Laura found Bonita exotic but Nancy kind of liked Chula Vista. Laura’s house was close to the school and felt almost metropolitan with traffic. Her brothers were younger and didn’t bait them like David did. Her parents rarely fought. But the girls agreed in preferring to have their overnights at Nancy’s.

There were several advantages. Her bedroom was isolated so they were unlikely to be disturbed by any brother or parent. Among other things they practiced kissing in there, pressing their mouths together like it looked in the movies, pushing their bodies against one another, eventually daring to touch tongues. (It wasn’t that they were homosexual, they understood; it was just that they wanted to be good at making out when the time came, and they could only go so far with their own pillows and forearms (in fact, wet kissing was icky-weird, like that trick when they put their index fingers together and then stroked the resulting double digit: they each perceived the other’s flesh but it felt dead.))

Then too, overnights always meant sneaking out, and the sneakout environment was vastly superior in Nancy’s territory. No traffic. Little light. Better cigarettes to swipe. Vodka less measured than the liquor in Laura’s parents’ cabinet.

They could venture into the cemetery at night, full or new moon, egged on by the vodka and also by taunts from bullying David and his friends, shrieking when discovered by the older boys, haunted and then tackled and finally wrestling for fun. They were nasty girls, and they never noticed that the boys were angling for them even more than they for the boys. Nancy was bothered by her own smell after a long tussle with David’s friend Gary. Laura first knew ambivalence when she started to carry erotic mental images of David along with clear recollections of his obnoxiousness as Nancy’s brother.

They could even edge out to the golf course and sometimes encounter boys from their own school, Ron and Doug who were almost popular and took golf seriously but also liked mischief, who would chase them and flirt a little. Once they found a herd of unharnessed horses there, nocturnal escapees from the adjacent livery stables.

They knew the animals. Although Nancy always rode Polopony, Laura took lessons at the stables, backbending in the saddle, posting to the trot, rocking to the canter. She got to know the horses by name and temperament and she had introduced them to Nancy when they hung out there. Boys learned how to ride but liked guns more than horses, and they never knew the animals as pets. Boys weren’t found much at the stables, but the love of horses brought Nancy and Laura there anyway.

Before the loose horses drew other adventurers, Nancy and Laura had sized up the herd. Deliberately then, each took the base of a coarse mane in her left hand, each swung her body, right leg leading, onto a broad back. Dingo was a sweet red quarterhorse, soft-mouthed and docile under Nancy. Bella was a beautiful bay mare, a little more spirited but a particular friend of Laura’s.

That’s when David and Gary arrived. They saw the girls mount the bare horses: momentary nymphs in the moonlight. Snorting they ran to ride as well, and Laura couldn’t resist. She didn’t have to work very hard to direct them toward dappled gray Casper and palomino Wasp. Ron and Doug got there in time to compound the humiliation, as Casper bucked off Gary’s mounting attempts. Wasp stood at first and then darted into a run and sudden halt, which threw David into the sand. Gary sprained an ankle. David broke his arm.

When the kids grew near driving age, or tall enough to see enough through the windshield, they hijacked the vehicles their parents didn’t care much about, and their playgrounds expanded to the fields and the unenforced roadways. Gary’s father owned a surplus Army weapons carrier, with a dozen forward gears and as many for reverse, and sometimes they mucked about in the fallow alfalfa fields, on that. Or they unilaterally borrowed Doug’s father’s Impala or Nancy’s and David’s dad’s old Caddy, and they took it up the straightaway beyond the country club to see what the car could do. The Impala shuddered at 105 but the Cadillac was good all the way up its speedometer.

They nearly crashed that car. They had it out trying for 120 when a small group of horses appeared on the verge of the dark county road. David twisted the steering wheel and put the car into a 720 degree skid. He held onto the wheel like it was the helm of a sloop at storm; the passengers were pressed against the starboard side of the car. The Caddie didn’t roll, but it stopped spinning six inches away from a big tree.

That evening, awash in goofball emotional storms of adrenaline high and sobering fear, was the last time they were nasty. They split up soon after – Laura to the university and David to the college, Gary to the 2-year community school and Nancy into a dull marriage – and learned to describe themselves with other adjectives. Each agreed it was a miracle most teenagers survive to adulthood.