I smiled. "Wear something comfortable. Very casual. Just bumming around clothes." I smiled wickedly. "Something that comes off easily. I mean, we might jump into the hot tub on the roof."
"On the roof?" They both said, together.
"Yah. It's a fun place. You'll love it."
"Should I bring a swimsuit, then?" Jolene asked.
I wanted to roll my eyes, but I didn't. I should have known that people never have just one hang-up. "No. No suit. Look. I want to tell you something about Saturday. At some point you will be getting naked. In the hot tub, absolutely. In bed, certainly. On the sofa, maybe. Just walking around, possibly. It's going to be very relaxed." I deliberately didn't say that there might be boys around. I'd just have to work around Jim and Bud however I could. It would not be fair to ask them to make themselves scarce in their own house, but maybe I could get them to give us some privacy if I asked nicely.
"N-n-naked?" Jolene asked. "I don't know. I don't know if I can. Not in front of other people."
"Silly. You've gone past naked with us." I told her. "And you're naked right now under that dress. One quick gust of wind and the whole school will know if you dye your hair."
Jolene almost grabbed the hem of her dress by reflex. She forced herself to hold her hands at her waist. She held her head high and said, "No they won't. I shaved."
"Way to go, girl!" Janice said. "I wish I could do that. My mom would kill me."
"Well," Jolene admitted, "mine doesn't know yet. But it's my body and my hair and my business if I shave it. Right?"
"Absolutely!" I said. "Just don't let the stubble grow back and you'll be fine."
"It kinda burned a little," Jolene said, "so I used some lotion and it felt much better. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it quite a bit, if you know what I mean. I was in there so long that my mom knocked on the door to see if I'd gone down the bathtub drain."
Jolene seemed motivated enough to change her behavior. She knew what she was doing and why she was doing it. It was just a matter of shaking loose all the conditioning she had been put through. Surely there was something we could do for her. I made a mental note to do some research on the subject right after I did my homework.
"Speaking of boys, Sam," Janice said, "Who was that boy we saw you kissing a minute ago?"
I wanted to give Bud some more good press, but it didn't seem the right time to go into details about Bud's extraordinary attributes in front of a girl who was scared of normal-sized cocks. Telling her about one that would make a mare's eyes water seemed uncalled-for.
"Oh that was just my brother, Bud."
"Your brother!" Janice seemed shocked. I had my pick of 'why'.
"Yes, my brother. Oh, he's not really kin. Mrs. Reynolds is going to be my second mother, so I think of him as a brother. Anyway, they call me 'Sis' and I call Mrs. Reynolds 'Mom', so I guess he's my brother, all right. Why?"
"Well, that surely wasn't a brotherly kind of kiss."
"What kind of kiss was it?"
"It looked like you wanted to screw him right then."
"Do you have a brother?"
"Well... no."
"Say you did. Would you fuck him?"
"NO!"
"Why not? Don't you love your brother?"
"It's not that."
"Then what?"
"You're not suppose to have sex with close relatives. We covered genetics in Biology last year. It has something to do with recessive or repressive genes or something, doesn't it?"
"Well, that would mean that having children with close relatives was a bad idea, all right. But sex and reproduction have been different things since they invented birth control. Do you plan to have children with every boy you have sex with?"
"God no!"
"Then having sex with your brother is fine, as long as you don't get pregnant, which you certainly don't plan on doing anyway?"
"Yeah, but... I mean... I guess you're right. I never thought about it like that."
"So why wouldn't you have sex with your brother?"
"Well it just sounds so icky."
"It sounds like you are as much a victim of psychological conditioning as Jolene is. That 'just sounds icky' is an emotional reaction, not a reasoned one. It's all just incidental brainwashing. We get told things so often that either aren't true, are only partially true, or used to be true but aren't anymore, until we just accept them. We don't think things through. We just behave like we've been programmed to do. We need to re-examine many of the precepts that we routinely take for granted."
Janice and Jolene were looking at me like I had grown another head.
"What?" I asked.
"You sound like you should be a teacher instead of a student." Jolene said.
"Yeah," Janice agreed, "when did you get your degree in psychology?"
"Doh?" I said. I had been about to add a point about freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the unexamined fact in order for us to become fully-realized members of society, but I decided to clam up instead. "Must be all that educational TV I've been watching," I confessed. "But you see my point?"
"Yeah," Janice said, "You're screwing your brother. He must be pretty good for you to come up with all this psychology stuff."
"You have no idea," I said...
"Isn't he just a Sophomore?" Jolene asked.
"No, he just acts like it. But he's very mature where it counts." I told them. "His older brother, Jim, is 19. I think he flunked a year somewhere. They are both very cute. They both work out, so they have lots of hard muscles." I was being as descriptive as I could for Janice's benefit. Jolene didn't get it.