Free Kinflicks by Lisa Alther

were watching a movie called Girls in Chains, to which no one under eighteen was supposed to have been admitted. It involved a gang of female motorcyclists who roared around cutting the safety chains off the cycles of their male counterparts and then hiding the cycles in clever places, like in the trunk of a police cruiser.
    Joe Bob took his right hand off the steering wheel, which he’d been gripping tightly. Without taking his eyes off the screen, he reached down and groped for my hand, which lay panting, palm up, on the seat next to him. After all, Brother Buck himself had told us to join hands. We knitted our fingers together, both studying the screen intently and trying to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary was happening. His huge hand with its stove-in knuckles enfolded my small skilled flag-twirling hand like a pod around a pea.
    This was my first experience with the concept that I have now, after extensive experimentation, formulated into a postulate:
    It is possible to generate an orgasm at any spot on the human body. Our hands, thus interlocked, took on lives of their own. They trembled and shuddered for the rest of the movie, as Joe Bob and I, though pretending to watch the antics of the girls and their safety chains, made our captive hands the focus of our entire existence.
    The movie over, neither of us knew how to disengage ourselves in a nonrejecting fashion, although by now both palms were slimy with stale sweat. Joe Bob shifted into reverse, using our clasped hands as a unit. On the way home I asked, “Do you ever think about stuff like what Brother Buck was saying last night?”
    â€œNaw, never do,” Joe Bob replied proudly, mincing his Juicy Fruit daintily. “You know, I liked Brother Buck real good last night, but he’s sure a morbid kind of guy, in’nt he? All that ‘lungs fillin’ with blood’ junk.”
    That evening, of course, opened the floodgates of groping. During the next several months, we groped all over each other — from putting our arms around each other timidly, to prim kisses with tightly closed lips, to wet messy gasping kisses with tongues intertwined and teeth clashing like rival bulls’ horns. I ran my tongue over his chipped front teeth and nibbled the scar tissue of his mangled upper lip and probed the cleat crater that clefted his heart-shaped chin.
    He finally got around to touching my breasts, such as they were, one night after a game against the Davy Crockett Pioneers of Roaring Fork, Kentucky. By now we had hurtled along into basketball season. Joe Bob had scored the tie-breaking basket in the final five seconds of play and was carried from the floor on his teammates’ envious shoulders. I had also enjoyed a triumph of sorts, performing solo in center court at half time a routine that involved winding the flagstaff over and under my legs in an intricate pattern. An error would have left me sprawling deflowered in the center circle. But I had performed the difficult number flawlessly and was rewarded with wild cheering. We had both imbibed enough ego tonic to last us until next week’s game.
    We were at a favorite parking spot high up on one of the red clay hills that ringed Hullsport. Below us, the lights of town were spread out. We were clutching each other in a panting embrace, me running one hand back and forth over his flat top, which could have served as a scrub brush by lopping off the top of his head. My other arm circled his waist, and my fingers clung to the delicious crevices of his spine as though they were toeholds on a mountain wall. Joe Bob with his left hand poked tentatively at my right breast, or rather poked the mound of my maroon uniform jacket, poked the padding of my Never-Tell bra. As I kept up my patting and rubbing on him, which required the concentration and coordination of rubbing my own head while patting my stomach, Joe Bob began prodding and kneading my breast as though he were a