Foolish Fire Read Online Free PDF Page A

spot me. I did it right in the hallway of my home in broad daylight during the two or three minutes in which my mom used the toilet. The element of danger, the risk of getting caught gave the act a special sense of urgency.
    Normally one session was enough to leave me feeling sated for a while—or rather, free me from the tension of thinking about it all the time, giving me a temporary respite from my addiction. However, I sometimes felt like testing my endurance by doing it three, four, five times a day, pushing myself to my limits. One Saturday when I had the house to myself, I managed, by spacing them out, a record-breaking eight times—until I was “shooting blanks,” coming without any discharge—pushed on by a dogged determination to dredge to the roots of my obsession and be freed of it once and for all.
    Sometimes I felt guilty about doing it so often. I thought of the whispered warnings about what happened when a boy did it too much and would go through a period of repentance when I vowed to quit once and for all. It never lasted long, however. At night I tossed and turned, unable to sleep. When I did manage to drop off, it was a restless slumber broken by intermittent wakefulness. And as the night progressed, I found myself pulling off my pajamas, then my underwear, until I was completely nude beneath the sheets, feverish with unsatisfied longing.
    These attempts at chastity always ended up with a guilty half-hearted fondling which very quickly modulated into a furious pumping. I discovered to my amazement that these periods of abstention only served to increase my eventual pleasure. The climax was positively gut-wrenching, leaving me so shattered that I was momentarily unable or unwilling to even lift a hand to clean off my befouled face.
    And so I sometimes purposely imposed these periods of celibacy to heighten my enjoyment of an increasingly routine act.
     
    *
     
    For the boys in seventh grade, body hair was still the definitive sign of physical maturity, and those of us who didn’t even have pubic hair yet would cover our genitals in shame every time we took our showers in PE.
    I felt more and more depressed each time I spotted another boy in the locker room sporting a shy new smudge of down-like pubic hair. In the steamy haze of the showers these boys were like newly-hatched chicks showing off their first badges of manhood, proud of their fledgling adult status. By the spring term of seventh grade, fully half of the boys had “arrived.” I lived with the fear that I would never join them; the sight of my own smooth, baby-bare pubis was a constant source of humiliation.
    Every morning after tumbling out of bed, the first thing I did was examine myself, running a hopeful finger over my pubis. Always there was nothing—only bare skin…detestable girl-smooth skin.
    Finally, one morning I received my first sign of hope. I was still half asleep in bed when I caught myself rubbing a vague itch. When I realized what I was doing, I sat bolt upright. “It’s coming,” I thought. Throwing off my covers, I pulled my pajama bottoms down. In the early morning light nothing looked changed, yet I could somehow sense that it was arriving at last, the pubic hair for which I’d practically given up hope.
    Every morning after that I tenderly caressed with my fingertips the harvest of downy fuzz which grew there, imagining I could see it getting thicker by the day. Then one morning, to my elation, I definitely spotted minuscule shoots of hair like scattered blades of grass shyly breaking the soil.
    Day by day—almost before my very eyes, it seemed—the hairs grew thicker, spreading out their fine spider-web filigrees of soft brown through which the skin could still be glimpsed. No longer would I have to hold my bath towel shyly in front of me as I crept toward the showers. I could now drape it boldly around my neck as I strolled around the locker room. And I could take my time in the showers from now on, soaping