Bobby

His name was Bobby, and he played basketball. Those are the only two substantial facts I remember about the guy. In the days I used to keep my high school yearbook, I could have picked his photo out on the page—a picture of a handsome black kid with skin the color of caramel and a face shaped like the business end of a fist, squared-off and flat and just as confrontational.

I stood out in high school for two big reasons. It wasn’t because I was especially popular, or because I was well-liked, or because I had notoriety as the class brain or clown. No, I stood out because I hit my full height when I was fifteen, well before anyone else in my school had reached such a monstrous size, and because I was the whitest kid in school. The only white kid in my otherwise all-black school, in fact.

At that age, kids who stand out tend to get the brunt of the bad treatment, but I cultivated the art of being invisible. I slunk from class to class without attracting attention. I found quiet corners to eat my lunch. In the classrooms I was fine. The dangerous areas for me were the hallways, the boys’ room, the school bus, and anywhere on the school grounds not normally monitored by the teachers. That’s where I would worry about being picked on, or called out, or worst of all, beaten up. I wasn’t a strong kid, or particularly trained in fighting. Being beaten up seemed about the worst thing that could happen.

It never did happen, though. I managed to glide through school without being noticed much at all. Bobby was one student who did.

I sat in the middle of the school bus. Not close to the front, where the extremely timid would lurk, and not in the back where the rougher kids would congregate loudly. The middle was a safe, invisible place to be, overlooked by the more boisterous. Until the that day my sophomore year, when I was minding my own business and looking out the window, and suddenly found myself inhaling a scent that was at once sharp and intimate. The cotton fabric smelled like urine and musk; I found myself jerking my head away.

Bobby had boarded the bus, his athletic bag slung over one shoulder. He was still wearing clothes from a basketball practice—and in 1980, we didn’t wear long shorts for basketball. No, we had tiny little shorts that barely covered our business, accompanied by white socks with stripes of color around the top that came up to our knees. I hadn’t paid attention as he’d terrorized the freshmen at the front by holding out his dirty jock at them. So it was something of a surprise to realize that he’d decided to thrust it under my nose. “You like it? You can have it,” he said, dropping it on my lap.

I remember want to drop the dirty jock like a hot potato. My strategy when irritated or threatened, then as now, however, was merely to show as little reaction as possible. I pinched what looked like the cleanest portion of the waistband between the very tips of my fingers, and with an expression of remote disdain, dropped the jock into the aisle, right on the dirty bus floor. Bobby’s friends had been laughing at his antics before, but when Bobby scrambled to retrieve his athletic supporter, they laughed even harder.

I wrote it off as one of those moments in which my invisibility had inadvertently become opaque, but there were a few other incidents that followed. Once or twice, Bobby sat down on the bus next to me. I was certain that there’d be harassment to follow, but no. He just sat there, saying nothing, and seeming to expect nothing. Even when I had to push my way past him into the aisle at my stop, he didn’t push me, or yank down my pants, or do any of the terrible things featured in my imagination.

It wasn’t until the day of a school assembly that I suspected anything was up. For some reason the two of us were seated in the front row of the auditorium, next to each other—which strikes me as odd, given that he was two years older and we didn’t share any classes. The assembly was long and boring. At some point, very early on, Bobby moved his leg next to mine, pressed his bare, basketball shorts-clad leg against my corduroys, and kept it there. His leg was lightly hairy. I could feel its warmth through the fabric of my pants. I must have made some vaguely move to slide away from him, but his knee and calf followed, and very firmly adhered to mine as he sprawled out with his legs spread.

I didn’t pull away again. For the rest of that assembly I let him remain that close to me, knee to knee, wondering what it could mean. I’d already been having sex with older men for four years, by that point; I was no innocent by any means. But the only sex I’d had with someone else my age was with a sad boy lost in a haze of drugs, at the request of my older friend Earl; I’d certainly never had anyone else in school make any kind of erotic advance to me, and it really threw me.

It was about a month later, close to the end of the school year, that Bobby made his move. He spied in me in the hallway between Algebra II and Civics. “I want to show you something,” he said, over the hustle and bustle of boys and girls slamming their lockers and cutting loose.

“I’ve got class,” I mumbled.

“Come on,” he insisted, and gestured to me.

My high school was shaped like an upside-down T. The bulk of the classrooms were along the horizontal cross-bar, while in the back were a few of the advanced science labs, the orchestra and band rooms, and some meeting rooms where Key Club and the National Honors Society held court. Bobby strode through the hallway toward the back as if he owned it; I slumped behind, invisible and unnoticed, as the numbers of people began to peter out. I watched as he made his way down a staircase at the very rear of the building.

The bell rang. The hallways quieted down as the last people fled to their fourth-period classes. Only Bobby and I were in the stairwell, and I followed as he disappeared under the metal stair. The only way we could have been seen is if someone had come up to the windows set in the doors leading outside.

I was in real distress. I cannot stand to be tardy for anything—I never have been able to tolerate it, even as a child. And there I was, deliberately absent from Civics, and getting to be more of a truant by the second. I had never been in that section of the school before, and I didn’t know what Bobby wanted . . . though I hoped I suspected. “I’m late,” I stammered.

“I want to show you something,” he said in his lazy drawl, as he stared at me. His eyes stayed fixed on me as his hands reached for his pants. He wore no belt. All it took to open his jeans was a quick flip of the uppermost button and the almost-silent rending of his zipper. He yanked down on the elastic waist of his white briefs, and hooked them under his balls, so that he could show me his dick.

It was not the largest dick I’d seen, but it was thick; thick and two shades lighter than the rest of his skin. He’d been hard before he’d unzipped for me, and his head was bulbous and full. Without touching himself, he made his shaft leap up in the air. “What do you think?” he said.

I was too wary to respond. I thought it might be a trap of some kind. I said nothing.

He curled his hand into a fist and drew it over the upper half of his rod. “You like it?” Again he made it jump in the air. “Touch it.”

I didn’t move. I wanted to touch it very badly, but I didn’t want him to know.

In a soft whisper, almost a growl, he repeated, “Touch it.”

When he reached out for my hand and pulled it toward him, I resisted only slightly. He rested my hand on his shaft, which was so hot and rigid that it felt like an iron bar left to bake in the sun. I felt a stirring in my own pants as my fingers wrapped around it.

“It likes you too,” he whispered.

Almost immediately after I grabbed hold, he started to shoot. His cum flew and landed several feet away on the stairwell tile; it dripped from his head and grazed his sneakers. Finally, it oozed slowly from the tip as he buckled and shook. I’d already retrieved my hand and backed away, careful not to let any of the stuff on me.

“All right,” he said at last, nodding at me. He stuffed his still-hard dick in his pants, zipped, and buttoned himself. “Later.”

I remained standing in the stairwell, stunned, for a minute before I proceeded to class. I slipped in with excuses ready on my lips, but I didn’t need them. The teacher must’ve assumed that if her top student was late, it must’ve been for a good reason.

I never had another close encounter with Bobby. He didn’t sit with me again after that, and he graduated that year. But I remember smelling his sweat and oils on my hand the rest of that day, and how I would cup my fingers and palm close and inhale discreetly, whenever I could. And I remember looking over his yearbook photo after that, and wondering what in the world became of him.