Free Labor Day by Joyce Maynard Page B

girl’s brassiere showing through the fabric of her shirt, from my seat in the desk behind hers, or my social studies teacher, Ms. Evenrud, would bend over my desk to look over how I’d formatted my bibliography, and there it was again, like a whole new body part that had come to life in my pants, where only a useless nubbin had existed before then.
    I could have been happy or proud, but this was merely a new source of embarrassment. What if people saw? Walking down the halls at school now, I lived in fear of pretty girls, girls with round bottoms, girls who smelled nice, girls with breasts. I had read an article one time about a method of catching bank robbers, where the dollar bills were treated with a chemical that got activated when the money was taken out of the bag, so some kind of pressurized canister released a blast of blue paint that wouldn’t wash off, on the faces of the robbers. This was how I felt about my erections—the undisguisable proof of my miserable half manhood.
    There was more. The worst was not even what happened in my body, but what went on now in my brain. I had dreams every night, about women. I was so unsure how sex worked, it was hard forming pictures of things people might do, things I might do, though I knew there was a place on a woman’s body where my newly sprouted organ could thrust itself in, like a drunk crashing a party. The idea of anyone ever wanting me there had not occurred to me, and because of that, every scene I invented was filled with shame and guilt.
    Some of the dreams came back over and over: images of girls at my school—but never, maddeningly, the cheerleading squad. The girls who populated my dreams, uninvited, were the other type of girls, the ones who looked as uncomfortable in their bodies as I did in mine—girls like Tamara Fisher, who had grown fat in fifth grade, around the time her mother died, and now, in addition to her stomach and her wide white thighs, carried in front of her a shelf of heavy breasts that looked as though they should go on some old woman, not a thirteen-year-old. Even so, I wanted to see them. I pictured myself wandering into the girls’ locker room by accident and catching sight of a huddle of girls changing there, or opening the door to a bathroom cubicle and seeing Lindsay Bruce squatting over the toilet, her pants gathered around her ankles, patting the secret place between her legs. The characters in my dreams were seldom glamorous or seductive so much as they were pathetic. Nobody more so than myself.
    One recurrent dream featured me, running around a pole in a field somewhere, or maybe it was a tree. I was chasing Rachel McCann, and she was naked. As fast as I ran, I could never catch up with her, and we kept running in circles. I could see her bottom, and the backs of her legs, but never the front of her, never her breasts (small, but interesting to me now) or what lay below, in the nameless place I thought about all the time.
    In this dream, an idea came to me, or you might say it came to the character that was me in my dream. I stopped running suddenly and turned around to face the opposite direction. This way, Rachel McCann would be coming straight toward me. Finally, I’d get to see the front of her. Even dreaming, I registered how smart I was to think of this. What a good idea it had been.
    Only I never got to see her. Every time I got to this part in the dream, I woke up, usually in a bed wet with my own embarrassing secretions, that I concealed from my mother by turning the sheets over, or stuffing them in the bottom of the laundry, or dabbing them with water and laying a towel on the spot until it dried.
    I figured out, finally, why it was Rachel never came around the other side to face me in her nakedness. My brain could not have supplied the necessary images. Breasts I knew, though only (except for that one time, with Marjorie) from pictures. But the other—a blank.
    As much time as I now spent thinking about girls, I