The
Girl in the Window
(Newsboy I)
By
Jacqueline Jillinghoff
I delivered newspapers
after school for five years, from the summer before eighth grade, when I was
twelve, until my graduation from high school five years later. I owe the job a
lot. It made me wealthier than the average teenager, won me a partial college
scholarship, and introduced me to a few lifelong friends. It also taught me
something about sex — not technique, though there was some of that, but the way
girls and women exert their sexual power over young boys, especially a bookish
boy without the strength or the experience to handle it.
I was a prime
target, too — the kind of kid who would later be known as a geek, though, in my
own little Catholic boys’ school hell, that haven of Christian love and
acceptance, I was known by the all-purpose put down “faggot.” It was bad enough
I got good grades and had a vocabulary that I didn’t have the sense to
suppress, but when I let slip that I liked Beethoven, my life was over. Nothing
offends the teenage demand for conformity as much as a dissident taste in
music, and I never heard the end of it. Between the name-calling, the
occasional beating, and the guilt over masturbation, I led a miserable
existence.
Mindy was the
first girl on my paper route to notice me, though Risa, her childhood friend
and next-door neighbor, wasn’t far behind. Both of them overheard me talking to
their parents, who approved of me as a bright, articulate young man, and both
of them realized I could be had without repercussions. I was the classic “good
kid,” and they knew instinctively I could be counted on to keep my mouth shut.
We had no friends in common, so I couldn’t ruin their reputations. If they
subjected me to the occasional sexual experiment, who could I tell?
Or whom.
One a cool
Saturday afternoon in October, I had just finished my deliveries and was
trolling back through my route, my empty bag hanging from my shoulder, my
payment book in my back pocket, collecting money from the few customers I had
missed when I made my rounds on Thursday and Friday nights. It’s hard to
remember after so many years exactly how old I was, but I had probably just
started my freshman year of high school, which would have made me a week or two
shy of my fourteenth birthday.
I don’t know if
Mindy planned the encounter. Her mother might have told her I’d be stopping by,
or she might not have thought it important enough to mention. In any event, she
— Mindy’s mom — had promised me someone would be home to pay me my seventy-five
cents for the week’s deliveries.
Like most of
the homes on my route, Mindy’s was a twin. It was divided from Risa’s by a
party wall. Their front doors shared a concrete stoop and a front walk that led
past short lawns to the street. I climbed the steps, stood with the storm door
propped against my ass, and rang the bell. Nothing happened. I got up on tiptoe
and peered through the fanlight. The inside vestibule door was open, and the
place looked empty. All I could see were the back of a couch, and grandmother
clock that stood against the party wall, and beyond that, the stairs to the
second floor.
I rang the bell
again. Again, there was no answer. I was turning to leave when I heard a window
go up and Mindy’s voice calling out, “Who is it?”
As I said, the
homes were twins. The front doors were set side by side into a kind of brick
projection surmounted by a miniature, slate-covered saddle roof. The upstairs
window, blocked by the mini-roof, wasn’t visible from the stoop. If I wanted to
look at Mindy while I talked to her, I had to go down and stand on the lawn.
“Paper boy!” I
called out. I took a leaping stride off the bottom step, turned around and saw
Mindy leaning out the bedroom window, her arms folded on the sill.
Her shoulders
were bare, partly hidden beneath the falls of her frizzy, red-brown hair. Her
face swarmed with dark freckles, and from what I could see, the population had
migrated from the nest, like ants, and colonized her upper back.
“Just leave the
paper in the railing,” she said. I had already done that. The thin Saturday
edition was tucked in the cast-iron curlicues of the railing that was bolted to
the front steps.
“I’m
collecting,” I said.
“I don’t have
any money,” she said.
“Your mom said
she’d leave it for me,” I explained. This was true. Mindy’s mom kept her change
in an antique secretary in the living room.
“But I can’t
come down right now,” Mindy said.
“Why not?”
“Because I
haven’t got a stitch on.”
Boing. My heart
kicked at the words. Her breasts, I calculated, were tucked behind her
forearms, and the way she was leaning, her butt was thrust out, pointing across
the room.
“That doesn’t
bother me,” I called back, trying, geek that I was, to sound mature and
nonchalant. But I didn’t know what I was saying. I just wanted to keep her in
the window, to look at her and think about her standing there naked.
“OK!” she said
brightly, with a mischievous music in her voice and a mischievous smile on her
face, and she pulled her head back into the room. Something round and white
jiggled as the sash went down, but so fast I couldn’t tell if it was anything
that belonged to a girl’s naked body. Bright clouds reflected on the window,
turning it opaque, and the dream was gone.
I was still
looking up at the window, hoping to catch another glimpse of heaven knows what,
when the front door swung open into the empty house. There was no other
movement, no sound. I walked up the steps again and looked through the storm
door, cupping my hands around my face to block the glare. The place was just as
dark as before.
“Hello?” I
called, pulling the storm door open and raising my foot to the threshold.
Silence.
“Mindy?”
Nothing. I
stepped inside the vestibule, and the storm door closed behind me with a hiss
and metallic slap. This was a lot of work for seventy-five cents.
“Hello?”
I was past the
coat closet, stepping into the living room, when the big inside door swished
shut behind me. I spun around, and there she was.
Naked. A live
nude girl. The first live nude girl of my loser life.
“I thought you
said it didn’t bother you,” she said. I can’t imagine what my face looked like,
but it felt like I had thrust it into an oven.
“I lied,” I
said. “You can never trust anything I say.”
I can be really
glib when I’m as embarrassed as hell.
Her back was
flat against the door, which took all of her weight as her legs, parted,
inclined at a low angle. Her hands were clasped behind her. The vestibule was
dim, but daylight poured through the fanlight above her head, transforming her
hair to a reddish halo. Somewhere on the way down the stairs she’d pulled it
back into a ponytail that rested on one shoulder in a mass of corkscrew curls,
leaving her breasts exposed. They were high and full, and their concave slopes
were sprinkled with freckles. Wide rings of dogwood-pink surrounded her nipples,
which were a deeper shade of pink, and hard like penny candies, and pointed in
slightly opposite directions. The hair at the inverted V of her legs was darker
than the hair on her head, the shade of dried blood, and deep inside was a pair
of puffy, white vertical lines, like an equals sign tipped on end.
I wanted the
moment to last forever, but Mindy broke the spell.
“So what do you
want?” she said casually, as though she was standing there in a T-shirt and
jeans.
“I’m, uh ...
I’m just uh, I mean I’m ...” I was stammering on purpose, to keep her there.
Really.
“You’re
collecting for the paper. How much?”
“How much
what?”
“How much do we
owe you?”
“Seventy-five
cents,” I said. “Your mom said she’d have it for me.” And all the while I was
thinking, your breasts, freckles all over them, and your short legs and your
hips and your pussy hair. Naked. A naked girl. God will damn me but I do not
care. I felt the desire in my mouth, as an itch at the points where my jaws
come together. I pressed my tongue into one corner, then the other. The itch
only got worse.
Mindy breezed
past me to the secretary in the far corner of the room. She bent over the open
drop leaf, rifling through the cubbyholes and giving me a very generous view of
her ass. She took her time. She was loving this.
“Here it is,”
she said. She straightened and turned and threw out her chest and walked back
to me and held out a dollar bill. I say it like that because time had slowed
down and separated into discrete, frozen moments. The soft stuff in my head had
swollen, crowding my consciousness into a singularity, a bright nude body
surrounded by pitch-blackness. I felt one of her hands lifting mine, the other
pressing the bill into it. The darkness became total.
Her voice came
from far away: “Can’t take it, can ya?”
I discovered
that I was on the floor, my back against the end of one of the two sofas that
faced each other by the front windows. Mindy was handing me a glass of lukewarm
tap water. She was standing over me, still nude. My eyes were level with that
triangular patch of hair.
“Boys,” she
said. “You act all cool, but when we give you what you want, you just can’t
take it. Am I the first girl you ever saw naked?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Thanks.” I handed the empty glass back to her, and she put it down on the
coffee table between the sofas.
“Can you get
up?” she said.
“Yeah, but I’d
rather not.”
“Rather,” she
repeated. “You talk weird. If you’re gonna stay here, you gotta show me what
you got.”
“This isn’t
like a trap, is it? You haven’t got a bunch of kids waiting in the kitchen to
come out and laugh at me?”
“Uh uh. It’s
just us. Come on.”
I struggled to
my feet and sat on the arm of the couch. Dropping my bag from my shoulder, I
unzipped and slid my pants and briefs off my butt. Her eyes widened a hair. She
was trying to be cool, too.
“Is it always
that big?”
My dick really
isn’t all that big. Six and three quarter inches, if you must know. But Mindy
didn’t mean big. She meant hard.
“No,” I said.
“Usually it’s kinda small. It’s just big now ‘cause I’m standing here with a
beautiful naked girl.”
“You really
think I’m beautiful?”
“Well, yeah. “
“If I’m the
only girl you’ve seen naked, how do you know?”
“Then you’re
the most beautiful naked girl I’ve seen today. Is this the first penis you’ve
seen?”
“Maybe,” she
said. “Does it feel good when you touch it? Boys are supposed to be like
yanking on it all the time.”
“I don’t like
to yank on it.”
“What do you
do?”
“I have to take
my shirt off.”
I could have
“yanked it,” I guess, but my masturbation techniques have changed over the
years, and I wasn’t into yanking that season.
“Go ahead.”
My sweater and
my T-shirt joined my bag on the floor, and I showed her how I did it: cupping
my balls with my open fingers, pressing the head of my dick against my bare
stomach with the heel of my hand, and making a wide circular motion with my
arm, like the tie-rod on a locomotive wheel.
I started
jerking off in seventh grade, but I had never admitted it to anyone, let alone
demonstrated it. I didn’t even have the courage to confess it to a priest, but
Mindy wanted to see, and she was nude. And nude girls get that they want.
“That looks
nice,” she said.
“Uh-huh,” I
said, my breath coming in spasms. “Do girls do it?”
“Of course not.
We don’t have dicks.”
“I know that.
I mean … Mmmm … touch
yourselves. “
“All the time,
she said. “I was just gonna do it when you rang the bell. You wanna see?”
“Well ... yes.”
“I have to lay
down.”
And she plunked
her ass down and stretched out in front of me on the oriental rug. She opened
her legs, and a pink globule poked through the tangle of hair like a tiny
bubble of gum. My first glimmer of cunt.
Mindy slipped
her middle finger between her bristling outer lips. Dull pink flesh bulged up
around it, and her fingertip disappeared into some mysterious vacuum, as though
her public hair had swallowed it up. She jiggled her hand at from the wrist,
creating tiny vibrations. Her index finger disappeared, too, and she kept her
thumb pressed to a spot near the top.
The color rose
in her face. Her freckles seemed to blend together. She breathed slowly,
deeply, puffing up her tits, and she twirled one hard nipple between her
fingers, keeping her eyes on my dick as it peeped out from beneath my rotating
hand.
I had lost the
power of speech, but she wanted to make conversation.
“My mom has a
vibrator,” she said. I didn’t know what that was, but I was too distracted to
ask. “I tried it a few times, and it drove me like really crazy. I was like
screaming and everything. But I like my hand better. It’s slower.”
“What’s it …
feel like?”
“It just ... it
kind of goes all through me and makes me all tight,” she said. “And then it
snaps and it’s like I’m like goin’ down a water slide. What’s it like ... huh!
... for guys?”
“Like that,” I
said, “except I’m the water slide. More like the log flume.”
“Huh?”
“You’ll see.”
We went on. She
wriggled her fingers inside her pussy and tweaked her nipple, and I coaxed my
dick back and forth across my stomach like a windshield wiper. The conversation
flagged. We only sighed, watching one another work ourselves to orgasm.
Weird as it
sounds, I never thought of trying to touch her. Our only contact came just as
Mindy went over the water slide: she extended one leg and touched her big toe
to the tip of my sneaker.
That’s all it
took. The hand in her cunt went around in one last, big circle and stopped, and
she exhaled quietly through pursed lips — like whoo! My come bubbled up
on my stomach. Thick and pearly and plentiful, it slicked up the head of my
cock and drizzled into my public hair and down my legs. I tried to catch it,
but it got away from me and fell in fat gobs on Mindy’s outstretched foot.
“Did you pee?”
she said.
“No. That’s
just what happens.”
“Eww. “
“Whattaya mean,
eww?” We were both laughing. “Everybody does it.”
I felt stupid,
leaning bare-assed on the sofa, my hands and my mid-section covered with honey.
I couldn’t move without my dripping all over Mindy’s nice clean rug.
But she was a
thoughtful hostess.
“Hold on,” she
said. As if I could do anything else. She bounded up and into the kitchen, her
ass waving at me as it receded, and returned with a fistful of paper towels.
“You make a
mess,” she said while I wiped myself off. “Doesn’t your mom find it on your
sheets and stuff?”
“She did once.
It was a big wet spot. I told her I dropped an ice cube.”
“Did she buy
that?”
“I don’t know
what she buys. She barged into my bedroom when I was still in bed.”
“That’s creepy,
“ Mindy said. She handed me a fresh towel. “Wipe off my foot.”
It was a
request, not a command, but it was my first taste of the pleasure of
submission. I knelt low before her, my ass higher than my face, and
painstakingly cleaned the spots of sticky come from her arch, her instep, and
her toes.
“My mom will be
home soon,” she said finally. It was probably a lie, but it was the quickest
way for a girl to get an unwanted boy out of her house. I had served my
purpose. I adjusted my clothes, sluing my bag on my shoulder and stuck the wet
wads of paper inside, intending to throw them away when I got home. Then, like
the professional I was, I took my little book out of my back pocket, marked her
“paid” and offered her a quarter change.
“Keep it,” she
said.
“ I feel so
cheap,” I said, repeating a line I’d heard on TV. Ejaculation clears a man’s
head. I was a calm conversationalist again, even if a girl was standing naked
in front of me.
“Huh?” she
said.
“Nothing.”
She walked me
to the door and stood behind it, just as she had when she let me in, shielding
herself from the eyes of the neighborhood.
“Was this ...
uh... I mean, did you like it?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she
said. “I learned a lot.”
“Learned?”
“Yeah. Now I
know some stuff I can do with my boyfriend.”
Then I was back
on the street, in the sweet autumn air, feeling more foolish than I had ever
felt in my life.
© 2012 by Jacqueline Jillinghoff