Once Ron asked himself the question, he had to admit to himself that he actually was getting involved with Missy. Beyond the mutually enjoyable experience of making out until he ached, every chance they got (which he deemed to be insufficiently frequent) and as far as she would let him go (which he deemed to be nowhere near far enough). That was the "plus" in "friends plus."
Sometimes it seemed closer to "friends minus." Missy had picked up a very clear understanding of the limited reliability of down-time birth control. Some of it, he was sure, came from the health classes during their last two years of high school. He'd sat through those himself. More of it, she said, was based upon advice from Jewell Johnson, the retreaded home economics teacher at the middle school where she had worked as an ESOL aide. Mrs. Johnson had felt quite free to dispense certain types of practical advice to the girls working in the ESOL program, since they had already graduated and attained legal adulthood, advice that perhaps even the health teacher at the high school might have flinched at.
"In my day," Mrs. Johnson would say cheerfully. She made no bones about the fact that she had been born in 1934. "Her day" had been the era before the pill-the great generation gap between the 1950s and the 1960s. Another world. One in which Grantville couples, when they went up to the quarry to neck, took along a length of clothesline to tie the girl's ankles together.
Or didn't, which had led to quite a few hurried weddings.
Missy pushed Ron's hand away. "Right now, I am definitely not interested in human reproduction. Or, at least, not in personal participation in the process. Live with it, or leave."
"Leave?" Ron asked cheerfully. "We're at my house." But he removed the hand.
Unfortunately, he knew that she was right. The various things that people were using for birth control were better than nothing, but.. . not all that good. Birth control now meant, as his dad put it, that over ten years, a well nourished fertile couple on good terms with one another would probably have a statistical two or three kids rather than a statistical four or five kids. If they were consistent and determined.
That was useful from a Malthusian perspective, but it was not exactly fail-safe in any one month.
Or convenient.
Or elegant.
Except, of course, for the method Missy was using. Reliable old standby. Keeping her legs firmly crossed and his hands off sensitive spots. Exactly what, during those last two years of high school, the recalled retired teachers who remembered life before the pill had drilled into the girls and Mrs. Johnson had reinforced. In this fourth year after the Ring of Fire, there were a lot of ways that life in Grantville didn't resemble the twentieth century any more.
"It's almost funny," Missy said. "Nobody talks about it, but you can practically look around town and see which couples opted for a permanent method up-time, once they had as many kids as they wanted. And which ones didn't. Which guys have had it done since the Ring of Fire, once an unexpected addition to the family showed up. And which ones apparently won't, no matter how hard the doctors and midwives push it." She giggled. "When my cousin Bill was detailed here by the army to get his EMT training last year, he was calling Susannah Shipley 'Dr. Snipley.' "
Ron nodded. In spite of everything the medical types had thought up, there were a lot more babies coming along now than there used to be. One thing he had noticed right away when he got back from Italy was that businesses had nursery rooms almost automatically. Private offices were furnished with portable cribs. It was that or lose your female employees.
As for "morning after?" There was only one possibility, now.
"I guess I could go through with an abortion, "Missy said. "If I was raped by Croats or something, and absolutely had to. But I don't want to. I sure don't intend to get myself into a pickle where I even have to think about it."
As for voluntary participation in human reproduction, her motto was, "No way do I want to go through the rest of my life barefoot and pregnant. Well, especially not pregnant. "
She wiggled her toes against his feet. Shoes and socks were among the few items of clothing she thought they could dispense with. The rest were all in the category of parkas and mittens.
He wouldn't try to put his hand back.
At least not this time. Not right now.
Why did he even want to put it on her sturdy, square-ish body? When she was seven or eight, he remembered, she'd had plump cheeks and dimples. The plumpness was long gone. Missy wasn't elfin, like a gymnast, nor graceful, like a figure skater. Very definitely female, almost maddeningly female sometimes. But a guy could see why, when a larger, masculine version of the build turned up on her brother, Chip had played football much better than basketball.
Grantville had quite a few girls who were prettier than Missy Jenkins. Up-timers and down-timers, both. The little Gertrude from Jena who was living with her family and going to school here was a lot cuter, objectively speaking.
But until and unless Ron managed to stabilize that upset karmic balance, the rest of them might as well be made of cardboard. That was fairly disgusting in its own right.
His hand went out again, tracing a line about three or four inches above her body, from neckline to groin.
"What on earth are you doing?"
"Confirming something I suspected."
"What?"
"I'd still be lying here wanting to put my hand on those parts of you if you'd never stopped being a dumpling or had already turned into a Sherman tank."
"Ron, that's gross."
"I think it's pretty basic data."
Chapter 26
Rudolstadt
"It is 'Thanksgiving' today in Grantville, isn't it?" Count Ludwig Guenther asked at breakfast. "A holiday. That's why there are so few up-timers here, going about their business, even though it is a Thursday."
His wife nodded. " Dankfest. Erntedankfest, more precisely. Mary Kat says that it is a harvest festival. Or began as one. But religious, not a fair, not a Kirmess. Though surely Kirmess and Messe , as in the Frankfurt Buchmesse, must derive from the same origin as Messe as a worship service, don't you think? In any case, in Magdeburg last spring, Caroline Platzer, Princess Kristina's lady companion, told me that it was the most intensely familial of their holidays. She hated it so much, the first couple of years after the Ring of Fire. Not that she was alone, because someone always invited her to dinner. But because it reminded her so much that her own family was gone that sometimes she would rather have been alone in her room rather than with someone else's relatives, pretending that she was all right."
Countess Emelie stood up. "Oh, how my back aches. I don't believe that I am hungry after all, dearest. There must be some tie to the liturgy. I'll go check in the library."
Grantville
"I'd expected the girl to come with you, but I suppose that it makes sense, since they have tomorrow off from school too, that Gertrude took the chance to go to see her sister." Eleanor Jenkins got up and looked out the living room window. "And, in a way, it will be nice to have just family for Thanksgiving dinner. Here they come."
"Who?" asked her daughter-in-law Debbie. "And, uh, it's not going to be 'just family,' Mom. Not even near-family, like Chip's Katerina."
"Wes and Clara. I see them coming around the corner. And what do you mean, 'not just family?'
"Missy asked Ron Stone and his little brother. That was when we thought the dinner would be at our place; before we decided to have it here with you. Gerry's come down from Rudolstadt for the holiday. They're out in your side yard, talking to Chip, right now. When they saw that Missy was heading straight for the kitchen, they sort of ducked around coming inside and having to talk to the grownups."
She frowned, mentally identifying and classifying the Stone boys, and then looked around. "What do you think about it, Chad?" she asked her son. "Really. About Wes' getting married again."