We tried to make the most of our time by doing nothing at all. It was 1989, the summer after fifth grade. I would turn twelve the next month, but Amber would already be in a different state. South Carolina shared a border with Georgia, but the Peach State felt impossibly far away, the distance uncrossable.
We’d only found each other two years before when she moved to town. Her family mirrored mine: a tall, white Air Force dad and a tiny Filipina mom with a thick accent. At our mostly Black and white school, walking the halls with Amber made me feel less alone. She made me one of two. Before Amber, some kids asked if I was a war baby. Tugging their eyes into cruel slants, they sang mocking songs about China and Japan and laughed while I pretended not to understand. After Amber, they just asked if we were sisters. I always said we were.
At her house, we lay on bath towels — hers pink, mine blue — crisping under the bright July sun. My pale father would never have allowed this at my house — his Irish skin routinely burned, having to be frozen and carved away by his dermatologist. Giddy with rebellion, we slicked ourselves with an old bottle of Coppertone one of Amber’s sisters had left behind. It didn’t smell like vanilla anymore, just coconut. We stabbed Strawberry Kiwi Capri Suns with tiny orange straw swords, the foil pouches caving in our fists as sugar rushed down our throats. The Hangin’ Tough CD played on repeat from her boombox, its metal buttons hot to the touch. Empty boxes of Cracker Jacks collapsed beside us. Sleeves of Icee Pops sagged and melted in the heat. My teeth felt sticky, filmed over.
Every time our swimsuits dried, we ran the Slip ‘N Slide. Skidded. Slapped down. Shrieked. Amber picked stray blades of grass from my upper thigh. I held still even though her fingernails tickled. Then we lay back down and baked again.
We didn’t always stay outside. During sleepover parties at Heather’s giant house, we typically ended up in the basement playing our version of the 1986 Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. Instead of rope, a mini-GLOW ring would be marked off on the carpeted floor, using couch cushions with scattered piles of throw pillows and our own bed pillows from home to land on. We’d turn the volume knob on the twenty-five-inch console TV all the way up, even after we were told by Heather’s dad to turn that racket down for the last and final time.
Amber and I always wanted to be “Hollywood and Vine,” the bad-girl tag-team duo, known for wrestling in lingerie and high heels. Meant to be “party girls” and street walkers, they read to us as glamorous California girls — spray-tanned gold, permed hair teased high, eyeshadow smoked and glittering across their temples. Across our ring stood the “good girls” — America’s sweethearts — wholesome and gorgeous, Southern belles, and girl-next-door cheerleaders. We stomped and seethed, boasting about our killer beauty and fighting skills, hurling insults like, “You’re so ugly, you couldn’t work these streets. Not like us!” We were caught up in the spectacle, drunk on the rare feeling of power. We spat phrases like punches, words we couldn’t have understood at the time.
With one hand, Amber would grab her thick braid that fell to her butt and whip it around like a blade, smacking her opponent in the face. I liked to sass mine, taunting and circling her until she got dizzy, then I’d suddenly shove her onto the pillows and pin her down until she begged for mercy.
We were tinier than the other girls — shorter, skinnier, not as strong — but we played like it wasn’t a game. And if one of us started to get overtaken, the other was right there, ready to body-slam our attacker. After the matches, we’d all collapse in a huge heap — twelve sets of arms and legs tangled — and laugh until our bellies cramped and someone yelled it was time for ice cream. Later, we would carry our bruises and scratches home like trophies.
In the long line to brush our teeth in Heather’s ensuite bathroom, we played the cootie catcher game. Whooping ensued when someone’s origami fortune teller proclaimed she was destined to marry a rockstar, live in a mansion on the beach with one kid and three dogs, and work as a fashion designer. We cackled when another was doomed to work as a trash collector, have a dozen bratty kids, and marry the P.E. teacher who always wore short shorts. Whenever the laughter turned into a stabbing pain in my side, I’d lean my head on Amber’s shoulder and she’d hold me up. I can still remember the scent of her strawberry shampoo.
Amber and I had another secret fortune teller I kept tucked deep in my backpack. We saved it for the car rides to and from sleepovers, when it was only us. Inside the paper petals, we wrote the names of our actual crushes and dream jobs. Amber wanted to be a horse veterinarian, and I wanted to be a movie star. We’d never tell anyone else something so important, something that could be held against us later.
Back at Amber’s house, sprawled out on the lawn, we filled spiral notebooks with romance stories starring us and our favorite New Kids on the Block singers, reading them aloud, giggling, fanning ourselves with the pages as if we might faint. Mostly they were about landing dream jobs in big cities, boys always attached to those dream lives.
Those fantasies felt possible as soon as we grew up. Growing up felt like an inevitable dream.
We did this for hours, the fluffy bath towels now flattened and stiff beneath us, each of us silently willing other kids on the street to see us and come and hang out. Cute boys who would notice us in our suits. But no one did.
When the waiting dulled, we abandoned the yard and went inside. Her house was curtain-dark and refrigerator cool from the blasting AC. The contrast made my nipples ache, sharp and tender, and I wondered if I’d bruised them flopping belly-down on the slide. I wondered if Amber’s hurt too, but I didn’t ask. She had bigger boobs than me, so they probably did.
Amber’s parents were both at the hospital where her mom was a nurse, and her dad was a lab tech and wore a white coat that looked to me like a house robe. We blasted music and danced wildly around the kitchen, using wooden spoons as microphones, attempting splits on the slick tile and failing gloriously. We raided the packed fridge and pantry, drank soda too fast, forced burps, and laughed when they came out wrong. I had never acted this free, this crude. I had never gone so long without adults.
We raced upstairs with a bowl of everything snacks — chips, crackers, candy, cookies all mixed into a single, reckless heap — and crouched in front of the VCR cabinet. We pulled out Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and The Princess Bride. Amber tried to slide one in, but there was already a tape inside. It wouldn’t budge. She pressed play.
A young woman appeared on the screen. Pretty. Someone we didn’t recognize. She arrived for a job interview in a powder-blue skirt suit, nervous and eager to please. She had just moved to the city and needed money for an apartment. She needed the job to stay in the city. Without it, she would have to give up her dreams and go home. Just imagining it made her cry.
Home must not be a nice place, I thought.
I don’t remember how the sex started or why we kept watching. It felt like an unspoken dare — who would flinch first? Like stumbling through a trapdoor together, a boundary we hadn’t meant to cross.
There wasn’t much story. And then, without warning, people began making out — far more than they did on Days of Our Lives. Then there was skin. So much skin. More than I had ever seen before.
My stomach twisted like when we rode the corkscrew rollercoaster at the October fair.
We watched, eyes wide, nervous, laughing, glancing at each other and back at the screen. What was this?
I don’t know how long it took before the carpet beneath us began to shake. We froze. At first, I didn’t understand. Then Amber lunged for the VCR, hammering rewind. It was the garage door. Her parents were home.
The tape whirred, agonizingly slow, as voices rose from the kitchen and heavy footsteps hit the stairs — adults moving toward us with purpose. It was time for me to go home.
Later, on the phone, Amber told me she’d snooped in her parents’ room and found more — tapes, magazines hidden beneath her dad’s jeans in the bottom drawer of his dresser. Her voice was flat. I nodded along before remembering she couldn’t see me. I felt relieved they were concealed, that the tape in the machine must have been a mistake.
I dreamed about the girl that night. About her leaving home, needing money, an apartment, having to use her body to get it. I wondered if that was what being an adult meant — doing things to get things, getting things in order to do things. It seemed wrong. But I couldn’t stop wondering.
Was it real or pretend? Was that a smile, teeth bared, mouth open? What else could it have been? The sounds ricocheted back—moans of pain, gasps of pleasure, trading places, sharpening into breath.
On the car ride home from Amber’s that day, I stared out the window, wondering if what I’d seen had imprinted itself on me — if my dad would somehow know. I rested my flushed cheek against my bare red shoulder and sniffed, inhaling coconut — the smell of a summer trying hard to last.
I thought about how happy I’d been, sunbaked and sugar-sick, Amber giggling beside me on her pink towel. We’d have twin sunburns and freckles as proof. But neither would last. Everything slid away faster than I could imagine. In just weeks she would be out of reach. My heart couldn’t yet imagine that loss, but it sensed it anyway. The anticipation hollowed me out. I wished I had a Slip ‘N Slide. At my house, the best we had was a rotating sprinkler. I’d run through the twisting spray and hop over it, watching rainbows arc and disappear.
Jane Ann Valentine is a Filipina American Southern writer living in New Jersey. She studied at Smith College and the Sorbonne and her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Hippocampus Magazine, HerStry, Middleground Magazine, and has received Barely South Review’s Summer 2025 Nonfiction Prize, the Nor’Eastern Playwriting Prize, and AAFilmLab’s Best Screenplay Award. When not being walked by her Old English Sheepdog Miles, she is at work on her first novel. Janeannvalentine.com IG: janevalentinelee FB: Jane Valentine
