This is the start of a new story that I hope people will find interesting. I previosuly posted the story "Seal Rocks" on Nifty (the last chapter was posted here in the High School section in April), and I hold out hope that some may read it and enjoy it as well. This is a work of fiction (though it has some real life themes, at least, in it), and no one should go looking for anyone they know in this because they aren't there. You also should comply with any local laws or prohibitions you may be under, as this story will contain descriptions of underage sex. I retain all rights to the story. Hope you like it, and I look forward to comments from interested readers - the comments I received for "Seal Rocks" were very gracious and helpful, and I thank all for them. Please note that my e-mail here is new, and not the old one that was referenced in the "Seal Rocks' story. Thanks. have fun.
When the World Changed, Part 1
Brady Conover had no business being so tall. He wouldn't even turn 14 until the day after Halloween, but he was already almost 6 feet. He was of course a stringbean - barely 140 pounds soaking wet, but with surprisingly thick thigh muscles that denoted his running speed, and held the promise of what the rest of him might look like when he eventually filled out. Certainly that prospect didn't hurt him when, on little more than a whim, he applied for a competitive scholarship at Wilson School, a slightly seedy second tier boarding school the next town over from his.
It was the spring of 1967, when central New Jersey was still a smattering of farm towns, and milkmen from the local dairy really delivered milk every morning. It would curdle in the steel box on the front porch in the summer if you didn't get it before the heat of the day rose, and in winter the cold would freeze a thin top layer of cream into a natural slushie that made any delay in bringing the bottles inside well worth the wait. Brady loved to peel off the paper lid and scoop the frozen cream out with his finger, heedless of his mother's admonitions that it wasn't sanitary (to tell the truth, she liked to do it too, but she tried to be discreet). The two of them were alone much of the time. His older brothers were away: the oldest, Trent, in the Army after graduating the previous spring on an ROTC scholarship; and the middle brother, Hal, at college - or at least trying to attend college, while making enough money to pay his tuition. Trent had shipped out that winter with the Ninth Infantry for a place called Tay Ninh, about an hour north of Saigon.
The family was fairly poor, and both brothers had worked along with their studies to pay their tuition. Brady himself had worked from the time he was eight - mowing lawns, doing barnyard chores at local farms like mucking out stables or chicken coops, picking strawberries and apples in the blazing summer sun, sometimes getting to exercise one of the standardbred horses that ran in the trotter races at Monmouth Park but stabled near Cullingtown when not racing.
That was his favorite - hitching the flimsy sulky to the huge trotter stallion, climbing in, and holding on for dear life as the horse powered around the track, its hooves throwing clay into his face as they flicked up seemingly inches away from braining him. He could feel the track whizzing by as he sat reclined in the sulky, his bottom only inches off the ground, his arms extended clutching the reins (though the horse really did the steering). He would finish the exercise lap shaky, but with a deep sense of exhilaration, as if he'd cheated death.
Not that death hadn't gotten its two cents in already.
"Daddy's heart just wasn't strong," was the fullest explanation he'd ever gotten. He had died when Brady was 3. Brady had no memory of the man. He vaguely recalled hugging a set of legs covered in pajamas, in a place that smelled funny. His more concrete memories along these lines were of trips to the cemetery, every other week, to plant flowers. He'd always go get water from a spigot against the wall of a large granite mausoleum (not that he knew at that point what the building was called, much less its function). It was a hard job, because the building seemed an impossibly long way off to his child's legs, but he knew it was important, so he always brought the pail back completely full, even if it made his arms ache the rest of the day. Doing that made his mother smile, and she smiled so little when they were planting those flowers. He hated to see her sad like that. After a few years, the visits to the cemetery grew fewer and further between, and more painful for his mother when they did occur. She finally avoided going altogether.
There was only one photograph of his father in their home - a copy of his high school graduation picture, in a battered frame on his mother's dresser. It was yellowish and discolored, as if from another ancient era. The face in the picture was thin and serious, much like Brady was whenever he examined it, with high cheekbones and light hair combed back from his forehead. "They all called him 'Whitey'," his mother told him whenever she saw him looking at the picture. "Sometimes it was as if you couldn't even see his eyebrows, they were so white." She liked telling him that. Brady's own hair was light, too, but reddish blonde except when the summer sun bleached it in streaks, though he definitely inherited his father's pale complexion. Brady would regard the deep eyes that stared back at him from that photograph for hours sometimes, when his mother was at work and he didn't have to be out on some farm doing chores, trying to learn something from them. Who was this man, what was he like, would he have liked Brady or been mean and strict. Trent and Hal had spoken about how strict he could be, and that frightened him vaguely sometimes, though it was also obvious they had loved him desperately, the way boys do with their fathers.
The photograph never answered his queries, and Brady accepted the mystery as a given part of his world. Daddy was dead, and he'd never know him except through the folklore of family stories. He memorized every one he heard, though, as if by accumulating those little bits of secondhand gauzy reminisce he could reconstruct some version of the man. He knew the reconstruction was incomplete and hopelessly idealized, but he treasured it. He'd talk to it as if it really existed, in the close summer nights when the heat bore down and the mosquitoes whined ever closer in the darkness. It was his companion, his confidante, his reassurance that he and the world were all right - even when his mother would sit up late, as she so often did, staring at the snow on the black and white TV long after all the stations had gone off the air, and drink cheap port wine until she fell asleep.
Maybe she was looking for him in the snow, just as he was looking for him in their memories.
If this sounds like an unhappy life, it wasn't - not overall. Brady played in the woods along the mill pond, fished and caught turtles and frogs, ran through fields of barley and corn, snuck into orchards to feast on plums and peaches, and was surrounded by friends and playmates. It was the sort of rural childhood that's now gone for most kids, and if it was limned about with the fact of his father's death, that shadow was often over in the corner, forgotten (or at least willfully ignored) in favor of that most important business of childhood: living.
In seventh grade, as his body was maturing, Brady discovered football - well, for himself, anyway. His brothers had played, of course, and had been star running backs at Cullingstown High. He vaguely remembered playing in and beneath the stands during games on long Saturday afternoons, throwing grass over the barbed wire fence behind the stands to the dairy cows that always gathered, as if they were rooting for the Cardinals too. When play was at the other end of the field, sometimes he and his friends would play their own version of the game on the empty end. When the Cardinals won, they'd have a parade down the hill from the high school and north along Main Street, the band marching and playing the school fight song ahead of the team riding in convertibles and pickups, and everyone would come out of the stores to cheer. But Brady had never played football himself, aside from games with his brothers that were little more than excuses for them to use him as a tackling dummy and beat him around, mercilessly but playfully, until they all were sore and hoarse from laughter.
The fall he entered seventh grade, Brady signed up for a new Pop Warner football team that was organizing itself in Summerton, the next town over (and where his father's cemetery was - it was his father's hometown). He saw a flyer for the team when he and his mother were shopping there one day (Cullingstown had one small grocery store but no supermarket like Summerton did - Cullingstown didn't even have a traffic light, and going to Summerton with its two signals seemed to Brady a trip to the big city), and had begged his mother to let him try out. Hal was home that summer and fall, earning money to finish college (and keep food on Brady's table), and he agreed to drive Brady over three times a week for practices and Sundays afternoon for games. He even helped to coach. Though he struggled to stay light enough to remain under the team's weight limit, Brady found he enjoyed the game a lot. He was also good, at that level anyway (not a surprise given how much he enjoyed it) - his speed and size made him a starter almost immediately. He played tackle. The team stank, frankly, barely winning three games all year, but he had great fun. He'd never been on a team before - his baseball skills were abysmal, and the shame of once not getting picked for Little League kept him away from the game thereafter, for fear of having to endure again that humiliation.
He talked about football all that following winter and spring in school, to the point where his friends were thoroughly sick of the whole thing. He couldn't wait for the following August, when the next year's practices would begin. The fact that he was continuing to grow was something he quietly ignored - he was sure if he just worked out more he'd make the weight limit no problem. But of course he didn't lose weight - growing kids that age never do - and he found himself nearly fifteen pounds too heavy when practice started. Hal was back in school by then, so Brady had to bicycle the fourteen miles between the towns each day for practice, trying vainly to lose enough weight to play again. Eventually, he accepted the futility of the quest.
This loss felt like part of him had been ripped out. The head coach, who had spent the previous fall telling Brady that his family should move to Summerton so he could eventually play for that town's high school team, commiserated, and let him hang around practice, and even let him help teach the younger kids on the pee wee team how to get into stances and block.
That was how he met Mr. Glendon.
There were a number of new coaches that second August, and Mr. Glendon was among them. He turned out to be a teacher, and coach, at Wilson School, a boarding prep school located on the south edge of Summerton. Brady would pedal by it as he came into town for practice - long brick building set well back from the street and facing inward, glimpses of swaths of green lawns and lines of elm trees and huge trunked Norway maples. It was magical and forbidding at the same time - a realm of the rich and privileged, neither of which he was or had any hope of becoming. That Mr. Glendon taught there was dazzling enough to Brady. When he suggested that Brady apply to go there himself, Brady was in shock. "My mom can't afford that - really," he protested. Not a problem, Mr. Glendon had answered. "Just apply for a scholarship." Since Mr. Glendon also worked with the school's admissions office, he was thoroughly versed in the details, and Brady become sucked in to the impossible vision.
So he did apply, dressing stiffly in an old suit and dress shirt of Trent's one bright sunny winter morning and spending the day in a large drafty classroom in the main building at Wilson, taking battery after battery of standardized tests, sitting with about twenty other similarly nervous looking kids he didn't recognize. He walked dazedly around the campus for a little while afterwards, before his mother arrived to pick him up. The students looked so much older, sophisticated, dressed elegantly it seemed to him even in their casual weekend mode, some still in their jackets and ties, moving with the unforced ease of total self confidence, smiling at each other and radiating security and upper class elan. Brady avoided eye contact, certain that his status showed like a neon sign above his head. Seeing his mother's old Plymouth make the turn into the long treelined driveway leading up to the main hall was a huge relief. They went to his father's grave after that, even though it was too cold for flower planting, and Brady stood alone for a bit, asking for help.
Winter passed without any word. As the trees began to bud out in April, Brady found himself forgetting the whole thing, playing again with friends in the greening woods. The games seemed different somehow - they were almost high schoolers now, and Tag or War were dismissed as hopelessly childish in favor of deeper exploits, explorations and wrestling and dares to perform dangerous and ridiculous physical feats. He fell in especially that spring with Kenny Heuer, a cheerful brownhaired kid from his class with an outgoing personality and an open face. Kenny was the one kid who made showering after gym class in junior high fun, and not embarrassing. Brady had begun growing pubic hair in sixth grade, and for a time had no idea what it was or what it meant (having never seen either of his brothers naked). He was horribly certain that his constant touching himself (and what results he'd been increasingly getting from such touching) had borne some awful fruit, and that he was now some sort of physical freak. He found himself thinking that a lot about himself, on lots of levels, that spring.
It was Kenny who saw his growing thatch of hair after one gym class, despite Brady's best attempts to hide it, and actually complimented him on it. The fact that Kenny too was growing a little hair there also made him feel better - it seemed everyone did, eventually, he realized (or at least hoped). "Wow, you got a lot, you're gonna be like a stud," Kenny exclaimed.. "No faggot there, right?" Simultaneously embarrassed and flattered, Brady agreed heartily - whatever "faggot" really meant, aside from the fact that everyone used it all the time to insult each other. Like you were sort of a girl, he supposed. That was insulting, all right; he had no desire to be a girl.
Kenny was shockingly uninhibited in the locker room, waving his dick around for all to see and making jokes about how everyone who stared at his antics (which included just about all of the other kids, including Brady) were faggots and queers who wanted to suck his dick. Brady tried to laugh at such comments like the rest of the guys. But he felt an odd prickly feeling in his skin and a tingling in his abdomen whenever Kenny displayed himself like that. He started finding himself thinking about Kenny a lot, and especially when he touched himself at night, and his climaxes started to become shattering explosions of feeling and fluid - nothing like the pleasant wave of feeling that he used to get. He had to hide one set of pajama bottoms, because a large crusty patch developed in front that defied all efforts to wash it out, and thereafter he was careful to press the heel of his hand against himself to keep anything from coming out. The result was a shuddering half climax, redirected back into himself, which left him feeling almost paralyzed for long minutes afterwards.
And always, when that happened, Kenny's face and body were there before him. It was weird.
He and Kenny took to exploring further up the creeks that fed the millpond, pushing their way through thick undergrowth far past the paths the other kids played on. They found, or cut, their own trails back into the forest, and imagined that they were the first people ever to go there. "Except the Indians, of course," Kenny noted solemnly one day as they nursed bleeding forearms after breaking through some particularly nasty bushes. "They went everywhere."
After about a week of such explorations, they discovered a small clearing alongside one of the creeks, entirely surrounded by woods, where the stream ran about ten feet wide and crystal clear over a small falls and rocks. They immediately decided it was their private sanctum, and vowed to tell no one about it, ever. They visited it together every chance they got. It didn't seem right to be there alone, somehow - not to Brady, anyhow. One day Kenny even brought a stolen pack of cigarettes, and they each choked their way through one, trying to convince themselves and each other that they were now officially cool.
One riotously warm day in late April, Kenny stepped over to the downhill edge of the clearing to pee. He kept his usual nonstop conversation going even as he unzipped and let fly onto a large bracken. "So Begowitz got to feel up Suzie Kerner, did you hear that? And I mean for real, under her bra and everything! Can you believe that? I mean how easy is she to let him do that, he's not even good looking, he's got zits. It's fuckin' disgusting, y'know?"
"Yeah," Brady said vaguely. He got that funny feeling again watching Kenny pee. He knew where the thin stream of urine was coming from, and he imagined the sight. He felt himself thicken, which embarrassed him deeply.
"Not that I'd mind gettin' a feel and all myself, that'd be really cool, right? But it's like she got no standards, lettin' Begowitz cop one, I don't get it. And shit, she's got a great rack, I never seen a rack like hers on an eighth grader. I'd love to play with them things, wouldn't you?" Kenny shook himself off, started to dip his knees slightly, the way guys do when they're tucking themselves back, and, and then stopped, laughing.
"Shit, look at me," he said, turning to face Brady. "Talking about Suzie like that gave me a boner."
He was right. His dick was sticking straight out of his jeans, right at Brady. It was red tipped, as if inflamed. Brady almost fainted, his mouth went dry. He tried not to look at it, and when he couldn't prevent himself from doing that he tried to avoid looking Kenny in the eyes. That too proved impossible after a few seconds, though.
"Jesus, Kenny," Brady finally managed to croak out
Kenny was grinning. He passed his fingers lightly over the shaft and hissed quietly. "You ever jerk off, Brady?"
Brady tried to swallow. "Yeah," he admitted, his cheeks reddening even further. Why do I have to be so pale, he thought, it shows so easy when I blush. "A - a lot, I guess. I guess we're not supposed to, though." His mother had caught him touching himself once or twice when he was younger. "Don't do that," she had admonished him in an oddly flat tone of voice - not angry, really, but coldly disapproving. "It's not nice," she added.
Kenny giggled. "My dad says it's OK, actually. He says all guys do it." He stepped forward and dropped onto the grass near Brady, still sticking out. "Over Christmas, my cousin Freddy and his family visited and he slept in my room. He's a sophomore. He and I jerked off a lot. You wanna jerk off?"
Brady felt dizzy. The entire world had contracted to the view he now had of Kenny's dick. "OK," he said quietly, realizing how hard he was.
Kenny giggled, his hand grabbing his erection. "Well whip it out then!"
Brady opened his pants slowly. He couldn't stop staring at Kenny. When his own penis was out, Kenny whistled. "Wow, that's big, I think that's even bigger than my cousin Freddy's. He measured his dick and he was like six inches which is pretty good for a fifteen year old I think." Kenny casually reached out and grabbed him by his erection, and Brady reeled, letting out a loud moan and falling onto his back. Kenny moved closer. "We used to do this to each other, it feels really good. Wanna do me too?"
"Can - d'you want me to?" Brady was barely able to speak, he was shaking all over.
"Sure, g'wan, I need to come so we can go back without me bein' all boned up."
Kenny began stroking Brady's cock, and Brady moaned again. Through his haze, he reached over and closed his left hand on Kenny's dick. It was incredibly hot, silky smooth surfaced but steely hard, with a tiny bit of clear fluid gathered at the tip. Maybe it's pee, Brady thought, though the presence of the fluid (and the fact that it was inevitably about to come into contact with his hand) didn't bother him at all. Kenny smiled, his eyes suddenly soft in a way Brady had never seen before, and leaned back on the grass, scooting over next to Brady, his right arm extended to Brady's lap under Brady's outstretched left arm. "Don't that feel good?"
Brady couldn't say anything in response. He simply nodded, and began trying to replicate the slow stroking movements Kenny was making on his own penis. He rolled slightly onto his side toward Kenny, providing them both with easier access. Within a minute, Brady was whimpering loudly, his hips moving with a life of their own. His head fell forward, against Kenny's shoulder. He felt it rise in him, gather strength, take away his breath and soul. He cried out and pressed his lips against Kenny's bare collarbone as it erupted out of him, Kenny aiming expertly so it spewed into the soft green grass between their butts.
Stars were swimming before Brady's eyes. He'd never felt anything like that when he did it to himself. He was suddenly conscious of the faint smell of Kenny's skin - Ivory soap and a little bit of sweat, and Tide from his shirt. It was almost enough to make him hard again. Kenny shrugged Brady's head off his shoulder. "C'mon, do me," he protested. "My turn."
Brady lifted his head, trying to catch his breath, and complied. The feel of Kenny's skin remained on his tingling lips. He stroked Kenny and watched as the penis in his hand appeared and vanished, up and down, its reddish color deepening to purple. Kenny wasn't talking now. His head was back on the grass, his eyes were closed and his lips, moist and very red, were open. Brady found himself wondering what they might feel like against his.
Kenny's breath started to come in great gulps. Brady saw his chest rise and fall. He picked up his pace, trying to take in every detail. He could smell his spit on his hand, and Kenny's crotch, and the fluid that was leaking out of Kenny. The combinations of soft odors was intoxicating; he found himself breathing in deeply as if he were the one about to come, just to take it all in. Brady had never so fully concentrated on anything in his life. Kenny's belly started moving to its own rhythm, too, his legs were slowly bending and straightening, almost as if he were swimming. Brady watched Kenny's movements grow more pronounced, his hips bucking upwards and now sideways a little as well in time to Brady's hand, until with a single strangled, "Oh, shiiiittt . . ." Kenny grabbed Brady's bare forearm and pulsed out four thin arching streams of watery semen into the grass. More ran out, burning hot, onto Brady's hand. Kenny's face was red and all scrunched up, his eyes very tightly closed, his mouth wide open so Brady could see that he had a filling in a molar. Brady wondered if he looked like that when he did it, too. There was a slight sheen of perspiration on Kenny's forehead that caught wisps of his chestnut hair and plastered them against his tan skin.
"Damn," Kenny whispered after a long moment. He sat up, moved away from Brady, and tucked himself back into his pants. "Guess we don't wanna sit there now, huh?" he said with an easy laugh, indicating the grass between them where their ejaculate had landed, as he stood up. "Want another cig?" he asked, brushing his hair back with one hand.
Brady felt crushed. He'd just shared an amazing, shattering, and (he felt) deeply intimate and romantic thing, and Kenny was acting as if they'd done nothing more than suck down a soda at Jocko's. He sat very still, staring at the grass. He wanted the moment to last, for Kenny not to move away in so uncaring a manner. He wanted Kenny to stay with him, he wanted to touch Kenny again. To kiss him. Wow, that was a gross idea, to kiss him, but Brady felt the desire powerfully, almost as much as the urge to taste a little of the fluid that lingered on the webbing between his thumb and index finger. Kenny's come, he thought. That's gross too, but I wonder what it tastes like. I never thought to taste my own, maybe I should do that first. But I have Kenny's come on my hand right now, it'll dry up and be gone. I'll lose the chance. Is it gross to want to taste it?
"Shit," Kenny muttered. Brady forced himself to look up. Kenny was fumbling with the matchbook. "They got all wet in the grass, I can't light anything. Let's just go."
Brady stood slowly, his eyes downcast. He felt soiled now, embarrassed. He zipped up his pants, very conscious that he was exposed, and wiped his hand on the grass. What did I just do, what's the matter with me. He almost stepped on the grass they'd shot into, and recoiled, stumbling back. Kenny laughed and started down the path, beckoning Brady to follow. As he turned sideways to slip past some thorny brush, he laughed again. "C'mon. Hey relax, Brady, it's just jerkin' off, right?" He started whistling "Paint it Black" as he strode down the path.
Brady stepped behind Kenny, his eyes glistening for reasons he couldn't explain to himself. He was glad Kenny didn't turn around and see. "Right," he managed to say in a level voice. "Just jerking off.".