That evening Mellie had dinner at Candace’s house. She liked dining there, even though she thought the tacos smelled funny. At Candace’s house the girls could eat without having a parent around. And they were allowed to watch “The Twilight Zone.”

Carmella was out but she returned to the house after dinner. Bob was with her and they seemed to have gotten over their argument. They headed to the back yard while the girls watched TV.

“What do you think they’re doing?” Candace asked during an ad break.

“We already know ‘who’ and ‘where’ and ‘when’ and even ‘why,’ but the article won’t be complete without a ‘what’.”

“This show is a rerun; let’s check them out.” Candace rose from the old hide-a-bed sofa first. Mellie followed her stealthy progress to the sliding glass patio door.

They could see two figures on the bench near the pool. Carmella and Bob were sitting close together and facing away from the house. The girls edged the glass door open just enough for them to shimmy through to the outside. As they snuck forward their eyes adjusted to the murk and they both recognized the telltale head movements of deep kissing. Bob groaned words that sounded like “Baby, baby.” His hand went to the nape of Carmella’s neck and then her head sank below the benchback. The bench remained motionless. The silhouette of Bob’s head and shoulders didn’t move.

Candace and Mellie looked at one another and shrugged. Together they tiptoed a few steps closer, and Mellie stumbled on the edge of a poolside planter. Carmella’s head bobbed up immediately.

“What the …?” she barked. “You whores! Get the hell out of here!”

Mellie and Candace ran back, indoors and through the house. They might not have thought further about what they’d seen if Bob had stayed still. But each carried the impression of a man adjusting himself, dealing with his fly. Neither girl had heard of oral sex – the idea of it skimmed the edges of their minds, like a fourth dimensional object just out of the reach of comprehension. They each had a dim, grossed-out impression about what the older kids were doing.

As for what they heard, neither knew what “whore” meant. As soon as they felt safe going back in the house, the pulled the dictionary onto the table.

They must have looked at every “ho” word in the book. They spent several minutes on “hore,” “hored,” “hoar,” “hoared,” and “horde,” but just couldn’t make sense of those as an insult.

“Well this is weird,” Candace commented and started chewing her hair. “We know she’s really angry; what did she mean?”

“Who, what, why …?” Mellie smirked and then she stopped. “Wait a minute… maybe we’re looking at the wrong pages.”

Mellie shifted in her chair, a little excited. “Think about ‘who, what, where.’ The words all start with ‘w,’ but ‘who’ sounds different than the others.”

“Silent ‘w’?” The question no sooner exited Candace’s mouth than her hands began tearing forward in the book. And found the word they sought.

Then the girls were satisfied. They were mystified by the nature of ‘w,’ with its three syllable name and its short and variable sound. They were perplexed about Carmella choosing a slur for them that was maybe appropriate to herself. But mostly they were gratified to discover and correctly spell a power word they knew they’d use.

Carmella didn’t finish high school. She turned up pregnant the next school term and her parents sent her to her aunt’s place, out of state, until the baby was born and adopted.

Candace and Mellie grew older, and in time they grew apart. Their names changed to Candy and Mel and their paths, while continuing sexually interested, diverged. Before their friendship eroded, before the first of them (Candy) took the big step, they came up with a list of qualities they agreed any good lover should acquire. They discussed the subject at length and in depth, and they concluded that they needed to excel at imagination, coordination, consideration, and practice.

Candy dispensed with her virginity in 10th grade but was no longer close enough to Mel to tell her about it. Mel became sexually active two days after she started college. Like most humans, after awhile at it, each of them got good enough.