Dweeb Ch. 01 - Imagine

Maybe technically, Charles Womack was a 'dweeb'; like kids had called him ever since he was in the sixth grade eight years ago. But it wasn't his fault that he got sick in the middle of fifth grade and had to repeat the year. Or, for that matter, that his dad was killed four years later by an I.E.D., and Charlie was emotionally thrown for such a loop that he failed every single class and was held back to redo the ninth grade. When he thought on it, it seemed no wonder that people treated him like a loser: He was, after all, eighteen years old and still in the eleventh grade at Theodore Roosevelt High School.

But Charles' struggles weren't confined only to name-calling. For instance, practically every school day between one-thirty and two-thirty, he wished he was dead. This was because he sat right behind Suzanne Pomeroy in seventh-period English. She was hugely popular, a cheerleader, and of course, really cute.

Suzanne had sixth-period gym and always arrived at English out of breath at the last minute before the bell rang. As she naturally flounced into the room, her breasts invariably jiggled over the tops of the several books and binders she cradled close against her stomach. By the time she got to her desk, Charlie's dick would already be halfway hard.

But the worst part for Charles was how she would stretch back in her seat before settling down. Wiggling in a half-dozen places all at the same time, she would reach her hands up to her head. As she casually, carelessly, fluffed her just cleaned and blown dry Swedish-blonde hair, her strawberry-scented shampoo would grab his nose. His throat would get tight while his jeans got even tighter.

Charlie was sure that Suzanne Pomeroy didn't know she was torturing him. She was one of the few students who wasn't outright mean to him. She'd smile at him, and even speak first sometimes, if they met in the halls. Not that that meant anything could ever happen with her for him.

Suzanne, or Suzie as she was known to all her friends, was also eighteen and almost exactly six months younger than Charlie. But though she was a Senior, she was re-taking Junior English because had she flunked it. All her Junior-year grades were generally poor and, in order for her to continue being a cheerleader, she also had had to specially petition the School District. That had gone well for her because, luckily, her father had saved the Superintendent five thousand dollars by extracting his wife's diamond ring undamaged from their home disposal unit. The State's academic requirements for a diploma, however, remained sacrosanct.

Thus, five days a week Charlie sat behind Suzie with his legs crossed while he wished his boner would miraculously shrink. He also worried that her boyfriend, Butch Carlson, who sat in the desk right beside him, would notice the growth in his lap and pound the shit out of him. Certainly the teacher, Old Lady Krautheimer, who was going to retire at the end of the year, would be unable to stop such an assault. There was no way that she'd risk her pension or health tangling with a three-letter jock who had led the Rough Riders to five State Championships in football, basketball and baseball over the last two years.

On Friday, May eleventh, Charlie was in his typical fix when the bell rang to dismiss seventh period. As the rest of the class piled out of the door like a fire alarm was going off, he sat afraid to move while he mentally tried to relax his petrified prick into flaccidity. Having suffered fifty minutes of agonizing pressure, his balls hurt, his stomach churned and his neck was hot. Suddenly Mrs. Krautheimer was standing immediately beside him, jostling his shoulder and asking, "Did I just catch you napping in my class, Charles Womack?"

Without waiting for an answer, the teacher hypothesized, "Maybe you were you merely lost in thought about what to get your mother for Mothers' Day on Sunday. If you need help, I can tell you that I used to love See's Candies. My children are long gone and I'm lucky to get a card from them now, but I do like to treat myself to California Brittle or a Scotch Mallow every now and then." She shook her head, came out of her fog and concluded, "Get to your next class, now. I'll see you Monday."

Charlie flushed as he slid from his desk and hid his recovering crotch with his notebook while he replied, "Thanks, Mrs. Krautheimer. That's a great tip." He was angry with himself for noticing the short plump teacher's nipples poking out fat and sassy against her cotton print dress. He was even more angry that the sight stirred his joint again, just when it had begun to soften to a manageable size. Stumbling past the sixty-four-year-old widow, he hustled out the door.

Charles's eighth-period was a scheduled Study Hall in the library. Since Mr. Abernathy, the gay librarian, never took attendance, and didn't actually care if the students skipped out, tardiness didn't much matter. Charlie looked at his bulging Wranglers' fly and ducked into the boys' lavatory to adjust himself. When he came out, he felt a lot better, but decided it was too late to go to the library.

Looking carefully around for patrolling hall monitors, Charlie walked quickly down a side corridor and exited the building early. As he crossed the playing fields to the avenue behind the school, Clara Krautheimer turned to her sophomores and asked them to pass their homework essays forward for her to collect. At the same time, at the door to her eighth-period Social Studies class, Butch Carlson pinned Suzie Pomeroy against the wall lockers, gave her a quick kiss and reminded her, "I've got to get to ball practice. Pick you up at eight..." She nodded her agreement with hidden reluctance, then slid under his outstretched arm into the schoolroom.

While Charles Womack drove his twenty-year-old Mazda Protégé to the Quadrangle Mall to goof around, Suzanne Pomeroy sat angrily doodling in her notebook. "Who do you think you are, Butch Carlson!" She railed in her mind. "More to the point, what do you think I am? Your toy?" She liked kissing as much as any girl, but not in the school corridor and not against her will. They had only been dating for the month since Spring Break and the Junior-Senior Prom, but he had been acting increasingly possessive in the last couple of weeks.

What was both worse and more telling, was that Butch was putting more pressure on Suzie for more physical stuff on every date. It was becoming obvious to her that while he was chronologically eighteen, he was emotionally thirteen and interested in only one thing. She was glad that at least she had never let him get to second base, let alone go all the way. Gritting her teeth, she silently raged at him, "You may be a rich lawyer's kid while I'm just a poor plumber's daughter, but I deserve respect!"

Suddenly her pencil-point snapped and Suzanne looked up guiltily to see if anyone had noticed what seemed to her to be a very loud noise. Fortunately, the whole class, except for her, was paying attention to the substitute teacher who was droning on about Potsdam and Harry Truman. Returning to her inner soliloquy, she concluded, "You're just a bully in a letterman's sweater, Butch Carlson! I've had enough of your Corvette and your clumsy passes. Show up at my house at eight if you want to, but you won't find me home!"

Taking a deep breath to help calm herself, Suzie mused, "I have to think of something else to do tonight, instead." While she mulled her options, she tapped her broken pencil's eraser idly on the cover of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'. Oddly, the drawn picture of Mark Twain's boy-hero looked to her to be almost exactly like Charles Womack. If Huck's freckles were acne-scars and if Charlie wore a torn straw hat, they would have been twins in her mind's eye.

Suzanne pursed her lips, laid down the pencil and thought, "Perfect! I need help in English, Womack, and you are nice, and smart, and might even be flattered that I ask." If her concentration had been lax at the beginning of Social Studies, it was completely absent for the remainder of the period. She was the first out of the room when the bell rang.

Suzie blew through her front door at four o'clock and cried exuberantly, "Mom! MOM!"

Bernice Pomeroy dropped her damp tea towel on the counter beside the sink and exited the kitchen patting her apron against her crisp cotton housedress. "My goodness, Suz," she called up the stairs to her already out of sight daughter. "I'm downstairs! What on earth is the commotion?"

The teen re-appeared from her room and walked more calmly, yet still in a hurry, back down to the entry where her bewildered mother stood. "Oh," Suzie said, as she caught her breath. "It's nothing, I guess. I'm just running late to meet some of the gang. We're gonna do some group studying and I wanted you to know I was home, but that I was going right out again. That's all."

Bernice squinted knowingly as she appraised the girl's effort to hide her excitement. At thirty-nine, Bunny Pomeroy was not so far removed from her own youth that she didn't recognize something was afoot, even thought her parental experience cautioned her not to be too nosy. "Well, that's fine, dear," she said blandly. "Your dad said he would bring a pizza home with him, so don't be too long, if you want to eat before that Carlson boy picks you up for your date."

"Oh, gosh, Mom! We're gonna get burgers, or something," Suzie lied. "Besides, I'm not dating Butch anymore. If he forgets that and drops by, just tell him I'm out, please."

Bernice frowned. "Well, alright dear, only don't tell me where you're going, or with who. I don't want to fib to anyone. When do you think you'll be home?"

"It's Friday night, Mom," Suzie reminded. "I won't be out past my curfew. I have cheer practice at nine in the morning." She laughed, "You know I like to get my beauty sleep! Now, I have to get my face fixed and get out of here!" She kissed her mother's cheek and scurried upstairs again.

Meanwhile, unaware that he had been targeted by Suzanne Pomeroy as her foil to erase Butch Carlson from her social calendar, Charles Womack wandered blithely from store to store in the Quadrangle Mall. He simply could not settle on what to get his mom for Mothers' Day. "A card, obviously," he muttered under his breath. "But what to go with it?" With his mind a-whirl, he sat on a bench and blankly stared at other shoppers.

After a few minutes, Charlie focused his eyes on a window display thirty feet in front of him and realized that he had randomly stopped in front of Victoria's Secret. To his embarrassed chagrin, the scantily clad underwear model on the poster he was staring at was his mom. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, then looked again. Now the model was, in fact, a model and she looked nothing at all like who he had imagined he saw.

"Man, oh man, Charlie," he said to himself. "Your brain is in bad shape."

Just then an older, overweight security guard tapped Charles on the shoulder and said, "Listen to me, kid. Studying that picture is not cool. Why don't you go home and watch TV or something?"

Charlie stammered, "N-no, mister, y-you got it all wrong! I was thinking about what to buy my mom. I'm shopping!" Then he jumped up and ran into the lingerie shop while the mall cop laughed his ass off.

Inside the store, a mature sales-clerk strategically blocked Charles path and asked pleasantly, "You're in a hurry, what are you looking for?"

Charlie gulped, hesitated, then blurted out, "A Mothers' Day present. But I don't know what she'd like!"

The clerk grinned and answered, "Oh, that's easy: Anything. May I make a suggestion?" As she watched Charles gratefully nod assent, she continued, "A gift card would be perfect. She could come in... find exactly what she wanted... and you wouldn't have to worry about it." Steering her customer to the counter area, she pulled out a distinctive pink-and-black plastic card with a mag-stripe and assumptively asked, "How much shall I put on it?"

Charlie was steamrolled. His neck was hot, his hands itched, and all he wanted to do was bolt for the exit. Clumsily pulling his wallet from his jeans, he fished out a twenty-dollar bill and replied, "Umm, twenty? Is that enough for a decent... er, I mean a nice, gift?" The lady just smiled and bit her inside cheek to keep from chuckling as she loaded the amount on the gift card while he nervously swiveled his head to see if anyone that he knew was watching him.

Seconds later, Charles was out of Victoria's Secret with his purchase and looking across the mall aisle at See's Candies. In his head, he heard Old Lady Krautheimer telling him how she loved See's and missed getting them now that her children were grown and gone. Inspiration clobbered him.

Marching into the candy store, Charlie bought a half-pound box custom-filled with the California Brittle and Scotch Mallows that the teacher had said she liked. Smug with his surprises, he walked out to his car, pausing only long enough to search the internet on his phone. Luck was with him; he found a Krautheimer' with a nearby local address.

Charles arrived home at half-past four after tucking the See's box, with no identifying note, under Clara Krautheimer's doormat. Though he was home later than usual, he was well ahead of his mom, who worked downtown until five. Going directly to his bedroom in the small tidy one-floor bungalow, he stashed the gift card in his sock drawer then flopped on his standard maple-frame bed. He felt wrung out and closed his eyes, but neither sleep nor relaxation were to be had.

Visions of Suzanne, Mrs. Krautheimer, the Victoria Secret poster model, the polished sales clerk, and even his mom in scanty underwear paraded in a kaleidoscope through Charlie's head. His hands, seemingly out of his control, unzipped his jeans and hauled his hardening cock out from his Hanes briefs. Groaning, he stroked his warm filled prick with his curled left fist, while he scratched under his balls with his right fingers. It wasn't long before creamy gray relief shot from his slit onto his T-shirt.

When his sticky dick was again limp, Charlie closed up his pants, peeled off his spunk-stained shirt, and found the quiet peace he had been missing since seventh-period began. An hour later, Colleen Womack, just home from work, peeked in on her son. She nodded her head as she saw his body position and the rumpled cotton evidence near his left hip. Backing out discreetly, she closed the door and sighed softly to herself as she moved down the short hall to her own bedroom to change clothes.

The first thing Colleen did, when she arrived at her antique queen-size waterbed, was perch her bottom on the edge of its walnut frame, tug off her open-toe golden-tan two-inch-heel pumps and massage her arches. As the improved circulation eased her general weariness, she thought about her son, crashed out in his room after obviously masturbating. "Poor boy," she murmured. Then, to herself, but also to her dead husband's imagined presence, she mused, "Like mother, like son, Wally. You didn't mean to leave us, but you did, and neither of us has been on an even keel for these past four years."

Flopping backward, Colleen let the baffled waves settle beneath her as she relaxed and continued aloud in a normal conversational tone, "Charlie has never expressed any interest in dating, but of course, he's a normal teenage boy with normal hormones, so he must think about it. I guess, Wally, that I'm just surprised that I am surprised to learn what any other mother would instinctively or, at least intuitively know."

While she talked to the ceiling, Colleen continued to undress herself. First, she raised her legs and bicycled them in the air slowly as she skinned off her dark beige form-fitting double-knit pull-on stretch pants. Next, tightening her abs, she curled up from the quietly sloshing mattress and lifted her pastel egg-yolk nylon-acetate blend top's hem over her head. Laying back down, she arched her back, while she sequentially hiked up her hips, knees and heels, like an inchworm on a twig, as she peeled her opaque white tights past her butt, then down her smooth legs, to fall on the rug in front of her closet.

Since she was parallel to the floor and partly sunk into the bed's quilted fiber-filled comforter, Colleen wasn't looking at her surroundings as she shucked her garments. Behind the ajar door to the master bedroom, however, Charles was transfixed as he looked at her and eavesdropped while she confessed her social abstinence to his father's invisible spirit. "I still miss you, Wally, and I don't seem to know really how to respond to men who show a romantic interest in me. For instance, my boss, Paul Jackson, lately has been hinting that he would like to make our relationship more personal and social as well as professional. He's nice, but do I want to complicate my life like that?"

When Charlie was at the Quadrangle Mall, the Victoria Secret poster model had magically momentarily transformed into his mom. Now, as he peeped at his mother, supine in simple white cotton underwear, it was she who became the fantasy model except that, blink as he might, she neither disappeared, nor became less stunning. Her full mounded breasts rose and fell evenly, but dramatically, behind their plunging underwired cups. Her panties weren't sheer, yet their thin material couldn't hide her dishwater-dark muff's arrowhead pointing straight to the vague plump camel-toe at her crotch.

Abruptly, the voyeur and his ruminating subject were interrupted by the china mantle-clock in the living room chiming six times while, at the same moment, three sharp raps reverberated from the bungalow's front door. These ordinary noises in the otherwise morgue-quiet little home had extraordinary effect. Charles spun on his heels, raced back to his room and leaned panting against his closed door praying to whatever powers that may exist in the universe that his heart would stay in his chest. Looking down at his groin, he was grateful that the scare had returned his engorged penis to its normal attitude.

Colleen, jolted from her reverie, yelped to whoever was knocking, "Just a moment!" Jumping from her bed, she hurriedly grabbed her electric-blue velour bathrobe from her closet, kicked into her pink terry-lined oversized house slippers and rushed from her bedroom. As she hustled along the short hall to the living room, she zipped her robe to her throat, fluffed her ash-blonde medium-length hairdo and called out again, "On my way! Just a sec!" At the door, she deliberately took a deep breath to settle herself, then looked through the fish-eye lens in the door to see who was on her porch.

Outside, Colleen's forty-one-year-old brother-in-law, Wilford Womack, stood patiently grinning beside a young girl whom she didn't recognize. As she opened the door, she commented, "Why, Ford, what a nice surprise!" Then, looking at the teenager beside him, she asked, "But who's this?" Before he could answer, she threw the door wide and added, "I'm sorry! Where are my manners? You caught me unawares, but please... Come inside!"

Down the hall and out of sight, Charlie cracked open his door to learn what he could about the visitor. When he heard his mother greet his Uncle Ford he relaxed, shut his door again, and dug out a clean T-shirt from his chest of drawers. In the living room, Ford said, "Hi, Collie. I'm sorry to bust in unannounced. My date just texted me that she's caught the flu and can't go out, but I was already in my car, so I thought I'd pop in and say hello. It's been a couple of weeks, or more, since we saw each other."

Then, indicating the girl who hesitantly trailed him into the house, Ford finished, "I actually don't know who this is. She just happened to be walking up to the door as I parked my car." He laughed. "I told her, "I'll flip you to see who knocks and she said, 'no, you go ahead. I'll just stand here.' That's all I know, even if you torture me!"