[This is a work of fiction. All characters depicted in this fictional work are 18 years of age or older. Any resemblance of any character to any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.]
My name is Henry Watson, and when all these things happened I was 18 and a senior at East Point Military Academy, an all-boys military high school in upstate New York. It was good being back at school, though I was a little sad that, come the end of the year, I had friends that I might not see again for a long time, if at all. It was fall, the air was chilly and crisp and tasted like lemon if you just breathed it in through your mouth fast enough. In those hours when the sun shone, the flaming oranges and reds of the leaves stood out against a sky as blue as the blue of Michelle's eyes, but before long it would retreat into a semi-permanent shade of battleship gray. The trees, with their waving masses of reds, browns and golds, were on fire, cold tongues of flame that flickered with each change in the wind. And wherever the wind had piled up hundreds of their little cadavers in small piles I made it a point to kick my way through it as I walked across campus to class.
Michelle is Michelle Hadley, my girlfriend, but she's back in New York City, so I wouldn't see her again until Thanksgiving break. Even though turkey day was only eight or nine weeks away, time passes more slowly when you're young, and it felt like I had to wait two eternities to see her again, and to get our tongues in each other's mouths.
East Point Military is just outside the little town of Armpit. That's not really the name of the town, of course, but that's what all the guys at the school called it. Back in those days Armpit had an ice cream shop, a store that sold cheap clothes and food high in sugar and brimming over with the type of fat that's bad for your heart, and a run-down theater with broken seats that played movies long since out of circulation down in New York City. But Armpit was the only outpost of civilization within a hundred miles of East Point, and it was within walking distance of the academy. The movies and the ice cream shop provided the perfect excuse for a Saturday evening date with a Grimsley girl -- always heavily chaperoned. Plus, you had get a date with a girl there first. We talked a lot about different Grimsleys, as we called them, but until Saturday rolled around, we had to be disciplined and focus our testosterone-addled brains on things like algebra and whether Hamlet really killed Ophelia.
East Point was a military-style school, but it was pretty much like any other all-boys' boarding school, except that the discipline and regimentation were heavier and we were required to wear uniforms. On most days this wasn't so bad because it was just the "daily grays," a tunic that buttoned up the front like a combination shirt and light jacket, and a pair of pants, both gray. For parades and at all formal occasions, though, we had to wear our dress uniforms, which were real 19th century Queen's Own Hussars affairs with white, high-waisted pants, a jacket that was short in the front and had long tails in the back. If we were drilling on parade, we had to wear these tall shako hats made of fake bear hair. We called parades "nutcrackers" for two reasons. First, the get-up we had to wear made us look like 450 Christmas nutcrackers come to life. And, second, because it was ballbuster. Or a nutcracker, in more polite terminology.
The school was on Lake Penasaukee, which was about ten miles long and ranged from about half a mile to a mile and half wide. Legend was that Penasaukee was a Mohican word meaning "penis - suck it." First-years were required to point their fingers at their crotch when whenever they said the name of the lake. It was a big lake, but only about 25 feet at its deepest point. That was more than deep enough to drown in, and it was damn cold, so we weren't allowed in or on the Lake unless it was an official school activity. You could get kicked out if you broke that rule.
I was sent, or rather sentenced, to East Point by my parents. My performance at a regular private high school in New York City was not very impressive. They said it would improve my academic performance so I could get into a good college. Truth was that Michelle and I spent a lot of afternoons together making out and walking around the city when we should have been studying. So my parents had a point because I'd be about 350 miles from Michelle and that lovely mouth of hers.
But after I got to East Point I still got mostly C's and a few D's, with an occasional B- thrown in as a saving grace by some sympathetic teacher. I was counting more on my family's money than my grades to grease the college admission rails. My father traded oil on the spot market, made a lot of money doing it, and traveled around the world for his job. My mom never traveled with him but instead lived in our apartment on the east side of Manhattan.
Colleges aside, their real reason for sending me to East Point was to get me out of the way so they could pursue their own interests. Love interests, that is. They thought I didn't know that they cheated on each other, but it was too obvious not to notice. Parents always seem to have a denial complex about things like that. "Oh, I'm sure he doesn't know that I'm screwing my assistant at the office," when the assistant would be dumb enough to call him at home where I could quietly pick up the extension in my bedroom and listen in. My dad always had an "assistant," sometimes two, always female and most only a few years older than me. Some of them were so outrageously beautiful and dolled up they made me feel embarrassed. I mean, I wanted to make out with them, a lot, but when you knew your own dad was fucking her it made things really awkward. He changed assistants every few months, anyway.
My mother was a bit different, though. Sure, she had her boyfriends to balance things out. Some of them were "mature" older men with gray hair, but some, like my dad's assistants, looked like they were fresh out of college and couldn't have been more than a few years older than me. What made my mom interesting was that she also had girlfriends, and they weren't just friends who were girls. I was pretty sure she swung both ways, though I never actually saw her with another woman in a compromising position.
Mom and dad each knew what the other was doing, but they'd worked out their own peaceful coexistence for their little Cold War. Mom didn't complain as long as the money kept flowing in. Dad was happy if mom didn't interfere with his women or talk trash about him to people in their social orbit. It was all something we just didn't talk about on those rare occasions when the three of us were together around a table.
So what about me? I'm maybe a little under average height for a guy, about 5'6'', and definitely on the thin side. I preferred the term "wiry" to "skinny," but I had to admit that just never had much muscle in my shoulders or arms. Not having lots of muscle was a problem I could live with, but what I couldn't get used to was the problem I had with girls. I'd had dates, and sometimes a relationship that lasted a few weeks. One lasted a month and a half. But I never had sex with any of them. Whenever things got to first base, I had to stop it there. Sometimes I'd sabotage my own relationship by being rude, other times I just stopped calling the girl. It wasn't that I didn't like them, and I certainly didn't want to be rude. But I was desperately afraid of going too far in a relationship -- and going too far with a girl -- because of my problem.
What problem was that? I had the worst of both worlds. Half of it was that I got a lot of erections, some spontaneous, others triggered by the sight of something intriguing and female. At that age a boy's hormone factory runs three shifts a day, so everybody got a lot of inopportune erections. But I got more than most. My little soldier down below was always ready to stand at attention, even when I wasn't thinking about sex. My morning wood was so hard that just to get rid of it I had to wait until my roommate had gone out to take his shower and then jack off like crazy using the dirty magaziine I kept hidden under my mattress. Sometimes, when I knew I'd have to speak in front of a class, I "bought insurance": I'd duck into one of the stalls in the bathroom on the way to class and jerk off. Paying for insurance has never felt so good since then. But that was just half of the problem.
The other half was that my penis was -- and still is -- small. Not a micro-penis, but it's considerably smaller than average. Soft, I'm just about one and a half inches. Well, not quite, but almost. Getting out of Lake Penasaukee or a chilly pool just aggravated this condition. Erect, I gain another inch, so at maximum stiffness my dick reached the commanding height of two and half inches. Well, almost two and a half inches. A penis my size was impossible not to notice in the locker room and the showers, and so I was given a few nicknames. Among the more colorful ones were "Sparkplug" and "Winecork."
The size of my dick was why I was never very forward with girls. I was always afraid of getting alone and busy with a girl. The thought of her putting her hand on my crotch -- or worse, down the front of my pants -- made me break out in a cold sweat. I always had to stop the action no matter how good it felt. I couldn't bear the thought of some girl getting startled by my diminutive penile dimensions and laughing me into the floor. Even more nightmarish was the thought that she would tell all her girlfriends about the date and how small my dick was. I'd be the laughingstock of Armpit. So I was always reserved around the girls and wasn't always trying to cop a feel when teachers or other adults weren't looking. In consequence I had an unearned reputation as something of a young gentleman.
I had no way of knowing how much trouble that reputation was going to bring me.
Though East Point was all boys, the girls weren't too far away. Grimsley Hall was an all-girls school on the other side of Lake Penasaukee, and about a half hour away from East Point by car. It was closer by water. To make sure none of the boys got the bright idea to break the rules and float their way over to Grimsley for an impromptu tryst all the canoes and rowboats were counted and locked up each night. I don't think anybody would have been fool enough to try to swim it because the water in the lake was always really cold, even in August.
The thought of getting to Grimsley on foot wasn't appealing either. It was all winding country roads with no sidewalks and no lampposts. Soused farmers in their pickup trucks with gun racks in the back windows usually drove those roads at 90 mph to get to their next honky-tonk. It's too dangerous even to bike the route, which is why East Point didn't allow bicycles, just in case anyone might be tempted to try to cycle over to Grimsley. You'd probably be found the next morning along the side of the road flattened into a bloody roadkill pulp.
And if you did get over to the other side of the lake, Grimsley had its own barriers. Grimsley's fortress-like stone walls extended on three sides around the school -- all except on the side fronting Lake Penasaukee. The Grimsley dorms all had double bullet-proof glass doors manned (or I should say womanned) 24/7 by a professional security service -- once again, all female. They weren't going to take any chances. Each Grimsley dorm was like a jewelry store in Manhattan: you had to be buzzed in and buzzed out. To make their appearance even more forbidding, the guards' uniforms had those belts that went across the chest diagonally - bandoliers, I think they called them. Why the hell they needed them, we could never figure out. We concluded it was all done for appearance's sake. Because of the bandolier, the East Point boys nicknamed Grimsley's female guards the "Chastity Belts." Grimsley likes to tell the parents of prospective students that no school did more to protect the virtue of its nubile young charges. Most of the Chastity Belts were older, mature women who might have been mistaken for refrigerators if they stood still and wore white. But there were one or two that were young and smokin' hot, and we joked about wanting to be strip-searched by them. Guys always talked about getting into the Grimsley dorm after lights out, and there were stories that someone had actually done it years before, but I thought that was bullshit. We could get into Grimsley for a blowjob only in the wettest of our wet dreams. Yet but for those wet dreams we were in a desert as far as female companionship was concerned, except for the teas and dances. And except for Miss Frobisher, whom I'll get to shortly.
