Chapter 3

It was the day after Labor Day and Betsy Lou wasn't ready when I stopped off at her house on the way to school. Mrs. Krupke invited me in for a glass of Quick, but I was anxious to get going to my first day of junior high. Actually, I was both anxious and nervous, but I still wanted to get there as soon as possible.

"You haven't hit your growth spurt yet, Mark."

"No, Ma'am," I squeaked. My voice was starting to go through it's indecision of whether it was going to stay soprano or change to tenor or even bass.

"Well, Betsy Lou has certainly sprouted over the summer."

"Uh, huh."

"She's turning into quite a young woman."

I was saved the embarrassment of having to come up with an appropriate answer when Betsy Lou came out the front door. She kissed her mother on the cheek.

"Bye, Mom. Come on, Mark. Don't want to be late."

Betsy Lou had on a white button-up blouse and a red plaid skirt. The skirt came down to about the middle of her thighs. I noticed that the back of it was sticking out a lot more than her skirts had the last time we walked to school. There were two distinct bumps on the front of the blouse, too.

I noticed some other things, too. She seemed to be walking a lot closer to me than she usually did. And she'd touch me a lot when she talked to me. It didn't gross me out or anything, in fact I kind of liked it. But it was something she'd never done before. I could smell her hair a couple of times when she got near me. That was new to me too. The concept that hair had a smell was something I'd never considered. It wasn't the shampoo she was wearing, though that definitely contributed to it. It was a combination of her and the shampoo. But mostly her. I've smelled a lot of women's hair since that day, but none of them smelled quite like Betsy Lou. And nobody ever smelled as good.

The other thing I noticed was that my dick was starting to get hard and it was a little tough to walk. I immediately started planning how to get may hands on a Playboy or two after school to handle it. It never occurred to me that the reason for the sudden growth was walking a foot and a half to the left of me.

Betsy Lou got quiet all of a sudden, and her eyes seemed riveted on my front. I had to grab her by the arm and pull her into me when she was all set to walk right into a fire hydrant. She looked a feverish, plus she was spaced out, the way my dad gets sometimes when he's watching a ball game on TV and my mother wants him to do something around the house and she has to yell at him to get his attention.

"Are you OK, Betsy Lou?"

"Huh? Yeah. I... uh... I had my attention on something."

"OK. Well, watch where you're going."

She paid more attention to where she was going but she still looked like she had something on her mind.

Like I said earlier, I never gave the size of my wang a second thought. It was what it was. The same's true about when it got hard. At that point in my life, that just got me figuring out how to get some alone time with my hand, ideally with a Playboy nearby. Soon, I'd come up with some other ways of taking care of it, but that was in the future. It never embarrassed me to be hard. It was just something that happened. So, if I got a hard on, I just put my attention on how I was going to walk with the stupid thing in my way, while planning on taking care of it later. I never thought about covering it up.

I think I heard people making fun of others who were excited once in a while. I'd hear the giggling and the comments but never thought about checking out the crotch of the guy being talked about. Later on, when people would notice and comment on me, it wasn't joking so much as a sense of awe. Which is probably what was going on when Betsy Lou almost walked into that fire hydrant, though I was too naïve to realize it at the time.

We got to school and things went fine. We both had a list of classes, a couple of which we shared, most of which we got lost trying to find. The first day was mostly getting seats assigned and going over what was expected in each of our classes. I had a couple of teachers give me stuff to read for the next day. It was a lot different from elementary school.

I had lunch with Betsy Lou. We just talked about what had gone on in our classes, sharing our opinions of Mr. Hendrix, the science teacher. Science was the one class we shared before lunch. She started out talking about how dreamy she thought he was. I didn't have much of an opinion of him, but I sure didn't think he was dreamy. She kind of moved away from that subject, so I guess I must have made a face or something.

Fourth period was gym class. About half the kids didn't have gym clothes and got chewed out by the coach. He was the same guy I had for World History. Anyway, I was one of the guys who had gym clothes because my mom had gotten a letter and taken me down to Hardwick's to get my Smithtown Jr Hi gray gym shorts and tee shirt. I already had the white socks and the sneakers. The one thing I didn't have was the jock strap. Now, that was embarrassing. What's the sense in going into that little room with the curtain if you have to come out and show your mother how it fits, turning around and showing your butt to everyone in the store? Mom gulped when I came out and told me everything looked fine and I could go put on the shorts.

One thing I didn't get was why such a big deal was made about changing my underpants every day yet I could wear the same jock strap five days a week for gym class and nothing was ever said about it. Maybe Mom thought I'd fart in the underpants but that wouldn't matter with the jock strap because it was open in the back.

Things got quiet in our row of lockers when I changed into my gym clothes and there were a few guys who had lockers in the next row hanging around when I changed out of them, but I didn't think anything of it. We hadn't done anything to work up a sweat, so I didn't need to take a shower.

Fifth period was Spanish, which sucked. We went around the room, telling Senora Lopez our names and she would translate them to the name we would be called in her class for the rest of the year — "Ola, Marcos." She was from some Spanish country down in South America and told us her father was in a band and played a gitter. Whatever that is.

Betsy Lou sat next to me in sixth period English. My teacher was Miss Hulbertson, and I think she had the attention of every guy in the class. I don't think any of them could have repeated anything she talked about, though. Miss Hulbertson had to be the prettiest teacher in the school. I spent most of the class thinking about getting home and spending some private time with my hand and my favorite toy.

We had those desks that were like a chair with a lid on it. You sat in the chair and the desk part was over your lap, a little higher than your stomach and lower than your chest. Betsy Lou kept looking under my desk until I finally asked her what was wrong. She said she felt a little hot. I don't know why she had to keep bending down and looking over at me, but she did look kind of flushed.