Can't we ever get a girl for this stuff? This is like the ninth dong I've had to look at this semester.

“Anatomy Lesson by Dr. F. Ruysch,” Adriaen Backer, 1670

I was never quite sure how Frances started hanging out with us. I think maybe she came to a few parties thrown by friends of friends and that’s how she got to know Miller.

I do know why she kept hanging out with us: she liked Miller. No girls liked Miller. He was good-looking enough and as a transplant from Pittsburgh, he counted as an exotic in small town Kentucky, but he was girl-repellant for the most part. And even when pressed by Cooper or me, girls couldn’t tell us exactly why they didn’t like Miller, just that they didn’t. He got his share of first dates, but never any second ones.

Frances was thin and short, a nervous type that either didn’t speak or spoke in rapid bursts, like suppressing fire from a machine gun nest. There wasn’t anything notable about her body, small breasts, hipless, pale skin with a sprinkling of moles. She hid her face behind large glasses and never wore any make-up. She favored plaid western wear and too long skirts that she seemed to have trouble walking in. I think at first I probably assumed she was Pentecostal.

Her most prominent feature was her terrible hair, dishwater blonde and incurably frizzy. She wore it in a thick braid down her back most of the time, scraped back from her face in a way that made her head look tiny. She even got in Miller’s pool with it in a braid, and when she got out her hair never seemed to be wet.

She followed the three of us around that summer, showing up at parties where she didn’t know anyone but us, huddling near us like she hoped no one else would talk to her. Maybe she liked all three of us, but I had a girlfriend and Cooper always had a rotating cast of girls he was dating, and she really did seem strangely drawn to Miller. When they finally end up making out on his couch at one of his pool parties, no one was really surprised.

The only result was that Frances was around more. It became impossible to go to Miller’s house and not see her as well. Cooper even started bringing his thin little alien girlfriend Tracey over now that it was just the three guys. Frances and Tracey even became friends after a fashion, going off to talk to each other quietly. My girlfriend tried to befriend them as well, but it didn’t work.

After a few weeks, Miller called Cooper and me to come over to his house. It was just the three of us. Miller was disturbed. He talked around the subject for a little while until we pressed him. He and Frances had finally had sex, a squalid scene in his car in a public park, and he had discovered a secret. Her clitoris was large. Very large. He held up his bony pinkie and menaced us with it. He admitted that when he first reached into her pants and found it, he had reached past it to confirm she had a vagina and not a set of balls. He worked through his misgivings in the heat of the moment and had sex with her away.

Miller was very angry with Cooper and me for laughing the whole time. And asking if she had tried to fuck him with it, and if this meant he had finally given his first blowjob, and if she had jizzed on him.

Miller became obsessed with Frances’ large clitoris. It seemed like it was all he could talk about: why it was there, what it meant, if he was still straight after jerking her off. It proved too much and he broke up with Frances over the phone after just a few days.

We didn’t hear from Frances for a while. She stopped coming to parties and dropped the oddball friendship she had with Tracey. None of us saw her until school started back in the fall and Cooper ended up having two classes with her. He talked about how uncomfortable it was to see her and life went on.

Cooper and Tracey broke up for the seventh time. At some point after that, Cooper slept with Frances and experienced the large clitoris for himself. He told me about their encounter and the clitoris itself in harrowing detail but kept it as a guilty secret from Miller. It seems he never quite believed Miller about how large it was but now he knew the horrible truth firsthand.

Now, I wasn’t kidding when I said Cooper was popular with girls. He was tall, and in shape, and had long black thick hair that was just feminine enough to put girls at ease. He slept with most of the girls I knew in high school, and the rest fantasized over him. And, of course, there were a number of bad break-ups. More than one girl had said he had a small penis.

It was a standard break-up insult but it came up so often that I finally asked one of the girls he had dated, my best female friend, about it, and soberly she confirmed that Cooper had a dick “No bigger than my thumb.” And she had held up her small, delicate hands.

This did start off a tirade of penis information I never wanted: Derek’s was short and thick—“like a soup can” and it had hurt; Jeff’s was long and thin—“like being fucked by a candle”; Tommy was uncut and —“it tasted like he kept it up his own ass.” She then demanded to know about the girls I had slept with: Who was really hairy? Who stank? Who had “swamp pussy?”

I deflected by talking about Frances and her large clitoris. And we spent the rest of that night theorizing on the intimate geometry required for a guy with a thumb-dick and a girl with a pinkie-clit to find an angle for mutual pleasure.