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Show come to the ground, I let the teeter totter touch the red dirt before pushing off with my legs. In the deepening night, I can no longer see Stacy at the other end but imagine her high in the air, held aloft only by my weight. We never make it very long, though we will attempt the teeter totter record several times that summer, as well as the swing record and the tree sitting record. Within a few hours, we give up and go home. The night has grown too cool, the shadows too frightening, and Stacy has no more stories to tell. I felt alive when I was with Stacy, my first real friend. My memories of that first year in Hawaii, my fourth grade year, the year before Karen moved to Maloelap and then Christine and best friends were traded along with Star Wars cards, are some of the most vivid of my life. I always wanted to be with Stacy, would wait on summer mornings until the clock read 9AM, the earliest hour my mother felt we should be allowed to bother the neighbors. Every weekend, I begged my parents to invite the Kaups to the beach with us and threw a fit if they decided it was going to be a "family day." Often a whole day at the beach wasn't enough. Stacy and I would sometimes spend hours in the bathtub after we got home, bathing suits still on, sand gritty at the bottom of the tub, diving our Barbies from the soap dish, as the skin on our fingers grew white. Then I would beg my mother to let Stacy spend the night. Together we created a spy club, tape recording conversations in the living room and watching Scott and his friends through the bushes; we developed elaborate dance routines to The Village People and Abba, momentarily forgetting that we were supposed to like rock and despise disco; draping a sheet across the living room, we staged plays and invited the neighborhood kids to attend for a quarter; and we spent hours mooning 136 |