Turning back to the one that I'd already had to deal with, I told him "Listen, I'm not looking for trouble – but I'm not going to be pushed around, either. You guys should give it a rest before somebody" -" I said "somebody", but he knew I meant him and his pals -" "really gets hurt."

I could see that he was afraid of me then, and he slowly nodded as blood streamed down his face from his nose. Keeping an eye on him, I told Janet "I think we're done here. Let's go home, Sis."

The rest of our trip home was uneventful, and even after Mom and Dad got home and asked us how our day was, neither of us said anything about the "fight" -" not because we were afraid we'd be in trouble (we knew we wouldn't, since we'd been defending ourselves), but simply because we didn't figure it was worth telling.

The second day after that, one of my friends told me that a couple of other kids had seen what happened, and the whole school knew that Janet and I had "kicked the asses off" the three bullies. When I heard that, I figured I was going to have to deal with the three dummies again, or their friends, or somebody else that wanted to be a hard-ass. Nothing ever happened, though – other than I was left alone in Gym class after that. Oh, and*nobody* ever bothered Sis!

As the rest of the school year progressed, a couple of our respective friends went from being good friends to best friends, and spent the night with us a few times. They were uniformly surprised to learn just how much "looser" the rules were at our house than at theirs: neither Janet or I had any qualms about going from point "A" in the house to point "B" in our underwear (worn out of consideration for the guest; otherwise, we likely wouldn't have bothered with even that much). Of course, they were somewhat amazed; but because Janet and I didn't think anything of it, they quit paying attention, too. After that, they got to the point that they were willing to follow our example. Naturally, the two of us followed the local customs whenever we were visiting someone else's place -" as we'd heard Dad express it, "My house, my rules; your house, your rules."