"Are you OK?" Janey asked, noticing the way he was tilting his head around.

"Huh? Oh, yeah, I'm fine," Dave replied, hastily adjusting his vision and wishing he had something clever to say. Unfortunately, spellbinding one-liners had never been one of his strong points.

"You look like you've got a crick in your neck," she observed, leaning back on the branch and raising her legs in a see-sawing motion. Her dress crept up several inches, exposing a generous amount of Janey-flesh. Dave struggled to keep his gaze off her smooth thighs.

"No, nothing like that," he said, casually reeling his yo-yo up and down, "I just got the sun in my eyes." A complete lie of course; it was eleven in the morning and the sun was behind him, but Janey didn't seem to mind. She was too busy watching the yo-yo.

"Hey, that's cool" she said, straightening up, "can you do any tricks?"

"I can do Round the World," Dave answered, grateful for an opportunity to show off his virtuoso talents. Backing up several paces, he spun the yo-yo in a long, looping figure-eight around his shoulders. The whirling red disks streaked past half a dozen times before returning to his open palm.

"Wow!" Janey exclaimed, genuinely impressed, "what else can you do?"

"Well..." Dave began, then launched into a demonstration of his considerable repertoire, his face glowing with secret pleasure. The whole routine lasted nearly two minutes while he wove through the various configurations. He finished up with a very passable Triple-Lindy, then glanced up into the branches, silently hoping for a standing ovation. He wasn't disappointed; Janey was leaning forward on the crook-limb, staring down at him as if he was some kind of Houdini.

Better still, her skirt had inched all the way to the top of her thighs.

"That's really good, Dave!" she applauded, shifting her bottom to a more comfortable position, "I got a yo-yo at home, but I can't do anything like that."

Dave opened his mouth to wave off her praise – hey, no big deal, I'm just a born genius, you know how it is – it but the words never made it past the back of his throat. In adjusting her center of balance, Janey had splayed open her thighs. Dave could see clear up to her silky white gusset. He stood goggle-eyed for several seconds, his mind dissolving into a mass of babbing whitenoise. Like most boys of twelve, he could be reduced to a blithering idiot by the slightest flash of panty.

"It's not that difficult," he answered, finally recovering his voice, "just takes a bit of practice." It was true enough; all you needed was a quick wrist and eighteen hours a day.

He risked another upward glance and was slightly disappointed to discover he couldn't see up her dress any more. She'd moved further down the branch, in towards the middle, and her skirt had slid down with her. Halfway to the knees, hiding just about everything. Well, he supposed it served him right for trying to sneak at peak at a girl's underwear. Except she wasn't exactly a girl, was she? He looked off down the road, wondering what he'd been thinking.

"Maybe you can teach me," Janey said, looking down at him from the middle of the bough, her pretty face ringed by a curly blond halo.

"Well, sure," Dave replied with a good-natured shrug. Why not? She wasn't bad company, now that he was getting to know her a little. Might even be fun to hang out with; they had a lot of friends in common, come to think of it. Strangely, he couldn't help wishing she'd show him a little more of her underwear – just out of curiosity, mind you. He was interested to know what they looked like; if they were any different to what a real girl wore under her skirt (unknown to Dave, practically every one of his friends wondered the same thing, though none of them would have dared admit to it).

Less than one second later, Dave's unspoken query was answered – quite abruptly – and to his most profound amazement.

"Good!" Janey laughed, tipping backwards over the branch. Hooking her knees over the bough, she suddenly swung upside down, with her long golden hair sweeping towards the ground. Her bright red sundress flopped inside out, revealing her shiny white panties to Dave's astonished gaze. His pupils widened in automatic reaction. For a moment, he honestly thought his heart was going to stall in mid-beat. It was as if she'd been reading his mind.

"So where you going now?" she asked, oscillating back and forth above the sidewalk.

"Memorial Park," Dave answered after an indescribably long pause. His eyes skittered over Janey's underwear recording every stitch, fold and wrinkle. They were plain nylon briefs, the kind that came up to the belly button, but he was utterly mesmerized by the spectacle. It wasn't the first time he'd seen a girl's panties, but he couldn't recall ever being this close before. They sort of glittered in the morning sunlight, rippling like liquid silver.

"Can I come too?"

"Okay," Dave answered without a moment's hesitation. At this point, he would have agreed to a frontal lobotomy if she'd suggested it with her skirt over her head. He stood in a slack-jawed fugue, watching the dress creep gradually south. It had no real waistline; nothing to hold it onto her body. Her panties had a tiny red trim around the legs, and there were seams running down the sides. He had no idea that girls' undies were so ... pretty. The material was sheer, slick, and almost translucent. If he ran his fingertips over them, they'd probably feel as smooth as glass. There wasn't so much as a hint of her natural sex; not a bump, not a bulge, not a single –

"Hey, watch this," Janey said, apropos of nothing.

Startled out of his panty-watching reveries, Dave jumped as if caught with his fingers in Old Granny Fester's apple pie. He could feel his cheeks burning with a sort of warm, fluid heat, and it wasn't just embarrassment. He was embarrassed, no sense in denying that, but he was also excited too. As excited as the day he'd played spin the bottle with Rhonda and Sherry, the Makepeace twins. No, the hell with that -- he was more excited than he'd ever felt in his life. What was going on here?

"Step back a little," Janey chirped from beneath the inside lining, "give me some room."

Realizing what she was planning to do, Dave backed up a few feet, realizing that the curtain was about to come down. Well, he supposed couldn't expect her to just sit there hanging upside-down all day (tempting thought the thought was). Nothing lasts forever, as his Mom was fond of saying. And anyway, maybe she'd do it again sometime soon. Like maybe in ten minutes, down on Jungle Gym at Memorial Park.

Arching her back, Janey swung forward with her arms outstretched like a gymnast. The branch dipped as she gained momentum. Dave's eyes widened to the size of dinner plates: her dress was flipping inside out; peeling back almost as far as her shoulders. For one heart-stopping instant, literally everything she had was on display: her flimsy little panties, her pale, alabaster tummy, her sheer white training bra. The frock whipped out over her head, held on by no more than a prayer. Dave thought it was going to fly straight off her body. Janey paused at the height of her arc –

then dropped off the branch in a perfect two-point dismount.

Face beaming with girlish mischief, she landed lightly on the grass beside the footpath, the frock still rucked up around her throat. David's heart was pounding like a trip hammer. He'd never seen a girl this undressed before. It was as if she was standing in the street wearing nothing but her bra and panties. He noticed for the first time that she was wearing frilly white socks and shiny black shoes – the ones with the thin black straps around the ankles.

"AWE-some," he said, totally flabbergasted by the girl's gymnastic prowess (to say nothing of the impromptu lingerie parade).

"I'm on the gym team at school," she replied with a radiant smile, then began working the dress down her torso. She did it without a speck of self-consciousness, oblivious of his wandering stare. When he thought of it, she'd been totally unaware of his attention from the very start. It wasn't like she was showing off or anything – it just never occurred to her that she was doing anything unusual. She was probably like this with all of her friends. Even now, she was chattering away in her warbling canary's voice, her large blue eyes glittering with innocent pleasure. Dave found that he was starting to like her.

Having returned the frock to its normal position, Janey straightened her hair with unconscious precision. She really was very pretty, now that he had a chance to study her face. Dave wondered why he'd never noticed that before; he'd known her for six years, three of them as a girl. Maybe it was because he'd never bothered to look twice 'til now. Funny, that.

"Who're you meeting at the park?" she asked with that same endearing naivety. She had dimples at the corners of her mouth.

"Aww, just some of the kids from Six-B," he replied, enjoying the way the breeze inflating her dress like a balloon. Cued by some obscure telepathic ability known only to children, they started walking down the avenue. Vast, lazy clouds drifted by overhead, dwarfed by a perfect blue sky. Dave spun his yo-yo on the end of its leash, hardly aware of what he was doing.

"What're you-all planning to do down there?" she inquired, turning those neon-blue eyes in his direction.

"Play tag over in the playground," he answered, eyes wandering down to her legs, hoping her skirt would inflate around her waist again, "tag, then maybe a game of rounders, if Georgie Stevens brings his bat and ball."

"Any girls down there?"

"Yeah, Katie Prescott and some of her friends."

Katie Prescott was Six-B's resident tomboy and perennial terror of Memorial Park. Like most of his buddies, Dave was somewhat in awe of Katie's devastating right hook and tended to walk on eggshells around her. It suddenly occurred to Dave how different Janey was to Hurricane Kate and her friends: sweeter, warmer. More... gentle, if that was the right word.

"You guys ever play kiss-chase?" Janey asked, a faint smile flitting over her rosebud lips.

"Well..." Dave stammered, wondering how he was going to answer that particular question. He stared down the green corridor, recalling the way her pants had clung to her pert, round bottom. The whole encounter was etched into his memory, from his first upward glance to that breath-taking final dismount. Every word, every sound, every detail; right down to the scent of the grass and the murmur of the wind through the leaves.

He looked over at his pretty blond friend, suddenly aware that his life had changed. Everything had altered in some silent, understated way only a boy his age would have noticed. He couldn't have put it into words, couldn't have explained it to anyone, not even to his mother, who seemed to understand everything. If he'd been a little older – or perhaps a little younger – he might have felt the hand of fate on his shoulder, pushing him towards an as yet unseen future. But being precisely twelve years old, he felt nothing on his shoulder except the clear May sunlight. He was simply a boy enjoying the last summer of his childhood, and the world was beginning to turn just a little faster.

The morning wheeled on towards a perfect spring day.