Nope, the boner goes unnoticed.

Marisa must have noticed my erection, but she decided to ignore it, just as she ignored some of the more, er, exuberant phrases I used during my speech. I didn't get any nookie from being nice to Marisa, but I did learn a valuable lesson: the jury was still out on whether feminism was having much of an impact on society, but it sure as hell had an impact on women! If this feminism stuff had such power over women’s emotions and behavior, then I was definitely going to learn as much about it as I could.

Meanwhile, my friendship with Marisa just took off from there. My newfound determination to learn about feminism led me to start paying attention to Marisa’s frequent rants, and soon they turned into real conversations between us. Marisa was delighted to have someone close by who wasn’t just humoring her on her favorite topic.

She also remembered my empathy in reacting to her freak out about her breasts. Mari started opening up to me, sharing her thoughts and emotions--and to my shock, I started doing the same with her. I wasn’t the kind of guy who talked about feelings much, nor did I want to be, but something about Marisa just inspired my trust and openness. I knew I could tell her anything and she’d keep my confidence. We sometimes would stay up most of the night, just talking about things that she’d never share with Jessica.

So over the course of our first year together as stepsiblings, I got to know Marisa and Jessica incredibly well. In their very different ways, the two girls opened up to me about all the little soap operas of high school life, their boy troubles, and even about dealing with the **** of their mom and learning to trust their new stepmother. I didn’t get much in the way of advice about girls from them--I was a little too nerdy to have much opportunity to use it--but we shared virtually every aspect of our lives with each other.

We weren’t real siblings--we’d met too late in life for that--but we did become incredibly close friends. That was the situation when we started planning for the summer…