Free Silver Girl by Elin Hilderbrand

There was the usual splashing and roughhousing and dunking; all of the kids were in the pool except for Connie, who claimed the water was too cold. She lounged in a chaise wearing her petal-pink Lilly Pulitzer cover-up, and she braided and rebraided her strawberry-blond hair. Meredith impressed everyone with her dives. She had just perfected her front one and half somersault with one and half twists, which was a crowd pleaser.
    As the party was starting to wind down, Meredith encountered Toby in the deep end. He had, as a joke, pulled at the string of her bikini top, the top had come loose, and her newly formed breasts—so new they were tender to the touch—were set free, bobbing for a second in the chlorinated water. Meredith yelped and struggled to retie her top while treading water. Toby laughed wickedly. He swam up behind her and grabbed her, and she could feel his erection against her backside, though it took a second to figure out what was happening. Her mind was racing, reconciling what she had learned in health class, what she had read in Judy Blume novels, and the fact that Toby was a seventeen-year-old boy who might just be turned on by her newly formed breasts. Immediately, there was a surge of arousal. In that instant, Meredith became a sexual being. She felt momentarily sorry for her father and her mother, because she was lost to them forever. There was, she understood, no going back.
    Connie left the party with Matt Klein. They were off to make out and push at the boundaries of Connie’s virginity, though Connie had said she was determined to stay chaste until her sixteenth birthday. Connie talked about her sex life all the time, and up to that point, Meredith had bobbed her head at what felt like the appropriate moments, not having a clue what Connie was talking about but not wanting to admit it. Now, suddenly, she
got
it. Desire.
    She dried off and put her shorts and T-shirt back on, then a sweatshirt because it was nighttime and chilly. She took a chip off the snack table but refrained from the onion dip. Caleb Burns’s mother called out from next door that it was time for him to go home. Wendy’s brother Hank, who was friends with Toby, wanted Toby to stick around, hang out in his room, and listen to Led Zeppelin.
    Toby was bare chested with a towel wrapped around his waist. Meredith was afraid to look at him too closely. She was dazzled by how he had suddenly become a different person.
    Toby said, “Sorry, man. I have to head out.” He and Hank did some kind of complicated handshake that they had either learned from watching
Good Times
on channel 17 or from hanging out on South Street on the weekends. Meredith knew that Toby would walk home—his house was nearby, hers a half a mile farther—not an impossible walk but not convenient either, in the dark. Meredith’s parents had said, as always,
Just call if you need a ride home.
But if Meredith called for a ride, she would be missing a critical opportunity.
    She said to Wendy and Nadine, who were both attacking the bowl of chips, “I’m going to go, too.”
    “Really?” Wendy said. She sounded disappointed, but Meredith had expected this. Wendy was a bit of a hanger-on; she was constantly peering over the proverbial fence at Meredith and Connie’s friendship. “Where did Connie go?”
    “Where do you
think?
” Nadine asked slyly. “She went to get it on with Matt.”
    Wendy’s eyes widened and Meredith shrugged. Wendy had clearly not been introduced to her own sexuality yet, though Nadine had, in whatever form that had taken. (Another girl? Someone from the camp she went to in Michigan?)
    Meredith kissed Wendy’s cheek like an adult leaving a cocktail party and said, “Thanks for having me.”
    “You’re walking?” Wendy said, sounding worried. “My dad can probably drive you.”
    “No, I’ll walk,” Meredith said.
    “I can ask him.”
    “I’m fine,” Meredith said. She hurried to the gate. Toby was strolling across the