John thought his dad was kidding about the whole military school thing. Everybody's parents got red-faced and shook their finger in their kid's face and said, "one more suspension/expulsion/excommunication and I will ship you out to military school!" Yeah, most people's parents said it. John's dad wrote a fucking check. The first thing they did was shave his head. John most certainly did not cry. Well, not then.

John was what they call "precocious". That meant that he learned how to get in trouble before the other kids. Well before the other kids.

John got asked to leave three day care programs - one for his habit of wandering off and twice for biting. He got expelled from a religious kindergarten for explaining atheism to the other kids - he didn't actually get excommunicated, but that was probably because his family actually was atheist. He managed to get suspended from every grade thereafter and every extracurricular activity at least once. The Boy Scouts twice.

It wasn't that he was a bad kid, he was just curious. And inventive. And fearless. And charming. And a little cocky. It was the cockiness that always came back to bite him in the ass.

Fearlessness took a nosedive at military school. He was frankly too scared to act up most of the time. He was lanky and kind of scrawny, and he was twelve, the youngest they'd accept into the program. He made a few friends and tried - for once in his short life - to fly under the radar.

Every summer, John came home. The first summer, his parents told him they were getting a divorce. The next summer, he met his new stepmother, Jeni. The one after that, he met his new stepfather, Keith. The one after that he spent mostly with Grandpa George and at the pool at the country club.

That summer, he took up with Lisa Gordon - literally the girl next door. She was pretty and had red hair and looked nice in a bikini. She would make out with him and she even let him put his hand up her top a couple of times. It was okay, he guessed. His dad, Jeni, and Grandpa George all had the condom talk with him. Separately. He promised to write letters to Lisa while he was off at school. He didn't, and the next summer she was dating Larry Clarke and gave him dirty looks when she saw him at the pool at the club.

When his junior year started, he got upgraded to a suite, sharing living space with three other boys, instead of the 16-person bunkrooms the lower-schoolers were crammed into. His suite-mates were two guys he'd gone to school with for a couple of years and a new transfer student named Ben. John immediately developed a huge crush on Ben, which scared the hell out of him

Ben was a badass - he'd been kicked out of two other military schools - one for smoking pot, and one for a mysterious lab explosion and subsequent fire that destroyed a 100-year-old building. Ben was tall and broad; he had light brown hair and dark, hooded eyes. He actually looked good in the closely clipped - but not shaved - upperclassmen's regulation haircut.

John immediately started hanging out around Ben as much as he could without feeling like a total dork, and Ben immediately changed the dynamic of the suite. John came in from his morning run one day to find Cal - one of the other roommates - going down on Ben on their couch. John could feel himself blush and his eyes open wide. He could also feel his cock start to get hard, twitching in his running shorts.

"Close the door, Johnny," Ben said, and he kept a hand on the back of Cal's neck when John could tell that the other boy was trying to sit up. "Come 'ere."

John took and released a breath, then shook his head slowly. Ben gave him a lazy smile, and John bolted for the bedroom. He stripped and got into the shower, still blushing furiously, hard and panting. He stood under the cascading water and jerked off to the memory of Ben's cock, dark and wet, stretching Cal's lips.

The summer between his junior and senior year, John was very, very confused. He found himself looking at girls and boys everywhere he went. He saw Lisa and her new boyfriend at the movies and was utterly shocked to find himself more attracted to him than her.

His senior year he got to move to a two-person suite. His roommate? Cal. One night, Cal came into his room.

"Yo, Johnny," he said. "Want a blowjob?"

He came in about 90 seconds, inexpertly jerked Cal off, and slept on the couch, badly.

John pretty much spent the rest of his senior year confused. Cal acted like nothing had happened, so John did, too. John redirected his attention to studying, kept to himself, and graduated with high grades and little fanfare. He got accepted to all seven colleges he'd applied to.

Home felt weird - everything had been changed to Jeni's taste - which was much cooler than his mom's had been, though John would die before saying so. John's dad was proud of him - which was utterly bizarre - and he let John do pretty much anything he wanted.

One night in the middle of July, John started to form his plan. He needed to figure some stuff out. He needed to figure some stuff out for himself.