Deaths Excellent Vacation

badgered our parents into taking us up to the boulevard for swirled soft-serve ice cream cones. Now, our mothers and fathers stayed by the motel pool to play cards, smoke cigarettes, and drink highballs out of indestructible plastic cocktail glasses while we lied about heading over to Funtown Pier so we could go out drinking ourselves.
    “My parents drink whiskey, Dave,” said Kevin. “Extremely hard to rip off, man. Doesn’t come in a can.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Sometimes, my dad snags miniature bottles off airplanes. Doesn’t bring ’em on vacation, though.”
    “Cool.”
    “Hey, you ever even drink whiskey?”
    “No. Not really.”
    “Word to the wise: Beer and wine, mighty fine. Beer and whiskey? Mighty risky.”
    I nodded as if I knew.
    “So, where’s Jerry?” I asked.
    “Said to meet him over on K Street.”
    “Cool.” We had two more blocks to go. “What about, you know—the girls?”
    “Relax, dude. They’re college girls. Means they’ll have their own wheels.”
    “Yeah.”
    “And Dave?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Chicks this hot? They definitely know how to find the dunes, bro. Probably been going down there to make out since we were like in junior high.”
    I shuddered to think about all the things the curvy college freshmen we had met eight hours earlier might know. They were both nineteen. Kevin and I were infants: sixteen-year-olds with pimples when we ate too much pizza. Our buddy Jerry McMillan was a little older. Seventeen. He’d been “held back” a year. Always said he liked second grade so much, he took it twice.
    We reached K Street.
    “I did score these.” Kevin flashed me a half-empty pack of Kent cigarettes he had undoubtedly stolen out of his old man’s Windbreaker. “Want one?”
    “No, thanks.”
    “You ever try one?”
    “Nope.”
    He shook the pack. “More taste, fine tobacco.”
    I waved him off.
    Kevin shrugged and lit up. He smacked down a long drag and let it out in a series of billowing smoke rings. I remember I was impressed.
    “We are looo-king goooood,” Kevin said between deep tokes, doing a pretty good Chico from Chico and the Man . A lot of guys did the same imitation back in the seventies, but Kevin had the shaggy Freddy Prinze hairdo to go with it.
    We waited. Kevin smoked. He looked pretty damn cool doing it, and that made me wonder if I could ever look cool enough for the night’s coming attraction: my first blind date.
    The two girls we had met on the beach had a friend.
    That’s why I had splashed on some of my father’s Hai Karate cologne. Found it in his Dopp kit along with some foil-wrapped condoms. My parents having sex. That was something I definitely didn’t want to think about when I was sixteen and being fixed up with a college coed who probably had sex several times a day between classes.
    “Where the hell is Jerry?” Kevin said as he ground out his cigarette butt in the sand at the crackled edge of the asphalt. “College chicks this hot won’t wait forever. They’re from Philly, man!”
    My heart beat faster.
    We’d first met the two Philly girls when they were half naked on the beach and Jerry McMillan had had the balls to stroll over to their blanket and talk like a letter straight out of Penthouse magazine: “Is it hot out here or is it just you two?”
    They should’ve laughed or groaned or even puked at Jerry’s lame pickup line. But, no. They both thought our somewhat older friend was cute. Most girls did. Jerry McMillan was lean and lanky with droopy eyes that made it look like he was half asleep at all times. He kept his shiny helmet of hair sleekly combed over his ears, its slanting divide always parked directly over an ironically arched eyebrow.
    As it turned out, the girls Jerry had randomly decided to hit on were looking to get down and boogie. They eagerly volunteered their names (Donna and Kimberly) and local phone numbers. They were staying at the Bay Breeze Motel with another friend, Brenda. Three college girls in a single room. No parents. They were all probably on the pill. A lot of girls were popping birth control pills in 1975 because “makin’ love with you is all I wanna do,” at least according to Minnie Riperton’s big hit single on the radio. Everybody who was sixteen or over that summer had already lost their virginity.
    Everybody except me.
    “We’ve already done the Boardwalk,” sighed the girl named Donna, arching her back, stretching her double- D cups to the max. If Jerry McMillan was a