By the time she was fifteen Cynthia was strongly desirous of a full sexual experience. But the farming community in which she lived was so small and closely knit she was afraid of the possible consequences of being discovered, punished severely by her parents and talked about by all the gossips, her reputation ruined and her parents ashamed. Then, too, she still felt lagging remnants of guilt about her own masturbation and was uneasily reluctant to take the next step. True, she had been kissed, and deeply, by many of her boy friends, had allowed a few of them to handle her young, swelling breasts, and permitted one to finger her sex with his rough, chapped hand, making her sex juices flow and her desire mount almost unbearably, but she had gone no further.
That June, when the winter-bare, plowed fields were covered with emerald green stalks of corn, rapidly inching their way upward to be knee-high by the Fourth of July, a square dance was held to celebrate the end of the school year. Johnny, as well as Paul Dawson and another friend named Mike, were home from the state agricultural school. Mike had become engaged to Betty Sorenson, who had blossomed into a dark-haired, ripely-rounded beauty with a saucy pair of blue eyes and a dimple in her right cheek.
The dance was to be held at a meeting house a few miles down the road. All the girls had new skirts, full-belled and brightly colored. The fiddlers in the area tuned up their fiddles and practiced the songs, the callers reviewed their patter and tried not to overstrain their voices during the preceding days, and all the wives and mothers cooked their treasured specialties, pecan pies, double-fudge cakes, fruit bread jeweled with red and green candied fruit, succulent hams studded with cloves, all to be eaten at midnight by the leg-weary crowd.