Chapter 2

After that one incidence, Laurie seemed to settle down and act pretty normal for a while (well, normal for her), and I’d just about decided to chalk the incident up to an adolescent brain fart. A day or so after the incident, it occurred to me that I’d seen that kind of erratic behavior (displaying themselves) in farm animals coming into heat, and I came to the logical conclusion that her behavior was a similar physiologic response to out-of-control hormones.

I was also thinking the thing with the panties might have scared her, after she had a chance to think about it. If I had told on her, Aunt Maxine likely would have slapped her clean into next week for being so slutty, and then she would have had to face Uncle Elvin, who, in all probability, would have been even less forgiving. Even though, physically, she was growing into a woman, Laurie wasn’t so grown up that she could escape punishment if she pushed her folks too far. I suspect flashing her cousin Eric would be seen as too far.

About a month had gone by before she went all weird on me again, and the next breakdown in lady-like decorum was even MORE shocking! I can’t imagine what brought on that latest craziness unless she misunderstood why I didn’t tattle on her about the panties. She may have taken my silence to mean that I approved of her behavior, or even that I got some kind of sexual charge from what she did, neither of which was the truth. Well, I’ll admit that the glimpse of pubic hair stirred something in me for a moment, but I never had any intention of encouraging her to keep doing it. Or to carry it to the next level!

I guess it must have been around the first week in May, because the spring wheat was already over a foot tall and the corn was pushing through the ground. Papa had plowed about a quarter of an acre behind the house, and Mama and Aunt Maxine were planting an extra-large vegetable garden. I took that to mean the Brandt family would be with us for a while. I had a lot of mixed feelings about that, most of them not very charitable. I liked Aunt Maxine and Uncle Elvin just fine, but their kids, especially Laurie, were really starting getting on my nerves. And there was still the issue of my room and my bed being co-opted.

There was about four weeks of school ahead of us before summer break, and I was in full study mode, boning up for my final tests. Even though school was an uncomfortable place for me, I knew I had to succeed, and I was one of those kids who would accept nothing less than straight A’s. The next year I’d be in high school and seriously competing for scholarships, and I planned to hit the ground running to win the best one being offered. I figured I was going to need it because, while we weren’t dirt poor, we sure as heck weren’t well-to-do. I couldn’t see Papa forking over a bundle of cash for my college education when it took every penny he had just to keep the farm on a paying basis. One failed crop would cause a lot of grief; two failed crops and he’d be in hock up to his ears. And anyhow, it was obvious that, even though he didn’t hold out a lot of hope for me, he would still rather have a farmer for a son than a scholar. What good was a scholar?

Well, that particular day I was hiding out in my little cubbyhole doing practice algebra and geometry problems, when, totally out of the blue, Laurie climbed the steps up to the attic holding a familiar box in her hands and asked me to teach her how to play scrabble.

Back in those days, there were no TVs, computers, smart phones, or anything else by way of home entertainment except the radio and your own imagination. Sometimes we would play card games, and we also had two board games we liked to play of an evening; Scrabble and Monopoly.

Since I was such a compulsive writer, I had built a pretty good vocabulary for a kid. I also had a talent for recalling tons of useless and obscure words and information. It seems that just about everything I’d ever read would stick to my brain like glue. Later on, I learned that I had an actual condition called an eidetic memory, and that particular ability meant that I was in demand as a partner when it came to Scrabble. In college, I was usually the first pick to compete in trivia contests.

But back to Laurie. Of course, I resented being interrupted, but Mama’s admonition to at least try to be civil couldn’t be ignored. Well, silly me, at first, I believed she was serious about wanting to learn the game. It’s not so much that people of my ilk are unbelievably naïve, rather, like I said, we just don’t pick up on subtle clues. Even so, it wasn’t long before her ulterior motive came shining through.

I didn’t have a desk or a table in my little corner of the attic, and the trunk had a domed top, so we had to set up the board in the middle of the folding army cot, then we straddled the narrow bed, sitting on either side of the board with the tile racks between our legs.

As I was shuffling the tiles and turning them face-down, I was explaining the general rules. Unbeknownst to me, Laurie was slowly inching her skirt up her splayed legs until, all of a sudden, I found myself staring at her fully exposed private parts. She got this Cheshire cat grin on her face when she caught me gaping, my eyes wide and my jaw dropping to my chest in stunned shock.

Now, while it’s true that I was socially slow and relatively clueless when it came to reading certain signals, my brain was perfectly capable of responding to something as primitive and as instinctive as a biological imperative. My limbic system was and is very much intact, thank you. At the sight of her sex in all its glory, in about ten seconds flat, my dick was as hard and straight as a railroad spike.

I recall it was pretty warm in that attic, and all I was wearing was a pair of loose, tan shorts and a blue and white striped T-shirt. No underwear. As my dick rapidly expanded to maximum dimensions, it pushed along my leg and damned near out the bottom of my shorts. It had never occurred to me to measured my erect dick (what would be the purpose?), but I think it must have been five or six inches long when it was fully at attention. And now the glans was swelling and peeking through the stretched foreskin and clearly visible to cousin Laurie.