She watched from what she thought of as her favorite personal spot, several branches up in the middle of a large maple tree. The young couple intruded on her privacy several times now. She hoped they would simply go away, but today they spread a blanket and have a little picnic. She recognized them easily, two students at the same school she attended, a school from which she couldn’t wait to graduate. It wasn’t a bad school academically, but it was a private religious school and everything about it chafed like she was allergic to it.
For example, her ultra-religious family stopped things for prayers often during the day. There was morning prayers, afternoon prayers, and if anything unusual happened they would stop and pray some more. Instead of going home to more prayers, she discovered this little strip of woods where she could hide away several hours after school and on weekends and get home just in time for dinner. Evening prayers were unavoidable, but at least she had a few hours of peace to herself.
Often people would come by, hiking along the stream and most were perfectly ordinary. They never saw her because she could hear them coming a long way away and hid in the darker parts of these woods until they were gone. What surprised her was how often she would see people doing things they would never do if they knew she was there.
It was seriously educational! She also knew some of the secret things about people she knew, but she would never tell. She considered writing a book one day, just hide all the names to protect the guilty, like Mr. and Mrs. Stevens.
Before she first met them, she thought they would look like that couple from the old TV show about the witch who married a regular guy. But the reality was very different. Mr. Stevens was older than his wife and looked at her in a way that made her uncomfortable. Mrs. Stevens wasn’t a witch, well not using the letter ‘w’ anyway. She really was surprised to see the Stevens’ car parked near her spot one day. The car was right where she would have been spotted if she tried to leave. It was only there for a short time, but it was enough to see Mr. Steven’s wasn’t alone. She didn’t recognize the young blond girl bobbing up and down on his dick, but it sure wasn’t red-haired Mrs. Stevens.
It bothered her a bit until she was cutting through a couple of backyards last summer and spotted Mrs. Stevens and someone not her husband skinny dipping in their pool if you can call getting screwed in the corner of the pool skinny-dipping. She remembered thinking Mrs. Stevens could use her chest as a flotation device in the event of an airplane crash. Another time she saw her with someone else and she was doing what the blond was doing with her husband. It was kind of funny seeing her breasts stretched down and swinging violently.
The Stevens weren’t the only people she saw doing questionable things. The Mitchell’s oldest boy liked to smoke pot near the stream. She thought he was about to get busted when she saw the Sheriff’s only deputy show up, but he took several puffs before going back on patrol. She knew of several other couples being foolish in different ways, some of them were actual couples who were taking nature to the extreme, others had partners that were not their official better-half.
She also discovered another facet of humanity her school failed to mention, homosexuality. Guys with guys and girls with girls really surprised her the first couple of times, especially her school’s vice-principal. She was disgusted at first, but that was more a reaction based on her upbringing than any real aversion. What she discovered is that people were people and it made her question even more of those religious beliefs she’d been hit with practically since birth.
Today’s couple wasn’t unusual in that way but in some ways a morality play she saw several times. She was close enough to hear today’s conversation, one she was sure they wouldn’t be having if they knew they had an audience. It was something she witnessed before. The guy wanted sex and the girl was holding out. The voyeur knew she would probably give in eventually, several girls had in the past. It was something else to loath about her religious school.
It often went something like this: The girl would give in and he would claim her virginity like it was sort of a prize. The next day it would be all over the damned school. His friends would pat him on the back and call him a ‘stud’, her friends would avoid her and call her a ‘slut’. His dad would congratulate him on his prowess while hers would ostracize her. Once the result started showing, she would get expelled while he would graduate with honors at the end of the school year. It was a recurring theme because the school did nothing in the way of sex education or birth control to prevent it. It was easier sweeping it under a rug and the girl along with it than facing reality.
She’d seen it before, only it took a while to understand what was happening. That lack of sex education was certainly one reason. It was also something she couldn’t possibly ask about at home. She couldn’t even imagine her father’s face if she asked about sex! The one time she asked about seeing an R-rated movie practically caused a heart attack. She didn’t even know what that rating meant at the time.
She thought it was the third time she saw a girl expelled during her Junior year that drove home the hypocrisy of it all. She knew the girl and had seen her from her vantage point with the same guy and witnessed what they were doing. At the time she knew they both seemed to be enjoying themselves, but the things that happened several months later really bothered her. It was like the script of a bad movie. The whispers started and a few months later the girl was expelled while the boy continued through graduation. She learned later the girl went to live with an aunt and had a baby girl. As far as she knew, the guy involved completely ignored the whole thing once the girl ended up under that rug of pseudo-respectability.
She decided it wasn’t going to happen this time and swung down from her tree.
“Hey, just what the fuck do you think you are doing here?” She yelled in a deep voice from several steps hidden in her woods. The young couple got frightened and while the girl was trying to gather everything together, the boy ran off. The poor girl just stared at him running as the voyeur stepped out from the woods.
“Oh, it’s you! You scared us.”
“No, I scared you, I made Billy run off and leave you hanging in the wind.”
“No, you just frightened him.
“I certainly hope so. You might not believe this, but I just saved you from making a huge mistake. Billy’s brother was why Mary got expelled.”
“That’s not true, Mary was expelled…”
“Mary was expelled for being pregnant. I know this school tends to gloss over basic biology, but it takes two people to get pregnant. Mary was only half the equation, Billy’s older brother was the other half. If you gave in you might well have found yourself in the same situation.”
“That’s not true, he loves me!”
The voyeur shrugged her shoulders. “Yea, Mary thought his brother did too. Maybe he does love you, but if he did why did he run off so easily? I would have stayed to protect the one I love!”
This girl paused to think about that as the voyeur faded back into the woods, uncomfortable that her anonymity was tarnished but happy to maybe have prevented another personal catastrophe.
