Realizing - Chapter 3

Okay, for those of you who have been flooding my inbox with requests for chapter 3 - here you are. Again, please excuse the lack of formatting as I'm copying and pasting. As always, feedback of any kind is welcome.


III

September 1993
Nathan survived his final year of elementary school. He, along with his classmates, even survived the experience of playing on the seventh grade football team. Of course, that they did survive and some might add, thrive, inflated the egos of a few of his peers. They slated themselves as being the next best thing to happen to Bentwood – in their eyes, they would be the ones to bring home the next state championship. Nathan was just glad he made it out alive, but he also learned that he really did enjoy playing football and decided to continue to play the next year.
The first day of seventh grade was much less stressful than sixth grade, which seems counterintuitive. To Nathan, the start of sixth grade had been so nerve-racking because of the ambiguity surrounding the new experience of playing football and of course the early onset of puberty. These things were still present as he began seventh grade, but he knew more about what to expect from them. He had even grown to like football. It was something he no longer dreaded, he was genuinely excited. And although not all of the boys had started puberty yet – he was no longer the only one anymore.

Nathan and his classmates were assigned their lockers, this was a new and exciting concept and they all seemed to feel pretty cool as they decorated their lockers with posters and filled with them with their notebooks and other supplies. The biggest challenge was figuring out how to work the lock. Turn to the right, then the other direction and pass the second number once; Nathan thought that someone could have made a simpler way to open those things. After a few tries it became easier and they all, well most of them, got the hang of it eventually.
Waiting for the bell to ring, there was a group of guys congregating around David’s locker. Nathan collected the necessary supplies he thought he would need for his first hour science class, a notebook and pen, and made the walk past about a dozen lockers to join the gang. David was holding something in his locker and Aaron and Greg were looking on with fascination.
“Hey guys. What’s up?” Nathan asked.
“Check it out man,” David instructed as he motioned with his head for Nathan to move closer to the locker.
Nathan leaned in to see David holding a Cosmopolitan magazine opened to a full-page spread of a super model wearing a red bikini. He briefly looked at the picture, moved back to his original position, and looked from side to side, at Greg and then Aaron, “What is it?”
“Dude, she’s hot, look at her,” Greg noted as he gave Nathan a shot to the gut.
“Oh…well, yeah. But…I mean…what’s new about it? I’ve already seen that,” Nathan lied trying to cover up his lack of interest.
“Who cares, I could look at her all day and never get sick of it,” Aaron added.
Nathan stepped closer to get a better look at the picture, not to admire it, but to feign some sort of investment in this thing that had captured the attention of his friends.
Again he fibbed, “Yeah, I can’t wait for the next issue. I heard they got a super hot chick.” He hoped they couldn’t sense the unnatural nature of his delivery.
“There’s no way the new chick could have bigger boobs than this one,” Aaron claimed.
“Well…we’ll have to wait and see,” Nathan realized how lame his words must have sounded and wondered why he felt so strange around these friends he had known for years.
The bell rang. It might have been the first time since kindergarten Nathan had been thankful that it was time to go to class. It was the first day of seventh grade and he was excited to go to class – this was good. Too bad it was only to get away from a most peculiar feeling.
Nathan found himself feeling awkward around his friends that morning. He couldn’t find anything to add the conversations. It was almost as if he was nervous, stuttering and everything. Nervous to talk to the guys he had known since kindergarten – some before that. It made no sense; he chalked it up to being in a weird mood and forged ahead.
One class down, he was back at his locker, feeling impressively smooth as he opened his lock with one hand. He put his newly distributed science book on the shelf. Phy-ed was next on his schedule. Nathan was looking forward to it. Mr. Henry was the teacher; Nathan got along really well with him and found himself to be extremely at ease around him. Mr. Henry had been Nathan’s phy-ed teacher for several years in elementary school as well as his football coach, so his class was not uncharted territory. Mr. Henry was very tall and well built with dark hair. He must have been in his early thirties. One could assume that he was an athlete in college and maintained some of his residual muscle mass from his glory days.
All of the seventh graders gathered in the gym and sat on the floor as Mr. Henry came out of the locker room…with Mrs. Sanstad, Tom’s mom.
Nathan thought this was odd. Two teachers? As they approached, Mr. Henry told the boys to go to one side of the gym, while the girls were to go to the other side with Mrs. Sanstad. Nathan was thoroughly confused and quickly realized that this in fact was uncharted territory. They all quickly learned that in seventh grade the girls had Mrs. Sanstad for phy-ed and the boys had Mr. Henry. No one ever told them why; they just went their separate ways when directed like trained animals. As they were going to their separate sides of the gym, Nathan, trying to figure out the reason for this segregation, wondered if they thought their hormones were getting too out of control to have them all in one spot at the same time. Were there all of a sudden too many of them for one teacher to handle?
All he knew for sure was that it was strange and he didn’t like it. Many of his close friends were girls and he didn’t like the idea of not being able to have them around him.
After going through all of that first day of class stuff, they ended up having open gym (boys and girls together for that day) for the rest of the hour. Some students played basketball, others volleyball. And then there were the kids who just sat in the bleachers and contemplated their dismal existence. That’s what a lot of people thought kids were supposed to do in junior high – so they did. With about fifteen minutes remaining in the class period, three words come out of Mr. Henry’s mouth that would set Nathan on a path of confusion, “Alright, shower up.”
Time in Bentwood seemed to freeze as Nathan tried to process what Mr. Henry had said. His internal dialogue started right in: Did he just say shower up? Meaning go in the locker room, strip naked, and stand around in the shower with all of the guys?
He was stopped dead in his tracks. He tried to convince himself that this shouldn’t be a problem, he had seen his friends naked plenty of times and they had seen him naked. They all had lived on lakes their entire lives and had gone skinny-dipping together on more than one occasion. But for some reason, there was something different about this. The thought of both being naked and seeing his friends naked elicited a strange feeling within Nathan that he hadn’t experienced before. He became light-headed and his skin began to tingle. He convinced himself that the uncomfortableness stemmed from the fact that he was one of the few guys that had gone through puberty, and therefore felt fairly insecure about his body. If Aaron were so fascinated with the hair on Nathan’s legs, how would he react to seeing hair in other places on his body? Nathan wasn’t interested in finding out.
As slowly as he could, Nathan made his way into the locker room. He got the sense that he was not the only one who felt a little odd about the situation; maybe he was just hoping he wasn’t the only one. He went over to his locker and slowly got undressed. He noticed that there were other guys that appeared to be purposefully taking their time. Nathan began to strategize. His thought was that if he got in the shower before them, maybe no one would realize how much he was freaking out about the whole thing. They would look like the weird kids since it was taking them so long to shower. They would look like the kids who had issues with being naked around everyone. It made sense in his head.
Nathan grabbed a towel and walked over to the showers where there was a flurry of activity - lots of laughing and screaming boys. The closer he got, the more he wanted to turn around and go back to his locker. He also was realizing, from the sound of things, that others no longer seemed as uncomfortable as he first thought. He had an overwhelming urge to look up and stare at everyone, but his neck acted as if it were paralyzed and stayed bent down, his eyes fixated on the floor.
Tom walked out of the showers, “You okay?”
“Yeah, my stomach kind of hurts,” Nathan responded without looking up. It was the best excuse he could think of on the spot.
“Maybe you should go to the nurse,” Tom offered his concerned advice while drying off with his towel.
“Yeah, maybe. I’ll see how I feel later.”
Tom seemed to accept that answer and walked back to his locker to get dressed.
Nathan reached the doorway to the showers, took a look inside, and all he saw was a mass of ill-defined body parts in a collage of steam and flesh. His stomach was instantly filled with miles of roller coasters – that sensation came back that he experienced in the gym when Mr. Henry first made the announcement to shower. It was a rush of excitement and guilt. He put his head down, went back to his locker, and got dressed.
Nathan’s thoughts for the rest of the day were consumed with what had happened in the locker room during phy-ed. The same thought kept cycling through his mind: what was wrong with him?
First, he couldn’t hardly carry on a conversation with his friends that he had known forever and now all of sudden he felt weird about being naked in front of them. He had been in very similar situations before and had never reacted in such an unnerving way. There was a physical response within Nathan’s body, one that he had never experienced before. It wasn’t that it was all that unpleasant even, it was just new, and he wasn’t sure what to make of it.