"You have great skin", Marcia said to me when the song ended.  I looked over at
her quizzically.  We'd been lying on her living room floor listening to a CD,
both a little exhausted from her attempts to teach me to dance earlier in the
afternoon, and although I'd been staring at the ceiling while the song was
playing she'd obviously been looking me over. I blushed.

"You're so lucky", she continued.  I spend all my time cleaning mine and I still
can't get it to look like that.  And you're a boy."

It wasn't like Marcia Wilson was the ugliest girl in the neighbourhood. She'd had
about three pimples the whole time I'd known her.  That was about three years,
since Marcia had moved in next door.  I was twelve then, she was fourteen, and at
first it seemed like we had nothing in common.  I was a kid compared to her
worldly adolescence.  Her brother Rob was a year older than me, but he was a jock
and he regarded me with some disdain.  He and I definitely had less in common.

I thought Marcia was smart and beautiful - more so as she got older.  Her mother
and my mother became friends, and so from time to time one or the other of us
would go next door to find our moms and pass on phone messages or tell them we
were going out or something while our mothers yakked half the day.  That was when
Marcia and I discovered we had similar tastes in music, and started swapping CDs
and tapes and spending time together sharing whatever either of us had bought
recently.

Not that I bought anything; it was all Marcia's contribution.  Mom and I weren't
doing too well since Dad had left, and even though he still sent some money I got
the impression from Mom that it was irregular and really only barely covered the
mortgage, and when she got retrenched from her job her savings were pretty much
all we had to go on.   Marcia's parents were rich,  or so it seemed to me.  Their
house was easily the biggest in the neighborhood.  It seemed Mrs Wilson was
always off shopping, sometimes taking Marcia with her and returning with more new
clothes than I'd ever seen.  Marcia's clothes wouldn't fit into the closet in her
room.  She had so many they also filled the huge closet in the spare bedroom they
had.  Even her brother Rob had more clothes than I'd ever seen, which was pretty
funny for a guy his age.  From what I could tell Mrs Wilson was worse, Marcia
told me the walk-in closet in her parents' room had barely any room for her
father's things at all.

"Well", I said, "I'm younger than you, I guess my skin will get worse in a year
or so".  I decided to change the subject and got up to put on the new Bjork CD,
one of Marcia's favourites.  I was a bit sensitive about the fact that I hadn't
really reached puberty yet.  Fine hair had only just begun to show on my legs and
around my genitals, but that was about all that had happened.  Mom bought me a
razor for my fifteenth birthday but I think that was more a symbolic thing or
something, I hadn't needed to use it yet.  My skin was, as Marcia had said a few
moments ago, smooth as a five year old's.

Strangely enough I wasn't really in a hurry to go through all the changes that
were in store for me.  I had noticed in the locker rooms at school the things
that had happened to the other guys in my year, and some of them seemed pretty
scary, or at least uncomfortable.  I couldn't imagine myself ever looking like
that, though I knew I eventually would.  I guessed that when it happened the guys
would start being a little kinder to me and not tease me about my size and stuff
so much.  I didn't really get on too well with many of them, or really any of
them - in fact Marcia was easily my best friend even if she did come up with some
harebrained schemes that sometimes got us both into trouble.

Mom had commented a couple of times over the last year or so that I didn't seem
terribly happy.  She was pretty perceptive.  I hadn't really been able to figure
it out myself, but every now and again I wondered why it was that life just
didn't feel right.  It wasn't just school, it was... well, a lot of stuff.  Lack
of confidence or something I guessed. I didn't say anything to Mom about these
feelings though, and I never told her how much I hated school.  I never liked to
tell her stuff that would worry her.