The following Thursday, Gina called me and asked me to go for a walk with her after school. I’d never spent time with her alone before, but it seemed like a simple request so I agreed to it.

We met a couple of blocks from my house and she led the way. I was still dressed in my school blouse and skirt. Even though it was a mild day, I had panty-hose on, which I often found uncomfortable in such weather. However, I did have a pair of bright blue panties on underneath, which I knew would show through the nylon nicely even though only I knew about it.

Fetching, that’s what I’d call it. Of course, there was no one I was trying to attract that way, but I was still very aware of the hidden effect under my clothes. On days with outfits like that beneath my skirt, I felt sexy anyway.

It turned out that it would be Gina who would shortly see what I had to offer with my underwear, but it took a little while for that to develop.

She had dressed very casually in jeans for her school day, and she was unusually quiet without any of her usual bluster. We went along Gun Hill Road where the Third Avenue El branched off for its former run downtown. It had closed the month before, and only a work train passed coming uptown with some salvaged signal equipment.

She briefly noted, “I thought they were going to replace this thing with something new.”

By then I was getting an idea of how things really worked in New York. “That probably isn’t going to happen in our lifetimes. They don’t have the money for it.”

We went down a walk next to the parkway, and then down another level to two tunnels that passed under the highway itself. The river passed through there too. We emerged on a path that went through a wooded area, a part of Bronx Park. We still hardly said anything, although I had already guessed that she had some plan for me. It would likely be something sexual I knew, but I didn’t know how far she would go with it.

“Come on over here. There is a place for us to sit.” It was a fairly big rock sticking out of the ground, but it was perfectly shaped to be a two-person bench. It was far enough from the path that it had a pastoral feel as the afternoon sun shone on us.

She was sitting to my left, and she put her right hand on my bare arm. Immediately I thought of some irrelevant comment to distract us. “Do you think this rock is left over from the glaciers?”

“Naw, look, it was a drill hole through it.” The hole was less than an inch in diameter, and it had been used to pack dynamite to blow it loose from the bedrock. “It’s probably left over from the construction of the highway.” Then she held my chin in her hand and turned my face to her. “You liked it when I kissed you on Sunday, didn’t you?”

Quietly, I said, “All right, well I did like it. Didn’t I admit to that?” For a moment, I again had the feeling that I didn’t know what she was capable of. Does this person know how to set boundaries for herself? Do I really know her as well as I have imagined?

When it came to kissing, she didn’t restrain herself. Without telling me what she was going to do, she put her arms around my torso and pulled me closer, She kissed me all over my face, including my eyelids, and then she was on my mouth. I liked it even though her quick assertiveness overwhelmed me at first.

At one point she stuck her tongue into my ear and I giggled. “Hey, that tickles.”

She said softly to me, “Chloe, I’m so fond of you.”

I used my normal voice. “Well, you know that I’m fond of you too, but still . . .”

She was still being strangely over-aggressive with me. Her fingers began to unbutton the buttons on my blouse. “Hey, don’t do that. Not right here in the park.”

“I’ll be discreet, I promise.” I felt unable to resist her, partially because she seemed to have some authority over me and also because I was curious about what she’d do next. It was notable how quickly she got her hands behind me and undid the snaps on my bra. She pulled that up and began to rub the nipples on my small breasts.

No one had ever done that before. It felt very good, I couldn’t deny that, and I let her continue her fondling of me. She got giggly too as she pulled my skirt up. “Oh, what nice panties you have. Robin’s egg blue I’d call them.”

I had trouble seeing all that as truly serious. For a few moments I chose to interpret her moves as some kind of harmless fooling around – hi-jinks seemed to be the correct word – rather than a serious attempt at seduction. I didn’t know how she’d accomplish that in such a public place, but on another level, she was taking liberties with me that I would never let a guy have at that stage.

Inevitably she took it too far. She got her right hand into the back of my skirt and slipped it under my stockings and underwear. Her hand was now on the bare flesh of my backside, and that was too much.

I pulled her arm away and jumped to the side. “Gina, stop that. You can’t do that to me here.”

She seemed to be in some kind of fugue state. “I did touch Jenny a lot more intimately than that.”

Some anger was coming out of me by then. “That was entirely different; it was in a private place, not a park.” I was upset enough that I was shaking, almost in fear.

“Well, we could go to Club Mangano right now and finish what we started here.”

“No, we are not! For one thing, I want to go on proper dates with you first.”

I don’t know how I came up with that, but Gina found it funny. “What, you want to go steady with me or something?”

“You went too far, and you know it.” I folded my arms in front of my chest. Maybe I had changed recently because I was now willing to defy her when she became manipulative. I knew she was capable of that.

She must have finally sensed the state I was in because she became apologetic. “I’m sorry, you know how impulsive I can get. We’re still friends, aren’t we?”

There was a side of me that was more concerned with other people’s feelings more than my own, and I hastened to reassure her. “Of course, we’re still friends.” I thought of a way to make amends. “The stairs to 204th Street are right over here. Let’s go to a coffee shop and have something together.”

*******

It wasn’t until we had been at a table for a few minutes that we were able to deal with each other in a more usual way. I decided to have the first words there. I was feeling better and I was able to analyze the situation.

My first comment was tongue-in-cheek. “I guess we had our first fight.” But then I transitioned to being more serious. “It’s struck me that we, I mean all three of us, have blown the lid off of some powerful feelings and we don’t know how to handle that yet.”

She still seemed reluctant to answer me, so I took one of her hands in mine and said. “You know I’m still your friend. But part of all this has been a – well, it’s more than an experiment. We have gotten pretty serious with all this and maybe we didn’t realize it.” Then I added, “I have to know, how did you figure out what you wanted from me in the basement? Or from Jenny, for that matter?”

She paused for a moment, and then she told me. “I’ve seen photos of it, what women do with each other, in magazines. You must have an idea of what happens when they are, as I’d put it, getting it on.” Then she decided to reveal more. “There are also these things called strap-ons.”

I had never heard that term before. “What are those?”

“They are sort of like dildos – oh, never mind, it’s not that important.” I remembered that she was supposed to explain some things to me, but she never had.

In just a few days I had become more prepared to challenge her. I was calm but quite forceful as I said what was on my mind. “First of all, where are you getting these magazines from?” I doubted she had just walked into some store downtown and bought them. “Also, if you saw scenes of lesbian action, you must have thought you could just try them out on me.”

From her expression, I knew I had hit some key points. “Never mind where I got them; I’m not going to tell you right now. Also, we have been rather uninhibited recently in our ways of dealing with each other.”

I knew what I had to say. “Kissing me is one thing. But you don’t have the right to put your hands in my bra or pants without telling me first what you are going to do.” Intuitively, I knew this was a good lesson for us to learn because no one was offering us any guidance on how to behave in sexual situations. We had to figure it out for ourselves.

She looked a bit depressed, but she still tried to make light of it. “Yeah, what do they call guys who do that? Handsy? Fresh is a bit out-of-date now.” Then, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you.”

The role of peacemaker was one I was good at. I used two of my hands to hold one of hers. “That’s all right, I’m not really mad at you. It’s just that we need to clarify things a bit first.” It seemed to go without saying that public sex in the middle of the afternoon wasn’t a good idea. I continued, “I know the three of us have to make this up as we go along. There’s no one to help us with this.” Then I noticed something. I smiled to show that I was amused. “My bra is still open and it’s just dangling there. Fortunately, my tits are pretty small, so no one will notice.”

Gina smiled too, but I could see that she was now uncomfortable in my presence. Then I used one of her own tactics, which was to be daring and further sexualize the conversation. “You’ve thought a lot about me when you are alone, haven’t you?”

That surprised her a bit. “Do you mean . . .”

“You know what I mean. I admit, I’ve thought about you too, a lot in the last couple of days.”

“I’m not sure why you’ve brought this up.”

“Because, honey, you brought it up when you started touching me.” That sounded harsher than I had intended.

She began a roundabout explanation of herself. “Usually when you have fantasies about somebody, they are completely unobtainable. But you and Jenny are very close to me, we’ve seen each other’s bodies. It’s a little hard to deal with that kind of intimacy.”

I didn’t want to continue the conversation, but neither did I want to hurt her feelings more than I had to. “Let’s just see how things develop. Take it slow, we are all living right here in this neighborhood.” Then I suddenly changed the subject. “You know who I imagined being recently? Marilyn Monroe.”

She was interested in that. “Really? Which movie.”

“Well, The Seven Year Itch is one.” It had been on TV, cut up by a lot of commercials. “The way she’s swinging her hips at the beginning, it looks like she’s going to knock the banister right off the stairs.”

“I like how she tells him that she keeps her drawers in the freezer. She’s playing that guy through the whole thing, and he’s too besotted to notice it.”

I asked, “So who would you like to be, I mean celebrity-wise?”

“I know who, Faye Dunaway.”

“Hah, if you had a submachine gun, it would be bigger than you are.”

“I don’t want to shoot people. But I would like to drive a getaway car really fast. What makes did they have back then?”

“Clyde liked Fords, from what I understand.”

Neither of us had seen that movie although it was periodically shown at revival theaters. But it was R-rated and both of us looked a bit young to pass for seventeen. I wished we could get somebody to be our “guardian” and get us into such movies. Both Gina and Jenny had sisters, but they were younger than they were. But that movie had been so influential that there had been a ton of publicity revealing what was in it.

So we relaxed as we talked about movies – actors saying lines written by other people. We were young enough to go into a trance when we were at a theater. The magic of films was that the audience could suspend disbelief and believe on some level that they were seeing something real.   

At one point, Gina asked me. “Aren’t you supposed to have dinner soon? Meanwhile, you’re eating a sandwich right here.”

“I’ll call them in a moment. They’ve met you and Jenny and they think very highly of both of you. I can get away with this once in a while.”

 “Well, I can be very charming as you know.”

****** 

Yet it wasn’t possible to dismiss Gina’s actions so easily. The memory of her and what she had done hit me hard that evening when I was sitting at my desk doing my homework. I knew that she had made a standing offer to me that could be redeemed any time I wanted. I was glad that I hadn’t done it that day, but it struck me that I would accept her sooner or later.

I felt very shaky. That was difficult to accept how rapidly everything had changed. A week earlier I had been a virgin with little prospects of getting a lover, and I accepted that as normal for my age and situation. Now, somebody had appeared and made an explicit proposal.

The fact that it was another woman was less important than I had expected. We could go to Club Mangano right now and finish what we started here. That was a big, life-changing event, and I wasn’t prepared to follow through on it yet. But it was still arousing. I imagined Gina’s dark hair and intense eyes and her compact body. I knew I’d be fantasizing about her that evening.

Just before going to my room, I slipped into the bathroom and took the big bath brush. I knew I’d need it that night. I figured that I could return it sometime before morning and no one would be the wiser. After all, Chloe is such a sweet, nice girl that she’d never thrust brush handles into herself or hump the arms of couches.

As I sat against my headboard, I conjured up a more elaborate scene than usual. Gina was indeed something like Bonnie Parker, the real one. Parker didn’t look much like Gina, but she was only four-foot-eleven, several inches shorter than my friend. She was also, based on the photos I had seen of her, a rather snazzy dresser. There was even a beret at times like Dunaway had in the movie.

For myself, I took the role of Blanche Barrow, Buck’s wife, although she didn’t look like me either. Yet she was a rather attractive young woman when she was with the gang.

An important part was the setting, the back seat of a 1930’s car parked in – Oklahoma, Missouri, who knows? I was wearing a garter and straps to hold up my nylons, as I assumed that was the usual get-up that women wore at the time.

I was sprawled out on the back seat cushion with my skirt up, my drawers off, and my legs splayed wide. Gina was kneeling on the floor with her face pressed against my crotch. Her lips and tongue probed my most sensitive places. I whispered, “Oh Gina, what you are doing is so nice, I love you so much.”

When I climaxed it was so intense that I made a bigger fuss than I should have. I spread my legs wide and then clamped them on the brush handle. It felt like my behind was rolling on the mattress. I couldn’t help but gasp a couple of times despite my efforts to stifle any sounds.

Afterwards, I lay there and pondered Gina. The first thing I had to do was get a look at whatever magazines she was talking about. Where she got these publications was her own business. Then I also had to find out what she had been doing with Jenny, if anything. One of them would have to volunteer the information I thought.

I realized that my kiss with Gina on Sunday had been my first kiss ever. Somehow I discounted that as an aberration, not the turning point it really was.

It seemed like I was facing a lot of adult issues at the age of sixteen that I wasn’t prepared to deal with. It seemed inevitable that Gina and I would be falling into each other’s arms, sooner or later.

*****

I had also never spent any time alone with Jenny, but I decided to go on a “date” with her that Sunday. It felt like a date, not a mere outing of two friends.

Jenny was very relaxed and low-key that day, which was a contrast to the drama that Gina could generate. We saw Soylent Green at the RKO Fordham, which may seem like an odd choice for us but it was rated PG. We weren’t challenged when buying tickets.

For lunch, we went to a little burger place right next to the theater. At one point I asked what the PG rating really meant. “How do you define Parental Guidance?”

She was capable of a very dirty joke at times. She whispered, “It’s like, ‘Mommy, why is that lady kissing that man’s penis?’ ”

I laughed at that, but I couldn’t come up with a good comeback. Finally, I said, “Hardly anything except pure porn is rated X because it’s box office poison. You know, you’re pretty tall. You could pretend to be my sister or cousin and we could see if you could get me into an R-rated movie.”

“I wonder if they would check my credentials then. Then they'd find out that I was also sixteen and, well, that would be it.” Then she caught me unaware. “I haven’t heard from Gina since Friday. Does she know where we went today?”

A good yet completely innocent question. I just looked at her, frowning probably, and tried to formulate an answer. I’m sure she caught on that there was more going on than she knew about. But she was very sensitive to other people’s feelings and she didn’t press the issue.

“It’s not important, I was just asking.” Then she immediately asked some questions about the movie we had just seen. She was very good at noticing details that I would miss in such a production.

However, after that lunch even more was different for me. Now I had another adult problem – namely Jenny – that strained the capabilities of someone my age. It was just starting to develop, but I now had another romantic/sexual secret that I did not know how to handle.  

****

The next weekend was Memorial Day. The three of us wanted to go someplace near the water. We decided against swimming because the ocean was still quite cold at that time of the year. The air temperature was forecast to be in the high eighties, however.

Orchard Beach was voted down because there wasn’t much to do there if one wasn’t swimming. I came up with the idea of Coney Island, where I hadn’t been since going with my parents at age eleven.

Gina said, “Have you seen what a dump that place has become? It must have peaked about sixty years ago.”

The Rockaways had an amusement park called Playland, and we decided on that. There were benches there too if we wanted to look at the ocean for a while. It was an extremely long trip by public transit, but we figured that would be part of the adventure.

I had green shorts that day. Not short-shorts, I couldn’t imagine myself in those. Gina had loose-fitting blue trousers, and Jenny had her denim skirt. We all had sneakers so we could do some walking if necessary.

Maintenance on the subways back then was starting to go downhill. Except for the newest cars, they were extremely noisy when the windows and end doors were open during warm weather. The 2 train had a particularly bad collection of rattletrap cars. When we changed for the A at 59th Street, that line had bigger, longer, and even louder equipment.

The best part of the trip was when the train emerged from the tunnel and crossed a couple of miles of trestles and bridges over Jamaica Bay. The subway that went to sea. We stood between the cars and enjoyed the seashore breezes.

It seemed like the three of us had temporarily gone back to the more innocent days of just a few weeks earlier. We said nothing about the sexual complications that had emerged. Instead, we were just high school students enjoying the holiday and each other’s company.

Gina had never been on the route before, and she asked, “Why did they even build this in the first place? Who comes out here in the winter?”

Jenny knew. “The Long Island Rail Road originally had it, and of course, they lost money on it.”

Playland was compactly fit into a single square block. I had always hated “thrill rides,” which often meant a roller coaster. Those had been among the worst, although I had endured rides on even wilder contraptions at various locations. By 1973, carousels were about as far as I cared to venture into the world of mechanical fun.

Gina was hyped to go on the Rockaway coaster, which was named the Atom Smasher. The “Chloe Smasher” seemed more apt. She asked me, “What’s the problem? Are you really scared of these things?”

“You bet I am. It’s like going through a series of fatal accidents and surviving all of them.”

“That’s the point of riding on them.”

Somehow she persuaded me to try it one more time, as if it was a phobia to be overcome. Jenny and I sat about halfway back, while Gina of course had to be at the very front. Just before we started, she looked back and waved at us.

The first step was the slow climb up the first incline. It seemed so calm to be pulled up seven stories, but I knew what was coming. As always, I closed my eyes as we crested the summit.

I couldn’t see the first drop, but I certainly felt it. It was like being in a free fall until the bottom, where my body was slammed into the wooden seat. Even though I was strapped in, I still grasped the front bar as if my life depended on it. I didn’t scream, but I moaned I’d call it on those rides. I felt myself being shoved back and forth on the curves, and up and down on the hills.

Periodically, I dared open my eyes. I saw that crazy chick Gina waving her arms in the air. Meanwhile, girders were passing over my head, and the direction of the train made it seem like I could be decapitated by any of them. It was time to close my eyes again.

At the end, I shakily got out of the car. I never puked after such experiences; maybe I was too proud.

Gina came over and laughed at me. “So, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“I feel like I’ve escaped death.”

“Come on, this is a lot safer than driving on the highway.”

She hadn’t had enough, and she had to ride the Atom Smasher twice more that day.

*****

Afterward, we sat on a boardwalk bench and looked at the Atlantic. Gina soon became too restless staying still, so she suggested that we wade in the surf – just up to our calves, she said.

I wanted to know, “What are we going to do with our shoes?”

“Just leave them on the sand; I don’t think anybody is going to snatch sneakers.”

Jenny said, “Maybe you can get away with that at Jones Beach, but not here.” That was at a state park out in Nassau County, and it was difficult to reach by public transit. “With the bags Chloe and I have, we can stow them in there.”

We felt like kids again as we splashed in the shallowest part of the Atlantic. Of course, we misjudged the surf at times, and we mock-screamed when the water came up high enough to wet Gina’s rolled-up pants and the hem of Jenny’s skirt.

When we were getting ready to leave, the topic of where we could go for real swimming came up. Orchard Beach in the northeast Bronx could be reached by a local bus, and we had all been there. It had nice bathhouses for changing, but it was on Long Island Sound and there was no surf.

I liked Jones Beach, an even more elaborate and beautiful Robert Moses creation with two huge swimming pools. My dad had a car, so I was the only one of us familiar with it.

Gina was not deterred. “We can take the Long Island Rail Road and then a bus.”

I was skeptical. “That’s a long trip. Do you realize how long it took just to get here?” I didn’t keep track, but it was well over two hours.

“The LIRR is pretty fast. We’ll look at the schedules and I bet it’s not as bad as you think.”

In the end, we decided to try it at least once and see how it went. Then, Gina hinted at something slightly provocative. “I want to see what kind of bathing suits we all have. No, no, don’t tell me; I want to be surprised.” I must have given her a sharp look because she smiled and winked at me. She said, “Ladies, we’re going to look better than mermaids when we come out of that bathhouse. I’m looking forward to that moment.”