The school work was easy for me mainly because I gave a damn. While my peers were out cheerleading or painting posters for the big game or getting laid in the back of some football player’s car, I was locked in my room studying. Academically, I would accept nothing but the absolute best. I once argued with a teacher who had given me a 99 on an exam when I felt I deserved 100. After an hour, I wore him down and he changed my grade. I earned that 100. I deserved it. I didn’t put much thought into my looks, but I’d be damned if some old fart with thinning hair and thick glasses was going to ruin my perfect grade point for the year.
I had one friend, a girl named Wanda Couric, who was as big a nerd as me. We never went to high school dances or football games because we thought sports were too violent and high school boys too stupid. Such thought processes made for a lot of lonely Saturday nights. After a while, we even got tired of each other’s company. You can only go to a pity party so many times before even that gets old. Wanda ended up getting contacts and wearing short skirts and joined the in-crowd while I just kept slogging along with my eye toward college. High school was like a prison to me. One more year and I would be paroled. It didn’t occur to me at the time that college was going to be ten times worse.
Then, toward the end of my junior year, Calvin Walker transferred to Milwaukee High and my entire world flipped upside down. He was an Army brat whose family moved every couple of years. I vividly remembered the first time I saw him. It was a Friday after lunch, in the middle of Mrs. Higgins’ advanced calculus class. I was in my seat at the front where I always sat. The door opened and this tall, skinny boy with a shock of jet black hair hanging in his eyes and glasses with thick frames walked in. He handed Mrs. Higgins a note from the office and stared at the floor. She turned to the class to announce him, as if anyone but me even cared. Most of the kids didn’t even look up.
“Class, this is… Calvin Walker… a transfer student from… oh goodness… Berlin, Germany. Are you German, Calvin?”
He shook his head without looking up or saying anything. She gave him a smile full of pity because she knew what a snake pit Milwaukee High could be, especially if you were a nerdy kid with no social skills, as he appeared to be. She patted his shoulder and told him to find a seat. The only seat available was the one at the very front of the row to my right. I watched him out of the corner of my eye as he folded his long legs into the seat and laced his long fingers together on the desk. He sat down without looking around, almost as if he were afraid to see what was around him.
Calvin Walker was tall and lanky, with not much meat on his bones. His chin was dotted with pimples and he had a few dark hairs shadowing his upper lip. When he sensed that I was staring at him he glanced over and gave me a quick, nervous smile, as if he was glad to find someone here even more of a nerd than he was. What struck me most about him was the color his eyes behind the thick lenses. They were bright blue, like the sky on a clear summer’s day. There was something about the way he smiled at me that made me all warm and fuzzy inside. I knew at that moment that Calvin Walker and I were going to be the best of friends. Maybe even more.
I got up the nerve to approach him in the lunchroom the next day. He was sitting alone at a table by the window, picking at a piece of meatloaf with the tines of a fork as if he were trying to figure out exactly what it was made of. I usually ate alone, but that day I slid onto the round plastic seat directly across from him without asking permission and just started talking. It was greatly out of character for me, but there was something about Calvin even then that drew me to him, like a moth drawn to a flame. Granted, it was a nerdy flame, but a flame nevertheless.
“Hi there,” I said brightly. I had never flirted before a day in my life, so I had no idea how to go about it. And looking seductive was not in my bag of tricks, so I just smiled to show him the perfect teeth that had only been free of braces for a few weeks and stuck out my hand. “I’m Lucy. Lucy Walsh.”
He wiped his mouth off on the back of his left hand and shook my hand with his right. His grip was limp, as if he were afraid of squeezing too tightly. “Calvin Walker.” He said it in such a way that it sounded like he was asking me if Calvin Walker was his name rather than telling me that it was.
“Hi, Calvin Walker,” I said, giving his hand a good shake to let him know that I wasn’t going to break. “Walsh and Walker… Walker and Walsh… I bet we’re next to each other in the yearbook!” It was a retarded thing to say and I immediately regretted it, but he smiled and bobbed his head. His hand was warm and moist. I pulled my hand back and rubbed my palms on the legs of my jeans for a moment, then fiddled with opening the container of milk on my lunch tray. “So, where are you from?”
“All over the place,” he said in the questioning tone again. “We just moved here from Berlin.”
“Berlin? Wow. How cool was that? Living in Germany?”
“Not very,” he said with a shrug.
I took a sip of the cold milk and picked up my fork. I had a lump of meatloaf on my tray, as well, along with a scoop of mashed potatoes and a few green beans. I dipped the fork into the potatoes and carefully stuck it in my mouth, being as ladylike as possible. My mom always told me to eat sparingly around boys. Take small bites, don’t eat everything. “You don’t want them to think you’re a pig, dear,” she would say.
I daintily wiped my lips on a napkin and kept prying. “So, what brings you to Milwaukee, Calvin Walker?”
“My dad’s in the Army,” he said with a heavy sigh, as if the weight of traveling the world was pressing down upon him. “He’s just got transferred to Fort McCoy in Monroe, so we’ll be here for a year or two.”
“Do you like it so far?”
“I’m not sure yet,” he said, narrowing his eyes to look around the lunchroom for a moment. The place was a haven for cliques. The jocks were at one table. The cheerleaders at another. The remainder of the tables were divided among groups of popular kids, unpopular kids (who weren’t even popular amongst themselves), the brainiacs, the dopers, the drunks, the criminals, and others who ate lunch in their own little worlds, trying to avoid the real world around them. Just let me get through the day without getting the shit kicked out of me, they prayed. I had to admit that I had days like that, where I hunkered down in my own little world and tried to go unnoticed. Being smart didn’t score you points in high school. To the contrary, the smart kids were usually the most alienated and bullied because they made the popular kids and the jocks feel stupid. They felt stupid because that’s what they were, stupid, not because someone else made them feel that way.
When his eyes came back to mine, he smiled just enough to let me know that he was glad I was there. “Other than the food, I think it’s going to be okay.”
“I think so, too,” I said happily. I grinned at him and he grinned back at me, and without another word, our bond was formed.
From that day forward, Calvin and I had lunch together every day and hung out just about every weekend. We discovered a mutual love of advanced math (nerds), competitive chess (nerds again), and a fascination with all things Star Wars. After school, we’d meet at the library so I could help him catch up on his studies. Schools in Germany were a world apart from good old Milwaukee High. Calvin was smart, maybe smarter than me, but he needed a little extra tutoring and I was happy to help.
I remembered sitting next to him at a table in the library, our chairs so close that our thighs touched. A little tingle ran up my leg into my vagina, which had never seen an object more foreign than a bar of soap and the monthly supply of tampons. My clit tingled when his hand accidentally brushed mine. When I got home from the library some days I had to change my panties because the crotch would be soaked. Calvin was waking something up in me that I knew had always been there but had never tried to come out before. I wondered if I had the same effect on him. I decided that the next time we were alone, I’d somehow manage to accidentally brush against his crotch to see if his penis was hard. It funny how ridiculously clinical I sounded back then. I wanted to see if his “penis was hard”. I was sixteen, for Pete sake. I had no idea what to call a boy’s thing back then. If a boy had told me he wanted to shove his throbbing cock into my tight teen pussy I would have run away screaming. Now… well… not so much.
A few weeks later, Calvin came to my house after school to study. We were in my room with the door open (there were no rules governing the doors in my house because a boy had never set foot there), sitting on the floor with our knees touching and our calculus books open on our laps when my mom stuck her head in to say that she was running to the grocery store. It would be hours before my dad would be home and she had to get something for dinner. She asked Calvin if he’d like to stay for dinner and he said sure. I waited until I heard the front door close and the car pull away, then I put my book aside and leaned forward to kiss Calvin on the lips. The look of shock on his face was priceless.
“What are you doing?” he asked, pulling his head back.