The older girls who were boarders struck Jack as much older. Their detectable sullenness wasn't limited to the daughters of diplomats or the other foreign students, nor was their gloom regional in nature--the cousins who were called "the Nova Scotia sluts" were as depressed as the girl from British Columbia whom Emma Oastler called "the B.C. bitch." The boarders had about them a noticeable air of being banished. The boarders' choir made the most mournful music in the school.
Sightings of the girls in residency were unusual in the junior school, but once, in his grade-three year, Jack was emerging from the boys' washroom (still zipping up his fly), when he saw a couple of grade-thirteen girls striding toward him--a flash of nail polish, kneesocks rolled down to their ankles, shapely legs, wide hips, full breasts. Jack panicked. In his haste, his penis got snagged in his zipper. Naturally, he screamed.
"Sweet Jesus, it's a boy!" one of the big girls said.
"I'll say it is, and he's caught his miserable thing in his zipper," the other replied.
"When do they start playing with their things?" the first girl asked. "Stop screaming!" she said sharply to Jack. "You haven't cut it off, have you?"
"Let me do that," the second girl said, kneeling beside Jack. "I have a little brother--I know how to handle this."
"You have to handle it?" the first girl asked. She knelt beside Jack, too.
"Let me see it--get your hands off the thing!" the girl with the little brother told Jack.
"It hurts!" Jack cried.
"You've just pinched some skin--it's not even bleeding." The girl was at least seventeen or eighteen--maybe nineteen.
"When does it get big?" the first girl asked.
"It doesn't feel like getting big when it's stuck in a zipper, Meredith."
"It gets big when it feels like it?" Meredith asked.
The grade-thirteen girl held Jack's penis in her hand; with the thumb and index finger of her other hand, she gently tugged at his zipper.
"Ow!"
"Well, what do you want me to do?" the girl who'd come to his assistance asked. "Wait for you to grow up?"
"You've got lady-killer eyelashes," Meredith told Jack. "When you're old enough, you're going to get your penis stuck in all kinds of places."
"Ow!"
"Now it's bleeding," the second girl said. Jack was unstuck, but she went on holding his penis in her hand.
"What are you doing, Amanda?" Meredith asked.
"Just watch," Amanda said. She didn't mean for Jack to watch. Without looking, he could feel his penis getting big--or at least a little bigger.
"What's your name?" Meredith asked him.
"Jack."
"Feeling better, eh, Jack?" Amanda asked.
"Sweet Jesus, look at that thing!" Meredith said.
"That's nothing," Amanda said. "You can get bigger than that, can't you, Jack?" He was as big as he'd ever been before. He was afraid that if he got any bigger, he would burst.
"It's beginning to hurt again," he said.
"That's a different kind of pain, Jack." Amanda gave him a friendly squeeze before she let him go.
"Better not catch that whopper in your zipper, Jack," Meredith warned him. She stood up and ruffled his hair.
"Maybe you'll dream about us, Jack," Amanda said.