This short story is underdevelopment, but I wanted to share the basic idea with my trillions and trillions of “faithful readers”…
(published: July 28, 2019)
Eleven
by DR Wolfe
{From “The Dirty Little Secret About Transparensee” Series}
(Includes some strong language and descriptions of sex)
Preface
As a young person I was exploited both sexually and emotionally while a student at the school for the blind in Michigan. Along with being sexualized at a young age, I lost the ability to understand and appreciate the good things about women.
So, this is a fictional story about how maybe in a future world this fictional society decides a different way to better educate and inform their young men about matters of sexuality. And because of it, this story is about how young women become the true benefactors of this practice.
Eleven
“235”, the last door on the right, the door read. He looked down at the slip to make sure before knocking.
His hands were sweaty, so he paused for a moment and wiped them on the paper before shoving it into the left pocket of his brand new jeans. His mom had bought them for the “occasion”, and it embarrassed the hell out of him! And besides, they were way uncomfortable, and stiff…
His best friend Larry, he always called “Lugar”, had been teasing him for months about it. Lugar was four months younger than him. But your friends always new your birthday was, and every kid he knew went through this–
The older kids would slap you on the back and give you this weird smile, and the younger kids would act like you were waiting for your execution!
And that’s exactly how he felt at that moment, waiting outside her door, despite all of the pre-counseling group sessions. They said, “Don’t worry, it will be one-on-one meetings, and every counseling session will be completely private.”
So they said, the boys didn’t ever need to be embarrassed about anything. They were there to learn from their guide, and become better people. But he was already a good person, he had thought…
The “guides”, as they called them, would at first be a wise, mature woman who would help them understand what the program was going to be about. Each boy would have many guides through their training, they explained. And as time went on, each of the guides would become younger and younger, nearer to their age.
But it seemed like a big waste of a lot of valuable time, especially with the warmer weather coming–
Almost every one of his friends from school, including a few who had already turned eleven, agreed, The adults almost always made it sound better than it really was–
At the moment he knocked, he still wondered if he had time to run. that is, once he got a look at her. But instead, the door quickly opened before he could decide.
He was a little surprised. It was a small, older woman, and she seemed really friendly. And thankfully, she was completely clothed!
“Hello. You must be Joey?” She asked, as she swung the door wide open and stepped aside.
“Yes,” he shyly answered.
“Hello, I’m Sophie.” She firmly stuck out her small hand and waited for him to shake it, as he quickly did.
“Come sit over here in the kitchen, Joey,” she said as she walked off to the left into a smaller room. He obediently followed.
There were only two chairs that were positioned at a small table, off to one side. He sat in the chair nearest the door, in case he needed to run, he briefly thought. And she sat down across from him.
He felt the silence was terrifying, even though it only lasted a couple seconds.
“So Joey, let me assure you first that nothing physical will ever happen between us,okay?” She gently laughed, noticing the instant relief that filled his face.
At that same moment she quickly reached across the table and squeezed his hand, and laughed again.
“Come on! Really Joey, I’m old enough to be your grandmother!” They both laughed, and he smiled for the first time, thinking how ridiculous he was being, imagining her tying him down and ripping off his clothes.
“You see Joey, my job is to educate your mind about the ways of ladies, and why soon you will desire to be in their company.” He laughed at this idea.
There was only one girl in his class that he could stand, Her name was “Izzy”. and that’s only cause she was into bugs.
One day she came to school with a nasty looking spider in a jar. And when she kept putting it into the faces of the boys, it freaked out most of them! he had laughed so hard.
So, that’s when he began liking her, even though she was a girl.
“Can I get you one of my blueberry waters?” She asked, getting up from the table.
“Yes please,” he politely answered. A moment later she brought an unopened bottle and a plate of cookies, crackers, cheese fruit slices and veggies. For a moment he stared down at the assortment and studied the plate carefully, before grabbing a stick of celery. Even though he knew he hated celery, and the way it always gets caught in the teeth.
“So, have you ever had a girl friend Joey?”
“No,” he tried to honestly answer. Izzy wasn’t a girlfriend, even though sometimes he gave her his lunch.
His answer surprised him, and he felt a little ashamed for not having a girlfriend. Was he supposed to have one when he turned eleven? Would they kick him out of the program until he had his first girlfriend, he wondered?
“That’s okay,” she immediately answered, touching his hand again. “Kids should be kids until their bodies tell them that they are ready to think about it. Too many people want to hurry that along, but we think eleven is a real good age to start talking, and teaching, young men about life, and where it comes from-” He smiled, since he liked being a kid.” She smiled a friendly smile, and he smiled back.
“For a long time, us adults pretended that this would just happen automatically to kids,” she continued. “We figured that nature, as it had always done, would take care of things for us adults. And we just kept thinking about all the other stuff, while our families and communities fell apart.” She paused and looked at him, and he nodded, although she didn’t really understand what she meant.
“But there’s a lot of reasons why you’re here. Do you know why you’re here with me, today, Joey?”
“Well, I’m Eleven now and all the boys have to be in the program. That’s the law. So I have to come here two or three times a week for a couple hours, until I’m sixteen, and your supposed to teach me about private stuff, like the birds and the bees?” He waited for her approval, since this is most of what he learned from the classes.
“yes, that’s pretty close, in a nut shell,” she said. Then she softly laughed. She had a nice laugh too, he thought.
He could tell, she was a very pretty lady, for her age. She looked like she probably ran or swam a lot, and spent some of her free time outside.
She was wearing a bright blue dress, with yellow trim along the sleeves and neck and green strap across the bottom. And he noticed, she only had a little bit of make up on, and it made her almost seem kind of pretty, he thought, as he watched her.
“Okay, first let me tell you that because of your biological development you’ll only have to come visit me twice a week, for now. Do you know what I’m saying, Joey?” She asked.
“Um,” he paused and thought about it. “Because some boys have hair down there sooner than other boys, and I don’t,” he quietly answered, feeling his face turn red.
“That’s right,” and she smiled that knowing smile. “Everyone develops different than everyone else. There’s a lot of time,” she assured him
“This is a five year plan to make the young men of our society better men, and make it fun and exciting too. Hopefully without embarrassing you guys too much.” They both smiled.
“And, because of nature, you are on the slow track, as us adults like to say. And that’s okay with you, isn’t it?” She asked, looking at him carefully.
“Yes, that’s good,” he answered, thinking he would rather go slow with all this stuff…and maybe get a few more days off this summer–
“So we want you to be informed about your own body, as well as understanding girls, and why they are the way they are–”
“And we want you to have the knowledge to protect yourself from a lot of different things, including yourself. Not just adults, or older kids, as you may have heard.”
“And we want you to understand and appreciate, and truly enjoy the best things in life. Having or not having sexual feelings at your age is perfectly normal, Joey. But what you do need to know at your age is that having sexual feelings is something that you and everyone else will eventually experience, as healthy, biological creatures.”
He nodded again, although this time he didn’t know exactly what she meant by all of this. And he definitely didn’t know what she was planning for the next lesson, but this conversation was beginning to make him a little nervous–
“So we will be working together for several months, maybe longer, learning about two specific things. Do you know what that is?”
“I think so,” he cautiously answered. She waited for him to finish.
“We’re going to learn about making babies and about how to treat girls better, even when they don’t deserve it?” She laughed.
“Of course, especially when they don’t deserve it.” And she smiled.
“But the first part, about learning how to make babies, I think you already know enough about that without my help.” And they smiled together, knowingly.
“But it’s going to be more about the biological process, and the emotional and psychological changes our brains make, wile we are engaged in the biological process of making babies, as you say.” He waited for her to continue–
“You see Joey, from the moment you start to notice the opposite sex, your brain is processing the information. So we, the guides, want to be here to help you understand what is happening during this critical time in your life, the time at which your body begins to change.”
“In a lot of ways Joey, you are like a little machine with lots of different parts working together, if that helps.”
He agreed, and laughed. He remembered his mom saying every time he changed him that his little brother was a “poop machine! You fee one end,” she said. “Then just like magic, it comes out the other end.”
“What’s so funny?” Sophie asked.
“I was thing that my mom always called my little brother a poop machine,” and they both laughed.
“It’s funny, but it’s true.” She paused, and continued. “?We people put out all sorts of things, and most are pretty gross. But they’re all important. And, as we’ll talk about, men and women even put out different things, even though we are all humans.” He wasn’t sure what she meant, but he knew women make babies, and men don’t.
“So some of what we’ll do is learn about the human body, and how we function, and how we make more people. But we’ll go real slow, and you can ask questions as we go, and I promise I won’t ever tease you. Okay?” He nodded his head.
“Sure,” he carefully answered.
“And I know you’ve heard this lots before, but there are no dumb questions in my class.”
So over the next several months Sophie and the boy sat in the living room and looked at lots of pictures. They also watched a lot of educational films together. And sometimes they would sit out back in the private patio and read articles and books together about all sorts of stuff, including the process of sexual reproduction–
So, before Sophie was replaced not only did he learn things about his own male parts, and how they work, but he learned a lot about the girls too…
And maybe that was the weird part, because very soon he started looking at the girls in his class, differently. It wasn’t like when him and a bunch of kids went behind the garage, and everyone pulled their pants down so everyone else could get a good look at what’s down there, like he did when he was five-years-old and lived on Hamburg Street in Detroit.
But rather, when he looked at Izzy and the other developing girls in his class, he began to appreciate their bodies in a way he hadn’t noticed before. The way their legs and back curved in a certain direction.
And surprisingly, he hadn’t every noticed it before, but there was a couple of the girls in his class that already had begun developing breast. And one day one of his friends caught him staring at one of them in the lunch line. He had been imagining her holding a hungry baby up to her chest, but it turned out to be her purse.
One day Sophie showed him a film about how important it was to breast feed, and he hadn’t stop thinking about it. The movie showed that women could help themselves by preventing breast cancer, simply by having a baby and nursing at least once during their lives.
Many of the movies they watched together were about how men’s and women’s bodies were different. He learned that women’s bodies were specifically made, in the way they were shaped, to continuously carry babies, first inside their bodies. And then later, in their arms or on their backs. And if the women of a tribe were under a lot of stress, searching for food or safety, the women in the tribe would become unable to have babies until the threat is over. Sophie explained that it’s all part of the bodies plan, to make sure we keep having healthy kids.
He didn’t realize it at the time, but along with all the other biological stuff, he was learning other things about the way females think. In a not so obvious way, she was constantly filling his mind with thoughts about how girls come to the conclusions they do. She went over lots of examples of how boys and girls will often solve the same problem differently, and it helped him to look at it this way.
She often said, “It may seem completely crazy Joey, but try to think about it this way-” And they would spend several weeks talking about one scene from a movie she showed him.
Although they stayed in touch for a while, and he cried when their time came to an end, eight months later Sophie was replaced by another woman, named Rachel. She was probably the same age as his mom, but he learned from Sophie that a gentleman never ask a woman about her age once they are an adult.
Rachel was way taller than Sophie, and almost as tall as his dad. But she was pretty thin, so it probably made her look taller than she really was–
And she had a way of leaning way over when she talked, that made her seem real athletic. She reminded him of the older basketball players he sometimes watched. They played all the time. And when she would grab something off the counter, she made him think of the way the players would reached way out to the side and somehow knock the ball away.
“It’s nice to meet you, Joey,” she said, when she introduced herself. He could tell right away that she already knew a lot about him and what Sophie and he had been talking about. He looked away, thinking about it.
“Well Sophie said she introduced you to the program, and that you were a great student. But so you know, I’m a whole lot easier than Sophie, as far as studying goes–” They both smiled. She had a huge smile, that barely seem to fit between her ears and long brown hair.
“I’m a talker, myself. So along with continuing to learn about people and our bodies and minds, and how it all works together, we’re going to focus on three things. Want to guess what they are?”
“No,” he answered shyly.
“We’re going to spend our time learning about the difference between, what we desire, what we want, and what we need, as people. That probably sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it?” She leaned toward him and smiled.
“Well sort of,” he carefully answered, hoping she wouldn’t start talking about what desire meant. He understood the other two, he thought, but desire sounded a little risky.
“Well, it’s not all that simple. But if we can learn the difference, then life can be a lot easier for us.”
There was an awkward moment, when they just looked at each other. Then a moment later, she spoke up–
“You haven’t asked me, Joey?”
“Asked you what?” He slowly asked.
“Are you wondering if we’re going to have sex?” Suddenly, he choked on the water he was drinking, and she slapped his back and laughed.
“Sophie said she could tell that you were worried about that happening with her? But here’s the problem with that question.”
She suddenly sat down across from him and gently took his hand. Looking into his eyes, he watched her eyes grow larger, almost inviting him inside. And then she began to smile, and he couldn’t help himself, but smile too.
Then just as quickly, she let go of his hand and grabbed her window pad. After punching a few buttons, she turned the screen toward him and he watched, wondering and worrying about what she was going to show him.
“Watch this,” she said. His eyes never left the screen.
It was five different scenes from five different movies, although he only recognized one of the actors. In one of the scenes, it was Goola White, who starred in the “Mansion Boy”.
In each of the scenes there was a couple featured who was holding hands and romantically looking into each other’s eyes.
When it finished, she quickly grabbed the pod and set it on the counter and began talking again.
In a couple of those movies the couple ended up getting married and having kids, but in some of those other movies, the couple never saw each other again. Yet, in that scene it appears as though all of them are having, are will eventually have sex. So what are we to think about that scene, if we only think about what’s in that scene and nothing else?”
He was confused by the question, and she could tell.
“What I’m say Joey, is that what is and isn’t sex isn’t so easy to know. To one person, this means sex, and to the other it doesn’t. And people have been arguing about it thousands of years.”
“And to some, just romantically staring into the eyes of another would be considered to be sexual. So does that mean that you and I have already had some sort of sex?”
“Of course not,” she answered her own question. “But some might say that, if they only saw that one scene between us, and nothing else-”
She paused, “So making judgements about sex is never going to be easy. But the more you know, the smarter you’ll be-”
“And Joey, so you know, I really don’t think anything will ever happen between us either, but, perhaps with another one of your guides, sometime in the future, maybe something very special will happen. But it will be when it is right for you, and only for you. I promise, we’ll all make sure you know when you’re ready-”
He shyly smiled, and looked away.