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AT THE HOP / Ron Carlson I'M TRYING TO SING the most popular song of the year, "The Hop," by Danny and the Juniors as I whip the towel around my arms and legs. I'm not much at grooming. It's hard to sing it for more than a minute without stopping and thinking you're silly. At the ha-ha-ha-hop! At the ha-ha-ha-hop! At the hop! You can rock it! You can roll it! You can really start to stroll it at the hop! hop! hop! hop! But on the radio it's a pretty strong song and has me hooked. I never even listened to the radio before, except for the goof songs which my brother Bobby likes, such as "Please Mr. Custer, I Don't Wanno Go!" Now, I listen to the radio all the time. My dad framed it in the wall when he built our basement. After I switch it on I fall back on the bed and do a backward somersault naked to dry my back. Hopping up to grab some underwear, I find something different on my bureau. Oh I've been finding these clippings out of Ladies Home Journal for a while now. My mother cuts them out and puts them on my bureau. They're about things like "Surviving the Troublesome Teens" and "The Six Teenage Dangers." I try not to touch them. I don't move them or go near my bureau top while they're up there. After four or five days they disappear. My mother and I have never talked about them, nor have I ever seen her place them or take them away. The last one was titled: "What Teenagers Want to Know About SEX." The word "SEX" was stencilled in red block letters on a picture of a big wooden crate, the kind they must keep dynamite in. It scares the shit out of me that they print things like that in magazines; what are they trying to do, embarrass everybody in the whole world? For that week, I gave my bureau plenty of room. I didn't change my underwear for three days and when the article disappeared, I finally felt free to sleep late the next day. Standing there with one leg in my shorts I see something new on the old bureau. A pamphlet. Picking it up, I read: Understanding Puberty. Oh my God. I drop it like a firecracker. What a word: puberty. It should be in the pledge of allegiance: "with puberty and justice for all." The truth is: I don't even know exactly what it is. They showed a film last year to all the girls while the boys were kept in Mr. Donaldson's class. Mr. Donaldson wouldn't tell us what the film was about, and I remember walking home with Fenn that I felt hurt and kind of sad that we'd been dealt with unfairly. Something was going on and no one would tell us what it was. Mrs. Talbot had been our teacher all year and then they show a film; and without a word to us, she and all the girls go into the auditorium leaving us with Mr. D., the fool. The Missouri Review ยท 7 And now, my mother is leaving pamphlets on my bureau. Next, I can already see it: she'll start leaving whole books and stacks of books. It's all not quite working. Well, I've touched the pamphlet, moved it, and I snap on my undershorts and go back to it. Understanding Puberty. It could be a travel brochure. Inside I see the diagram of the male reproductive organs. It all looks a lot like Florida, the capital of which is Tallahassee. Two pages later are the female reproductive organs, the side view, internal. It looks like nothing, like lines. I try to imagine Linda Aikens or Carol Wilkes with one of these. And the truth is: my imagination won't work. If I saw some girl naked and she looked like this I would scream and tear my eyes out. No wonder sex is such a big secret: it's...

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