“Hey, look!” Travis Richardson yelled. “Little Shrimp went to beauty school over the summer!” The pack of varsity baseball players trailing behind their team captain erupted in laughter as they passed by the tree-covered courtyard outside the arts building, where Michael was eating lunch with Lauren and her friends. Michael blushed so hard he could feel it in his face.
“Travis Richardson!” Lauren shouted as he passed, “you leave Mikey alone! He’s actually a really good French braider!”
Michael was generally grateful for the protective role Lauren played in his life on campus, but he cringed at the nature of this particular defense, since hair-braiding wasn’t the manliest of skills. Travis Richardson was a senior and a three-sport varsity athlete. He stood well over six feet and always had a rotating cast of girlfriends: girls he dated, not friends who were girls. He was, in other words, everything Michael was not. And at the present moment, the contrast between them couldn’t be clearer. Travis and his senior bros were on their way to their cars, about to head off campus for lunch, while Michael, a sophomore, was perched on the grass behind Lauren’s friend Heather, his hands full of her partially-French-braided jet black hair.
“Hey!” Heather snapped, feeling Mike’s hands cease moving. “No one told you to stop! And you better not screw my braid up!”
“Heather,” Lauren said in a mildly scolding tone. “Be nice.” Lauren and her friends had PE later that afternoon, and they’d heard they were going to have to run the track. So it was decided that they needed their hair braided. Lauren’s blond hair was being worked on by her friend Janisse, a beautiful dark-skinned Black girl who was easily one of the smartest students in their grade. That left Heather without a hair braider, until she’d looked at Michael and told him to make himself useful. Since the girls--mildly annoyed to find Michael underfoot every time they hung out with Lauren--had forced him to learn how to braid hair over the summer, he couldn’t rightly refuse.
“I wish Travis Richardson would let me be nice to him,” Heather joked, grinning wide. Michael felt his whole body burn with jealousy as Lauren and Janisse laughed in agreement and talked about how fine Travis was, how big his biceps were and how good his butt looked in tight jeans. Heather had a bit of a reputation as a wild-child party girl, but she was drop-dead gorgeous. All of Lauren’s friends were! And of course Lauren herself was the most beautiful of them all. Michael masturbated nightly while thinking about all three of them--or at least he had before his Mommy had taken him to A Caring Place and gotten that damned cage put on! Now he couldn’t jerk off, ever! And no matter what he seemed to do, these three smoking hot girls saw him as a friend and nothing more.
“What do you think, Mikey?” Heather asked with a sneer that Michael could hear even if he couldn’t see it. “Is Travis Richardson the hottest boy in school? Or do you have a crush on some other big, strong boy? Maybe Jeremy McClinton is more your style? Do you like basketball players or baseball boys?”
“I -- I’m not gay,” Michael said softly.
“Well--” Janisse said, cutting off what was surely going to be a mean reply from Heather, “you know it would be okay with us if you were, right?”
“Yeah, Mikey,” Lauren said, “you know it’s okay to be yourself around us, right?”
Michael’s mind reeled, and, as so often happened, he said nothing and the girls went back to talking amongst themselves like he was not even there. He was offended by what the girls were implying about him, but the gentle tone in Lauren’s voice made him ache, physically and emotionally. Truth be told, he really needed someone to be gentle with him right now. Despite his high hopes for a fresh start, Michael’s sophomore year was not off to a good start. This year, Michael was determined to show his Mommy--and Lauren and her friends--that he was a big boy, that he could grow up and be independent and do well in school and not cry every day. But now, almost a month into sophomore year, Michael was finding that naming his goal was much, much easier than actually accomplishing it.
It doesn’t help, he thought, grimacing as he continued braiding Heather’s hair, when my Mommy keeps acting like she does. Not only had Michael’s regular visits to A Caring Place continued, cuddle time with Mommy had too. And Michael’s Mommy had begun to treat him even more childishly than she had before. From insisting that she be the one to do things like grab his snacks from the cupboard, to banning him from watching PG-13 movies (she claimed they could “disturb” him into losing progress on his therapy), to holding his hand whenever they crossed the road; Michael put up little to no resistance as his world became more and more restrictive by the day. The worst part was, Mommy seemed to have a built in excuse for pretty much everything. When he complained that she started picking out his clothes for him, she claimed it was because he always took too long to decide. When he whined about her cleaning his face with a washcloth after every meal, she would casually remark that he was too much of a messy eater, and she couldn’t let her little boy run around looking like a slob, now could she?
The worst of it came one day when Michael accidentally knocked over a cup full of grape juice. From then on, his mother made it a rule that he had to drink everything from a children’s plastic sippy cup. Worse still, she’d started feeding him warm milk from a sippy cup when they spent time on the couch together. This, perhaps more than anything else, made Michael feel like he was slowly being turned into an overgrown infant; although at this point he was just relieved she wasn’t making him use a full blown baby bottle. Why he continued to put up with it, he could not tell you. To listen to his Mommy explain it, as she often did looking down on him while he nursed from the sippy cup, Michael’s cooperation with her changes was proof that it was somehow relieving to him to have his mother take the lead again.
That’s why school was so important to him this year: It was a chance to prove Mommy wrong. School was time away from home and from A Caring Place. It was time to be with his peers, to be a high school student, to be normal, to not think about the fact that he was a breastfeeding, pull-up wearing fifteen year old. And Michael just knew that if he could make school work--if he could have a year where he made good grades and didn’t cry every day and maybe even got Lauren to date him--well his Mommy and Nurse Linda would have no choice but to see him as the grown up young adult he knew he was!
Or could be.
Or at least wanted to be.
The problem was that tenth grade didn’t seem to be coming any easier to Michael than 9th grade had. Never one who was good with schedules, Michael spent most of the first week going to the wrong class during the wrong period. These flub-ups inevitably resulted in wet eyes on his part as the teacher whose room he’d arrived in patiently tried to explain the schedule to him again and walked him to where he was supposed to be. And the work! Oh my God, Michael had thought his teachers might have waited a week or two to let students ease into being sophomores, but no! The homework was piled thick and deep from day one, and Michael was shocked to learn that there had been summer reading assignments his Mommy had not even told him about!
“Hey!” Heather snapped at Michael, jarring him back to reality. “It’s done. Just put the hair tie on it and finish it.”
“Heather,” Lauren said in that indulgent tone of voice she always used for her wilder friend, “you could thank Michael for the nice job he did. Your hair looks great.”
Michael’s emotions exploded with gratitude when Lauren praised him, but crashed again as Heather said, “Yeah, it looks fine. I just don’t need him sitting there touching my hair like some perv after he’s finished. Little dweeb is probably filling up his spank bank with the memories!”
Janisse and Heather giggled, and Lauren shook her head. “Mikey’s not gross like that, are you, Mikey?” she asked.
“N--no!” Michael stammered.
“That’s our Mikey,” Janisse said. “Just one of the girls.”
Michael could hear the kindness in Janisse’s voice. She was always so nice to him, and he knew she hadn’t meant to hurt him. Nevertheless, her words stung. Why did so many women in his life see him as a girl?
The truth was, of course, that Michael had once jacked off--regularly and furiously--thinking about Janisse and Heather and especially Lauren, but right now, thwarted by the tiny lavender cage his Mommy would not even discuss releasing him from, he hadn’t jacked off in well over a month. He was ravenously horny, and couldn’t do a damn thing about it, despite the hours he’d spent alone in his room, fruitlessly trying to figure out some way to escape the cage.
That’s another thing that doesn’t help, Michael thought, ruefully. How am I supposed to feel grown up when I have to come to school in a chastity cage and a pair of princess pull-ups? Today’s pair had Mulan on them, and as Michael shifted his weight around on the ground he was sitting on, he could feel their crinkly heft holding him softly under both the boxer shorts his Mommy let him wear over his pull-up and the pair of short, khaki shorts she’d dressed him in on top of that. Michael had been horrified when his Mommy made it clear that he would need to wear his pull-ups to school. He’d cried and screamed and tried to explain how he would die of mortification if anyone at school ever found out about them, but his Mommy had held firm. “Right now,” she’d said, stroking his hair as she held him curing a tearful cuddle session, “you’re going to get to wear your big boy boxer shorts over them, but if you keep on being fussy with Mommy, then Mommy can take your boxer shorts away. Is that what you want?” It was not what Michael wanted, but with a sippy cup of milk pushed into his mouth, all he could do was swallow, not answer.
“Hey, sweet pea,” Lauren said, sitting down next to Michael and brushing his hair out of his eyes. “Are you okay?”
“M -- me? I -- yeah, I -- I’m fine.”
“Really?” Lauren asked, “you’ve seemed preoccupied all during lunch. What are you worried about? That quiz in Spanish later today?”
Michael felt himself flush. He’d had no idea that they had a quiz coming up in Spanish today. He thought that was next week, and he hadn’t studied even one bit! And while he felt grateful that Lauren paid attention to him enough to see that he was worried, what could he really tell her? Lauren was his dream-girl, his childhood crush. He couldn’t remember ever NOT being in love with her. She was perfect: tall and blond and lightly freckled in this beautiful way and she’d hit puberty early and had big breasts and best of all, she’d always been protective of him. She’d never shunned him the way all of the boys and most of the girls did. He’d die, absolutely die, if she ever found out about the baby treatment he was getting at home and at A Caring Place. What was he supposed to say?: Well, my Mom--who I have to call Mommy now--has me in a chastity cage and makes me wear little girls’ pull-ups to school under my boxers and I’m terrified that you’ll find out or that anyone will find out and it makes changing for PE hell because I’m terrified that my boxers will slip too low or ride up too high and expose my pull-up when I’m dressing out and I can’t pee standing up anymore and even if I could I can’t let anyone see this cage that’s locked on me so I have to time my bathroom visits really carefully during the day and that’s mostly what I’m worried about but yeah, now that you mention it, I’m also going to fail this Spanish quiz I didn’t even know we had? “Yeah,” Michael finally squeaked. “Just worried about that Spanish quiz.”
“Silly bear!” Lauren smiled, bopping Michael playfully on the nose. “I called your house the other night to ask if you wanted to come over and study for it, but your Mom said you’d gone to bed early.”
“You -- you did?”
“Yeah, of course. Called your cell first, and then your house’s land line when you didn’t answer! I know Spanish is hard for you, and I wanted to help.”
Michael’s Mommy had started taking his cell phone from him at 6 PM every night, citing studies about screen time increasing anxiety in teenagers, and she hadn’t even told him about Lauren’s call! He didn’t understand her at all anymore. Last year, every missing homework assignment and failed quiz was a huge event at home, with his mom -- er, Mommy -- yelling at him and telling him that his grades counted now that he was in high school and hiring tutors that never seemed to work out. This year, Mommy seemed unfazed by notifications about Michael’s missing assignments and already-low grades, often saying they needed to focus on lifting his cares before she scooped him up for another lap time session.
As Michael thanked Lauren for her concern, the bell rang, signalling the end of the lunch period. Thank God, Michael thought, I really need to pee. Because he had to sit down to pee now, and because even if he could have peed standing up, Michael would still be paranoid about anyone seeing his chastity cage, he’d fallen into a routine of carefully planning his bathroom visits. Sixth period fell right after lunch, and Michael and Lauren had Ms. Featherford’s Western World history class that period. Ms. Featherford had, apparently, once been a really good teacher, but she was well past retirement age now and frankly, she was a little senile. Unlike other, sharper, teachers, Ms. Featherford didn’t mind that Michael asked for a bathroom pass at the start of every class period. And so rather than peeing during lunch--when the boys’ room was inevitably packed--Michael had gotten into the habit of getting a bathroom pass from Ms. Featherford at the start of 6th period, and going and peeing then, when he could have some privacy.
As they said goodbye to Janisse and Heather and walked to class, Lauren instinctively put a hand on Michael’s shoulder. She often did that as they walked the hallways of school, Lauren a step behind him and guiding him, protectively, in front of her. Michael was thrilled to be touched by Lauren, but so wished she would hold his hand, which would be a gesture of romance, not of almost-big-sisterly protection. And it didn’t help that the top of his head barely came up to Lauren’s breasts!
His bladder tingling, Michael went straight to Ms. Featherford’s desk and asked for a hall pass.
“No,” the old teacher said, shuffling some papers on her desk.
“No?” Michael said in disbelief. She always said yes!