11
Generally, I'm keeping this mostly chronological with the occasional
tidbit from my future to tease you. Yes, I'm talking to
you! I can see you from the other side, looking at these
words and wondering when I'll get back to the point... What
was it? Oh, yes, I could have you wade through the next five and a
half years of my life to find out what the end of the last
installment meant, as I
had to. But as I'll
already have enough other things going on then, I thought I'd address
it now and thus put my childhood years fully to a close for this
tome.
You see, it comes down to Pete. My earliest childhood friend and
subsequent not quite friend. In my later years I found out that my
sister had been the babysitter for him in his preschool years and
thus I might simply have first come to know him as the other kid
my sister took care of like she took care of me. This may also
explain the mentor role his father, Zack, took in my life as he was
already familiar with my family and me, as well as being his son's
friend. But ultimately the question I will always have and never
trust the answer for: Was Pete my friend in my later school years or
something else?
In eighth grade when I wanted people to think I was fat and thus
place their attention on my fakely bulging belly rather than
elsewhere, I knew Pete was the perfect person to pass this on to as
he would delight in spreading a disparaging notion about me. Yet
that same year I'd invite him over for a few sleepovers and one time
chatted in our side by side beds about boys & girls and what it
meant to maybe be one versus the other...
By our Senior year of High School, Pete had taken up lacing his
fingers under a table that we both sat at and lifting it up with his
knuckles while waggling his eye brows at me like it should mean
something to me. I would witness these moments with perplexed
curiosity as it definitely seemed to mean something to him.
But it was completely lost on me. When some of our friends
were at the same table, they would avert their eyes as they seemed to
be tuned into what it was supposed to mean as well. By our
Dungeons & Dragons time, he was doing it so often that his
upperclassman friend finally told him to knock it off, and he mostly
did.
At the age of thirteen, to disguise my growing breasts, one trick I
relied on was rolling my shoulders forward to allow my shirt to
drape. As it would look silly having my hands dangling in front of
me when my shoulders were forward like this, I gave them each a task
to do, left hand in the pant's pocket, right hand holding my
notebook. When Van, as part of his confessional phone call, told me
the reason I was given the title of 'The Sneakiest' in our High
School yearbook was because of my notebook, I was completely stumped
and it would be more than five years later when I'd learn what that
comment must have meant while watching an episode of Quantum Leap.
A more Science Fantasy show than Science Fiction, as there didn't
seem to be much science in it, the show centered on a man from
the future whose spirit was propelled into the bodies of various
individuals of the past where he was to live though a critical moment
of their life and ensure a proper outcome. In one show, that was
deemed so controversial the network buried it, the guy 'Sam' ends
up in the body of a woman. For late nineteen eighties television
that was a seemingly unthinkable thing that many found very
disturbing. Then the character of 'Sam', as the woman, tries to
prove to another character in the story that he's really a man in
this woman's body because he knows what it's like to hide a
hard-on in school with his notebook.
Like having my own Quantum Leap at that moment, I relived
moments of my past as I realized what Van must have meant by using
that comment. My school mates must have assumed I held my notebook
that way, not to distract attention from my bulging breasts, but to
hide something down there. Pete must have been lacing
his fingers and raising the table with them while giving me a knowing
look to convey an expanding penis reaching and lifting the table from
beneath. On my last night in New England Pete had us sit on straight
backed kitchen chairs to watch his videos rather than on the living
room's couches. His videos were porn and in retrospect: Was Pete
trying to have us 'reveal' ourselves without anything to hide our
'interest' with, such as a couch pillow, as we
watched the movies? If so, I cluelessly won the challenge as I
had a built-in advantage versus the rest of the friends there that
night.
Had Pete picked up on our late night chat when we were age thirteen
and concluded I needed help passing as male? Thus, he subsequently
developed and socialized the story of why I held my notebook like
that and then added to it with his lifting of the table while looking
at me as if making fun of me for something. Or had Pete actually
thought I had a perpetual 'hard-on' issue, really thinking I was
hiding it all the time with my notebook, and was truly making fun of
me for it? Had my going away party my last night in New England been
planned to embarrass me in front of our friends as my last memory of
my childhood and it didn't work out as Pete intended?
And thus is the mystery of Peter.
Given the friend/frenemy balance, I doubt I could ever believe the
answer he'd give me if I asked him all these years later: Would he
be taking credit for helping me when he truly hadn't meant to?
Or would it be the other way around?
The one thing I did know as I finished my own leap through my history
which knitted all these moments together in a flash of insight: I
had truly earned the title of 'The Sneakiest' at school.
With my cluelessness, in my attempt to hide my 'situation' from my
school mates, I had dramatically over achieved!
No comments:
Post a Comment