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it, huh?” I said in a low voice.
    He denied it vehemently, but his attitude gave him away. He couldn’t keep from jumping up and down.
    I pushed him away. “Cut it out.” Then I asked in a whisper, “How did it feel?”
    “Great!” he shouted. Then in an excited whisper he described how he’d panicked initially at the onset of the strange new feeling, but remembering my words, had continued on until he’d been overwhelmed by the most delicious feeling in the world.
    “You should have seen the shower wall! But I didn’t even care!”
    In his zeal he began illustrating by pumping his fist furiously in front of his pelvis.
    “Stop it!” I hissed. “What if someone sees you?”
    “Ooops!” He slapped a hand over his mouth and put on a comically contrite look.
    “Nothing in the world feels as good, right?”
    “Yeah.” After he calmed down, he began to talk seriously about certain dreams he’d been having for the past several months. Though he couldn’t quite remember their contents, he did have vague, half-forgotten memories of melting bliss. That was what his experience in the shower had reminded him of, and he’d felt an eerie sensation of recapturing that dream feeling.
    “It’s called a wet dream,” I said. “You were coming in your sleep even before you knew what coming was.”
    “Why does that happen?”
    “The pressure builds up if you don’t let it out every now and then. It’s nature’s way of relieving you.”
    “I always felt a little scared. I didn’t even realize I was wetting my pants. It was always dry in the morning.”
    “At first not much comes out. Then more and more does.”
    “How come you know so much?”
    “I read it in a book called What Every Boy Should Know . That book tells you everything. And it’s right in the school library, too. Me and Jack are always peeking into it.
    “Is that where you learned about beating off?”
    “No. I discovered that by accident one day.”
    “Guy, where do you usually do it?”
    “Right here on the bed. About where you’re lying.”
    He quickly shifted away from the spot and I laughed. Then he asked me with a straight face: “What do you do with your come?”
    “When I’m ready to come I roll to the side of the bed and do it onto the floor.”
    He glanced downward.
    “Don’t worry, I always clean it up.”
    “If you do it tonight, be sure and wake me up. That way I can jump out of the way when you’re ready to shoot.”
    “Get lost!”
    He laughed and jumped over to his cot. He imitated the motions of jerking off frantically, his face contorted like a monkey’s, his throat emitting simian grunts.
    From that night on, Bobby’s quick pantomime of a jerk-off became a secret signal between us. We did it at each other whenever we thought no one was watching—in the hallway, in the living room, outside. It became a symbol of our giddy, shared joy. And when we were safely unseen, we attacked each other with the gesture, making sputtering noises with our mouths, dirtying each other with the imaginary ejaculate, and afterwards breaking down into helpless, howling laughter, giggling until our sides ached. No one could guess why we were acting so strangely.
    Whenever Bobby returned from a trip to the bathroom, I accused him of beating off. He did the same to me. At first we both denied it, but then confessed that the thought of being suspected of it only made us want to do it.
    On the fourth day of his visit, we went to see a movie at the Sunnyside Mall. We were sitting in our seats waiting for the feature to start. I was feeling bored and restless, not at all interested in the movie, and I could tell that Bobby, too, had other things on his mind. We fell silent for a long time. Then suddenly we looked into each other’s eyes and smiled. Not a word was exchanged. As if at a pre-arranged signal, we rose to our feet and walked up the aisle, back toward the men’s room. By the time we got there we were both skipping, barely able to