As I sat at the table the next morning, Darrell asked, “Davey, do you know the alphabet?”
“What’s an aphapet?” I asked.
“Well, the ABCs?”
“Mommy taught them to me,” I said. I sang the song for him, which ends, “Now I’ve sung my ABCs. Tell me what you think of me.”
“I think you’re pretty smart,” he said. Then on a piece of paper he drew a capital and a lower-case a. I identified them and he drew the other letters. The only ones I got wrong were m and n. I never could remember which had two humps and which had one.
“Good job,” Darrell said, patting me on the back. “I think you’ll find that school is a piece of cake.”
Cake? I wondered. What did school have to do with cake?
Paul came into the room at that point and said, “Davey, we need to go into town to buy you some clothes for school, so you should get dressed.”
Wearing clothes was not my favorite thing to do, but when we had gone into town before Paul had always made me put some on.
“Why do I need clothes for school?” I asked. “Can’t I go this way?”
Darrell roared with laughter and Paul said, “Davey, I know that your preference is to go au naturѐl, but children in school wear clothes, and so do the teachers.”
I didn’t understand either the words au naturѐl or the necessity of clothing at school, but I simply shrugged, went into my bedroom, and got dressed.
When I returned in my favorite shirt and shorts, Paul looked at me and said, “You’re growing. It’s lucky we’re going to get some new clothes.”
The three of us rode in Paul’s truck. I sat between my two uncles. The truck had a gearshift on the floor which Paul moved from time to time. Since I had one leg on each side of the shift, I had to be alert to move, too.
Thinking about school made me nervous. I had no idea what to expect. Would I like the other children? Would I like the teacher? Would I like learning new things?
At the school the next day, Paul parked the truck and the three of us walked in. Everywhere I looked, there were children ─ happy, chattering children. Most of them were clearly older than I was, and sure enough they were all wearing clothes.
The uncles took me to a classroom and introduced me to Mrs. Partridge, the teacher.
Funny, I thought, she doesn’t look like the partridge in my bird book.
She welcomed me and showed me where my desk and cubby were.
The room was filling up with children, all about my age and size. A boy sitting next to me said, “Hi, I’m Willy.”
I thought that was a funny name because it was the word that Darrell sometimes used for my pee-pee. I giggled, but Willy just looked confused.
“You’re new here, aren’t you? You weren’t in kindergarten last year,” he said.
“My uncle didn’t think I needed to go to kindergarten.”
“Uncle?” he asked. “What about your parents?”
I felt myself tearing up. “Mommy and Daddy are dead,” I said. I think it was the first time I actually said that word.
“Oh, gee,” Willy said, “I’m sorry. I guess I shouldn’t have asked.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “My uncles take good care of me.”
The girl in front of me turned and looked at me. I suppose she’d been listening. “How many uncles do you have?” she asked.
“Two,” I said. “I’m Davey. What’s your name?”
“Priscilla.”
I was happy that I’d already made two friends.
As the morning went on, we talked about numbers and reading. Mrs. Partridge called it “Reviewing.” We had a chance to pick out books from the ones on shelves under the windows. I got two and sat at my desk, enjoying looking at the pictures.
Looking over at me, Willy asked, “Can you read?”
“No,” I answered, feeling as though there might be something wrong with me.
“Would you like me to share a book with you?”
That sounded friendly, so I nodded.
We went to a part of the room where there were a lot of cushions. Sitting side by side we looked at the book together. After we’d talked about the first picture, Willy asked, “Would you like me to read it to you?”
I nodded, and he began to read, pointing to the words as he read them. I followed along, and when he’d finished, I asked, “Can I read it now?”
He looked a little surprised but handed me the book. As I read, I too pointed to the words. When we finished, he said, “I thought you said you couldn’t read.”
“I can’t,” I said, “but now I can read the words you pointed to.”
We had a morning recess and an afternoon one. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day, so we played outside. I joined Willy, Priscilla, and a couple of other kids in a game of tag.
The school had a room called a cafeteria where we could get lunch. We all sat at a big round table and ate spaghetti and meatballs. I looked for the piece of cake Darrell had mentioned, but I didn’t see any. Still, it was fun.
When school was over, I wondered how I would get back home, but when I went out the door, there was Paul’s truck. He was leaning against it with his arms folded.
I ran up and gave him a hug, and he hugged me back.
“Where’s Darrell? I asked.
“At home working on his computer,” he answered.
I wanted to tell him all about school. I talked and talked, all the way back to the cabin.
When we got there, I hugged Darrell and went into my room, where I took off my school clothes before running outside. The day was still warm and sunny, and I enjoyed the sun on my bare skin.
A while later, Darrell came to the door and called, “Hey, nature boy, it’s time for supper. I went in, put on my clothes at Paul’s insistence, and sat at the table.
We had a happy meal as I told Darrell everything I’d told Paul about school. “But,” I said to him, “there wasn’t any piece of cake.”
He looked puzzled for a moment and then roared with laughter, explaining to me what the expression meant.
From then on, I looked forward to going to school and was disappointed when Paul told me that schools weren’t open on Saturdays or Sundays. I quickly figured out how to read and was soon devouring the classroom books. Paul said I was an autodidact.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s a person who teaches himself. It’s a good thing to be.”
Willy and Priscilla and I grew to be fast friends. I had lots of other friends in the class, but they were my best ones.
As the weather grew colder and snow started to fall, I began wearing clothes, even in the cabin. After all, while I liked being naked, I didn’t like being cold.
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The school years seemed to fly by. I occasionally had a sleepover with Willy, either at my house or his. We giggled when we peed together and compared our wee-wees.
One time, when Willy was only coming for the day, he brought Priscilla, and Paul took us on an Explore to the meadow. Of course, we all wore our clothes so we only waded in the stream.
Often at night, Paul and Darrell played chess while my bears and I watched. I learned how the different pieces moved, and one night I asked if I could play. Darrell and I played while Paul and the bears watched. Of course, Darrell beat me, but it wasn’t long before I was winning my share of games.
When we were in fifth grade and both Willy and I were ten years old, we began spending even more time with each other. Sleepovers became a regular Friday night event. Willy had known for a long time that, when the weather was warm, I liked to go naked. After he promised never to tell his parents, he joined me bare at the cabin on Friday nights. Neither Paul nor Darrell ever said anything about it.
Our bodies had changed, as those of growing boys do. We were approximately the same height and neither of us was given to fat. In the summers we both tanned all over. The main difference was that he had blond hair and dark hazel eyes while I had darker hair and gray eyes. He had a very light sprinkle of freckles. In the summers, his hair turned almost white and his freckles grew a little darker.
We had both learned that we really liked to touch and be touched by each other, whether it was arms around shoulders, big hugs, or gentle caressing in bed at night.
Often on the Saturdays when Willy was visiting, the uncles took us on Explores. I had decided that it was babyish to take the bears, but they continued to live on my bed. Willy grew to love Explores as much as I did. Like me, he enjoyed lying naked in the sunshine, and like me he loved to paddle in the stream and sit there, feeling the water run over his penis.
At the cabin, we shared one bed. At his house we started off in two beds, but after his parents had both said goodnight, I slipped into his bed with him.
Being normal boys, we were both very aware of our penises, which we had taken to calling our willies. They often grew hard and stiff when we were together, but we didn’t know why. We compared them often and played with them in bed. At first we each fondled our own, but after a time we discovered that we liked the feelings when we fondled each other’s.
From the time we had been together in first grade, our school occasionally had lock-downs or active shooter drills. Early on, we knew that intruders had gone into schools across the country and shot children, but of course we never thought that would happen in our little town in Maine.
During the drills the teacher locked the classroom doors and we all huddled in cloakrooms, so we were not visible through the windows. I sometimes thought that doing so would make us sitting ducks if a gunman ever got in, but for the most part we looked at the drills as an escape from routine.
For Christmas that year, one of my gifts from my uncles was a book called It’s Perfectly Normal. The book discussed puberty and sex very graphically and succinctly. There were detailed drawings. It told about everything from willies and balls to erections, which we called boners, about something called wet dreams, which we’d never had, and masturbation, which we usually just called playing but boys at school called jerking off. We learned about ejaculating, something else that had never happened to us. Willy and I pored over the book for hours, often giggling and always growing hard as we examined the pictures. It was another thing for which Willy was sworn to secrecy.
Sometimes we lay on my bed rubbing each other’s willies and hoping to have an ejaculation, but nothing happened.
It wasn’t until we were twelve that we first felt what the book called a climax. I felt it first. It was a lovely feeling even though I didn’t shoot any semen, another word for which the schoolyard had a term: cum. Another month passed before Willy first had one. From then on we were able to bring each other to increasingly exciting climaxes. In time, we were doing it more than once a night.
When that happened, I decided it was no longer appropriate to go around the house naked. I reserved the nakedness for times when it was warm and I was either outside or in bed with Willy.
One night when I was nearly thirteen, I lay on my bed alone jerking off, and I shot a little cum. I was thrilled. When I told Willy the next day, I think he was a little jealous, but it wasn’t long before he too was shooting.
From then on, our times in bed together took on new and exciting adventures. We learned to time our climaxes so that, just before we came, we stopped pumping and waited for the feeling to subside. Then we’d begin again, letting the tensions rise. We’d repeat that three or four times until we just couldn’t stand waiting anymore. The pressures would rise, I’d often break out in goosebumps, and as we moaned and arched our backs, cum would shoot onto our tummies and chests.
It may be that the book caused us to move ahead in our experimenting a little faster, but we also understood just what was happening and why. And, as the book said, it was all perfectly normal.