“Men are all pricks, and the only reason we date them is because they have one.”

Megan had to show me how, of course, but putting the thing up inside me was less trauma than I expected. The little plastic tube went in; you pressed the plunger and pulled the tube out, leaving the little bundle as a cork. And it had a convenient string attached for when it came time to remove it.

“You’re giggling, aren’t you,” Megan accused.

I nodded. “Just remembering the last time I had something up there,” I said around a sour smile. “That thing…in the motel….”

“…the dildo,” she said (like I hadn’t known what it was called).

“…yeah… I almost lost my mind when you turned it on.”

Now she was giggling. “Oh, you meant the vibrator!” she said, maybe a bit too loud.

Beverly cackled from the doorway. We’d gone into a little den near the piano room (yes, they had a room just for pianos, two of them), but we hadn’t realized it had more than one door.

Joanna’s aunt, who couldn’t be more than five or ten years older than us, sipped her highball and chuckled. “Sounds like you girls know how to have fun.”

She winked at me, and I knew exactly what she meant by the gesture. Yikes!

“So, Megan, you and Gayle have gotten it on?”

“Call me ‘Pete’,” I protested, but she ignored me now, watching Megan the way a rattlesnake watches a prairie dog hole.

Megan looked at me. “Uh, yeah, I guess….” She trailed off, I wasn’t sure why. “But Pete was my boyfriend before….”

“Oh,” I grunted. Maybe trying to tell people what actually happened wasn’t a good idea?

“Before you found out Gayle was a girl?” Beverly took another sip of her drink.

“Yeah,” Megan drawled it out as if trying to think faster than the speed of sound.

“Call me ‘Pete’,” I said again, drawing Aunt Busybody’s attention to me and off Megan. “That’s what everyone calls me.”

The ice in her glass clicked against her teeth as Beverly drained the last bit of whatever liquid it had contained. “Even your family?” she asked.

“Well, no,” I admitted. “They call me Hunter.”

Beverly stared at her ice cubes for a moment, then looked up at me a little cross-eyed. Maybe she had started drinking well before we got to the party. I looked away, a little embarrassed, which was becoming a chronic condition for me.

“Hunter?” she said, making it a question and apparently shaking off a bit of blurriness. “Why the fuck would they call you ‘Hunter’?”

“It’s my middle name,” I said, just as Joanna barged in through the door that Megan and I had entered by.

“Petey!” she shouted. “C’mon, Number 17, shake your skinny booty. We’re waiting for you at the ol’ swimming hole!”

Megan and I took the invitation to get out of there, following Joanna back to the pool room. It was a stupid conversation, anyway.

The head cheerleader broke into laughter as I got closer. “Look!” she exclaimed. “Pete’s a Chatty Cathy, too!”

I glared at Joanna, and Megan rolled her eyes. She traded a glance with me, as if to ask if I needed that explained, but I had seen the commercials for the doll that talked when you pulled its string, so: No.

Joanna turned and sprinted ahead of us, almost but not quite tripping on the plastic rug placed near the French doors to deal with drippy people coming into the house. We followed more slowly.

Just before we got to the opening, something else occurred to me. “We’re naked,” I said to Megan.

She nodded and paused in the doorway to let me catch up. “.

“Everyone else is, too,” she noted.

It was true. Joanna made a flat dive into the pool just then, and several girls squealed. A quick count came to seven in the water, three more in lounge chairs under the skylight, plus Megan and me. A dozen skinny-dipping girls, most of them cheerleaders.

Would this have been a dream come true two weeks ago? Because it wasn’t now. I was looking at the other girls and… and… well, I felt something, but it wasn’t lust. They all seemed so comfortable just being who they were.

And hadn’t I just thought it? The other girls….

I guess what I felt was envy. Maybe a little jealous of their being so comfortable with who they were.

* * *

The water in the pool was as warm as August, with only a breath of humid air moving above it. Did they keep it warm all through the winter? It doesn’t get that cold in Friendly, but we have snow almost every January. It probably costs a fortune just to heat the big old house, let alone an indoor pool.

No business of mine, I decided.

I waded in at the shallow end, then dog-paddled out to deeper water. It all felt very odd, and I seemed to be more buoyant than I remembered being. I used to walk on the bottom of the pool because it took effort to float; now, no — I floated easily and felt nearly weightless in the water.

Parts of me wanted to float a little more than other parts, a bit of positive bounciness in the chest, as the water flowed around me when I or one of the girls moved. One of the other girls….

Everyone laughed and talked and pretty much ignored me. It was so very, very odd. I felt like the invisible boy — but to be truthful, I didn’t feel at all like a boy. How could I, naked in a pool with eight or nine cheerleaders, all of us with strings hanging from our…, our badge of acceptance into the Ice Cream Party Sisterhood.

If I wasn’t a boy, then I must be a girl, and as long as I got to play football, I guess I didn’t mind that much. Weird thought, but I was finding it easy to enjoy myself. There were squeals when someone splashed someone, but mostly it was laughing and talking and giggling.

“Look,” someone said. “Gayle’s a member of the itty-bitty-titty committee, too.”

I dove and swam underwater to escape that conversation, feeling my little breast buds being pushed up by the water. I didn’t need attention called to them. And wouldn’t anyone call me Petey anymore?

When I got my head above water again, Megan was beside me. “Having fun, Petey?” she asked.

I nodded. “Yeah, I am. I’m sorry for, um, being such a drama queen earlier.” I smiled to show that I got the irony of what I was saying.

She laughed. “You’re entitled,” she said. “In fact, for the next five days or so, you’re expected to be emotional, maybe irrational. It’s a crock, mostly, but it makes a good excuse.”

We both laughed at that. Megan laughed harder, pointing at me and accusing me of blushing. I probably was, but it was also a huge relief to discover I had a place where I was accepted that wasn’t a roomful of bloodthirsty jocks.

Joanna had somehow disappeared and came back into the poolroom wearing a towel to announce munchies and a movie in the big family room. A stack of huge towels was available.

Megan had shown me in the motel how to twist one into a sort of dress, and I did so, like everyone else, without much thinking about it. And with a lot of squealing and laughing, everybody went back inside the main house.

“Movie?” I whispered to Megan.

“Mr. Linklater,” she explained, “owns both movie houses in town and usually keeps a few prints of old movies around for emergency showings. And he has his own private 35mm projector at home.”

“Cool,” I agreed.

“So, what are we going to see?” someone asked while heaping goodies like wieners and cheese and veggie sticks on their plates.

“Tonight’s feature is Cactus Flower with Goldie Hawn and Walter Matthau,” Joanna announced in a fake television voice.

Several cheers broke out, but Beverly booed. “It’s a ten-year-old stinker,” she claimed.

Joanna ignored her, and soon the movie started, the big family room making a pretty good home theater.

Megan and I sat together and shared popcorn. I didn’t remember ever having seen Cactus Flower before, and the opening scenes with a suicide attempt almost made me get up and leave the room. Megan held my hand, though, and I got through that.

Afterward, we all sampled each other’s ice cream and discussed the movie.

The consensus seemed to be that Walter Matthau’s character was just the sort of lying, manipulative crud that most boyfriends turned out to be. I laughed along with everybody else at that judgment. Almost everyone had identified with Goldie Hawn’s character, the lied-to girlfriend. Even me, I discovered.

“Does anybody have a decent boyfriend?” someone asked. Several girls jumped to their boyfriends’ defense, despite having just bashed boys as a group. I noticed Joanna didn’t defend Jake. It was all pretty entertaining, with a lot of laughter.

“Let’s face it,” Beverly announced, “Men are all pricks, and the only reason we date them is because they have one.”

That got some boos and more laughter.

But Joanna called Megan out, “You’re the only one here who isn’t dating a guy,” she noted.

More laughs, and I felt my face go red.

“That isn’t true, you know,” Megan objected. “Petey isn’t dating a guy either.”

My face couldn’t get any hotter, but Joanna pounced.

“Is that so, Gayle?” she demanded. “You’ve never had a boyfriend? Never had a date with a boy?”

I don’t know what gave me away, but just then, I did think of Leland Frick inviting me to the movies on Sunday. Megan grinned at me sideways, and I frowned back at her.

“Uhhh?” I said.