Game Day
A club is formed for the purpose of undressing males
Over the years, there were very few families with boys in the neighborhood. It was a spacious suburban neighborhood with fertilized lawns and slate roofs, and over time the girls had admitted one of the few boys, Carl, into their games for the very base reason that, for as long as they could remember, he willingly did almost everything they asked. Besides, Carl was a bit younger and despite being a male was the more self-conscious of them. Though almost fully grown now, often when they were children he went along with acting out their games as a means of gaining their acceptance. All the while, as is often the case in this world, the girls were really the planners and schemers.
The Anderson girl, known affectionately as Cleo, lived across the street from and was best friends with Roberta. Cleo had strong Danish lineage with a doe-like forehead, crescent-shaped eyes and deep cheekbones. She worked the cash register on weekends at the super market, smiling cheerily at everyone, and was well liked by almost everyone. Roberta was small and tight and effervescent, like a gypsy with fluffy hair and easy dimples, but puberty had done wonders for her frame, and she carried her voluptuous 18 year old stature like a goddess.
Another playmate of theirs was Shantel Boyardi, of Italian descent, who had exceedingly expensive-looking black hair. Her eyebrows were straight, ultra dark, full charcoal, highlighting irresistible, languid brown eyes. She was a year or so older than Carl, lived across the street from him, and was distractingly and almost artificially beautiful to look at. And she knew it.
Carl was attracted to her without even realizing it, as any self-respecting male would be who gave her the slightest amount of attention. Her dark beauty, especially her spacious brown eyes, could hold the average male gaze like a magnet, but she found that that gaze faltered slightly when she returned it, which she had learned to do, piercingly, with a child's unwitting incredulity, causing the beholder to look away in recognition and take stock of his emotions as if an indecent and unbearably rare event had just taken place between them.
Shantel had grown accustomed to such attention. It happened frequently enough, and with experience she realized that some men seemed utterly uncertain of how to deal with her, and wore their attraction to her openly, even eagerly. For them she had come to understand that they held no clear remedy for this gift of their admiration. They could not help themselves, and accordingly she grew accustomed to exercising the potent and swift power to subdue them through no greater act than meaningfully returning their looks.
Despite this awareness, Shantel was not smug or self-conscious. Even now as a young adult she was quite outgoing, a lot of fun to play with, and in the vibrant warmth of summer she had not outgrown her childhood inclination to wear pink and white striped polo shirts and ruggedly tight denim shorts.
When Roberta mischievously announced late one weary afternoon that she and Cleo were forming a club, which she did with Cleo, Shantel and Carl on the front porch of Shantel's house, she told Shantel that she wanted her to be a member. It was a game club, they would be taking turns rolling dice, and she knew that Shantel knew a lot about dice, she said with coy naughtiness, implying that dice was a metaphor for something both more base and more adult. Knowing anything at all about dice seemed to them like reason enough to invite Shantel into the club.
"A club," said Shantel acceptingly, rocking in the porch swing, her black hair swishing onto her face and then flailing behind her. "That sounds like fun." She glided in slow undulations, acutely tuned into the underlying messages coming from Roberta.
Carl sat on the short sandstone-topped side wall of the porch wearing a t-shirt and shorts, and because it seemed obvious to him that he was not clearly invited into the conversation, he was expertly kicking a pillar with his buff-colored tennis shoes, but he was listening, suspecting something odd was going on based on the tone of the conversation and how it seemed designed to keep him at a distance.
"This isn't only a game club," Roberta said informatively.
Shantel stopped rocking. "No?" She asked.
"Oh, no, it's a women's club, mostly," said Cleo, with a joyful idiocy in her voice, purposefully encompassing the three girls and giving Carl the message that they were up to something that might include him, but definitely not yet.
Carl tilted his head, listening. He was used to this treatment and not put off by it. Yet, based on the blithe tone of their talk, he had the vague feeling that today they were talking about something important, more important than usual. He could not put his finger on it, but there was an odd feeling to it, as if underneath it all was something sacrosanct, tenable to women but not initially to boys, and he suspected that the girls-only bond they were keeping meant even a peripheral admittance to it might come with a price for the male sex. As he thought about it, it put a sense of daring into him, finally putting him a little on edge.
As if to assuage his fears, Roberta spoke up, saying, "Males are allowed, but they have to follow all the rules, right?"
"It's all in the dice," answered Cleo giddily. Roberta looked at her and simultaneously they flitted their eyes up to the heavens.
"Yeah. It's a dice club for sure," Roberta said instructively. Then she asked Shantel, "Do you have some dice?" It was clearly meant as a way forward, a way to get started on whatever the next part of this adventure would turn out to be.
Shantel lifted her feet and let her rocking come to a still while she pondered the question.
"Here's the game," Roberta went on. "It's a little old-fashioned. You roll the dice and based on what you roll you have to go to a certain base. Like anything under 5 and you go to first base." Roberta then looked quizzically at Carl to see if this baseball reference had any meaning to him. He was staring slack-jawed at them, but his eyes revealed his thoughts, narrowing keenly, and his mind focused and buzzed with attention.
Shantel stood up thoughtfully, pulling back her hair and staring myopically into the middle distance, realizing that there might be very interesting consequences to playing this game with Carl. If she understood things at all properly, the game meant experimenting with sexual themes.
"Males have to follow all the rules," said Cleo, emphasizing the world 'all,' "because it's a girls club, but sometimes girls don't."
"Right," said Roberta in a drawn out tone of mockery.
Shantel wanted to know if Carl understood what they were talking about. She skipped over and stood looking at him, enveloping him with candid eyes, purposefully inspecting him to see what was going on in his face. She locked eyes with him and he rather abruptly seemed to surrender his gaze to hers. He looked down between them, then returned her gaze with conciliation written all over his face, his eyes daubed with an unspoken pleading, and, even though it was not her intention, she felt again the satisfaction that comes from the look of a male publicly revealing the effect she had on him, his gaze confessing a private need to please her.
"You know this club is for ladies," she said instinctively to his face, smiling wickedly, then with a wave she beckoned the other girls over.
"Males can play the game, like I said" said Roberta, walking over to Carl. Then Cleo sauntered over and suddenly there were three girls all fencing him off from the rest of the porch. "It'll be fun," she announced conclusively, giving Carl a mad smile.
Carl's mind was tilting all over. To him, what hung in the air most, and which he could not see beyond, was at least the possibility of some kind of sex with three very grown up girls. He had almost no experience of sex, but he believed they were going to include him in the game they were taking about, and it hardly mattered to him what was actually meant by sex. The idea of joining in a game of titillation with the older girls seemed fun, and the idea of anything sexually suggestive with Shantel held a magnificent drama of its own.
"Let me go look for the dice," said Shantel joyfully. Pivoting like a ballerina, hair radiating, she turned away from the group and made her way into the house. A moment later she returned with a dice, holding it tremulously like you might handle a delicate moth. When Roberta and Cleo saw it, they gave each other down-lows followed by hi-fives. They looked at Carl to get his reaction, and he gave everyone a grand smile meant to say, I'm in no matter what.
"We have to play this game somewhere inside," said Roberta, taking the dice. "We need a table and maybe another room too."
"My older sister is here watching TV," said Shantel, referring to Georgia, he sister home from college, 2 years older at 20, "but we can go upstairs to the playroom. There's a spare room there with some junk on the floor."
"Oh," said Cleo smugly, 'We'll have to see if Georgia wants to play at some point." She shared a lighthearted look of conspiracy with Roberta.
"If only," said Roberta bravely.
The playroom was a large arched room filling most of the attic. Short walls lined with paneled bookshelves led to the slanted walls that arched up to the ceiling. The ceiling was painted white. There was a long, beat up, blotched wooden table in the middle surrounded by chairs.
"Here are the rules," announced Roberta.
Cleo let out a soft, whimpering laugh which interrupted Roberta. She held up a finger to pause Roberta's speech, then moved around the room studying it, and whispered in Shantel's ear. Shantel's eyes widened appreciatively. She looked back at Cleo with amazement, then looked at Roberta and said incredulously just the single word, "really," and then turned and gave Carl a snickering omniscient scan of appraisal, her eyes traveling up and down the entire length of him.
Carl returned her look with one of awakened oblivion. He had been friends with these girls most of his life and could not bring himself to sense uneasiness, but then the odd thing happened in that Shantel and Roberta and Cleo all went into the other room for a minute, leaving Carl alone, and their barely audible whispering shot through the closed door right into him, their hushed group sounding so quietly excited, triggering an ineffable stirring in his body. He became cognizant of a change to his physical state, how he was zinging with the faintest pageantry of exhilaration, awakening a greater awareness of the surroundings, of the upcoming game, and of who might do what with whom. His face lit up, his eyes bolted awake. His urge to play expanded, and he found himself feeling light, pliant, and willing.
