Jill is Jillian Cynthia Pettit, which I think is a beautiful name. She's my best – just about my only – friend. For the record, I'm Diana Dawn Sayers, Didi for short, and we've been tight since fourth grade, when we got into a hair-pulling, kicking, biting fight about something neither of us can recall, exactly. While we were waiting for the principal to give us a reprimand, we started chatting and found out that we had the same birthday. It was incredible. I'd never met anyone born the same day, same year as I, and neither had Jill. From that time forward, we were inseparable. Together we set out to discover life.

We did discover a lot together. All the usual growing-up things. I found a lost joint on the school bus and we shared it in the girls' toilet that day. It wasn't as much fun as the gin that Jill was able to sneak out of her daddy's liquor cabinet. We had brief acne scares which fizzled out, and we both got our periods and started blossoming body-wise in sixth grade, and once we didn't speak for two or three days because we both had crushes on the same boy at school, only it turned out he didn't like either of us.

During that difficult time when our bodies were growing faster than we could keep track of, and unusual urges, with them, one of us lucked onto masturbation. Which? I can't remember. All I know is that for days we didn't do anything else. We'd go to Jill's house, up to her room where no one would bother us, and we'd take down our panties and sit on the bed gasping and sighing as we fingered ourselves to shivery-sweet orgasms that left little buds of wet juices on our just-thatching beavers. My titties were bubbling up then, and after a couple hours of frigging my pussy, the nipples would ache like crazy, and I'd have to rub them to make the sore go away. But it seemed the more I rubbed, the more oozy and shuddery I felt all over, and I felt a gnawing inadequacy, too, a sense that surely there was more to it than just this.