I wrote about a 40K word piece on the continuation of the basic story beginning right where Chapter 1 left off, then threw it all out. This started as another vignette about Landrie's sister, who was introduced in Chapter Two, but morphed into something more central to the story as I got into it. As always, all characters are over 18. Hope you enjoy.
Chapter Three: The Trouble with Suzie
Part One:
One of these things is not like the other.
Susan Tennyson Souther (Suzie) was nothing like her sister. Well, that wasn't entirely true. Suzie has the same jet-black hair, same green almond-shaped eyes, and a voice so close to Landrie's that you'd have a hard time picking one from the other if you listened to the two blindfolded.
As my relationship with Landrie grew, Suzie was always on the periphery, either waiting for a ride home from her older sister outside our class, in the reception line for the academic competition team when it returned from the state competition or watching from afar when I waved my goodbye to Landrie at her graduation. She always observed my relationship with Landrie, even in little things, with an intensity that made me uncomfortable.
I did not appreciate the significance of the differences between the two until Suzie enrolled in my senior honors college credit history course. She'd taken junior US History from my cohort Janice, who reported her to be "crazy smart, but a flake, with a huge lazy streak" who was "more interested in getting laid than making a grade." I thought this was a needlessly uncharitable statement, but after a couple of weeks into fall semester, I could see Janice' point.
Landrie was smart in a very systematic and linear way. She understood that the study of history involved recording and recalling events, then interpreting them to learn about human nature and human conduct from history. This process fit Landrie's personality like a glove because her mind was one of the most organized places on the planet. Suzie's mind was not orderly. Rather, it was a chaotic whirlwind of thought with only one common denominator, the rejection of everything smacking of authority or of an official explanation.
This did not mean that Suzie was dumb. To the contrary, in some ways she was smarter than Landrie. When Suzie applied herself, she perceived patterns from history that very few perceived. She was capable of drawing parallels in human behavior from events separated from one another both geographically and by decades of time. Her language skills, when she bothered to employ them, were more highly developed than Landrie's. She also exercised a razor-sharp ability to perceive the motivations that drove history's actors, though most often interpreting and expressing them in an ugly and jaundiced way.
For example, in her first week, we happened to hit the rabbit trail of the Mormon migration to Utah a little early, even though out of our time sequence, and Suzie summarized it thusly: "they just wanted to fuck as many women as they could get their fucking hands on, and they couldn't do that back East." It mattered not that she had a point, I couldn't allow this to pass, or the rest of the class would spend the rest of the year trying to one-up her. The rest of the class drew in their collective breath to await my reaction. I quietly stopped, pulled one of the pre-printed red discipline referral notes from my side drawer, wrote a description of the offense, split the two, retained the carbon copy, and calmly instructed her to "take this to "Vice Principal Tompkins, right now, no detours. I will be checking with her."
Suzie was suspended for a week and put in alt-school. It was not her first trip to alt-school. It probably wouldn't be her last. I scheduled a pop quiz during her censure to ensure that she'd get a zero on it. I didn't believe in free rides and had the sneaking suspicion that Suzie used the double-fuck phrase solely to give herself a mini-vacation.
While Landrie was obsessed with accomplishment and reveled in recognition for it, Suzie seemed offended by the idea that any student should care whether they got an "A" or an "F" on a test, or what a teacher thought of them. I looked at her transcript following the "fuck as many as they could" episode, and the results were telling. Suzie was probably the top student in our high school in Calculus and Physics, but barely passed accounting and business math, courses that ought to have been layups given her ability. Her math and science grades were off the chart, but in every social science she was a C- student who would have earned Ds had it not been for a healthily sized bottom of the bell curve present in our high school. Her college board exams showed the highest possible score in math and science subjects, and laughably weak scores in the humanities.
The transcript screamed "substance over form"โSuzie was a student who cared about what she knew and what she could do with it and gave not one good Goddamn about whether she proved it to anyone else. Once she mastered a subject to her liking, she quit, and it didn't matter where that the teacher was only 50% finished with the lesson, or what subjects might later be tested.
Suzie's attire, on the other hand, screamed "fuck me." While Landrie had worn her share of short shorts, short skirts, tight shirts and low-cut blouses during the second half of her senior year (In fact I liked to think that it was this combination of newly revealed flesh that got me in "trouble" with Landrie in the first place), Suzie's attire bordered on the obscene and frequently crossed the border with the pedal pressed to the metal.
Landrie was athletic looking, with an "All American Girl" appearance, while Suzie seemed to come straight off the pages of a men's magazine. Landrie was an athletic 5' 4", Suzie was an hourglass 5' 8" with a narrow little waist, ample hips, a well-defined plum-shaped bottom, and a bust that was a D cup or larger. Unlike Landrie, who kept her black locks well-brushed and pinned up in a ponytail, Suzie looked like she'd just fallen out of bed, which was probably the point. Her legs were remarkably long and tapered and she shared the same strong thighs that her sister boasted. The distinction in their looks hit me one evening as I drove home the first week: Landrie was so pretty she tended to make men stammer, Suzie was so sexy she tended to make them erect.
Several teachers over the course of her years had turned her in for violations of the school dress code. Suzie was so inventive in her exhibitionism that whole sections of the dress code were rewritten on her account, including the addition of several new "no one can ever wear this shit" and "you can never do this shit either" bullet points. She wore cutoff jeans that were so short that the bottom of her ass-cheeks showed with the slightest provocation, which she gave at every opportunity.
For example, before taking her assigned seat in her very first class with me, she made a point of pirouetting to speak to the boy behind her, glancing over her shoulder to see that I was looking, then dropped her pencil before slowly bending at the waist to pick it up. This exhibitionist ballet gave the young man she had been addressing a deep dive view into her cleavage and he appropriately stared down Suzie's shirt like a deer stuck in the headlights. The move simultaneously made the narrow blue denim strip barely covering Suzie's crotch cut so deeply into that crevice that I could swear her labia was exposed. I looked, momentarily, just as she had intended, shaking my head in laughing disbelief, a look I shared with Suzie's classmate and good friend Elise Matthews, who had seen these antics before.
Every shirt, whether a t-shirt or button up, was stretched so tightly across her ample firm bosom that you could tell not only the size of her breasts, but their exact shape, the color and shape of her nipples and areole, and how they reacted to the cold. Short answer: magnificent. Her buttons were so stretched by the tight shirt that small eyelets popped open between each button, allowing a glimpse at her ample deliciously curved chest. A favorite tactic was to wear dark-colored, plunging bras along with tight white button-down shirts so that nothing would be left to the imagination.
While Landrie was personable and met guys as people before engaging them as potential romantic interests, and she had been remarkably conservative in her approach to sexuality Suzie was a tease, or, biblically, a "temptress." She absolutely reveled in creating sexual desire in men, young and old alike, and liked nothing better than to gather gaggle of guys to follow her about. And of course, with her looks, attire, and attitude, a virtually limitless supply of guys were perfectly willing to join the gaggle. One unsurprising byproduct of this attitude was that Suzie didn't ever seem to have had a significant boyfriend, and never dated any boy steadily. Her reputation for looseness came from her appearance, not testimonials from anyone who had "been there and done that." All this led me to wonder why she felt the need to work so hard to create interest. She was beautiful and would have been remarkably attractive without the more brazen behavior.
Unlike Landrie, who maintained a larger cadre of associates but no single close friend, Suzie was very close to a strong cadre of running mates, Elise Matthews being the first of the lot. She garnered rides to and from school, walked between classes, ate, and generally hung out with the same group of four girls, forming an incredibly tight-knit klatch.
Older men were not immune to her charms. In whispers in the teacher's lounge, in carshare rides to and from school, and in the coach's locker room, I heard teachers who knew far better say things like "I'd like to take those shorts down and give her a lesson or two" or "I bet she fucks like a mink" and "she wouldn't look so Goddamned cocky with my dick buried up her ass."