Chapter 3

The next day at school, nothing terribly eventful happened. I turned in all of my completed homework to some very surprised teachers and, having done that, they began to truly notice me for the first time. They began to call on me in class, seemingly pleased when I supplied them with correct answers to their inquiries. In the classes where I'd already made my new self known, things mellowed out. Mrs. Crookshank asked me occasional questions on various anatomical topics but there was no longer a sense of challenge in them. She stayed confined to the current subject at hand and called on me no more than she did the other favorites in her class. The disinterested students like my former self, she continued to ignore. My history teacher on the other hand, seemed almost afraid of me. She didn't call on me a single time but eyed me nervously whenever she was discussing a controversial topic about the Civil War that was being scaled down into black and white, good and evil for the 'tender young minds' she was instructing. I know she was expecting me to pop up with another mini-lecture to counter hers. But I kept my peace, remaining in my seat quietly, mostly lost in my own thoughts, knowing that there was nothing that she was going to teach me about history.

That night was Friday night; the night that Mike's parents allowed him to use the car. He told them we were just going to drive around downtown; cruising he called it. It was, I remembered, the same thing he told them every weekend and every weekend they bought it. What we actually did was drive to a secluded park near the falls where a kegger was being held. For two bucks a head you could drink all the beer you wanted.

The night was brisk, as it always is in eastern Washington in late February, but the good weather was holding. The stars were out and a full moon hung in the sky, providing scant illumination to the darkened family picnic area. The atmosphere was festive as we arrived, paid our money, and filled our first plastic cups with ice-cold beer from the tap. Kids ranging in age from fourteen to eighteen were everywhere, lounging near cars, sitting on the picnic tables in groups of three, four, eight. Music blared from at least ten different car stereos and at least five different boom boxes, most of it conflicting with each other.

I took a moment to stare at the falls, watching the white, foamy churning of God knew how many millions of gallons of water rushing over the cliff. I could hear the roar of them even over the car stereos. It wasn't very far from this spot where Tracy had an appointment with destiny. An appointment I sincerely believed I'd cancelled. I took a drink of beer in her honor and then joined the party.

I drank beer after beer, getting pleasantly buzzed. I took a few hits off of joints or pipes that were passed my way, increasing the buzz to blissful intoxication. I listened to the conversations around me, which, admittedly, were not terribly stimulating. The talk was of rock bands, cars, drug experiences, fights, who was a bitch, who wasn't. It was peppered with unnecessary profanity, particularly the word 'fuck', which was the favored modifier among this age group.

It was less than an hour before a girl named Stephanie found me. She was skinny and bleached blonde, but attractive. She was also a junior and nearly two years older than I was. She chatted with me for few minutes and then brought up the subject that had led her to me.

"I heard you and Debbie got a thing goin'?" she asked, taking a drag off her cigarette. "Is that true?"

"No," I answered. "She's just a friend of mine."

"A friend?" She giggled. "I heard you were more than friends. I heard she threw herself at you over at Raisin's house the other day."

"Who'd you hear that from?" I asked, sipping from my latest beer.

"Lonnie," she said. "He said you were pretty smooth about it too."

I smiled at her, staring into her eyes. "I have no idea what you're talking about," I said. "Debbie and I flirted a little but nothing more than that. You know how rumors are around here."

"Yeah," she said, tossing down her smoke and crushing it under the toe of her tennis shoe. "I do. Some people just can't keep their mouths shut about things."

"Yep," I agreed. "But some people can."

Less than an hour later we were 'taking a little walk' into the wooded area around the park. We sat against a tree, watching the falls, the sound of the party distant in our ears. We started kissing, which led to my hands beneath her jacket and sweater, which led to me taking off her pants and eating her pussy on the cold, damp ground. I pulled two orgasms from her and then extricated a condom from my pocket. A minute later my pants were off, my dick was capped, and I was thrusting within yet another tight, teenaged pussy. Afterward we returned to the party, walking together as friends out for a nature walk, the discarded condom marking the spot of our indiscretion.

"Where have you been?" Mike, who was quite fucked up, asked me when I rejoined him.

"Oh," I said casually, "I was bullshittin' with some of the guys over there."

"Oh." He nodded, and then went back to his graphic description of the time he'd bagged a girl and her sister at a similar kegger party. The rest of the guys listened respectfully to his tale. They then tried to top it.

I took a moment to be nervous about driving home with Mike as we twisted and turned along the levy road at high speed. I had no seat belt on - it simply wasn't done back then - and I was thrown from side to side as he drunkenly hit 20mph curves at around forty-five or so. But I took comfort in the fact that I'd done this dozens of times in my previous life without a second thought and nothing had happened then. I already knew that I was scheduled to live to at least thirty-two. In a way I was kind of immortal, wasn't I? Well maybe not immortal, but at least invulnerable.

I was cheered by this thought as we went on our way at 11:30 that night (we were both required to be home by midnight). That made being tossed from side to side by centrifugal force kind of fun. Even when the back end of the car slid a little on a sharp curve, bringing us dangerously close to the edge, I didn't get an adrenaline rush. I simply cheered Mike's skill with the car and asked him if he had any more weed on him.

Saturday was a good day. I woke up only slightly hung over from the beer, knowing if I'd drank as much as I had the previous night as an adult I would have been nearly incapacitated the next day. God, youth was great.

It was shortly after the breakfast dishes were washed and put away (my parents had no dishwasher, an appliance they would not acquire until shortly before I moved out) when the telephone rang. Tracy answered it.

"It's for you, Bill," she told me, being very polite for Tracy. A cynical part of me informed me it was simply because I was doing a favor for her tonight and she wanted to stay on my good side. But a more hopeful part wondered if she was simply calming her attitude towards me a little.

"Hello?" I said, expecting it to be Mike.

It wasn't. It was Debbie. "Hi, Bill," she said. "How you doin'?"

"How'd you get my number?" I asked her, knowing I hadn't given it to her.

"Oh, I've got my sources," she said mysteriously. She then got right to the point. "My parents and my sister are going out of town for the day." A brief pause. "I was wondering if maybe you'd like to, you know, come over?"

"To your house?" I asked.

"Well, yeah," she said. "If you're not doing anything else that is."

"Nothing planned," I told her, a smile forming on my face. "What time should I be there?"

I used my charms on Mom to score a few bucks off of her, though I had to endure one of her lectures as the price. Soon I was heading out the door. I stopped at a convenience store and bought another package of condoms. Twenty minutes after that I was in Debbie's house.

We didn't bother much with preliminaries. Less than ten minutes after my arrival we were in her bedroom stripping off our clothes. She begged me to eat her again like I had at Raisin's house and I teased her a little, saying I didn't want to break the law or anything. Finally I buried my face between those thighs and went to town. I then fucked her, after donning a condom of course. I then taught her the finer points of giving a blowjob, stopping her before I actually came in her mouth because I wanted to fuck her again. I showed her the female superior position and she caught on quickly, finding that if she rubbed herself in a certain way, she could bring herself off.

"See," I told her, after I'd finally blown my second load into the condom, "you can do that with any guy and you don't have to rely on his skill in order to get yourself off. As long as you can keep him from coming for the length of time it takes you to rub yourself to orgasm on his cock, you can be satisfied."

Her naked, sweaty body was collapsed across mine, her ample tits pushing into my chest. My hand was idly stroking her firm ass. "But how," she asked, "do I keep them from coming? I haven't done it with many people besides you, but every time I have, the guy comes in less than a minute or so."

"Suck him off first," I advised her, knowing I was making some future lover very happy. "Use those tricks I taught you when you were sucking me. Take the load and then demand he eat your pussy. Tell him he gets nothing else if he doesn't return the favor."

"Wow," she whispered, her tongue licking at the sweat on my neck.

"While he eats you," I continued, feeling myself stirring again already. God the wonders of youth! "He'll get hard again, but it will take him longer to come since he'll have just done it. You should be able to keep him active long enough to give yourself a good come." I patted her ass, rolling her over and beginning to kiss her again. "Because that's really what it's all about, isn't it?"

"Yeah," she breathed, thrusting her tongue at me.

I went home mid-afternoon and fell fast asleep. My balls were aching in a very pleasant way, the way that tells you they were happily overused. I'd taken a shower before leaving Debbie's house so I had little to do before my babysitting assignment that night. When I awoke I only had to put on fresh clothes, comb my hair and, of course, brush my teeth, expunging my mouth of the smell of teenaged pussy.

As I headed out the door Tracy was getting ready for her party. She was dressed in her tightest pair of jeans and a form-fitting sweater. She smiled as I went by.

"Heading to Anita's?" she asked.

"Yep." I nodded. "Have a good time tonight."

"I will," she said. "And thanks again."

"Anytime, Trace," I replied, heading downstairs. "Anytime at all."

Anita was dressed in a red dress that showed off her natural attributes-her tits-nicely. Her chunky legs were covered with dark pantyhose. She saw me looking as I entered her house and blushed a little.

"You look very nice," I told her lecherously. "Are you sure you want to go to this party tonight?"

She giggled like a teenager. "My presence is quite expected," she told me. "Besides, the kids are awake anyway."

I nodded. "Of course," I said, and turned to the kids, who were playing on the floor with a collection of toy cars. They saw me and squealed, heading for me.

"But sometimes," Anita said thoughtfully, "a girl gets a little ill and has to come home early; say around nine o'clock."

"Really?" I asked, smiling, wondering if my dick could perform after my earlier session with Debbie.

"Really," she said and then turned to the kids. "Gimmee kisses," she told them. "Mommy's going bye-bye."

She returned at ten after nine, just after the kids had been put to bed. After brief inquiries about their health and well-being, she walked over to me and took my hand. She traced her manicured nails over the back of it and then guided it under her dress, sliding it along over her nyloned thighs to the junction of her legs. I could feel dampness and musty heat emanating from her crotch.

"Do you feel how wet I am?" she asked, grinding her thighs together, pulling on my wrist to put pressure on her sensitive regions.

"Yeah," I said, my mouth drying a little.

"That's from thinking about you and all the things I'm going to do to you tonight," she told me.

"Cool," I gasped.

"Why don't you take these pantyhose off me?" she asked, kicking off her shoes. "I could use a little air."

I kneeled before her and pulled off her pantyhose, as requested, and, while she stood there before me, she threw the hem of her dress over my head. Her bare legs and crotch were directly before my face, the silky material of her dress billowing over my back. The smell under there was rich with musk; her pussy lips were oozing moisture. She widened her stance a little, spreading her legs and bringing her pussy near my mouth. Her hands grabbed the back of my head and pulled it forward, into her wetness.

I ate her to orgasm as she stood there, though her knees became quite wobbly as she came and she had to hold onto my shoulders for support. She then pushed me to my back on the floor and pulled my shoes from my feet and my pants and underwear from my body. She spread her dress around my hips and lowered herself onto my straining, very erect cock. Slowly she sank down upon me, engulfing me in her wet snatch and then pumping her hips up and down.

I must say that she gave me one of the best fucks I've ever had, before or after recycling. I wondered why her husband had divorced her. He couldn't have found someone better in bed. Better looking maybe, but not better in the sack.

I staggered home about ten-thirty that night and fell immediately into bed. My crotch was throbbing with the beat of my heart and my dick had a raw, used feeling to it. I had a smile on my face as I fell into sleep, thanking God for Mr. Li and for the fact that I hadn't been in a jovial mood that night and wished I was an Oscar Meyer wiener or something. Never in my life had I had so much sex in so short a period of time. And with three different girls too! My last thought was what tomorrow would bring.

It didn't bring much. My body was aching and sore. Since it was Sunday, the Lord's Day after all, I spent the entire 24-hour period without leaving the house. It was a day of rest. There was school tomorrow.

The poor weather returned for Monday's walk to school. The temperature was in the thirties, the sky was cloudy and spat intermittent flurries of snow down upon Mike and I as we walked to school. Mike was telling me what a great kegger it had been on Friday and that I should have gone to the one on Saturday night as well.

"I'm tellin' you man, there was bitches everywhere," he proclaimed.

"Yeah?" I replied, brushing a snowflake out of my eye and pulling my hood tighter against the cutting wind.

"Fuck yeah," he said. "I met this bitch from Spokane High and we got all fucked up together. After a while we went off to the trees and she gave me a fuckin' blow job."

"A blow job huh?" I asked, as if interested, wondering if Mike had ever really been laid at all.

"Yeah," he leered. "She could suck-start a Harley, I'm tellin' you. You shoulda come. I bet you coulda got laid too."

"I'm waiting for Miss Right," I told him.

He looked at me strangely for a moment and then, finally figuring it was a joke, started laughing.

I didn't laugh back and we walked on in silence. Mike bothered me. I knew the path that he was on but every attempt I made to even talk about steering him off it had failed. I wanted to help him, to keep him from ending up a 33 year old loser living with his parents and never having held a job for more than a year in his life. Didn't he want to marry, have children, raise a family? Didn't he want what everyone else in the world did? Surely the life he would end up with was not what he desired, was it? But I had no idea how to even begin to steer him. His façade was of the tough, independent person, streetwise, never needing advice or help from anyone. How could you reach such a person? Especially when they'd spent their entire life as the superior member of the friendship. I was clueless and hoping that some answer would come to me. But the answer, for the moment, eluded me.

"Well look who's back," Mike said as we approached the school.

I looked where he was indicating and saw Richie Fairview standing with his cronies in their accustomed spot near the bike racks. The same spot where I'd engineered his downfall and his trip to the hospital. Even from this distance I could see he had a bandage on his nose. Though he had a heavy coat on I was reasonably sure his chest was taped up beneath it. I'd felt a definite crunch when I'd kicked him the other day.

"Well well," I smiled, already turning that way.

"You gonna fuck him up again?" Mike asked, a little fear in his voice, but not as much as before.

"Only if he wants to go the hard way," I said, heading directly for him.

You have to understand that Richie was more than just Richie to me. He was the epitome of bullies, the sum of all large, stupid aggressors who had picked on me since grammar school. He encompassed bullies who would pick on me after Richie would eventually graduate or drop out or whatever. As a shy, easily malleable kid I'd been easy fodder for them throughout my school years. And they had left an impression that was deeper than I'd realized until I'd seen Richie on my first day back. Richie represented all bullies who had ever said an unkind word or had laid an unjust hand upon me. By besting him at his own game, I was besting demons that had helped shape my previous life. I intended to make him suffer, to bring him down as far as I could, to expose the lie that all bullies represented; that they were gods, unchallengeable.

His friends tittered nervously as I approached, whispering some things to him, him nervously whispering some things back. The very fact that he was standing at the head of them despite his earlier defeat told me a lot. He'd undoubtedly told them he was going to repay me for the sneak attack on him the first time. They were anxiously awaiting his revenge. I was pretty sure there would be no revenge. The Richies of the world don't generally think things through very carefully.

"Hey, dickwad!" I yelled directly at him when I was close enough. "How was the hospital?"

"Fuck you, motherfucker!" he yelled, taking a few steps closer; again telling me volumes about his intentions. Had he been meaning to fight me, he would have waded right in. But he didn't. He took a few steps towards me, obviously hoping I'd cower and back down. When I didn't (and why he thought I would, after our last encounter is a mystery to me), he slowed down, his mind re-evaluating what his strategy was. In that moment I knew I'd won the confrontation.

"That's some pretty insulting shit you're talking," I told him conversationally, walking closer. "I suppose you think your friends here are impressed by it." I shook my head sadly. "They're not. Talk is cheap, faggot, action is where it's at. If you wanna impress your friends and restore your reputation as a badass you're simply gonna have to kick my ass. Isn't that what you told them you were gonna do?"

"I am gonna kick your fuckin' ass!" he roared, taking a tentative step forward.

I laughed. "Are you now? Well go ahead and do it." I made a 'come-on' gesture with my fingers. "Kick my ass. Let's see you do it."

He stood still, his face fuming, infuriated with shame and anger. He wanted to, that was obvious, but he also remembered what had happened last time.

"I'm waiting," I said impatiently. "When are you gonna kick my ass? It's sitting here right in front of you. Start kicking."

He remained motionless, his body trembling with rage, rage I was oh so pleased to see. This was even more satisfying than besting him in the first place. "Yeah," he finally said. "So you can rat me out and have me arrested or something."

"Oh please," I scoffed. "Having someone rat you out never bothered you before. Why don't you just admit it? You're scared of me. You wouldn't take a swing at me if I dropped my hands and closed my eyes, would you? It hurts to get the shit kicked out of you, doesn't it? It's an experience you don't care to repeat, is it? You know that if you take a swing at me, or make any move at all towards me, you're gonna be riding in an ambulance again, don't you?"

"Fuck you!" he yelled, near tears now, on the brink of collapse.

I shook my head again. His friends were staring at him, nervous fear in their faces.

I spat, the wad landing on his shoe. "You fuckin' disgust me," I told him. "If you want to fight you come and find me and we'll have ourselves a fight. But keep in mind, that if you start any of your 'fuck you' and 'I'm gonna kick your ass' bullshit with me again, I'm not gonna be so generous. Like I said, talk is cheap. If you want some action, look me up. If you don't want some action, keep your fuckin' mouth closed when you see me."

I turned my back to him and walked into the school, Mike in tow. I knew I had nothing to fear by turning my back to him. I knew it.

Lunchtime. In my previous life I'd always eaten pretty much alone since Mike had a different lunch schedule than I. But now I found myself the center of some attention. People kept coming up to me, just wanting to talk about this and that. I was becoming popular I realized, not sure I liked it. And again, I was 32 years old, not fifteen. The conversation I was offered was not terribly stimulating.

After only five minutes the combination of the cold and the endless litany of pussy stories, car stories, or drug stories drove me inside to the cafeteria. The cafeteria was the domain of the preppie students, those college bound overachievers. The air was warm and scented with the aroma of spaghetti. It was filled with the babble of conversations and the clanking of plastic trays on simulated wood grain tables.

I stood near the doorway surveying the scene, seeing the gathering of cliques at various tables, trying to find a place to sit down. Many of the students in there were those who were in my classes. They'd always ignored me since I wasn't quite one of them and I had no desire to strike up friendships with them now. With burrito and soda in hand I scanned around the room and finally locked onto a solitary figure sitting by herself near the back of the room.

It was Nina Blackmore, the future emergency room doctor. Like always, she was by herself, eating out of her tray and reading a book. Nina, in addition to being a high school classmate, had been a junior high and grammar school classmate as well. She'd appeared at our school when I was in the third grade, a new student from somewhere or other. That, in combination with a lisp she'd had at the time had doomed her to the role of unpopularity. She'd been the butt of jokes since forever, although they'd been particularly bad in grammar school. Third, fourth, and fifth graders can be unusually cruel to kids who were somewhat different.

I myself was as guilty of this as everyone else. I'd done my time chanting teasing rhymes at her back then, deriding her, calling her ugly, making fun of her lisp in as cruel ways as fourth grade minds could conceive. Though she'd gone to speech therapy until well into junior high and lisped no more, the damage was done to her. She was an outsider, belonging to no clique, doomed to be by herself until probably college where she would show up the vast majority of her classmates by working her way into a 130 thousand dollar a year job.

But even then the mark of her school years would be forever upon her. I would know her as a paramedic, would frequently transport patients to the emergency room where she was employed. She would have a reputation as a cold hearted, vindictive bitch among the paramedics and nurses she dealt with. She was the kind of doctor who would question a paramedic or RN's every decision, no matter what the outcome of the patient. And she'd always reserved her most scathing comments for me. I'd always known this was because I'd gone to school with her and had once, in grammar school, been one of her tormentors.

A typical example of her wrath is something that occurred nearly a year before my recycling, on a frigid January day. I'd been dispatched to a call for a child with seizures in a middle-class section of the city. Child seizure calls are generally nothing that gets paramedics terribly excited. Usually the child either has a history of seizures or is having them because of a high fever. Seizures are not usually life threatening.

However, when I walked into the house that day with my partner and the crew from a Spokane Fire Department engine company, I took one look at the kid in question and knew I was dealing with something more than a seizure call. The kid, who looked to be about ten years old, was lying on the carpet near the sofa. His skin was blue, as blue as a police uniform, and he was not breathing. His eyes were vacant, staring into space, bugging out. He was lying still.

There was a brief second of pause while we all clicked into this-is-really-an-emergency mode. And then every eye in the room turned to me-the paramedic, the person in charge of this mess-waiting for me to tell them what to do.

"Start bagging him," I barked to one of the firefighters and she rushed into action, opening their bag and pulled out the equipment.

I kneeled down next to the kid and felt for a carotid pulse. It was there, but it was weak and very slow. What the hell was going on? I'd wondered, trying to think. Ten year olds did not just suddenly collapse and die from a seizure. There was something I was missing.

The mother was, understandably enough, absolutely hysterical but, while I opened up my airway bag and began setting up to put in a breathing tube, she was able to tell me that she'd heard a strange noise and had entered the room to find her son seizing on the couch. It had gone on for a considerable time and then he'd simply stopped just before we'd arrived. His breathing hadn't started again. She told me he had no known medical problems. He'd had no fever, had in fact been perfectly fine when she'd talked to him less than ten minutes before she found him seizing.

While I pulled out my breathing tube and a laryngoscope-a lighted instrument used to peer down someone's throat prior to placing the tube-the firefighter began bagging the child, forcing air down his throat and into his lungs. While she did this, my partner had hooked the child up to our EKG machine. I took a quick glance at the reading. His heart was only beating thirty times a minute and was slowing further with each passing beat. What the hell?

The firefighter who was bagging seemed to be having trouble. "The air won't go in," she told me. "It just blows out the side."

Armed with that information I took another look around the room. The television was on, tuned to a cartoon show. A half-eaten hot-dog was sitting on a plate on the coffee table. The light bulb suddenly went off above my head.

"Was he eating?" I asked the mother.

"Yes," she sobbed, wringing her hands. "I'd just given him his lunch."

"Shit," I muttered, everything falling into place. "Stop bagging him and let me in there," I told the firefighter. She stepped aside and I picked up my laryngoscope. Lying on the floor near his head I inserted the blade into his mouth and lifted the tongue out of the way. The light bulb on the end of the blade illuminated his airway for me. It was blocked solid by a chunk of pink hot dog.

"Matt, give me the Magills," I told my partner.

He slapped a long set of forceps into my hand, an instrument designed specifically for removing foreign objects from airways. I'd never used them before-true choking calls are rare-but they worked just exactly as I'd been promised. I grabbed the chunk of meat and pulled it free, revealing his vocal cords and trachea behind it. I gave him a second to see if he would start breathing on his own. When he didn't, I picked up the breathing tube and slid it through his vocal cords. The firefighter attached her bag to the top of the tube and began forcing pure oxygen down into his lungs.

By the time I got the tube secured his skin had pinked up considerably and his heart rate had increased to more than a hundred. By the time we loaded him into the back of the ambulance his eyes were open and he was gagging violently, no doubt upset to wake up and find a large tube in his throat. By the time we got to the hospital I'd been forced to remove the tube and he was breathing well on his own. He was a little confused and dopey but awake and able to talk. When we brought him in to Nina's emergency room I was positively glowing with the satisfaction of a job well done, convinced that out of all the times I'd been needlessly called, for once I'd actually been needed, that I'd actually made a difference.

And what did Nina, the good doctor have to say to me after she heard the progression of the call?