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Show Maloelap in the summer of 1979. Her house sits across from mine, back away from the street as if in a hollow. She is the only girl my age on our street, and our friendship is formed initially by proximity. Our vision is poor, so we both wear eyeglasses with the round plastic frames sold at the Navy Exchange. We are also the same height. The similarities end there, however. Stacy's face is dotted with freckles that become more prominent in the sun, and she loves bad boys-hence her Han Solo infatuation-while I prefer the sweet ones. I am a painfully good girl, rewarded for my responsibility, who rarely disobeys and always comes home on time. I want to choose the good boys, even though I wonder about those dark haired ones, those that Stacy and most of my peers choose, those who test the boundaries and still get the girl. Maybe because she attends public school while I am in a private one, or maybe because she has an older cousin named Kari who writes long letters from the mainland filled with adult details, or perhaps because her mother is a nurse and tells her things that I only read about in the racy novels like Looking for Mr. Goodbar that Steven Slater and Robert Hunter pass to me beneath our desks during history class, Stacy knows more about the world than I do. When we read in a Playboy found in the bushes near the park about a meeting in a van on the side of the road that involves honey, it is Stacy who explains about tongues. And for these reasons I am drawn to her, even as she makes me feel uneasy. When she suggests we set a teeter totter record, I agree. In fact, when Stacy suggests anything I agree. She seems to be at the center of something that I can only glimpse. Up and down we go for half an hour, neighborhood kids stopping by to see how 134 |