Chapter 13

Unless you've been really fucked hard in your butt, you probably don't know what I'm talking about. But if you have, then you know how sore I felt Thursday morning. I'd taken a shower of course, right after my morning workout with Coach like I usually did. I've always been a clean person anyway, not real crazy clean, but when you spend your whole life working in a garage you learn to appreciate soap. Know what I mean?

Even so, it felt like my tight little ass was still being stretched, but it felt empty too, and that's a weird feeling. I was sore, yeah, and I'd even had a little blood, just a tiny bit, probably because I'd been so tight when Coach had first pushed his big dick inside me without any lube. But I wasn't as sore as I'd been after that first time with Steve, or again the very first time Coach and me had done it; I'd been real tender then.

Still, when you walk around after being screwed the way I'd been, you tend to walk a little funny. And then you think about how you're walking funny and you try not to, because maybe people are looking at you. That just makes it worse, because then you really are walking funny. I wondered if having sex in my vagina would feel like that, but I didn't want to try it just to find out.

Thank goodness I was still a virgin and still had my little cherry down there when the doctor had checked me out. I was pretty sure Daddy wanted to find out for certain if I'd been having sex or not, now at least he'd think I wasn't. I knew girls who had lost their virginity riding horses, or so they'd said. One girl, Beth Holt, had said she'd busted hers on a see-saw when she was like seven or something. I'm not sure my dad would believe a story like that. I hoped I wouldn't lose it playing football and if I didn't stop acting weird around Daddy, having Nancy Ryan take a look at my vagina might get to be a regular thing. That would suck.

Anyway, I walked funny into my first class and sat down next to Matt. Sitting wasn't so bad as long as I shifted my butt every now and again.

"What happened to you?" Matt asked me. All the kids were talking; waiting for our teacher to start with the school announcements and then we'd stand and say the Pledge of Allegiance, and then start our normal English class.

"What?" I asked, digging out my notebook.

"You got a limp or something." He started getting his out too.

"Oh, I'm just a little sore." I shrugged and felt a little dumb for getting caught like that.

"You ready to come over tomorrow night?" Matt leaned a little closer, scraping his desk and chair across the floor.

"Um..." I swallowed hard. "I don't think I can..." I started and paused, just because I expected Matt to say something, but he didn't. So then I felt really awkward. "I have to talk with you about it. At lunch, okay?"

Matt got kind of a dirty look on his face, but he didn't say anything. Then the teacher, Mrs. Vale, who was Jackie Vale's mom, walked to the front of the class, so we had to pretty much be quiet anyway. I felt bad though and I wanted to look at Matt, but afraid he'd be looking at me, so I just looked at the teacher and waited for class to end. I always liked English, but it seemed kind of easy for me, so I was pretty bored usually.

Second period went about the same. I didn't sit next to Lance, since Mr. Carter, our chemistry teacher had us sitting in alphabetical order. He had a bad memory, or maybe his brain was just too full of elements and stuff to remember a person's name too. Either way though, we always sat in the same place. John sat next to me though, since his last name's Relton and I'm Russet.

There'd been a boy named Haley Robinson between us, but he'd been suspended for smoking on the very first day of school, so his parents just sent him to the Christian Fellowship School over in Beaverton instead. Nobody really missed Haley very much. He'd been a troublemaker since the fourth grade when his dad had married his babysitter, or something like that. Some people said she was Haley's cousin on his dad's side and everyone gave him a hard time about it anyway. He did act sorta inbred and we wondered if his mom had been his cousin too.

So, I told Lance and John both that I had to talk to them at lunch about something important. I told John a little more, since he sat next to me anyway. Chemistry was in the lab, which meant we didn't have desks; we just had long black counters with glass beakers and Bunsen burners and junk on them. All the cool chemicals were locked up though; we'd just be taking notes that day. I sat on my stool, which felt a little less comfortable than a desk chair because it really made my butt feel like there should have been something in it, and John leaned a little closer, since he wasn't that far away.

"What do you wanna talk about at lunch?" he asked in a whisper, since Mr. Carter could be sort of a butthead about talking in class. But most of the teachers were, to be honest.

"Shhh..." I held my finger to my lips and gave him a warning look.

"What?" he mouthed, holding his hands out like he was waiting.

"I can't go out with you," I barely breathed the words and at first I thought he didn't hear me well enough to understand.

But then his eyes got a little bigger. "Why?" he said a second later, and that was too loud.

"Excuse me." Mr. Carter held up his finger like he had a good idea. "It's my turn to talk, I think." He looked around and nobody said anything. "Now, if we seal the tube and apply heat, what will happen?"

"How come?" John had decided to whisper to me again and too bad for him, because the teacher was just looking for someone to say something.

"Yes? Uhhh..." Mr. Carter had to look at his seating chart. "John? What will happen when we heat the tube?"

"Huh?" He'd still been looking at me and his face got red as he turned to face the teacher. "It'll, uh ... get hot?"

It turned out to be a long class for John. Not only did he spend an hour wondering why I couldn't go out with him after I'd said I would, but Mr. Carter kept calling on him all the time to answer questions. And John really sucked at chemistry. I liked chemistry a lot, although just the lab stuff mostly, and I was awfully good at it. The written tests were a little harder, but they didn't count as much anyway. Mr. Carter believed in 'practical chemistry' whatever that meant and said a person could get nothing but C's on the written tests and still ace the class. I hoped he was right. Anyways, I felt sorry for John, but all I could do was sit there and take lazy notes and wait for the class to end.

Third period I had study hall, a good class if there ever was one, and I usually spent it in the library. You could actually walk around the school during study hall too, so long as you were going to the bathroom, to the cafeteria, or to the library. I used that little bit of freedom to play my little joke on Nurse Haven that I mentioned before, and then spent the rest of the hour in the library, hiding in the natural history section just in case she came looking for me. Somehow I doubted Miss Haven would though, more likely she'd stay locked in her office for the rest of the day.

You'd think that if a 14 year old girl in the eighth grade of a rural middle school was going to break the law, it wouldn't be extortion. Shoplifting? Sure, it happens all the time, I bet. Underage drinking? Hey, I'm guilty of that and so are all my friends. But blackmail? And actually, that thought hadn't really occurred to me, at least not consciously. I didn't contemplate what I'd ask for or make the woman do, I swear.

Instead I thought of it as more of a prank, a way to get even for being kicked out of the boys locker room and stuck with a babysitter, because that's what she was and everybody on the team knew it. I had no doubt that somebody would start razzing me about it soon, probably Brian Hades. He was always the first and loudest at making dumb jokes about other people, probably cause most kids wouldn't say anything back.

During lunch I finally had to face my three friends. I wondered if Steve had talked to Kyle yet. I'd wanted to call him the night before, but all my brothers had stuck close to me, which was kind of nice, but kind of awkward too. Steve had come home late like he always does. The rest of them, well ... Mark and David were mad at Greg and Henry, all four of them were mad at Scott, and Scott was mad at them too. Daddy was mad with Greg and Henry as well, and he'd given them a talking to, so of course they wanted to talk to me to compare stories, but they couldn't because Mark or David or Scott would always walk in on us, or call me away, or something. We couldn't even talk in our beds because Daddy had me sleeping in his room while he slept on the couch, which he liked doing sometimes anyway when there was a good movie on late at night. Last night they were showing The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly on TNT so of course Daddy was on the couch. And I felt too tired to talk to my brothers anyway by that time.

"Why can't you come over tomorrow night?" Matt got the first question in and John wasn't far behind.

"How come we can't go out?" he asked. "You said..."

"What about me?" Lance didn't want to get left out. "Are we still gonna do something together?"

We were about as alone as we could get in the cafeteria during lunch, which wasn't alone enough to suit me. Not with about a hundred kids around. At least we had our own table and we could hunch our heads together in the middle, but we always kept looking around. Lots of guys liked to come over and talk to one of us for one reason or another, just to say hi or see what's going on, you know.

"Look, I went out with Kyle, okay?" I had no idea how to say what I wanted to say, so I just said it. "And I liked it."

"So..." Matt started, but I cut him off.

"So, I'm gonna keep going out with him. If he wants to..." I allowed, " ... and I don't think going out with you guys would be a good idea. Seriously, I think we'd just end up fighting and stuff and I don't want that."

"So you're going to be Kyle's ... girlfriend?" Lance said it like he was spitting the word out.

"That's lame!" John stared at me. "You promised."

"I'm gonna call Kyle up," Matt said and he looked pretty angry.

"I know I promised. I'm sorry, okay? If you guys want to be mad at me, alright, be mad at me then, but don't blame Kyle. He doesn't even know about this, I swear," I whispered, pleading with them to listen. "I can't go out with all of you, I just can't. I thought about it all day yesterday and it hurt me, okay? It hurts when I think about you guys fighting and getting mad and all that stuff."

"I thought we were all gonna be like your boyfriends or something?" John was biting his thumbnail, which he did sometimes when something bothered him. Kyle had said it was because John had probably sucked his thumb when he was a baby, but that had just gotten Kyle a black eye at summer camp.

"I can't be everybody's girlfriend," I sighed. "I'm not even a girl!" But this wasn't even close to the right time to be talking about that issue.

"I'm gonna kill Kyle," Matt muttered, having decided that Kyle had done something to change my mind.

"You always say one thing, but then you go and do something else," John's voice trembled with the effort of keeping it quiet.

"I know what I said..." I frowned.

"But you said all that other stuff too, about us being friends and promising and all that, and we did!" Lance argued, and he had a point. I could understand what he meant and it reflected all of their thoughts. "You're the one who keeps getting mad all the time, Ann. We never did! Just you and now you're gonna say you went out with Kyle once and so you like him better than us? It ain't fair."

"I don't like him better than you!" I felt like I was gonna cry pretty soon.

"It sounds like it," John said and Matt nodded his head.

"I like all of you the same. I just don't want to go on a date with you guys anymore," I said, getting louder and feeling frustrated because I thought maybe they were right and I was wrong ... Again.

"I don't wanna date you anyway." Matt looked at me and he might have been ready to cry too. He started getting up.

"Matt..." I reached for his hand, but he jerked it away.

"Yeah, me too, man. You and Kyle have fun, huh?" Lance stood up as well, grabbing his lunch and leaving with Matt.

"John, please. Just try and understand, I don't want to hurt you guys..." I stared at John's face, but his eyes were turned down.

"I'm gonna go," he said quietly and then I was pretty much as alone as I'd ever been in my life.

It felt like every kid in that lunchroom was staring at me, as if they'd heard every word and they weren't taking my side. I felt my gut aching, like I was all hollow suddenly. But I wasn't empty, I was full of hurt and it tried to come up through my eyes, but I wasn't gonna cry. I thought about being strong and all the things people had said to me. I had to take care of myself and stop worrying all the time about everyone else. But Lance had been right too, I was the only one getting mad all the time. Until today, anyway, now they were all mad at me and not for any reason I might have had, but simply because I'd changed the rules on them. Again, for like the tenth time in two weeks. They were getting tired of it and how could I blame them?

But still, a little voice in my head told me they were being pretty selfish too. What did I owe them anyway? They had my friendship, just like always. I wouldn't kiss them suddenly and life wasn't fair? I wouldn't go out on a date with them and fuck them? That voice kept getting louder and it sounded kinda mad too. I didn't change the rules; I was just trying to figure them out the same as everybody else, that's all. If those guys were gonna be mad, I didn't care. We'd been mad at each other before, hundreds of times, and we always made up. We'd make up this time too and not because I'd change my mind, I decided, but because we weren't totally dumb. Only an idiot throws away a best friend and none of us were idiots, were we?

I really hoped not, but I wasn't so sure.

"You breakup with your boyfriends?" Brian Hades caught up with me as I left the cafeteria. "Little lover's quarrel?"

He was laughing so I punched him in the nose. A good shot too, a real one like he'd never expected from a girl, although if he'd remembered the first day of football practice, he should have. It knocked Brian flat on his butt, right in the middle of the lunchroom, and blood gushed from his nose. I hoped I'd broken it. It's probably the first time in his life that anyone had knocked the big bully down. He'd always been so much bigger than everyone else, but not anymore. He looked pretty small sitting on the cold linoleum holding his wounded nose and he didn't try to get up either, he just sat there.

That would be some big news and a lot of trouble most likely. I'd had my share of fights, like any boy does, maybe even a few more than most, despite the fact I was physically a girl. But that was my first fight of the new school year so ... I shrugged, it had to happen sometime. I went to my next class feeling pretty sure that I'd be pulled out of it so I could see the principal. Wouldn't be the first time for that either, just the first time that year. It would be worth it too, I decided, knocking Brian on his ass. Not only because he deserved it for a lot of different reasons, but it would give me back whatever respect I'd lost after my little scene with my three friends. I wasn't the most popular kid in school, not by a long shot, but everybody needs respect and right then I needed it more than most.

Sure enough, about 20 minutes into Art class I got called to the office. Brian was in the Nurse's office, Principal Snyder told me. His nose wasn't broken, but it was still bleeding a lot, or so he said.

Mr. Snyder was tall and skinny, with thin black hair and an Adam's apple that looked huge, and it bounced up and down when he talked so I had a hard time not to staring at it and forget what he was talking about sometimes. He asked me the usual questions, with why being the big one, of course. I'd been planning for that.

"He, uh..." I licked my lips and looked around before leaning a little closer to the principal's big desk. "Brian touched me," I said quietly. "On my butt."

"What?" That surprised him, probably because like most people, Principal Snyder sometimes forgot I was a girl. Especially after I'd knocked some bigger boy down with a bloody nose.

"He touched me," I repeated, a little louder. If I could have started crying I would have, but I wasn't that good of an actress, so I just looked sad.

"Well, uh ... I see." He shuffled some papers. "He's on your football team, right?"

I had a sinking feeling then, like maybe I'd outwitted myself. Coach had made it sound like the principal was just looking for a reason to kick me off the team. Maybe I'd just given him one, I wasn't sure.

"Yeah." I nodded. "But he never does anything there."

"Really?" Mr. Snyder considered this. "Why not? I mean, uh ... Why would he ... touch you ... in the cafeteria and not while you're playing football? It seems like..."

"Cause Coach would get mad." Inspiration struck me. "Everybody knows if someone says something or does something like that, Coach is gonna call his dad and kick him off the team." I spoke like it was the gospel truth, and even though Coach hadn't exactly said that, I was pretty sure everyone understood that it was true.

"But I thought ... In the boys locker room, I mean..." Mr. Snyder had been thinking all the boys had been doing all sorts of stuff with me in the locker room, I could see it on his face.

"The locker room?" I shrugged like it didn't matter. "Coach didn't let me change right away. I always had to wait in his office until everybody else was done."

That wasn't really true since I'd pretty much gotten bare buck naked before practice, and the only reason I went to Coach's office after practice was so he could teach me how to have man sex. But I felt pretty sure Coach hadn't mentioned any of that when he'd talked to the principal, so I wasn't going to either.

"I see, uh ... Okay, Ann..." Mr. Snyder wasn't sure what to do now. Brian wasn't there to defend himself, being too busy bleeding in the nurse's office, and if what I said was true then it had been Brian's fault anyway and he should probably be suspended for grabbing a girl's butt in the cafeteria. Heck, the principal might have been wondering if I was gonna get a lawyer and sue the school district. I heard they did weird stuff like that in Seattle, and for a lot less than getting groped by a classmate!

"Am I going to be suspended?" I asked him.

"Um, no. I don't think we need to do that. But this is a warning, understand? Your first and only one. We can't have students fighting. The next time it happens you'll be suspended for three days." He tried to look tough or something, but Coach was right, Principal Snyder was a pencil necked geek who'd never played football in his life.

"Yes sir." I nodded.

"Okay, go on back to class. The next time you see Brian I want you to apologize to each other. You're classmates and, well, teammates too, I guess, so I expect you to behave like it."

I wondered if I'd be in a lot of trouble when Principal Snyder talked to Brian and he denied everything. I thought the principal probably wouldn't believe him. I mean, since Brian's a boy and I'm a girl, in boy's clothing sure, but still a girl. The principal couldn't afford not to believe me over him, because if Brian ever really did grab a girl's butt, another girl's, and she complained too ... Everyone would want to know what had happened with me, and why Mr. Snyder hadn't believed me, and what kind of school was he running anyway? Letting someone like Brian Hades run around without supervision.

Yep, Brian was guilty for life now and that little voice in my head was gloating. "It's not so bad being a girl sometimes, is it?" she asked, and that's when I realized that little voice was female and that seemed really strange.

By the time I got back to class, it was almost over so I pretty much just grabbed my stuff and headed over to the high school for shop. Thank goodness for that too; I needed the break! I'd be working on the shop project with Mark, which was cool. The shop teacher, Mr. Wetland, liked to rotate us on projects and partners, so we were always working with different machines and different people, but always the same too. Like I always did the project with Mark on Thursdays, and I always did Mondays with The Boz, fixing his girlfriend's car or maybe his truck, usually.

We were turning that old '56 pickup truck into a low rider, like I probably mentioned before. Really chopped too, which was gonna be super cool since we'd never really done that before, me and my two brothers, I mean. Scott and Steve had turned a Lincoln Sports Coupe into a low rider once though, for some drummer down in Los Angeles, and it had been so killer that Carlos Santana had used it in a couple music videos. It's always cool seeing a car that your brothers had built on television.

Anyway, Mr. Wetland hadn't been too sure about the idea, to be perfectly honest. We'd had a big meeting at the very beginning of the course to plan what we wanted to do as a class. Most of the guys didn't really know, or their ideas were pretty simple. Greg and Henry didn't really care and they'd go along with whatever the class wanted. They were more into customization and detailing than hard-core chopping anyway. But me and Mark and David had pushed for something real low, with hydraulics and everything; something that would scare the hell out of people. Especially the people around Squinosha, who thought only Mexican gangsters drove around in low riders. With the three of us in the shop, well it was kind of hard for Mr. Wetland to say no, especially when Low Rider magazine decided to cover the build. Scott, who's pretty good at the public relations stuff, had called somebody, although he wouldn't admit it.

"We gotta fix all this shit. Fuck!" Mark said loudly, measuring the cuts and welds that some of the other guys had made the day before. David was working with The Boz and he looked over at us from across the shop, but that's all. He worked on the truck on Tuesdays and that's when he was usually swearing up a storm.

"How bad?" I asked, meaning did they cut too much? Or not enough. The truck wasn't any more than a framework as it sat there. Everything had been taken off of it and we were going to fabricate a new body anyway, since the old panels and stuff would never fit again, not after we were done with it.

"Bad enough," Mark told me, slashing the metal with a grease pencil. "We gotta break some welds." The other guys were gonna hear about it later because my brother could pretty much be an asshole when he wanted to be. "We gotta watch these guys closer, Wethead doesn't have a clue." That's what he called Mr. Wetland when Mark got pissed.

I tended to go easier on the other guys. Some of them didn't know much more than how to change a tire, or the oil maybe, but some of them were pretty handy too. And they were learning, which was why we were there, right? Well, maybe not me or my brothers, we'd been doing this stuff since we'd learned to walk, literally. I had pictures of me two years old, fetching wrenches for my daddy.

Just a couple years before when I'd been all of 11 going on 12, I'd done most of the engine work on an old Silver Edition Corvette that we restored to original perfection. All the paint had been mine too; my first time flying solo with a paint gun. Greg, who was pretty good with a gun himself, had done the mixing and Daddy had been watching over my shoulder. So yeah, I'd had a lot of supervision naturally, but that car had been as much mine as anyone's and it had been me standing in front of it, arms crossed and looking like a punk badass when 'Vette Magazine had taken their pictures.

Daddy had named that car 'Pure Ice' because of the color, a blue so light you thought you were just imagining it, covered with a pearl satin finish that made it shimmer. It wasn't factory silver, but it looked perfect and even the notoriously strict Corvette traditionalists didn't seem to mind. But when the magazine published its article, they'd put the word 'Prodigy' in big letters and that's the name that stuck. A lot of the writing was about me though, and I'd felt sort of bad about that, but Daddy was proud and so were my brothers. Anyways, that car had become sort of famous after that. From San Francisco to Seattle to Denver, and even in places like Vancouver, up in Canada, it was always a big draw at the conventions. The owner, and the president of the Pacific Northwest Corvette Club, always invited me to come along to the shows.

Anyway..."We got nothin' but time." I grinned and started getting my cutting torch together; I was gonna be breathing fire for the next hour or so.

"Here, take a break." Mark tapped my shoulder and I killed the torch. He had a soda for me and it was good and cold.

"Thanks." I pulled my goggles down around my neck and took a long drink. "I'm gonna go ahead and cut those engine mounts too, long as I'm here."

"Okay," Mark nodded. "We gotta get the new ones in tomorrow though, all the braces too." We didn't really have to, but if we let it go somebody else would try to do it and that would just mean more work for us later.

I sat there drinking my Coke while Mark tried to explain to Mr. Wetland why I was gonna work on the project two days in a row. " ... cause we're getting that 505 big block and it's gotta sit as far up front as we can get it."

"And why's that?" Mr. Wetland asked, as if he'd never looked at the schematics or something. I just shook my head.

"Because we're putting two big ass blowers back here, remember?" Mark tried to be patient, drawing the layout with his hands. "The truck's gotta be clean. We're gonna have like 14 inches of window and we try and stick a manifold through the hood it's gonna look like some candy ass funny car."

"I thought we wanted a scoop though, and..." Mr. Wetland might have wanted a lot of things, I thought, laughing to myself.

"No. We're putting the rams down low, on the sides, see? This thing's gonna look like it's coming to eat your sister." Mark tended to get excited.

"What?" Mr. Wetland stared at my brother and I decided this might be a good time to flame on.

"You gotta watch your mouth, dude!" I laughed at Mark as we pushed our brooms around the floor. It was just about the end of class and Mark had spent most of it talking with the teacher. He was lucky though; being 18 already and a senior, Mark could get away with stuff that I'd never dream of.

"He's an ass." Mark shrugged, dismissing the whole thing. "Hey, I was gonna ask you if you wanted to go with us tomorrow night."

"Go where?" I asked.

"Me and David are taking the girls camping out by Fouchet Springs," he said with a smile. "It's gonna be fun. We'll come back Saturday night."

"The girls? You mean Sherry and Jane, right?" I began wondering who was really asking me, Mark or Jane.

"Yeah." He nodded. "It's supposed to stay warm for a couple days and even if it gets cold, the springs are gonna be hot."

"I can't." I made a little face. "We have a scrimmage on Saturday at one o'clock."

"So what?" Mark laughed. "It's just a scrimmage. Come on, go camping with us."

"Nah." I went back to sweeping. "Coach would get super pissed, probably bench me or something."

"How about we come back Saturday morning then?" Mark persisted. "You won't miss a thing, I promise."

It did sound kind of fun going camping, especially up to the springs which were all hot mineral water fed by some deep down volcano or something. But I knew part of the reason Mark asked me was because Jane wanted to see me, and maybe Sherry too, for all I knew. And I didn't quite understand just what was going on between those two girls and my brothers, but it seemed pretty weird. Part of me said no, don't go. But another part of me remembered Jane and I did sorta want to see her again, but I sorta didn't too. It would just be more confusion that I didn't need, but leave it to me to try and find a way to make it worse.

"Can Kyle come?" I asked, without really thinking about it as much as I should have.

"Kyle?" Mark looked at me and thought about it for ten seconds at least, which was plenty long enough to tell me something was definitely up.

"He's sort of my boyfriend now," I prompted.

"Yeah, I know. Um..." Mark glanced at David who was tossing scrap metal in a bin, not paying us too much attention. "Sure, yeah. Kyle can come along, that'll be cool."

"Okay." I nodded and that was settled, mostly. I still had to ask Kyle, of course.

And I'd have to tell Coach I'd miss football practice on Friday, since we'd be leaving right after school got out. He wasn't gonna be thrilled with that, but I figured it would be better than missing the scrimmage and besides, I had the plays down cold and Coach knew it. The other backs really needed some time in the huddle.