CHAPTER EIGHT


In which Kevin takes up pedagogy and some geeks benefit from his wisdom.


Kevin

Jason was a bit quiet the following morning, which wasn’t like him at all, and I wondered if he was regretting the previous evening’s activities.

“Not really,” he said when I asked. “But… you’re not going to tell anyone about it, are you?”

“Don’t be bloody stupid! Obviously I’m not – I mean, it doesn’t exactly make me look hyper-normal, does it? And, besides, we’re mates, and mates don’t drop each other in it.”

“Right. It still feels fucking weird, doing that with my brother, but I suppose as long as nobody finds out about it, it won’t matter. And I suppose it was kinda interesting. Have you ever done that with your brother?”

“God, no. Me and Chris? I don’t think so.”

“Why not? It’s not like he’s butt-ugly, is it?”

I looked at him. “Jase, he’s my brother,” I said. “I bet you’d never looked at Luke that way until yesterday evening, had you?”

“Well, no…”

“And, anyway, why would you think I want to do anything with boys?”

“Well, you don’t seem to be beating the girls away from you, so maybe your brother could be a sort of alternative. Let’s face it, you and me, we’re never going to have the girls fighting to get near us, so… well… having Luke do it was better than doing it myself, is all I’m saying. Maybe if I ever reach puberty girls will start taking an interest in me and then I won’t need Luke any longer, but that could be ages away. And I’d have thought it’s the same for you: until you get some muscles and buy some contact lenses I don’t think you’ll be getting anywhere with girls either. So maybe it would be better getting Chris to do it for you instead of just wanking yourself stupid every night.”

“There’s no way I’m going to ask my brother to toss me off. He’d fall about laughing, and then he’d tell Mark and Colin, and pretty soon it would be all round the school. Maybe it’s okay for you and Luke, but me and Chris… no. No chance. And, anyway, the whole point of what’s happening to me at the moment is to stop me wanking, so I don’t think he’s going to suddenly start volunteering to do it for me himself.”

“Yeah, I’d forgotten about that. Well, we can probably fix it so you can do it most Thursday evenings, as long as you don’t mind an audience.”

“Thanks… I suppose. I’d sooner be able to do it in private, though.”

“Well, you could have done that last night, if you hadn’t wanted to laugh at me and the Microbe more.”

“True, but that was worth it. You looked pretty funny, playing with each other.”

“You just wait till next time we beat you at cards!”


It drizzled through football training that evening, but it didn’t rain hard enough for Mr Clifford to call the training off, and so everyone got wet – except me: I got to sit under the verandah of the changing room, brushing up on the laws of the game. Mr Clifford wanted me to take a referee’s course sometime at Easter if it could be arranged and so he expected me to have a good basic knowledge of the rules before then. At least it kept me dry, though I got wedged up against my very wet brother on the journey home, which meant I was a lot less dry by the time Colin’s mother dropped us off.

“Lee is free tomorrow morning,” Chris told me. “He’s expecting you at around ten o’clock. Mind you don’t mess up – your timetable is getting a bit full, and if you’re not careful you’ll end up scrubbing someone’s boots every night of the week.”

I wasn’t too keen on that idea: cleaning endless pairs of dirty boots really isn’t my idea of fun. But when I got to Lee Woodford’s house the following morning I found that he’d already cleaned his boots himself the previous evening.

“You should have left them for me,” I said, although I was grateful that he hadn’t. “That’s really what I’m here for, after all.”

“Is it? Honestly, I didn’t actually understand most of what your brother told me. He said something about you doing things you’re not supposed to, and because of that I can get you to work for me, or something like that, but I didn’t really get it. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to look stupid, but… please could you explain it to me?”

I looked at him. Various adjectives sprang to mind: ‘neat’ (although he was about the same size as Danny Engel, visually he was completely different – even though it was the weekend he looked very tidy, his dark brown hair carefully combed and his clothes clean and smart); ‘toothy’ (he had both an overbite and very large front teeth); and ‘posh’ (he had one of those very correct ‘private education’ accents) – though he didn’t seem at all snobby about it.

“Well, did you understand any of it – like what Chris caught me doing, for example?” I asked.

“Not really. He said something about you playing with yourself, but I don’t see what’s so bad about doing things on your own. What exactly was it that you were doing?”

Did he really not understand, I wondered, or was he winding me up?

“Do you know what masturbation is?” I asked.

He shook his head slowly, and I was virtually certain he was being honest with me.

“Doesn’t your school have sex education?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Why? Is it something to do with sex?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Oh. Only I don’t really know anything much about that. Of course, I’ve heard things at school, but I don’t know if any of them are actually true.”

“Haven’t you ever thought of looking it up on the computer? I mean, you do have one – or don’t you?”

Looking round the room I couldn’t see one, but…

“Yes, but it’s downstairs in the living room, and I couldn’t use it for anything like that or my parents would find out, and then they would think I was dirty. But… if you’re supposed to work for me… perhaps you could help me. You could teach me about it and tell me whether the things I heard at school are true or not, couldn’t you?”

I wasn’t too keen on that idea: in its way, this could turn out almost as embarrassing as having to play with myself in front of Dwayne and Sam had been.

“Wouldn’t it be better to ask your parents?” I suggested.

He stared at me. “Is that how you found out about it?” he asked.

“Well, no. But my school had classes for it.”

“I simply couldn’t talk to my parents about something like that,” he said. “It would be far less embarrassing if you could help me. Please?”

“Okay, I can see it would be less embarrassing for you… By the way, what do your parents think I’m doing here in the first place?”

“They didn’t ask, and all I said was that I’d have a friend coming round this morning.”

“Well, we ought to do something, otherwise they’ll wonder what we’re doing. Can you play chess?”

“Yes, but I’m not very good.”

“That’ll do, then. Have you got a chess set?”

He nodded, pulled a set from under his bed and handed it to me.

“Get it set up and I’ll go and tell my mother we’re playing chess,” he said. “That way we won’t be disturbed.”

He came back a couple of minutes later carrying a bottle of Coke and a couple of glasses, which he put on the floor beside us. I finished setting up the board and went through the usual process of hiding a pawn in each hand. He picked the black one, so I sat down on the white side of the board and shoved the king’s pawn forward two spaces.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Eleven, nearly twelve.”

“And you really don’t know about sex?”

No – well, not much, anyway.”

“Okay, tell me what you do know…”


Lee

I didn’t really know Kevin Stratford, of course, but from what I had seen of him at football he seemed nice, and although I had no idea why he was here – in all honesty I hadn’t understood what his brother had told me at all – it seemed like too good an opportunity to miss.

However, this was still quite a difficult question to answer without blushing…

“Well,” I said, “I know boys are different from girls because girls don’t have a… you know… and my friend at school told me that sex is where you put your… your willy inside a girl’s… front…”

This was really difficult: I’d never talked about this sort of thing before, except with my best friend at school, and I was scared that Kevin would think I was a complete baby for not knowing anything about it, or perhaps that he’d think I was dirty for wanting to talk about it at all. But he didn’t laugh or anything, and he didn’t look disgusted with me either. Instead he nodded.

“That’s basically right,” he said. “If you do that with a girl when you’re both old enough, you can make her pregnant and then she’ll have a baby… you do know where babies come from?”

I nodded. “They come from inside their mother,” I said.

“Right. Babies start after a man has had sex with a woman, so if you’re going to do that with a girl you have to be very careful to make sure she doesn’t get pregnant.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to do that. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to anyway – it sounds disgusting.”

“A lot of things you hear about sex sound disgusting, but somehow when you try them you find out that they’re not,” he said.

“But why would people want to do that?” I asked. “I can understand that if you’re married and want to have children, then you have to, but when I’ve heard people talking about it at school, or at football, they make out that it’s something everyone wants to do. And I was afraid maybe it’s me – is there something wrong with me? Why does everyone want to do it except me?”

“It’s not you,” he assured me. “I bet you none of the boys at school or at football have ever done it, and probably most of them don’t really want to either – at least, not yet. Most people don’t get interested in sex at all until they reach puberty. I know I didn’t.”

“What’s puberty?” I asked.

“Ah. I suppose if your school doesn’t have sex education and your parents haven’t told you, and you can’t use the computer either, there’s no way for you to know. Well, puberty is when you start growing up properly – you could say it’s when you change from a boy into a man. Haven’t you ever noticed the way some of the boys in the team are more developed than others?”

“I don’t get changed with the rest of the team,” I said. “I always go straight home after the game. I take my kit off in the car and Daddy gives it straight to Mr Clifford while I’m putting my old tracksuit on. Then I come home and have a proper bath here. So I haven’t seen what the other boys in the team look like. And at school we get changed for games and PE in individual cubicles, and we wear trunks to have a shower after rugby or hockey.”

“Okay. Well, have you noticed any changes to your own body recently?”

“Not really. I’m still getting taller – I’m four feet seven now – and I suppose I’m getting a bit faster and stronger, but that’s all.”

“I was thinking more about your… you know, personal places.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Except…”

I hesitated. If there was something wrong with me I didn’t want him telling everyone about it… but so far he’d been nice and hadn’t laughed at me at all. I really wanted to know the answer to this question, and I didn’t know who else to ask, so I decided to go ahead.

“It seems to go hard a lot,” I said. “It’s uncomfortable, and I don’t know why it happens. Can you tell me?”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It happens to all boys. There’s not a lot you can do about it, but it’s nothing to worry about.”

“Really?”

“I promise.”

“Thanks,” I said, and I really did feel relieved. “But why does it happen?”

“It gets like that when you’re thinking of sex – basically it has to be hard when you have sex or you won’t be able to get it in. But when you’re going through puberty it seems to get hard a lot for no reason. It happens to me even when I’m just sitting in class trying to follow what the teacher is saying, and it’s often hard when I wake up in the mornings.”

“Me, too,” I said, happy to hear that it wasn’t just me. And now I felt relaxed enough to ask the other question that had been bothering me, too. “One other thing: when I was talking to Freddie – that’s my friend at school – he… well, he showed me what his one looked like, and it was different from mine. And I wondered if maybe there was something wrong with mine.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” he said. “I don’t think any two look the same. But I’ll have a look at it for you if you like.”

I stared at him. “I’m not supposed to let anyone see me undressed,” I told him. “I mean, I didn’t even show Freddie, even though he let me see his. That’s why I’m not allowed to get changed with the other boys at football.”

“Has your doctor seen you undressed?”

“Well, yes. But that’s different.”

“Not really,” he said. “You’re asking me about sex, and you want to know if there’s something wrong with you, so I’m sort of like a doctor. And I promise I won’t tell anyone else about it, either – after all, doctors are supposed to keep their patients’ details confidential, so I will, too.”


Kevin

He didn’t seem sure about it, so I didn’t push – clearly his parents and his school, which was apparently some sort of religious place, both set high standards by modesty.

“Look, you can always ask your doctor,” I said. “I’m sure he won’t mind talking to you about it.”

“Yes, but Mummy always comes with me when I see the doctor.”

“Ah. Yes, I suppose that would be a bit awkward. Well, I really wouldn’t worry about it – like I said, we all look a little bit different from each other, and it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it. Is there anything else you want to know?”

“Well, yes, but… look, you promise not to tell anyone?”

“Of course I do. Even if Chris asks me, I won’t tell him.”

“Well, then…”

He stood up, undid his trousers and pushed them and his underwear – white briefs, I noticed, which I didn’t think anyone wore these days – down to his knees. Then he lifted his shirt out of the way.

It was about average size – and actually probably a bit bigger than either of the Microbes could offer, though I thought I might not mention that to Jason, unless he really annoyed me, of course… anyway, I couldn’t see anything wrong with it.

“That looks okay,” I said. “It isn’t too big or too small, and it seems to hang down properly. Does it just look funny when it sticks out, or something?”

“No – it’s the end that’s different,” he said. “Freddie’s has got skin all over the end – so is he the one with something wrong?”

“No, not at all. It’s just that you’ve been circumcised – that means that the skin over the end has been cut off. It’s quite common – I know at least two other boys who have had it done, and there are probably more in the team, and at your school, too. It’s perfectly normal.”

“You swear?” he asked.

“I swear. There’s nothing wrong with you, Lee.”

“Gosh, that is a relief,” he said, pulling his trousers back up. “When I saw Freddie’s I was afraid that… anyway, thanks, Kevin. You know you could really have got me going there, don’t you? I mean, if you’d said something like “Bloody hell, what’s happened to you?” or something I’d have really thought I was a freak. I knew I was right about you being nice.”

“Maybe I’ll do that next time!” I threatened, grinning. “No, I know it’s really difficult, not knowing stuff and having people tease you about it, so I wouldn’t do that to anyone.”

“Thanks. So… will you give me proper sex education lessons, then?”

“Well, what else do you want to know?”

“Everything! I want to know what happens when you get puberty, and why boys want to do sex with girls, and why boys look different from each other, and how exactly babies start growing, and… well, everything! Please, Kevin? I won’t ever make you clean my boots if you say yes.”

“Well, I suppose so. But I’m not really a proper expert or anything – after all, I’ve never actually been out with a girl, and there’s probably stuff I don’t know. But I’ll do my best.”

“Cool! Except… maybe it would be better if we don’t do it here. Mummy might come upstairs to see what we’re doing, and if you had some rude pictures to show me, or something like that, we’d get into trouble. So can I come to your house? If I tell Mummy that you’re teaching me chess, or maybe that I was going to play football with your brother, I’m sure it would be all right. Can I come this afternoon?”

“Yes, I suppose so. I don’t have anything else planned, anyway. Do you know where we live?”

I gave him my address and then we just played chess for half an hour or so. He wasn’t particularly good, though he did know the basics, and when we played a second game, during which I asked him to explain why he had made each move as soon as he had made it, and explained the thinking behind my own moves, he seemed to take it in quite well. And it’s as well that we stuck to playing chess, because partway through that second game ‘Mummy’ came into the bedroom without knocking ‘to see if we needed anything’.

“No, thanks,” said Lee, without looking up, and Mummy retreated again.

“That’s why I want to come to your house,” he whispered, once he was sure she’d gone.

I wondered if he’d be allowed to come at all if his mother liked to be able to check up on him all the time.

“It’s not really like that,” Lee said. “It’s just that she doesn’t know you – well, she’s seen you at football, so she knows who you are, but it’s the first time you’ve been here, so…” He shrugged. “She just likes to know I’m safe. She wasn’t very happy about me joining the football club at first, and when she found out there was a black boy in the team she wanted me to leave. But Daddy said it would be a good thing for me to play football, especially because I’m not much good at rugby or hockey, and he managed to persuade her that Dwayne is just a boy who likes football and not a mad gangsta who’s going to get me hooked on cannabis… sometimes Mummy has some strange ideas about people. But that’s another reason why I’m still not allowed to get changed with the others – I’m sure she thinks Dwayne passes round cannabis cigarettes in the changing room.”

I really started to like him at that point: being able to dismiss his mother’s casual racism with a joke instead of actually following it, the way a lot of kids might, seemed pretty decent to me. Although it sounded as if his father was a lot more sensible.

I went home shortly after that and spent my lunchtime wondering if I could persuade Chris to turn my camera off for the afternoon – I didn’t particularly want to try to talk about sex with Lee in front of the camera. But before I managed to raise the question Chris said he was going round to Colin’s for the afternoon, and that meant that I didn’t have to worry about it: I’d simply use Chris’s room instead. As soon as he had gone out I went up to my room, disconnected my computer from the monitor, keyboard, mouse and so on and carried it to Chris’s room, where I connected it to his monitor and so forth. It would have been easier to use his computer, but I knew it was password-protected, and if Mark had had anything to do with choosing the password it would be well-nigh uncrackable.

I spent a while looking for suitable material to use for my lesson. As I’d told Lee, I’m no expert, and a bit of help in the way of visual aids seemed to be a good idea. Of course, if you type the word ‘sex’ into Google… well, apparently there’s so much stuff out there that Google won’t even respond unless you give it something else to work with. So I added the word ‘education’, and that gave me plenty, including reams of lesson plans for use in schools. I started looking through these, and I got so engrossed that I lost track of time, and it was only when the doorbell rang that I realised what the time was.

I got up and went downstairs, and when I opened the door I found not only Lee but also another boy who looked even geekier, right down to the plastic-framed glasses and the light brown hair brushed into a parting, a style which I’m pretty sure nobody has worn since about 1945. Both boys looked as if they were going to church: they were even wearing ties.

“This is Freddie,” said Lee, indicating the time-warped figure beside him. “You don’t mind if he comes too, do you?”

I did mind – this was likely to be awkward even with only one student. But I didn’t think I could just slam the door in Freddie’s face, so I invited them both in, hoping I could persuade Chris to give me credit for the extra body.

“You didn’t need to dress up for me, you know,” I remarked as I led them upstairs.

“Sorry,” said Lee. “It was Mummy’s idea. But I said we might play a bit of football later, so she let us bring our sports kit. We can get changed into that if you prefer.”

“Whatever you like,” I said, leading them into Chris’s room. “Just sit on the bed for a minute while I go and get some extra chairs.”

I nipped downstairs and grabbed a couple of chairs from the dining room. When I got back I found them looking at Chris’s photo of the football team.

“I think it’s nice that you’ve got a team photo in your room,” commented Lee. “Is it to help you remember who everyone is?”

“No – I think I know who everyone is now. Actually this is my brother’s room, so it’s his photo.”

“Oh. Why…?”

“Because my printer isn’t working,” I said, quickly – I really didn’t want to have to explain about the camera in my room. “And I thought that we might need to print stuff, so I set up my computer in here. Now – where would you like to start?”


Freddie

I’m a geek. It’s the glasses – there’s nothing I can do about it, at least not until they need replacing. What happened was that originally I chose a decent pair that didn’t look bad on me at all, but then I broke them – well, I didn’t actually break them myself, but they fell off when I was playing football in the school yard, and before I could pick them up someone trod on them. My mother refused to buy me another good pair – instead she got the cheapest pair in the shop, which I really don’t think were all that much cheaper, because as far as I can make out about 95% of the cost of glasses is the lenses. Anyway, I complained that they made me look geeky, and she said ‘Well, you’ll just have to look geeky until you learn how to look after your things.’ So I decided to try to look as geeky as possible, which is why I now have a geeky haircut and wear geeky clothes most of the time – after all, I thought, if you’re going to get beaten up for wearing bad glasses, you might as well go the whole hog.

Unfortunately it didn’t embarrass my mother into getting me a decent pair of glasses, but it didn’t get me beaten up either – the boys at school seemed to think I was too strange to bother hitting. A couple of them started calling me names, first ‘Supergeek’ and then ‘Captain Geekoid’, and actually I quite liked that, so I started answering to it. Now most of my class just call me ‘Captain’, which is actually sort of cool. Lee’s happy too, because when we’re standing next to each other, suddenly he doesn’t look half as dweeby as he does when I’m not there.

Anyway, we’d been friends for a while, but since I became the Geekmeister we’ve become really good mates, and that’s why he’d invited me along this afternoon. He’d called me on his mobile just before lunchtime, and that was unusual – his attitude was that if he was at home he’d always use the landline: why pay for a call or use up your free minutes when your parents’ phone is free? So I knew something was up. The first thing he said was ‘Do you want to learn about sex?’ which you can believe got me interested. So I asked what he meant, and he told me he knew an older boy who was prepared to teach us all about sex.

I know very little about sex. I’ve often wished I had an older brother who could explain things to me, but I haven’t. Instead I’ve got a much older sister (she’s sixteen) who is an utter pain and whom I try to ignore as much as possible. I’m glad my parents have never tried to talk to me about it, because I’m sure I’d just curl up and die from embarrassment if they did, but I’d like someone to explain it to me. As it is the only thing I know is something I heard a couple of boys from another school saying to each other on the bus one evening, about how you put your thing inside a girl’s front, and that’s sex, and it’s called ‘fucking’. I would never have thought of doing that, and Lee said the same thing when I told him what I’d heard. So perhaps now we’d find out what sex is really about, and as Kevin had asked where we wanted to start…

“What’s fucking?” I asked him.

“That’s when you have normal sex with a girl,” Kevin told us. “You put… look, we’re going to talking about a lot of body parts here, so perhaps we should get the terminology done first. I haven’t actually had time to find any photos we can use yet, but I’ve got a friend who knows about computers and where to find stuff, so perhaps I can get some proper pictures before the next lesson…”

“Photos?” I interrupted. “What, you mean real photos of naked people?”

“Sure. There are sites that deal with naturism, so somewhere there are sure to be photographs. But we haven’t got any this week, so I need one of you to volunteer to be our model.”

I didn’t get it straight away, but Lee did.

“You mean that you want one of us to get undressed?” he asked.

“Yes, please. Any volunteers?”

Lee and I looked at each other. I was in no rush to volunteer – yes, I’d shown mine to Lee, but we were friends. I didn’t know Kevin at all. But Lee didn’t seem to want to either.

“No?” said Kevin. “Then we’ll do it the old fashioned way. Call, Lee.”

He took a coin from his pocket and flicked it into the air. Lee called ‘heads’, and heads it was.

“Bad luck!” said Lee, smirking at me.

I suppose I could have just got up and gone home, but I really wanted to learn about sex, and so I stood up and got undressed. I thought Kevin might laugh at my deliberately-chosen old-fashioned white underwear, but he didn’t, and nor did he laugh at me when I took them off and revealed my thing.

“Thanks,” he said. “Now, do you know the proper name for this?”

“Penis,” I said. “And these are testicles.”

“Correct. What else can you call them?”

We went through as many of the slang words as we knew, and Kevin taught us several more but said he’s use the proper words for our lessons. And then he said, “You already know that if you want to get a girl pregnant you have to put it in her front – and we’ll deal with the proper names for girls’ bits in a moment. But you wouldn’t be able to get it to go in like it is now, so could you make it stick out, please?”

I stared at him. “I can’t do that!” I protested. “It happens sometime, sure, but it’s nothing to do with me wanting it to, I promise!”

“You can still make it go hard if you want to. Or maybe it would work better if Lee does it for you.”

Now it was Lee’s turn to argue. “How? I mean, I can’t touch it – I’d get germs!”

“No, you wouldn’t. In any case you can wash your hands afterwards, or even have a shower if you prefer. And I promise you that you’ll both learn something important if you do this.”

It took a bit more persuading, but finally Lee swallowed, reached out a finger as carefully as if my thing was a live grenade, and just barely touched it before snatching his hand away again.

“Not like that!” said Kevin. “Take hold of it properly, and keep hold.”

Eventually he persuaded Lee to take hold of it properly and to squeeze a little, and as Lee’s soft hand closed around it I felt… I don’t know how to describe it properly, but ‘strange’ and ‘weird’ ought to be in there somewhere, but so should ‘warm’, because it didn’t feel bad at all. Then Kevin persuaded Lee to sort of stroke it while still squeezing a little, and that felt really strange and weird and warm, but definitely nice, too, and almost as soon as he started doing that I began to get hard. Lee let go in a hurry, but Kevin told him to keep doing it, and soon it was jutting up properly.

“How does that feel?” Kevin asked me.

“Nice,” I replied. “Sort of warm and tingly.”

“Do you want him to stop?”

I shook my head, because the ‘nice’ part of the feeling was now a lot stronger than the ‘weird’ part.

“You can call that Lesson One,” said Kevin. “Having your penis held and stroked by someone you really like and trust feels good. How does it feel to you, Lee?”

“Well… it still feels dirty to be touching him there, but at the same time it is sort of interesting – it feels really warm and hard… do you really like me doing this?”

“Yes,” I told him. “It feels good - please don’t stop.”

Kevin let Lee go on holding me for another minute or so.

“Okay, your turn,” said Kevin. “Lee, get undressed, and then you’ll find out how it feels to have someone else touch you like that…”


Lee

I stared at him in horror. “No!” I cried. “I mean, I can’t! Not… well, not at the moment…”

My willy had got hard, and I thought that if Freddie saw that he’d think bad things about me. But Kevin seemed to guess what was wrong.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s normal, remember? Anyway, I hope you know by now you can trust me, and Freddie’s hardly going to tell anyone about this, is he? Come on, Lee – Freddie wasn’t afraid to take his clothes off…”

“Chicken!” added Freddie, and then of course I felt I had to do it. Yes, I know it’s stupid to let people goad you into doing something you’re not sure about by calling you chicken, but right then I couldn’t help it: I didn’t want my best friend to think I was scared to do what he had already done. So I took my clothes off.

“Oh, you’ve got one like that,” commented Freddie when I finally moved my hands and let him see. “My cousin looks like that, too – we were comparing notes when I stayed with him at Christmas. He says a lot of boys at his school – he’s at boarding school – look like you do. Come here and I’ll try holding it for you.”

I was really pleased to hear that I wasn’t all that unusual: even though Kevin had already told me so I was glad to hear it confirmed. So I let Freddie take hold of me, and it was a very strange feeling indeed. I felt something deep in my stomach, and I thought for a split second I was going to vomit, but that quickly passed. Then I felt nervous – what if he pulled it off, or twisted it badly, or… but I remembered that this was Freddie, and I didn’t think he could hurt me… except when someone is holding you like that you feel horribly vulnerable.

But then he stroked it the way I’d done to him, and that just felt good, and I realised why he’d liked me doing it to him. I stopped tensing myself up and relaxed a little, taking a step closer to him so that he could get at me more easily.

“It’s nice, isn’t it?” said Freddie. “Why don’t you do it to me at the same time?”

So I did, and that felt really, really nice. Freddie smiled at me, and I smiled back and stroked him some more…

“Okay, that’s enough for now,” said Kevin. “You can do that some more in a minute, but first of all let’s deal with the rest of the mechanics…”

He explained that our balls were here to make sperm, and that during sex these sperm travel through the penis into the woman, where they meet up with and fertilise an egg, though he also explained that we were probably still too young to have any sperm yet.

“Next time I’ll tell you exactly what happens at puberty,” he promised. “It’ll be easier to explain that with some pictures, so I hope I can find some. And I’ll be able to tell you a bit about some of the other ways you can get nice feelings – you don’t actually have to have full sex with a girl to feel good. Just holding each other like that feels nice, and I suppose it qualifies as sex, of a sort.”

“Have you got any homework for us?” asked Freddie, grinning – I really don’t think I’ve ever heard Freddie asking for homework before.

“Yes, alright – try to get together during the week and practise feeling each other. Examine each other properly, and next time you have to tell me everything you can find out about each other’s body. And now you can go and wash your hands, or have a shower if you prefer – the bathroom is along the landing on the left.”

I definitely wanted a wash – it still felt dirty, touching where Freddie pees – but I didn’t think I needed a shower, so I pulled my pants back on and went to the bathroom, where I washed my hands thoroughly. When I got back Freddie was already fully dressed, and he spent so little time in the bathroom that I was still getting dressed when he came back – obviously he’s less worried about germs than I am.

We went downstairs and played chess for a while until it was time for us to go home. There was nobody else at the bus stop when we got there, and that meant that we were able to talk freely.

“I thought that was amazing!” said Freddie. “And I can’t wait until next week. Do you think he’ll really be able to find some proper naked photos?”

“Probably. There are supposed to be millions of things like that on the net.”

“Yes, but I bet they’re hard to find… I hope he can! I’d really like to see what happens as we get older, and how much older you have to be… my cousin – the one whose thing looks like yours – is quite a bit older than us – more than a year, anyway – but he looks just like you do. In fact his is quite a bit smaller than yours. So perhaps we’ll have to wait quite a long time before anything changes.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “Kevin says it’s already happening to some of the boys in my football team, and they’re the same age as me.”

“Great! So… do you want to come over to my house tomorrow afternoon, so we can do our homework?”

“I’ve already done my… oh, you mean the homework Kevin gave us?”

He nodded enthusiastically.

“Yes, I should be allowed. I’ll text you when I‘ve asked my mum. And if she says no we can probably find an evening during the week.”

“Or two evenings. At least two… wow, Lee, that felt so strange – but we’ve definitely got to try it again!”

And I thought he was right about that.

**************************************


So Freddie and Lee have learned something that, for some strange reason, their school has neglected to teach them. You can bet we'll be seeing a lot more of them, too.

Looking for a good mail address? Try gothmog@nyms.net – eight out of ten cats who expressed a preference said their owners preferred it...

Copyright 2013: all rights reserved. Please do not reprint, repost or otherwise reproduce this or any part of it anywhere without my written permission.

David Clarke