Average High School Life Ch. 01

Lots of disclaimers on this one. I'll start with the usual.

Like many of my longer stories, this is not a quick "stroke story." Most of my longer works go over 100,000 words, and I suspect this will be no different (for reference, an average paperback novel is 120,000 words). In fact, the amount of sex in this first installment is low; it's mostly setting and character setup. Hopefully the ratings on my other stories will convince you to stick with this one and give it a chance.

In that same vein, I welcome and encourage comments and feedback, and hope you will rate the stories. I can't promise I'll listen to and follow all suggestions, but I do appreciate other perspectives.

This is categorized in sci-fi/fantasy but the reason for that doesn't become clear for a while. This is going to seem like a bog-standard story for a while, and it's only later that the more fantastical elements come into it.

Finally, I want to dedicate this story to a random commenter who posted anonymously on a story I read years ago (unfortunately I don't remember the story name or author). They wrote that the author should have classified their story as sci-fi/fantasy because the number of women the protagonist successfully got with was totally unbelievable. That comment basically gave me the premise for this whole story.

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Just before my head hit the wall, something jabbed me in the back.

That, of course, made me jerk around like someone shot me with a few thousand volts. The table shuddered in front of me, my chair creaked as it shifted, and my hands hit the desk. The class turned to look then, seeing I was fine, the snickers started.

“Are you all right Mister Mulligan?” Miss Garnier asked.

“Fine,” I replied, barely getting ahead of the crack I felt in my throat that would have suddenly made me a soprano.

Our teacher nodded and continued her presentation, her slides glowing on the screen behind her, and occasionally on the pale cream blouse she wore when she stepped in the way. I quickly turned and glared at CC, who watched our bio teacher like she was gleaning the meaning of life from her lesson.

I turned back around and tried to stay focused, but I knew this class would be miserable for me for the rest of the year. First of all, the parts of science I actually did like were what they called the hard ones. I did okay with chemistry and I really liked physics. Well, parts of physics. I had a knack for figuring out how things were supposed to work and how all the different parts of things fit together and would affect each other. But when Mister Armand made us try to prove all of it with numbers and math my knack didn’t translate. He wasn’t an ass about it, but it still didn’t help me get more than a C+.

So that was strike one; biology was a soft science and the only interest I had in it were the topics my hormones wanted more experience with. Strike two was Miss Garnier. She was new to the school this year and well-built enough that she still looked more like a college co-ed than a teacher. She had a fit body with enough curves to be noticeable, though most people wouldn’t call her curvy. Her light skin, dark eyebrows, and straight pale blonde hair finished the picture.

It was the second day of classes but she had already dethroned English teacher Mrs. Bedi as the star of the guys’ bathroom graffiti art. Before the end of the first day someone had snapped a picture around the school of her bending down to retrieve something, her tightly stretched skirt clearly showing no panty lines. The subsequent online poll that sprang up said 72% of the student body thought (or more likely fantasized) that the lack of panty lines was because she went commando.

Her wardrobe on day two continued her trend; black pencil skirt and silky cream short-sleeved blouse. After seeing that, there had been a drastic change in seating. Miss Garnier had a habit of standing angled to the class and very often gestured up with her right hand to point or wave at something on the screen. That meant today, the right side of the class was largely male. In contrast to her skirt, it was very easy to tell she had on a bra, but still all of them were apparently hoping a careless gesture or pose might open a gap between her buttons and give them a more detailed view.

Both of those issues might be a problem for any given guy or girl. The third problem was probably just a “me” issue; her voice may as well have been Ambien. She had a nice, light voice that wasn’t high but still clearly feminine. I guess maybe alto, if she were a singer? Either way she had that plus a very slight hint of what I thought was a French accent. It was the way she said her “s” and a few “a” sounds. Whatever it was, the combination just sort of lulled me to where I was ready to pass out.

Note to self; when you have her class last period, down an energy drink right before.

The bell rang and the scramble to change classes began. I turned to CC as she got out of her seat.

“I don’t know whether to thank you or smack you,” I said to her.

“You’re not supposed to hit girls, fam” she said.

“Right.”

“Unless they ask really nicely,” she added.

“Stop it.”

“They should be moaning, too, not gonna lie.”

“Ha, ha,” I said, “You’re not supposed to tease boys like that you know; we have uncontrollable urges where women are concerned.”

“Yeah, well your lizard brain probably doesn’t recognize that I qualify so I’m safe,” CC said.

I winced and didn’t respond to that comment.

-=-=-=-=-=-

CC’s real name was Cecelia Cormier, so her nickname worked on a few levels. Where it didn’t work, however, was in making jokes about her chest, something that bothered CC a lot more than she admitted.

I’d known her since 8th grade. We hadn’t been in any classes together before that, but that year we ended up in three, and in two of them we were assigned to sit next to each other. We didn’t hate each other, so I thought she would just be another person I knew from school until I found out she was also an avid gamer. After the first few months of the standard “guy can’t believe a girl is actually a gamer” bullshit, we got along really well and she slid into my friend group along with one of her friends named Bethany, who was her gamer pal until they met up with us.

A few of us braced for a disaster after introducing girls to the testosterone cabal but it didn’t happen. At first. The girls were late bloomers, puberty-wise, and the changes in us guys weren’t drastic for the most part. Voices dropped, beards grew, food consumption quadrupled, but none of us got jacked or changed our attitudes much. Some dates happened, a few dances were attended (we were social gamers, and only average students; we spent as much time chatting on socials as we did gaming), but we never had a Kardashian level blowup.

Then the girls turned sixteen and their hormones finally kicked in. Or, at least, Bethany’s did. CC’s did too, but she just grew a few inches, had to get braces and her wisdom teeth out, and got cranky every month. Bethany, on the other hand, grew almost a foot, and grew about half that in her chest and hips. Suddenly all the guys wanted to sit next to her on the couch on movie nights and couch gaming sessions, and they wanted her in their FPS squads even though CC could snipe a fly out of a spider’s web at any given distance. Things were a little more tense for the next year as some of us guys filled out (or, in some cases just stretched out), and a few trips to waterparks or Bethany’s pool at her house got more awkward, especially with Bethany and CC’s newfound affinity for two-piece suits. Some of us guys tried to relieve the tension by finding other girlfriends, but none of our efforts panned out; the longest any of us stayed with a “high school sweetheart” was four weeks.

Then homecoming happened in Junior year. We all went to the dance as a group to support my friend Zach who’d been dumped by his sophomore girlfriend just before. Booze made it into the event, but Bethany and I stayed sober for the sake of everyone else.

Unfortunately the alcohol loosened everything up for people. Anthony and Danny both danced with Bethany a lot, and their dancing included less fun “dancing with my friend in high school” and more “I saw this in a hip hop video.” Meanwhile, I had to almost carry Zach out of the venue after he emptied his stomach into a toilet and almost faceplanted in it after loudly telling Danny and Anthony to go fuck themselves for spending so much time ignoring him to hit on Bethany. As I was getting Danny into my car, CC suddenly decided she was done for the night and came with. After getting Zach’s dad to help remove him from my car (Zach’s dad was cool about it, and slipped me forty bucks in cash for driving his kid home and keeping him from being busted), I drove CC home.

I then found myself sitting in her driveway for half an hour while she soaked my suit jacket with her tears. She was also not totally sober and announced that she was gay, and she’d planned on going back to Bethany’s house with her to confess her feelings. It had been a great plan except for the hour Bethany had spent talking up Anthony and Danny and telling her she was going to make a play for both of them, hoping to end up the girlfriend of at least one. Two glasses of spiked punch later, CC didn’t trust her own emotions and had to bail, which is why she left with me.

Of course, if her being gay hadn’t totally destroyed my chances with her, she smothered any faint glimmer of hope by ending the night declaring I was “an amazing friend” and pecking me on the cheek. I learned later that for an encore, she’d gone into her house, roused her sleeping father (he had a job that he started at 5:00am) and proceeded to explain to him how she was gay.

That incident basically killed our friend group. Things simmered for four weeks and divisions quietly got more and more pronounced. I was a little bitter at the rest of the group; at Zach for passing out and making me haul him around and deliver him into his house (with the help of his father in the end, who was a cool guy), and at everyone else for not helping me. I was distrustful of Bethany, partly because I was biased by CC, but also because she almost immediately began playing Anthony and Danny off each other, not letting either know quite where they stood with her. Despite that, within our friend group the two guys low-key flexed about the fact they were with Bethany, while she preened like the queen of the nerds. I was even a little mad at CC for putting me in the position of guarding her secret (everyone assumed her falling out with Bethany was because of an unrequited crush on one of the guys, and CC didn’t correct them). She also used me as a beard by not shutting down the rumors of our relationship.

While it would have been poetic and memorable for the bomb to have gone off on Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, or just before prom or something like that, it happened on November 4th at 3:23pm.

Bethany sent a message in one of our group chats that read, “Hey Jay, my car’s in the shop. Can you give me a ride to school tomorrow?”

I don’t know if she’d accidentally used the group chat when she meant to send me the message directly, or if she just assumed it wouldn’t matter if the rest of our friends saw the innocuous request. There is a slight chance she knew that she’d just dropped nitrous into the volatile engine that was our friend group and did it on purpose, but even now I don’t think she’s that kind of person.

Regardless, before I could respond one way or another, two messages fired back almost at the same time.

Danny wrote, “Hey my car’s working, why don’t I come get you?”

While CC replied, “What, are your two boy toys too worn out to get you that early in the morning, now you need to rope Jay in too?”

(I should note that nobody was using proper grammar, syntax, or spelling out even half the words. Emojis were used in place of entire phrases in many cases.)

Bethany briefly held on to civil discourse at first by pointing out to Danny that he would have to drive across town while she literally lived between my house and the school.

But then she, assuming CC was joking around, replied to her by saying, “I’m willing to share if you are.” There were several suggestive emojis that followed.

After that it was off to the races. It quickly became clear that CC was not in a joking mood, and further both Danny and Anthony had some pointed questions about what Bethany meant when she said she was okay with sharing. I stayed out of it until CC’s and my nonexistent relationship became a feature in the arguments, at which point I jumped in and explicitly denied that anything was going on between us. Everyone accused me of bullshitting, until Zach (who had been staying on the fringes making snarky comments about being the only one not getting any) “helpfully” chimed in to say he believed me, because he was in the city randomly for something one day and saw CC kissing a girl.

The conversations, accusations and insinuations continued well into the small hours of the morning. At midnight CC actually called me in tears, blaming me for the friend group knowing she was gay, and accusing me of betraying her so I could get in Bethany’s pants. I came back at her, pointing out how she was sabotaging my prospects of getting in anyone’s pants by not denying she was going out with me. CC then changed my status from “amazing friend” to “amazingly selfish asshole.”

The rest of the year was what I believe great writers would call a “fucking mess.” I ended up mostly isolated, alternatively blamed for causing some of the issues or for not apologizing to the people I should for the things I should. Ironically it pushed me to focus on my future, looking into college options and career paths and figuring out that I needed to get my shit together and learn to do math. My parents ended up hiring me a tutor and I started playing around with some 3d modeling and CAD programs on my computer, since dropping into the FPS games I used to play would inevitably send me notifications about the people on my friends list I was no longer talking to.

My fiddling around got me to the point where I could actually make some basic 3d printing models that weren’t horrible. My parents’ anniversary is in February, so I went down to the local public maker lab where they had free printers for use and worked on printing a present for them. I eventually got a job there, which helped take my mind off of my disastrous social life and gave me a new source of possibly girlfriends who didn’t know who I or, more importantly, CC even was. Unfortunately my success rate didn’t go up on finding anything beyond a one or two week fling.

About a month after that, CC sent me a message, asking if we could meet up. There was a hill overlooking a junkyard both CC and I could bike to. It was our favorite meeting spot since we’d become friends, and where we’d shared our first kiss (it was a “why don’t we try it with each other” situation before either of us were actually interested in romance. For obvious reasons that had only recently come to light, it never went beyond that.)

As I mentioned, I’d stayed mostly isolated from our friends for months. I avoided them in the halls and classes, and spent all my time out of school becoming a conscientious student or just gaming alone.

CC had stayed closer to the pulse of what was going on, though she admitted her methods weren’t ones she was proud of.

“Zach apparently really liked the booze he had at homecoming,” she said, “No lie, Bethany’s mom loves me, always has, so I go hang out with her sometimes when Bethany’s not there. When I’m there, I can usually snag a few seltzers to take home. I give those to Zach, and he tells me all the tea.”

“Okay,” I said slowly, “So what’s happening?”

“Zach is getting Anthony into the same hobby he’s into,” CC said.

“Soccer?” I guessed.

“Drinking,” CC said, “Bethany dumped him.”

“Were they ever really going out? That whole thing was always kinda sus,” I countered.

CC shrugged. “I think Anthony and Danny had it in their heads that they were part of some sort of triad with Bethany. Not gonna lie, Bethany just liked the attention. GTA 6 started breaking up that little fantasy.”

My brain had a bit of trouble with that one. “What does Grand Theft Auto have to do with them? Danny hates those games.”

“That’s my name for the whole…thing…that happened. ‘Great Thundering Assholes’ instead of ‘Grand Theft Auto’,” CC explained.

“Okay,” I said again, deciding to leave that one alone.

“They both started to push her about what the hell they were doing. Turns out Bethany likes Danny better as a boyfriend. His whole ‘angsty musician’ vibe does it for her, and he also has no spine anymore; Bethany has him completely wrapped around her finger. Wrapped around her tits, more like. I guess she only kept Anthony around because she liked the attention, or getting the boys to fight over her, or both.”

“Great, thanks Cee, that’s…definitely more than I needed to know, not gonna lie.”

Cee shrugged, and I saw a faint hint of a smirk. “So yeah, Bethany and Danny are official now, Anthony and Zach are drinking buddies. Nobody games anymore. Or at least they don’t with me, though I don’t know that the booze twins would be any good in a match anymore, and Danny would be too scared of Bethany catching him talking to me, not gonna lie.”

“So…that’s it for our group then, huh? Figured that was going to hold off until we went away to college, at least,” I mused.

“Yeah,” CC said, then she took a deep breath.

“Look Jay, that whole mess after homecoming…I used to call it GTA 5 because I thought you five were assholes. Now I realize I was just as much of one. You were right; I was hiding behind you, and it really sus, especially because I hadn’t asked you,” she said, “Do you forgive me?”

“Why now?” I asked. In the back of my head, I worried that she was going to slowly rope me into bearding for her again.

She looked away sheepishly and explained, “I talked to my dad. I…I actually got a girlfriend a few months ago.”

“Really? That’s great,” I said, with no sarcasm at all.

“Yeah…we broke up last week,” she said.

“Oh,” I replied, the list of questions I’d been compiling in my head suddenly disappearing.

“She told me I was too clingy, and that started a fight. I hate thinking of myself as clingy. I complained to my dad about it, and he pointed out how Julia had been the only person I hung out with outside of school while we were going out, and it probably overwhelmed her. Then I broke down and told him everything that happened with GTA 6. He agreed with me about some people, but he pointed out where I was sus too. He said I probably screwed you over the worst. So I’m sorry, and I promise I won’t do that again.”

I wanted to revel in my righteousness at the time, but somehow I managed to be smart and say, “I’m sorry too. Not gonna lie, I shouldn’t have reacted like that and cut you off.”

We shared a hug, and then CC said, “You really are a great friend you know. Can we make a pact? Let’s be honest with each other. No blaming, no accusations, just straight truth?”

“I…guess I can try, yeah. I’ll tell the truth if you do,” I said.

“Deal,” CC replied, “And call me on that shit, too. My dad says I’m too good at letting things sit and hoping nobody notices.”

“Will do,” I replied.

“Good.”

-=-=-=-=-=-

Thus began our rekindled friendship based on pure honesty and CC teasing me to distraction about my and her own relationship exploits. That said, both of our summers had been frustratingly void of trysts or relationships.