I was always the brainy one. All the way through high school, math and science held no mystery. With this gift came a curse: ostracism. When other girls’ social lives evolved to cliques with interests like cosmetics and boys, I was excluded. Nobody wanted to associate with the nerdy girl who made them look dumb. And boys? Same thing. A few (very few) dates always ended badly because I intimidated them, just by being myself.
There was one advantage. At graduation, colleges came to me. Three, in fact. I told the guidance counselor I was interested in electro-mechanical engineering, and she sent my transcripts to those universities. They, in turn, sent representatives to interview me. One of them was my first choice, and I accepted.
Then another miracle happened. Mom and I were on campus looking at dorms when reps from the school’s premier sorority found us and made me an offer. Free room and board, plus a stipend, if I agreed to tutor some of their members. The school had world-class medical and business schools, and the rich and powerful sent their sons there. Those same type of people send their daughters there to find rich and powerful husbands. Their high school studies, however, were secondary to their concentration on ascent into society via the debutant track. I would be helping them maintain passing grades until they snared that trophy husband.
Of course, Mom said yes. Now I had a totally free education, and they could vacation with my college fund.
I was assigned a room in the sorority house with another tutor, Liz Stone. She was tall, slender, pretty, I guess, but intense and quiet.
I introduced myself. “I’m Laura Simon.”
“Liz Stone,” she replied. “I’ll take the bed by the window.”
She unpacked her two bags and flopped on the bed.
“You’re here for the same tutoring gig as me?”
I nodded.
“What’s your major?”
“Electro-mechanical engineering. Yours?” I asked.
“Same. You think you can cut it?”
“I think so,” I said. “I graduated first in my class with a concentration in math. I should do okay.”
“I was first, too. Maybe it’s good we’re together here.”
We spent most of the afternoon getting to know each other. She was a jock, playing high school soccer, basketball, and softball, but was skipping college sports to concentrate on her education. Her graduating class was twelve hundred (mine was a hundred and five). Late afternoon, we ate at the food court, and after we returned, she had a senior get us a box of sweet red wine.
We spent the evening drinking and laughing, telling stories of our high school days. She was an excellent storyteller, and the wine helped loosen her tongue. Her retelling stories of her high school days had us both in stitches. But when she started to relate an event from her senior prom night, she noticed my suddenly pinched face when I turned away.
“What, did I say something?” she asked. I couldn’t face her. She crossed to my bed, wrapped an arm around my shoulders, and asked again, “What’s the matter?”
I couldn’t contain myself anymore, turned and buried my face in her shoulder, bawling uncontrollably.
“Sweet Jesus, honey, whatever is it?” Her arms tightened. “Shh, shh, it’s going to be alright. You’re here with me now, it’s going to be alright.”
I turned away, embarrassed that I was so emotional. She grabbed a tissue and, lifting my face, dabbed my eyes. “Did something happen to you? Is that it? Tell me, let me help. You can trust me, I can keep a secret. Can you talk about it?”
A sob and a sigh, I sat back. “It’s okay, you couldn’t have known. It happened at my senior prom.”
And I told her the story. How, after four years as a social outcast, out of the blue, I was asked to the prom. By Tom Winston, a football player, nonetheless. I was on cloud nine. Dress, hair, makeup, the whole nine yards. He picked me up, we went to the dance, and afterwards went to an after-dance party.
We stayed at the party for about an hour before leaving to take me home. I suspected the punch was spiked, so I drank sparingly, but being unused to alcohol, I got buzzed. He detoured to an isolated spot where we parked. I had never kissed a boy before, but when he held me and put his mouth on mine, I was over the moon.
Soon I was getting really warm. It seemed his hands were everywhere. He squeezed my breasts, and it was an electric shock. His hand was under my dress, fingers rubbing my button until I thought I would pass out. We got into the backseat, and when he pulled my breasts out and began sucking my nipples, it was the most intense feeling I had ever experienced. He was still kissing me, and I was holding on for dear life.
“I was tingling all over. You’re supposed to lose your virginity on prom night, right? I had never thought I would, but here it was, just about to happen.”
He raised up, opened his pants, and, holding his penis, he pulled my panties aside, rubbing it against my vagina. It was like my whole body was electrified. I could hardly breathe.
Then he thrust it into me. I thought he had stabbed me; the pain was so intense. And it was only a few seconds later when he grunted, threw back his head and gave a long, exhaled sigh. I felt a throbbing sensation. He was shooting his sperm into me.
He said if we waited a few minutes, he could do it again. I said I had to get home, so he pulled it out of me. A flood of bloody semen followed. It was all over my dress and the seat. He cursed, said it was my fault the stuff got all over the upholstery, and he was going to have to pay to have it cleaned.
“When we got home, he said he would pick me up the next night, and we would go back there again. I just bunched my dress between my legs, so I wouldn’t drip, and hobbled through the patio door into the kitchen.”
Mom was waiting. She was horrified when she saw me. We went into the downstairs bathroom, where she cleaned me as best she could. She bagged the dress and bloody towels for the landfill. She said it was a good thing my dad had already gone to bed, or that was one young man who would never have seen the sunrise.
I stayed home the next day, and Mom got me Plan B. The day after that, between classes, Tom cornered me and told me that we were going back to that place that night. I told him no. He said if I didn’t, he would spread the word that I was a slut, an easy lay. I told him that if I heard even a whisper, I would spread the word among the girls that I had just touched him and he had shot off in his pants.
“I never heard a thing, and two months later, I graduated.”
Liz got this strange look. “Do you know where this Tom person is? I’d like to meet him.”
“Playing football at some community college in the Midwest, I think. Not that I care, as long as it’s not here.”
She drained her cup and refilled hers and mine. Her face had returned to smiling, and she began telling a softball story about a female umpire’s faux pas. “So she’s getting ready to put the ball back into play, where the umpire announces the balls and strikes on the batter, and she says, ‘I’ve got two balls…’. I was the catcher, and I just fell over laughing. I don’t think she ever figured it out.”
We drank most of the wine that night and suffered mightily the next day.
There were two events I remember from our freshman year. The first happened at our first mixer, where the sorority sisters visited a fraternity. Liz and I went along because, after all, we were members. The boys and girls had mostly paired off (Liz and I politely declined). She and I were standing in the living room surveying the squalor young men seem to see as acceptable living conditions, when one of the frat boys came up behind Liz, reached under her arms, and grabbed her boobs.
She spun around so fast I thought she would catch her own shadow, and grasped that unfortunate young man by the throat. When his hands came up, trying to dislodge her grip, she delivered a mighty blow to that place where no man or boy would ever wish to receive one.
He might have screamed like a little girl, but her grip paralyzed his vocal cords. His exhale sounded like the air coming out of a balloon. She put him on the floor and sat on his chest, her right hand pistoning. Some other frat boys and I wrestled her off. It was literally only seconds. But the miscreant’s appearance looked like a collaboration between Picasso and Dali. His brothers hauled him off to the Urgent Care. The doctor needed the cause of the injury for the injury report. “Ran into a door,” the brothers said. “How many times?” the doctor asked. But they stuck to their story. It seems the house was on the dean’s shit list, and a charge of sexual assault was all it would take for him to lock the doors.
On the plus side, the word went out up and down Greek Row: DO NOT MESS WITH THOSE BITCHES IN DELTA SIGMA! THEY WILL FUCK YOU UP! And for the next four years, whenever we visited frat houses, we were treated with the deference and respect ladies of our genteel upbringing deserved.
The other thing happened during the winter quarter. We had a house mother, Tracy Simson. Her husband had passed away years before, and, childless, she had applied and was accepted as the house mother for the sorority. She could charitably be described as plain. Like women in those old-time photos of pioneer women who looked more like men. From the neck down, she had all the right stuff in all the right places, though. She was a tough old gal, always knocking on our door, telling us to keep the noise down.
It happened at another frat mixer. Liz and I were talking with a couple of frat boys when Liz asked where the ladies’ room was. The one they pointed us to on the first floor had more stuff on the floor than on the stool. We wandered upstairs, looking for another one up there.
Walking down a hallway, we turned a corner and encountered several frat boys standing in line by a door. Liz tapped the last boy in line on the shoulder and asked, “What are you waiting for?” The boy turned around, saw Liz, and freaked.
“GREAT FUCKING HELL, IT’S THEM!” The others in line turned and, also recognizing Liz, all broke and ran.
We looked at each other and had the same thought. What’s behind the door?
Liz opened it. The room was dimly lit, but we could see people on the bed. A woman on her hands and knees, a man behind whose penis was either in her vagina or anus, and another in front with his penis in her mouth. The woman was sandwiched. Closer examination revealed the woman was Tracy Simson.
Liz was first to act. “WHAT THE FUCKING HELL ARE YOU COCKSUCKERS DOING TO THAT WOMAN? GET THE FUCK OFF HER!”
They, too, had no difficulty recognizing Liz. The one in the back pulled out and ran out the door. It was pretty funny, because he still had a hard-on and it waggled as he ran. The one in front held his hand over his penis, but he ran out the same.
Then Tracy sat up, swung her legs off the bed, and said, “What are you two dumb bitches doing, fucking up my party?”
I’m sure we looked pretty stupid. Hadn’t we just saved her?
Then we heard her story. Since her husband died, she had wanted male companionship in the biblical sense. With her looks, those prospects were dim. She had found, though, that when she accompanied the sisters to their frat mixers, some frat boys would flirt with her. She decided to encourage them, and they plied her with the spiked punch, most of which she poured out, acting drunker than she actually was. They would take her off somewhere where the boys would come and get laid, and she got her ashes hauled. Problem solved.
We swore to keep her secret. And from then on, she gave us more slack when things got noisy in our room.
Okay, there was one other notable event in my freshman year. Something that may have set the course for the rest of my life.
We were winding down after a day of school, labs, and studying. A little wine, a little melancholy. The other sisters were establishing their social networks, dating and whatnot, while we were on our own. Not like high school, just not included in the other girls’ activities.
Sitting on my bed, I opined that I probably was destined to die an old maid, because “boys just aren’t interested in me.”
Liz came over, sat on my bed, put her arm around me, and said, “Close your eyes.”
I looked at her quizzically.
“Go ahead, close them.”
I closed them.
Then her lips were on mine, her tongue caressing their crease.
Startled, I opened my eyes and saw hers watching me. She asked, “Did that boy kiss you like that?” She leaned back in, kissed me again, tenderly but more insistent. The initial shock was wearing off, and my body began reacting to her. My arms embraced her, my tongue coming out to greet hers.
Her hand was under my shirt, caressing my stomach, working its way up to my breasts. She lifted my bra up, palmed a breast, gently massaging it until the nipple stiffened. “You have amazing tits, Laura,” she whispered against my lips. “I’d like to see them.”
Off came the shirt. I unhooked the bra and shrugged out of it. This was the first time I was purposely nude in her presence, and I felt myself getting hot as color suffused my face. But her eyes held mine, my face asking approval, hers granting it. “Fuck, Laura, they’re beautiful!”
A smile of relief, and I was back in her arms. Her lips returned to mine as she twisted at the waist, laying us on my bed. One hand returned to massaging my breast, while her lips traveled to my cheek, ear, and neck. Her lips gently sucked the skin, while her tongue lightly caressed. “You are so fucking gorgeous,” she breathed. “I can’t believe those high school boys weren’t fighting over who would carry your books.” Her lips traveled under my chin and down my chest, kissing and lightly sucking all the way. I was staring wide-eyed at the ceiling, pulse beating hard and fast, out of breath, body aflame. Even my most explicit masturbatory fantasies had never made me feel close to the way Liz was. And when her lips closed over a nipple, taking it in her teeth, gently nibbling while her tongue worried it, my whole body convulsed. My hands reflexively went to her head, holding her against me. I was moaning, I was shaking, I was on the verge of a monumental orgasm that would quake me to my soul.
She snaked a hand down my shorts, inside my panties. Her middle finger entered my vagina, her thumb pressing hard on my clit, rubbing it urgently. “Come for me, baby,” she whispered.
It was like I was hit with 10,000 volts. Every muscle in my body seized. My eyes were wide, unseeing. She had to put her other hand over my mouth to stifle my screams. It went on and on. I went into convulsions, my pelvis bucking up and down, riding out the waves of ecstasy that kept coming, one after the other.
She finally withdrew her hand from my shorts. When my vision cleared, I saw her smiling down at me. “That’s one way to make love to a woman, not the wham-bam-thank you, ma’am, that other asshole did. You like it?
“Very much! I have never felt like that in my life!”
Suddenly, a pounding on the door. It was Tracy. “What’s going on in there? You two pipe down, there’s ladies out here trying to study.”
“Yes, mother,” we replied in chorus.
After she was gone, I looked back at Liz. “This girl-girl stuff; does it mean you don’t like boys?”
“Oh, I like boys just fine. I react to people I’m attracted to, and I’ve been attracted to you since day one. Others would label me bi. But I’m exclusive. If we’re going to be a pair, it will be only you and me. What about you?”
“I’m confused. Except for that ugly experience, and tonight, I’m totally new to sex. I’ll try, but understand that if I decide to end it, it’s over. I don’t want to commit to something that I know so little about.”
“Fair enough. So how about we shove the beds together?”
That’s how we began. Four years later, we’re about to graduate, and we’re still together.
