Michael Thomas Ford - Full Circle by Michael Thomas Ford Read Free Book Online Page B

arrival of the annual Sear's Wish Book and its store of treasures. I listened as he chattered, happy to be walking with him. But I also felt that I had now somehow become his guardian, responsible for making sure that he escaped the terrible thing that was waiting for him in the years ahead. I hoped that, like the flu, this new affliction would pass for both of us. Until it did, I would be watchful, looking for signs of danger, searching for the thing that would prevent Jack's destruction.
CHAPTER 5
    It is a dreadful thing to feel responsible for someone else's well-being, and worse when that person seemingly feels no reciprocal obligation. Not that Jack didn't care about me. He did. But as we got older, his idea of caring came to consist primarily of making sure I wasn't ostracized socially, and this he did mostly because he needed to be sure of his own position in teenage society. If I sound bitter, perhaps I am. Whether this is justified or not I cannot say. I only know that I spent a great deal of my time during the next few years keeping a watchful eye on Jack. I was always on the lookout for danger, always suspicious that disaster waited behind every corner. I developed a wariness that manifested itself in almost pathological shyness and a tendency to walk around with my shoulders pulled up. A stiffness settled in my neck and refused to go away. I realize that I'm making Jack sound like a first-class egomaniac. He wasn't. He was a teenage boy, with all the usual faults of teenage boys. If others existed for his convenience, it was only partially his fault. As I've said, people tended to orbit around Jack, anxious to either earn his notice or take care of him. Boys liked him. Girls swooned over him. Through the changing parade of friends and hangers-on, I was the one constant, always there, always waiting.
    During this time I learned to more or less ignore the feelings I had for Jack, or at least to convince myself that what I felt was friendship on a level slightly more focused than usual. This I attributed to the fact that we'd been thrust together at birth. It was only natural, I rationalized, that I would be closer to him than I would be to other boys. If I happened to sometimes think about him while I touched myself (after repeated failure, I'd given up hope of ever remaining chaste), that was only because we were so often together that he came naturally to mind. And if I thought about other boys as well, and never about girls, well, that was something I didn't allow myself to examine too closely. Besides, I had gotten good at feigning interest in girls. Largely this was accidental, as I still didn't quite realize that I had any real reason to pretend. My imaginings during masturbatory sessions were not overtly sexual, tending to focus more on vague daydreams about intense friendships. When I did allow myself to think about sex, it was in an offhand way, based mostly on glimpses of other boys in the locker room and wondering what it would be like to kiss or touch them. Even then, I hadn't the faintest idea what two boys might do together, and my fantasies almost always stopped above the waist. And anyway, I liked girls. I found them interesting, at least when they weren't giggling and whispering together in corners, as they seemed often to be doing. I found that, with some effort, I could even engage with the other boys in conversations about which girls were the most kissable, personable, or likely to put out if asked (not that I really knew what this meant). If I never quite got to the point of actually asking one of them to a school dance, or to a movie, that was attributed to my retiring nature. Girls were no problem for Jack. The charm he'd evidenced since birth only grew brighter as he reached his mid-teens. Where most of us spent a year or two battling acne, awkward bodies, and the ravages of hormones, Jack went through all of it seemingly overnight, going to bed a boy and waking up the next just a moustache