Guardian Angel
3 A Kiss is Just…
SOMEHOW, we all survived fifth grade. There was a party at Brenda’s house at the end of the school year. It was the first time I’d ever been invited to a party. Well, she invited most everybody in our homeroom, but still… It was like being somebody. Rhiannon and Whitney stayed close by me through the entire party and I got up to bat with both of them. I never got to first, though.
“Hey.”
“Hey yourself,” I said as Jessica stuck her head above the floor of the hayloft. I was escaping up there from Betts. I had enough of chemistry in the attic for a while. Betts had girlfriends in the house and I was told in no uncertain terms to get my pervy butt away from them. It was going to be a long night. I might just stay up here. Jessica hauled herself up and all of a sudden, I felt like I was ten feet tall. She came to see me!
“You survived fifth and next year you’ll be kings.”
“Yeah. It was cool. I’ve got friends.”
“Good. I was worried about you. You know, of course, that after sixth grade, you’ll be back at the bottom of the heap again. It will be like first grade. At least it was for me. With junior and senior high in the same building, you’ll be looking up at everyone. I thought I’d never make it through seventh grade. Your sister was no help. As a freshman, she could only bully the junior highs. At least next year the rat bastard Drew will be at the bottom. See how he likes polishing some senior’s shoes.”
“They make you do that?”
“Only if they don’t like you. I didn’t have to do anything like that. I don’t think you will, either.”
“If there’s a shoe to be licked, I’ll be the one hoping he didn’t step in dog-poop,” I said.
“You did good this year,” she said. “Did anyone give you shit?”
“I was always surrounded by Carl and Doug and the fabulous five.”
“How lucky can you get? Five pretty girls to pal around with?”
“Yeah. But I didn’t get to first base. I get so antsy when I’m with them sometimes that I have to just go to the bathroom and pee.” I laughed. I couldn’t believe I’d just told Jessica that. I hadn’t even told the guys.
“You mean nobody even kissed you?” Jessica asked. She sounded really surprised.
“Why would anybody kiss me? I’m just their dress-up doll.”
“Well yes, but they kiss their dolls. Believe me. I still do.”
“Really?”
“Do you know how to kiss?” she asked.
“How would I know that?” I asked.
“Okay. Well, this is just because we’re friends and you need to know this. So, no girl—well, mostly no girls—will start a kiss. If she’s holding your hand, she’s telling you that you could kiss her if you wanted. She just can’t say that. It would be so much easier if we could just tell a boy we like, ‘It’s okay to kiss me now.’ But no. Then we’d get called easy. It’s so unfair.”
“Have you ever been kissed, Jessica?”
“Yeah, sure.” I tried not to get pissed off. She said it like it was no big deal. Just the thought of someone else kissing her made my stomach hurt. Well, my stomach hurt anyway. That’s why I was in the barn. Betts had punched me because I saw her come out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel. That was before the other girls came over. I mean I was just in the hall when she came out of the bathroom. She saw me and called me a pervert and slugged me in the stomach. The damned bitch. I can’t wait till she leaves home. “Look, I’ll show you.” My eyes got big.
“Really?”
“Yeah. So, we’re out on a date or something. Like at a party.”
“I was at Brenda’s party with Whitney and Rhiannon.”
“Were you holding hands with one of them?”
“Both. At different times.”
“Sorry I didn’t think about this before, but I’ve been kind of busy. So, you’re holding hands.” Jessica took my hand in hers. It was different than holding hands with Whitney or Rhiannon. There was a kind of tingle that went through my arm and right down my spine. This was good enough. We could just stay like this for a long, long time. “Holding hands is like the first step. A girl will let you put your arm around her and it doesn’t mean anything. But if she lets you hold her hand, that’s something. It’s more… intimate. It takes two, you know?”
All I could do was nod my head.
“I like holding your hand, Jessica. I like it a lot.”
“Yeah. It’s too bad you aren’t in the same grade as me. But we can still practice. So, if she’s holding your hand, like I’m holding yours, it probably means it will be okay to kiss her.”
“Probably? How do I know?”
“Well, sometimes a girl holds a guy’s hands just to keep them under control. If you’ve been trying to touch her, well she probably just wants to keep your hands away from anyplace else.” Jessica paused a second and looked into my eyes. “You wouldn’t do that would you, Brian? I mean touch a girl who didn’t want to be touched?”
“Hell no,” I said. “I have enough trouble with people touching me. Or punching me.”
“I didn’t think you would. It’s important to a girl to know that you won’t try to make her do something she really doesn’t want to. So. You’re holding her hand and it’s just the two of you. That’s important. Kissing the first time needs to be private. You don’t do it in front of your friends. Maybe that’s what didn’t work at the party. Were there always people around?” I nodded. “Well, if they really wanted to, they could have led you someplace where there wasn’t anyone. But maybe it just wasn’t right for then. So, if we’re alone or at least can’t be seen, and I’m holding your hand, then it’s okay to try a kiss.”
“You mean like we are right now?” I laughed, looking around at the hayloft.
“Well, yeah. Except I can’t really kiss you because you’re not in my grade. So you'll have to practice on your own. Use your arm. Just softly kiss it. If you get it wet or hurt it, it’s not right.” She demonstrated on her arm. I felt pretty silly, but having Jessica teach me was pretty exciting, too. “You’d probably start by just leaning over and kissing my cheek. And then if I looked straight at you, that would mean I’m ready for a little more. If I turned my head away, you’d stop.”
I tried kissing my arm again and looked to see if I’d slobbered. I guessed I'd only practice this after I washed from now on.
“That’s not going to work. I’m not saying it was bad but… we’ll have to try it.” Try it? Jessica took my hand again and looked into my eyes. I just leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. She sighed and smiled at me. Well, those were the cues she told me about. I kissed her right on the lips. Kind of quickly so she wouldn’t have a chance to change her mind. “That was good. The next time you kiss her—maybe on your next date—it will be easier and she won’t pull away or anything.” I kissed her again. “I don’t think you’ll have any problem from there. Just make sure to keep your lips soft and don’t push too hard.”
Jessica stood up and headed for the ladder down from the hayloft. Then she turned around and gave me another quick kiss right on the lips. She giggled and headed down the ladder. I sat there until it was my bedtime.
I got to go to science camp for four weeks! Betts complained non-stop about how unfair it was since she could only go to horse camp for two weeks—in spite of the fact that it cost about ten times as much. This year I really got to focus on what I loved—chemistry. I started building a list of additional things I would need for my lab back home. I knew for a fact that my parents couldn’t afford what I wanted, but the camp had a catalog from Edmund Scientific and it had way more stuff than the Sears-Roebuck catalog my original set came from. They promised that we’d each get our own copy of the catalog to take home at the end of the summer.
I was really surprised when we were assigned partners from the botany lab, and who do you think I got but Angela. I was pretty happy about that. She was even more developed than she’d been the year before and I couldn’t believe she wasn’t wearing a bra to cover those huge breasts. She just wore a camp t-shirt like the rest of us. It was blue, so you couldn’t really see through it, but the bumps on the front of her shirt moved around like crazy and there were two points I couldn’t take my eyes off of.
Our ‘field assignment’ was to gather soil and water samples from various parts of the camp and test them. I would provide the data on the test and Angela was to provide the analysis that would show what crops were appropriate for that particular soil and water combination. Angela pointed out areas where she thought certain things would grow best and cataloged the various plants that grew around while I was gathering soil samples. I spilled my test kit twice because she moved and my eye tracked straight to her points.
“What’s with you, Brain?” Somehow the nickname had transferred to camp. I guess it was just too easy to miss. “You shake like a leaf when you measure out the chemical test.”
“I… uh… Gosh, Angela. I keep getting distracted by your, uh… breasts. They’re like, right there in front of me and it doesn’t look like you are wearing any underwear.”
“I hate clothes and underwear, especially,” she declared. “When I’m eighteen I’m going to become a naturist.”
“What’s that?”
“Some people call them nudists. They never wear clothes. Mom and I don’t wear clothes at home. They are so ridiculous. She says I have to wear underwear to school, though, or all the boys will hit on me. Are you hitting on me, Brain?”
“Angela, I’d never hit you. You’re just… distracting. That’s all.”
“Not hit me. Hit on me. It means you are trying to get in my panties. Except I’m not wearing any,” she laughed.
“But you already showed me what was in your panties last year. Really. It’s just seeing you like this makes me antsy and…”
“Hard?” Damn it! What a question to ask. I was doubled almost in half trying to hide the fact that my traitorous cock was tenting my shorts.
“Um… yeah.”
“I want to see. I’ll let you see mine. It’s different than last year. I got hair. And Bloody Mary comes to visit every month. You should be glad you don’t have to put up with that! Come on. No one’s around. Let’s see.” With that she pulled her t-shirt up over her breasts and pushed her shorts down to her ankles. There was no underwear.
When I’d seen Jessica a couple years ago while we played doctor, her breasts were just little swollen bumps on her chest and I’d pretended to listen to her heart by pushing my fingers down on them. They’d grown, but I hadn’t seen them uncovered again like Angela’s were in front of me. And she was right. There was hair growing between her legs. I had a little hair around the base of my cock, but it was mostly just below my waistband. Hers seemed to go right down between her legs.
“Come on! Let me see yours,” she panted. I pulled my shorts and jockeys down and my cock stuck straight out. “So cool,” she said. “Now I see how a guy can push it inside a girl to fertilize her. When I saw it last summer, I kept trying to figure out if I had to, like, suck it in. Now you could push it in. Does it spurt?”
“Huh?”
“When you rub it does stuff spurt out the end.”
“I… um… never…”
“Try. Look.” She reached between her legs and spread the hair apart. I just saw the little crack there last summer. The way she was sitting and holding herself, I could see a wet pink opening. My cock ached. “This is where the cock goes when it’s time to fertilize the egg,” she said, pointing at the opening. “But this is the part that is cool,” she continued, pointing at a bump above the opening. “This is the pleasure button. It has some Latin name like Clittus or something. When I rub it, it feels really good, but nothing comes out of it. Mom said that when a male gets excited, stuff comes pumping out of his penis. Are you excited?”
Hell yes. What was I supposed to say? Everything was feeling tingly. It used to be that it just made me antsy and then I could feel the stiffness starting. But now, I was flushed and my heart was beating fast. I figured I must be scared someone would catch us. I tentatively rubbed at my penis while I watched her rubbing her pleasure button. In a minute, all I could see was that little opening that was designed for a penis to fit inside. I know this is strange, but even after the show and tell last summer, the only place I could imagine fitting into was a girl’s navel. I didn’t realize there was a hole there just waiting. It was all wet and I wondered if she peed herself, but she was leaning back with her eyes half closed and rubbing her pleasure button like crazy. When I rubbed my penis up and down it felt really good and I just fell into what was happening like falling into a deep pit and feeling like there was no bottom and all of a sudden stuff was shooting out the end of my penis.
I thought I’d peed at her.
“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to pee.”
“So cool!” she said. “That wasn’t pee. Look, it’s white. You shot your stuff that could make a girl pregnant. Oh boy! I had a little jolt, too.” She sat back and breathed deeply, her rich brown nipples rising and falling. I couldn’t figure out where to look. The big breasts or the little hole. “Next summer when I’m on the pill, we can try putting it in me and we’ll feel what it’s really like. We better put our clothes on and go back to the lab with our samples.”
I pulled up my pants and watched till the last moment as Angela’s vagina and breasts disappeared beneath her shorts and t-shirt. When we got back to the lab, we discovered we were one sample short and we had to run back out and quickly grab a sample of muck from beside the beaver dam.
I found out that night that I didn’t have to be actually looking at her to make the white stuff spurt. It was enough just to think about it and rub vigorously.
When I got home from science camp, the first thing my parents did was introduce me to Cary. Cary was a guy my mom worked with in the circulation department at the local newspaper. She was all happy that he came over for dinner the night I got back. All I wanted to do was talk about science camp and here we had a guest who obviously wasn’t interested in science.
“So, what do you think, Brian? Would you like to be a paper carrier?” What? I think I missed the whole conversation. Be a what?
“Huh?”
“The route for this neighborhood is open. Your mom thought you’d like the opportunity to earn some spending money.” Money. Chemistry stuff. Why didn’t he say so in the first place?
“Sure. I’d love to.”
“I’ll meet you here tomorrow morning at five-thirty to show you the route. I’ll work with you for two days and you should know where the papers go. Then on Saturday, I’ll go with you to collect and make sure your book is up-to-date. From there on, it’s all yours.”
“Wow!”
Wait. Five-thirty? In the morning? Sure enough, Mom was pounding on my door at five and I was dressed just in time to meet Cary at the door.
“Breakfast when you get home,” Mom said as she shoved me out the door.
“We’ll use my car today, but when we get back, I want to look at your bike and make sure it’s ready for the road. Then tomorrow we’ll do the route on our bikes,” Cary said as we pulled out. “Roll each newspaper and snap a rubber band around it. I’ll point out the houses and you can run to the door.”
“Don’t we just put them in the box?” That’s how our paper always came. But we were at the end of the rural delivery route. Everything south of us was on to-the-door delivery. Crap! This is going to be a lot more work than I thought.
We finished the route in an hour and came back to look at my bike. Cary was pretty good about it and made sure the tires didn’t leak and had the right amount of air in them. He checked my brakes and the fit of my seat. He raised it an inch. It had been at the same place since I got the bike when I was eight. Hey! I was growing!
“Okay, tomorrow morning on bikes. That means we’ll have to band and bag the papers before we leave, so I’ll be waiting with the bundle at your door at five-fifteen.” He left. Earlier? I went in the house and Mom gave me a bowl of cereal and a grapefruit. I was dead. As soon as she left for work, I went back to bed.
That was short-lived. Betts was in charge. When she got up at eight, I had to get up. She said so. I still hadn’t gone to see my friends since camp, but she had a list of chores a mile long that I had to do. She was still pissed that I got to go to camp for four weeks and she only got to go to horse camp for two. Then she said she had to work with Rika so she’d be ready to show at the fair. I had to muck out the stalls. I was pretty sure it was her horses that pooped in them.
She never fixed lunch, so I grabbed a peanut butter and bologna sandwich and slipped out through the woods to go to Geoff’s. Mostly we just went out to the woods and hung out. Geoff was in my class and John was a year younger and surprisingly they always thought I was cool because I took them up to play with my HO gauge train in the attic sometimes. We were in the woods and kind of playing together, but it amounted to a lot of pretend that we were sailing around the world and just making up a story in our heads. But at least we were doing something besides chores.
The next morning, Mom still called me at five and told me to hurry because the paper bundle had already arrived. I threw on my clothes and dragged the bundle of newspapers inside to start rolling them and snapping rubber bands around them. Cary got there about ten minutes later and helped roll the last couple dozen. Then he showed me how to stack them neatly in my bag so I could grab them with the least difficulty. By five-forty-five we were off down the long gravel driveway and up Mosquito Road. It took more than an hour.
“All right, you’ve got to work on your speed or start earlier,” Cary said when we got back. “That last paper was delivered at seven o’clock. Our promise is that all papers will be delivered by six-thirty. I’ll give you this week and handle any complaints at the office, but next Monday everything is for real. You get a complaint, points get taken away. You earn points by having your collection book up-to-date every week, selling new subscriptions, and having customers call to compliment you. Every customer complaint takes a point away. Points earn you credits toward cool stuff we give away at the carrier meetings each month and you get scrip that you can actually spend at certain businesses in town. It’s an incentive to do your best every day. There are even trips to baseball games and a dude ranch that you can earn. You are going to be very successful if you work hard.” Then Cary was gone and Mom shoved toast and peanut butter at me and left for work.
It was only seven-fifteen, so I grabbed my sleeping bag from my room and headed for the barn. I slept until ten and then went in the house to eat a real breakfast. Wheaties, the breakfast of champions. Betts was already out on Rika, so I slipped back to the woods to spend the day alone. There was plenty of bologna, so I just took a couple sandwiches and my canteen with me and stayed out until I figured Mom and Dad were home from work.
There were only two more weeks till school started and one was the county fair, so at least the mornings I couldn’t avoid Betts were limited. At the fair I rode Silk in barrel races, pole turning, and rescue. And, of course, the required Western Pleasure class. All 4-H ers with horses had to participate in that. When school started, Betts had to get up before I got back from delivering papers and Dad made sure she went out to do her chores first thing. The high school bus came an hour earlier than the elementary school bus, so I still had time to take a shower after she left and make my bus. It was going to be hell next year when we were both catching a bus at seven. Oh well.
Sixth grade was okay. Yeah. That’s it. I had two more new oxford shirts and Whitney got one loop the first day of school. I thought I’d grown some, but Whitney was even taller. I waited a couple weeks to wear my other new shirt. I wanted to know who was going to be hanging around. I wasn’t sure. Mom hadn’t noticed that I didn’t wear the other new shirt yet.
Rhiannon kind of grew up over the summer. Or out. All of a sudden, my buddy Doug had a girl hanging on him that he didn’t try very hard to shake. Liz was really hard to read and a little aloof unless she got to pick out an outfit for me to wear to school. All five girls got a kick out of that. The big deal was the way Carl’s and Brenda’s relationship ended. I mean, ka-BOOM!
It was Carl’s fault. Whitney told me so. It was always the guy’s fault. Especially since he bragged in gym class that he’d gotten to second base with Brenda. She found out. She used the lunchroom to make sure everyone knew they were through.
“You aren’t welcome at this table anymore,” she yelled at Carl. “You’re not my boyfriend.” Carl got up and took his tray to a different table, but Brenda wasn’t through. “And don’t you ever touch my bra straps again!” If there was ever a comment meant to scare every girl in the cafeteria away from him, that was it. I had to hand it to Carl, though. He was calm.
“No problem, babe,” he called back at her. “Thanks for being so willing.”
Oh, crap! My number one bodyguard and the leader of the girl-posse just destroyed each other in the cafeteria. This was not good.
Brenda pushed her way between Samantha and me and buried her face on my shoulder and cried. Samantha was my left-hand girl of the day. She and Liz and Rhiannon were rotating on that side with Whitney on my right. Rhiannon never really looked at me when she sat there because Doug sat at that end and she was focused on him. She usually made sure she had her leg plastered right up tight against mine, though. I had no idea what to do, so I just sat there with a girl crying on my shoulder and patted her back.
“Why did he have to tell everyone?” she whined. “Now they all think I’m a whore. And I didn’t… I didn’t. I’m never going to go out with a boy again!” Oh, Carl! All the boys in school just started hating you. “You wouldn’t do that, would you, Brian?” she asked.
“Um… no.” Right answer. Whitney and Brenda sandwiched me so tightly I gave up trying to eat my lunch and just put an arm around each of them. I remembered what Jessica told me, though. Having your arm around a girl is nothing. It’s not near as intimate as holding hands.
I got the whole story from Carl’s side later on. He felt miserable—not only for telling guys he got to second base with her, but for what he said in the lunchroom. “She didn’t have to say that to me,” he whined on the bus. “I was proud of being with her. I wanted everyone to know. I guess it’s okay if she talks about it, but not if I do.” All I could do was nod my head. I sure wasn’t going to say anything about what I’d ever done. I’d figured out unwritten rule number one. Never talk about what you and a girl did together. Whew!
The rest of sixth grade was mostly okay. I was really tired most of the time and often put my head down after I crammed my lunch. I’d sleep until one of the girls woke me up and said it was time for class. Something changed there, too. No one took the fairy loop from my second oxford shirt. It was pale blue, unlike the navy blue shirt Whitney first got or the tan one she got the first day we were back in school. Rhiannon got a yellow one last year. When I wore the new shirt, I kept expecting one of them to attack me and take it, but they just left it there. I guess the game was over. Still, I liked being surrounded by them at lunch and we sat in a cluster in class. Carl and Doug were in our cluster, too, but Doug was always beside Rhiannon and Carl sat as far away from Brenda as possible. Man. How awkward.
In sixth grade we passed classes but we stayed with the same group. When the bell rang, we had four minutes to all go from one class to the next, passing the kids from the other sixth grade classes as they switched to their next class. Six periods and study hall back in our home room. I knew we were considered to be the ‘smart class’ though I wasn’t sure how some of the guys got in there. It was a little cliquish, but I didn’t see any difference.
Oh. And Miss Sullivan. I fell in love with my English teacher. We had three periods, lunch, and two periods, then a fifteen-minute stretch recess, then two more periods, ending with study hall. Fifth period was English and I missed going out for recess most days after it. I wrote stories and poetry during recess. I had it bad. One night I dreamed she’d taken my fairy loop. That caused the posse to tease me something terrible. Never should have told them!
“Did you get to first base with Miss Sullivan today?” Whitney whispered when we got to our boring sixth period social studies class.
“Shh. Don’t be stupid,” I answered. “She’s a teacher.”
“Bet you’d like to kiss her though, wouldn’t you?” Brenda whispered from the other side.
“Poor Brian,” Samantha giggled. “In love and never been kissed.” I wasn’t about to tell her otherwise. I was still remembering what Brenda did to Carl. If Jessica did that to me I’d never leave my room again. I couldn’t show my face to the world.
Not that I saw Jessica that much. She was in eighth grade and rode the high school bus. You’d think we lived in different worlds. Well, I guess we did. Sometimes I saw her waiting for the bus when I finished my paper route if I was running late. But she was always with Drew and Betts, the siblings from hell. We’d smile and wave but never said anything.
Sometimes I just thought up conversations I’d have with her and kiss her in my imagination.
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