I'd grown up relatively poor. My mother worked as a waitress at a truck stop and my dad drove a cab. I was used to not having the same nice things some other kids had. It didn't bother me and I expected life would go on that way. But it didn't. My dad was killed in an auto accident while working, and investigation discovered his cab hadn't been properly serviced by the cab company in a long time. My mother sued and we won a shitload of money.
It was 1987, I was fifteen and we moved from the poor side of town to a true middle class neighborhood. Everything looked so upscale to me, it may as well have been Beverly Hills. And the girls, man... they weren't the same. They wore tanktops and shirts that showed their flat, toned tummies, jean shorts and LA Gear shoes. They had big hair and smelled so damn good. The guys wore zubaz and blindingly bright colors, while they rocked their shoes sockless, trying to pull off the Don Johnson look.
I was the same redneck I'd always been. I wasn't changing for anybody. I stood out like a sore thumb.

Our immediate neighbors were a middle aged couple named Marty and Helen. Everybody called Marty, Doctor Marty on account of he was some kind of doctor. He was also super religious and had a kind of Bible camp in his front yard every single weekend for neighborhood kids. My younger sibs both went, more because my mom was trying to suck up than anything else. I had a Nintendo, a VCR, a huge boombox and a home gym set-up in the backyard. I hardly ever left my room, and when I did I was always in the back weight training.
I'm not sure how long she'd been spying on me, but one day I was lying on my back doing bench presses and listening to Guns N Roses on my boombox when I noticed Karlie, sitting on her roof staring at me.
Karlie was Dr. Marty's youngest daughter. She was about my age, brunette, dark eyed, kind of pale and totally deaf. When she saw me looking up at her she smiled and waved. I racked my weights and sat up, waving back. Like an idiot I said whats up, then remembered she couldn't hear me for shit. She could read lips though, so she said something like nothing much. Not being mean, but it was kind of hard to tell what she said at times, since she never quite got the sounds right.
After that she got up, dusted the seat of her shorts off and vanished over to the far side of her roof. I didn't see her again that day, but nearly everytime I worked out she'd be there smiling and watching. I invited her over a couple of times and she'd shrug and say maybe she would.
She finally did in the summer. It was about dusk and humid as all fuck. I was stripped down to just basketball shorts in my backporch bedroom, playing Metroid and getting pissed because the game was so fucking hard in places (or maybe I was just so bad at playing). I saw movement in my peripheral and glanced over at the screen door. Karlie was standing there. She waved and said hi. She had to have climbed the 5 foot wood fence between our houses. Either that or she jumped from roof to roof and shimmied down somehow. Either way, I thought it was pretty fucking cool.

I spent about twenty minutes letting her see all my stuff. Ever since winning the lawsuit, my mom had been kicking me back about $200 a month just fo whatever I felt like and I'd amassed a monster rock album collection on cassette tapes. Karlie was more into hip hop, but she thought it was really cool how I had so many tapes. She was wearing a bright pink t-shirt and jean shorts (she was barefoot, another plus in my book) and she reached into her hip pocket and pulled out a joint. You smoke?? She asked. I didn't, but fuck it. I wanted to spend some time with her. We went out and sat on the steps and lit it up.
neither of us was really all that interested in smoking or talking. So before too long, the joint had been flicked into my mom's roses and we were making out pretty heavily on the steps. It got just hot enough to leave me with a raging hardon, when she said she had to go home. Blue ball city. And that shit happened with her over and over again.

Karlie's older sister Renee (Its how she spelled her name) came home from college somewhere back east around early Autumn. She was dark haired and eyed like Karlie, but not so thin. Renee was definitely a little on the chubby side. She was dating this wanna be cop named Hector. Everybody in the neighborhood called him Barney Fife. He was a short, skinny Mexican guy in some community oriented policing program where ordinary citizens volunteered to patrol in marked cars without lights. They had no gun, no club, just a blue uniform. But Hector thought he was fucking Super Cop. He was constantly badgering people about how they'd parked, or 'littering' or jay walking. The standard response was "Hector, just shut the fuck up."
Renee introduced herself to me the morning after she got home and we started talking off and on for a few weeks. One night I was watering the lawn and she came over.
"Karlie's just teasing you," she told me. "She likes getting a guy all hot and bothered and then splitting. Its a game for her."
"Pretty fucked up game." I said.
She shrugged, took a drag off her cigarette. "Thats the way she is. She's a little bitch. Our parents let her get away with murder because she's deaf." She then started mocking her sister's way of talking. "I hate her sometimes."
I didn't say much about any of that. I knew better than to jump into another family's shit.
"I can see why she picked you though," she said. I got pissed at first because I thought she was making a crack at my being poor white trash. "No, it's because your really hot." she told me, laughing.
"Even if you are only like what?? Sixteen?? Cause you look twenty."
I grinned.
"Anyway, don't let her jerk your chain,"Renee pushed me playfully. "Your too good to be treated that way."
I watched her walk away. She was in an extra long gray t-shirt. She had on shorts underneath but it didnt look like it, and her big ass was twitching just the right amount with each step. As if she knew I'd watch, she threw a look over her shoulder and winked.

The next night Renee came to see me. We were kicked back in my room. Like with Karlie before, it was clear what she wanted.
"What about Barney..?? I mean Hector??" I asked.
She laughed. "I'll end up marrying him because his parents are loaded out the ass, but please... he can't make me holler. You look like a kid that maybe could."
I was game for trying anyway.
I cut the lights out, locked the door and we screwed like crazy. When we were done she was sitting naked still on a chair, looking into a mirror fixing her wild sex hair and smoking. "Not bad for a kid."
"You aint that much older than me." I reminded her.
"Your still a kid," she stuck her tongue out. "Same time tomorrow night??"
"Hell yes." I said.

But the next morning Karlie was all up in my face. "How could you?? With my own fucking sister?? I hate you!!!"
My mom was bitching because I'd ruined her chances to be friends with the neighbors, and Hector. Hector walked up to me, his hands clenched the next time he saw me. When I asked him "What the fuck do you want??" In a pissed off tome, he stopped. Stared at me a minute, then turned around and got back in his car and left. With Renee. She shrugged at me, then stuck her tongue out real quick as she passed by. I laughed.

Like most newly rich poor folks, we blew that entire wad of cash and went back to being poor after a few years. I didn't mind so much. There were aspects of being middle/upper middle class I didn't like to much. But that summer was memorable.