but the actual gay kids. So, like me, he didn’t really fit in anywhere.
When I started asking my stepfather if I could hang out next door at Eddie’s house, he probably took one look at the boy and mentally filed him under “Completely Unthreatening.” The kid’s grandmother, on the other hand, dimly sensed that in his bony chest beat the same hormone-charged heart that every other teen boy possessed. And so Grandma Goldstein would haul her arthritic bulk down the half flight of stairs into the rec room every hour … and find us putting together a spaceship made out of Legos, or playing video games, or watching whatever new sci-fi or horror flick he’d surreptitiously recorded at his job. And she’d just sigh at the vast expanse of dorkiness on display before her, shake her head, and go back to her armchair in the living room.
After a couple of months, she stopped checking up on us. And that’s when we started watching descrambled satellite porn. If I’d flipped out or acted disgusted the first time I came down there to find naked boobies on the TV, it probably would have ended there, and we would have gone back to platonic geek pursuits.
I could tell you that we started fooling around because I was achingly lonely and desperate for human touch. Or because my stepmother was conservative and ultrafeminine and I was in full-on rebellion against her and everything she stood for, be it cosmetics or Christianity or chastity. And I had all that going on in my head, sure. But the fact was, I’d been jilling off two or three times a day since I was twelve and was drowning in my own wave of hormones. So when Eddie finally got around to making his first fumbling pass, I was happy to catch.
At first it was just awkward groping, the awkwardness compounded because Eddie was more than a little squeamish about bodily fluids. It’s tough getting laid if you’re a teenage neat freak, but at least it means you’re all for condoms. Eddie finally decided to read the fucking manual and found a copy of The Joy of Sex. Consequently, he figured out how to get me off, and like good little geeks we started trying everything in the book. Sex became my favorite hobby, and he was a willing horse. If I had a crappy day at school—and, let’s face it, at that age they’re pretty much all crappy—I’d sneak out at night and hit Eddie up for a booty call.
We continued sex on the sly until my magical powers started to manifest. I got crazy-moody; it was like a whole second puberty on top of the one I was already trying to cope with. I got mad at him one night (I don’t even remember why now) and his beloved PlayStation 2 blew up; it was your typical budding-Talent pyrokinetics, but I had no idea what I’d done, or how I’d done it. Afterward, he didn’t want anything to do with me, and I spent a miserable angst-ridden month that climaxed in me waking from a nightmare to find my bedroom on fire.
My stepfather sent me to Columbus to live with Aunt Vicky. There wasn’t room for me at the regular Talent school, so she enrolled me at Upper Arlington High, where I and a few other students got covert magic lessons (I think the classes showed up on our transcripts as Esperanto). Once I’d regained some equilibrium (and learned a silencing charm), I looked around for quiet, geeky guys with pretty eyes and graceful hands. And started deflowering them, one by one.
In the middle of my sophomore year, I experienced a nearly catastrophic charm failure. I’d done both the guys in the school orchestra’s bassoon section, and each boy had jumped to the conclusion that he had been my special first time. I didn’t put the ideas in their heads, but since I wasn’t forthcoming about my sexual history—in my teen brain, I figured since I’d never done it without a condom, they weren’t in any danger of disease so it wasn’t their business—I didn’t dissuade them, either. Stupid.
And at the time I didn’t realize the fatal flaw in the low-grade silencing charm I was using: it stops working if the enchanted party is around someone else who knows about the taboo subject (in this case, sex with me). So, take two previously virginal guys I’d gotten busy with and put them in the same room