Chapter 2: 2. Cereal

I woke up when I heard Mom stumble in about 5:30 in the morning. She yelled something obscene at someone then slammed the front door and laughed like she’d said the funniest thing ever.

She floundered in the hallway until she found the bathroom, and pretty soon, I could hear the shower running and Mom shouting the lyrics to some early nineties tune. I lay there quietly, trying to process what had happened last night. My eyes were gummed closed by dried tears, so I sort of knew it had really happened.

I needed a shower I decided but I would have to wait until Mom finished. I was about to get up and look in my hidden hole to be sure that the money existed when Mom surprised me by barging into my room, naked, with a wet towel haphazardly wrapped around her, dyed blonde hair streaming water down her over her shoulders and breasts.

“Garry Larry,” she shouted, then winced at the sound of her own voice. “Your old mother has fallen into it!” Then she cackled like a hen and whooped like a hound.

“Into what?” I asked.

She sat on my bed, getting the sheets wet. “Into matrimony!” she crowed. “That son-of-a-bitch Colonel Underwood asked me to marry him!” She giggled. “I had to trip him and beat him to the floor but he finally came through. Bitsy Underwood! Can you imagine that?”

I had to rub my eyes to get the boogers out before I could really react and by that time she had popped up from her soggy perch and gone across the hallway to Jenny’s room. “Hey,” I heard her shout. “Number One Daughter, your Ma is going to get married!”

At least, Mom was taking on the task of getting Jenny up and moving. But now I didn’t dare look in my cache for the cash I’d put there when either one of them might come traipsing in. I decided on taking the shower I had thought about earlier, so I got up and got into the bathroom before Jenny could.

In the shower, I briefly examined my chest. The growths there had first appeared about ten weeks before and had made life a bit difficult for me in P.E. the last few months of the school year. But the doctor had been right, I wasn’t the only kid with the problem, and wearing a loose t-shirt over a tight one, pretty much kept my small problems concealed.

They were sensitive, though, and one kid in P.E., Armand Kiel, had earned a kick in the crotch from me for grabbing and twisting them. Even the memory of that caused me to wince. We’d both been sent home for the day, but the next day, Coach Taggart seemed to think we were even and made us shake hands. Kiel actually got teased more for letting a skinny sissy kick him there than I did for having tiny titties.

I’d been called a sissy and worse for years. I didn’t worry that much about it, but if the bullying got physical, I had been known to slam doors on fingers and stab people with pencils. Bruno Liefeld had four little scars on the calf of his right leg after he tripped me in the cafeteria line and stepped on me. A fork makes a good weapon.

I hadn’t hesitated last night when I slammed the front door into the sergeant’s face, even though he had never laid a hand on me. He didn’t seem to resent that, or he had an odd way of showing it, leaving $400 on the floor. And the note.

I’d been so scared. Mom and Sis had been raped in the past and I’d felt sure it was my turn. I knew it would hurt. I stood there in the shower, crying, but no one could have known.

I dried myself with one of the few luxuries Mom insisted on, big fluffy towels that felt plush against the skin. I wrapped one around me, doing a better job than Mom had done earlier, but wearing it as she had. I did have breasts to cover, didn’t I?

What the hell did Milo want from me?

I finger-combed my hair to help it start drying and wrapped a smaller towel around my my head to soak up the excess. The day already promised to be hot and humid with little chance of air-drying it quickly, and I hated hair dryers in this sort of weather. The no-heat setting wouldn’t dry it at all. I pulled off the towel and rewrapped it with the other side inward to pull up more wet.

What was I going to do with $400? And the note….?

Not just where could I keep them hidden but what actions should I take. There were things I would like to buy, but would I have to lie to Mom and Sis to explain where I got them? First thing to buy would be a new cellphone, mine had gotten stolen last week. I could probably get a cheap one at Walmart.

But would I buy something pretty and wear it to meet him later today?

His note made it sound like he wanted me to dress like a girl. And yet, it was when I had confirmed to him that I was a boy that he had really seemed interested. Why else had he wanted to know if I had a dick? It wasn’t as if I were hung like some of the guys I had seen in gym class. And he didn’t seem to be gay, after all, he’d come here intending to fuck my sister.

I was up, I decided, so I might as well get dressed. I pulled on my underwear—including a second t-shirt to help hide my little boobs. I hated having to wear a second layer in the summer heat. I found a mostly clean pair of jeans and slipped my feet into some sneaks without socks. Done. Good thing I’m not a girl, I thought, Jenny could make the job of getting dressed take half an hour or more.

Mom had gone to bed while I was taking my shower and I’d heard Sis get up and leave her room in the add-on, so I wandered out to the kitchen, still combing my hair with a wide tooth comb to get more water out without causing much damage. Jenny was sitting at the table where I had been studying for tests, but she was ignoring my schoolbooks and eating handfuls of generic Frooty cereal right from the box. She looked like she always looked coming down from a high—like lukewarm hell.

I reached around her to retrieve my glasses that were still where I left them last night. Mom teased that the wire rims made me look like Paul wearing John’s glasses but Sis and I pretended that we had no idea who she was on about, just to wind her up about getting old.

I also moved all my books and papers into one stack, too. My classes didn’t start for a couple of hours yet, and hell, was I even going to go? You were only allowed to miss one session in Summer Semester, a second absence and you were out of the program. I’d missed one already, but I didn’t really have to pass any of these classes.

They mattered only if I intended to go back to school this fall. Was I? I’d be sixteen the week after classes started, the age at which, in my state, you could decide to drop out without them coming after you. I decided I could go one more day at least, take the tests and if I flunked even one of them, or even if I passed them all, I could decide about dropping out later. There was only one more week of Summer Semester, I could probably tough it out.

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I got out a bowl and another box of cereal (one that hopefully hadn’t had Jenny’s grimy hands in it) and a carton of milk, and poured myself some Frosty Flakes, the kind with the cheerful hyena on the box instead of the brand-name tiger.

“Morning,” I offered.

She regarded me with benign indifference, wiped her nose with the back of her hand, and retrieved another handful of fruit-flavored corn cereal. “Murf,” she said with her mouth full.

“You missed your sergeant last night,” I told her.

She breathed out between pursed lips, spraying a bit of half-chewed multi-colored food on the table. “When did he get here? He was supposed to pick me up six thirty.”

I mulled that over. Was Sgt Milo habitually late, or had it been a one-off? Most military-types are painfully punctual. So maybe Sis was lying, just to justify shooting up and missing her date.

“Ten,” I told her, but I didn’t mention the money or the note.

“Oh, well,” she said. “You snooze, you lose.” That could apply either way. She grabbed another handful of cereal and gnawed on it.

I rinsed my bowl and spoon and put them in the dish drainer. I didn’t really want to engage Jenny in conversation about Milo, anyway.

“Did you hear Mom’s news? She’s getting married?” Sis asked, not sounding all that interested.

I nodded. Frankly, Mom was still good-looking if a bit faded and crumpled. Her personal habit of drinking all night may have helped her find this Col. Underwood, but could she really be what he was looking for in a wife?

Jenny sighed, looking mournfully into the now empty box of cereal. “No prize in this one,” she said in an odd echo of what I had been thinking.

I gathered my books into my backpack. “I gotta go,” I said. “It’s an eight block walk to school.” I still hadn’t had time or aloneness to check on the money and note, but they would certainly be safe where they were until I got back. I didn’t need to be extra-paranoid about them. I started checking my backpack to be sure I had everything I needed, schoolbooks, notebooks, pens and pencils, billfold with some cash. I didn’t pack a lunch.

“Take you fifteen minutes,” she said. “You’re gonna be way early.”

“It’s test day, I need some time to study.”

She waved that away, beginning to disassemble the cereal box into strips of cardboard, gray on one side and colorful on the other.

“They don’t really do that any more,” I commented, looking around for my cellphone before remembering it had been stolen earlier in the week. That was something I could spend some of the money on.

“Do what?” she asked, tearing several of the cardboard strips in half sideways.

“Put prizes in cereal boxes. Unsanitary and stupid because the prizes were always junk.”

Jenny snorted. “Mom got lucky, I guess. She did find the prize in the bottom of the box.”

The idea seemed funny to me, and I grinned. “Colonel Underwear?”

“I think it’s Colonel Undertall, but yeah, don’t we all need a Sugar Daddy?”

I grunted and headed out the door, thinking. Was Sergeant Milo going to be my Sugar Daddy?

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