Chapter 1

Alice Lindley took a deep breath and sat down at her desk with a large cup of decaffeinated tea. It wasn't a particularly hard job; all she needed to do was pick three halfway decent drawings from the pile in front of her. But she had left it until late Sunday afternoon, and she had no idea what the pile actually contained. Alice had gone out on a limb for her tenth-grade students, convincing the head of her department that the senior high art show ought to contain at least three paintings from the sophomore class in order to encourage them. Unfortunately, it was still early in the school year, and her class was still doing basic drawing exercises involving techniques like perspective and shading.

"I won't be grading this work," she had told them, "so just paint what you see or what you feel. I want you to make it your painting, something you want to tell the world about you."

There were twenty students in the class, and they had seemed so enthusiastic about the opportunity to show their work. That was one of the nice things about teaching tenth grade art — it was an elective, and all of the students in the class wanted to be there. So she was confident that there had to be at least three halfway decent drawings. She would hate to go crawling back to Mrs. Woolsey and tell her that there were only two, or one, or God forbid no pictures worth displaying.

The first five she picked up weren't even close. This sixth, a still-life, showed very good color choice and good balance, even if the artist -- Melanie Lyons -- had been a little too sloppy in her brushstrokes. A few drawings later, she came upon another, a landscape by James Cammer, that was also fairly well done. But then came a long string of, well, unmatured talent, she thought. Finally, with only two left, she found a third -- by Nancy Collins -- that was also worthy of inclusion. Breathing a sigh of relief, she turned to the last picture.

"Oh!" she gasped. She could almost hear her heart pounding in her chest. It was, without question, the best picture of the group, a beautifully executed portrait of a woman reclining on a couch. It looked almost like the young man had had a model sitting for him, allowing him to perfectly capture her half-smile, her sunlit blond hair. But she knew that it wasn't a realistic portrait. The woman in the picture was completely naked. And the woman in the picture was her.

She quickly flipped the picture over to note the name of the student: Gordon Grant. He was a shy young man who hadn't given even a hint of this sort of talent in the first two weeks of the class. She soon found herself turning it back over to stare at the picture. She couldn't help herself; it was almost perfect. The face, in fact, was perfect. But there was more. The woman's breasts were not the overly inflated set of boobs likely to be painted by a fifteen-year-old boy. Instead, they were a perfectly natural-looking set of breasts. Full, to be sure, but then so were Alice's. In fact, the painted breasts looked just like her own might if she had posed for a picture. And she found herself blushing as she realized that Gordon had divined that she was not a natural blonde. That, too, was not the sort of perception she expected from a teenage student.

And finally, there was something about the picture she found disturbing. Sitting it on the end of the couch, she stared at it for ten full minutes before deciding on another tack. Moving to the window of her apartment, she pulled down the shades and began undressing. In minutes, her jeans and short sleeve shirt, bra and panties were piled in a small heap on the floor. From her bedroom, she dragged the mirror that hung over her dresser, setting it up on her coffee table with Gordon's picture propped up next to it. Blushing again at the thought of what she was doing, she lay down on the couch to compare herself with the woman in the picture.

It hit her almost immediately, sending her stomach into another series of flips. The woman in the picture was looking at the artist who was painting her with a sort of desperate hunger. Her smile was not so much one of happiness as one of invitation. Her eyebrows were raised just a little, as if she had a question but was too afraid to voice it. Her mouth was open slightly, as if it were becoming hard for her to breathe. And then there were those breasts. They looked just like hers, except that the nipples of the woman in the picture were erect, pointing straight at the artist drawing her, and the skin around them almost painfully tight.

"Oh, my," Alice whispered. It had been too long since she'd felt like the woman in the picture. Only 25 years old, Alice had spent the last two years in this small town, where all the good-looking men seemed to be married. She'd turned down one date after another from some of the geekier teachers at the school, and just hadn't made the time to meet any other men elsewhere. Pulling her eyes away from the picture, Alice quickly dressed and returned the mirror to the bedroom. She just as quickly put Gordon's picture at the bottom of the pile.

The next day, her class found the three pictures that she'd chosen displayed at the front of the room.

"Good morning, class," she said. "I wanted you to see which pictures I've selected for the art show. The pictures you see up here are by Melanie, James, and Nancy. All of you did some very good work for me, and I'm sure that, as the year goes on, you'll all get even better. It was very difficult for me to pick the top three. But congratulations to all three of the students whose work was selected. You each will need to get a frame for your picture, but we may have some extra ones that you can borrow. Let me know if it's a problem."

She had studiously avoided Gordon's eyes as she looked around the room during her introduction, and she continued to avoid him during the rest of the lesson. But at the end of class, there he was, obviously waiting to talk to her.

"Gordon. What can I do for you?"

"My picture was better than any of those, wasn't it?" Gordon asked.

"Yes it was, Gordon. It was the best picture I received. But it would be inappropriate for a student show."

"Why? I painted what I saw, what I felt, just like you said."

Alice smiled. It was clear that the youngster had quite a crush on her.

"How old are you, Gordon, fifteen?" she asked, watching the boy nod in response. "Well, Gordon, it's very, umm, sweet, that you think enough of me to want to paint my picture. But this is not the kind of picture that you ought to be painting at your age, particularly of your teacher. This is a very good picture of my face, and if people saw it, they would think that I must have modeled for you, which of course I didn't. And they would think that I was a horrible teacher to have allowed you to paint a picture of me like that, and to want to show it to everybody else."

Gordon looked downcast.

"I'll tell you what," Alice said, "if you have any other paintings, I'll try to get one in the show. You're obviously a very gifted artist -- you did a wonderful job painting my face, for example. Unfortunately, that part of the painting is just too small to crop out and make a separate picture. Why don't you show me some of your other pictures, and I'll let you know if they would work."

"Well, I do have one here," Gordon said, "but I'm not sure that --"

"Good," Alice interrupted. "I have to run to another class now, Gordon, so why don't you just drop it off in my mailbox in the office? Then we can talk tomorrow after class."

On her way out at the end of the day, Alice found an envelope in her mailbox addressed simply "Mrs. L." She waved to the secretary in the office and began to walk down the hall. On the way, she undid the clasp on the envelope and pulled the picture halfway out.

"Oh!" she said as she stared at the second picture submitted by Gordon. It was clear from the naked torso that, like the earlier picture, this was also a nude, this time of a young man. Blushing furiously, Alice hurriedly jammed it back into the envelope just seconds before turning the corner, nearly running into a girl standing in the hallway.

"Excuse me," she mumbled, stumbling out of the door that led to the parking lot. Throwing her books on the passenger seat, she roared out of the parking lot.

By the time she reached her apartment building, she had gotten over her anger that Gordon had almost caused her considerable embarrassment in the principal's office. She remembered that he had been reluctant to show her the picture at all. Besides, as a teacher, she had promised him an honest appraisal of his work. Once in her apartment, she threw her purse onto the table and took the envelope with her to change her clothes.

"Now, young man," she said to herself, "let's see how you do with a male nude."

She pulled it halfway out again and began unbuttoning her blouse. It was quite clear that the boy knew how to draw; this was a self-portrait, one of the hardest of all pictures to paint. He had painted himself looking straight ahead, a small sneer on his lip. It was a very good picture, Alice thought. As she had talked to Gordon earlier in the day, Alice had noticed that he was actually pretty good-looking. She absently flipped her blouse onto her bed and reached behind to unzip her skirt. Letting it fall to the floor, she reached forward and pulled the rest of the picture out.

"Oh, my," she said as she stared at the full drawing. Gordon had drawn himself from just below the waist, or, more specifically, just below his dangling penis. Alice couldn't help but smile at the size of that penis. Whereas the earlier picture had perfectly captured her breasts, this one was exaggerated beyond all reason. In the seven years since she'd lost her virginity at age 18, Alice had had what she considered a healthy share of sexual partners. Not a lot, by some standards, but enough to know her way around the male body. And none of them, she giggled to herself, had this large an organ. Using Gordon's hand as a scale, Alice roughly calculated that he'd given himself an eight-inch penis. And that was flaccid. Still, it was perfectly proportioned, and she felt her nipples tingling as they brushed against the thin fabric of her bra.

"Brrrr. Better get some clothes on."

She hurriedly pulled on her clothes and hurried downstairs to make dinner and prepare the next day's lessons.

"Did you get a chance to look at my drawing?" Gordon asked after the next class, on Wednesday.

"Not yet," Alice lied, slowly raising her eyes from her desk to meet the youngster's. "I'm afraid I was just too busy last night. But I promise I'll look at it tonight and we can discuss it after class on Friday. How's that?"

"Okay," Gordon said.

Alice watched her student leave the room, hoping that he hadn't seen her checking out the front of his tight jeans. It was fairly clear that the boy was somewhat larger than his peers. Maybe there was a way to make him reveal a little more. Maybe she should tell him the truth, she smiled. Sure, she giggled, tell him that she had woken up just before dawn on Tuesday, and again on Wednesday, her body drenched in sweat, the dream of him naked in her bed still before her eyes. That would certainly get her an erection.

"Miss Lindley?"

"Oh, yes, um, Melanie," she said, turning her head so fast she almost gave herself whiplash. She quickly found the student, the only other one remaining. "What can I do for you?"

"I just wanted to make sure you were all right. You looked a little pale on Monday when you were running out of the building."