Chapter 2: Friday

Waking up slowly, I stretched my arms out while squinting at the bright sunlight in my bedroom. The next routine maneuver left my hand holding my morning wood. Then I remembered Kara’s admonition and took my hand away. Headed for the bathroom, I noticed the clock.

I was up almost an hour early, likely from the bright sunlight. I was sure Kendall was still sleeping, so I could enjoy a full-length hot shower. I noticed the shampoo while waiting for the falling water to turn hot. Will Kara’s hands be in my hair tonight? Better wash that too.

I was almost done when my brother wandered in for his morning pee.

“Don’t flush while I’m in the shower, Ken!”

He seemed to mumble something incoherent while he peed, made a haphazard gesture of handwashing, and shuffled out without scalding me. Point for him, I guess. It was still so early, so I pulled on my t-shirt and pants and searched the kitchen.

Only one egg meant I was making pancakes. The thing about making breakfast now and then is the way Mom reacts. She carries on enough that my brother gets jealous and aggravated. He calls me a “mama’s boy,” and I can’t really argue it. We’ve always been very close.

Something I’ve appreciated more as I’ve gotten older: she’s always treated me like an adult, even when I was acting like a kid. I’m not sure how she got to be so patient, but I do remember being surprised by how calm she was when my little brother was screaming and melting down.

I guess watching him lose his mind was a negative example because he got nowhere with his tantrums. Being older now and seeing other small kids gave me some perspective. He wasn’t unusual, just a regular boy who wanted to get his way. As we got older, the house got quieter. Mom (Dad too) had a powerful way of watching you calmly and waiting you out. You got nowhere by yelling, and the expressions on their faces could really sting.

I don’t claim to be perfect. Late one night when I was more than a year too young to have a permit or license, I took Dad’s car and went joyriding (by myself). I didn’t notice it was out of gas; the tank ran dry about thirty miles away. I had to call him, admit where I was, and have him dispatch the auto club to give me a can of gas. While I was waiting just off the end of the freeway ramp, a couple of cops came by, and I had to (partially) explain that I was just waiting for the tow truck.

Somehow, I bluffed my way out of it. I think it helped that I was quite tall for my age and bearded, and they assumed I was older.

But back to my Friday morning. Working off Grandma’s recipe card, I made up enough batter and started cooking up a batch of pancakes. When the family straggled in, I asked Ken to prepare the breakfast table while I finished making the coffee.

“We’re out of eggs, sorry, I used the last one for the batter. At least we have milk and enough orange juice.”

“Oh, this is great, Connor. I love it when you make our breakfast. You’re going to make some woman very happy when you’re older.”

“Yeah, as her housekeeper,” snarked my brother.

“You may be excused, Ken,” growled Dad.

“But I haven’t finished!”

“My point exactly.” Ken recognized the trouble he was in.

“I’m sorry, Dad, Connor. Thank you for making breakfast.”

See what I mean?

At school, my first period and homeroom class was geometry, and I managed to avoid smirking while leaving my homework on Ms. Colbert’s desk. Since I was early, we had a brief moment together before I went to my desk. She glanced at my paper.

“I used this book last year, Connor. I want to thank you for omitting a sketch with your answer on question five.”

I looked up sharply. It seemed like a perfectly ordinary comment, and her face was carefully neutral, except for crinkling around the corners of her eyes.

“Sometimes, I struggle teaching geometry. It’s hard to explain the real-world implications.”

“Ms. Colbert, I appreciate how you take an in-depth approach. I’d better go sit down.”

Suddenly, my view of her was very different. Generally, I didn’t think about my teachers very much. Most of them were older than my parents and aloof. With dozens and dozens of students assigned each day, individual contacts were limited. My geometry teacher is moderately attractive but twenty-plus years older than me, but her sense of humor did get my attention.

I thought of myself as a pretty good student because of my parents. Sometimes the extra workload was a burden; other times I appreciated that I would have choices a lot of my peers would miss. Books were everywhere when I was little. Watching Ken, I realized they were reading to me almost every night after I started talking in full sentences. That is, if they had treated me the same way they treated him.

He had my pile of preschool books, and we both could read simple run-sit-walk-talk level books when the other kindergartners were still learning their alphabets. They kept challenging us as we got older.

Before reaching high school, I was reading all kinds of “juvenile classics” like Mark Twain (Tom Sawyer), Jules Verne (Journey to the Center of the Earth), Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island), E. R. Burroughs (A Princess of Mars), and Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter).

This last story opened up a whole world for me. Before then, sex wasn’t something I thought about. We spent our hot summers undressed, and I knew the difference between boys and girls and men and women. When I asked about sex and why people did it, Mom explained that sex felt like being gently tickled until it got to be too much fun and you had to stop.

When I started getting erections, my brother said I was weird. But Mom set me straight. Oops, stupid pun. Eventually, masturbation was explained to me, and I stopped unconsciously jerking off in the living room in front of everybody, in favor of, shall we say, private practice.

Getting back to Hawthorne, Mom and Dad used the story as a pretext to explain the whole system of morality in conventional society. All about sex and love, about morality and marriage, and why poor Hester Prynne was forced to wear the “A” for adultery that created her pregnancy and her baby Pearl.

Perhaps I should have read The Scarlet Letter when I was older, because it made a powerful impression on me. More than other teenage boys, I worried about birth control, reputation, discretion, and so on. By the time I found Kara, my mind was oriented toward creating a first experience for us without regrets and with lasting fun.

I suppose there were girls at school that thought I was too wimpy or gay. I looked at their faces and bodies, of course, but I tried not to be obvious about it. I didn’t proposition girls I didn’t know; actually, I didn’t proposition girls, period. I felt intimidated: a troll surrounded by beauties. Kara explained later that the same process happened in reverse. She described me as very good-looking. But she explained the possibly interested girls were thinking I would reject them, as being just ordinary.

It didn’t make a lot of sense to me. On the other hand, from the beginning, Kara’s beauty revved up my imagination—something crazy. I managed a couple of brief conversations and then forced myself to take a leap and asked her to join me for lunch. She looked at me, surprised, and then smiled. My heart started beating again, then. I was sure of it. From then on, it was all good.

After my little moment with Ms. Colbert, second period was my Advanced Placement English course, with some miscellaneous educator and my wonderful girlfriend. I enjoyed Kara’s grasp of English, and I asked her at lunchtime how she achieved it.

Kara’s mother had a few stay-at-home years when her daughter was in elementary school. Arlene read to, coached, and encouraged Kara similarly to the way my parents had. Together, they haunted the public library.

Kara wouldn’t talk about him, but I had enough clues to know that her father had essentially divorced both Arlene and Kara and moved away across the country when she was age 9. Apparently, he did pay a little for her support but showed no other interest.

I’m a pretty easygoing guy, but from time to time I imagined myself punishing what’s-his-name with all kinds of torture devices. That was after I saw a picture of ten-year-old Kara looking sad. I only calmed down after another picture showed her gleefully riding a pony at day camp the next year.

Kara’s reading background was like mine and qualified us for the AP English class. We would end the class in May with a standardized test, and a good score would be applied as units on our college transcript. I suppose I would be drawn to Kara anyway, but having similar reading skills and background helped knit us together even tighter.

Sometimes, we would read to each other from interesting things we’d found.

“I know it’s a cliché, sweetie, but even a tech manual would sound sexy if you were reading it to me.”

“I’d say the same thing, Connor. It’s like I feel your deep voice resonate inside my own chest. Eh, don’t stare.”

“You said, ‘chest’!”

“Shut up. Take your shirt off and look at your own nipples, then. Jeez!”

Only slightly exasperated, she knew her smiles reinforced my silly behavior.

AP English was split between lecture and quiet reading, during which Kara and traded warm looks and smirks. At the end of second period, Kara’s friend Billie stopped us.

“All right. What is going on with you two?”

“I’m going to dinner and meeting his family tonight.”

“I’ve said it before. Kara, if they don’t like you and you break up, you HAVE to give me Connor’s number.”

“I will, but I’m expecting everything to go well tonight.”

I needed to negotiate my way carefully. Dismissing Billie out of hand would hurt her feelings and make her angry. But looking interested or open would cause jealousy with Kara. But then I had an idea.

“I’m surprised you aren’t already connected with some guy, Billie, the way you look.”

With that quick compliment, I snuck a quick kiss from Kara and escaped, then, on my way to my next class.

We struggled through our regular meeting during the lunch period. We couldn’t talk intimately with so many ears around us. We chafed under the PDA limits. And Kara was dressed in a new outfit. Above, she wore a jersey from a professional women’s soccer team, made from a lightweight, breathable fabric that clung to her curves. Below, some stretchy polyester shorts in royal blue, white socks, and generic running shoes.

Of course, I fantasized that her shorts would cling so tightly that her pussy would be visibly outlined. She wasn’t quite that forward, though. I was sure she wore panties or tucked something in there to keep the eyes of other boys staying inside their heads. Also, because Kara was blonde, the light spray of pale hairs on her legs stayed unshaven. My dreams were of running my hands over them smoothly, without any hint of stubble.