How to Help Your Kids Be Cool.

Lessons from the Tween Seductress of Beaver Pond

Actual photo from my diary in junior high

On Beaver Pond

When I was 11, my friends and I schemed up a way to seclude two cute boys from school into the woods away from their friends, and have our way with them.

It was the summer before we entered junior high, and we’d been reading Seventeen magazine to prepare us. We understood that entering junior high was the big time, where the women would be separated from the girls, and concluded that we would have a supreme advantage if we could start junior high having already secured our first kiss. Girls would respect us and boys would fear us. We imagined the crowds in the sixth grade hallways parting, as everyone whispered in awe as we floated by, worldly women among mere children.   

Of course, we had been obsessing about the boys for a year or two already, while they completely ignored us. We harassed them, called them and hung up, and screamed insults at them on the playground, but they were mostly impervious to our advances. But now that we were almost in junior high, a few boys seemed to have finally noticed us back. In fact, Melanie had officially been asked out by Joe, meaning they were the reigning power couple of the fifth grade.

Now, “going out” in those days did not actually mean you went anywhere together, out or otherwise. It didn’t really mean anything, other than that maybe you passed some notes or talked on the phone. It was more of a status, a display of your prowess with the opposite sex — everyone else knew you were going out.

But Melanie had not yet secured a kiss from Joe, nor had anyone else in our grade, and we were determined to change that. Joe’s best friend was Ben, and they were two of the more outgoing boys, who had noticed girls existed. They would sometimes talk to us when we prank called them at slumber parties, and they seemed particularly amenable to playing along with our games of insulting each other. My friend Mandy had given them the finger in the hallway one day, and Ben told her “at least mine’s not a mile long” (Mandy had beautiful, long fingers), and I was so jealous she’d gotten his attention. Meanwhile, Joe had recently established himself as the player of the 5th grade by asking Melanie out.

So we knew these two were ripe targets. They totally wanted it, we could tell. But time was running out, because summer break was about to begin, and seeing them regularly would no longer be assured. We knew we needed to act immediately, and that the first step was to get Ben and Joe alone, away from the rest of their friends and the prying eyes of stupid adults. We knew the perfect place: Beaver Pond.

Get your mind out of the gutter. It was a small swampy pond, with actual beaver dams. I grew up in a small town in the woods, and as kids we all traversed the trails in the forests that connected the neighborhoods to each other via backyard. That’s how we got around. But most people didn’t know about Beaver Pond, which was off the main trails and you had to bush-whack a bit to get to it. I had taken my friends to see it a few times, but most kids didn’t know about it.

So Beth, Melanie, and I hatched a plan. We would entice Joe and Ben on the bus, by telling them we knew a secret spot in the woods where you could see beaver dams. Then we’d tell them to meet us there on the first week of summer break. We knew they wouldn’t say no, because beavers are cool, and knowing secret spots in the woods was a valuable source of knowledge. And then once we got them there, we would play spin the bottle and emerge from Beaver Pond as real women.

But how were we going to get Joe and Ben to suggest spin the bottle?? Obviously we weren’t going to suggest it. But what if it didn’t occur to them? What if Beaver Pond didn’t inspire thoughts of romance? Should we plant an empty bottle there in advance?? We decided we needed to pre-stage Beaver Pond, to make sure that when the boys arrived, they would be in the mood for love.

So the day before our planned event, Beth, Melanie, and I each stole pantyhose and bras from our older sisters. We went to Beaver Pond and flung the undergarments around in the bushes, hoping it would look like someplace where unspeakable passion had recently occurred. Why anyone would be hiking the woods in pantyhose and then discard them by a swampy pond full of giant rodents is anyone’s guess. All I can tell you is that to our almost-12 year old brains, this was a masterful plan. Obviously, Ben and Joe would see the bras, think of boobs, and even though we didn’t have any, the subliminal tone would be set, and they would be overcome by an unquenchable desire to kiss us. We also put on lipstick, made kiss marks with it all over some pieces of notebook paper, and then tore out the pages and strew them around the pond.

After surveying the scene, we decided we’d set the perfect tone, after littering this remote bog with pantyhose, bras, and kiss-marked notebook paper. But we decided against leaving an empty bottle, because that would be too obvious. Instead, we found a nice pointy rock, and set it in the middle of a circle we cleared. If all else failed and they still didn’t figure it out, the plan was that Beth would suggest playing truth or dare, we’d do a few normal rounds, and then I’d dare one of them to spin the rock. We couldn’t let Melanie make these suggestions because she and Joe were already going out, and we didn’t want her to seem too desperate. So Beth and I would assist, and pull it off in a totally nonchalant way. But that was only a back-up plan if the kiss-marked paper and bras didn’t work their magic. Either way, we were sure that once the rock had its first spin, everyone would want to spin it again. Hahaha, they would be ours.

I won’t keep you in suspense about how our plan worked out:

I turned 12 the following week, riding high off the success of our Beaver Pond seduction plot. Our junior high wouldn’t know what hit it, when we walked in. I pictured that first day of school many times in my head, and it always involved us busting open the doors and walking down the hall in slow motion, with a soundtrack playing.

How to win friends, influence people, and dominate middle school.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You want to see what this precocious seductress looked like. Presumably I must’ve been quite the burgeoning goddess of love, or at least scary enough to bully the boys into doing my bidding, right? Alright fine, I’ll show you just how fearsome I was at the time: