Finally, I am ready to resume Alistaire's adventures! As we go along here, we will answer the question: Can you go home again? There is a fourth series, Alistaire at College, roughly laid out, but it will be some time coming. Be patient with this one. Your copious comments will accelerate the process.
If you have not read any of Alistaire's
prior adventures
, I advise you to do so before you read this series. Those stories have been very well received. I do think that you could probably enjoy these tales without the prior ones, but not as much. If you have read Alistaire and Alistaire Too, but it has been a while, I am posting Alistaire's Cast of Characters concurrently with this first chapter to catch you up.
Another advisory, I have been self-indulgent in my storytelling this time around. There are going on ten thousand words before any sex happens in this first chapter. Then there will be
all the sex
. I have to set up a lot of Alistaire's problems and challenges, particularly his parents. You will like them.
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The One Going Home
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Most of our families had come and picked us up at the field where the graduation party was held. One by one, cars pulled up at the road near the field, and we dragged ourselves over and waved goodbye.
Bridget was first to go, damn her. We shared a glance, and a fist bump freighted with the weight of a boatload of orgasms and years of companionship. Then she turned and loped off to hop in her parents' Tesla Model X. I shared a teary-eyed look with Petra as Bridget disappeared, but honestly, she was losing so much less than I.
Then Carla was gone.
Ben went next. He strode off across the field, turning back to wave as he went. The morning sun got in our eyes as we watched him. It looked a bit like a scene in a maudlin movie where the loved one wanders off 'into the light.'
Then it was me. I was not sure if I hated or desperately loved my parents for dragging themselves out of bed to come for me so early. If they had slept in, I might have died from watching all my friends leave. But since Mom and Dad were there early, I was losing precious minutes, even hours with those that remained.
Trey and I hugged it out, hard, and I shoved Adam back on his ass as a final payback for the math class incident.
And I shared some long, painful looks with so many girls.
Jenn, damn her, actually teared up. She was the only one I dared touch, and it was just a hug. I dripped tears on her shoulder too, as we embraced.
Then I was heading for the rented Escalade, with my parents looking bemusedly on as I broke free from more friends than they had ever known me to have in my life, many of them girls. I approached them, standing tall.
"Can I drive, Dad?" I asked, trying not to let my voice sound heavy.
He heard it anyway.
He sighed. "Well, I guess if you wipe out, we all die together," he muttered. And he handed me the keys.
I got behind the wheel, he sat beside me while Mom climbed in behind him. The rest of the huge vehicle was packed to the gunnels with the accumulated crap of four years in New England.
I refused to look back, and drove off, following the nav.
We stopped barely fifteen minutes along at a Starbucks, before we even got onto the interstate, because we are Americans.
The girl taking orders at the counter was cute. Cute enough for me to notice. Mom had gone to the restroom while I stood in line. Dad took a seat nearby, reading emails on his phone. I had not been to a Starbucks since the last time I was home, but I knew both my parents' boring-ass orders by heart.
The girl punched our order in backwards, and had to re-enter it. She and I traded a smile, and I realized she was flustered. I realized that I had been 'looking' at her, and it had knocked her off her game. I smiled again apologetically, then promptly stared at her chest far longer than needed to read her name tag. "Thanks, Gina," I said.
"You're welcome, um, Alistaire," she chirped back, writing my name on a cup as she did so. "Come again!"
Probably not, alas. Her name tag was nestled on some nice scenery.
I turned away to find my mom had joined Dad at his table, leaving no seat for me.
"Sorry, Al," Dad said. "I'm not used to needing a table for more than two these days."
I waved them off and waited on my feet. Neither offered their seat to me, of course.
Once our coffees came, my parents, bless them, let me drive in silence until we were well along on the main highway.
"So, that's done then," my father said, almost tentatively.
"Yeah..." I tried not to sigh.
"A year ago, when you were figuring out where to go to college," Dad went on, "I'd have expected you to be on top of the world that you had finished here, and were leaving that school in your rear-view mirror, Al. But today," he went on softly, "I think you realize more than I expected how much you are leaving behind."
"What was it like for you, Dad, when you graduated from St. George's?" I asked, keeping my eyes on the road, where they were safe from tearing up.
"Fraught..." Dad mused. "For most of your time these last four years," my dad said thoughtfully, "I was disappointed that you weren't having the amazing time I had. But now I think I might have been wrong. I was ready to move on like a rocket when I graduated. You seem almost like we were ripping velcro free to get you into the car. It warms my heart." He looked back at Mom behind him. "How about you, Sophia? How was your graduation?" he asked archly.
She only chuckled.
A change of subject would be welcome, I thought.
I got one.
"At least our boy isn't so heartbroken at leaving the prep school womb that he couldn't flirt with that cashier back there," Dad observed. "I don't think I've ever seen you do that before, Al."
"Dad!"
"She liked your attention, Alistaire," my mother put in from the back seat. I shifted uncomfortably. "But why not? My baby boy is a handsome man these days!"
"Mom!"
We drove on in silence almost to the New York border.
My phone chirped from my pocket, sounding out Ben's text tone. I ignored it since I was driving.
"There were actually quite a lot of girls in your orbit at graduation, Alistaire," my mom piped up out of the silence as we rolled across the Tappan Zee Bridge. "More than I can remember you ever talking to, much less being close friends with," she mused.
I was being probed.
Fat chance, Mom.
"Yeah," I replied idly, as I navigated the bridge. "Turns out, girls are people too."
My phone sounded again. This time it was John Travolta singing Greased Lightning. That was Bridget.
"But so many..." my mother mused, in a voice that sent my antenna bouncing to full alert. "Your father and I were talking over dinner last night about all of them." She fell silent for a moment or two. This was the sort of conversational pause my father always,
always
filled. He stayed silent this time, which I knew was not a good sign for me. "Any doubt we had was settled by the utterly effortless way you flirted with the Starbucks girl. Our boy managed to become a man recently, and we were wondering who it was..." Mom added almost idly.
Fuck.
I had a choice. Bluff, or fess up. I wanted to bluff, but my bluffing skills had lately been honed toward leaning into sex, not away. And I knew my parents. The CIA has nothing on them.
However, fessing up seemed... unwise as well. The full truth, even were I inclined to give it, might kill them.
"Mom!" I gasped, trying to split the difference with scandalized outrage in place of an answer.
Dad laughed. Hard. "Al, be glad you've been at boarding school. Your mother pulls no punches with adults. And you are one now." He chuckled again. "But the question stands. Are you a man yet?"
"Man enough to just steer us all at seventy-three miles an hour into that big ass pillar," I said acerbically, waving at the upcoming overpass. They both laughed. "What the fuck, you two?" I asked plaintively.
It was a deliberately worded question. And to my amazement, neither of them jumped my shit for the language.
"Four days ago, Alistaire," my mom chuckled, "neither of us would have even thought to ask you the question. But we have eyes. And experience. You look like you've moved forward in your life, and if you have, we feel like we should talk about it."
"And if I haven't?" I asked dangerously.
"Oops?" Dad said merrily. They were certain. They had manufactured me, after all. They did have insights. They also had patience.
My phone beeped yet again. This time it was my buddy Chris from back home. Princess Leia's Theme. I had assigned it to him once in a fit of irritation and had never changed it.
"I am not a virgin," I growled between clenched teeth. "Can we move forward now?"
Dad turned around in his seat and extended a fist toward Mom behind him. They bumped knuckles.
What the actual fuck?
My phone was blowing up. Two texts came in together, both with my generic text tone. Who was that? I had assigned all my friends at school their own tones, along with most old school people back home.
It had to be Carrie, Mary, and/or Maddie... I had not texted back and forth with them enough to assign them their own tones yet.
And then Dad mercifully went into a long discussion over my AP efforts, and what were the maximum credits I could conceivably get from them, versus how many I felt I had actually earned. I was disoriented, to say the least, that my parents just seemingly ignored the revelation that I was no longer their virgin, hapless-with-girls child, as if it was no great shock to them.
It had sure as fuck been a shock to me... even once it was true so many times over.
But the subject of APs was a conversation I wanted. The fact was, I had crushed every damned exam I had taken. I was sure of it. And I found that bragging about that was a far simpler proposition than talking about sex with my parents while I drove through New York State.
A bathroom break, followed by some earnest lobbying, had me still behind the wheel as we hit the Jersey Turnpike. I was settling into a comfortable drive. And I was a little surprised to find that I was handling being behind the wheel for so long as well as I was. That said, driving long distances was more tiring than I had realized. I knew I'd have to relinquish the wheel sooner or later. Road trips had not been a big part of my driving experience thus far.
