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already hidden the supplies in the alley behind their house. The supplies consisted of a small piece of plywood and a short piece of four-by-four fence post.
    We would take the plywood and prop one end of it up with the four-by-four (Jimmy and I had two uncles who were carpenters, and he would himself go on to become a plumber) and build a jump for our bikes. Then we would ride and jump off it, right in front of the twins’ house, which was conveniently located right across from the park (good cover). This would enchant the unsuspecting kissees-to-be (and most likely their little sister), drawing them out from their house and into the street, where they would be easier to kiss.
    We would then gallantly offer the girls a ride on the handlebars of our bikes, having just proven our proficiency with bike trick skills by landing any number of cool jumps. The girls would get on our handlebars, and Jimmy and Grant would ride left down the alley with the twins, and I would take a right with their little sister and keep her occupied while they carried out the rest of the mission. The kiss-the-twins mission.
    The only person more likely to tell on us than the girls, after all, was their little sister, and I had it covered. Keep her occupied. Don’t tell her the plan. Don’t wipe out and rip the knees out of her tights. Drive her around the block a couple of times, and drop her off. Grant and Jimmy would take care of the rest.
    We thought we had pretty much everything covered. We even had secondary strategies; if the jump didn’t work right away, we could always make it higher, and if that didn’t work, I could bravely lie on the ground right in front of it, and they could jump over me.
    It was a good plan, and it worked.
    What we hadn’t foreseen was, I guess, unforeseeable to us at the time. The girl factor, that is.
    How could we have known that the twins’ little sister would think that I was a boy?
    And how had the girls already found out that Jimmy and Grant wanted to kiss them?
    And what was I supposed to do if this girl, who was one year older than I was, slid off my handlebars as soon as we rounded the corner into the alley, planted both of her buckle-up shoes in the dust and both her hands on her hips, wanting me to kiss her like my uncle was kissing her older sister?
    It hadn’t crossed our minds, but that is exactly what she did (and I can’t remember her name to this day, and so can’t make one up, because this is a true story): the twins’ little sister wanted me to kiss her, and I’m sure I must’ve wanted to oblige her, if only for the sake of the mission. Because that is the first most secret, sacred tomboy rule: never chicken out of the mission.
    There was only one problem. The girl problem. She didn’t know I was one.
    It wasn’t that I had deliberately misled her, it just hadn’t really come up yet.
    And since me kissing anyone was never part of the plan as I knew it, I had not given much thought to the girl factor. But this girl had a plan of her own.
    There she was, all puckered up and expectant-like, and it seemed to me I had a full-blown situation on my six-year-old hands.
    A mistake had been made, somewhere, by someone. But what was it?
    I had a number of options at that point, I guess.
    I could have put my left hand on the back of her yellow dress, my right hand over her smaller left one, and given her a long, slow …
    No, I would have dropped my bike.
    I could have leaned awkwardly over my handlebars and given her a short, sloppy one, and just hoped for the best, hoped that there wasn’t something about kissing a girl the boys couldn’t tell me, any slip that might reveal my true identity.
    I might even have gotten away with it. Who knows? I would have liked for this story to have ended that way.
    But it didn’t. And because this is a true story, I would like to tell you what really went down with me and the twins’ little sister in an alley by the clay cliffs the summer I turned six.
    But