me a week of privacy; I had begun to feel frustrated at my Roommate constantly being in our room, asking questions.  On the other hand, it would be a week without getting a look at Kerry, and I was, in a way, becoming addicted to looking at Kerry for so many minutes a day.  To be honest, I had begun to fantasize about her, and becoming … I don’t know … I didn’t have the vocabulary for explaining what I needed.

Presently, everyone was gone from the lounge, except Kerry, and of course, me.  I knew there had been a couple of students last year who had stayed for Spring Break, but they weren’t here this year.

After a decent interval, I got up and walked over to Kerry, leaving my books at my table.

“Hi!” said Kerry, in her low, somewhat muffled voice.  I wondered how she could sing so well with such a muffled voice.

“Your folks getting late?” I asked, with a smile.

She shrugged, and smiled back.

“Do they live far way?” I asked.

“Oh no, right here in town!”

I laughed.  “Why’re they late, then?”

“My mom doesn’t drive, and my Dad works late,” she explained.

“Oh, I see.”

“How about you?”

“I’m not going home for the break,” I said, suddenly realizing that this would seem interesting to her.

“No?  Your parents traveling, or …?”

“It’s too far; I’m from California,” I explained.

“No family close to here?”

“A few in the Washington, D.C. area, and one in Atlanta,” I replied.

“Oh no, so far away!”

How painfully sweet her voice was!  I was already prepared to be her slave, but now I was almost swooning with love and admiration for this lovely, simple, charming girl.  I was so lost in my private thoughts that it almost slipped by me that she was unhappy with the idea of leaving me alone on campus.  She continued to gaze at me in distress.

“Don’t worry; I stayed behind last Spring Break too.  It’s fine; they have food, and everything!”

“Still, …” she began, her smile fading.  She seemed to make up her mind about something, but it wasn’t her way to discuss her idea until she was sure it was going to work.

It was now about six, and already quite dark.  Only the two of us were in the lounge.  I would normally have gone to my room, to clean up after my roommate left.  (She normally left a huge mess.)  But I was keeping Kerry company, though we were not talking at all.  I had given up on conversation, and pulled out a Manga novel I had picked up to read.  (My roommate had lots of them, and she had asked me to read them any time I wanted.)  Kerry watched me, but I carefully didn’t stare back.  A few years ago I had realized that I tended to stare, and had made a conscious effort to be careful in the staring department.

“Then, I guess you’re a sophomore?”

“Yeah; and you?”

“I just joined this Fall … Freshman,” she said, looking right into my eyes.  She had lovely light blue-grey eyes.  “What’s your major?”

“Undeclared,” I said.  “I’m thinking of Art, though my family wants me to do something like, physics, or chemistry.”  I shrugged.  It was not my favorite topic of conversation.  “And you?”

“Psychology, and English, maybe,” she said.  I was surprised; she didn’t look as if she were interested enough in people to want to do psychology.  English would be fine.  She spoke grammatically, and I had decided (based on very little evidence) that she was articulate and communicated well.

My golden girl

I was getting hungry again, and a little tired.  I was just smiling at her, and she smiled back.  We were both seated close to each other on the nifty armchairs they had just put in that year.  I was trying not to look at her legs, which looked fantastic.  She had on a medium-length skirt and a plaid shirt and a knitted vest, and looked perfect to my eyes.

“If I asked my folks, would you like to come home with me?” she asked, blushing.  “There’s plenty of room.  And you could come back here whenever you wanted, to get anything.”

“Oh.  Um …” I was struck speechless, though I had anticipated a similar offer for a while.  every nerve in my body wanted me to say, yes, yes, sure, why not?  I’ll go get my stuff right away!  But I simply looked around, confused.  “Just think about it,” she said, sounding worried.  “I should give you some time to, like, decide whether you want to come home with us.  Your folks might be upset, maybe?”

“Oh no, not at all.  I just have to ask my Dad, that’s all!”

“OK,” she said, nodding.  “Oh, here they come … that’s my Dad, in the pickup,” she said, blushing.

Like Kerry, her father was big made, not just tall.  He had a slow smile, and sandy hair carelessly brushed into a sort of side part, jeans and a denim jacket over a shirt with a fine plaid pattern, which did not look like the usual lumberjack uniform.  He was not quite six feet tall, but looked all of 250 pounds of solid muscle.  With him was bright-eyed, blue-eyed, dark-haired kid who studied me with interest.  Kerry had introduced him as her brother Kevin.  He was slight and tall, and looked about twelve.

I had shaken hands with Kerry’s father Larry, which I thought a name that suited him well.  He had immediately called home about the possibility of a visitor, and Kerry’s mother had agreed.  While Dad was loading up Kerry’s bags into the back of the pickup, which was a nice new one, freshly washed, Kerry, Kevin and I went to my room to pack some clothes for me.

“Do you have to, like, tell anyone?”

I had to tell the Residence office that I would be gone, so that the Cafeteria could plan their meals.  I stepped into the office, and the lady in charge said she had just been on her way to my room.  “Everyone who was planning to stay over the break seems to have gone with a classmate,” she said, “and I was going to offer to take you home with me!”

“Kerry has offered to let me visit for the week,” I began.

“My folks said yes,” Kerry said solemnly.

“That would be fine,” said the lady, Mrs Boyle, evidently comfortable with Kerry’s respectable appearance.

It was odd, having Kerry in my room.  Kevin prowled around, not talking, but checking everything out.  Kerry occasionally called out to him not to touch anything, and instead of getting indignant he simply nodded.  He flashed an occasional grin at me, and I could see the way Kerry’s eyes lit up on his face, too.  They seemed too perfect to be human beings.

Kerry was casting a critical eye over my clothes, the few of them that were clean, and I was getting embarrassed.  “Bring a swimsuit,” she was saying with a smile.  “They’ve got the pool ready already!”  This was embarrassing, because my only swimsuit was indecently revealing.

“I don’t have one,” I said, keeping the swimsuit hidden.

“Oh,” said Kerry.  “I have a couple, but …”

Kevin grinned.  Obviously Kerry’s suits would not fit me.  I had never worn anyone else’s suit, and I didn’t think it was a normal thing to do.  Kevin simply shook his head and pursed his lips, and Kerry grinned and shrugged.  “I don’t like to swim that much,” I said.

After the bags had all been loaded, and Kevin offered to ride in the truck bed, Kerry got in next to her father, and I got in, and I pulled the cab door shut.  I had just learned that their family name was Lynch.  For the first time I was seated right next to Kerry, feeling her arm along mine.  She felt warm and a tiny bit sweaty, but she smelled perfect, wonderful, healthy young girl.  She turned and smiled at me.  When we were seated, we were the same height.  We giggled together, and I thought I could never be happier than I was just then.  My hand wanted to grab her hand and squeeze.  I am not an affectionate, touchy-feely person, but at that moment, I was afraid that my sheer joy would frighten Kerry who sat next to me.

Unable to resist my urge, I just tapped Kerry’s hand, which was lying on her thigh.  She turned her head, her face radiant with a gleeful smile.  She gently tapped my hand, which was now on my own thigh.  We traded taps as her dad drove along, down the street that led to the College, into the major road that led through the residential parts of the town, then turned off into a suburb, past a strip with department stores and supermarkets and my favorite ice cream store.  Tap!  I tapped her back, and I felt her silently shaking with laughter.  I quickly turned my hand palm up, and waited.  It was insane; I had hardly had a conversation with her, and here we were … I did not even have words for what we were doing.

“This is our street,” she said softly in my ear, and I looked to get a good view.  It was an unremarkable street with houses spaced well apart, and SUVs in almost every driveway.  Then we were in a more modest part of the same street, and we turned into a wooded lot, and she put her hand in mine and quickly squeezed, and let go.

Kevin jumped off the truck bed, and by the time I had got out, and helped Kerry out, savoring the feel of her arm in my hand, a short woman with dark curly hair, and Kerry’s lovely smile stepped out of the shadows, and came straight to me, and gave me a quick hug, before I could gather my wits together.

“It’s good to have you with us,” she said, in a quicker, crisper version of Kerry’s speech.  The little family of four had surrounded me, and were blinding me with the brightness of their smiles, and their welcome.  My baggage was taken inside, and I was bustled into a cosy little room upstairs, and shown the bathroom, and given a towel, in case I wanted to take a shower or a bath.  “You can take a nice long soak, if you want,” said Kerry’s mother Kaitlyn.  “Kerry can shower in our bath; we have two,” she explained.

I was determined to protect the reputation of our family.  I had heard only fragments of our family history, but it was clear that my father’s family had its shameful secrets.  But in the US, we were eminently respectable, and I knew that if I was invited to shower, it was best that I took up the offer.  My nerves were humming with excitement for which I did not have a name, and I almost shamed myself with the lasciviousness with which I conducted my ablutions, to put it delicately.  I decided to go down to supper in a lovely dress I owned, which I had only worn for my junior prom in high school, but which was quite simple in design.  I had also decided not to wear any underwear, I don’t really know why.

There was a soft knock on my door, and I called out to whoever it was to come in.  It was Kerry, dressed only in an orange T shirt and boxer shorts.  She saw me in my elegant clothes, and drew a long breath.

“Wow … you’re all dressed up for dinner!”

“I …”  To be frank, I didn’t know how to reply without sounding either rude or condescending.  “I could change,” I offered.  “Are you, like, dressed for bed?”

“I kinda forgot you were here,” she admitted, blushing.  “I’ll go dress!  I’ll be right back!”

Before I could say anything, she was gone.  She came back shortly, dressed in a skirt and a knitted top, looking quite decent.  She did wear carpet slippers, which seemed reasonable; I was wearing a plain pear of slippers too.  She led the way to the stairs, and we went downstairs together.  The table was laid, and Dad and Kevin were seated, waiting for us.  Mrs Lynch smiled approval at Kerry and my dress, and waved us to two of the remaining seats, and brought out a simple meal of roast beef and potatoes, and sundry vegetables.

At home, surrounded by her family, Kerry was far more relaxed than I had seen her at College.  In a few moments, I had learned that she was in the choir, the band, the swim team, and was interested in music and athletics.  Her legs were no accident; she described how she had to wake at four in the morning every day, swim the prescribed number of laps, then clean up and come to classes, then get an early supper, and head off to band practice, then choir practice.  She evidently had few friends, and most of those were in choir, band, and swim team.

Kerry was her family favorite.  Dad, Mom and Kevin all doted on her.  Once she had given a full report of all that she was doing currently, they turned to me, naturally.

“Well,” I began, “I play in the orchestra, violin.”

“You do?  I tried out for orchestra, but I couldn’t get in!”

I shrugged.  I colored; you had to be fairly good to get in, but my conviction that Kerry was perfect in every way warred with this information.  “Maybe you were having a bad day,” I suggested.

“Uh uh,” she contradicted.  “I played my best!  Maybe I should have tried for viola.”

My eyes went wide.  I happened to know that we only had two violas, and they wanted a third.  “If you try out, you’re sure to get in,” I told her.  I explained that we were short.

“If you had brought your violin, you and Kerry could have played for us!”

I looked at Kerry, who was seated across from me, and we blushed together.  My heart was beating so hard, I thought I would die.  I could see Kerry was also feeling something equally strange.  I was suddenly acutely aware that under my dress, I was naked.  I crossed my legs, and pressed them tightly together.

Somehow we managed to finish supper, and Kerry came upstairs, into my room.  We seemed unable to avoid looking into each other’s eyes.  We sat side by side on the edge of my bed.

“We’re going to have fun,” she said softly to me.

I wanted to say: I’m so happy, I think I’m going to cry!  And it was as though she could hear my thoughts.  Her smile disappeared, and she gazed into my eyes, and I looked into her light blue ones, that seemed open right into her soul.  I struggled to smile, to lighten the mood.

“You must be tired,” Kerry said, sliding off the bed.  I slid off, and my dress was pulled up, accidentally, so that anyone could have seen all of my private parts, but Kerry had just glanced away, and I quickly slapped my skirts down over my thighs.  She turned round and only saw me smoothing my dress down, blushing bright red.

“Good night,” I mumbled, and desperately put my arms around her, and pulled her close.

It was heaven.  I never wanted to let go.  And Kerry hugged me back fiercely.  We held each other close, and began to rock to and fro at the same moment, and I held my cheek against her cheek, and I said, “Oh Kerry!”

It seemed like an hour passed this way, but it could have only been a minute.  Kerry held both my arms in her big hands, and looked at me, her eyes shining.

Presently  I was in bed.  It was higher off the ground than I was accustomed to, but the mattress was soft and comfortable.  It seemed of a piece with the entire family: warm, comfortable, and friendly.  I must have mumbled something when we parted, but my mind was not functioning properly.  I was still completely off balance, vibrating with all the feelings that were going through me.  It was as though I was afraid to let this girl out of my sight.

But I felt completely safe, as though nothing could harm me.  Though I felt greedy for her company, I didn’t feel that she would leave me all alone.  I felt almost physically that she was close by.

It was a long time until I could drop off to sleep, and I remember the dreams I had very clearly.  I was floating, face up, and I could will myself higher by simply tightening my body.  I did it rhythmically, and I would float up, and then float down, float higher on the rises, and falling less and less each time, until I was flying above the trees, vibrating with pleasure; somehow I could see below me, even though I was facing up, and I flew over the lakes, and up the faces of mountains, until I exploded with happiness.

I woke up, needing to go to the bathroom.  I opened my door, and the hallway was dimly lit, and I found the bathroom, and did my business, squinting my eyes against the glare of the light.  I was tempted to look in on Kerry, but I was afraid of being seen, so I reluctantly returned to my room, and tried to sleep again, but without success.

Soon it was morning, and I heard birds singing outside the window.  I felt fuzzy-headed, but I felt wonderful!  I slipped off the bed, and cautiously looked out my door.  I saw the grey light of an overcast morning through the hall window, and walked up to it, and saw a large pool.  And someone was slowly swimming: it was Kerry.

My heart began to race; I had to get a better view.  I went back in the visitors’ room, and found my contacts, put them on, and hurried back to the big window, and drew aside the curtains, and stared.

She wore just a one-piece deep red racing suit with a T-back, and she was swimming lengths steadily.  I watched hungrily, devouring the sight of her as she made an effortless turn, and continued to swim.  I slowly slipped downstairs, found the door that led out to the pool, and quietly took a seat a little distance away, where I could watch her without her noticing.

At this stage of things, I was acutely aware of her body: the sheer athleticism of the girl, the strength in her arms and her back, and most of all in her amazing legs, the beauty of her motion in the water.  I just knew enough ab out swimming that I could tell that her form wasn’t perfect, but … she swam effortlessly.  Everything else she did, she did with determination and careful attention.  But in the water, she was a sprite; it was her element.  For evermore I would imagine her in the water.

It was cool in the shadows in the early morning, and I pulled my nightie tight about me and looked down at my skinny, sallow-skinned legs, and briefly felt envious.  Steam had been rising from the water surface, but as the sun hit the walls, and was reflected into the water, Kerry seemed to glow.  She turned, and saw me, and her face burst into a smile of pure pleasure.

“Hi!” she called, in a high, sweet voice, a contrast to her usual calm, low tone.  I just waved, smiling back.  She immediately turned on her back, and I was afraid she would crash into the side of the pool, and hurried to the water and crouched down, and my worry must have shown on my face.  “What’s the matter?” she called, having flipped over to make the turn, and having resumed her backstroke.

“I thought you might hit the edge of the pool!”

“Oh no,” she explained, “I can see, like this, see?”  Obviously she could, so I relaxed.  “Just four more, now,” she said, concentrating on her counting, and speeding up.  A minute or so later, she clung to the gutter casually, blowing out water, and grinning her toothy grin at me.  “Wanna come on in?” she asked, gesturing with her hand.  I shook my head, blushing.  We’re flirting, I thought in amazement; it seemed so natural, and I had slipped into this new relationship so thoughtlessly.  But she was so utterly innocent, she doesn’t realize it yet.  She swam closer, and pulled herself out of the pool, and walked over to me.

“So, what do you think?”

“About what?”

“Well, about my stroke!  Am I swimming well?”

I blushed, as she continued to grin.  It was the sort of banter athletes used on their non-jock friends, and I was completely at a loss.  My friends were complete nobodies; awkward, shallow socialites.  I stared at her legs, as she wiped the water off her face with her hands.  Her legs were perfectly smooth, shaven free of her body hair, and my mouth was watering with my desire to bite her, to hold her legs, to crush myself against them.  I shook my head; I wasn’t going to get in the water in my sheer nightie.  I had to get in my room quick, and get decent.  She held out her hand to pull me up, and I took it.  We were close, and once again we were looking into each other’s eyes, and her smile softened.  She began to walk toward the house, and I walked with her.  I felt awkward, naked under the thin cotton nightgown I had worn.

She followed me to my room, and inside, and I realized that she was as mindlessly attracted to me as I was to her.  She was toweling herself dry, and once we got inside, she backed out again.  “You’ve got toothpaste and all that?”  I said I had.  “Ok, see you in a bit!”

When I got to the bathroom, Kerry was just coming out, and she held the door open for me, and I could see Kevin looking down the hall through his door, observing that the girls had taken possession of the toilet facilities.  “You’ll have to wait,” called out Kerry, and the little guy blushed and closed his door.  I hurried inside and began brushing my teeth.  I didn’t want to waste time showering; I’d shower at night.  I checked my face carefully; it was the same as always, except that my eyes seemed a little more … what’s the word?  Piercing sounds wrong; they just seemed to have more character.  My eyes look quite American, though some of my other features might be considered oriental.  My lips, and my mouth, generally, looked … actually quite acceptable.  Anyway, I thought, Kerry seemed to like me the way I was.  I carefully did my eyebrows –a departure from habit– and just barely touched up my lips.  I put my hair in a ponytail, which emphasized how long it was, and brought out the shape of my face, which was heart-shaped.  I smiled at myself, thinking how vain I was getting.

I hurried to change into light spring-time playclothes: shorts, crop-top and shirt, and canvas shoes, and went downstairs.  Only Mrs. Lynch was there.

“Hello, dear!  Did you sleep well?”  I replied that I certainly had.  “Sit down, and I’ll fix you whatever you’d like; pancakes?  Waffles?  Oatmeal?  Eggs?”

“Just waffles would be great, Mrs. Lynch!”

She got to work right away, and came to sit and talk to me.  “Kerry has a music class this morning.  You can go with her, or you can stay and play with Kevin!  The music teacher lives in a small condo, so there’s not a lot of space there.”

I was tempted to ask to go, but my brain was getting too clever.  You’ve got to give her a chance to miss you, it was saying.  I wanted her to have such a need to be with me that she couldn’t concentrate on her music!  I realized that I want to completely enslave my new friend Kerry, almost as badly as I wanted to be her slave; in all other respects, my brain was behaving very sluggishly.

“Maybe I’ll just stay here and read, or …”

Mrs. Lynch was nodding.  She said Kevin would be around, just in case I felt like doing something.  He gets bored, she said, and I’m glad you’re here to provide a little excitement!  I replied that I didn’t know how exciting I would be, and we got to batting the topic back and forth, until the subject of it clattered noisily downstairs, burst into the breakfast nook, and blushed, seeing me.  His smile made me warm; everyone in the family made me feel good.  I still remembered Kevin smiling at me from across the dinner table, after he had told us an interminable story about some game of roller hockey, and we had all kidded him about the details of it.  It was the only time Kerry had made a mischievous dig at anyone.  Clearly the two siblings were very close, and fond of each other.

Kerry came down soon afterwards, with her violin case in her arms.  She put it away, and smiled at me.  It was a mixture of a friendly smile for a favored guest, and a tinge of something more: a shared secret.  Just a tinge; nobody could have possibly noticed it except me!

“I gotta go to violin lessons,” she said.  “I’m gonna take my viola with me.”

“Good,” I said, wishing I had agreed to go to the lesson with her.  I so badly wanted to show off to her, now that I knew she could play.

“Will you be ok?”

“Yup.  I have a book to read, and I’ll be fine!”

“Are you sure?  You don’t want to be reading on your spring break, do you?”

“Oh, sure; I’ll read for a while, and then explore down your street, until you get back!”