Chapter 3

You couldn't lock the bathroom doors from the outside. I fully expected Danni to come storming in with murder in mind ... but she didn't. In fact, they left me alone the rest of the night. This is not to say I couldn't hear them, but it was strange, because they honestly didn't sound any different than they had on other nights. I mean I could hear voices, but not what was being said, and those voices kept speaking until I finally fell into an exhausted sleep. They obviously hadn't been traumatized into silence, but that didn't mean they would still tolerate my existence.

It had been weird. It was still weird, because I couldn't figure out how to feel about it. What was arguably one of the best things that had ever happened to me had... happened to me. There wasn't a guy in school who wouldn't give his left nut to get Danni Nelson to jerk him off. But that hadn't happened like all those guys - including me - would have dreamed about it. Yes, her hand had stroked my rod and made me spurt, but there was a down side, in terms of the girls probably never speaking to me again, and maybe hating me... including Danni Nelson.

There was no way I could face them in the morning. I had heard our parents come home around three, but I skipped breakfast and just stayed in bed. Since I didn't get to sleep until maybe four, I was able to sleep until ten. Even then, I tiptoed around and listened before I went into a room, just to be sure. It was pretty clear the girls were gone, though, so I relaxed and had a bowl of cereal.

I had slept in the shorts, and I figured they probably needed washing, so I went back to my room to get dressed. Things were feeling almost normal.

Phee was sitting on my bed, waiting for me.

She was dressed for the day, which made me feel kind of naked. That had never happened before. She had her hands in her lap and had been looking at them or something because she looked up as I came into the room. I had no idea what to say to her. I had stopped when I saw her, and we just looked at each other for what seemed like a long time.

She finally spoke. "You okay?"

I was astonished. She was worried about me?

"Yes!" I said, a little too eagerly, most likely. "Are you okay?"

"I don't know," she said.

My heart sank.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"What for?" Her face had a look on it I couldn't quite figure out.

"What for?" I was astonished again. "I like Danni. And now she'll probably never speak to me again."

That look persisted.

"I didn't know you liked her," she said.

The way she said "liked" rang a bell in my head. She was using it in a different way than I had used it. She had used it the way kids at school used it, which injected it with all kinds of extra meaning.

"Not like that," I said. "I like all your friends. Sometimes you guys are a pain in the ass, but I wasn't complaining. You know what I mean?"

She neither nodded nor shook her head.

"Mom and Dad are going to kill me when they see those pictures," she said.

So that was what that look was all about. What I was seeing must be a version of my sister's defeated look. That was rare, because she was rarely defeated.

"They'll never see them," I said. Now she looked interested. "Think about it. They don't surf those sites, and probably none of their friends do either. It's the first time I saw them, and I hang around pages like that all the time."

I blinked. I had just admitted to my sister that I routinely went to porn sites.

"What I mean is that there are thousands of sites, and your picture is only on one of them." I almost said "so far," but managed to keep that inside. I knew how I had seen the same pictures on hundreds of sites. If a girl looked good, her picture proliferated all over the place as people reblogged it. Even then, though, the older a picture was, the less likely it was to appear on a recent month's page. Unless, of course, it was a really good picture. And, come to think of it, Phee's was a really good one. I decided not to tell her all that too.

"So it's true," she said. "You look at pictures while you ... um ... do that."

It took me a few seconds to get my voice to work. Then I tried to make it sound really casual, like it was really unimportant. "Sometimes, I guess."

"Is that why you print them?"

Even a blind man could see she was referring to the fact that I had printed her picture. I tried to reassure her, as much as a pervert could reassure anybody.

"That's the first time I ever printed anything! Honest! I've never printed any pictures before this!"

She stared at me for the longest time, as it slowly dawned on me that, based on my actions (printing the pictures) and what I had just said, that made those particular pictures really special somehow.

"I only did it to show you!" I said. "I mean I wanted you to know how stupid it was to put them on there, and I figured that if I had them it would shock you into not doing that any more."

"We didn't put them online," she said.

"Yeah, but I didn't know that," I said. "I mean there are thousands of pictures that girls took of themselves and it's obvious they put them on there. They're laughing and joking and..." I thought of Frankie, licking Beth's split. "Other stuff," I finished weakly. "Girls do it all the time. When I saw the pictures it was only natural I thought you guys had done it on purpose too. I mean, that time I caught you taking your own picture ... I didn't think about it then, but it's like the ones I see on those sites all the time."

She sighed, and her shoulders dropped. "I just wanted to see what I would look like. I wasn't going to show it to anybody. But it doesn't matter now. They're there, and they'll never go away. And if Mom or Dad or any of their friends ever see them, I'll be grounded until I'm thirty."

She stood up, and started for the bathroom door, which was probably how she had gotten into my room in the first place.

"Anyway," she said, looking over her shoulder. "Thanks."

"Thanks?" My voice must have sounded shocked, because she stopped and turned around.

"Yeah," she said. "For not being a dickhead about it, and for showing us what you ... um ... showed us."

"You're serious?" I gasped. "You're actually glad I did that?"

"You impressed the crap out of the girls," she said, smiling for the first time that morning. "If this was one of those stupid superhero movies you love so much, my next line would be 'You have taken the first step toward immortality!'"

I stared at her, dumbfounded. "You mean Danni's not pissed at me?"

"Danni?" Her eyebrows went up. "Not at all. She couldn't stop talking about it. Even Frankie said it was the coolest thing she ever saw, and I'm not completely convinced Frankie even likes boys."

I thought of that picture of Frankie and Beth again, and spoke without thinking it through first.

"Does Beth?"

Phee stared at me for a few seconds. That look was back on her face again ... the one I had thought was involved with her feeling defeated. But that was all wrong for the current situation, so I was confused.

"Oh, Beth likes boys," she said, her voice quite firm. "You'll find that out at the next sleepover."

And with that she turned and left my room.

Now, I don't know about you, but my conversation with Phee convinced me I was golden. Hadn't she said the girls thought I was the next best thing since sliced bread? Not in those words, of course, but you know what I mean. And what did that comment mean about the next sleepover mean? My fantasies went wild.

So I was absolutely confused when I was completely and irrevocably ignored by the whole bunch... including my sister. You'd have thought I didn't even exist. At school, I saw Denise and walked up to her and said "Hi," and she acted like she hadn't heard me. She brushed on by me without even making eye contact. Frankie was next. She was standing with some friends, and before I could say anything at all to her she said "I gotta go," and went the other way. It wasn't until I got home from school that my sister sidled up to me and said "Don't talk to the girls at school, stupid!" Then she walked away. She spoke to me in a civil manner at supper, in front of the parents, but other than that she steered clear of me completely.

I was mystified.

It went on for two weeks. I finally decided that they'd thought about things and changed their minds. Girls do that, you know. So I was equally mystified when, on a Friday morning as we were waiting for the bus, Phee said "Don't make any plans for tonight." She timed that for when the bus doors opened, and of course she sat in the back with her friends, so I couldn't talk to her.

I finally cornered her at home after school and asked her what was going on.

"Sleepover," she said, her voice light and airy.

"Tonight?" I was shocked for some reason. "Here?"

She gave me a perfectly normal sister-to-brother look and said "Well duh, Einstein."

I didn't feel much like Einstein.

"So what am I supposed to do?" I asked.

"Nothing," she said. "We'll come get you when we're ready for you."

When you're seventeen, and a guy, it's pretty normal to feel like you're superior to girls a year or two younger than you. I don't mean that in a bad way. You just feel older and wiser. And yes, I know how stupid that sounds to somebody who's actually grown up, but that's the way it is when you're a kid.

Now, add to that the fact that four popular girls are eager to get you alone in your sister's room, and that past behavior suggests future benefits, and a guy might get a little overconfident.

It turned out that it was Frankie who came through my bathroom door to get me and, as I might have been just the teeniest bit overconfident, I said "You have on your PJs. Somebody forgot to tell you to get naked before you came to get me."

Somebody also forgot to tell her she should be flattered when a hot guy says something like that to her.

She folded her arms across her chest. "When pigs fly, asshole."

Then she turned around and went back into the bathroom. She closed the door.

It stayed closed for a long time, and then Danni opened it. She came in, closed the door behind her and came to stand by my bed.

"Move over," she said.

I thought she was going to get on the bed with me, and that was a great idea, so I moved over and got on my side. She sat down on the bed, instead of lying down beside me. She stared at me for a bit.

"We have a problem," she finally said.

"Nothing a little lovin' can't solve," I said, cockily.

"And that is the problem," she said.

I misunderstood. I patted the bed beside me in invitation.

She shook her head. She actually looked like she felt sorry for me or something. Then she got up and went back to Phee's room through the bathroom.

The bathroom door stayed closed a lot longer this time. I began to suspect that all was not well, for some reason. That was confirmed when the next girl to come into my room was Phee. She cut right to the chase.

"You're acting like a jerk," she said, "and you're making my friends mad at me."

"What did I do?" I complained, in typical clueless teenaged male incomprehension.

So she explained it to me.

The girls were, as I have already indicated, very close. They'd been having these sleepovers for years and years, and anything could be (and was) discussed. Of course as they got older, that included boys, and sex and all that. Like all kids, they asked each other questions, but sometimes nobody knew the answer. At one point, when someone wondered aloud why boys did this or that thing (she couldn't remember who it was, or what she wanted to know) someone else had said Phee should get the answer from me. Phee, of course, thought that was a terrible idea. She had said, "Go ask him yourself."

That led to a standing joke in the group. Any time any odd or incomprehensible male behavior came up, somebody would say, "We should go ask Tut."

"So it was a joke," I said.

She shook her head. "It used to be a joke. Remember a couple of months ago when I asked you why guys like Call of Duty so much?"

She was talking about Tina Johnson breaking up with John Disston. He was supposed to go with her to her cousin's wedding, but called her and said he had a family emergency. She found out what really happened was that he got into a marathon game of Call of Duty. Phee had asked me why a guy would do that ... mess up a good thing with a girl over what she called "a stupid game." We had ended up talking about it for quite a while.

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