Strong Enough
by Nico Grey
XVI
"That was an interesting day," Tyler concluded. He watched coyly as Caleb climbed into bed.
He appeared to take a moment to steady himself, before shrugging nonchalantly, dropping his briefs, and climbing in after Caleb.
"Oh, shoot!" Caleb exclaimed. "I forget about my mom! We really should keep our underwear in the bed with us."
Tyler reached out from under the comforter and stretched, but he couldn't quite reach his briefs. He rolled out of the bed to retrieve them, then climbed back in.
"Uh, Tyler?" Caleb reminded him, "I left mine on the floor, too."
He encouraged Tyler with a pleading expression.
"You could have said something when I got mine," Tyler complained as he climbed back into the bed again.
"Yeah," Caleb agreed smugly. "But this way I got to watch you climb out of bed and back in twice!"
"I should have made you get both pair," Tyler objected. "You're the one that doesn't mind walking around naked."
"Oh, I mind," Caleb assured him. "But not with you," he reflected. "I'm not self-conscious around you anymore."
"Around Abby?"
"Oh my god!" Caleb exclaimed. "That was freaky!"
"Then why did you do it?" Tyler wondered. "You spent more than two hours completely naked with us. I was starting to wonder if you planned to ski home that way!"
"I'm not really sure why I did," Caleb admitted. "Part of it was for Abby. I know she gets pretty excited about the idea of seeing us. And I kind of feel like I owe her. She really has been generous with us. Especially with me.
"But I think I also did it for me. It helped me prove something to myself."
"I used to be very self-conscious," Caleb admitted. "When I was younger, I was pretty small and didn't feel good about myself. Then I figured out that I was different, and that made me even more aware of how others might see me.
"But what really turned me into a wreck was that thing that happened to me when I was in eighth grade. For a long time, I hated myself. And just the idea of anyone really looking at me, even when I had all my clothes on, made me want to run away and hide."
"Hey, my bed, my rules," he objected when Tyler wrapped arms around his waist.
"Yup," Tyler agreed. He squeezed Caleb firmly, nuzzled the side of his neck, and waited.
Caleb sighed. He rolled over and leaned back into Tyler's arms.
" I think today was another step for me. I let go of my fears and of my. . . I guess it's like hyper-self-awareness. I trusted that Abby would see me without any defenses, just me, and I would be alright. And I was. Even if I did think I was about to wet myself once or twice," he grinned.
"So now I'm ready for another step," he drew a deep breath and held it. Then he exhaled. "I want to tell you about what happened. Back when I was in eighth grade."
Caleb waited. Tyler continued to hold on securely until Caleb got the message.
Even while safe in Tyler's arms, it was stressful for Caleb. Reliving such a disgraceful experience, as much as he trusted Tyler, still resurrected a shameful image of himself and renewed old self-loathing.
"I was in seventh grade when I finally figured out that I was different," he explained. "It didn't take me too long to figure out what that difference was. Some of my classmates, even some of my friends, had already sensed a change. They started to drift away from me. And because I didn't really have a great image of myself to start with, I didn't fight it. I watched them go. I got used to being alone."
Eventually some of the girls in Caleb's class noticed that he was alone. There were overtures. He was just glad to have some friends again.
But the rules were different. Boys understood each other. At least they did after a fashion. They shared common interests. They generally looked at the world in the same way. There really weren't many strings attached with boys' friendships, and certainly no emotional strings were attached.
His new friends meant well, Caleb allowed. But they didn't really understand life from a boy's perspective. In a sense, Caleb came to understand later, their relationship with him was more like those they had with their pets or toys, than like their relationships with other girls. He was something new, exciting, interesting. . . gay.
Eventually they had discovered that Caleb was gay. And that made him even more interesting to them. There are so many things that twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls want to find out about boys. But most boys aren't easily accessible. They have their own social connections with other boys. They don't need the friendships that girls offer and will retreat to their own social tribe when they find being around girls awkward or uncomfortable.
Caleb had no other tribe to turn to. He learned that having friends involved going along with awkward conversations, and eventually with uncomfortable forms of peer pressure.
But it was nice to have people who shared some of his interests. Twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls are very interested in their male peers. So was Caleb. He and his new friends spent a lot of time discussing some of the really cute guys in their class.
Eventually the conversation turned to helping Caleb find a boyfriend. The girls wanted the same thing. But they preferred to let Caleb venture into that unfamiliar territory first. He was their trial run into the world of relationships with boys.
There were clouds of girlish giggles in the air around Caleb's subtle— or perhaps not-so-subtle— first clumsy attempts to sound out boys in his class about his interest. Those didn't improve his relationship with his male peers. And they certainly didn't get him any dates.
Eventually some of the alpha members of his new friend circle began to grow impatient. Something wasn't working. They began to research boy-boy relationships and reached some interesting conclusions.
The problem, they decided, was that trying to hit on other seventh— and then eighth— grade boys was a very chancy proposition. Most boys that age were at least as inexperienced and awkward as Caleb and the girls. It could be a long time before their experimentation produced useful data.
Caleb decided that he would just have to wait a while longer— maybe even until he was in high school!— to finally explore the mysteries of love.
The girls had other plans. They were less interested in the mysteries of love than they were in learning about the practicalities of sex. And Caleb did still seem like their perfect entrée into that world of guys and sex.
Caleb was small. He was cute. He was cuddly. He was desperate to remain part of the only social group that still welcomed him. They would use his desperation to encourage him to aid their research. All it would take was peer pressure and some subtle manipulation. And in the end, they really would be doing it for his own good!
The girls hit on a plan. Older guys! If young boys lacked the confidence to explore their sexuality, older guys wouldn't have those same inhibitions. They knew what they wanted and would take it if offered. Caleb was bound to interest some of them.
It was just a matter of bringing their test subject into contact with some of these older guys in the right set of circumstances. A couple of the girls were certain that a local grocery store was the perfect place to try out their plan. It was public enough to be safe, and to allow them to supervise. But customers would start to thin out by mid-evening. Those that arrived later were often male and alone.
Some of those men had to be lonely. Some of them would surely be interested in a cute little fellow with a hot little body, like Caleb. There were bound to be a few of them that would be so taken with his charms that they would want to explore them up close and personal. Perhaps they would be so desperate that they wouldn't mind if the girls watched.
The challenge was to persuade Caleb. The best way to ensure his participation might be to hold back just a little bit of information from him; details that might concern him if he knew in advance, but for which he would be grateful in the end.
The girls had planned the event thoroughly. They would all be there to support Caleb and to offer encouragement. His job would be to tease these older men. It was a prank! It would be fun! And just a little bit sexy!
Caleb really wasn't sure about the idea. But his closest friends were enthusiastic. And they'd all be there to support him.
Caleb would ride his bicycle, both to facilitate escape if necessary, but also to help show off 'the goods'. The girls praised his thighs and his bottom as outstanding assets. They'd get guys hot. Then he would speed away on his bicycle. It would be a great prank!
Caleb had been instructed on how to dress to attract attention. He'd look stunning in a white cropped midriff t-shirt, quite snug and brief white shorts, white socks, and white athletic shoes. 'Very virginal', he was assured. Just the thing to lure in guys who liked hot, young boys.
And that's how, one night in mid-October, a very chilly Caleb Bradford, barely thirteen years old, came to find himself circling the entrance of the supermarket on his bicycle, offering faint come-ons to almost every guy that entered or left the store.
Eventually his entourage— a couple of them referred to themselves self-deprecatingly as his 'support hoes'— became impatient with their lack of results. Caleb was becoming discouraged by the chill fall air penetrating his barely-clothed body. The leadership team of his support hoes decided to relocate to the large, glass-enclosed store entryway. It would be warmer inside. It would also be easier for customers to hear Caleb's sexy sales pitch.
"So there I was," Caleb explained, "Riding in slow, lazy ovals inside the entryway of that store. There were fifteen or twenty excited girls watching everything that I was doing. And every time a younger guy came into the store alone, I'd mutter something like 'you want to get lucky?' as he walked past me."
Tyler hadn't said much throughout the entire story. He held Caleb. He nuzzled his neck or stroked his back when he thought Caleb needed additional support. But as the story drew toward its climax, Caleb could feel the tension increase in Tyler's body.
Eventually the chief support hoes became frustrated. They had been there for close to two hours and the only thing they had received for their efforts were some strange looks.
Jennifer Klug decided that perhaps Caleb needed a more exciting and explicit sales pitch. Most of the guys that night had apparently been too dense to understand what it meant to 'get lucky'. Without conferring with the rest of the executive team, or with Caleb, she took things into her own hands. Literally.
Jenny was a girl with initiative. She was going places. And she wasn't going to wait for Caleb and the rest of the support hoes to bring her there.
When the next customer came into the entryway, Jenny waited for Caleb to pedal slowly past. Then she reached out, grabbed the back of his shorts, pulled, and announced: "For just twenty bucks, this virgin ass is yours!"
The customer was startled! Most of the rest of the support hoes were startled— but also extremely excited. Caleb was very startled!
"When she grabbed my shorts and offered my butt for sale, I hit the gas! I stomped on the pedals hard and tried to get away! Jenny held onto my shorts. I guess they were made from pretty thin material."
Caleb noticed the alarm course through Tyler's body like it had through his own two years previously. He waited for Tyler to calm down before he continued.
"What about your underwear?" Tyler asked. "Did she get them, too?"
"I wasn't wearing any."
It felt like a shameful admission. Or at least very slutty— so pretty much the same thing.
"I had worn a pair of red briefs that night. I guess I thought they would be sexy, or something," Caleb explained. "But the girls said they could see them right through those white shorts. That defeated the 'virgin' marketing campaign. So we stopped at Burger King on the way to the store and they made me get rid of them."
"Holy. . ." Tyler struggled to get his emotions back under control again. He kept his arms securely around Caleb and gently stroked his back.
"Yeah," Caleb agreed.
It was a bad situation. It was about to get worse.
Caleb and the support hoes had assumed that most customers had paid them no attention. That wasn't entirely accurate. A few had mentioned concerns to grocery store management. After visual confirmation of the disturbance, the store manager had decided that he wanted nothing to do with confronting a gang of more than fifteen teen-aged girls. He called the police.
Less than two minutes after Caleb began his Lady Godiva on a Schwinn Sporterra impression, three police cruisers rolled into the store parking lot. Apparently they were prepared for some sort of teen girl insurrection.
What the police discovered were sixteen very excited teen girls chattering away energetically, and one deeply shamed and nearly catatonic thirteen-year-old boy sitting in a corner of the store's entry area, trying desperately to cover himself.
"The police brought me home that night," Caleb explained. "But the store manager was very upset. His customers were being propositioned for sex. He demanded that the police file charges.
"My father went through the roof. He had already started to suspect me. He had tolerated it so far, but he wasn't happy. And now that it was a public scandal, he took off his belt and tore a strip off my butt before my mother could stop him.
"That might have been the end of it, at least mostly, except several of the girls had taped everything on their phones," Caleb groaned. "And a couple of them started sharing the video online. Before the authorities stepped in and reminded people that posting kiddie porn," he shivered," online is illegal, I think half of Keene had seen my bare bottom and knew that it could be purchased for twenty bucks."
"What about the charges?" Tyler needed to know.
"They were dropped eventually," Caleb said. "But first the story was spread all over the newspapers. The videos were out on the internet. And everybody in town was all over my ass!
"Homophobes made my life miserable at school. I don't think staff had any idea how to handle the situation. My 'support hoes' weren't very supportive after that. They protected themselves. And eventually the town started to turn on my family because of my 'reputation'. It just sucked!"
Caleb felt tears begin to trickle down his cheeks. Tyler attempted to comfort him.
"My father divorced my mother so he wouldn't have to live with me, Tyler! He offered me money to change my name!" To Caleb, that was either the ultimate betrayal, or it was the ultimate proof of his own worthlessness.
"At least you have a new start here." It was a lame attempt at comfort, Tyler knew. He tried to say more with his body language. "Nobody cares about your past."
Van Cross didn't know as much about computer technology as he thought he knew. But he did know enough to set up an anonymous social media account. He shared his own social media contacts with that account. Then he used the anonymous account to share a handful of attachments. Just a concerned citizen passing along information to whomever it concerned. It was the responsible thing to do.
Caleb woke in the morning feeling like an immense weight had been lifted from his chest. He had shared his deepest, darkest secret and. . . nothing had happened. He had trusted Tyler with a story that showed himself in the worst possible light. But he woke up in the morning, still wrapped in Tyler's arms.
Counting backward, Caleb calculated that he and Tyler had been friends for less than three months. They had begun to see each other as partners barely five weeks earlier. Now Tyler knew Caleb at his worst, yet he still held him protectively in his arms.
He realized that he was young. It was too soon for certainty. But Caleb was starting to think that he had found the person with whom he wanted to spend the rest of his life. He hoped that Tyler felt the same way. So far, all signs pointed to 'yes'.
He felt a warm glow in his chest, a peaceful sensation, as he buried himself deeper in Tyler's arms and returned to sleep.
When he woke again, Caleb felt a thrilling sensation somewhat lower than his chest.
As always, he wasn't at his best first thing in the morning. But he was becoming familiar enough with the sensation to recognize it.
"Can I massage yours, too?" he begged. "Please. . ."
"Of course," Tyler replied. "I told you yesterday. You can anytime you want to."
It took Caleb a while to make sense of that statement.
" I guess I forgot. . . Or are you talking about what you said when we were visiting Abby?"
"Yeah. At Abby's. You said I was the only person allowed to massage yours, and I said you could massage mine, too."
" Oh!" Caleb snickered. "I misunderstood. I thought you were giving me permission to massage. . . myself."
Then he laughed out loud.
" Thank god Abby misunderstood, too! Otherwise she wouldn't have let us leave until, well. . . Yeah. I guess you get it."
He could sense a warmth that told him Tyler was blushing.
"We have to be careful when we're there!" Tyler said. "If we let her, I have no idea how far she might go!"
Caleb took a while to consider the warning. He had mixed feelings. But Tyler made a reasonable point.
"We should be on the same page," he agreed. "You're my boyfriend. I should take your feelings into account now before I just let her do what she wants with me.
"I need to know when I'm letting her do anything to me that you don't like. I've been letting things happen that I can live with because I feel like I do owe her and it doesn't hurt me. I haven't been thinking about anything else, and I need to do that now."
Caleb tried to express his thoughts more coherently. But Tyler wouldn't let him. So he got even.
He was pleased to discover that Tyler seemed to make a bigger mess every time. It was a good sign. That would take a load off of Tyler's mind.
Silver River wasn't the most tech-obsessed school district in the state. But it was a weekend in the middle of winter. Many students were bored. And even if they weren't tech wizards, most students at Silver River had social media accounts.
Those social media accounts were connected to each other. Nobody was connected to everybody else in the school. But there weren't more than four or five degrees of separation between any two students attending Silver River.
As Sunday wore on, those connections were starting to happen. And considering the nature of the subject matter, once the first connections were made, the information really started to fly.
Caleb and Tyler spent the day on skis. They had breakfast with Nicole and were out the door in less than twenty minutes.
Out in the fresh air, Caleb felt like he was reborn. Their adventures had been subdued the previous weekend, due to Caleb's injury. But the crisp winter air, Tyler's companionship, and some strenuous exercise was really bringing him back to life.
After enjoying lunch, again with Nicole, they were right back out on the trails. They continued their adventures until the position of the sun in the sky warned that it was time for Tyler to think about going home.
They returned briefly to the Bradford residence to brew Tyler a quick cup of coffee. Nicole sent him out the door with another container of cookies and a motherly kiss on the forehead. Caleb cheekily slipped in a 'boyfriend' kiss before Tyler stepped outside.
"How was your day, Abby?"
Caleb decided to initiate the call again. The first semester had ended on Friday. With no homework over the weekend, he was starting to feel at loose ends as soon as Tyler left.
"Not as exciting as yesterday!" she reminded him.
Caleb was sure that Abby must have noticed his blush over the telephone connection.
"Well I'm glad you enjoyed it," he brazened out his embarrassment. "I found it very therapeutic."
"Therapeutic? This I have to hear!" Abby chortled. "Do you need to give it time in the open air for health reasons?"
"It's about freedom, Abs," he explained. "It's about freeing myself from my past and from other people's perceptions of me."
"Well, just don't try that in front of my mother," Abby ordered. "You really don't need to be freeing yourself from her perceptions of you. I believe she has your number."
Caleb laughed. He noticed that he really didn't mind. And that was another form of freedom.
"I talked to Tyler last night," he told her. "I told him about that thing that happened to me back when I was in eighth grade. I told him the whole story. I think I'm ready to tell you, too, if you have some time now."
"Unless I was on fire, I'd make the time," Abby assured him. "For months, I've been waiting for you to dish on your sordid past. And as it turns out, I really do have time. It's kind of strange, but I haven't heard a word from anyone all day today."
When Abby sat down next to Caleb on the bus the following morning, she immediately wrapped her arms around him.
"Abby! What have I done?" Caleb wondered. "And what will Tyler say?"
"I can't believe you've been carrying that around inside you for all these years," Abby sympathized. "I can't believe what those people did to you!"
In Caleb's mind, nobody had really 'done' anything to him, except for his father. His support hoes had used him, but not with any real malicious intentions. They were curious about their developing sexuality. They wanted to find out more about boys. Caleb was useful and could serve their interests. And like Lexxi and her crew with Tyler, they didn't think about how it might affect him. It just seemed like fun to them. They assumed that it would be fun for Caleb, too.
Caleb really blamed himself as much as he blamed the support hoes. He was too needy and weak to speak up for himself when their plans began to concern him. He went along rather than rock the boat and risk losing their friendship. He paid the price for his own choices.
Abby saw it differently. But perhaps that was her guilt speaking. And to be fair, she blamed herself for what happened to Tyler. She wasn't holding Caleb's support hoes to a higher standard than the one to which she held herself.
Caleb and Abby agreed to disagree on that point. But she wouldn't tolerate his disagreement on another matter. She kept him wrapped firmly in her arm until they had to separate to go to homeroom. When Tyler met them in the cafeteria before the start of the school day, he eyed Caleb very curiously.
The first day of the new semester was very similar to every day of the last semester, aside from new schedules and a handful of extra morning announcements. Caleb was slightly interested to learn that the boy's basketball team had won a game over the weekend and that the next event on the Silver River social calendar would be a Valentine's Day dance the following Friday, on February 13.
During the course of the morning, Caleb was pleased to find that Tyler had joined his sections of Geometry and History, and that Abby was taking the same section of Biology as he was. At lunch, he discovered that all three of them were sharing an English class together every afternoon. The second semester was already off to a great start!
The lunch period was a bit of a watershed in Caleb's day. He had spent the morning oblivious to his peers, only delighted to find Tyler waiting for him in two classes and Abby in another. During lunch, he started to become aware of curious glances from other students and odd expressions on their faces. It was hard for him to interpret, but he definitely felt an undercurrent of excitement in the student body.
Caleb wasn't surprised to notice the excitement had possessed Lexxi Sprague's table. It wasn't a welcome discovery, but he also wasn't too surprised to notice that her crew seemed very interested in what was happening at his table. Benjer Frye was sitting at the table again. He wasn't sitting any closer to Lexxi than he had been the previous week, but Caleb thought that Benjer had the air of a hopeful supplicant; a hopeful supplicant that still appeared to think of himself as an equal.
Eventually, Caleb grew tired of glancing around the cafeteria and finding faces staring back at him almost everywhere he looked. It was creepy! Even a few members of the staff appeared to be watching him!
He turned back to his own table and whatever it was that the cafeteria dared call 'American Chop Suey'. It was definitely strange. It looked more like a pasta dish with tomato sauce than any sort of Chinese cuisine.
Tyler and Abby were making plans to meet up somewhere in the computer science wing at the end of the next period to walk to their English class together.
"What do you have next?" Tyler asked Caleb.
"I'm on the other side of the building," Caleb explained. "For my art class."
"And after English, PhysEd to end your day?"
Caleb agreed.
"That will work. My final class is photography," Tyler said. "I'll be right next to the gym. We can meet there at the end of the day every Tuesday and catch my bus together."
Squeals from a nearby table startled Caleb. He was reassured to learn that it signified nothing more alarming than an invitation to the Valentine's Day dance that ended happily for two people. And then the excitement level around the cafeteria began to make sense to him.
"How big a deal is the Valentine's Day dance, Abby?" he wondered. "I don't think it ever even registered while I was going to school in Keene."
"Keene simply lacks the proper romantic sentiment," she sniffed. "It's one of our biggest social events at Silver River. Anyone who is anybody, or who even aspires to be anybody, will be there."
"So who are you going with?" Caleb realized, too late, that the question might be a little awkward.
"Both of you!" she informed them. "You'll be the luckiest guys there."
Caleb resisted the temptation to offer to find an eighth grader to invite her. He was sure that she really did mean well.
The worst part of Caleb's new schedule was the final period of the day. He had never minded Physical Education. He wasn't enthusiastic about most sports, but he was reasonably athletic and he was competent. The class should have been tolerable. But Caleb had also never been in a physical education class with Benjer Frye.
Worse, the gym coach decided to start the semester with a unit that featured basketball skills. And as Abby had already told him, the only basketball skill that Benjer really excelled at was offensive fouls.
Caleb had no idea why the coach taught a class on basketball skills that included no instruction. He just split the class into six teams and directed them to begin playing. Then he immersed himself in either paperwork or porn on his tablet. Caleb never bothered to get close enough to find out which.
In the shower after class, Caleb wondered whether the class had been playing basketball or some basketball-football hybrid. Benjer had managed to make hard contact with him on four occasions during class. Caleb wasn't entirely certain that it was personal. Benjer made hard contact with a lot of people during that class.
As Caleb was exiting the shower, he heard a loud popping sound and felt a sharp sting on his left cheek. Apparently that was a Silver River tradition, too.
He recognized the goat-like laugh.
The voice was also familiar.
"I wouldn't pay twenty bucks for that ass. But I'd be happy to kick it for free."
Several of the other barnyard animals found that observation amusing.
Authors deserve your feedback. It's the only payment they get. If you go to the top of the page you will find the author's name. Click that and you can email the author easily.* Please take a few moments, if you liked the story, to say so.
[For those who use webmail, or whose regular email client opens when they want to use webmail instead: Please right click the author's name. A menu will open in which you can copy the email address (it goes directly to your clipboard without having the courtesy of mentioning that to you) to paste into your webmail system (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo etc). Each browser is subtly different, each Webmail system is different, or we'd give fuller instructions here. We trust you to know how to use your own system. Note: If the email address pastes or arrives with %40 in the middle, replace that weird set of characters with an @ sign.]
* Some browsers may require a right click instead
