The Good Daughters by Joyce Maynard

he decided he didn’t need college anyway. Ray probably believed he could charm his way through any situation, and so far this had proved true.
     
    FEBRUARY BROUGHT THE ARRIVAL OF the Beatles in America, which perked Val up a little. All around me, at school, girls were going crazy over them. The only difference of opinion about them focused on which of the four was cutest. Paul was the clear favorite, but a lot of the girls in our class loved John, too. The rebels tended to go for George or, if you were a little weird, Ringo.
    “Who do you love best, Dana?” my home ec partner Angie O’Neil asked me, shortly after their first appearance on Ed Sullivan . “Let me guess: George? Or Ringo.”
    I could have said none of them interested me. I could have shocked her totally and confessed that my secret crush at the time was Honor Blackman, who played the beautiful crime-fighting anthropologist, Mrs. Cathy Gale, on The Avengers and wore skintight catsuits that I sometimes pictured myself unzipping and peeling off her, as if she was a banana.
    “George,” I said, playing it safe.
    “That’s good,” she said. “Because I love Paul.” She said this as if we were actually in the running for snagging one of them to be our boyfriend. This way we weren’t in competition.
    “I love their English accents,” she said. This held true for Honor Blackman too, so I nodded in agreement.
    If Val had taken more of an interest, she might have spent more time over my high school years exploring the question of why I never had a boyfriend. Boys called me up sometimes to get the math assignment, and sometimes for advice concerning girls they liked. I had good relationships with boys, actually. I think they understood, whether they articulated it to themselves or not, that in many ways I was like one of them.
    “Do you think Lorena likes me?” a boy I was friends with, Mike, asked me one time, while we were doing a biology assignment together. Cutting planaria in half and watching them regenerate.
    “Possibly,” I said. I liked Lorena, too, was the truth; and I imagined it might be mildly exciting, discussing her together, though I was not about to reveal to Mike or anyone else the nature of my interest in Lorena.
    “She has the most incredible body,” he said. The fact that he would say this to me—a girl who had the least incredible body—seemed almost like an accomplishment to me at the time. I had done that good a job of freeing myself from any kind of female identity that would have left a person like Mike to suppose this observation might have hurt my feelings. Which it did not.
    “Well, Cassie Averill is pretty hot, too,” I said.
    “Cassie’s not as pretty as Lorena,” Mike said.
    “But she’s got the best tits,” I said. I had listened to my brother with hisfriends. This was how I learned how boys talked. If Mike thought it was odd, hearing this kind of remark from a girl, he didn’t let on.
    “You think they’re bigger than Lorena’s?” he said.
    “No contest. I’ve seen her in the locker room.”
    He was setting a planarium on a slide now, but that wasn’t why he sighed. “If only you could sneak a camera in there for me,” he said.
    “Yeah, right.”
    “You think Cassie likes me?” he asked me. This was a boy for you, ready to change his allegiance on a dime. One mention of a pair of 38 Ds and he’d forgotten all about the girl with the 36s he was obsessed with one minute earlier.
    “Didn’t you see her looking at you in history?” I said.
    “Now that you mention it, I’m asking her out.”
    “Just promise to give me the details,” I said. “I’m counting on you.”
    I lived vicariously in those days, listening to the stories of boys I was friends with, talking about things they got to do with the girls I had crushes on, and then listening to girls I had crushes on talking about things they did with boys I was friends with.
    I was always falling in love, was the truth, but nobody ever