The other change that came with adolescence, and this, alas, brought problems enough to cause me trouble, was that I discovered sex. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that sex discovered me. I was unaware. I was so ignorant that you, who read these memories I have committed to paper, will probably want to laugh... Or maybe cry. I don't know.

See through my eyes.

I stand naked in my boyfriend's bedroom, my gawky teenage body shivering in the air-conditioned chill. The cold is making my nipples stick out from what little I have of breasts. Or maybe it's my nervousness making them do that.

I never thought it would happen, but somehow, I found a kindred spirit. We met several months ago through a school musical. My high school's thespian society was putting on a production of Scrooge, which had a few large choral numbers, and since I was in the chorus and the vocal ensemble, I got dragooned into the production as an extra, along with the rest of the chorus and vocal ensemble. We were collaborating with one of the local all-male Catholic high schools to get a supply of tenors and basses to fill out the cast and to obtain male actors for the appropriate roles - Ebenezer Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, et cetera. My boyfriend was the Ghost of Christmas Future.

I met him backstage. He was reading Tolkien.

My parents aren't happy about me dating anyone, but they're tolerating it for now ("He seems harmless enough," my mother had muttered after I got back from our first date - I'd introduced him to my parents before going out with him to see the latest Star Trek movie, in which Kirk and Spock steal a spaceship to go down to Earth and save the whales, and the less said about the small talk we tried to make for the duration of the introduction, the better) and somehow we've managed.

I have a very early curfew - ten o'clock, well before my bedtime - but there are ways around curfews. One way to spend plenty of time with him is to set up afternoon dates. After we had several months of library dates, and closely monitored study dates at my house, it convinced my parents that I could be trusted to actually study on a study date, so I am now allowed to study at his house on occasion. During the summer, when we don't have school, we mostly just read science fiction books, or play Talisman. His mother is downstairs the whole time, so it's not like my parents need to worry about our dates being unchaperoned.

We still haven't worked up the nerve to kiss each other yet. Isn't that funny? We've been dating for months, and we decided today to play doctor because I'd never played doctor as a child, and neither had he, and we found out that apparently that's something nearly every kid does, and we've missed out on a large part of childhood, so here I am, naked. But we still haven't even kissed.

We have at least established that my temperature is 99.1 degrees ("Well within normal range") and that I have a pulse. Also, that my amber eyes are a clear indication of a rare recessive gene trait, although it doesn't seem to mean anything other than that I have weird eyes, which I kind of already knew.

He bends down to put his ear up against my chest to listen to my heart. "Sorry. I don't have a stethoscope," he says, his voice an octave higher than usual. "Heart seems fine. Nice, strong heartbeat."

His hair tickles my chest.

"I need to test your reflexes, now," he says. "Could you sit on the bed and cross your knees?"

He doesn't have a rubber mallet, so we decide to use one of my Dr Scholl's sandals as a substitute.

My left foot flies in the air.

"Ow."

"Sorry," he mumbles. "Your shoe is heavy. I didn't hurt your knee too much, did I?"

"No."

"Good. Okay. And you have good reflexes. Um." He blushes. "Could you open your legs?"

"Why?"

"I need to check you."

"Why?"

"Because... because that's just how it's done. Doesn't your doctor do a complete examination when you have your physical every year?"

"No."

"Huh. Mine does. Um. You're not... bleeding, are you? Like, wearing a tampon?" He blushes even harder.

"No! Mom says I'll lose my virginity if I use a tampon. And anyway, I'm not having my period. I just had it, remember?"

"How can you lose your virginity to a tampon? That's not even possible."

I blush.

"I promise, I won't try anything. I just want this to be done the right way."

Oh, God. He's going to be the first person to get a good look at me since I was a baby, or at least since I was eleven years old, and he's going to think I'm horribly, horribly ugly, because I'm not normal.

I had a friend in sixth grade who told me this. She was one of the few friends I ever had. She was as unpopular as I was because everyone said she was a lesbian, also that she had lice (she did not have lice) so we wound up always eating lunch together and eventually, we had sleepovers, and one night we were up late playing Clue after watching Saturday Night Live, a show that would have given my parents conniption fits if they'd known I watched it, and we were both naked because we'd been playing Truth or Dare and one thing led to another, so there we were playing Clue naked, and out of the blue she looked at me and said "You have a penis." (She'd also tried to kiss me, earlier, which I'd found confusing). But anyway, we were friends. Friends don't lie to each other, do they?

"Please don't hate me," I say, as I cringe and open my legs.

He blinks. "Why on earth would I hate you?"

"Because. Because I have a penis. My best friend said so. She saw me."

"What? No, you don't."

"I do."

"I got a good look at you when you took your clothes off, actually. You don't." He grins. "Trust me. I'm a doctor, remember?"

"But why don't I look like... I thought I was supposed to have a hole there."

He sighs. "No, no, no. I mean, I've never seen a naked girl up close, except for you, but I know that's not always what girls look like externally. I've seen pictures. In magazines." He blushes again. "Haven't you had sex ed? My high school required it as part of ninth-grade health class."

"I was embarrassed. I got an F."

"Oh. Hmm. Well, that explains things, I guess... Would you. Can I. Um. This would be easier if I could point and use my fingers. Um... Could I?"

I nod. I'm blushing harder than ever, now.

"So, okay. This is what I remember from my health class. I'll put it together with some of the, um, pictures I've seen. The diagrams they give us in sex ed class are kind of crap. So. This is your vagina. You absolutely do not have a penis. We don't look anything alike. I mean, if you really want, I could show you, so you have some basis for comparison - no, no, better not. Anyway. These folds of skin here," he says, his face red as a plum as he quickly runs the tip of his finger along the portion of my anatomy he's referencing, "that look kind of like curtains, only they stick out, these are part of your vagina. They're called your labia. Labia minora. They come in all different shapes and sizes, from what I've read. And sometimes they sort of dangle outside, rather than staying tucked neatly behind the outer labia, because for some girls they extend past - um, are you okay?"

I'm gasping. God, it feels good when he's touching me there. It feels much better than when I touch myself there, even when I'm rubbing myself to get off.

I'm also probably blushing harder than he is. He's my boyfriend. And he's touching me.

"I'm okay."

"Good. Okay, this part right here at the top? Sort of peeking out from behind that little bit of skin, when I lift it? That is a clitoris. Also, like your labia minora, not a penis..."

"...Oh!"

"You okay?"

"I'm okay," I gasp. I'm definitely okay, now. I'm more than okay.

"Gosh, you turn red all over when you blush... Oh." He notices that I'm still panting a little. He gulps. "Sorry. I didn't mean to... I was just trying to get things right. So, anyway. You're healthy. And I can safely say you're a girl. Nothing extra there. I'm not sure what your friend was going on about. Maybe she was trying to play a trick on you?"

I'm normal, after all?

"It's a miracle!" I cry out, and then I start laughing. "Thank you! Thank you!"

After I have my clothes back on, we cuddle together on the bed, reading our books - he's reading something called A Fish Dinner in Memison, I'm reading The Mists of Avalon because I can't take it home. My father would want to borrow it because it's Arthurian stuff, and if he read it, he would absolutely freak out at the Goddess worship and the Druidism and the sex.

It's probably just as well he doesn't know about my boyfriend's large collection of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons modules, and the gaming we've done, alternating who gets to be the player and who is the dungeon master, or the back issues of Dragon magazine, which has this really funny comic strip about gamers who are so stupid that they think gazebos are monsters - all that's Satanic, according to my parents.

Or about the Heinlein novels, either. Thanks to my reading about Valentine Michael Smith and Lazarus Long, both of whom seemed to live very happy lives, without hurting anybody, despite doing things differently from the way my parents taught me life ought to be lived, I have decided that monogamy is just an exotic rainforest wood, and nothing I particularly need to have as a fixture in my home, once I am grown up and have a place of my own.

My boyfriend then asks me, "Wait, how could you think you have a penis if you've been having periods, and you don't want to insert a tampon?"

"Can't a person have both?"

"Oh. Hmm. Probably yes. But you don't."

We go back to reading.

A little after that, he gives me my very first kiss, and I have my second orgasm that day, and learn that I have something called a "hair trigger."