My cousin Sadie and I grew up together. Her mother and my mother were sisters, and I was only about a month older than Sadie, so when we were growing up, our mothers used to hang out together all the time and Sadie and I were each other's constant playmates.
Besides that, both sets of parents were really into playing bridge, so the four of them would get together at least one night every weekend to play bridge, leaving me and Sadie to pass the time together. It was a built-in babysitting situation.
Both our families were living in a big apartment building in the city, but when I was about to start third grade, my parents bought a house out in the suburbs. Sadie and I would see each other once a month or so, when our parents would get together for dinner and bridge, and Sadie and I could hang out and play together. Two years later, Sadie's dad got a promotion at work and they had enough money to move out to the suburbs too. They ended up buying a house that was just two houses down from ours, so Sadie and I would be able to hang out together all the time again. Since we were going to be in the same grade in the same school, I took her over to look at the school building from the outside and told her all about where the classrooms were and the gym and all that stuff.
When school started in the fall, we would walk to school together in the morning and most days ended up walking back home together after school. I had other friends at school, but Sadie was always my favorite person to hang out with.
* * *
When we started junior high, we were still in the same grade, but we had different homerooms and mostly different class schedules. Still, our classes were still pretty similar and in a lot of cases we could study stuff together. Sadie was really smart, although I was a little better in math than she was, and she did better in English and history than I did.
We had both started getting interested in the opposite sex. We weren't really going on formal dates, but we were kind of figuring out who we were attracted to. If Sadie and I hadn't been cousins, it would've been the two of us, but we knew that was totally off-limits.
It's not like any of our parents ever said anything about it or warned us about it, we just knew. I knew our being cousins was the problem, but at the same time, it was a little strange to me that it mattered so much to everyone. It just seemed so unfair that the girl I really liked the most -- who was my best friend -- was the one girl I was supposed to forget about. But what could either of us do about it?
* * *
One Saturday afternoon when we were in our first year of high school, we were hanging out at my house. My dad was off playing golf with Sadie's dad, and my mom had gone out grocery shopping. Sadie and I had just been talking about TV shows and movies and stuff when she asked me, "Will, have you ever kissed a girl?"
I was a little embarrassed at the idea of talking about that kind of thing with her. I'm not sure why, since we talked about pretty much everything, but still... "Not really, I guess," I said.
"Not really? What the heck does that mean? You guess?"
"Well, I was at a football game about a month ago, and we won at the last moment, and everybody was jumping up and down yelling and screaming, and this girl kind of hugged me and gave me a kiss on the cheek. More like a peck, I guess. I mean, like I didn't even know her. I had seen her around, but I had never actually talked to her. It seems like it was just part of the cheering everyone was doing. So, I guess, if you're talking about actually kissing a girl, the answer is 'no.'"
I got the feeling that Sadie was not impressed with story or my long-winded explanation, and was getting really impatient with me. But now that I had finally given her a straight answer, she said, "Well, I've never kissed a boy either. I was just wondering if maybe we should try it together? You know, kind of practice, so we would kind of know what we were doing?"
This was a pretty weird suggestion, I mean, given that we were cousins and all. At the same time, it sort of made sense, I mean the idea of practicing. And I guess the idea of getting to actually kiss Sadie was... Well, once she brought it up, I definitely wanted to try it. Even though it was weird, considering. I mean, we had grown up together, but over the last year or so, she had started looking good in a whole new way.
When we were young, she had always had her hair in pigtails. Now that seemed ages ago. These days, her hair was black and long and shiny. (Sadie's dad was Jewish -- very secular, none of us were religious -- but that's where her black hair came from. The whole Jewish thing made Sadie seem somewhat exotic to me. It made me feel mainstream and bland by comparison.)
Everything else about Sadie was changing too. She had been a skinny kid, but now a new shape was emerging, she was taller and still slim, but with a new profile of emerging curves that somehow got to me. I had tried to not get distracted by it, to not let it change anything, but I had certainly noticed. So, even though...
We had been sitting on the sofa. Sadie stood up, and I stood up facing her. We both leaned forward and felt our lips begin to touch. We really didn't know anything about kissing, and had no idea that there was such a thing as French kissing or anything of that sort, so we just kind of stood there kissing with our mouths closed, not even hugging each other while we did so. It may sound sort of lame, but feeling the softness of Sadie's lips against mine did feel really good. I mean it was something we had never done, and I had never really expected us to be doing this, but wow.
It was hard to tell how long we stood there kissing. Probably not all that long, but it felt like a very long time. Then Sadie stopped and pulled her head back, and we just stood there looking at each other.
"I know we're not supposed to do this," Sadie said. "But I think it was good practice, don't you?"
"Yes," I said, not happy that we had stopped. "Yes, it was good practice. Now we know."
* * *
By our sophomore year of high school, we had both started going out on actual dates and going to school dances and stuff, but it was still pretty mild, and Sadie and I were still hanging out together after school pretty much every day.
