“I?m only thirty-one,” he replied. “You?d be surprised what I haven?t heard yet.”
“I?ll keep that in mind.”
There was a lot of activity in the parking lot; a lot of young girls wearing just about as little as the law
allowed and young men with acne and cutoff jeans making awkward passes at them. The beer was ice
cold and it tickled the tongue and made the mouth feel clean and fresh, and the hamburgers were real
meat and cooked just right. So I hunkered down in the seat, bracing my knees on the dashboard, and
took a long pull on my bottle. It had been a long time since I had spent lunch watching pretty young
girls at play.
“Just look at that, would you,” Stick said wistfully.
“I?m looking,” I said, just as wistfully.
After a while two girls in a TR-3 pulled in and parked near us. One of them got out and threw
something into the trash can. She was wearing thin white shorts that barely covered her bottom and a
man?s white shirt tied just under her breasts, which were firm and perilously close to popping out. She
stood by the door of the TR-3 for a minute, flirting with Stick, and then she got in and leaned over and
whispered something to her friend. When she did, the shorts tightened around every curve and into
every crevice and you could see the lines of her skimpy bikini through the cotton cloth and see the
half-circles of her cheeks.
“Holy shit,” Stick muttered, “that?s damn near criminal.”
“She?s not a day over fifteen, Stick.”
“1 don?t remember fifteen-year-olds being stacked like that when I was a kid,” he said somewhat
mournfully. “Do you remember them looking like that?”
I remember Doe at fifteen, coming up to Athens with Chief for homecoming, flirting with me every
time Teddy or Chief looked the other way. She definitely looked like that.
“Seems to me they were all flat-chested and giggled a lot,” Stick went on.
“They?re giggling,” I pointed out.
“That?s a different kind of giggling.”
“They?re just beginning to figure it out,” I said.
“Figure what out?”
“How to drive a man up the wall.”
“She?s got the angle, all right,” he said, drumming the fingers of one hand on his steering wheel and
staring back at the little cutie, who lowered her sunglasses and stared back.
“Oh my,” Stick moaned. “You just don?t know where to draw the line.”
“About three years older than that,” I said.
