The best guy friend

Fic. This is the character self-portrait of the best friend of the 'protagonist', for the Appointments & Disappointments series. 

This does not define me, yet it was a defining moment at the time. I was seven. My dick had learned to be erect. It got erect at the most embarrassing times. There was something about short-haired women on tv that gave me strange feelings and made me want to pee. Short haired women and cute skinny japanese boys who kinda' looked like women. On this one occasion I peed in a coke bottle outside the house as I sang a lovesong at one of those boys. My parents heard it. They made fun of me for a long time. I didn't care. I had a pretty good idea by then what I liked and didn't like.

I told her I'd always protect her and have nothing bad happen to her, ever. Everyone was disappointed. They asked her if I was her boyfriend, she said I was her best guy friend, they asked me if she was my girlfriend I said she was my best friend. Every holiday she was back home at, we hung out, we were together for all the festivals. She was my best friend, my bestest friend. My parents thought she was the love of my life, they wanted us to 'date' and get married later. "She looks like you and she acts like you, but she can never replace you!" I shrieked and cried again. You have my twin, she said, she looks just like me. I cried for hours when I discovered my friend from next door would be going to a boarding school. I was ten.

I was twelve. For the first time in my life I put something back together, having always dismantled electronics and abandoned them. The radio didn't work as it originally did, but the internet helped me put it together. I carried it around for three weeks, plugged it in to show people I had fixed it. The family friends joked I'd become a electric repairman when I grew up. My parents and grandparents told me I'd be an engineer, an engineer was someone who took things apart and put them back together, and invented new things. They put me in this weekend group that did cool techy things.

I was fourteen. We entered our first robotics competition. The challenge was to pick up red balls and take them from one location to other. Our team was the youngest by several years. We didn't win, but they gave us special prize for greatest enthusiasm and early start. The judges, who ran a tech company, offered to sponsor all our future projects, and we took it. We were all over the newspapers. My mother cried, she still has a book of all the print media appearances we made then, even from the small regional newspapers that called to interview us.

It was her first boyfriend, and first breakup. We didn't do anything, she said, but what a loser, to cheat like that and talk to all of them foreign women. I told her it was fine. Things would be fine. I did not tell her about the boy I had been kissing, the same who was mean to me at school but would find every opportunity to meet me and kiss until our lips were blue. He wouldn't be caught being seen with me, or knowing me, but oh he really liked kissing. I didn't tell her. She had a problem, I didn't. I convinced her he was a loser and didn't deserve her. She broke up with him. They got back together in two weeks anyway. I was sixteen.

I was eighteen. I had sex with a woman for the first time. I discovered I didn't enjoy sex for the heck of it. That I needed the feels and the energy and the passion to feel good. I pretended to have had the greatest time of my life. Two of us, to naked body, barely bumping against each other. People oversell sex, I discovered it's not fun without all the other things that come with it. I told nobody.