Page 42 - Philly Girl

26 Janice Shapiro

first teenage sexy feelings that he inspired. Our love was so
sweet and so pure and so real.
He called the day we both returned to the city. He lived
away across town and didn’t drive. Somehow, we made
it work for two years. Our pet name for each other was
“Pup”—that’s what his older brother called his girlfriend. It
felt natural and fun for us to have pet names.
My parents liked him. He dressed well. His father owned
a clothing store and he really knew style. We never talked
about school or our futures or our parents or anything. We
never drank or did drugs. We mostly ate enormous corned
beef specials and made out on Saturday nights. We would
“park” (as they called it) in my father’s car and we weren’t
even deterred after a police officer shined a flashlight in the
backseat of the car, where we were gloriously in heat and
oblivious to anything but each other. Despite our terror that
night, we did it again the next Saturday night.
I resisted going to “second base” (letting him “feel me
up”) because I didn’t want him to know that I was really flat-
chested (see “The Truth about Falsies”) at the time and wore
a padded bra. We waited until my seventeenth birthday and
then, we agreed, that would be my birthday present to him.
Eventually, I graduated high school and went to college,
and Bobby and I broke up. As a college girl, I couldn’t date
a boy in high school. Foolish, perhaps. But life moves on,
and I did.