The year is 1994. in anticlimatic

I’m sharing a king size bed with my best friend Tyler at his house at the end of Main. The bed fills the room. A large dresser at the foot of it has a small box TV with a Sega Genesis plugged into it. The house is old. Lath and plaster, high ceilings, wood floors. Loud boxy wooden windows. His parents keep a fairly cluttered, but comfortable home. Both smoke indoors, which is not a big deal to anyone. The bedrooms are upstairs, and on the upstairs landing is a small room with an antique makeup mirror and bench next to a small old window.

It’s 1994, and it’s June. I can’t recall a brighter sun. Tyler and I pedal around town on our bicycles. We fish the docks. We swim in wishing wells to collect coins for candy. Sometime there are more of us. Sometimes we wander the swamps of our youth, breaking sticks and snatching frogs. On brave days we go to the beach to spend time with the upper echelon of our pubescent peers. Specifically- girls. Girls which we had suddenly all noticed around the same time, which incidentally was about the same time about half of all the girls we knew suddenly acquired curves. The ladies who arrived early to that party achieved popularity instantly, by default. Some would manage to hold it long after it was warranted by sheer force, even after being well outshone by late bloomers.

We lads didn’t know what to do with girls, of course, so we would just hang around them. Quietly going insane with unsatisfied instinctual impulses. At night when we would retreat to tree forts and evening crickets, we would tell tall tales about our chance encounters with the creatures. Most of them complete fabrications, but the level of truth was less important than the imagery the tales would conjure in our imaginations- where French kissing was a mysterious coordinated dance of the tongues, and breasts felt just like water balloons filled with sand.