But, most of all, I remember Brenda Narramore.

Please don’t tell my wife, who is snuggled up beside me now, cradled against my back, but I am dreaming about a girl I met one summer nearly three and a half decades ago.

Brenda Narramore.

My first summer love.

My muse and inspiration.

How many times have I redrawn her body, first as a leather-clad warrior in my comic books, then as an indestructible street fighter in a ripped and slashed flight suit as the heroine in my graphic novels? How many hours have I spent retracing her curves and lines? In fact, I made my fortune transforming my memories of Brenda Narramore into pen-and-ink drawings of Belinda Nightingale, superheroine of the postapocalyptic world.

The critics always label my impossibly busty Amazon in her tight, revealing costume as “nothing more than an adolescent sexual fantasy.”

They’re right.

She is.

She is Brenda Narramore.

The girl I once feared I’d let the cloaked demon snatch away.

JERRY’S car finally crunched across the seashells on the shoulder of the road.

I could hear “Love Will Keep Us Together” leaking out of his car stereo. Captain and Tennille. It had to be on the radio. No way would Jerry buy a cassette that bogus.

Jerry—who actually possessed a legal New Jersey driver’s license in addition to his fake one from New York State that made him officially eighteen and therefore old enough to buy booze—had his own car. A Starsky and Hutch Gran Torino with a modified V-8 and a Cruise-O-Matic transmission. I can still see the scooped manifold jutting up over the hood. His “ex-dad” had given the car to Jerry just after the divorce.

“What it is, what it is,” he said as he scrolled down his window. “You bring your bread?”

I dug into my shorts. “Five bucks, right?”

Jerry snatched the wrinkled bill out of my fist. “Funkadelic. You steal it from your old man?”

“Nah. I mowed lawns last month.”

“Dyno-mite.” He turned to Kevin. “Don’t leave me hangin’, bro!”

Kevin passed off his cash with a slap to Jerry’s palm.

“What it is, what it is,” said Jerry. I forget why. We all said that in 1975, I guess. “Hop in, brothas!”

Kevin called shotgun. I climbed into the backseat with the two cardboard flats filled with beer cans—one slightly refrigerated case of Schlitz, another of Falstaff. A wrinkled grocery sack stuffed with twist-cap bottles of what Boone’s Farm called wine clattered every time Jerry hit a pothole.

“Didn’t even need to hire Squeegie tonight,” Jerry bragged. “The blind doofus with the Coke-bottle glasses was working behind the counter.”

If Jerry couldn’t score our adult beverages with his fake ID, Squeegie was always his fallback plan: a burned-out World War II vet who slept in the Dumpster out back behind the liquor store. Squeegie would do just about anything for two bucks. Of course, back in 1975 gas cost forty-four cents a gallon, a stamp ten, and a whole pack of cigarettes only thirty-five.

The last time someone sneaked me a pack here in New York City, it cost him nine dollars, and I only got to smoke one before my wife caught me, started crying, and flushed about eight dollars and fifty-five cents’ worth of tobacco down the toilet.

I had told her I’d quit.

I had lied.

WE met the Philly girls at the state park.

Brenda Narramore was beautiful.

A dark pyramid of wavy hair tumbled over her shoulders in a cascade of kinky corkscrews. Her body was perfectly proportioned, up top and down below. She even wore sexy librarian glasses before they became fashionable. That’s why Belinda Nightingale always accents her skintight leather breastplate with horn-rimmed reading glasses.

That first night, however, the real Brenda was not costumed as an Amazon princess. I remember she wore an embroidered peasant blouse tied off with a sash, the shirttails barely covering her bikini bottom. It looked like she was wearing the tiniest miniskirt ever sewn. She also carried a canvas flower-power beach bag.

“Hi, guys,” said Donna. “This is Brenda.”

Donna more or less said that to me, officially pairing us up for the evening.

“Hey,” I said.

Brenda Narramore smirked. Her raven-black eyes sized me up. I don’t think they liked what they saw.

“Shall we?” said Jerry, who was lugging the clinking bag of Boone’s Farm bottles under his arm. He held out his free hand and Kimberly, the lanky girl who tottered like she was already wasted on cheap wine, took it.

“Need a hand?” Donna said to Kevin, who carried the case of Schlitz.

“I’m good.”

She squeezed his bulging upper arm. “Strong, too.”

He shrugged. “I work out a little.”

“A little?” She was kneading his arm like some Italian women work over cantaloupes in the produce aisle.

“C’mon,” said Kevin with a well-practiced shake of his shaggy hair. “Let’s boogie.”

They headed down to the beach.

Brenda Narramore looked at me. I never felt so scrawny or childish, standing there soaked in Hai Karate, wearing my best Orange Sunkist “Good Vibrations” T-shirt and denim cut-offs, straining to hold on to that case of Schlitz without all the cans tumbling out because, somehow, maybe from the condensation dripping down the sides of the aluminum tallboys, the cardboard bottom had become sopping wet.

Brenda pulled a pack of Doral Menthol cigarettes out of her beach bag. Stuck one between her plump lips. Flicked her Bic and lit up.

I guess I was gawking at her.

“Dream on,” she sneered on the exhale.

She ambled down to the beach.

I followed. A safe distance behind her.

WE scraped up some driftwood and used the brown paper wine bag to start a small beach fire.

Not a raging bonfire, just enough extra warmth to help the beer and wine make everybody feel good ’n’ toasty. Intoxicated after chugging three tepid cans of Falstaff (the beer that promised “man size pleasure”), I became hypnotized by the fire. I saw chattering mouths and contorted faces dancing in the flickering flames, not to mention a flock of shadowy witch doctors leaping across the sand, furiously stretching out their twitching limbs to reach the not-too-distant dunes where, it seemed to me, more nefarious shadow friends might lie in wait.

Remembering Kevin’s sage words about beer and wine being considered mighty fine, I unscrewed the cap off a bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill and started guzzling.

It’s no wonder, not much later, I started seeing real phantoms. The demon in the dunes.

I gulped the wine, because I was nervous, sitting scant inches from Brenda Narramore, who kept lighting up Doral Menthol cigarettes while exhaling her own hazy cloud of specters, adding them to the mustering swarm of ghosts sent swirling skyward by our smoky campfire. One time, when I shifted in the sand, our thighs actually brushed. I don’t think Brenda Narramore felt it, but I was extremely glad I had worn the tight cotton cutoffs instead of my J.C. Penney polyester shorts, which would not have done a very good job concealing that night’s rising adolescent fantasies.

Then, believe it or not, Brenda actually turned, pushed a few bouncy hair coils out of her eyes, and smiled at me like she knew every secret I had ever had.

“Ciggy-boo?” she said, holding out her crinkled Doral pack.

“He’s a wimp,” sniggered Kevin, who was bogarting one of his dad’s Kents on the other side of the fire circle, letting the cigarette dangle limply off his lips. “Dave doesn’t smoke.”

I reached out for Brenda’s proffered pack. “Hey, there’s a first time for everything, bro.”

“What it is, what it is,” said Jerry, admiring my sense of adventure.

I pulled a white, filtered tube of tobacco out of its wrinkled cellophane container. “Dorals, huh?”