It's the unexpected that gives you the most reward in life. That's what I think I've learned so far in the last 25 years. 25 years is how long I've been on this earth, and the only other thing I've learned beyond the cliché of "Nothing is for certain" is that no matter how much you think you know, you really don't know anything. Looking back at my senior year of high school, I can now see that all three of these little pearls of wisdom go hand in hand when you get right down to it. They're all pleasantly connected in such a way that if you're not careful, if you ignore one of the rules, you end up paying the price of all three. It's a package deal.
The unexpected gives you the most reward... nothing is for certain... and no matter how much you think you know, you really don't know anything.
It's simple philosophy from a guy who doesn't really go all that deep. I can admit that, too. My life has been a simple one, and for the most part pretty uneventful. I got up and went to school every day, from the time I was in kindergarten to the day I walked that stage in the auditorium my senior year of high school. Never missed a single day, a feat most kids are either incapable of or too smart to pursue. I think I missed out a bit on a lot of the things people look back on fondly as they get older. But again, I didn't expect to miss out on much.
That was my problem. I didn't expect anything out of the ordinary, I assumed my life was heading on a direct course and I was possessed of ignorance only very young men harbor. I'm not saying I was a jerk or anything like that, though I know I had my moments. I'm just trying to illustrate my inability to really handle anything as I cruised through my eighteenth year of life. I believed I knew everything I needed to know, it was only when then unexpected showed itself that I had real problems. So, as you can imagine, I had a lot problems.
Most of these problems centered on women.
I didn't have much of problem finding a date if I wanted to, and while I wasn't one of the elite "jocks" or "popular guys" at my school I wasn't scraping the bottom of the barrel either. I was in the middle of the equation, in that gray area that allowed you to know and be friends with a great cross section of people. I got along fine with the upper class, but very rarely did their conversations go beyond themselves and the time-consuming high-wire act of actually staying popular. The bottom feeders were, to be blunt, nerds in the computer labs and library during lunch and they always had a good dirty joke. I liked them, almost as much as I liked the stoners and Goth-girls. Funny how we never had any Goth-guys, but I think for our particular group of Goth-girls, that wasn't really an issue.
I had friends in every clique, and while somewhere better than others, I had the common sense to be thankful for my neutral position. Anyone who has been in the extremes of the high school class game can tell you being a bottom feeder or even popular can sometimes ruin your life forever.
I wasn't a bad looking guy, standing at 5'11" and sporting a full head of curly blonde hair that I was always trying to keep combed straight. I had grown up very thin and skinny, but as my 18th year grinded on, I found myself filling out to actually have a pretty muscular frame. I decided to play football, even though I didn't really care for the game that much, and found my only talent to be knocking people over. But in my small town of 2500, a place where football took precedent over everything, it was considered a gift. To be honest, I would have rather been at home reading a book than be out there pounding and getting pounded. But, playing ball helped the jocks warm up to me, and since I didn't want to rock the boat, I played.
I took my studies only half-seriously, and my grades were good, but not as good as they could have been. Again, in hindsight, I wish I had been focused on the academics more rather than pre-occupied with women. That was pretty much all did as I went through high school; I lusted after women. My sex drive had kicked in very early, puberty starting in third grade and all. I'm told that I started early, and being one of the few to endure acne and body hair in the third grade forced me to learn good hygiene quick. As a result, later on I was one of the few acne free kids in high school, and I was also riding several years of youthful, pent up lust.
I'd been out with girls before, and I'd had the superficial girlfriends that really only wanted to hold hands or have someone to go to a party with. In the end, the chances for sex were pretty limited. I had been raised in a strong Christian household, and I worried a lot about my family finding out should I ever actually have sex. In a small town, as anyone can who has lived in one can tell you, there are no secrets. But I guess every rule has an exception, and that's what this story is about.
The school year was winding down, and graduation was like a gigantic finish line on the distant horizon. Most of us were running to it at a good pace, some of us sprinting and others lagging behind, huffing and puffing along. I was running at a good pace just happy to see the whole mess coming to a close. I wanted out of my one horse town, and I had received a few scholarships to attend a community college an hour out of town. Like I said, my grades were never really good enough to garner any awards large enough to send me to a big college. But again, that was my fault.
I had been tutoring one of my classmates, a girl that I can describe as being unfairly marked as a bottom feeder by the upper class. "I say unfairly marked" because she really had no reason to be spit on, but that's what happened to her nearly all the time. It wasn't that she was ugly. She was only a few inches shorter than me, had blonde hair, a great figure and a pretty smile. She wore flattering glasses, but why should glasses be an automatic strike against you? She always attired casually, but when she wore a dress, she gave every cheerleader in the school a run for their money. She was my age, and at 18, she was already sporting a body that did nothing but curve. Maybe that's why the other girls despised her so much.
I think Shawna would have been okay if she just hadn't shaved her head. She had the prettiest blonde hair as we grew up together, and she was always complimented on it. But when she moved to Alaska at the end of the sophomore years, and then came back at the beginning of the senior year, she had lost her hair. She had shaved it down to a buzz cut that gave her the most uniquely butch look I had ever seen. If people picked on her before, then they absolutely dogged her after that. She took it all as well as she could, and I could only say so much about it. But you could hear the horrible things people said to her, and the flat out mean pranks they pulled were getting to her.
Personally, I think her haircut gave the girls who were jealous of her already a superficial reason to bomb her.
Still, she always nice to me, and I really enjoyed being around her. We would often hang out after school and watch Looney Tunes for a half hour before we started her tutoring. Her mother was always at work, and her younger sister was always out with friends. We laughed at a lot of the same shit, and we always managed to somehow to put some thinly veiled sexual innuendo into our conversations. I see now that we had so much sexual tension between us, it was amazing we didn't snap sooner than we did. But like I said, I was caught up in my plans and banking on the expected and certain things in life. I never expected Shawna to be as bold as she ended up being.
We sat in her dining room, books strewn about the table as we poured over the Shakespeare classic Hamlet, which was one of my favorites. After seeing Mel Gibson in Zefferelli's version of the story, I was hooked and read the play from cover to cover. I had showed the movie version to Shawna to help put a lot of the archaic word play into context, which actually helped a lot. Hearing the words put in emotional context helped us both see the meaning behind Hamlet's faux madness. Shawna felt that it was both an act and a truth for Hamlet as he professed his insanity. I agreed with her, because to take on such an enterprise as he did, you'd have to be a little mad. And speaking in iambic pentameter can lead one to lose their marbles if your not careful.
"So do you think Gertrude knew about the murder?" she asked me rubbing her bright blue eyes, her glasses daintily hanging from her slender fingers.
"I think on some level she did," I replied as I took a drink of water, "But only superficially. Otherwise, why would she so trustingly have drunk out of the goblet at the end?"
Shawna frowned. "She knew. She was in denial."
"You think?"
"I think," she smiled. Her buzz cut was both bizarre and sexy to me, and as she let it grow out, I would often tussle her hair. It was fun to annoy her like that, but it was also kind of a turn on. I had never really seen a girl with short hair like that.
"Okay, I'm licked," I grunted as I stretched my arms out, "I'm done."
"Me too," she nodded as she yawned, "Want to watch a movie?"
I shook my head. "Nah, I gotta get going. I have about an hour to get home before dinner is on the table."
"How about a dip into the hot tub?"
"Are you kidding, I didn't bring any shorts."
"So?" she asked innocently.
I looked at her. "You just want to see me naked," I joked as I straightened up our books and papers.
"Maybe," she shrugged, but her eyes were focused on me intently. I felt my cock stirring inside my pants, and that familiar rush of sexual adrenaline as I realized she was flirting with me again. We had been flirting off and on like this ever since we met, and like I said, we had a lot of sexual tension between us. We were always hugging or touching one another in some way. Many times her hand had accidentally slipped and found my crotch, or when we wrestled my hands always seemed to find her breasts. We both never said anything about our groping, but it was an unspoken ritual between us.
"Well, I guess so," I rolled my eyes, feigning disinterest as my cock swelled.
"Good," she said and went upstairs to change, adding as she went, "Can you turn it on?"
"Can I turn you on?"
"The tub, you moron," she said, "You already turn me on."
I laughed and went to the tub. I pulled the heavy cover off and laid it on the wooden slats of the back porch. The yard was secluded from view of the neighbors by huge, thick cedar and pine trees, and I found that comforting. If I was going to get naked in the hot tub, I'd rather that fewer people see me. It was getting to the hot afternoon hours as the sun made its way to set. The gnats and noseeums were swarming in the shafts of yellow sunlight that broke through the dense cover of the pine trees on the property. I pulled my shirt off and kicked my sneakers away. My pants and socks followed quickly and finally, I took my underwear off. I stacked everything together on a nearby bench, stained to match the porch, and got into the tub. The water was hot and bubbling as I settled in. My cock was aching from anticipation, and I tried to calm myself. I didn't want to assume this would lead to sex. But when you're eighteen and horny, even the smallest gestures from the opposite gender can be a prelude to sex.
