Rosie’s secret

People would always laugh when I said my best friend Rosie lived at the bottom of my garden. But it was true. We had a big garden, and five other people’s gardens backed onto ours, and Rosie’s was the one at the bottom. So there.

In the Spring of 1992, Rosie was eleven and I had just turned twelve. She had dutifully scrambled over the fence when I’d gone down and called for her, and we were lying on the grass flipping through the latest issue of Just Seventeen. This was the year of Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, and Keanu Reeves (Ted) was the sexy heartthrob du jour. So we were thrilled to find him on page eleven. Full page head-and-shoulders, poster-style. Highly coveted bedroom wall material.

After giving Keanu a thorough appraisal, we flipped to the next page. Here was a portrait of Bogus Journey co-star Alex Winter, who in our eyes was the precise opposite of sexy. We both “eurghed” at the same time, and giggled.

“Okay, close your eyes”, said Rosie. “I’m going to choose one of these pictures, and you have to kiss it.”

This game sounded fun. “Okay!” I said.

“But you can’t cheat, so no looking”, said Rosie. “You have to kiss whichever page I choose. And you’ve got to put this on first.” Out of her little purse came a small red lipstick and a hand mirror. She pushed them into my hands. I made my best attempt at painting my mouth. Then shut my eyes tight.

“Okay, choosing now”, said Rosie. I heard the sound of pages being flipped back and forth. “Okay I’ve chosen. Ready?”

“I’m ready”, I said, and pursed my lips.

“Remember, no looking!” said Rosie, and then the mystery page from Just Seventeen was smooshed into my face. “Kiss it! Go on!”

I pressed my lips firmly on the page, making an exaggerated “mmm” sound to prove I really was.

“Now open your eyes!”

I knew what was coming, really, but that wasn’t the point. I opened my eyes and found myself nose-to-nose with Alex Winter. He was beaming at me goofily, his face now besmirched with an inelegant smudge of red lipstick. “Oh noooo!” I wailed.

Rosie laughed delightedly. “You kissed Alex Winter, hahaaa!”

“Pweurgh!” I said, making a show of wiping my mouth. “Ugh! Oh, he’s so yuk. You’re horrible!”

“Now you have to marry him!” said Rosie.

“Oh noooo!”

We laughed for a long time. The sun peered out from fluffy clouds, and a breeze rustled the leaves of the old conifer that shaded us. A squirrel darted out, scaled the fence, leapt effortlessly onto a branch and was gone.

“What age do you think you’ll be when you get married?” said Rosie.

I pondered this for a moment. “Hmmm… I think when I’m twenty one. What about you?”

“I think when I’m seventeen”, said Rosie confidently.

I nodded. Seventeen was millions of years away, for sure. But was it really old enough to be married? I wasn’t sure. An ant crawled onto my leg. I flicked it off. “Do you think Keanu’s got a girlfriend?”, I said. I hoped not, because I was a serious contender.

“Yeah, I think he’s probably got a girlfriend”, said Rosie.

I sighed. “What about Johnny Depp?” (Johnny Depp was my fallback option.)

“Johnny Depp’s going out with Winona Ryder, remember?”

“Oh. Yeah.” I sighed again, picked up the now slightly crumpled Just Seventeen and began searching for a replacement fallback.

“What age do you think you’ll be when you lose your virginity?” said Rosie.

I lowered the Just Seventeen. Tough question. Sex had always been just Something I’ll Do When I’m Older. An earwig was on the approach. I used the Just Seventeen as a scoop-and-flip. The earwig landed in a patch of clover. “Probably sixteen”, I said, because sixteen was the legal age.

“I think I’ll be fifteen”, said Rosie. She twiddled her bracelet. “Or maybe fourteen.”

I thought fourteen definitely sounded too young to lose your virginity. I thought of something Mrs Vickers, our biology teacher, had said in our one and only lesson about sex. She told us about the hymen, which is the bit inside that breaks when you lose your virginity. She told us that sometimes, girls’ hymens would break when they went horse-riding and they wouldn’t even notice.

“What do you think it will feel like to have sex?” I said.

“Well, my cousin Kerry’s seventeen, and she lost her virginity when she was sixteen to a guy who was twenty two, and-”

“Twenty two!” I squeaked. It was unimaginable. Twenty two was miles older than anyone I knew, except for my parents and my friends’ parents and they were really old, like forty. A couple of my teachers might be twenty two-ish, I supposed. I tried to imagine doing it with a teacher. That made me feel weird. “How did she end up doing it with a bloke that old?” I said.

“Her brother’s mate, apparently. They were all drinking alcohol and her brother passed out in the room, and then his mate was all like hey, I’ve always fancied you and they started kissing and stuff, and then they had sex on the bed while her brother was asleep on the floor. And the brother never found out because the mate said to not tell. Anyway, she said his dick was massive and it was like trying to squeeze an orange through your nose.”

I thought about that for a bit. Then I remembered something else Mrs Vickers had impressed upon us. “Did he put a condom on?” I asked.

“She didn’t say. He was really drunk though, so...”

Then Rosie did the face, the one that let people know she was about to say something very impressive that required their undivided attention. Then she declared, “I know how to put a condom on a bloke.”

My breath stuck midway through an inhale. “Really? How?” I meant how did she know how, but she took it as how do you put it on.

“So there’s this little thing sort of like a nipple on the end of the condom, and you’ve got to hold onto it, like this-” (she pinched her fingers together) “and then you sort of hold that bit on the end of their dick. Then you’ve got to use your other hand to unroll it down the dick. But you’ve got to keep hold of the weird little end bit, because that’s where the sperm goes. It’s like, five teaspoons of sperm that comes out.”

I shimmied closer. “Is it difficult to put it on?”

“Yeah”, said Rosie, leaning casually on one elbow. “But not for me, because I know how to do it.”

“How do you know how to do it?” I asked, knowing Rosie’s mum was strictly no-telly-after-Eastenders.

“My uncle Pete showed me.”

I dropped the Just Seventeen in my lap. “Your uncle?”

“Yeah. You know how I go and stay at his sometimes? Honestly, Uncle Pete’s more like a mate. He doesn’t treat me like I’m just a kid, he says I’m very mature for my age. He tells me about sex because he knows I’m mature enough for him to tell me about it.” She shrugged indifferently. “He’s shown me loads of stuff about it.”

“Has he?”

“Yeah. Like, loads.”

“Like what?”

“Porno mags, videos... I’ve seen people doing it in loads of different positions. And I’ve seen two naked women doing it. And a man doing it with two women. And I totally know what sperm looks like.”

“Really? What does it look like?”

“It looks like milk. Uncle Pete showed me how he makes it come out. He showed me it in his hand.”

I was buzzing with something that wasn’t quite admiration, but was close. It was a bit like the feeling I’d had when I watched my older cousin casually lick her fingertips and use them to put out the flame of a candle. “Did he really?”

“Yeah!” said Rosie, nodding vigorously. “And other stuff too. I can like, totally talk to my uncle about sex. And now I know loads, basically.”

Thoughts were hurrying through my mind, but I was struggling to catch and hold onto them. Then the sun slid behind a big cloud, and we were cast into shadow. There was a chilly gust. I shivered and pulled my sleeves down. From the direction of the house came the sound of many stainless steel objects being dropped. Then I heard my mum go, “oh, bugger”. Nearly dinnertime.

“Hey.” Rosie said, and now she was looking at me earnestly, her brow slightly furrowed, her eyes damp. “Don’t tell anyone, okay?”

“I won’t”, I said.

I looked down at the well-thumbed Just Seventeen, which had fallen open on the Keanu pic. I stared at his face for a bit. His eyes were dark brown. “I bet Keanu’s really good at sex”, I said.

“I bet he’s definitely really good at sex”, said Rosie, and we giggled. And then we were back to flicking through the Just Seventeen. And swooning fervently over Keanu Reeves. And Johnny Depp. And Edward Furlong. And Chesney Hawkes. Although we were starting to go off Chesney Hawkes a bit.