Tag Archives: Regina

by serialjones | January 23, 2012

Forbidden Truth #146: Merry-Go-Round

While Ward was finally getting his first taste of the Real Thing, Harlan was off with Audre, getting his own initiation into a very different and no less real side of the boy-girl thing.

But before we look in on Harlan and Audre and their after-school recreation, we cannot leave you with only a few thin slices of Ward and Regina’s horizontal dance, and no idea of what Ward would bring to his debriefing with Harlan.

Ward’s tumble in the sheets with Regina was thrilling and sensual. The denial each one had about their mutual attraction resulted in neither of them being prepared for sex that day. They did not have a condom.

Now they were in Regina’s bed, too hot to stop and consider a better way to go about this.

The Thrill of this encounter was not unlike the antisocial activity of the FOSOA. This, too, was a flirting-with-the-margin that separates the nice, legal things from the nasty, illegal ones with all their lingering consequences.

What motivated the FOSOA was their need to break from their obedience and take on something antisocial to stretch against the restraints built into their ambitious lives.

Whereas the desire that ultimately stripped off Ward and Regina’s clothes, tossed open her bed-sheets, and cranked up the space heater angled near the bed, the better for them to rub their naked bodies together without the encumbrance of bedding, was another imperative: the unrestrained mammalian reproductive drive that cares for nothing more than the replication of genes, the sooner the better.

The Sensuality, as it happened, had the same cause as the thrills: sex without a condom, turgid penis against vaginal walls wet with estrus, rolling waves of lubricious mucus membranes that coaxed the turgid penis to deposit its life-bearing fluid near enough to the uterine opening to spark the miracle of life, all in a rage of hormonal activity.

This, of course, will lead to other, very real thrills. Will Regina have a menstrual period in two weeks when she is due? Christmas Break, 2011: The Thriller.

The experience nearly closed off Ward’s mind from all rational processes, from all caution. From all but one tiny piece of consciousness telling him to pull that thing out of its happy place and launch its mess of come anywhere but the baby factory. He did, he thought, just in the nick of time. Or so they hoped.

Harlan and Audre were also experimenting. But their experiment’s parameters were set up along different needs. Less mutual, one might argue, though there are strong pieces of evidence that would counter that argument.

They took advantage of the early end to the school day to find some place to be alone.

Harlan would not normally have considered Golden Gate Park but his usual will had been diluted considerably by these feelings he had, a strange, previously-unexperienced emotional world in which he was light-headed and felt a welcome stupidity take over his usually incisive mind. All he knew was that he wanted to be with Audre.

But he was cautious about who might see him with her. Not all of him had gone dull and stupid with romance. While they were still in the vicinity of the campus, he did not take her hand in his or put his arm around her to tell her he thought she was hot.

This was not because he feared rejection. This might be the case with other young men, who fear that the action of baring their feelings, rather than opening the woman up to a mutual infatuation, will only annoy her and instead conjure rejection.

Harlan had no such fear. He could see that Audre was nuts for him. She was shy, flushed, weakened by some emotions that he thought she might not understand any more than he was able to understand what had taken hold of him. But he knew that she would not reject him or ridicule him for his silly state, because she was in a similar one.

Rather, his inhibition was from fearing the shift in his public image. He was the alpha smart-guy. Word had spread that he and Ward had messed around with black powder, had created an explosion that wounded Ward, who had lost actual flesh and would be forever marked by the experience unless a plastic surgeon someday rebuilt an earlobe for him.

These props to his image had given Harlan a bit of cred and more than a little bit of swagger, which he had found helped him to feel OK about being on the periphery of social inclusion. That bit of swagger, that alphahood as the smart guy, could all be spent in a mad hurry if he were no longer seen as the guy who was above all the teen silliness but, in fact, was caught up in the silliest of it.

But when he and Audre were far enough from anyone likely to see them, his inhibitions fell away. He did not care as long as no one from school could spy on them.

At last they were in Golden Gate Park walking along the asphalt paths. The early sunset of late autumn brought a chill breeze blowing from the northwest, off the frigid Pacific Ocean. Audre shivered as they stood on a little elevation above the merry-go-round and its herd of frozen horses circling in their harmless stampede.

Harlan put his arm around her and pulled her close to him. He had an erection, the same one that had gone from full- to half-extension several times since they first boarded the bus near the Hout Campus. Now it was in full telescope mode and he was feeling awkward because Audre seemed to him so innocent, virginal, even, and he did not want to embarrass her. Her hands were stuffed into the pockets of her open coat. Harlan could feel them as she wrapped her coat around him in a hug and held his waist with her insulated fingers.

She snuggled into him till he felt her press against his hard-on. Then she moved her hips a little bit and he felt the pressure of her body move away from his stiff penis. Then she pulled him closer again and he reached up to her face and opened the curtain of hair and kissed her carefully on the mouth.

Her first contact with him was chaste, as if she were kissing a grandma or an auntie. He kissed her again and this time her mouth opened a little and their tongues touched. They held each other closer and he could feel moisture at the tip of his penis. He hoped he was not going to come. She reached her pocketed hands behind his back and pressed her body still closer to his and they kissed again. And again and again. Their hips were rising and falling slightly with each kiss.

“Hey, get a room!” spat a weathered old homely man in his late 40s, as he hurried by.

This made them laugh, and they broke off the embrace. They held hands and began to walk but Harlan’s Bone Daddy was giving him great discomfort. He excused himself and stepped into the restroom near where they had embraced. In the stall, it took Harlan just a few quick strokes, a flush of the toilet and a quick fondle of his scrotum, to get him painfree and ready to walk.

While they strolled without speaking along the paths of the park, quiet smiles took over their faces. They were oblivious to any stimuli beyond the one they walked with hand-in-hand.

In this state of reverie, Harlan pondered. I don’t think I need to do the Real Thing with this girl. At least not today. Weird. Maybe I’m in love?

Audre interrupted this inner query with a gentle poke to his ribs.

“Hey. I think I like you.”

“Me, too, I think. I mean, you, you I like.”

“But I… I need to go real, real slow.”

“That’s OK. Real slow. OK.”

This was fine for Harlan. He did not need to get the Real Thing from Audre, at least not just then. That goal had flown from him. He was no longer regarding her as another target of his ambition. He liked that she lived outside that world with its drama of success or failure always hanging in the balance.

“And I want you to promise me something?” she continued.

Harlan wanted to pull his hand from her. Now it begins, he thought, the assignments, the requirements, the coercion. The buzzed feeling seemed to come for free, but now comes the hidden cost.

Though his hand loosened up slightly, it did not convey rejection or a new indifference. He needed to hear what she had in mind.

“So, like, promise you what?”

“Um. Like, boys talk? You know? Whatever happens, could you, like, promise you won’t tell anything to your friends?”

“Well, I don’t have many friends.”

“Ward. He’s your friend. And Mona Boggs’ twin brother, right? So promise?”

“Yeah. Yeah, sure. No problem.”

And there truly was no problem in this for Harlan. This was not going to be a hard assignment. Even before Audre had made her request, he was wondering how he could tell Ward that he felt something that made him not want to treat Audre like Gina Dunphy or the Porn Babes. No, this was an easy request. It was almost as if he had requested it of himself.

Just in case she doubted his sincerity he added, “No problem. Really. No problem at all. We are like Las Vegas. What happens here stays here. Right?”

Audre’s answer was non-verbal. She stopped them walking and wrapped Harlan in another open-coat embrace. Bone Daddy came back to life. Something felt different, though, this time, something sweet and pure. Then they kissed and kissed and kissed some more.

From the far-flung corners of the intricate Web, items of interest and intrigue (some even stranger than fiction):

Unprotected Sex on the Rise

1914 Carousel at Golden Gate Park

Comments Off

Filed under Forbidden Truth

Tagged as Audre, Harlan, Regina, Ward

by serialjones | January 20, 2012

Forbidden Truth #145: Daily Ritual

Ward got through the short day on Friday without letting the anticipation of his after-school plans distract him.

There was the quiz in Mr. Mueller’s class, entered into with a major dose of stress because Ward had become so preoccupied from that e-mail exchange with Regina that he had not gotten confident enough with the Goethe poem to feel fully prepared. He was OK with the Rilke, even better with the Hölderlin. But he sweat with worry thinking that the Goethe was going to come up for him and he would be cooked alive.

Herr Mueller seemed to take pride in the methods of examination that he had devised to preclude success for ill-prepared students. This quiz was no exception. To prevent wandering eyes from striking pay dirt, he passed out jumbled versions of each of the three poems in sequence. Student one gets the Goethe, the second in the row gets the Rilke, next the Hölderlin, and so on through each row. Pages face down till the teacher signals the start of the quiz. A student with the Hölderlin would see only the Rilke over the shoulder of the classmate in front of him or her, and those with Rilke would only see the Goethe and so on.

The first task was to reassemble the lines in their original order. Then, they were to translate them with a fair degree of accuracy.

When Herr Mueller, sitting at his desk facing the class, signaled the students to turn over their pages now and begin the quiz, Ward turned his sheet face-up and muttered, unvoiced: Goddamn fucking Goethe! Regina! You distracting bitch!

Then Glen Hammerslag, sitting in the last seat of the row, directly behind Ward, raised his hand and told Herr Mueller that his page was blank.

Herr Mueller may have hated his own imperfections as much has he did those of his students. With an ornery look on his face he pulled out the remaining quizzes from the folder that had bulged before class but was now flat with only a few sheets left. He took the replacement quiz from the folder and gave it to Jocelyn Fabus, at the front of the row. She held it and looked at him, awaiting further instruction.

His face went cross as, in a voice more sarcastic than was necessary, he said to her, “Now, why don’t you pass the first one I gave you to the student behind you? And so on. Then maybe we can start again? Hm?”

Ward exhaled with immense relief. No problem, Herr Mueller.

The rest of the day went along with no untoward happenings. As he walked to his locker at the end of the half-day, Ward felt he had nailed “Reif Sind…” on Mueller’s quiz and, with a nod to pure luck, felt this earned him a good Christmas Break.

With that victory he assessed the damage from the distraction, not only by the e-mail exchange from the night before but also the anticipation of what might await him after school that day. Did Regina really have something for him that he might possess, something that the other FOSOA members would drool over?

It felt like some old espionage movie from the Cold War with the Soviets: the woman with the hots for an agent steals a tape containing the code for an assassination plot that, were it to happen, would put the free world in jeopardy.

Only this was no cold war. Or was it?

Ward was pleased that this little spy movie going on in his life did not deter him from performing well in his classes that day, with that awesome stroke of luck in German a major bonus.

The break could be sweet.

In her last e-mail to him, Regina had implored Ward not to tell anyone that he was going home with her after school. People talk. It can get ugly. And especially do not tell Harlan or Tristan. Swear! No one must know. If my father finds out…

Tristan would be no problem. He was going to be picked up by his mom right at noon, along with Mona, to be dropped off at SFO for a flight to Los Angeles. They were to spend the first half of the break with their dad and Kiki.

Then there was Harlan. That turned out to be an easy one, too. Harlan had his own distraction to deal with. He was in crush or in love or in limerence. Pick one.

Ward could see that Harlan was doing exactly what he, Ward was doing: trying to get out of hanging with his bud after school, as had been their unquestioned practice for over a year.

They met at their lockers as they always did after the last class of the day. Harlan’s relative immaturity provided the perfect means for them to make a shift in their daily ritual.

Harlan had a worried look on his face and it seemed to Ward that it caused the younger boy to rush out his statement. Unlike the Harlan Colfax Ward had known since their first day of school freshman year, this guy was having major problems holding eye contact.

“Man,” Harlan said, hustling out the explanation, “I got all this stuff to do. Like, my aunt, and Hank, I guess he’s my uncle, common-law style. I haven’t like seen them in like ten years. They’re coming down from the north. So I gotta take care of a lot of—-”

“Hey. Me, too. I gotta check on something. Do some research. Computer science, like. If I learn something, I’ll tell you.”

“Whoa, dude. Christmas Break is like ten minutes old, and you’re gonna go off and study at some library? You are seriously dedicated.”

The competitive fire moved Harlan’s eyes to lock onto Ward’s.

“Ah, it’s this, it’s something, it’s someone I know who might teach me some things that I got an itch to learn. It’s not dedication. It’s more like obsession or something.”

“Well, obsess on. Let’s talk or text in a day or so and see what goes on.”

“Totally.”

Ward had told Regina in his e-mail the previous night, when he agreed to her proposal, that he would meet her at the bus stop at 12:30.

She was there. On the ride to her home they tunneled into their PDA worlds, checking messages, Twitter, assorted apps. It is likely that a stranger who took the time to notice them and wonder about them would have thought they did not know each other.

Ward did not feel relaxed enough with Regina to converse with her because this lunch meeting was ostensibly about a flash drive that had some Hoplonik Systems anti-hacker code copied onto it. Purely business and the kind you cannot discuss in public.

But he was also a bright kid and even a dull one would have figured that from all those looks that Regina had flashed at Ward, the ones that had helped to slowly restore his pride as he ignored them day-by-day, were not solely about wanting to help the FOSOA as they planned their next adventure. He had briefly entertained the notion that she was going to dangle the flash drive in front of him until he promised to arrange another date for her to go out with Harlan.

Naw, unlikely. Doesn’t fit. Those looks were directed at him, at Ward. He had ignored them because he had needed to rebuild his razed pride.

And they seemed strange, weird, to him, these looks, the anger at him as if he were the one who had rejected her. Then these other looks of longing that made as little sense as the angry ones.

It was as if Regina held a remote that controlled her emotions. She had tuned in one channel on the ferry when she had persevered with her insinuations that Ward did not know his own sexual orientation and then went straight to personal insult when he threw the same accusation back at her. The next channel on her remote dialed in those hostile looks at him for having fun with Mona Boggs. Now this other look, the flirty, longing one.

For relief from the confusion, Ward buried himself in Smart-Phone World till it was time to get off the bus.

At her home, Regina made him wait at the corner till she could see that Severn’s mother had waved at her, a daily favor asked of Regina’s parents so they would know that their daughter had come home safe (and alone). Once Dottie turned from the window, Regina signalled him and into the house they went.

Then she made the I’m-home-I’m-OK call to her mom who told her to eat lunch, the baguette and cheese and olives, she knew where they were, but not too much. She reminded Regina that they were going out to dinner at Le Colonial with Dottie and Dick and Severn.

Ward walked slowly around the living room looking at things while Regina brought them Cokes and the bread and cheese and olives her mother had mentioned.

She put them down on the coffee table and gestured for him to sit on the sofa. Then she sat there, too, a few feet from him.

As they started to eat, Ward asked if she could show him the flash drive, like, soon?

Regina said, “Yes, soon. We’ll look at it on my computer. In my room. I’ll show you in a minute. But let’s eat first. And I have to ask you a question.”

She bit a piece of baguette and took a slice of cheese and an olive onto her tongue and then chewed. As she did, she slid closer to him on the sofa, till their thighs nearly touched.

“Do you think you could, like, handle honesty from me? I mean, the truth about something that I never told anyone?”

“Yeah, I mean, I hope so.”

“Then, I’m… sorry. I’m truly sorry that I was mean to you on the ferry that day.”

Her face reddened. She looked down. In that moment, at that angle onto her face, Ward saw, for the first time, a different Regina Conklin. Not the brash, bold, competitive girl who seemed to want to take power from him, but someone who, as able, strong, tough as she was, had room in her heart for someone other than herself.

Her hand went up to her forehead and seemed to wipe some heat away. Then it came down and rested on his thigh. Then it met his hand. She wrapped her fingers around his and he gently closed his grip. Their fingers went active with affection for the other’s hand, speaking for them the feelings they could not put into words.

It was just like the instructions on the brown paper sheet.

Because Ward had not rehearsed for this moment, had no nervous expectations of anything other than a flash drive, he was calm enough to recall all the instructions with near-photographic precision. While he held her hand, his other went up to the top of her spine and softly rubbed her neck and then her shoulders, kneading two or three times before he pulled her head close to him. Their mouths kissed and opened and licked, and hands went wandering.

Not too long after that, she led him to her bedroom, where sheets were thrown over and clothes removed and one boy’s penis was withdrawn from one girl’s vagina just one second before he discharged his white reproductive goo.

It was soon enough, they hoped, though for the answer to that they would have to wait till sometime after the end of Christmas Break. An anxious Christmas Break.

From the far-flung corners of the intricate Web, items of interest and intrigue (some even stranger than fiction):

Holderlin: All the Fruit

On Being Limerent

Comments Off

Filed under Forbidden Truth

Tagged as Harlan, Regina, Ward

by serialjones | January 19, 2012

Forbidden Truth #144: New Platypus

Thursday night of that week, Ward stopped ignoring Regina. It was not that he found nothing more to be gained from his continued vindictive withdrawal from her. He had, in fact, only just begun to regain the pride he had lost on the ferry ride when he felt so dissed by her attitude.

OK, he said to himself, she had specified Harlan and she had gotten him instead, so, OK, a little bit of the miffed customer was maybe appropriate. But she had laid it on way too thick when she went on and on about how he and Harlan looked queer to her and the other gearwheels and belt works of the Hout gossip machine.

She, like, couldn’t just accept that it was Ward she got in the deal? I mean, you got lemons, go do that lemonade thing, don’t try to convert it by some miracle into Oban single malt scotch. OK?

But treating him like he was some creepy slug found under a rotten piece of bark on a forest hike? Uncool. To the max. Totally uncool!

So there was supreme entertainment in his cold-ass turning from her whenever she stood beside Audre, who had somehow all of a sudden gotten bold and was all giggly with Harlan who was, like, giggly back at her. Dude! This is so not like you!

So many thoughts were locked up in Ward’s private vault. And not only was there no language that he could use to get them out, but no way to even talk to his primary bud about any of it, because Harlan was acting kind of nuts. Was he in love?

That could be a fucking disaster for the FOSOA.

Ward gave Harlan several escape routes if he did not want to answer when Ward asked him if he might have a crush on Audre: ”Look, I mean, you know, dude, if you are like… you know, or if you’re not, you don’t like have to say anything but, like, it’s OK to like just change the subject but, you know, do you think you might be trying to spend more than a little time with, you know, the retro-hippie chick? For whatever reason, it’s like, cool, so, whatever.”

To which open-ended questioning Harlan responded with a goofy grin and said, “Man. I do not know what is going on. I am like so missing the Real Thing, you know? Since my friend with privileges so shined me on. I will keep you informed of how I do. It is all cool. FOSOA, it’s cool, too.”

Then his eyes went into a glazy look that would have led Ward to believe his friend had joined the ranks of the Hout stoners, had he not known that Harlan, like himself, had zero interest in smoking pot. All that was missing was the washed-out skin tone. Harlan was blissed-out mindless, just like the stoner kids.

Ward admired his friend, and felt a little cross with him, too, over the answer he’d given. Because the two had an open exchange about everything from their schoolwork to the Porn Babes to how their parents (and for Harlan, his sister) irritated them, Harlan just might have been a little more open as to what his plans were for Audre. And not only did this miff Ward, but, whoa, was the 15-year-old like going to get his second helping of the Real Thing before Ward had gotten his first? Way unacceptable. Way, way unacceptable.

In Ward’s mind, since he had come to regard Harlan’s sexual adventure as a mercy fuck from Gina Dunphy, and one that, by the way, had compromised the secret of Einstein-Kepler-Newton for the FOSOA, it hardly counted as the Real Deal. This somewhat softened the blow to his ego.

But Harlan, in spite of all the truth in that description, still had the edge, and this dug under Ward’s skin. When Audre sidled up to Harlan on campus and they became foolish with each other, the only thing that pleased Ward was that Regina accompanied Audre and tried to make her own presence apparent to him. This further encouraged him to ignore her. This was good on many levels, not the least being that he could then focus all his attention on Tristan, his tour guide for Hacker World.

The exploration of this new world gave Ward the greatest pleasure of anything in his life. He had emerged, with Tristan, as those who would take the FOSOA to the next level of applied outlaw science. There was, truly, a treasure trove. Not only in the techniques, but in the rush Ward got as he saw his knowledge expand, at times with quantum leaps.

Harlan was, no debate required, brilliant, with a wicked-fast mind and a frightening curiosity. When they were doing research for the science fair project back in spring, Ward had come upon a quote from a theorist of protoscience: ”Advances are made by answering questions. Discoveries are made by questioning answers.”

Harlan was the nascent scientist who, by example, was teaching Ward how to become a thinker who might make both advances and discoveries. Ward was almost always a small step behind his friend. Not a giant step, a very small one, but nonetheless palpable.

That was in brain-world. In the sexy games, Ward, as he had scripted it, would get, by virtue of his age and greater dating experience, the first full-on sex act, and be the first to graduate up from the Porn Babes.

Now, once again, the Colfax had trumped the Dixon, and was even poised to be the first one to have a full-on lover with whom he would be able to get the Real Thing as a Regular Thing. Bummer.

In the digital world, however, in the cyber realm, Ward had the edge. It would go Boggs, Dixon, Colfax, in that order. Were they horses in a race, less than a nose would separate the winner from the show horse.

And so it was Ward’s new and vastly growing interest in the hack-ability of the virtual world that was primarily what drew him from the attention Regina was trying to lavish on him.

Discomfiting her for mistreating him on the ferryboat and at the brew pub was simply, to Ward, an excellent bonus.

And then there was the shift. It happened on the Thursday night of the last week before Christmas Break, the bulk of the week gone, even more so than on most Thursday nights because on Friday the 16th school would let out at noon, when lunch normally began.

It was on that Thursday night that Ward got the text message from Regina.

Ah. Cool. Now a chance to ignore her from his room. But something, perhaps the implacable curiosity of his young scientific mind, led him to dig a little bit into what might be going on here.

It was as if someone had taken the sharp point of a screw and lightly touched the surface of his skin. First a tickle, then an itch, still pretty easy to ignore. But once the epidermis had been violated, the invader dug deeper till Ward could think of nothing but what that chunky little bitch was trying to do, bugging him like this.

He retrieved the message read it quickly. What? No way.

She is bluffing. She is playing a game. There is nothing to this. Most likely.

But her parents did own a firm that dealt with security for computer systems. What if there is something to this? Hoplonik. She knew enough to throw that name in there. Flash drive? What?

The screw dug deeper till he had trouble concentrating. He had been studying for a German quiz the next day.

Ward had three poems to translate in preparation for what Herr Mueller was going to hit them with. He felt pretty confident with the Hölderlin and the Rilke. He was stumped, though, by the Goethe. He was trying to translate the lines und dich reißet neu verlangen/ Auf zu höherer ßegattung. One online translation service told him this meant that the poet was rising up to meet a new platypus.

He threw down his pen and went to e-mail and sent a harsh message to the pest who had stolen his concentration, as if she were somehow behind the ludicrous translation.

The e-mail went on longer than he had intended.

He told Regina that he was trying to prepare for a German quiz that he had to take second period. She must not have known that these third-year language courses were tough because she was in first-year Spanish, and she probably didn’t care anyway.

Then he aired out his skepticism that there was anything to her claim that she had a flash drive that would have in it anything of interest to him. He told her he thought she was probably blowing up something she had overheard when he was working with Tristan at the computer lab on Monday. Then he scolded her for eavesdropping on them.

Ward secretly hoped she had heard about their outlaw activity, and that it went along with the rakish hunk taken out of his ear-lobe to make him look like a daring, risk-taking kind of guy.

He hit “send” before he proofread his work. Let her sort through the typos. Serves her right for annoying him.

Regina promptly replied. She told him that she thought he was wrong, that she had copied onto a flash drive some code from her father’s computer. It had something do to do with Hoplonik Systems’ anti-hacking programs. Maybe Ward believes her, maybe not. Up to him. But he really should see for himself before he decides that there is nothing on the drive he would find interesting.

Maybe he would like to come over to her house after school let out on Friday and take a look at what she has? If he wanted to, he could borrow the flash drive for the Christmas Break. But just Ward. Not Tristan, not Harlan. Just Ward. And don’t tell them about it, either.

Just Ward, and Regina. Maybe they could take the bus there together after school tomorrow? Her parents would still be at work.

The shift was underway.

From the far-flung corners of the intricate Web, items of interest and intrigue (some even stranger than fiction):

Protoscience

Mistaken Translations

Comments Off

Filed under Forbidden Truth

Tagged as Harlan, Regina, Ward

by serialjones | January 18, 2012

Forbidden Truth #143: Luck

Regina was alive. She felt more pure life coursing through her body than at any time since she had stopped playing sports. This was the first time that she had, at least in the moment, entirely extinguished the nostalgia for her former world, with its less ambiguous evaluation of one’s performance.

She smiled to think that it was not that long ago that she fought back the temptation to seek out Ms. Evans, her soccer coach, and, tail between her legs, beg to be put back on the team. This was different. It effaced that nostalgic temptation. Here was a real game to be played, with real fun, too, when it worked out.

Part of what sent the hot blood surging through her and made her temples throb came from the obvious, that she had actively taken on the very beautiful Mona Boggs, the model-or-movie-star-beautiful Mona Boggs. Or at least Regina thought she had, but in matters like these what we believe to be true is often a better motivator than what is, in fact, true.

And something else warmed Regina’s blood. It was Ward’s aloof disregard of her. During a few courageous moments, she had allowed herself to admit that she had been mean to him that day on the ferry. But as these moments of self-critiquing were hard for her, she dismissed the remorse with a reminder that she had been justified in her treatment of him that day.

This was not altogether a departure from the truth. There was that problem of the false promise these so-called Outlaw Scientists had made to her, when Ward guided her to slip that phony page into the Hout website. He had tried to lighten her role in the ruse when he reminded her on the ferry that he had been the one to walk her through the entire process. Still, even though it was his expertise that had accomplished the task, she was the one on the hook because she had provided the access. Her fingers had done the work, not his.

And, anyway, none of this changed the fact that the boys had promised something and then not delivered on it. Bait and switch. It had worked like a con game. Oh, sure Harlan finally came around but it was too little and too late. That she had to practically threaten Ward to get his friend to go out with her was not, in her opinion, delivering on the promise. In some ways, it was worse than ignoring her had been.

It was wrong, not only from the perspective of simple right and wrong, as in making a promise in order to get something you want and then breaking the promise once you get possession of the thing. This was an ethical violation so simple that even a five-year-old would scream like a tortured cat if he or she fell victim to such a scam.

Not only had Ward initially been inserted in place of Harlan, but it took them forever to get the date planned. This delay left her to speculate that she had been the subject of some conversation between them. She imagined it went something like, “You take her out,” “No, you,” and back and forth.

We all know that the delay and the swap-out of Ward for Harlan was more the product of Harlan’s immaturity that anything else. What probably should go without saying, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, and to use one of Regina’s favorite notions about the dating world, Harlan was not really her type. He probably wasn’t Audre’s, either. But at least those latter two had the affinity of alienated outsiders.

But we agree with Regina that the boneheaded boys had mucked things up, as boys in teen world often do, out of a combination of their developmental lag in getting swift with the intricacies of relationships, and too much pride to admit the need for some guidance. A toxic combination.

The hot blood that Regina felt in her quest for Ward came from her confidence that she would succeed. He had tried to paw her on the ferryboat that day. So he must think she’s hot, or at least maybe his type. That was Confidence-Builder Number One.

Then there was the success she had earned in playing social puppetry with Audre and the Albion Moonlight rehearsal. Confidence-Builder Number Two.

Related to this was that other thing that makes lucky people confident people, at least till their confidence grows excessive and they come to expect luck, banking on something that can go away as quickly as it came.

Regina had in the past learned that she could, if not rely on luck, at least not be surprised when it appeared.

Sports had been the main arena for this. Once, in a close game, she had made an off-balance kick that sent a weak ball floating right at the goalkeeper for the other team. The goalie, an excellent player, maybe the best in the league at her position, fell awkwardly as she reached up for the ball, victim of a leg cramp. Score! Victory! Teammates piling on. Awesome!

Luck, pure and simple. There were other instances, too. An uncannily high number of these. We don’t even need to mention that her parents had the foresight (dumb luck! her father often declared) to start up a firm that would thrive in the time of so-called “war on terror,” in which cyber-security would become paramount in the minds of decision-makers both corporate and governmental.

There would be sparse economic conditions in many households during the flattened economy, but not in the Conklin family. There was nothing under that sturdy, dry roof to incline their only child to identify with the radicals, hippies and bums camping out with the Occupy Movement. Lucky girl!

And her luck seemed to be holding. Here were the boys, in their prankster science adventures, stoked on a firm that her dad and mom had been talking about for months. So much that the name, Hoplonik Systems, had entered her vocabulary, even as the business talk around it was so boring that she had become expert in drifting into her own mind when it came up, better than to try to understand what they were talking about. She often found her body going through a series of reflex yawns, one triggering the next, physiological accompaniments to her boredom and apathy.

Luck: Confidence Builder Number Three.

Regina was so over-amped from this new game that the look on Audre’s face when the two girls left the computer lab did not infuriate her or even bother her, but, rather, amused her and gave her a tickle of delight.

Regina was in the hunt. She was so confident that she would prevail that, when the two girls walked from the Hout campus that Monday and Regina caught a glimpse of her best friend, and could tell in an instant that she was a goner, in crush or in love or whatever, she did not hate Audre for what had just happened between her and the boy Regina had once trained her own sights on.

It was fairly early, we want to say late afternoon and it would have been called that a few months prior, but evening will be the best term here. It was the 12th of December and by 4:30 the dark sky had replaced the sunlight and left only a yellowish glow from the soon-to-be rising moon.

The girls walked along in silence. Audre shot a few guilty looks in Regina’s direction but the latter gave her no confirmation that this feeling was going to be reinforced. Neither of them said anything till they were standing at the bus stop. Regina trembled with anticipation. She was in the hunt and she was going to win. She could feel it. She was going to get the trophy.

She wanted to share her euphoria with Audre, whose hair curtain, though back to its usual veiled position, was not as extreme, not so tightly closed. Regina could see that her friend’s face was pink and her lips a little quivery. “Hey,” said Regina. “It’s OK. Gimme a hug. It’s OK. I think he may be your type. Go for it! Do the right thing for yourself, girl.”

Audre looked at her as if she expected some kind of trick. Regina said nothing more, but, with her head bobbing encouragement, she managed to bring to her friend a little incipient hope that there was no trick here, that Regina meant what she had said.

Audre tilted her head to one side, staring intently through the opening in her hair. Regina made eye contact and nodded once, twice, repeatedly, till she built up Audre’s confidence that, yes, it was OK, whatever it was that was going on in her heart. All was going to be OK between the friends.

Audre threw her arms around Regina and hugged her. The hug lasted a long time. Regina thought she could identify at least some of the multitude of emotions roiling inside her friend. Relief that something with a boy was finally happening for her; maybe some gratitude that Regina was not showing any signs of envy; and maybe, somewhere deep inside her sensitive and mysterious friend Audre, there was an eagerness to share what had just happened in the computer lab carrel with the gorgeous Harlan Colfax.

Finally Audre let go of the hug with a cascade of giggles that were so joyous they turned to tears.

As the bus pulled up with its huff of released air brake pressure and the flump/squeak of the rubber-lined front door opened for them, as the smell of its public transit interior enveloped them and they got on and took a seat, nothing more needed to be said between the two girls.

Audre, thought Regina, was OK, taken care of for now. Regina herself was hot from the blood pumping through her, from the hunt that was underway.

Hoplonik Systems and Ward Dixon and Take that, Mona Boggs: Game on!

Let the fun begin.

From the far-flung corners of the intricate Web, items of interest and intrigue (some even stranger than fiction):

Is There Such a Thing as Luck?

Lloyd Price: Lady Luck

Comments Off

Filed under Forbidden Truth

Tagged as Audre, Regina

by serialjones | January 17, 2012

Forbidden Truth #142: Feathers Aflame

As we continue our exploration into the perspectives of the five Hout students in the computer lab during their after-school study on that Monday in December, we must now choose from the three remaining kids. We have snuck into the spreadsheet lesson, have seen the red cheeks and touched hands and poor concentration of Harlan and Audre, at the start of something much more than a project organizing a vinyl collection. What, exactly, that something will be, only the future will reveal.

So let us now visit the two remaining FOSOA boys.

They, too, had settled into a carrel. Ward had stroked in his password and logged in, and he and Tristan had gone on a little adventure of their own.

Ward had been eager to show Tristan a blog he had discovered, by an anonymous hacker, presumably a guy though that was open to debate, who used the name Mota Hari. He called it his nom de guerre. The foreign sound of this added another level of intrigue to the mysterious character.

The predilections of the two boys were beyond the sophistication of many of their peers. They had, almost as much as Harlan, voracious appetites for learning about the adult world, the world of power. For all three of them, the more knowledge they acquired, the easier it would be for them to obtain some of that power.

It was as if their kiddie naïveté had caught fire and they had run from it. Their innocent and incessant curiosity had made them charming children in the eyes of adults. But with their adolescent awakening, the naïveté was openly dissed by their comrades, and they collectively attempted to expel that form of charm from their behavioral repertoires.

Ward, while surfing the net one day, had stumbled upon a picture, from decades before, maybe the 1980s, called “Poodle with a Mohawk.” He printed it and tacked it to his wall. His new trajectory of rebellion was validated one day when his father brought to his room some library books Ward had left on the dining room table. The dad saw the punk-rock poodle. A spark of recognition opened up his weary eyes and his inner wheels seemed to stop turning, if only for a few seconds. “I remember that. Still funny. Yeah. That’s a good one. Find it online?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Good. Yeah, that’s still good.”

The young men had run from their naïveté. As they did, they each looked like a bantam rooster with tail feathers aflame. And, like that young cock, they not only took the fire with them, but fanned the blaze in their attempts to escape it.

The way this worked with Mota Hari was that, in their haste to grab onto this hip, insider blogger, this hacker with the red-hot advice on how to get into and monkey-wrench systems, they did not bother to learn what Mota meant, or who Mata Hari was, either.

It took Ward a few tries to get into Mota Hari’s site. It appeared that the site itself had been hacked into. Was it Hoplonik Systems? A few days before, MH, as he or she was called, had given out an alternative URL for his or her disciples to use to get into the site. Meanwhile, it seemed, the main site just happened to have crashed.

Neither did Ward nor Tristan know what nom de guerre meant. They both studied German for their foreign language. Even there, these two science-boys bit into the requirements with savage intensity and then forgot a great deal of what was learned once the high grades were bagged.

It would have been good if Ward or Tristan knew the translation of nom de guerre, so they could get some idea of the gravity of what they were attempting. Harlan would later tell them what that phrase meant. He was of greater language retention than the other two, and he had taken French and made a point of committing to memory those phrases most commonly used by non-French-fluent English speakers. He could not yet incorporate je ne sais quoi or bête noir or tout de suite in his own speech. But he recognized these phrases and he knew what they meant.

Harlan’s knowledge would have been particularly helpful to Tristan and Ward in studying Mota Hari’s blog. But Harlan was otherly occupied. Without his input, his friends did not know they were associating with someone who thought of himself (or herself) as a warrior. Either that, or was mordantly tongue-in-cheek.

MH had a new post today. It was about taking on the establishment under the aegis of the Occupy Movement. “Monkey-wrench the mother fuckers,” urged MH.

Ward and Tristan looked at each other as if they were two ten-year-old boys who had discovered “Star Wars” for the first time. This was because, their rooster feathers aflame, they were crowing over how smart they were and how much smarter they were becoming by the minute.

Ward jumped up and clapped his hands together. “Yes!”

Mr. Murphy looked at him sternly over his reading glasses. The look he shot at Ward was not unlike a little figurine of Mrs. Santa with a rolling pin that Ward had seen after his mother had returned from the KPFA crafts fair and unloaded her bounty on the dining room table. Mr. Murphy wore a mustache, a shirt instead of an apron and a stern grimace instead of a benign smile, but the round, soft body, the pink face and the wire-rimmed glasses were a match.

Ward sat back down. But before he did, he caught a glimpse over the carrel wall to the one butted up against theirs. Regina was quietly mousing and clicking and maybe listening to everything they said.

“See,” said T-Boggs, “MH is into Hoplonik, too. Or they’re into him. He’s trying to figure out how to create a shield that keeps them from hacking him back when he invades a system. This dude is mega-cool.”

The two FOSOA on active duty churned as Tristan clicked and moused his way through the blog. We will rise above the technical details that were the core of their conversation and look instead into the minds of the two boys becoming dangerous men.

Ward was jacked up on the vapors of power. Until very recently, he had seen himself as an underdog in nearly everything he did. Though he was super bright, the relegation to social insignificance over the years had pigeonholed him, not only in the society of his school classes, and not only among the super bright peers he cavorted with, but in his own mind, too.

He had, in a word, developed a strategy of social reserve, concealing his brightness and presenting his social deficits in place of a more vibrant personality. As those of you who have paid attention are aware, this approach was going through a shift. No more innocent recluse. Get ready for the new Ward Dixon. Here he comes. Kind of.

These changes never happen as quickly as we can imagine them happening. The world of the hacker, the idea of becoming a peer with Mota Hari, was a means of fronting some of that new power. And he had this very cool peer tutor to guide him.

Ward bounced with joy at the prospects that awaited him.

For Tristan, something new was happening, too. He was a tutor for the first time. His brains, his learning, his risk-taking were all desired by these new friends. He had never before met one, not to mention two, bright, ambitious guys who were not also cowardly, obedient geeks, and three years behind everyone else in all ways but grade-bagging. He had never told a fellow student at Mt. Corvée about his hacking. Nothing more than an occasional hint to test the waters, and those waters had always felt too icy and uninviting to explore.

Not so with the FOSOA. He had recently found himself grinning ear-to-ear upon the realization that Ward had a talent and that he, Tristan, had been the one to hatch it. Tristan’s memory of such an involuntary grin breaking open his usual dour countenance went back to maybe his toddler days, before he realized how betrayed he felt by his dad’s serial broken promises. This was new. This was fresh. Yes!

Regina is the last of the five we shall revisit before we leave these students to work on their studies without our further invasive presence.

One would expect the girl-jock to be forlorn, the odd person out while the other four are paired up, one pair conspiring to acts of love, the other pair to acts of war.

But Regina is not forlorn. She had, over her many years as an athlete, heard a piece of wisdom so many times, from coaches and the veteran players who were her captains on the fields of sport, that she had inculcated it into her marrow. It was so much a habit of her thinking that it had become part of her being, her programming. No longer was it an act of will to bring it into play, but an act of will for her not to bring it into play.

It was wisdom based on fact: There is a lot of game left; we may be behind but it is only the first half. Yeah, they have scored on us but they will soon ache with the weight of fatigue from these early exertions. Stay tough, girls, stay in the game, see if we can catch them before this thing’s done.

Hoplonik. Her parents had bandied this name about the last several weeks. She was sure that was the name of that firm they had just contracted with on some security software project. The name was odd. Maybe the founder was born somewhere else and it was his or her name, but for whatever reason it stood out.

The boys were talking about it. She did not know what they were doing on the other side of the carrel wall, but she did recognize that name, Hoplonik.

She sat in her carrel occupied by her desultory mousing and clicking but she did not feel alone. She smothered a grin. She thought she might be able to get hold of that something that Ward would find very interesting.

There is a lot of game left, girl, just you watch and see what happens.

From the far-flung corners of the intricate Web, items of interest and intrigue (some even stranger than fiction):

Poodle With a Mohawk

Mata Hari

Comments Off

Filed under Forbidden Truth

Tagged as Regina, Tristan, Ward

by serialjones | January 13, 2012

Forbidden Truth #140: Flash Drive

After Harlan had his epiphany, that is, that he might be able to teach Audre what he knew about Doing It, he became privately obsessed with her.

Audre was not considered by anyone at Hout to be in the same league as Mona Boggs. Audre had a charm, to be sure, but it was subtle, rare and refined but subtle, like certain foods and wines. Then she made it all the more subtle by hiding it from view.

Harlan’s new attraction to her had several dimensions. One was the foregoing, the bit with the rare, refined beauty, understated by the intrigue of the self-veiled girl-woman.

Another was that her removal from Hout society gave her the air of the innocent virgin. This gave Harlan the sense that here was someone in his class, older than him, maybe more socially mature than him, but someone like himself who did not mix much with the rest of the Hout student body. He and Audre were both outsiders who were not geeky or nerdy.

Audre was actually kind of hip, in an old-school sort of way. Harlan felt but did not know that “hip” was synonymous with “aware,” that is, that it reflected a consciousness distinct from the norm of the community.

One other and perhaps the most important dimension of his attraction to her was that he had caught her many times gazing at him from behind that hair veil. Months before, this had made him uncomfortable. He did not know how to respond, other than to pretend that it was not happening. To do that, he had to ignore her and try to suppress his knowledge that it was happening.

But in his new awareness, something had occurred to him: this was a shy girl’s version of what Gina Dunphy had done, the first few times she had come in to help his mom with the seasonal deep-clean. Because it was the shy girl’s version of it, he didn’t recognize it as a come-on. But it was no less a flirtation than was Gina’s sly smile, as if she had a joke to share.

Harlan thought that Audre’s staring, if she was, in fact, flirting, meant that the odds of her rejecting him were pretty low. This was the most important feature of the many that fed his obsession with Audre Freeman.

My, how much he had learned! And in just a few months. And how important those two afternoons with Gina had been, both the School-for-Screwing afternoon, and the Hey, I’m Rory, here to pick up my girlfriend afternoon. For without both of these, Harlan would not be thinking of ways to get Audre into bed.

Nor would he be entertaining thoughts of how not to become locked into a romance. He was still a dude’s dude. Now there was this new land to explore, but he was not ready to homestead there just yet. That would, at this stage in his life, be a sheer waste of time. He liked the idea, though, of a nice long camping trip in that place, with the notion that he could return back to the Land of Dudes as soon as he wanted.

He had seen other guys go into Romance Land, get locked into a girlfriend, and soon turn their backs on the guys who had been there for them for years. They became total saps, wimping out whenever their women did not like something they did. The boinking was so important to them that their buds were cut off unless the girlfriend had to fly to L.A. or something, to visit Aunt Agnes who had just been admitted to the hospital.

No, Harlan was not ready for Romance Land. As 15-year-old boys often do, he doubted if he would ever be ready for the full homesteading project.

So he tried to come up with some kind of exit plan, before he got trapped by having that sweet thing, that Real Thing, on a steady basis. But right now Harlan was not doing so well with the exit plan, because getting in was obsessing him like nothing ever had, with the possible exception of his GPA.

On the Monday before Christmas Break, he wore dark glasses in the Bistro to scan the place where Audre and Regina sat every day, to see if Audre was still in the habit of looking at him, and, yes, he confirmed that she was.

After school, good fortune gave him an excellent hand to play. Audre and Regina were leaving the computer lab as Harlan, Tristan and Ward were going in.

“Hi,” Audre said to him. Then she turned her head to the side.

“Hey,” said Harlan, “How’s it going? You down with your computer work?”

He had no idea what the scope of their computer work was. These two girls were not in Dual Discipline AP Science.

“Oh, it’s OK, I guess.”

“It’s OK.” Harlan felt idiotic repeating what Audre had said.

“I mean, I didn’t really get it.”

“What do you mean?”

Audre looked at Regina who shrugged her shoulders as if to say, Don’t look at me – you’re on your own.

Audre turned back to Harlan and explained that Mr. Helms, their Applied Info teacher, had given them an assignment that had stymied both girls. They had to put together Excel spreadsheets with some algebraic equations, and they had become stumped. And then discouraged. They had decided to leave and work on it another day.

“I can show you some things,” Harlan offered, as casually as he could manage.

For a moment, he thought of doing her project for her, or at least the thinking part. Like, maybe that would move things along between Audre and him.

“Hey, in or out but close the door. It’s getting cold in here.”

Mr. Murphy, the teacher assigned to after-class computer lab, had barked this order to the five kids holding open the door. “Come in, go out, but shut the door! It’s December, for cryin’ out loud.”

Once they were all inside, Mr. Murphy assigned them carrels. “Only two at a time, per carrel; you know the rules.”

Harlan looked only at Audre when he said, “Why don’t I show you some things, and then you can show Regina.”

As Regina went to her own carrel, Ward, trying and not trying to get her attention at the same time, placed all his attention on Tristan, in an effort to appear to ignore her. Harlan’s ignore her advice ruled supreme in his mind. It helped him to invoke the will power to stay the course.

Ward was far from indifferent. He did not want to reward Regina for her weird behavior so he tried to hold himself aloof. At the same time, he wanted to demonstrate to her that he and the new guy were wrapped up in some important work, which, in fact, had been their topic as the three of them walked to the lab.

“Hoplonik Systems,” said Ward as he and Tristan settled into their chairs. “We gotta learn more about them, dude. Down on the Peninsula. Silicon Valley. They are like doing the most advanced anti-hacking shit. They got this shield, like, that turns back on the hackers and then hacks into the hackers’ systems, like pulling out all this information. We got our work cut out for us.”

Regina, from her own carrel, had no trouble overhearing all this. Ward made a point of speaking in a voice loud enough to impress her with the high level of mischief they were working on, but soft enough not to attract the attention of Mr. Murphy.

Regina settled into her own chair and turned on the computer. Then she smiled. Here she was, the odd person out, the only one without a companion at her workstation, and yet she felt no blues. She smiled more broadly. This was because the systems security firm her parents owned had just won a contract to do work for Hoplonik. The lure to pull Ward Dixon into her life was right there, ready for the taking.

So Regina’s luck had struck twice. First Albion Moonlight and now this. For the past two months, her father and mother had put the potential Hoplonik contract at the forefront of their discussions around the house. Through most of the fall, her father had spent hours after dinner, usually on Skype or e-mail, communicating with key people at that firm. He often worked at his home workstation, but sometimes from his laptop and at times his iPad.

Regina had often been chided, gently, lovingly, patronizingly, by her father for her lack of brilliance with the digital world. She could do the basics, Facebook, texting, e-mail, papers word-processed for class assignments, but she was not going to prosper in a career that required the kind of mind found more often in people like her father and Ward Dixon.

In her Applied Info class, the teacher had given the students flash drives to confirm that they knew how to move data from one computer to another. Before the Christmas break, they would have to demonstrate familiarity with this simple operation.

Regina had pondered, from the time the assignment had been given, what she would copy from which computer at home. She now knew. She suspected that her dad felt so secure in his home that he did not password-protect his Mac, so her next challenge would be finding an opportunity to get to her father’s computer.

The lure was there, almost in her possession. She now knew what she would copy onto that flash drive.

And she knew that Ward Dixon was going to take that flash drive home for the Christmas Break.

From the far-flung corners of the intricate Web, items of interest and intrigue (some even stranger than fiction):

Peer Tutoring

Anti-Hacking Law Criminalizes Most

Comments Off

Filed under Forbidden Truth

Tagged as Audre, Harlan, Regina, Tristan, Ward

by serialjones | January 12, 2012

Forbidden Truth #139: Wildfire

Regina Conklin was also agitated, but, unlike Ward, she was having a difficult time going to sleep. Thoughts burned in her mind like a wildfire in the dry hills of Southern California in August or September.

She knew that she would not sleep till she had conceived a scheme to get Ward’s attention. Regina vacillated between collapsing and, in her language, kicking ass. Both could provide the foundation for a plan. When she considered the phrase, Maybe I should just collapse away from it all, she meant folding up her outward manner and going inside, closing off all cheer, all light, all joy for anything that had to do with any of the three boys who called themselves the FOSOA.

It might work.

But, most likely, it would not. That was because not one of them seemed to care if she existed. Ward and Harlan had, at one time, seemed to care deeply about her, when she worked at the Hout Admin Office over the summer and they needed something from her.

And then Ward had shown too much interest in her, just after school started up again.

That was so not cool, that whole ferry ride to Marin. He may not have looked like a geeky metal-mouth dweeb anymore, but he still acted like one. He deserved to be shut down. Really. So uncool, that whole day.

What had made that day with Ward particularly bad was that, back then, she still thought she had a shot at Harlan. Now she could hardly stand to look at him. He struck her as a CGI-enhanced movie character, like the guy in “Big,” or the star in a story of a 15-year-old who eats a bunch of some tainted kiddie vitamins, like, maybe accidentally enhanced by some scientist’s error, and the kid gradually becomes a five-year-old again. Only he’s still tall as a teenager and he shaves, but not too much, like maybe twice a week, max, if the kid is played by Harlan Colfax. And he still gets stiffies, and maybe he’s even done it with some skank but, in all other ways, he’s still a five-year-old boy.

It made her sick to think of him and how stupid she had been to think she liked him.

So, nix on the collapse option. No way to just go into her depressed self and hope this makes them all feel bad. No chance that will deliver the desired results. They would not even notice her.

In spite of her recent foray into social puppetry — and it had been successful, in that she had her friendship back with Audre — Regina had to admit that she was new at working with the subtleties of relationships. She was still a novice. The Albion Moonlight thing had fallen into her waiting hand like a piece of ripe fruit. She knew she could not depend on that kind of good fortune happening with any frequency.

No matter, with or without luck, she would give this new challenge her best effort. She still had the temperament of a jock. No to collapse! Yes to competition! It had to be a game, winner takes it all. Unlike soccer, more like baseball, there could be no draws. One victor. Play hard till it’s decided.

She was mistaken in thinking that what she saw of the drama in the Bistro at the FOSOA table constituted a thorough scouting of her opponent. Regina had missed the crucial act, the coin-down-the-gullet grand finale. For that reason, she did not know that Ward and Mona were not, as the old term has it, a-sparkin’.

Well, they were, sort of, but the match that struck the spark was slapstick, and Ward skulking off with his wounded pride was not the same as making googly eyes, one hottie to another.

But Regina played with her own version of the competition for a while. It felt so natural to frame her world as a battle that it would have seemed foreign to consider Mona and Ward in any other terms. So it would be one-on-one till a winner was declared.

But she felt weary when she considered the disadvantage she suffered in comparison to Mona Boggs.

How could she compete with someone so beautiful? Slender, pretty, vivacious, pretty, cute-sounding little voice, pretty, pretty smile, pretty eyes, too pretty to be real and so vain that each day she had to work herself into looking even more pretty? Yech! No way to compete with that.

Yet, no quitting, either. Play the game out to the end. There must be a way to prevail.

Then Regina caught herself. What am I thinking? I do not even like Ward Dixon!

And, besides, it was so unfair that Mona Boggs was not around when he really was a little geek. It was even more unfair that Regina was around then and still had this old image of him to shake loose. Totally unfair. Mona comes along and he is tall, and has no chrome smile, and he’s got these stupid coin tricks that he never offered to do for Regina. Maybe it would have turned out differently if only he had. Insensitive donkey.

Regina imagined Ward getting punished for showing only his non-geeky side to Mona. She aired out her imagination, the dark side of it, and then felt embarrassed at her ugly wishes for him.

She took a deep breath. She did not need to tell herself to take the deep breath. She did it out of sheer exhaustion, as if she had run laps or wind sprints and had just returned to stasis after the exertion. A deep, rich breath. Ahhh.

Yes, she concluded in her quieted state, she would compete for Ward’s attention. But it was not the same as beating another player out for a spot on a team or defeating an opponent on the field of play. This was a different league.

To bolster her confidence as she prepared to enter the field of battle against the delicious good looks of Mona Boggs, Regina replayed her most recent triumph, that which had brought back her friend. A soft competition. No losers. No hurt feelings. The smoother the scheme, the better the outcome.

That had been a piece of cake. This new one would be a tougher challenge. It was fortunate that she had prevailed her first time out in this strange new league. She was one-for-one. Let’s go for two in a row!

She told herself that victory would depend on her not playing beyond herself. She knew this cliché well, knew what it meant, that, in order for her to succeed here, she had to avoid over-confidence and acknowledge her novice status, never assume for one minute that she was entitled to an automatic second victory, that all she had to do was phone in her performance.

She would need to draw from her success with Audre and not try to do something she did not know how to do. She would somehow lure Ward into her life. She did not know how she could do this. Was it possible to find something that she could dangle before him, something that he would want so badly that she could lead him where she wanted him to go? She could then show him she could be different to him than she had been on the boat ride.

Regina was pleased with the way her idea had developed. The breathing had calmed her. She thought she might even be able to sleep soon.

The alarm! It was going to go off in four and a half hours! Ugly. The burning eyes, cranky mood, headache and dull mind would all be visited upon her when the alarm slapper her prematurely from her slumber.

Almost done. She had to finish the plan for the next day before sleep would come. She was determined to find something that Ward needed and then get it and entice him with it to pull him into her life.

Omigod, what am I doing? I don’t even like this boy!

But the truth was that Regina did like the boy. And she knew it. She was making a transition from not liking him to liking him. Better to say that she was shifting her perception of Ward from the image of his younger self, the image of him that she had carried all the while he had outgrown that self. The braces, they were gone. The short, nerdy guy, he was gone with them.

Sure, he was awkward and silly, and he postured in ridiculous ways. But he was taller, smart, even smarter, it seemed, stupid coin tricks aside, and with a look in his eyes that was different. There was in them an intensity that had not been there even as recently as the day they took the ferryboat to Marin.

Mona Boggs, the interloper from L.A. She was able to see the new Ward without the lingering stink from the old one. Unfair, yes, but Mona had, without willing this or even being conscious that she was doing it, opened Regina’s eyes to see beyond the little boy who had been so silly on the ferry. Out of that little boy this other guy, this, dare she say it, this young man had emerged.

Regina was going to be different to Ward. She was going to be sweet to him. She was going to learn what he wanted and she was going to try and get it and use it to bring him into her life.

Then the sleep that had been so elusive took her down to its wondrous depths, down and away from the ragged edges of her troubled existence.

Regina had a plan. She could yield at last to the seduction of deep sleep. Her last sensation was that she was disappearing inside the mattress, pulled down so deeply that should someone come to wake her, the sheets and her electric blanket would lie smooth and flat and the bed appear to be empty, so lost was she in her slumber. She had a plan.

From the far-flung corners of the intricate Web, items of interest and intrigue (some even stranger than fiction):

Teens with Disturbed Sleeping Patterns at Risk

How Much Sleep Do You Need?

Comments Off

Filed under Forbidden Truth

Tagged as Regina

by serialjones | January 9, 2012

Forbidden Truth #136: Rats

We must pull our attention from Harlan and his affection for Bone Daddy, who has responded so voluptuously to the idea that Audre Freeman might be hot. We don’t want to encourage Harlan to take any more time away from the many obligations that he already has. A post-orgasmic calm has settled over his nerve-rippled body, perfect for the hours of work he still has ahead of him before he shuts off his computer, brushes his teeth and crawls into bed.

Only a few miles away, maybe even fewer than two, Ward has finished his work and has gone to sleep. He awakens a few hours later. He has come in his boxers from a wet dream. It did not disturb him, as it had earlier in life when he first experienced these nocturnal emissions and did not understand that most boys his age had them with some frequency.

Ward got up and changed to a dry pair of undershorts, took a towel he kept handy for these moments and dried his sticky pubic hair and the sheets.

Consciousness was again folding over him when the dream resumed, the one that had spat the ejaculate from his penis, the dream that he had forgotten till he was going back to sleep. The memory of it brought him back to full wakefulness.

In the dream, he was standing behind a tree in Glen Park. Three girls his age were playing catch with a softball. One of them was Mona Boggs. She looked the same as she did in the Bistro at Hout during lunch, only in the dream, she had immense breasts. When she tossed the softball, the right breast fell loose from her bra.

He could not at first make out the other two girls. Then one emerged as Regina Conklin. Only with the more modest breasts of real-life Mona.

Then Tristan Boggs comes out from somewhere and walks to the tree Ward is standing behind. They high-five each other for no obvious reason. One of the girls shouts to them, embarrassing Ward, who had not known they knew he was there. He tries to conceal his erection, which has popped through his closed zipper like no erection could ever do outside of a dream or a CGI scene in a movie.

Then he sees Mona throw the softball to one of the other girls, but she throws it too high and it goes over the girl’s head and bounces off the tree just a few inches above Ward’s head. He ducks. The ball, in slow motion, arcs up on the rebound and over the head of, first, Regina, then Mona. He cannot identify the third girl, whose back is to him. All he can see is long, blond hair down to her waist, and the back of her ballplayer cap. This girl runs toward the ball and catches it over her shoulder, like a wide receiver on a football team, or Willie Mays in the 1954 World Series.

This is where he awakens, breathing heavily, drawers soaked with warm, pungent semen.

Ward, at sixteen, was, in some respects, much like the Ward he would become as an adult, disinclined to dissect dreams and dig into their parts for messages or clues on how to live his life, or for solutions to some metaphysical conundrum that might be harrowing him.

Like many people, his piercing the meaning of his dream-life was isolated to the tracing of images back to the source material from the “real world.”

Over Labor Day weekend, when Harlan was at Lake Tahoe and Geordie was working at Black Bart’s, Ward had gone out to Glen Park. He wanted some companionship and he needed a break, having spent several hours doing not only the homework due on Tuesday and Wednesday, but some prep work on an extra credit project, knowing he could score major competitive points over his friend. So he took advantage of the quiet weekend and got a leg up on the reading for some supplemental take-home work that would be due mid term.

Glen Park had become a destination for a little relaxation because Ward had gone there earlier in the summer and by chance got into a long afternoon of throwing frisbees with a couple of long-haired guys in their early 20s. This time, there were no long-haired frisbee players, just some old people in their 40s walking dogs and talking in that subdued, serious way old people have.

He was about to go to another park to look for some kind of sport he could get into, a pick-up basketball game, maybe a softball team needs a player, when five or six girls came into the park and started doing soccer drills, kicking the ball around, passing it from one side to the next.

Ward stepped behind a large tree before they noticed him. From his hiding spot he spied on them. Doing nothing but watching the girls play ball, he felt a sizeable tent go up in his pants. He turned and pressed his back to the tree, reached inside his waistband and put his hand around the tent pole and moved it back and forth a half dozen times. Then he quickly undid his zipper with the other hand and shot a load out onto the fallen leaves and forest duff before again securing his trousers.

Immediately Ward knew that what he had just done was bad, knew he could get arrested, and that, if he did, he might have to register as a sex offender. He did not deny that he had just perped some pervy behavior. But, dang! It sure did feel good.

For Ward, that event was what he thought the dream was all about, that day at Glen Park over Labor Day Weekend. But funny how the unconscious works, even when we don’t care to know if it even exists. Ward would never know that the dream had worked, inexplicably, to embolden him the next day to make light of his coin trick when Mona Boggs tried to tease him about his faux pas.

“Did you get your quarter back?”

“No.”

“You didn’t? Why not?”

It seemed to Ward that Mona was trying to find again something about that failed trick that would trigger the laughter that had doubled her over the day before. Since Ward had swallowed his pride and his confidence along with the quarter in the finale of his coin-trick performance, he could have blushed and made defensive excuses, vintage mid-teen explanations but practiced by plenty of older guys, too, some deep into their adult years.

There were a number of ways he could have lamely deflected responsibility for his screw-up: The lights on the ceiling; T-Boggs bumped me; Harlan whistled; someone pulled out a chair and the scraping sound threw off my timing.

I am better than that trick. Now, come on, please, give me a break.

But he said none of these, nor anything like them. Instead, he smiled at her. He had no idea where his new confidence came from, face-to-face with maybe the hottest babe ever to set foot on the Hout campus, but he looked at her and he said, “Naw. It’s gone. A tip for the guys who work in the sewers.”

Then, a big smile.

“Ooh, yech!” said Mona Boggs, though she broke into a wide grin right afterward. Ward could tell by her laughter that she had not punished him by averting her face, that she liked that he had not deflected responsibility for his mistake but had spun the problem with the missing quarter into kind of a joke.

This was all grown-up stuff that surprised him. And he was blown away that he could do it at all while being teased by a beautiful girl. He was also surprised at how much she seemed to like his rejoinder.

But the weirdest part for Ward was that, for the first time ever, he saw Regina Conklin, at another table, looking at him as if she cared about him. Hard to believe, but what else could that look mean?

This was difficult to understand because he was convinced that he had played her fool on the day they took that ferry to Marin. Her disdain for him had not just hung around on the boat and the walk through the shopping center, the Cokes and fries and onion rings they had at the brew pub. It had hung around him like soot one cannot get out of a sweater. Like, stained and smelly, and permanently so.

This new look on Regina’s face made no sense. Where was it coming from? The light in her eyes was static, as if she were hypnotized.

She was over there, standing up, getting on her coat and shouldering her bag. Audre, the retro-hippie chick with the two rusty streaks in her hair, was also putting on her coat. But the most confusing part followed.

As they walked past the table where Mona was grinning at Ward’s comfort level with gross things, Regina scowled at him. She nearly hissed at him.

It was just the same as if Ward had succeeded, not failed, on the ferry ride, and had now jilted the loyal, suffering Regina Conklin by showing Mona Boggs that he could be the kind of het man who removed the garbage and took care of the mice and rats.

Her look was just the same as if that were the reality of their relationship. Only it was not what had happened.

But Regina was acting as if it were.

Weird!

From the far-flung corners of the intricate Web, items of interest and intrigue (some even stranger than fiction):

Willie Mays: The Catch

Why Men Take Out the Trash

Comments Off

Filed under Forbidden Truth

Tagged as Harlan, Mona, Regina, Ward

by serialjones | January 4, 2012

Forbidden Truth #133: Circus Pro

We shall now return to Regina and Audre, on their habitual post-lunch stroll around the Hout campus. There were a few short passageways between the soft beige buildings of brushed stucco, textured to give some suggestion of the pioneering Spanish influence on the early architecture of San Francisco. In a little less than ten minutes, the two could traverse the entire grounds, the paths and the two quads.

The first of the quads, where, in nicer weather, the more gregarious students congregated, was only half occupied on this November afternoon. The other, smaller one, where Audre had at one time found her precious solitude, was empty. Then, around the Bistro and on to the next path that joined the quads. They usually went through the circuit twice.

Often, they talked a little, usually quiet talk, digestive talk, with their kicked-up blood sugar levels from lunch. Sometimes, though, they walked in silence. Regina, the more talkative of the two, had learned the pleasure of silence, a more meditative mode of being, from her introverted friend. She had learned that thoughts, if held inside, could be incubated, matured. Then they came out better when they were finally hatched.

Regina had never known a girl, or a woman, for that matter, who did not pry into her private thoughts and who seemed to actually like the shared silence.

The girls did not know they were practicing meditation, that they had accidentally stumbled upon that quiet, inwardly-directed consciousness that redeemed them from the pressure to jabber for the sake of keeping someone safe from the anxious state of shared silence.

This appreciation for quiet communion had become so unquestioned, so habitual, that Regina was startled to hear Audre, uncharacteristically, ask her, “What’s wrong?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you’re so quiet.”

“So are you.

“I’m quiet a lot. I have a quiet personality. I think I’m an introvert.”

“True, that, girl, but you have, like, become my best friend because, well, for a lot of reasons, but, for one reason, that, like, you know, you’re OK with quiet. And I’m OK with quiet as long as you’re OK with quiet, but you’re not right now, are you?”

“This quiet is different. You’re hiding something.”

“No, I’m not. What do I have to hide?”

“I don’t know. You’re the one that’s hiding it.”

This dialog had to be suspended, by tacit agreement, as they walked through the larger and more gregarious quad, which, though only partly occupied, still had far too many kids for them to carry on their conversation with any sense of privacy. They passed by clusters of chattering students, some lost in their PDAs. A pair of boys, one with a DSi playing a game with thumbs working like hungry birds over spilled seed. The other boy talked trash, trying to get the player to choke.

When they were back on the path after gliding through the busy quad, Regina, in retrospect, realized that, in fact, she was hiding something. Audre was right, something had been hidden from her, but it had also been hidden from Regina herself, from her own awareness.

Best friend, yeah, but sometimes I think I’d be better off if I were just left alone. No, best friends do this. That’s why we love them.

“Yeah,” Regina fessed up, “I guess you’re right.”

“It’s about the new girl, isn’t it? The twin sister of the new nerdy boy, huh?”

“Yeah, I think so. I don’t think I like her very much.”

“What has she done to you?”

“I don’t know. For one, she’s too good-looking.”

“Yeah, true. She’s really pretty. But she also works on it like she’s not so pretty and is trying hard to come up to pretty. It is kind of unfair.”

“True.”

“Pisses you off?”

“Only just now.”

“Hm. It’s OK to be pissed at her for that. Is that all?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. It’s that she was laughing at Ward Dixon’s really stupid coin tricks, huh?”

“No, no, not at all – well, maybe a little. It is definitely not good to encourage boys to be stupid, to do lame coin tricks. Not good. It trains them to be stupid for the rest of their lives. Then everyone who knows them has to put up with the stupid things because they were, like, encouraged when they were 16.”

This last statement hung in the air as the two friends now passed for the second time through the smaller quad where one table was now occupied, by Zenzi Ryoko, a Japanese foreign student no one disliked. Nor did anyone like him, either. He was, everyone agreed, very nice. But he had no friends. He worked on an iPad, probably doing homework.

When they got to the adjoining pathway, the conversation did not resume. It continued to hang in the air. So Silence was the third companion on their remaining walk. For Regina, unlike their conjoined quiet moods, this one did not bring her tranquility. She was, in fact, very uptight.

Mona Boggs had pissed her off because Ward was supposed to be hers. No. Not hers. Not her boy, not anyone she would ever want to date. Ever. But it felt so unfair. Why was that? She was puzzled.

The two friends bid each other goodbye and went to their respective classes.

Regina could not concentrate. This made no sense. It was so unfair. She was convinced of this. She was so convinced of it that she entertained herself with a fantasy that she struck Ward Dixon with a slap to his face. That, she said in the little movie she directed inside her mind, is for insulting me.

It felt so good that she replayed the fantasy several times. It is so unfair. She lost a few semester points when Mr. Hurley asked her when the Berlin Wall fell and she told him that she did not know. He told her to take a wild guess and she said, “Oh, I don’t know, 1968?”

He smiled sardonically and told her, “No, but that would have been nice, to end the Cold War 22 years earlier.” Then he asked her if maybe she wanted to give it another try?

But Regina was so bothered by not knowing why she was bothered by Mona Boggs laughing at Ward for acting stupid (encouraging it!), that she could not concentrate enough to add 22 to 1968 and at least get partial credit. She gave him the open palms up sign with a cross look on her face, and he made a mark in his grade book and asked someone else to do the simple arithmetic.

It is so unfair.

She knew this statement was a fact. It was at least as solid a fact as the date that European Communism ended. But Regina did not know why it was so solid a fact.

Regina was hard at work on her studies. Not the history of 20th century Europe that Mr. Hurley was paid to teach her, but the study of human courtship behavior.

Of particular interest to her was that paradoxical notion of possession by rejection. By this we mean that weird thing that happens when we reject someone as unsuitable for us, and we are then surprised at how furious we get when someone who appears to be higher placed than us finds our rejected lover worthy of affection. It may be the most mysterious form of anger to afflict the human psyche.

Had she known more about Mona’s reason for joining the FOSOA at lunch, at least some of Regina’s ire would have cooled. And had she and Audre spent, oh, let us say ten more minutes in the Bistro, they would have seen Mona doubly amused by Ward Dixon, and not because he saved his more adroit sleight of hand performance for the end of his show, but, just the opposite, that in his confidence he gradually moved the bar up till he attempted a trick he had tried dozens of times before and had only succeeded at twice.

The trick was simple in conception but it required the brilliant timing that only comes from the drill-to-deadly-boredom repetition of a circus pro. The quarter is flipped upward from the catapult of thumb sprung off forefinger. Then the performer awaits its descent with open mouth and catches the coin in his front teeth. Only twice had Ward caught it.

His previous tricks had so delighted Mona that she clapped her hands and said, “Oh, awesome, awesome.”

This made the raising of the bar irresistible. And made, also, the urge to get it right so irresistible that poor Ward blew the last trick. And not only did he blow the trick but he blew it the wrong way. In his previous failures, the quarter had bounced off his nose or his chin or his cheeks and clanked to the floor.

This time, though it was right on target and had all the earmarks of the marvelous show-closer that he had envisioned, the trick failed from a slight error in Ward’s timing. He clamped his teeth a half-second too late and the coin went down his throat with an embarrassing swallow.

Mona enjoyed her richest laughter of the day.

Harlan took the humiliated performer away like a corner man tending to a beaten boxer.

Mona sat down next to Tristan, the main reason she had joined the boys at their table. She had received a text from their dad. Something about Kiki and don’t tell your Mom.

Had Tristan received one, too?

From the far-flung corners of the intricate Web, items of interest and intrigue (some even stranger than fiction):

Swallowed Coin?

Comments Off

Filed under Forbidden Truth

Tagged as Audre, Mona, Regina, Ward