It was Sunday afternoon. I was annoyed because the football game was blacked out in our area. There was a knock at my door. I looked through the peep hole, recognized my friend Sally and opened the door. She came in and said, "I suppose you've heard about Alice."
"No, what?" I asked.
"Look outside," Sally told me.
I followed her to the front porch. "Over there," she said, pointing down and to my left.
A black limousine had pulled into the driveway. "What's going on?" I asked.
"I don't know," Sally answered. "Mr. Gruene told me one of the units on your street was gonna be available. It wasn't till he told me the address that I realized it was Alice moving out."
Suddenly I couldn't stand up. I found my deck chair, and Sally helped me to sit down. I could feel my world crumbling. "I've lived next door to her for the past twenty years, or most of it," I told Sally.
"I know, I know," Sally said.
When I was four, I went into foster care because my biological mother couldn't take care of me, and she didn't know who my father was. A paternity test showed that it wasn't who she originally thought. That's what they tell me; I don't actually remember anything about her. I have only the faintest memory of my original foster mother, who took care of me while the state looked for an adoptive family. I was placed with the family I know when I was five, and the adoption was finalized when I was six. Okay, the reader doesn't want to hear all that, but it's all to lead up to the fact that I moved in with them when I was five, and Alice's family lived next door to us. We were both starting kindergarten that fall, so naturally our parents arranged for us to play together.
My parents never hid the fact that I'm adopted. Even though I agree with their decision in hindsight, my town wasn't populated with the most open-minded people. I remember at least a couple times when I could sense that my mom was hurt at other people referring to my older brother Scott as her "real" son, or other language like that. I assume there were many other occasions that I didn't know about. Alice and her family weren't like that, though. In fact, I found out years later that it was Alice's parents who suggested that we play together. We were in the same class all the way through elementary school. We spent a lot of time together. I remember in the fourth grade we went to the park, and I carved our initials in a tree.
Scott was in a pee-wee football league from the time I joined the family until he aged out. The year after I came along, he had a teammate Jim who became his new best friend, so our families ended up sitting together in the bleachers. His sister Sally was two years younger than me, and when the season came to an end, Jim and Sally would still come over together. It turned out Sally and I both liked science fiction and horror, and while Jim and Scott were playing in the back yard, Sally and I would watch one of my movies on the VCR. (Yes, VCR. This was still the eighties, remember.) Sometimes she'd bring one of her movies over, and I think hers were scarier than mine!
Most of the school districts in our area still had junior highs instead of middle schools. When Alice and I got on the bus on the first day of the seventh grade, I took the first seat that was adjacent to one where she could have sat, but she went toward the back of the bus and sat with the older boys. I remembered a couple of them because they were among the ones who'd teased me about being adopted. When I got on the bus at the end of the day, she was already sitting by the window, and a boy I didn't recognize was sitting next to her. The door closed right behind me, so I sat down before my books could fly all over the place. When we got off at our stop, she went ahead of me, and I realized that she had developed a bust over the summer. I knew about boobs by now, of course, but she was the first girl whose development I'd actually witnessed. I ran to catch up to her. She didn't seem annoyed, but she seemed distant now. Her house was past mine, and now I noticed that she had curves. Of course, I hadn't actually heard about "curves" yet; I just noticed that that general area of her body was proportioned a little differently than before, and it was strangely appealing.
I put my books down and changed out of my first-day-of-school clothes into jeans, forgetting what I'd just noticed. When I came back out, Sally happened to walk past the front of our house. The elementary school had apparently let out. I waved to her, and she waved back. She stopped and came to the front door. I went outside and she asked me about the new school. I told her about the day's events, leaving out the parts about Alice's shape. That night I dreamed that I was on the beach, and Alice stepped out of the water naked. In my imagination, boobs looked very different from real life. It was my first wet dream, and I realized that I had come to love her.
From that day until we graduated high school, I kept trying to find a way to spend time with her, but she no longer seemed interested. It couldn't have helped that she also had her vertical growth spurt before mine. While I was trying out for the baseball team, she was playing basketball. I asked her out to our junior prom and then our senior prom, but she already had dates both times. (Junior year, it wouldn't have mattered, because I ended up in the hospital at the time of the prom.) We went to different colleges, and each time I came home I hoped she'd be around so we could catch up. We did, but only briefly. Then in my junior year, she transferred to my school! I thought this would be great, but I had to do a lot of studying, and she seemed to be at frat parties a lot. As it turned out, she majored in journalism and contributed many stories to the college newspaper.
I was a biology major, and I was fortunate enough to find work at a marine research facility in our city. After I'd been there six months, I had enough saved that I could move into my own apartment, on the second level of a nice complex. The first thing I did after I moved in was to sit down and turn the television on. The late news was ending, and I recognized Alice's name in the credits. When I got up the next morning, I looked over the edge of my porch. A car in the parking lot looked familiar, but I couldn't place it. As I walked to my own car, I noticed a bumper sticker on the familiar car. It was from my college. I'd moved in next door to Alice again!
For two years I looked for any excuse to see her. The opportunities were rare, because she always worked the evening newscast, and I had more or less typical business hours. One Saturday afternoon I came back from a trip to the gym and saw her car there. I was so sweaty that I didn't even make the effort this time, opting to take a shower instead. I had just dried off and come out of the bathroom when I heard the doorbell ring. My heart jumped. "Could this be the time?" I thought. "Give me a minute!" I yelled. I ran to my bedroom and put on my jogging pants and the first T-shirt I could find.
When I opened the door, I was disappointed. Then I was mortified. It wasn't Alice; it was Sally. And the shirt I'd put on was the one where the cars are having sex in every imaginable position, including three-ways. "Surprise!" Sally yelled when I opened the door. She put her arms out and I couldn't stop her from hugging me. She pulled back and laughed. That's when I noticed the shirt.
"I just got out of the shower," I told her. "Let me change into something else."
"No, that's okay," she said, following me in. "You don't have to change for me."
I relaxed. "It's good to see you! Have a seat." I told her. "Would you like something to drink?"
"Any wine?" she asked.
Mentally, I did the arithmetic and realized that she was 22 now, and she was attractive too. "Let me check," I said. Now, I should have closed the door behind us when she came in, but I didn't. At that moment a spring breeze ran through the apartment, and when it whipped across the front of my jogging shorts, I had to conceal a hard-on. "But first, I should really change clothes."
She pointed across a counter. "Is that the kitchen?" she asked.
"Yeah."
"Then I'll just look for myself while you change."
"Okay. This shouldn't take long." I went into my room and closed the door. First I felt weird because I'd never thought about Sally that way. Then I felt weird for feeling weird. She was 22, she'd already spent more time in my apartment than Alice had in the two years we'd lived in this complex, and—coming out of my room—I realized that she was damn pretty. From where I stood, she had a really nice ass.
She turned around with some Zinfandel I had left over from a recent pool party. "Are you going to give me the tour?" she asked.
