Becca's pubic hair and right tit.

The first time we did it, Mattie had just seen Sam’s older sister’s right tit while she changed into her bathing suit in the upstairs yellow linoleum bathroom of Sam’s suburban home. We were twelve and it was a few months after Mat’s mother died and we all put on suits and our fathers taught us how to tie our ties for the funeral. Mat was spending the hours after school swimming and eating afternoon snacks at Sam’s house until his dad came home from the mill, and he was still learning the limits of how much he could get away with through being suddenly motherless. In this case, it was hiding behind the door of the bathroom while Sam’s sister Becca changed. Later, it would be the weed paraphernalia going through the wash and coming home after curfew with a black eye, but at this time voyeurism in hopes of seeing some secret expanse of skin was enough. Becca caught him of course, and Mat was scolded but the pity for his motherless future saved him from anything more than a ‘you should know better but we’ll all just laugh it off because if you don’t know better by now you never will because your mother bled out, crushed beneath a steering column in a cold steady rain’.

As twelve year olds, we wanted to fuck everything that moved. There were the young girls in plaid dresses and pigtails at school, all of whom we were all too embarrassed to admit we liked. There was the jogger from Josh’s neighborhood with the big tits and fluorescent colored tank-tops. There was Miss Holtz, the student teacher who wore khaki skirts and put her hands on our head when counting us off into teams for recess. We were never much interested in the movie or pop stars–at twelve, we knew little of the fullness and emptiness of love, but we knew enough to know a tit in the flesh and blood was better than one pixelated on the tv screen or printed page. From the half dozen streets that made up our world, we populated a veritable pantheon of goddesses with schoolmates and mothers and strangers and a top them all sat Sam’s sister, Becca. She was tall and had long curly blond hair and wore earrings and denim skirts and we didn't know any better than to worship her as beautiful. She was distant but always smiled at us when no one was looking. She was at the heart of all of our innocent adolescent lust. And so, Mat’s encounter with her teenaged breast was as momentous occasion as anything since the funeral. We treated it as such, and clamored out his bedroom window onto Mat’s rooftop to hear the story in full.

We laid on the slanted shingles and tucked our sweatshirts beneath our heads will we watched the suburban moon rise. Once settled, Josh and I held our breath as Mat described, in detail, Becca’s pubic hair. I didn’t believe he really saw it, but still high-fived him and worshipped him and listened enraptured as he used elementary vocabulary to describe the soft brown curls of hair and the poetic swell of a teenage breast being tucked into a green one piece. As Mat struggled to find those first words for the feelings we’d spend the rest of our lives craving and paying for, we all hid our growing excitement, crossing and recrossing our skinny hairless legs.