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one day, other women; and finally, sweet relief incarnate, Ronit Yellen, the new girl from Israel by way of Massachusetts, whom I’d circled and poached, hawklike, upon catching the scent of “New person who hasn’t known me since kindergarten when I was assigned my rank on the day-school pecking order and so might one day think I was awesome.” We all got together at Melissa’s house to watch Dream a Little Dream , a teen comedy intended to whimsically dampen the Hanes Her Ways of girls in our preteen demographic, starring Coreys Haim and Feldman. We were to have a girltastic time.
    Melissa was spoiled by her parents, a mouthy Egyptian mom and a dad who was never around. Her bedroom was bedecked with all the trappings of a tween dream: she had a princess phone, a tiny pink TV/VCR combo, boys on the walls ripped from the pages of Tiger Beat , and a daybed with a trundle underneath it for Hannah, her Number Two. After Kosher pizza, Melissa led us through what she decided was sleepover-y fun. We played M.A.S.H. and found out whether we’d live in Mansions, Apartments, Shacks, or Houses when we got older. We made those origami fortune-teller things you put on your fingers so we could find out whether our husbands would be Eytan, Josh, Ben, or Yehuda after jotting down the Hebraic names of our comelier male classmates on the insides of the paper folds. We made a big deal about taking our new bras off in time for bed. And all the while, a syndicated episode of Night Court was on in the background that would burn an indelible impression onto my budding sexuality.
    It was the episode in which John Larroquette’s smarmy lawyer character, Dan Fielding, saves the life of Markie Post’s goody-two-shoes character, Christine Sullivan, by using the Heimlich maneuver on her when she chokes. Because Dan saved Christine’s life, the premise went, she was obligated to sleep with him. Maybe sort of fucked-up for Night Court , but don’t forget how many prostitutes and hobos were woven into the story line of what was otherwise a pretty genial prime-time sitcom starring a magician.
    It’s difficult to overemphasize how erotically compelling this episode of Night Court was to me. I thrilled at the notion of a silver-haired, libidinous character actor old enough to be somebody’s old dad, coercing his co-star into taking a load of cum down the same throat he’d dislodged food from earlier in the episode! I imagined Markie Post wriggling beneath John Larroquette on the floor of the hotel room he’d secured for the occasion, sick with the cheap champagne he made her drink, prostrate with extreme weakness, forced to let him enter her and pound until he finished. At the end of the episode, when Larroquette had a change of heart about their “sex-for-choking-avoidance arrangement” and his stupid conscience kicked in, I had a case of twelve-year-old blue clit that an army of Coreys couldn’t slake. I drifted off in the middle of Dream a Little Dream , quelled by visions of Dan Fielding grunting over my arched back, holding his calloused hands over my mouth as I whimpered “no.”
    I spent the better part of that year in Melissa’s clique, with the sporadic banishments that come along with being friends with someone wont to hate you randomly at a moment’s notice. Like a lot of junior-high girls drunk on their own company, we were very excited about our little group. We came up with a code for our teachers’ names we’d use in notes we’d pass among one another. We ate lunch together every day and listened to Melissa’s decrees about whether or not it was cool to like Arsenio Hall or Sinead O’Connor that week. And we were religious about alternating houses for our weekly sleepover parties.
     
     
    ONE TIME, at my house, for the occasion of Nascent Sexual Awakening Experience Number Two, Hannah Ginsberg brought over a piece of contraband she’d confided to us about earlier. She’d found a copy of Penthouse magazine in the mail,