Chapter 1

They say fact is stranger than fiction, and I’m here to tell you that’s true in spades. I learned that from my sister.

Hannah is my sister. You know her by another name, but we’ll get to that later. For now, let’s just say the names in this story have been changed to protect the guilty.

She’s only older than me by a hear and a half, but when we were growing up she acted like she was twenty-one and I was ten. It was that way for the entire six years after I was ten. Personally, I think it started when she had her first period, but since we don’t talk about that kind of thing in our family, it’s just a hypothesis.

Anyway, Hannah seems to try to do whatever she can to make my life miserable. She rats me out whenever she knows I did something against the rules. She told two of my girlfriends I was cheating on them and another one that I had an STD. That, of course, was ridiculous. She knew there was no way in the world I was sexually active. She was just trying to mess with what passed for my love life.

Not that that made any difference. I’ve never gotten a girl to let me do more than kiss her and maybe cop a feel of a boob, now and then. Truthfully, my girlfriends all know she’s full of shit. I’m a nice guy. It’s just how I was raised. When I started dating my dad sat me down and gave me this long lecture about how women are precious and should be treated with nothing but respect. I suggested he needed to give the same speech to Hannah, except about how boys should be respected, too, and he just laughed. He told me more, but I’ll wait on that part until later, when it will make more sense.

Hannah, of course, never gets in trouble. She’s the fair-haired child who can do no wrong. I’ll give you an example. When she was around twelve she got into Mom’s makeup and did up her face. Mom simply wiped it all off and said, “Not yet, Hannah. I’ll tell you when you can wear makeup. Don’t do that again.” To show you the difference, the next year I tried to make a birdhouse in Dad’s shop without asking him. How could I? He was at work. My mother yelled about how I could have cut my fingers off and that I tracked sawdust into the house and all that kind of thing. I got grounded for a month.

Even though there are two months in the year when we’re the same age, she got to start school a year before I did. So now, she’s a junior and I’m just a lowly sophomore. I get better grades, but that doesn’t mean diddly to anybody.

So now you can understand why, one Saturday morning, when Hannah came into my room (without knocking) and said, “Hey Dork, I need a favor,” I was less than enthusiastic about doing it, even though I didn’t know yet what it was. And yes, her pet name for me is “Dork.” But only when the parents aren’t around. It should be instructive to you that she called me that while asking me to do her a favor.

“Pound sand,” I said. I had to keep things gentle like that. If I said, “Eat shit,” she’d run to Mom and cry and moan about it. Cursing in our family will get you extra chores, like dusting the ceiling and washing out the garbage cans and stuff like that.

“Do it and I won’t tell Mom and Dad you lied to them about going to Kevin’s and went to the mall instead,” she said, sweetly.

Crap! How the heck did she find out about that? One of her menagerie of friends probably saw me and reported to her on my movements. It wouldn’t surprise me if she had a whole spy network out there with orders to keep a list of everything they ever saw me do. In any case, I knew better than to deny it. She’d have rock-solid evidence.

“Why didn’t you tell them already?” I asked, sarcastically.

“A girl needs leverage sometimes,” she said, smiling.

I knew I was screwed. I actually thought that: “I’m screwed.” Which, by the way, is kind of ironic, as you’ll see later.

“What is it?” I groaned.

She held out her smart phone. I didn’t have one, yet. You have to be a junior in our family before you get a smart phone. Another example of how Hannah got her way all the time was that she got her phone the week after school let out last May. Her argument was that she had graduated from tenth grade and that made her a junior, even if school wasn’t in session yet. Naturally, they bought her argument.

“I need you to take some pictures of me. I want to send them to Steve.”

Steve was her boyfriend. He’s a jerk. He’s a bully, and he thinks he’s tough. But he’s just a jerk.

“Go in the bathroom and take a selfie, like thousands of other sluts do,” I said. It just came out. The part about the sluts, I mean. I think it’s because when she said Steve’s name I got distracted or something. I really hate that guy. I winced. She’d really go off on me now.

But she didn’t.

“One, I am not a slut,” she said. “Two, it’s not that kind of pictures I want taken. I want something nice, and you can’t do nice with a selfie. Besides, you know Daddy snoops on my phone.”

“You see him every day,” I said. “What does he need a picture for?” I grumbled. I should have been thinking about the fact that she hadn’t gone off on me, but I wasn’t. Maybe I was too shocked.

“Kevin ... mall...” She just smiled at me.

I got up off my bed, where I’d been reading my social studies book.

“Go stand against the wall over there,” I said, reaching for the phone.

“I said nice pictures,” she said. “I was thinking outside, by those bushes in the back yard that have the red leaves.”

“Come on,” I groaned. “It’s freezing out there.”

“It’s fifty-five degrees,” she said, smugly. “Don’t be a baby. Put on a jacket or something.”

So we ended up in the back yard by a line of shrubs Mom said were called Spindle bushes. They’d been green all summer, but now they were fiery red. Hannah stood between two of them and struck a pose. I had to admit she looked good. I already knew that, of course. She’d been cute as we were growing up. Not that I had thought about that, but every relative we had gushed on and on about how adorable she was. I did notice when she started looking round in places that had been flat. Truth said, I noticed every girl who grew breasts, and whose butt filled out and got round.

She hadn’t cut her hair since I could remember and today it was in a ponytail that went clear down to the small of her back. Her hair is that golden blond that has highlights of red and brown in it. I had, in fact, put on a jacket, but she hadn’t. She had on faded and torn jeans with a pink T shirt that had something on the back, but was plain in front. She’d gotten it when she walked five miles to make money for breast cancer research. I thought that was appropriate since she had a rack to be proud of, but of course I didn’t say that.

It was sort of appropriate in another way too, right then, because the nipples on her breasts looked like they were trying to rip holes in the shirt. I mean it really drew attention to the fact she had breasts to be concerned about.

I thought about that. It would be a pretty nice picture. From a guy’s point of view, of course. I was pretty sure Mom would be unhappy if she saw a picture like that, seeing as how she’d been reminding Hannah to put a bra on ever since she’d started wearing them. Hannah had hated them back then, and wasn’t fond of them even now, years later. That was made obvious by the fact she wasn’t wearing one now.

Dad wouldn’t just be unhappy. He’d blow his stack. He was the poster guy for dads who frown and stare at the boys who came over to study with her or whatever. She’d only been allowed to date as long as she’d been allowed to have a smart phone but she’d jumped into that with a vengeance and Dad had hopped on the “I’m dangerous, sonny, so watch your step with my daughter” bandwagon with both feet. The only thing I hadn’t seen him do was that goofy thing with the two fingers, where you point them at your eyes and then turn them around to point at someone else, and say, “I’m watching you.” He did, in fact, pick up Hannah’s phone every once in a while and look around in it. I think he was terrified that some boy would sext her a picture of his dick and corrupt her or something. She complained about the invasion of her privacy but Dad said it was his job as a parent.

So, a picture like this would make people unhappy for sure, and might even get her grounded if they saw it in her phone before it got deleted. Even better if it showed up on social media. I thought about how I could “happen upon” such a picture and point it out to Dad. I had a quick little fantasy about that in which I was on Facebook and said something like, “Wow! I think that’s Hannah! She sure looks cold.” And then Dad would say, “What?” and I’d look uncomfortable and say, “Nothing. Never mind.” That was like waving a red cape in front of a bull and he’d come over and look. I could just imagine seeing him getting red in the face and yelling for her.

“Well?” Hannah interrupted my reverie.

“Looks good,” I said, holding the phone out and aiming it at her. I pushed the zoom button until she filled the screen. Her nips looked fabulous. “Smile.”

“I want to look mysterious,” she said, not smiling.

“We’ll take it both ways,” I said.

During the process I got carried away and zoomed in on the front of her shirt and got a nice one of just her chest. I had another little fantasy about Dad thumbing through pics and going ballistic. I also emailed myself that picture and another one where she had this impudent look on her face and it was obvious she didn’t have on a bra. I would have emailed myself the one where she stuck her tongue out at the camera, but I didn’t have time. You saw pictures like that all over Facebook, with a girl’s tongue hanging out of her mouth while she grinned. There was a rumor going around that that meant the girl was willing to suck your dick and let you shoot on that flat tongue. I wasn’t too sure about that. There were literally tons of those pictures out there and I’d seen girls doing that pose together in front of the school like it was no big deal. I’m pretty sure sucking dick is a big deal to most girls. If I was a girl it would be to me.

She took the phone, said, “Thanks, Dork,” and went back inside.

I went back inside too and back to my room. I opened my laptop and the screen of my computer came to life. I typed in the password (no snooping parents for me!) and went to my email. I tapped on the picture with of the close-up of her chest and it filled my screen.

There were Hannah’s admittedly sexy breasts, covered only in thin, pink cloth, that did nothing to hide the fact that she could feed a baby any day of the week if she wanted to. And if she had milk. You know what I mean.

It suddenly occurred to me that those breasts could feed a baby! It was amazing. I mean you know from the time you’re about eight how babies are born. At least I did. You know that men and women have sex and that babies come from that. You don’t really apply that information, except maybe to stare at a woman who is holding a baby. Even then you don’t reflect on how some guy climbed on top of her naked body and they did this and that (which was clear in my mind only because of the internet) and he shot his sperm in her and it knocked her up. You don’t think of that when you see her, but there’s this place in the back of your brain somewhere where stuff gets processed and things get confirmed. Such as having sex makes babies. And that woman definitely had sex.

What had me holding my breath was that I had never once thought about the possibility that some day Hannah might let some guy climb on her naked body and put his dick in her and make a baby in her and that then her breasts could feed that baby. I knew she fooled around a little on dates. A couple of the guys she’d gone out with claimed she fooled around a lot, but since she never went out with them again, I figured they were engaging in the time-honored process of bragging about pure bull shit. And I knew her. She wouldn’t risk college by getting pregnant. Not even with Steve.

But there they were. Real, live, warm breasts, with nipples a baby would probably some day suck on. Sure pink cloth covered them, but that made no difference to me at all. I knew they were there.

I felt dizzy and realized I’d been holding my breath. I let it out and dragged in another one. I still felt dizzy. My sister was a ... girl!

Of course I’d had the odd fantasy about various girls in my life. I’d looked at them as females of the species and wished there was a way I could be fully male with them. But along with that speech Dad had given me, he’d told me a story, too. It was about when he was a Boy Scout and his troop went out to this farm owned by the scoutmaster for a fourth of July campout. They had lots of fireworks and all that and they set up their tents by the pond. The scoutmaster’s family had come along, and that included his daughter, named Merril. Merril had been sweet on my dad, according to him, and when it got dark and everybody was running around not paying attention to her she found him and got him off away from the group. The way he said it, “Things got intense and she wanted me to have sex with her.” By this time I was hooked and listened avidly.

“I didn’t do it, Bob. I knew it was wrong. She got mad and went back to the house, but I was glad I didn’t do it. I was even more glad I didn’t do it three weeks later, because word got around she was pregnant and that some boy was going to have to marry her.”

“Wow,” I’d said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I figured it out. She was already pregnant that night. The guy who got her that way was a jerk. I think she decided I’d be a better candidate and that’s why she wanted to have sex that night. She was going to blame it on me, and I wouldn’t have known the difference. You have to be careful, Bob. That kind of thing is like a shark, underwater where you can’t see it. But it can come up fast and bite you right in the ass.”