Bonnie was the star of a stellar cast of girls at my new school.  The girls who had grown up going to the University School – the “lab school” as it was called -- all seemed somehow more dangerous, more worldly than the wholesome girls of the village school.  Of course they weren’t.  They grew up in the same town we did.  They went to school a couple of miles away, and were immersed in the same strict Seventh Day Adventist sub-culture we were immersed in.   No, they probably weren’t any more dangerous and worldly.  But they sure seemed it!  And to me, none of them seemed more dangerous and worldly, more sexy and beautiful than Bonnie.

     I first became aware of her during basic skills tests early in the school year.  The walls were folded up to join three of our school’s modular classrooms and all the seventh graders were seated in alphabetical order.  Bonnie sat across from me at the other end of a large semi-circle.  She was still tan from summer vacation, and she seemed to me bathed in the golden glow of sunlight.  She had huge eyes and an overbite (or was it an underbite?) that gave her mouth a sexy pout.  Her long, stockinged legs seemed to glisten.  She smiled extravagantly, and yet, seemed to me totally unapproachable, a golden girl, a goddess.  I was had.