After we finished the first 2-liter bottle of Coke, my teeth felt like sea glass. My tongue was a sandpaper slug, and it hurt a little. Too much sugar. Mom said no soda in the house, I wasn’t used to it. I wasn’t used to eating icing straight from the tub either, or watching R-rated movies. Mom said nine’s too young for R-rated movies. Michelle’s mom didn’t seem to say much, though. She liked to sit out on the deck and smoke cigarettes, which Dad said were really bad, like drugs, and she would drink lots of yellow drinks with ice cubes in them and not really do much of anything. And I think that was good, because Michelle got to do stuff other kids weren’t supposed to do, and I got to do it with her when I went over. Mom said as long as there’s parental supervision you can go on a play-date, but I don’t know if she knew that Michelle’s mom wasn’t really supervising, just sitting on the deck.

So Michelle and I watched Jerry Maguire on her big screen television in the den and got big bottles of Coca-Cola out of the pantry and drank them when they weren’t even cold, just straight from the bottle. And then we both lay on the floor for a while, burping really loud and looking big and bloated, kind of like those walruses you see lying around in pictures in National Geographic. And my stomach hurt a lot, but it was okay because while we were burping on the floor I got to read a few of Michelle’s Seventeen Magazine, which she had a subscription to even though she was only a little older than me and we were in the same 4th grade with Mrs. Fields. And later we went on the big trampoline in her yard and she did lots of somersaults in the air, but I wouldn’t do them because I was afraid I would fall on my head.

Another reason I liked going over Michelle’s was that she was one of the coolest girls in our grade. She dated Alex Grendi and Billy Walsh for a week each, and I think she dumped both of them even though they told everyone that they did the dumping. It was weird when she started talking to me, because I was pretty quiet most of the time and sometimes got a hard time from the popular people, but we started being kind of friends all the same. I think she thought I was funny, because when I sometimes said things all sarcastic like Dad she laughed really loud. And I’m pretty sure she meant it in a nice way, because when she laughed she smiled in her eyes, not like when other people laughed when they called me Creep and stuff.

Michelle was also a lot more mature than the other kids in my which I think is why people thought she was cool. And I don’t mean that she looked older, even though she did, she was taller than all the other girls and wore a bra already, and it was a real one with wire in it, not like the stretchy training bras Mom gave me that Christmas. But when she talked you could tell that she knew stuff, stuff that we hadn’t learned yet. She wasn’t smarter than me, I was way better at English and a little better at Math, but she knew about a lot of adult stuff that we hadn’t been told about yet. She said that was because her Mom thought it was better to speak to her like she was a grown-up, because babying kids delays their development or something, and she also got to watch R-rated movies. Which I didn’t really understand anyway.

The time we watched Jerry Maguire and drank the full 2 liter bottles of Coke and went on the trampoline was our fifth play-date. I only know that because I don’t really have a lot of play-dates, so when they happen I remember what number they were and everything. On our third play-date, Michelle said she was gonna teach me about sex, and she did, even though I still don’t think I really understand all of it. Another reason Michelle’s house was cool was her gigantic box of Barbies. I only had about five in a little basket in my room, and just the basic ones with the outfits they came with, but Michelle had a huge plastic bin filled to the brim with them. And she didn’t just have Barbie, she had Stacie and Ken and everyone else as well. So on our third play-date she told me she was gonna teach me about sex, because it was about time I knew, and she didn’t want to wait around until I learned by myself. I said okay because Michelle’s were usually good ones, and the only thing I knew about sex was that it was how people were made, and without it we wouldn’t exist. I don’t really know who told me that, I think I saw it on a commercial or something.

Michelle had Barbie on her lap facing me and they were both kind of staring at me, Michelle with her normal eyes and Barbie with her plastic eyes, and then Michelle told me to get Ken out of the box. Not the businessman Ken, the beach fun Ken, she said, because Barbie was more attracted to him. So I did and Michelle put them next to each other on the floor and told me to watch and pay very close attention. She took Barbie’s flight attendant outfit off and then she took Ken’s board shorts off, and she kind of mashed their faces together for about a minute. Then she moved their legs into weird positions and rubbed them against each other, but mainly she was rubbing the plastic bump between Ken’s legs against the rubber inside Barbie’s thighs, and I was really confused the entire time, even though she was explaining what she was doing. But half the words I’d never heard before, and I couldn’t see how rubbing skin together or whatever she was doing with the dolls could make a baby.

But I guess I just wasn’t mature enough to understand that kind of stuff yet. Hopefully I will be soon, because I don’t want to be a kid forever and now every time I go over Michelle’s I have to watch as Michelle rubs Barbie and Ken together in between their legs and I would like to not feel so stupid and be as interested as she is. Maybe if I ask Mom really nicely she will let me watch R-rated movies.