When Candace and Mellie were 13, they were sex fiends. That was their favorite subject, for private musing or confidential conversations. They’d been friends since they were 10, and they still played with their Barbie dolls. But not with the Mattel clothes. They fashioned provocative outfits out of small silk scarves. They made wild women of those manikins.

They also sought pornography in word and picture, but those were difficult to acquire. Neither had an older brother from whose drawers they could filch. Candace’s dad was absent and Mellie’s disdained men’s mags, so there was no Playboy stash to discover. But they were desperate girls with active imaginations; they made do with what they had. Mellie borrowed her father’s copy of Candide (copyright 1930, Hartsdale House, Inc.), illustrated by Mahlon Blaine (and by A. Zaidenberg at the chapter ends). She never found anything sexy in the words of the book, but some of the pictures were much more inflammatory than the National Geographic photos her classmates went for. There was an etching of two naked girls opposite the title page, to Mellie’s initial shock and continuing delight, and just about every following picture was suggestive. On Candace’s part was Another Country, by James Baldwin. Her grandmother had given it to her for her birthday a month before, figuring it would broaden the child’s perspective. When they learned that the opening scene includes balcony sex at a party, the grandmother tried to take back the book and the granddaughter became so interested she proceeded to read the whole novel. Candace was disappointed that the sex didn’t get better, but she liked the book anyway.

The girlfriends were into sex but not yet up for boyfriends. Their classmates were too childish and even the notion of an older male was intimidating. They agreed that their obsession was really a form of preparation. They had an idea about what was ahead of them, and they aimed to be good at it.

They were also into getting away from their parents. That’s the main reason they were trying out new variations on their names. They answered to Candy and Melanie in their homes. But Candace had recently decided her nickname sounded cheap; she was experimenting with her full Christian name. Mellie didn’t have a Christian name, she said, because she was Jewish. But she’d never been crazy about her three syllable appellation and she’d recently met a character named Melly in the longest book she’d ever read, so she was then trying on a short version. The name project was not caused by their sex obsession but the two courses were obviously coincidental, both incidental to adolescence.

As was their shared interest in journalism. They volunteered to work on their junior high newspaper. They covered subjects like the afternoon football games and pencil sales at the little student store on their campus. They had some ideas about becoming glamorous, sexy reporters when they grew up. They perused Brenda Starr in the Sunday comics with stars in their own eyes. They regularly chanted like a catechism: who, what, why, when, where?

So Candace and Mellie read and viewed what they found, took their doll play in directions parents don’t want to imagine, invented the raciest stories they could think of and once even showed one another how they touched themselves. But by far their favorite activity was spying on Candace’s sister.

Carmella was almost four years older than they. At 16½ she had curvy hips and a real bustline. She filled her bra (Candace and Mellie did not need their stretchy training models, and were about two weeks away from experimenting with toilet paper implants). Carmella’s hair was long and straight, peroxide-encouraged to remain blonde: exactly what teen sex wants. And she had boyfriends.

The younger girls had always found Carmella’s activities interesting compared to their own, but this was her first year of high school, and she’d taken a turn into what Candace and Mellie considered a darker side. Carmella had given up trying for the cheerleader positions and girl-cliques of late junior high, in favor of a pouty edgy type of solitude. She dressed in tighter clothes and walked around alone a lot. When they could do it discreetly, Candace and Mellie followed her.

They knew she sometimes met up with a group of boys at the practice tennis/handball courts on the school grounds. The courts were stark white concrete backboards, open at one end and separated by thick walls. They were built for tennis and handball players, but they were used for quick meetings and sketching sessions. A few kids brought paint but most drew with chalk or with the coal-like rocks that littered the ground nearby. Everyone learned how to sketch sex organs on those walls.