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His name was Ralph. The penis, that is. The young man that Ralph was attached to was named Michael, not that I or anyone else would remember that decades later. Poor Michael! He seemed nice. Attentive and loving, in a slightly anodyne kind of way. But Ralph? Ralph had a mind of his own. A personality. Ralph was hard to forget.

The novel in which Ralph appears, Judy Blume’s Forever …, turns 50 this October. (A TV series loosely adapted from it premiered on Netflix earlier this year, and has been renewed for a second season.) As I’ve written before, I was 12 when I first read the book. I had never dated a boy, much less kissed one—that wouldn’t happen until I was 16—when I came across it, and Ralph.

I remember the cover quite clearly: cream-colored, with an illustration of a gold locket, within which was a rendering of a young woman gazing downward as if lost in thought, or sorrow. She had a pert nose, tweezed eyebrows, and long, feathered hair. Very 1970s. “A moving story of the end of innocence,” read the book’s description. Readers were meant to understand that this young woman was the individual whose story was moving, and whose innocence had ended. Inside, we learned that her name is Katherine Danziger. She is a high-school student, and also a virgin.

Forever By Judy Blume

That I “came across” the book sounds misleadingly passive, because in reality, Forever was given to me, just like it was given to—and devoured by—many, many other preteen girls, and not necessarily by our parents. What’s also deceptively passive: the book’s title, particularly that ellipsis, which suggests a pensive ambiguity, maybe even ambivalence. Is this a story about “forever,” or is it not?