This is a new story by the author of D'n'M which appeared on Nifty between 2019 and 2021. If you have read D'n'M then some of the characters will be familiar. However, this is not a continuation of D'n'M and it is not necessary to have read that story in order to follow (and, I hope) enjoy this one. A Very Ordinary Boy will have at least two parts. Part 1 consists of 13 chapters, not all of which contain any sexual material. Its main characters are teenage boys.
All the characters and events in the story are fictitious. Any resemblance to real people, either living or dead, is entirely unintentional.
The story is copyrighted and may not be reproduced in any way without the express permission of the author who can be contacted at pjalexander1753@gmail.com
A Very Ordinary Boy (Part 1)
Chapter 1: A beginning.
Boring! Boring! Boring!
Why am I so freaking boring? Boring person, boring life, even a boring name. There are boys in my year at school with cool names -- Oscar Montgomery, Milo de Beer, Blake Barnado - but me? Oh no, nothing that would so much as ruffle the water. Jack Smith, that's me - what could be more boring than that? Okay, probably boring is a bit OTT, but it's definitely very, very ordinary. And it could have been way better. My grandpa, that's mum's dad, well, his family was from Spain, hundreds of years ago apparently, and his family name was Margelles, which, of course, was mum's name too when she was a kid, but then she grew up and went and married my dad and stopped being Miss Shania Margelles and became Mrs. Michael Smith. Smith! And it's not as if she completely ditched the Margelles, oh no, it's still her professional name, the name on all her qualifications and certificates, and on the door of her office -- Margelles and Associates -- so, if she can use it when she's at work, what's wrong with me using it at school? But no, I'm my father's son so I have to have his name -- some sort of birth certificate shit. I don't understand it, I just have to put up with it and have a very, very ordinary name to match my very, very ordinary life. If I was to die tomorrow, which would be the most unusual and interesting thing I would ever have done in all of my years on earth by the way, that's what would be on my gravestone:
Jack Smith
17 years old
A very ordinary boy.
You look as if you don't believe me? You want me to prove that I am buttnumbingly ordinary? No problem. Where do I start? Oh, I guess I already have -- with the name -- so what else can I bore you with? Okay, what do I look like? Any idea of the average height for a seventeen-year-old boy? The answer is five feet, ten inches. And how tall am I? You guessed it -- five feet, ten inches. My dad, the aforementioned Michael Smith (Mikey to his friends and family, Smithy or Sir to his colleagues at the airport) is 5-11 so I've got just shy of a year to grow the extra inch, and then I can be boringly the same as him. I went past mum (5-4) when I was fourteen and expected, well hoped, that I'd hit six foot, just so I would be a bit different, but that doesn't look as if it's gonna happen.
Hair colour? Mostly you'd call it mousy, mid-brown if you're being kind, longish and quite thick on top, short at the sides, pushed (and carefully gelled) back from my face, revealing my blue eyes, not piercingly blue you'll have noticed, not ice blue, just ordinary blue.
Body-wise I'm okay. Nothing flabby but I'm not super-toned or built either. My totally hairless chest has gained some definition since I started using dad's home gym equipment a couple of years ago (which is more than he does these days) and my tummy is flat but with no 6-, or even 4-, pack to speak of. The workouts have given me a bit of bulge in the bicep department but you won't see me entering The World's Strongest Man competition any time soon. Now, this, of course, is where I tell you I'm seriously out-of-the ordinary down `there', where it counts - in the junk area. Surprise, surprise - I'm average (I Googled it) - three and a half inches soft, just over six inches hard and about four and a half inches around, uncut with a slightly hairy sack and a tidy, mouse-coloured (a bit darker than my head hair) bush. No treasure trail to speak of yet, though I'm hopeful.
So, generally, in the looks department, you'd most likely say there was nothing about me to cause a stir, neither chiselled and darkly handsome nor flabby and grossly offensive. My gran, grandma Smith that is, thinks I could be the next James Bond, but that's grans for you. As long as she keeps on regularly topping up my allowance I'm happy to play the leading man in her life.
Home is on one of those exclusive estates in the suburbs on the airport side of the city, close enough so that dad can be home from a late night shift in under fifteen minutes. The house, bought mostly on-line when we had to move quickly (for dad's job when I was ten), is a predictably anonymous 4-bed, 3 and a half bath, double-garage executive detached in half an acre at the end of a cul-de-sac of eight near identical and unremarkable properties. My room is up in the roof and, including a bathroom and big walk-in store-room, stretches the whole width of the house. It's a fairly standard teenage boy hang-out with the usual furniture and technology stuff and the décor is mostly blues and greys. Just about the only unusual thing about it is the stuff on the walls, not posters of bands or sports stars or not-quite-naked glamour models, you know, normal teenage boy stuff. Instead there are lots of art posters and postcards -- Van Gogh, Hockney, Rothko, Botticelli -- that I've bought from galleries or over the internet. That's my big thing, you see, art. Dunno why exactly, it's just something that means more to me than most other stuff. It helps that I'm good at it, drawing and painting I mean. Mum says I automatically seemed to know what to do with pens and crayons right from being a really young kid. So you could call it Jack Smith's USP, the one thing about my life that isn't totally and mind-numbingly ordinary. I like reading too, so one whole wall of my room is covered in book shelves. I read all sorts of stuff, like graphic novels (no, they're not just for thickos), other stories (not `the classics' though, we get all the Dickens and Bronte crap at school), biographies (especially artists but some famous people like Churchill, Eminem, JFK), and lots of art books like the Pre-Raphaelites, the Impressionists, the Dutch School, that sort of stuff.
Mum and dad's room is downstairs at the back, so far enough away to be safely distant. They don't come up very often, pretty much leave me to it up here in the roof, though that isn't a rule or anything like that, it's just the way things have gone since I got to be about fourteen or so. I think, no I know, that they want me to be as independent as possible and as private as I want to be, especially my mum who tells my dad that that's important for healthy adolescent development'. Yeah, that's the actual words she uses, like I'm one of her clients at Margelles and Associates. Mostly, though, it's because they both spend so much time working, mum at her practice in town and dad at the airport where he's a big noise air traffic controller. I don't mind it when they make one of their expeditions to the eyrie' as dad calls it, as long as they send a five-minute warning text in advance. That was something we agreed after dad walked in on me a couple of years ago. Let's just say it was a `pants round the ankles' moment and I'm not sure which of us was more embarrassed, him or me. Actually, yeah, I do know, it was me. I still don't know exactly how much dad told mum but, whatever, they don't come up now without giving me the heads up in advance.
And that's it for the Smith household -- no siblings for Jack (something about messy complications when I was born) -- apart from Rosa who comes in several days a week to `keep everything on track' (dad again), which means doing all the cleaning and the laundry as well as cooking stuff to go in the freezer. Apparently my mum had insisted that, as she'd gone to all the trouble and expense of getting herself highly qualified, she was determined to work full time, and as dad's job often involves long shifts and late nights, there was no way the place could function without help. Enter Rosa, small, fierce and incredibly loyal Rosa, who treats me like one of her several hundred grandkids (okay, I'm exaggerating but even she says she's lost count of them all) with a mixture of way OTT affection -- several hours of hugs and kisses whenever she sees me - and military discipline -- she won't vacuum the floor in my room if I haven't first cleared it of socks and plates and paints and books. And don't get her started on dirty towels and laundry in the bathroom!
You've probably noticed that I haven't mentioned anything about school and so you're thinking that that's some sort of disaster area that I don't want to tell you about. Well, wrong, cause school's okay, it's just somewhere else where I'm outstandingly ordinary. My grades are fine (maybe not so much in science), mostly middle-of-the-road B's and C's, except in art which is always an A. The teachers (and mum and dad) are all convinced I could do way better and, to be honest, they're probably right. But the way I look at it is, once I've worked out what I want to do with my life then I'll know which subjects I need to concentrate on and then I will, do better I mean. Trouble is I haven't got much time left at school and, if I'm not careful, it'll be "Bye, bye Greenside High" before I've got my shit together enough to knuckle down and get decent grades for getting into uni. Dylan -- he's my friend and I'll tell you about him later -- says it's a no-brainer cause I'm bound to do something arty, and he's probably right but I mean, like what exactly? When I talked to the careers advisor she came up with this stupidly-long list of jobs and careers, everything from art therapist to stage designer, with teaching, magazine illustrating and advertising in between. So I asked her, "How's a guy s'posed to make a choice?" and she said she didn't know `cause she's a careers advisor, not an artist so maybe I needed to go ask an artist. Helpful or what? So I go to school every day, never late (get dropped off every morning), polite to the teachers (actually I'm polite to everyone -- so ordinary), do enough work to keep out of the spotlight (even in science), don't get into trouble (never been in detention or on report). In short, your average, ordinary, unremarkable, under the radar seventeen-year-old kid.
I said I'd tell you about my friend Dylan, one third of the Dylan-Simone-Jack trio that came together on the first day of high school and which has been glued together (maybe elasticated would be more accurate) ever since. It would be impossible to exaggerate how important Dyl and Si are to me, and not just because they keep me out of the saddos group, you know, the kids who always eat lunch alone and then disappear off to the library so it's not so obvious that they've got no friends. As if! I swear that I'd be a 100% saddo if it weren't for Dyl and Si. Dyl is the brains of the group and our job, me and Si, is to keep him from being picked on for being a nerd or a geek. I once saw his face actually crumple and tears form in his eyes when he didn't get an A and a commendation for some pointless piece of history homework set by a temporary teacher. Academically there's nothing Dyl can't do, but ask him to mow the lawn or tighten a screw and he completely goes to pieces, hasn't a clue. Sometimes I'm even amazed he manages to tie his laces and fasten his shirt buttons in the morning. His big thing, though, is games, not the video variety but real, old-fashioned board games like Monopoly and Cluedo. He's got this other group of friends that he plays with, whole weekends sometimes, where they all turn up at one of their houses after school on Friday and don't emerge again until just before curfew on Sunday night. They play non-stop all weekend, even phones are banned. I don't get it, never have, but it's not a big deal and it no way affects his friendship with me and Si, in fact, in a weird way, it seems to make it stronger. And if you think I'm gonna explain what I mean by that, you're wrong `cause I can't so I'm not gonna bother even trying.
Si calls herself the bad one which isn't really true, though, of the three of us, she is the one most likely to get herself in trouble, in school and at home. It's not that she's ever very much out of line, but at nearly six foot and as black as midnight it's hard for her to get away with stuff without being spotted. It's true that she's the one who'll come up with crazy ideas, like the time when we were about thirteen and she decided that it'd be fun to make a smoothie using one of every type of fruit and vegetable in her mum's kitchen, but then forgot to put the lid on the blender. You've probably seen something like that on some lame TV sitcom and it looks really funny. Believe me, it isn't. Mrs. Vincent went ballistic (I'm still not sure how me and Dyl made it out of there alive) and it took us nearly the whole afternoon to clear up the mess. Si was grounded for a week and my mum made me write a letter of apology and deliver it in person along with a big bunch of flowers paid for out of my allowance. Like I said, Dyl has this other group of friends that he hangs out with and Si has hers. When we started at Greenside High she came under a lot of pressure to take up basketball -- she was way tall even then. She didn't want to -- "Organised team sports are not my thing" -- but she agreed to give it a try and discovered she was good at it and enjoyed it. Now she plays for the first team and has won shed-loads of medals and trophies. They wanted her to be team captain this year but she said that would be joining the establishment and no thank you very much.
So you're thinking, Dyl and Si both have other friends to hang out with, what about the third leg of the stool -- me? Honestly I'm not much of a joiner, in fact I'd probably be a paid-up member of the saddos if Dyl and Si hadn't scooped me up on that first day of school. There was nothing deliberate or planned about it, we just happened to sit together for the standard introductory orientation talk by Ms. Ohura, the principal. At the end we agreed to stick together to eat lunch so we wouldn't be on our own and a target for who knew what the older kids might be planning to do to us newbies -- we'd heard and believed all the usual rumours about the first day of high school -- and we just sort of gelled over cold pizza and salad and we've been together ever since. I do spend quite a lot of time in the art room and there are usually other kids there too and, although there might be some chat as we draw or paint or sculpt or whatever, we're not really hanging-out and we definitely don't meet up out of school. At least, I don't.
And the art thing, you're wondering why there aren't any of my pictures on my bedroom walls? Aren't they any good you're thnking. Actually they are good, some of them at least, and they'd look great up on the walls, but the reason there aren't any is because of my mum. Not because she doesn't think they're any good or because she doesn't like art -- her office walls are covered in it -- but because of her job. She's a child and adolescent clinical psychologist which means she helps kids with mental illness, stuff like depression and self-harming and anorexia. One of the things she does to try to work out exactly what the problem is, before she can decide how best to help, is she gets the kid to draw a picture. Then she looks for clues, like is it mostly all black or are there lots of gravestones or is it a picture of the kid's family with the dad scribbled out? To a trained eye like hers, anything like that is some sort of clue to help her see inside the kid's head and what makes them tick or why it is they're somehow broken. Now I'm sure it's great to know that someone can see inside your head, that is if you've got a problem that needs an expert to help you sort it out, but I totally don't want my mum poking about inside my head and discovering all my dirty teenage secrets.
Of course, I'm basically too boring and ordinary to have dark corners of my life with big NO ENTRY' signs fixed up all around, so there's really not much for my mum to find out except, that is, the gay thing. I've known for ages, years. I started to suspect when I was around twelve. It was the usual set-up, I'd hear other boys talking about girls and what they'd like to do with them and I realised I had no interest in kissing with tongues or touching a random pair of tits. Of course I thought I was just a bit slow on the uptake -- I didn't start properly changing down there' until I was nearly thirteen -- and assumed I'd start getting interested in girls eventually. Then, of course, there was the classic locker-room scenario when it was like my eyes were magnetically drawn towards other boys' naked bodies, changing for sports or in the shower. Now I may be ordinary but I'm not stupid and it didn't take me long to put two and two together and realise that I wasn't wired like all the other guys and that it was, in fact, the guys that I was interested in. Shock, horror and instant self-loathing? No, not really. If there's one half-way decent thing about having a clinical psychologist for a mum - even if she does embarrass the shit out of you by changing her hair colour every week -- it's the fact that stuff like that gets talked about over the dinner table and it's made crystal clear that, although being gay may not be common, it definitely isn't abnormal. So even once I'd worked out that I was gay, I didn't go round beating myself up about it or try to cover it up by making out to be desperately macho and dating every girl desperate enough to be seen out with me. No, nothing like that, but I did quickly decide it was nobody's business but my own and that I would take my own sweet time before I told anyone about it. And maybe I won't tell. Straight people don't have to `admit' to liking the opposite sex, so why should gay guys? Anyway, if and when anyone else is gonna know, that will be up to me to decide and that's why I don't want my mum doing the same 2+2 arithmetic and coming up with the right answer. So as of now no-one, not even Dyl and Si, know the dreadful truth -- except you, of course - and I am more than happy for things to stay that way. So don't go round shouting your mouth off, okay? I'm trusting you. Don't make me regret it.
As an author, it's REALLY encouraging to know that there are people out there who are taking the time to read what's been written, and then bothering to send a response. So please do feel free to write to me at the email address given at the top of the chapter. I welcome all comments and guarantee to write back. PJ
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