As Cody loped down the courthouse stairs, he scanned a young woman’s body. Short skirt, sexy legs. A young woman he’d stalked distantly before. Gayle, the sister of Mrs. Jones, his high school math teacher. The court clerk. She did not see him. As far as he knew, she’d never glanced towards his physical ugliness.

Cody raced behind her, stopped, and thrust his hand up. Fast as a hummingbird at a flower. Felt those legs, right over her ass; he had a second to realize the roundness. She screamed, jumped forward; he glimpsed the outline of her face, the hair, and the moving bodies of the court staff around her. Did she fall? He didn’t see.

He ran, not looking back. Across and over the stairs and through the street, jumped a metal fence, over the lawn and to the other side, gone. Sprinting, the one thing he did right.

He didn’t glance to see if anyone chased him until well near the park. All seemed okay, but his pounding heart welled up. He slipped behind some bushes, gasping hard.

A few moments before, he masturbated in the courthouse. Spectator’s gallery. Out of the rainy April afternoon, half-focused on proceedings, his main attention on the court recorder girl, so curvy and tight-dressed, she made his lust rise, made him touch, through the hole in the pocket of his pants.

He drove out the deadness with his fingers, awakening power. Desire and energy peaked him, pushed him to force resolution, but it never came. The court adjourned for lunch; everyone hastened out.

That’s where he entered the unpredictable.

***

After the sexual assault, Cody walks faux-nonchalantly along a line of oak trees, then jumps into the park washroom, enters a stall.

Slams the door, locks it up, pants down, jerks off fast. The pleasure of the second, vanishing, diminishing.

Disgusting. Sick. Ugly fucking piece of shit.

All his energy resolving in a few spurts. And now, empty, alone, the four stall walls his cell. Left with his body limp and his mind pounding, “why? why? why?”

This incident the greatest of his accomplishments and the epitome of his ugliness. Touching the human warmth, realizing its shape, taking that time away in his mind. Holding that moment to the peak of climax.

Escape from the scene accomplished already. He’s only 17; if he’s caught, what’s the worst they can do? But again comes the weakness, the return of loneliness and regret.

He sits listening to his heart push and pound. Outside that beat, a feedback whine through his ears.

On the bus, they’d called him repulsive. Every day, until he stopped riding, and started walking to school an hour earlier.

“You’re weird-looking, your head’s like a big butt.”

“Or a squashed turd.”

“No girl will look at you. Your face, it’s twisted.”

“And your personality, too. You don’t talk. Now you’re grinning like a donkey.”

“You’ve always got that sick smile on your face, you creep me out.”

He’s a freak show. Eyes moving all over the place, cheeks twitching, so nervous all the time, always worried he’ll make himself even more ugly through appearance or action. And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, his worst fears realized, simple watching grown to sexual assault.

At school, in dance class, two more boys than girls. Girls allowed to choose their partners sometimes. Everyone chosen every class by all the girls, except he and his friend Ross, the boy with the sloping shoulders. Nobody ever chose them. Ross didn’t seem to mind. But Cody seethed.

In math, he took remedial. At noon, extra study. Only one or two students in the room. The teacher, Mrs. Jones, crossed her legs at the front while eating a sandwich. He had to jerk off, just watching. That’s how it started. Watching Jones’ thighs and letting himself come.

Again and again.

A shame to be so twisted. But it’s all he had.

The high school stairwell’s extra flight led up to the roof. Cody lay up there, beside the exit door, his head just over the edge of the steps, eyes watching girls sway below him, climbing and descending the two lower floors. He’d jerk off dominating down at them, the bosomy females chatting and oblivious in their tight pants and low cut blouses. He’d think about past stairwell episodes in class, sneak out, run down the hall to lie on the upper floor, watch the live show, and masturbate.

He found himself so full of orgasm, three, four times a day. Afterwards, sometimes, his head rang; the sound accompanied him for hours. Relief followed by sadness, sometimes rage at his weakness. But that weakness returned time and time again. So much strength to force the come, then the flaccid aftermath, the knowledge that his only sexual connection was this. A one way high.

But these actions beat all computer porno. This way was real, the porno not even a primer now. Cody caught in the excitement, pushing the risk.

He wanted to be close to someone. Had hope about it constantly, though every class surrounded by unattainable girls. His fantasies stretched for hours each day. His grades dropped each report card. He felt himself so much more than a watcher. He wanted to touch. He wanted to caress. He wanted someone to touch him. That love of another’s feel deep in his imagination, in the curse and pleasure of daydreams. He thought over and over of a girl hugging him, undressing him, fucking him….

What if when he was fondling himself in the math class Mrs. Jones came over and did him a favour? Just like in the porno. But this never happened, although the knee-high-booted teacher smiled at him when he secretly did it from behind his exercise books. Did she know? He didn’t think so. She would’ve freaked. But sometimes he believed she wanted him, just before his climax.

He knew his face disgusted everyone. Fat lips, huge eyebrows on a wide and pockmarked face. Hair brown, lank and messy. His body like a bent piece of bacon, mostly lard but still weirdly skinny. Lots of fleshy folds and flaps, even at 17. Big feet, the only asset his speed; he could sprint a hundred yards in seconds.

His mother didn’t know a thing. She warned him “sometimes those girls are faster than the boys,” she moved in a miniskirt herself, she was fucking disgusting, cellulite and fat, when she bent over, there were her panties. He didn’t want to see that. She never bought guys back, though; if she found one for the night, she stayed away. He never knew exactly what she did, but he had a few sick guesses. He spent most of the time in his room, anyway.

Except when plundering his Mom’s medication cabinet.  So many pills in there to ease his mind after the teasing, or during the despair.

He kept taking bigger chances. First, the porno in the house, where only his Mom could catch him, if she would care anyway. Then, lust in the math class and jerking off on the stairs. Then he bought some salami and carved it into the shape of a penis. He tucked the salami on top of the dashboard of his Mom’s car. He drove the car to a mall parking lot and sat across from it, watching to see if young women glimpsed the salami cock. Sometimes they did and averted their eyes, or giggled and walked away fast. That really turned him on.

He wanted them to see, so he could come.

But from any surreptitious orgasm rose humiliation. The stink of underarm hormone, the anxiety stench from deep within forced out his pits. Inside, rotten. Yet he had a huge sex drive; he couldn’t stop it. It just came out. He was a stupid, lame joke.

***

Grades plummeting down, April already, and Cody’s in the park, watching the young girls walking or sunning themselves, and doing it to himself as they lie only metres away, and he sits with a towel over his lap.

Funny: they don’t have a clue. Maybe he’s not even there, maybe he’s in his room, and this is only a fantasy. But the wind from the river hits, and the girls pack up.

He’s close to completion, and now his anger close to rage.

“Why can’t they wait for me?”

On Friday, he travels to the government buildings. They’re a few blocks from the park, a 20-minute jog from his Mom’s apartment. He knows Gayle T. works at the court. Mrs. Jones’ younger sister. He’s seen her a few times, when she comes to pick Jones up at the school after work. How sexy Gayle is! How can she stand not masturbating herself 24 hours a day?

He can only sense her. He can’t experience what she feels, when she’s moving in that beautiful body. He wants to know that, or to be as close to it as possible.

Cody goes to the courthouse gallery. He wants a viewing.

That’s all he intends…to watch.

He moves up the building steps as if in a dream. He thinks the whole sex thing could be some kind of active meditation. Sometimes, in the old days, people would go out in the desert and not eat for a week and find their name. A discovery from denial. Very pure. Cody’s discovering how on the edge and driven he can be, how far he can take the risk, what names he will call himself afterwards. Pervert. Scum. Coward.

The vision of Gayle T. drives him. Those long brown legs. She wears sexy dresses all the time. And there she is, keyboarding out the record, recording proceedings. The case drags on as he watches; he doesn’t notice where anyone stands, what anyone says. He focusses on the slit between Gayle’s legs, as she does the typing down there on the floor. He feels hard and ready. He can do this. Cum in the courtroom.

But he doesn’t, quite.

The Judge stops the proceedings.

It’s adjournment time in the palace of justice. Noon break, and everyone rushes out the front door, where the wide steps unfold, and Cody follows. He does not know Gayle will present herself before him, tap down the stairs in her black pumps. He does not know he will rush up, and grab. He has no idea he’ll take it that far.

Then he does.

And now he finishes in the park washroom and staggers out into the late afternoon. He knows Gayle must have seen him. If not, then he’s a truly lucky piece of shit.

He has become exactly what all the bus teens said he was. They told him and he shows their tell. A pervert, a weirdo, an uncaught sex offender.

Cody thinks “I deserve whatever I get,” as he lopes up the street to his mother’s home. A police car appears, and he hops into a side street. He’s a shadow now. After showing his cock power, the spurt rose up, semen flowed down. He experienced the accomplishment of the stain on his pants.

In juvie jail, they’’ll tear him apart. And that’s exactly what he wants, now he’s thinking about it. He wants the court to sentence. Send him where evil deserves to be.

“Guilty, your honour.”

Cody tries to tell himself he’s really a gentle person. He wouldn’t hurt anyone. It’s the lust that speaks. That’s all he has in his defence.

He reaches his mother’s apartment. No one home as usual. He goes to his bedroom, takes a jackknife from the drawer, and sits naked. He studies his testicles, still wet from the orgasm. Punishment, punishment. He opens up a blade and moves it over them. He touches their skins with the tip of the blade, then the edge.

But he doesn’t have the guts. He’s a dirty piece of shit coward. He’s got to live with the fear he’ll be caught. The anticipation of it. He pushes the knife down on his thigh and it breaks the skin. Some dark blood pushes up.

Cody reaches for a tissue and dabs it over the graze. He stands, pulls his clothes on, folds a towel over the knife, and stows it away. Tissue down the toilet.

His phone rings. It’s his one friend, Ross. A guy with pushed-in lips who minces when he walks…a boy with defective knees that point in, not out.

“Did you hear the news?” Ross says, in his whispery voice. He lives six blocks from the government buildings. “Some pervert in a weird mask assaulted a woman right outside the courthouse! It’s all on camera. I’ve got the footage on my Snapchat.”

And Cody thinks to himself, That was my face, and his hands shake. It’s only been an hour, and already the video’s out.

He tells Ross he hasn’t heard about the assault, but wow, that guy sure must’ve had some nerve.

“Yeah, the cops are circling everywhere ‘round here,” says Ross.

Cody’s mouth trembles as he hangs up. He can’t stop shivering. He goes to his mother’s bathroom and finds the benzos. He returns to his bedroom, takes one, then another, and waits.

An hour passes. Cody’s breathing eases.

He thumbs through his old childhood books, like Cat’s Pyjamas and The Three Pigs. Then he picks up his phone and goes to Ross’s Snapchat and watches himself on video.

Pretty grainy, hard to see anything, mostly his features are blocked by the presence of others, and when they’re shown, quite obscured.

He puts the video in slow motion, and he sees Gayle as if for the first time. After Cody takes off, she twirls awkwardly around, falls on one knee, and her blonde head is up, facing the courthouse doors, as others come to her aid. Her legs catch light; they’re shiny and smooth on the screen. Her mouth’s wide open, gaping and twisted.

Cody stares. Now, on the screen, he sees himself clearly, and he understands the look on Gayle’s face.

He has shown himself to her.

She knows who he is.

For Cody, that will make all the difference.