Hunting the Fairy Tale

Chapter 40 - The Chef on The Bench

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Seems like Paisley has found herself a new hobby. First, she never made friends with girls and now she keeps on bringing stray ones to the bench. No, that's not right, technically Hunter brought Prissy.

I've met this one before. Years ago. We were dance partners in a stupid school show. I was in sixth grade and back then girls were just starting to not be gross. To be honest, I remember Molly Granger pretty well. She was, after all, the first girl that got my pre-adolescent body all excited.

The only girl I'd ever had any form of physical contact with at that stage had been Paisley, and come on, Paise is not a girl. She's a friggin' sprite that got stuck in a chilli pepper and grew arms and legs. Even today holding her feels like I'm holding a baby bird that could be crushed if I squeezed too hard. 

Pity, she doesn't want to act like a friggin' baby bird. Perhaps she is acting like a baby Griffin.

Molly made a huge impression on me right from the first moment. I was a little shy back then when it came to girls. We had to do this twirling thing and then I had to put my hands on her hips from behind. I was immediately startled because she was definitely no Paisley. 

I could actually feel her and for reasons I didn't understand back then, I rather liked how she felt. It freaked me out. I was about to turn 12, what the hell did I know about that kind of thing? I didn't really have anybody to teach me about those things, and until that moment I didn't suspect that I would actually like the way girls feel.

I hated the whole dance thing. I was terrified that someone would find out that I was having all kinds of strange sensations in areas of my body, that I thought were unnatural and unacceptable. I was afraid that someone would try to cut off some crucial boy bits again. Hell, I planned to cut it off myself. 

I'm pretty sure I would have too if Jake didn't see me that night after our last dance performance sorting through the knives in the kitchen, looking for the right one for the job. I don't know how he knew what I was planning. Jake often just knows what I'm up to by the look on my face.

In his calm Jake way, he just took my arm and dragged me to his room to show me a book he'd found among Grandma's things. It was the kind of book you'd give to adolescents to help with their sexual education, but I think it was written in 1642. 

It referred to girls' private areas as rose gardens and made almost no sense. There was very little detail about anything, but I did get the message that the strange things that were starting to happen to my body were pretty normal and that I didn't have to cut anything off... yet...

Jake, Ash, and I had each other and that book as our source of information, and sometimes Hunter would come with some nuggets he'd learned from his dad.

Truth is, the four of us weren't really all that interested. To us, girls meant Paisley and everybody knows that she's a friggin' bush harpy. I guess we just had too many other things to worry about and be interested in to really care too much about the mechanics of reproduction.

At least at that age.

I also always kinda avoided the topic. When the other guys asked Uncle Ryan all kinds of questions, I would just leave. The whole thing scared me. Anything related to the biology behind being a boy scared the shit out of me. I guess it still does in a way. I wanted my mother to come back and didn't think that exploring my boy-ness would help with that at all. 

I was afraid that it could bring Tansy back into my life. There's nothing I fear more than that.

My twin sister, Tracy has virtually disappeared from my mirror now. I miss her so much. I think I'll always miss my sister. She was my soulmate. We shared a womb and we shared a face. How weird that the gene roulette somehow managed to give us virtually the exact same face even though we're not the same sex.