Chapter 1

This story covers most of a lifetime, so it may be a little disjointed. Sometimes my memory isn’t too good anymore.

I was painfully shy and I couldn’t talk to girls in middle school or high school because I was blushing beet red because of the boner making a tent in my chinos practically every second I was awake. It didn’t help that getting verbally abused and physically beaten up regularly by my dad left me feeling pretty worthless.

Back in elementary school, I just wanted people to leave me alone. I found out that if I was really gross, I could shock people and get them to put distance between us. If a girl was assigned the seat next to mine, at one of the two person, heavy, natural finish, oak tables, picking my nose and mining fat, nasty buggers was usually enough to get them begging to sit next to Lee. I don’t think Lee’s mom made him change his shorts or take a bath every day. It always smelled like Lee had just pooped his pants. I must have been pretty awful, huh? At least keeping my distance kept me out of trouble most of the time.

I was always the kid who got caught. For example, Sally W. kicked me under the table until I had purple bruises all over my ankles and shins, but the minute I told her to stop or I’d punch her, I got written up. I did get what I wanted though, a table of my own at the back of the room. None of my wolfboy behavior made it any easier for me to talk to the girl I’d had a crush on since I was eight.

Sally G. was our minister’s daughter. I thought she was prettier than any girl I’d ever seen. In sixth grade, a girl’s figure usually isn’t the first thing you notice. I’m sure Sally G.’s figure was just fine, but what I remember most was her curly hair, blonde, but tinged with red; and the cutest sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Sally G. had a pretty face, with sparkling blue eyes that filled up my dreams and imagination.

I wanted her to like me. I would have been happy if she acted like I existed. Sally got the “call from God” and joined the church one week, I heard the “still, small voice,” and joined the next week. I hoped that would make Sally G. think I was worth talking to. It didn’t. I think all grand gestures and sacrifices are doomed to failure, so it’s better to just be yourself.

Sally’s mom tried to be the “youth minister” in our little American Baptist church and she was counseling me after I took the long, scary walk down the aisle. She asked me if I wasn’t excited about getting to sit at Jesus’ feet and hear him teach for eternity. I said, “That sounds pretty boring.” My mom blushed so red I was afraid she’d catch fire.

After five years at our church, Sally’s dad got a call (a job offer) from another church, and the family moved away. My dad said he thought Mr. G. didn’t want to write any new sermons.

With Sally G. gone, I had a hole in my emotions that even my obsession with Hailey Mills couldn’t fill. I already had a “type” of girl I preferred, so the movie stars of the day all seemed too wide in the hips and too thick in the thighs to be interesting. It sounds strange to say that I thought Liz and Marilyn were both much to adult looking to lust after. I did find the print ads for Liz’s movie, Butterfield 8, that featured her in a slip arousing. Bridget Bardot looked almost perfect, but the characters she played who felt contempt for their fiancé or husband killed my interest. My biggest relationship fear was being in love and getting cuckolded or dumped in favor of a muscle man or a rich guy.

Then, I noticed Jean S. She was another minister’s daughter, but her dad was of the more exotic Lutheran, Missouri Synod, persuasion. The Lutheran church was brand new, and quite an architectural sensation because the side view looked just like a ski jump.

Jean S. was taller than Sally G. She had shoulder length blonde hair that was straight and smooth, with the ends turned under. Her hair reminded me of the Breck Girl commercials. Her face was not just pretty, but beautiful, in the way Ingrid Bergman’s was. I worshipped her from afar, just the way any twelve-year-old boy would worship Miss Bergman. On top of that, Jean had the beginnings of a figure.

In a moment of insanity, I bought a toy ring with a big, simulated ruby, that I thought was suitably beautiful. I slipped it in the pencil drawer of Jean’s desk before class one day. No one saw me, and who might have gifted Jean with a ring fit for a princess was the hot topic of discussion among all the girls that day.

I apparently had a self-destructive urge and let it slip to Kris Kress that I had put the ring in Jean’s desk. A few minutes later, Jean was asking me to please, please, please take the ring back. After all, no self-respecting, well-scrubbed, Iowa sixth grade girl wanted to be linked in any way to the feral wolfboy.

I told Jean that the ring reminded me of how pretty she was, and that I thought she should keep it, whether she wanted it to be from me or not. Jean didn’t want to risk touching me in her effort to get rid of the ring, so she just shrugged and went back to her desk. I saw her drop the ring in the trash can on her way out the classroom door at the end of the school day. I thought that was how my interactions with girls would go for the rest of my life.

The notable exception to disastrous attempted relationships came about in seventh grade, when I met Mattie. Our school system was tracked, by ability. I was in the Advanced Track. I was sitting in math class, when the loveliest girl I had ever seen walked in the door. She handed Mr. Akers her transfer paperwork and she slid into the seat in front of me.

Mattie was not one of the sheep. She had her own ideas about how the world should turn, and she was willing to fight with adults, even school officials, if she wasn’t happy with the rotational velocity.

The name on her birth certificate was Martha, but she had heard entirely too many Martha Washington jokes, and she was so over it. Her name was Mattie, thank you very much. Mattie was not a fan of sitting in the school desk facing the front of the class. Mr. Akers constantly tried to get her to face the front of the room. Mattie turned for as long as he was looking at her, then resumed her preferred position, sideways in the seat. From my observations, Mattie had a good reason to prefer sitting sideways in her desk. At age thirteen, Mattie’s breasts were as big as those of most high school girls, and they mashed into the desk’s writing surface when she faced forward. It really looked uncomfortable.

For some unknown reason, I was not tongue tied around Mattie like I was around other girls. She was in the Talented Track for most of her classes, but her father wanted her in a traditional math class, not the experimental program the Talented Track kids got. I let her know I thought Mr. Akers was unreasonable about facing forward in her desk, though I only said, it looked like she was uncomfortable when she faced the front.

Mattie gave me this sly little smile and said, “You notice a lot, don’t you?”

That was about the extent of our conversations. It was totally irrational, but I felt like Mattie could see the real “me.”

When spring arrived, Mattie floated into class wearing a sun dress. When she sat sideways in her desk, it gave me a wonderful view down the front of her dress, especially when she leaned forward a little bit. Sometimes her bra cups would pull away from her breasts and I could see the sweet swell of her mammaries almost all the way to her nipples. In those moments, I thanked Mattie’s father for being a fan of traditional math. I think I thanked Zeus and Odin too. Seeing down Mattie’s dress was definitely a “religious experience” for me.

I tried not to stare, but I’m sure Mattie was aware of where my eyes adored her. However, I knew I wasn’t significant to her. As a seventh grader, she was already dating high school boys. Most were friends of her high school age older brother, but still, she was so much more sophisticated than I was; I was sure I wasn’t even a blip on her radar.

In eighth grade, I got asked to be a lunchroom monitor. I was shocked that anyone would trust the feral wolfboy with any kind of responsibility, so I accepted. The garbage had to be processed before being packaged for removal. To reduce bulk, they ran everything through a grinder. However, when they had the horribly greasy fried chicken that drove me to bring a sack lunch, the chicken bones had to be segregated because they would break the grinder.

My partner in slime, Scott H., was two inches taller and twenty pounds heavier than I was. He was also a garbage Nazi. He was always angry and aggressive. One day Mattie was going through the line to get rid of her garbage and she didn’t put her chicken bones in the prominently marked gold bucket, but sent all her leftovers into the garbage can. Mattie was wearing a white, long sleeved dress that day. When Scott bellowed at Mattie to fish her chicken bones out of the garbage, Mattie gave him her best, “get real” expression and kept walking. Scott set off in hot pursuit, like a squad car on “The Streets of San Francisco.” I couldn’t see our “advisor,” so I took off after Scott.

Mattie ducked into the closest girls’ restroom, and Scott was about to charge in after her, when I stood in front of the door and told Scott there was undoubtedly a rule against a boy going into the girls’ restroom, even when in hot pursuit of a garbage violator. When Barb, one of Mattie’s friends came out of the restroom, I asked her to please go find Miss Smith, the monitor’s advisor, and bring her down to the site of our confrontation.

Scott tried to intimidate me with his extra height and weight. He leaned forward menacingly, towering over me, his bad breath testing my resolve, but I stood my ground and kept him from charging into the girl’s restroom to apprehend Mattie. Miss Smith finally arrived, and I explained the situation to her. She got Scott to stand down. I explained that Mattie wasn’t dressed to go searching through the garbage, and I volunteered to find the offending leg bone and remove it from the garbage can.

After school, I was getting my books out of my locker. My adrenalin level had finally gone down to something resembling normal. Mattie paused as she walked by my locker and whispered, “I know you’d like to be my hero, but I can fight my own battles.” I was crushed.

I was so full of hormones, I had no idea what I was doing a lot of the time. I masturbated three or four times a day. I liked the swimsuit pictures in LOOK magazine, any pictures of Hailey Mills I could find, but even the women’s underwear section of the Sears catalog worked for visual masturbatory inspiration. I was pretty sure at that point that I had a knight’s true, pure love for Mattie, because I would never let myself think of her beautiful face, her gorgeous shape, or her lovely breasts, when I jacked off.

We were working on a one act play to present in class, and the characters Mattie and I were playing had a conversation. We were out in the hall practicing our lines when Mattie gave me that little smile of hers I’d seen a few times before. It sort of said, “I know something you don’t know.” Perhaps I imagined it, but when she smiled that way, I always heard an elementary school girl taunting a clueless boy in the sing-song chant that inevitably accompanied those words.

“You like to look at me, don’t you, wolfboy?” Mattie said.

“Yes, I can’t seem to stop myself. From the minute you walked into Mr. Aker’s class, I’ve thought you were the prettiest, most poised, most intelligent girl in the world,” I said.

We had reached the point in the play when my character was supposed to take the hand of Mattie’s character and declare his love or something like that. Mattie surprised me when she took my right hand and held it in both of hers.

“Do you think about me when you touch yourself?” Mattie asked.

“I haven’t yet. It has been difficult not to, because you are my dream of the perfect girl, living and breathing. I want to do every physical thing a guy and girl can do, but only with you. I think I love you, and I want to keep my thoughts about you pure,” I admitted.

“I think about you when I touch myself because I can tell how badly you want to touch me. It makes me feel warm inside to know you want me. I think you’d make me feel good when you touch me, so I don’t want you to have pure thoughts about me. You have my permission to think about looking down my dress in math class and up my skirt in home room. You have my permission to think about how much you like how my tits look under a cashmere sweater, and how you wonder how my boobs compare to the girl in Playboy this month, and what a super hard boner you get when you can see I’m wearing black panties. You have my permission to think about getting me naked and touching me any place you’d like to touch me. I give you permission to imagine anything we could do to make each other feel good,” Mattie said.

Then Mattie went back to acting like I didn’t exist.

Over the next two years, I figured out that Mattie couldn’t deal with me being so shy and immature. I thought about how I could compete with the older guys she dated, and realized that when a guy has a car, it opens up all kinds of opportunities. I got my license on my 16^th birthday. I put in a summer de-tasseling corn for Pioneer, and I started my Junior year driving my hunk of junk to school and parking in the student lot. A lot of kids teased me that my car looked like it belonged in the teacher’s lot, not in the student lot with the new Mustangs, GTOs, and even the local mafia boss’ kid’s Corvette.

Home room in high school was in the cafeteria, and the seats were assigned by last name, in alphabetical order. Mattie was at my table. I smiled at her and said, “I’ve been thinking about how I could do some things better so you’d feel like I was worth your time. I’d like to talk it over with you after school. Can I take you to Reed’s for a malt?”

“You’re sure your wreck won’t give me tetanus?” Mattie joked.

“I cleaned out the interior just for you. No trace of equine contamination remains.” I said.

“Well, I guess I could chance it. I have known you since seventh grade, so I ought to be relatively safe with you,” Mattie said.

“You’ll be as safe with me as you want to be,” I said, and gave Mattie a grin.

After school, I walked Mattie out to my hunk of junk. I opened the door for her, and she gracefully slipped in. I walked around to the driver’s side, got in, and fired up my 1957 Ford Fairlane. Mattie was sitting pretty close to me. She said, “There’s too many people and it’s too noisy at Reed’s. Why don’t we go out to Grey’s Lake, and see what’s going on out there, since they turned the gravel pit into a park?”

“Sure, I said,” as I headed for Fleur Drive.

Chapter 2 »