Nancy and Laura were nasty little girls, and they developed into nasty teens.

Laura figured out how to masturbate when she was four. That’s when her hand explored her groin deliberately, that’s when she recalled the sight in the pediatrician’s waiting room of a large woman changing a squirmy girl baby and fantasized about being that baby. (It wasn’t that she was gay, she contended when she revisited those first fantasies from the vantage point of much later; it was that she wanted someone powerful and confident, like her rookie mother wasn’t.)

Laura taught Nancy at one of their play dates soon after, solemn for fifteen minutes while their mothers drank coffee and evened up the edge of the sour cream coffee cake in the kitchen. “It’s entirely too quiet down there,” Laura heard her mother’s voice as the sound of a dinette chair scraped the floor overhead. She and Nancy pulled their pants up before parental eyes could scan the built-out basement room. (Decades later Laura watched her own baby girl lay stomach-down on a fat stuffed sheep, pressing her little crotch against the toy’s plush, and smiled with recollective understanding. She just tried to get Cassie to take the activity to her room.)

No mammal would forget those clitoral lessons. Mostly alone but sometimes together, Laura and Nancy continued to self-stimulate. After her mother caught her behind the living room couch Laura narrowed the scope of her grope to her own room, own bed, after hours. (Her mother told her “not to do that” and within two days put the incident out of her mind, but of course Laura never forgot being found and forbidden.) Nancy was allowed to lock the bathroom door and was not discovered.

They were almost twelve when they added reading material. By then Nancy’s brother David was living in the basement room, filling it with boy noise and boy smell, and that’s where the girls found the paperbacks. Cheap ink and thin margins on yellowing paper. Busty girls in short skirts who managed one way or another to lose their underwear. The books opened easily to sections about hard penises thrust into odd places. The language was corny but the images were fresh.

Not that all the girls’ time was spent on sex. School took a bit of attention, objective in class or subjective on the playground, and family time could be fun or infuriating but mostly, from age four to fourteen, what gave Nancy and Laura pleasure was candy and sex, and riding horses while talking about snacks and sex, and walking while joking around about food and sex.

Nancy owned a horse. A lot of the kids in Bonita kept horses but they were rich; Nancy’s family was there because they’d been in the area forever, and they owned a horse that no one else would. Polopony was his name because he had been one, but the accent was on the second syllable and that threw most ears off. Polopony didn’t throw anyone off though; he was a gentle old gelding who only came to life near the golf course greens, because they must have reminded him of polo grounds. Near the lawns he would perk up into a trot or even a canter, which was kind of painful because Polopony was so thin his neck bone jutted like a rock, and when Nancy and Laura rode him double the one in front could get hurt on that neck, but it was kind of wonderful too, to feel Polopony moving like the horse he’d once been.

He was a skinny aged thing and couldn’t compare to Liz’s five-year old quarterhorse or Pam’s half-Arabian mare but Polopony was still a horse, and that was more than Laura’s suburban household had to offer. Nancy’s family sprawled in the unincorporated area of Bonita while Laura’s inhabited a Cinderella home in the die-cut tract near the newest high school in the adjoining town of Chula Vista. Bonita means lovely and chula means cute, which in Laura’s opinion just about summed up the difference. For not only did Bonitans have horses and golf courses; they had lonely roads where Laura and Nancy could ride or walk and talk about the boys they liked; and they had the cemetery, where the kids could wander at night and thrill themselves in several ways.