Prologue

Doris hated her name. Why couldn't she have been named something exotic or fashionable, like Madison or Alexis or Riley? Those were names of the visible ones, the exciting ones, the popular ones. Doris was a name for the invisible, the girl that no one noticed, the girl who people passed without speaking, the poor unfortunate with the white cane.

Doris Elaine Smith had been blind since birth. She had never seen a sunset, a cloud, another person, or herself. Doris was a very young child when she discovered that others possessed this thing called sight. In the years following, she mostly was angry... angry at whatever God had made her this way; angry at the people who talked louder to her because she was blind even though nothing was wrong with her hearing; angry at her parents for simultaneously doing too little and too much for her; and angry because as soon as the do-gooders had helped her across a street or to a classroom, they left her very much alone.

As Doris grew older, her anger evolved into fierce independence. Her feelings of isolation continued to grow as well. She learned how to live as a blind person and take care of herself fully. She tried using a guide dog for a while, but the animal brought an extra burden of responsibility, so she instead worked hard to develop her ability to get along with just her other senses and her trusty cane. As the years progressed, she excelled in school all own her own, and she held more mental maps of her surroundings in her head than most people had thoughts.

By middle school, she had become very self-assured largely because more and more elements in her life were stable, unchanging. Then suddenly her world turned upside down.

Puberty struck!

Her body, once one of her constants, was changing almost daily. Hormones began to course through her body along with the wild thoughts that accompanied them. Breasts and shapely hips appeared along with new, very different hair here and there. Worse were those amazing menstrual periods. All of these very normal parts of maturation Doris could feel, but could not see.

The bad part of high school for Doris was the loneliness. The good part was that by the time she was seventeen, she had become accustomed to her new body. Then the most amazing part of all emerged—her sexuality—mysterious, perplexing, disturbing, wonderful... and so many unanswered questions.

In her search for answers, she read all the books that she could find, but the Braille books had only words. There were no pictures. Her imagination filled with unconfirmed ideas about her feelings, about boys, about her own body, about relationships, and about that unnamed powerful force that caused her to manipulate herself to shattering orgasms almost every night.

The questions piled up in Doris, yet she had no source of answers. Her parents were no help at all. They were good, conservative, born-again Baptists who believed that sex was for procreation only. Her mother couldn't even bring herself to discuss Doris' menstrual cycle. She gave up in the middle of a vague discussion of original sin and simply gave Doris a book, one written for young children. If something as natural as her cycle was an uncomfortable subject for her mother, then conversation about sex was an unthinkable.

Doris had no real friends to provide insights either. There were people who helped her get from place to place, but they weren't friends to whom she could bare her very soul. Her teachers offered no help either. They thought that since she was so quietly self-sufficient, then she must be on top of all aspects of her life. As a result, the normal school yard learning about sex from peers or teachers was lost with Doris.

Nonetheless, deep inside her were raging fires that seemed to be burning out of control. Her nightly self-manipulation only made matters worse.

In other words, Doris was about as horny as a teenaged girl could get.

After graduating from high school, Doris convinced her parents to allow her to enroll in the local junior college. More importantly, she talked them into renting an apartment for her across the street from the college. That was the only way, she had argued, for her to put in the extra time she needed to keep up in classes. The real reason, of course, was that she was desperate to be on her own and away from her parents. The parents finally relented and that started a bold new chapter in her eighteen-year-old life.

The apartment complex had a swimming pool at its center and that is where our little story really begins. Doris loved the exquisite feelings of warm sun or cool water on her body, sensations that she had just come to know. The pool quickly became her favorite place to read and study, or to simply be in touch with her feelings. She could hardy wait each afternoon to don her brand new swim suit and head for the pool... and her new life.

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