All for one. One for all.

All good things come to an end.

‘Lights out’, would ring in a few more minutes, but they could stay here. Their absence would be covered by a friend if the principal came around unexpectedly early to do a bed check.

Miss Dixon—the principal—was always unpredictable, but it was Friday night of a long, holiday weekend, so she’d be later if she did it at all.

Many of the girls had taken the opportunity to return home so there were only half the girls still in the school, and many empty beds. In all of those absences, it would be easy for them to be overlooked, and too complicated to keep track of, except their day-clothes were already laid out for the next day, so Miss Dixon would know that they were still somewhere in the school if Stefanie did not remove them and remake their beds.

Le-an remembered something. “I left my watch inside, and I forgot to bring our phone out with us. I left it lying on my bedside table. Ah well, it doesn’t matter, Stefanie will keep a look-out once she finds out I didn’t bring the phone when she tries to phone us.”

Stefanie was their closest friend, though she was nothing like them and she was already accepted as a part of their future nursing plans.

Le-an, the eldest of the trio by only minutes, was elevated by that slight age difference to be a leader in some things, but they each had slight advantages in certain circumstances. Sarah’s was in math. Olivia’s was in history, but they knew enough not to be so obvious in their differences. All of them were honor students.

They were always ahead of any of the other girls in terms of academic accomplishments. Few students or teachers could tell them apart without their name tags, but even then, it could be difficult, as they regarded their clothing as common, so even the name tags could get mixed up. It usually didn’t matter.

When they were in their nightdresses, as now, no one could easily tell which one was which, and not in the dark.

From the moment they entered the school environment five years earlier when they were thirteen, they had made a pact to stay together. They knew each other’s moods and difficulties, and believed that they loved each other better than anyone else might be able to love them, except perhaps for their Aunt Jessie who had brought them up while their parents had been posted abroad, only putting them into the nearby boarding school when other difficulties had swamped her.

The evening was warm, so they were not uncomfortable leaning back against the warm brickwork of the chimney.

Their conversation was often interrupted as they marveled at a shooting star, or admired the stars in the distinctive formations, wondering if those formations even existed as they now saw them from thousands of light years away. The Plough, and Polaris; the North Star. Orion’s shoulders, body, belt and sword. The Seven Sisters—the Pleiades star cluster; Taurus (the bull), then Orion again, Cancer, Gemini, (the twins) and Ursa minor (little bear).

The sky was pin-pricked with tens of thousands of suns; giant fusion reactors like their own sun (except much bigger), in the sky, giving rise to the possibility of life existing out there in that darker void between the suns, on some invisible world just like the one they lived on. The planet, Venus, star of evening and star of morning at other times of the year, was still just visible, low on the western horizon following the sun out of sight.

The wind was getting up. There had been rain in the forecast, but they were fairly-well sheltered where they were. They should go back in. They could see that the clouds moving in fast, were already beginning to obliterate the stars.

Lean sighed. “We should go in. To be caught up here is to risk expulsion, and we can’t afford that, not this close to us getting admitted to Nursing School."

They felt the first splashes of rain and could hear thunder somewhere behind them.

“It’s raining. I suppose all good things must come to an end, and just as I was enjoying it. We’ll have to go back in, but I’ve got to pee first.”

“Me too.”

“Me three.”

The rain began to come down hard almost immediately. They were alone, with no one to see them or to comment, so they stripped off their nightdress and panties in the near dark so as not to get them wet, revealing mature young bodies, and tucked their tightly rolled-up clothing under their arms to keep them dry. They were ready to scurry back into the school when they were finished and would dress at the bottom of the steps; checking each other in the weak light there, before they snuck back into the school to their beds.

“I’m damned if I’ll squat and have this dirt splashed up onto me by the rain, I’m going to do it standing up, like boys do, and aim it over the edge of the roof. It can be our last act of rebellion. There’s no one to see us to judge.”

Once an idea took hold, they did not fight it. If one was ripe for mischief it soon infected all of them the same way.

“I think it did us good to look after those two cousins for a while, last year, while we stayed with Aunt Jessie."

She shook her head, disbelievingly. “They didn’t care who watched them pee. Boys are like that. No shame, no embarrassment. They wanted to show off that part of theirs all of the time on the flimsiest of excuses, playing with themselves. They think of nothing else. They regarded us as stuffy adults, and not as girls only a few years older than them, but they certainly weren’t shy or embarrassed when we got them in the bath and they wanted to show us how high they could pee up out of the water, like a fountain.”

Olivia chuckled, hiding her embarrassment. “I’ll see if I can do it without making a mess down my leg this time, but even if I do, it doesn’t matter. We have to go to the bathroom and wash our feet anyway. We will have to pee and run.”

They stood lined up at the edge of the roof in the almost total dark and struggled to start peeing. It was not something they were used to doing, having tried it only twice like this before, with indifferent success, and the dark hid their clumsy and messy embarrassment in their attempts, from all eyes.

Boys had the advantage there. They could hold themselves and often had to, at first, to make sure their foreskins were pulled back from the head, so as not cover their urethra (Le-an had even done that for their cousins. Oh, the things they learned once they overcame those embarrassments), and then could direct it where they would (even with Le-an directing it once), with intriguing delicacy and accuracy. Accuracy enough to write a name in the snow—their own, or a girl’s name, while they stopped the flow and started it at will, something a girl could not easily control or direct. They had tried it once, without success.

They stood defiantly, like the rebels to propriety they were, legs wide apart, fumbling gently at their bodies in a way they did not usually do, opening themselves up, delicately parting the lips of their vulvas, sweeping hair to one side, and directed the sputtering shower at first, and then a hissing, ragged stream down the roof, as a male might, but not with the same degree of finesse, or accuracy and success. They wet their fingers, and even splashed their feet and legs as they adjusted and shuffled their feet to achieve the best flow with the least discomfort. They were always game to try almost anything once, where no one might criticize them.

“You can imagine what Miss Dixon would say if she saw us like this. She would ring a rare peal over us, would call us irredeemable and tell as that we were immoral and were asking for trouble, skating toward a bad end, daring to display ourselves like this; showing everything, shamelessly, and she would then phone our aunt and commiserate with her about what a trial and a burden we must be for her.”

Women should never stand up to pee without a lot of practice. It required more attention to detail, more familiarity, more focus. However, with some re-jiggling of a few errant hairs, and touching, pressure here or there, exposing, lifting, pulling, getting fingers wet for a moment, and a few other minor adjustments as they giggled at their daring to poke society’s expectations for them in the eye, they managed, though not well.

Boys never had that difficulty.

Their minds could never let go of their cousins’ antics. They had been given the task of bathing their cousins; two difficult boys, and getting them ready for bed each evening for the next week. They had watched with some surprise and some considerable curiosity on several occasions, those same defiant younger cousins; only five and six years old, unabashedly unlimber their little spouts in the garden, or anywhere they felt like it, and no matter who was with them, pull the skin back from the rounded heads of their circumcised p*****s without any shyness.

Le-an and her sisters had learned about what that bloody mutilation of circumcision meant, and about foreskins at that moment, unable not to watch, as their cousins let-fly, showing themselves off proudly, and demonstrating how easy it was, and how far and how high they could pee up against a tree, just as they did in the bath, and why didn’t they try it?

They couldn’t, and had no intention of trying.

“Look at what we learned? We learned about boys, if not men. I’d like to see circumcision done, though it might be a bit grisly, and maybe they don’t let women watch that or do it in case they got carried away and took too much off in revenge for some past hurt, suffered because of that object. It didn’t seem to leave our cousins with any kind of trauma, or any difficulty with erections when we bathed them. I don’t think they knew how they affected us seeing them that way.”

That had been the first time they had ever seen a real, live p***s, in the flesh. And that diminutive little thing was what all of the fuss was about when they discussed it in the dormitory in awed voices? That little thing? And then they had seen them become erect in the warm bath after that, sending that little fleshy tower poking up out of the water; then uncomfortably learning about testicles, as well as erections. Thankfully, girls were not disfigured in that way.

Getting into a warm bath, as well as many other things, stimulated those boys that way. Though anything and everything seemed to stimulate them, especially any kind of touch. She and her sisters were naturally curious, while striving not to appear so once the initial feeling of alarm had died down about what had they touched or done to have caused that, after they had got the soap to work on their little bodies.

Perhaps they had been focused too much upon those little spigots, as that was what most interested them. Their cousins had not minded being touched there by these intent and curious girls, (after their natural girlish hesitation about touching that strange object) but seemed to like being the center of attention as they were washed, touched, and handled more than might be usual, relative to when others did that for them.

What they were learning, left them with a feeling of discomfort, once they began to believe that their cousins had not been deformed in some way when they became erect.

“I’d never seen a boy’s prick, never mind seeing one stiffen up, until that moment; never watched one growing, become erect like that, sitting in the bath as nonchalantly as you like and him not embarrassed by it at all. But I was! I even wondered if I had somehow caused that to happen; my proximity, or a smell I had not been aware of. Had he seen my breasts as I’d bent over him in just my nightdress? Could he respond to seeing those at so young an age? He had even reached out as though to touch. I didn’t know what to do with myself for a while. All the things we missed out on, not having brothers, or going to a mixed school.”

The rain began to come down harder, wetting them enough, that they knew they should get this over with, retreat quickly, and dry off before their hair got soaking wet too, or it would be obvious that they had been outside in the rain, and that would invite more questions than they wanted to deal with.

They were distracted by the blackness over the edge of the roof, and the far lights of the village, beckoning them into the void, much as the bow wave on a ship so hauntingly attracted others to forget the precariousness of where they were, even enough to overbalance and fall in, to disappear forever.

Verdict? Lost at sea, accidental death, and nobody ever recovered. A lot of suspicious deaths were hidden that way.

The distant lights flickered in the rain for a few minutes and became obliterated by the increasing downpour as it moved farther across the landscape like a shroud.

Something flapped close by Sarah’s head, distracting her; a bat or an owl, and she swore as she slipped on the edge, throwing her arms out, dropping everything, fighting to recover with a shout, and began to slide down the wet roof, letting out a cry as she tried to recover her balance, slamming her hands onto the flat roof as she turned, hitting her knees hard onto the tiles, losing her rolled-up clothing, clutching futilely at whatever might be within reach, but there was nothing.

Her sisters heard her cry out, saw her land on her knees on the hard tiles, and then throw herself flat, desperately trying to grab at something to hold onto, as she skidded slowly down the wet roof on her belly and breasts with a horrified cry, disappearing into the dark.