I grew up alone.
I stuttered and had a lisp when I was very young. Needless to say, making friends was all but impossible. My reddish hair, freckles, and glasses didn't help any. Speech therapy, and the incredibly nice woman who led the class, helped me get rid of the stutter and lisp by fourth grade. I ended up skipping fifth.
I had never made many friends in grade school, but when I entered middle school, I tried harder. Over the first few months, I made several friends, but one became a very good friend. We liked the same kind of bad science fiction movies, the same rock music, the same books. And Dungeons and Dragons. We even secretly liked the same country songs. The irony was that I had been going to school with him for years.
In seventh grade we had homeroom together, as well as several classes. It was junior high, so we had to change into a uniform, shower, then change back into our street clothes for gym. I was barely thirteen, but I was further along than some of the guys in eighth grade. It was difficult at first, having all that nudity to deal with. I'd already suspected that I was too interested in boys' anatomies, and was finding it difficult to deal with that, and the feelings it caused. What was most difficult though, was having Trey in the class.
Trey was just a normal guy: not fat, not skinny, not tall, not short, not stupid, not smart. He was athletic, had blond hair, brown eyes, and ordinary features. There wasn't much about him that stood out, unless you happened to be a boy, about his age, who was beginning to be concerned that he found other boys attractive. In that case, Trey had the most wonderful blond hair, all wavy and unruly, eyes so soft and brown you wondered if they felt like felt or velvet, the cutest nose that turned up just a tiny bit, red lips so perfectly shaped that they belonged in magazines or on television. When he smiled, it made you wonder how anyone else would dare reveal how weak and tepid their own smile was. If you were a boy who was beginning to worry that he might like boys instead of girls, Trey had the cutest butt on earth, and he was beginning to fill out the front of his pants in ways that made your breath come short and fast, and made the front of your own pants suddenly feel tight and constraining.
Trey was a little bigger than I was, but that was normal, as I was one grade ahead of other kids my age. I was smarter than him, but he was better looking than me. He was a natural athlete, I was a natural bookworm. He was naturally outgoing and popular, I was naturally introverted and insecure.
Trey didn't care about any of those things. He didn't care about any of my foibles. He only cared that we got along, that we had fun together.
Exactly how we became friends, I couldn't tell you. It just seemed to happen.
By the end of seventh grade, we had started spending almost all of our time together. His older brother was an ass, so we usually wound up at my house. We rode our bikes to the arcade, or the movies, or just around all day. He slept at my house almost every weekend during school.
I finally had a best friend, even a blood-brother.
Yes, we had done that. One day between seventh and eighth grade, in the little shed behind my house, we had cut our palms and held them together, our blood mixing, and swore we would always be brothers - until death. That was also the day that we had given each other our private nicknames. I called him Three, he called me X. Blood-brothers had to have private, secret nicknames.
