I’d been friends with Chad now for three weeks. He still had all his other friends, of course. He simply had another one: me. Because of who he was, so outgoing and friendly to everyone, when he was hanging with his other friends at school and saw me, and he called or waved me over to join them, I joined him, and them, and they accepted me, too. They didn’t have much choice, if they wanted to remain friends with Chad. He never put up with sarcastic or mean remarks about other kids. If you wanted to bag on someone, you didn’t do it when you were hanging with Chad.
We’d spent some time alone with each other, too. Not a lot, but a couple of times I went over to his house after school, and he’d been to mine once. We talked and laughed and I hoped he enjoyed my company as much as I did his. He acted like it. But it was hard to tell, as he was so much the same with everyone.
With all the things we talked about, things boys talk about I guess, neither one of us had ever said anything about sex. He didn’t ever mention it, and I was too scared to bring it up, even if I wanted to. I was enjoying the heck out of—oops—enjoying the hell out of just being with him, being his friend, and didn’t want to do anything that might jeopardize that. So I was still gay, maybe, and he was still Chad, and that was plenty enough for me.
Except sometimes at night, my almost-dreams when I was falling asleep, those sort of thoughts that preceded sleep that you really couldn’t control at all, would get away from me, and I’d think about kissing him. In my dreams, he always kissed me back and told me how much he’d been hoping I felt the same way he did.
Hey, you can’t be 13 and not think stuff like that, if you’re a gay kid, maybe.
Brittany Sawyer was still being aggressive. I’d started wondering if I could sit somewhere else at lunch. Her questions had been getting more pointed. I hadn’t asked her out yet, and the hints she was leaving that I should do so were getting more like statements than hints.
And, she’d begun sitting closer to me at lunch than what was normal. The chairs were all lined up at the table, evenly separated, and she’d slide hers closer to mine when she’d sit down. She was right next to me, and her right arm would be rubbing my left arm. I couldn’t really move away from her. It would be a little insulting and would hurt her feelings. So I just put up with it. But on Friday, after sitting close for the last three days, she rubbed against my arm for a while, then put her hand in her lap, and after a while, slid it over so it was on my leg instead of hers. She squeezed my leg a couple of times, mid-thigh. I almost choked on my sandwich.
Then, very slowly, she began moving her fingers up along my pants, sort of tapping and rubbing on the inseam, moving steadily towards the middle part of me. She leaned over and breathed in my ear, “If we go to the movies this weekend, we can sit in the back, and in the dark, I can do even more than just touch your leg.” Then she slid her fingers higher.
The crash of my chair falling over backwards, with me still in it, got all the kids in the caf on their feet, looking at me. I rubbed the back of my head, and was glad it hadn’t hit anything on the way to the floor. I started blushing, but then Mario was helping me up, and when they saw I wasn’t hurt, Tom and Mario started laughing. I did too, as I’d learned the best way not to be teased was to laugh at yourself whenever anything embarrassing happened. You might still get teased, but it usually wasn’t so mean-spirited if you were laughing too.
When I was sitting at the table again, Brittany got kind of motherly, gently caressing the back of my head, and asking if I was all right, and what had happened. I told her that boys are very sensitive around their crotchal areas, and she giggled and started cooing in my ear. Except what she was cooing was, “So, Saturday night again?”
-- -- --
When I was walking home from school that night with Chad, I told him I had a date with Brittany the next day.
“You don’t sound too excited about it. What are you going to do?”
“Go to the movies again, I guess. That’s what she wants to do.”
“What’re you going to see?”
“I don’t know. She’ll pick something I guess.”
I guess he could hear my lack of enthusiasm, because he looked at me and this time asked, “Don’t you want to go? If you don’t, why did you ask her?”
I decided to come clean with him. He was the only one I could talk to about anything like this, and it seemed kind of exciting to talk about it.
“She’s been kind of hinting all week she wants me to ask her out, and I’m really not interested in her romantically, and the way she talks, I think she’s interested in me that way. But today, she put her hand on my leg and then slid it up, up to, you know?”
“She grabbed your balls?”
I blushed. But I had to keep talking. This was fun, even if it was embarrassing. But he was so much more open about things. Just like when he let me see him naked in the locker room a few weeks before. He didn’t seem to think anything of it. Now, he was talking about my balls, as if it wasn’t a big deal. To me it was. I wished I could be more like him.
“She didn’t grab my balls. She almost did. That’s why I crashed and burned in the caf.”
“Oh,” he laughed, “was that what happened? I was wondering. I thought maybe you’d been leaning back, tipping the chair on its back two legs, and overbalanced.”
“No. She was about to touch me, was up right next to, uh, you know, and I bailed out.”
He thought about that for a minute, still chuckling, then asked, “What did she say when you went over backwards?”
“She asked why I did, and I told her I was very sensitive in my crotchal area.”
I kept walking, and then realized he wasn’t with me any longer. I stopped and looked back, and he was lying on someone’s lawn, holding his stomach and laughing so hard his face was red and tears were coming from his eyes.
I walked back to him. Then stood waiting for him to be finished. Every time he’d look at me, I’d glare at him, and he’d go back to roaring again.
Finally, after a looonnng time, he sat up. Then he had me come sit on the lawn next to him.
“Marc, what’s a crotchal area?” And he started trying real hard not to start laughing again.
“Well, jeeeze, Chad. I couldn’t say ‘crotch’ to her. She’s a girl.”
Then I had to wait for him to stop laughing again before we could resume the conversation. Finally, he could talk.
“You know, girls are just the same as us, Marc. They know all about the same things we do. They have sex ed like we do. She’d certainly know the word ‘crotch’, I’d guess since she was six. You can say that to a girl. You can say anything you’re thinking to one.”
“I can’t. You probably can. I can’t. I get to blushing, and I’m not sure what’s appropriate, and if I start thinking about them thinking about what I’ve got down there, well, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want her thinking about me and what parts I have. It’s embarrassing!”
He looked at me, and got a little more serious. “You’ve got a lot of hang-ups, don’t you? You seem very shy about things like your body. And, I notice you almost never say any curse words, and even then I’ve only heard ‘damn’ and ‘hell’ and nothing else. Here, let me hear you say ‘shit.’”
I looked at him. I didn’t say anything. I’d never said that word before.
“Go ahead. Say it. I dare you.”
“I can say it. I just don’t need to. I’ve said it lots of times, just not when you’re around.”
“Then it’ll be easy to say it now. Go ahead.”
His eyes were amazing. They were so full of life, so eager and enthusiastic, and it was like I could see what made him so special, just looking into them. He was staring at me with his full intensity, wholly into what he was saying.
“Go ahead,” he repeated.
“Okay. Shit.” And then I blushed.
He stood up, offered me his hand and pulled me up too, then draped his arm across my shoulders. He did that now and then and I loved it when he did.
“So you asked her out for a date with her tomorrow night, and she’s already been reaching for your goodies. Your balls. Your cock. You can say those words, too. She certainly knows them. She might even have touched some, but probably not. She’s probably eager to do so. What are you going to do when she does?”
I looked up at him, and I think he could see the indecision, maybe even some discomfort, in my eyes. “I didn’t ask her out. She wanted me to, but I never did, so she asked me again. And I don’t know what I’ll do.” That might have been the most honest thing I’d ever said.
“Then we need to plan it out.”
So we continued walking home, but pretty slowly. He started thinking out loud, talking about Brittany and her intended assault on my equipment, and it was entirely strange, the boy I wanted so bad to be my boyfriend talking about what I should do when being groped by a girl. But he was talking and scheming and getting my opinion of what I wanted and didn’t want, a gentle humor in his voice, and some of it was pretty specific, and my body was responding in ways I didn’t want it to. Thank heavens I was wearing my tee shirt in the current fashion, hanging out over my belt and half way down my, uh, crotchal area. It covered me up. It isn’t always all bad not to be too developed yet.
-- -- --
I met her at the theater in the mall. She lived in the other direction from the mall from me, and it was easier this way. Both our parents dropped us off at the mall. My father was going to drive us all home afterwards. I had my cellphone to call him when we were ready.
I saw her already waiting outside the theater.
“What are we going to see?” I asked when I walked up to her.
“Westlake Central. It’s a comedy about kids in high school and the messes they get into on dates.”
How appropriate, I thought. But I was too busy to speak. I was looking at her.
When Chad was talking to me, walking home yesterday, he knew all sorts of stuff I didn’t know. I didn’t ask him how he knew. I’d do that when we had more time. But he knew stuff, and I listened.
He’d asked me if I wanted her hands in my pants, grabbing me, stroking me, feeling me up real good, whatever. I told him no, and he just looked at me, surprise and something else on his face.
I’d told him I just wasn’t ready for that yet, certainly not with her, and when I did something like that I wanted to feel something for the person who I was doing it with, and I didn’t feel anything at all romantic for Brittany. He nodded. He said that was cool. I thought he’d tease me. It made me feel even closer to him that he was taking this seriously, and was paying attention to my feelings, and not teasing me for them. Even if he didn’t understand them. Even if he thought the situation was at least a little funny.
So he began talking about diversionary tactics. Some of it, I got to laughing pretty hard. I didn’t think I had the nerve to spill a Coke in her lap, but we discussed it.
But we had decided that maybe the best way to keep her out of my pants was for me to go for hers. It would distract her if nothing else, and if she refused to let me touch her, I’d certainly have reason to pout and pull away from her, and that would accomplish my overall mission of keeping my innocence intact. That was my way of phrasing it. He said something much cruder. He wasn’t nearly as repressed as I was.
He also said some girls were really as eager as we were to do stuff. I loved it that he included me in the ‘we.’ It made me feel more mature than I really was. I actually did want to do stuff, but with him, not Brittany. If he wanted to assume otherwise, that was fine. Although if he thought I didn’t want to do things with Brittany, did he think I didn’t want to do them with anyone else, either? I didn’t want him thinking that. I wanted him thinking about him doing stuff with me. But I was sure he wasn’t thinking about that at all.
I wondered. Did other kids my age have such jumbled, mixed up thoughts that always seemed to be bouncing around in their heads? They couldn’t. I was sure this was my own private curse. I was confused so often. I had no idea how I was always getting good grades in school. When I sat in class, thoughts like this often distracted me from what the teacher was saying.
But, to get back to the plan, he said some girls were eager, and he could tell from what I’d said, Brittany was that way. He said if I doubted him, there was one way I could tell for sure. He said if she was wearing a skirt, it meant she wanted me to try stuff, because it wasn’t possible if she was wearing pants, so a skirt meant she was hoping. And, he said, if she was wearing a short skirt, she didn’t want to wait till the movie was half over before I began.
I don’t know how he knew this stuff.
But he did, and I’d listened. So, while she was telling me what movie we were going to see, I was looking at her and thinking, because her skirt was about as short as I’d ever seen on a barely teenager. She also had a blouse that buttoned up the front, with only about four buttons in all, and they were very large, and the top two were already undone.
She was as pretty as ever, but was wearing makeup which she didn’t at school. It made her look older. Especially the eye shadow. I was still uncertain if I was gay, but if I was straight, I’d probably have thought she was hot. As it was, even though I wasn’t that interested in girls, just looking at her, and thinking about what would be happening in not too long a while, I started having feelings I didn’t expect to have. Down below type feelings.
I got the tickets and we went in. She said we needed to get some popcorn and a large drink. I bought them after waiting in the concession stand line, she took the popcorn from me and shot melted butter all over it from the machine they had, then grabbed a couple of handfuls of napkins, and we went into the theater. It was still ten minutes till the show was to start and the screen was showing ads. The lights were about half on but it was easy to see our way.
Brittany took us to the top of the stadium seating. The theater was about half full, and most everyone in the place was a teenager. There were two other couples in the back row, one in each corner. Brittany looked at one couple, then the other, and took us to the seats right in the middle as far away from the other kids as possible.
I put the drink in the cup holder, then waited till she sat down. I gave her the big container of popcorn, then sat down myself.
She immediately pulled up the armrest that was between us and tucked it back between our backrests. Then she took my hand and scooched over so she was half in my seat. She put her head on my shoulder, which was a little difficult because she was taller than I was.
Then she said, “This is wonderful, Marc. I was starting to think you weren’t going to ask me out. We’ll have fun tonight. I can hardly wait for the lights to go off.”
Then she raised her head and kissed me on the cheek. She held her lips there for more than just a second. And while she was kissing me, she moved our hands so they were both lying in the middle of my lap.