Odyssey In A Teacup Read Online Free Page A

at that camp, and we three girls participated fully. It was also a first for Vette but for Maxi, it was just a refresher course. We kept up our kissing binge post-camp, working at bettering our personal bests.
    Ralph wanted in. Not your average bloke, Ralph averaged himself by turning it into a pissing contest. He made a tally board at school during one of his woodwork classes.
    ‘Why do we need this?’ asked Maxi.
    ‘So we can see who gets the longest list.’
    ‘We already know you’ve got a long one that lists.’
    He smiled at this. Yep, average bloke.
    By comparing notes (not lists), we four learned a lot about the opposite sex. From Sylvia, I learned a lot about the opposite of sex.
    One Saturday afternoon when Ralph, Maxi and Vette were over at my place, we sat in my bedroom pooling our experiences and gossiping. We talked about a girl in my class who did more than just kiss. Bridget was an attractive blonde. The girls at school nicknamed her Gidget (after the movie character), the petite and cutesy heroine of many teenage girls. Well, Bridget was the petite and cutesy heroine of many teenage boys. She earned pocket money after school hours from her job in a deli, and she earned a reputation at school from her hand jobs behind the lunch shed. The boys nicknamed her Digit.
    After my friends left, Sylvia, who was a walking cliché and often spouted them, called me into her bedroom. Her lips were tightly pursed in disapproval.
    Shit. Here we go ...
    ‘I overheard your conversation about that girl, Digit, the one with the two jobs.’ Jesus! If I weren’t so pissed off that she had eavesdropped, I would have laughed. It was like a really awesome game of Chinese whispers. ‘This girl is a “nice” girl. Boys sleep with nice girls, but they marry “good” girls. Which do you want to be?’
    It was not a question. It was a guilt-inducing statement pitched like a question, just for effect. That way, it looked like I was being given a choice. Sylvia was overprotective, and I’m sure she was concerned about my reputation, but only inasmuch as how my decisions would reflect on her parenting skills. Image was paramount. ‘What will the neighbours think?’ was a common catchcry during my childhood and adolescence, and Sylvia was tethered to it.
    ‘Well?’ she added when I didn’t respond.
    ‘Well what?’
    ‘I’m waiting for your answer.’
    ‘What’s to answer? It’s a rhetorical question.’ I don’t think she understood what a rhetorical question was because she looked confused. I just stared at her and raised one eyebrow.
    ‘ Oeuf! Just keep your pawpaw covered up. Pest! ’
    Noonie was not the only pet name for genitalia that I was exposed to. In my family, a vagina was a pawpaw, and a penis was a fawkey. I didn’t question this. But I questioned Sylvia when one of her friends got pregnant. I was nine at the time.
    ‘How do you get pregnant?’
    Sylvia wasn’t comfortable talking about it but obviously, she knew I’d be asking sooner or later, because she pulled out a sex education book from the bottom drawer of her dresser and gave it to me to read.
    The book talked about the way a baby is made from a union of a tiny part of the mother and a tiny part of the father. When I discussed this with Ralph, he reacted pretty strongly.
    ‘You’re wrong!’ He indignantly pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. ‘The father’s part is not a tiny part.’
    Geez. Only nine years old and already prickly about the size of his organ. Like I said, Ralph was a visionary. But neither of us knew that this tiny father part referred to sperm (we didn’t even know what sperm was). And although I can’t remember the name of the author, it’s highly unlikely a man wrote that book; otherwise, even the size of a sperm would have been blown out of proportion. Here’s the thing, though. Relative to six feet of height and two hundred pounds of mass, a pecker is a piddling, teensy-weensy part of a man. Miniscule.