Junior high is truly a bizarre period of adolescent life, especially when it comes to all the crazy shit your body throws your way as you mature. When I was entering my teens, I was shaped somewhat like an overstuffed sausage, sporting rabbit teeth that I had not yet grown into, and the need to constantly have badly permed hair. It never looked like that picture from the magazine that I would bring to the hair salon and point to and plead with the stylist, “Please, I want it to look like this,” and I was in a constant state of despair over it.
I would say I wore glasses, but that wouldn’t be completely accurate. I ownedglasses because I was quite near-sighted, but I refused to wear them as I felt they were hideous. Because a sausage-shaped frizzy-haired girl with rabbit teeth is an otherwise stunning creature to behold, and glasses would just fuck all that up.
To make it worse, I was always friends with the “nymphomaniac with big tits”.
Always.
I was perpetually the weird, funny friend of the girl who had the body of a porn star and was ruled by her hormones which were on a level I couldn’t yet relate to. This is funny to people who know me, because I mostly became “that girl”, the gleefully nymphomaniac sex-bomb with giant tits (while also still being the weird, funny friend), but I was a later bloomer and not the molten hot ball of sexiness that I longed to be at that when I was thirteen. It was a phenomenon that, when out in public with whichever adolescent sex bomb who claimed me, automatically rendered me utterly invisible.
Looking back, I figure it was probably pretty nice to have me around because my big-tittied girlfriends would have companionship without risking “competition” with me at their side. Did I mention that they always had perfect hair, too? Goddammit. Why?
I was a “total prude”, as I was told often by those much cooler than me, I didn’t smoke or drink, and I made a fantastic lookout for my girlfriends when they’d want to partake in booze, smokes, or underage fucking, a post I found myself assigned to regularly, if not reluctantly.
Hindsight, age and a whole host of other things have led to a place where I know that we were all wearing labels that were given to us unfairly and sexualized, either negatively or positively (so we thought) entirely too early in our lives, but when I was thirteen, how we were seen was insanely important. It was almost as important as it was to put everyone you knew into a category that you could easily define. And it was extremely important to be older than we were. We were not children, after all. We were thirteen. We weren’t babies, dammit, we were teenagers now! And we wanted to be sexy, because everything around us told us to be.
During the summer following the seventh grade, the thing to do, and I mean really THE ONLY thing to do, seeing as I lived in a very small town with little to no entertainment options if you were under legal drinking age , was to spend all day, every day at Tapiola Swimming Pool. The savvy parents would spend the twenty dollars to buy their children a summer pass, supply them with a small Dairy Queen budget for post-swim ice cream treats, and they wouldn’t have to see their kids at all except when they would occasionally come home to clean out the refrigerator.
And I loved to swim. If I was unable to get a ride to the lake, the swimming pool was my happy place. I’d put on my one-piece purple and magenta bathing suit, as ugly as it was modest, and my big-tittied girlfriend at that time with would put on her size-too small-bikini, the top of it covering minimal real estate on her giant boobs, and we’d head to the pool. She had achieved “smoldering underage sexpot”. I had achieved “weird friend”.
That particular summer, the general theme at the pool had become “All boys chase big-tittied girlfriend around the pool and attempt to rip her swimsuit off while she pretended to hate it.” Ah, that was a great game. This game would go on for hours while I would swim around, do handstands, see how long I could hold my breath, see how long I could sit on the bottom of the pool on the deep end, practice diving…all the things the sidekick does while her big-tittied girlfriend holds court with the boys who had no interest in frizzy-haired girls shaped like sausage who spent their time trying to perfect the perfect cannonball with the biggest splash.
Looking back, you have to kind of wonder if the lifeguards at the pool got a charge out of watching this game and the inevitable thirteen year old nipple sighting, or if they truly did not notice because of the sheer number of children who had been dropped off for the day while their parents had the house to themselves to smoke weed, work on the lawn, run around naked without interruption, whatever it was that parents did when their kids were out of their hair.
Everyday this went on, though there were some days where the boys had other things to do like play basketball or go fishing and big-tittied girlfriend would swim around the pool with me, seeming a bit disappointed. She wasn’t much for sitting on the bottom of the pool, and holding her breath for long periods of time did not give her the validation she longed for. At least there was something I was better than her at.
It was August and our days at the pool were numbered, so we went even more often than in prior months, trying to use up as much of the pool as we could before starting the eighth grade. The day everything changed started like any other day. I put on my horrifically unattractive one-piece bathing suit, and big-tittied girlfriend put on her brand-spankin-new, one size too small string bikini with the hot pink and red kissy lips all over it. Somehow her boobs and hips had grown even more and her waistline shrunk. I was still shaped like plump bratwurst, for the most part. It was highly unfair.
Once we arrived at the pool, I headed right for the diving board and dived in while she did the “Oooh it’s cold! Teehee” dance she did every day, dipping her toes in, shivering, giggling, dipping her toes in again before getting all the way in. It was all part of the routine she had perfected. It was foreplay of sorts. It didn’t bother me much, but I saw that it bothered some of the other girls at the pool. I guess they’d have to learn their own routine if they wanted to compete for the attention of hungry boys who weren’t sure what to do with their involuntary boners.
The game of chase and maul started as usual, but then something highly irregular occurred: I don’t know if the boys noticed that I grew some puffy starter-tits over the summer, but the next thing I know they went from chasing her to chasing me.
What the fresh hell?
I will more than readily admit that I was initially flattered. Confused but flattered. Because I was supposed to be. Hey, they were paying attention to me, that’s kind of cool, isn’t it? This means I’m important, right? This was all new. Maybe I was kinda sexy now? Finally.
But a feeling of terror quickly overshadowed the feeling of flattery, and I swam like hell to the shallow end of the pool, which had always been sort of a “home base” as that’s where the pre-teen babies swam. Boys in that mode were scary to me. I felt this way on some level when they were only after big-tittied girlfriend, but now that they were after me, it was a whole new level of terror.
I mean I hung out with mostly boys throughout my entire childhood, as both my interests and the demographics of my neighborhood lent themselves to that, but those were ‘build a fort with’ boys and ‘build bike jumps with’ boys.
Not ‘want to rip your clothes off’ boys. Who the hell were these boys?
I really didn’t like these boys.
Two of the thirteen year old horndogs broke off from the pack and caught up with me in the shallow end, and I was suddenly being pawed at from every angle, my swimsuit rabidly tugged at. How many fucking arms did these little fuckers have? They seemed excited by my reaction, my fear seemed to fuel them. When I realized that, I inadvertently fueled them even more.
They weren’t successful at ripping the bathing suit off since mine had substantiallymore fabric than big-tittied girlfriend’s bikini, but at one point a hand went through a leg hole and fingers started prying at a part of my body that I was barely comfortable touching with my own hands.
“GET THE HELL OFF ME, PERVO!!!” I felt like the rabbit my teeth appeared to belong to. And these boys were coyotes trying to tear their prey to pieces.
I managed to break loose and fling myself out of the pool, annoyed – the titillation at my first experience with male attention still present on some level, but, more so, I was majorly annoyed, afraid, and confused by all of it. They were paying attention to me, but this is not how I wanted to feel as a result. I didn’t like this at all.
Big-tittied girlfriend clung to the side of the pool a few feet down with three or four of the more loyal ‘big-tittied girlfriend chasers’ and laughed at me, but looked a little put out at the same time. This new turn of events threatened to throw off the perfect dynamic that we shared where I was invisible and she was the star attraction.
“Haha she had hair down there,” one of the octopus boys had loudly whispered to another in his pack. What the heck, of course I did. I was still mostly flat as a board up top, despite the starter boobies, but I was still thirteen and stumbling through puberty. It made me wonder after the fact if these little fuckers hadn’t grown a little grass on their field yet. Or did they just figure someone who looked like me hadn’t…and were surprised? Whatever the case, I felt gross and exposed. I felt ashamed that someone knew my body was maturing, and horrified that they were vocalizing it where others could hear. I wanted to vanish. When it was finally time to go home, I was relieved to leave what was usually my happy place.
School would be starting back up in about a week. After that day, I went to the pool a few more times with big-tittied girlfriend before it closed for the summer. She never wanted to stay as long, even though that day where a little bit of attention was diverted from her didn’t repeat itself. This was mostly due to the fact that boys weren’t coming back to the pool, so that danger was no longer present. The boys were now at the football practices that had just started, or on end of summer camping trips with their families. Big-tittied girlfriend didn’t really see the point of even going anymore.
A few nights into the new school year, big-tittied girlfriend and I went to the movie with an awkward boy who lived in our neighborhood. He had a bad haircut complete with a braided “tail”, and his teeth were always covered in a furry layer of plaque. He brought his cute cousin from out of town with him, much to big-tittied girlfriend’s delight. I sat down next to big-tittied girlfriend, but when she and cute cousin inevitably snuck up to the balcony to “do it”, I ended up sitting near awkward boy. Awkward boy scooted over to the seat next to me and proceeded with multiple attempts at holding my hand. He finally gave up when I moved a seat over and said, “Stop touching me, pervo, I’m trying to watch a movie.” He called me a prude. I was ok with this.
When we eventually left the theater, big-tittied girlfriend’s hair mussed, her neck covered with hickeys, and a triumphant smile on her face, and the two boys whispering and laughing to each other a few feet behind us while comparing notes, things felt right in the world again.
:) 