Men, Women & Children (21 page)

Dr. Fong said, “And how do you feel about football? Is it important to you?”

Tim said, “It was last year, but this year I guess it’s not as important. It actually kind of seems less than important, really. Pointless, in fact. I guess most things are pointless, though.”

Dr. Fong said, “And what are some of the things that aren’t pointless to you?”

Tim said, “I don’t know. I play
World of Warcraft
.”

Dr. Fong said, “And this is a game of some kind, a Nintendo game maybe?”

Tim said, “No, it’s a video game, but not Nintendo. It’s a computer game. You play it online with millions of other people.”

Dr. Fong said, “And you’re probably very good at this game?”

Tim said, “I guess. It’s not really about skill, though. It’s more just about how much time you put in and how familiar you can get with the different enemies and stuff in the game.”

Dr. Fong said, “And these other people you play the game with, are they your friends from school?”

Tim said, “No. They’re just my friends in the game. I mean, they’re my friends, but I’ve never met any of them in RL.”

Dr. Fong said, “RL?”

Tim said, “Real life.”

Dr. Fong said, “I see. And do you have any friends in . . . RL, at school perhaps, that you interact with as often as you interact with your friends in the game?”

Tim said, “I used to, but since I stopped playing football, I’ve kind of lost most of those friends. There’s a girl, though, that I’ve kind of been hanging out with. She’s cool.”

Dr. Fong said, “Very good. And do your mother and father approve of her?”

Tim said, “We just started hanging out. My dad’s cool with it. My mom isn’t really in the house anymore. She moved to California with another guy.”

Dr. Fong said, “I see. I didn’t see that in the file I got from Counselor Perinot.”

Tim said, “I haven’t really told anyone about it.”

Dr. Fong said, “Well, I’m glad you’re comfortable enough here to tell me. It’s important that you feel free to discuss anything you feel is relevant to your current emotional landscape.”

Tim had held the secret of his mother’s remarriage for some time. He felt that this was as good a time as any, and as good an environment as any, to divulge it. He said, “I also found out, through my mom’s Facebook page, that she’s getting remarried to the guy she moved to California with.”

Dr. Fong said, “I see. And what is your reaction to that?”

Tim said, “At first I was pretty sad, I guess—or just confused, really. Then I started not to care that much about her or about anything. Have you ever seen ‘The Pale Blue Dot’?”

Dr. Fong said, “No. I haven’t. Is this a movie? Or a video game?”

Tim said, “No, it’s this thing—it’s a thing that Carl Sagan wrote and then some people made videos to go with it and put them on YouTube.”

Dr. Fong said, “I see. And is this something you used to watch with your mother?”

Tim said, “No, it’s something I just started getting into not too long ago. It basically lays out the fact that we’re all insignificant and nothing we really do matters in the grand scheme of existence. It was what kind of made me get over the fact that my mom is with some other guy now. Wait, do you tell my dad anything we talk about in here?”

Dr. Fong said, “No, I don’t. Anything said in this room stays in this room, between you and me.”

Tim said, “Okay, cool, because my dad doesn’t know about my mom getting remarried.”

For the remainder of the hour, Tim and Dr. Fong discussed Brandy Beltmeyer, the Olympian football team, Greg Cherry, California,
World of Warcraft
, the altercation between Tim and Tanner Hodge, and the awkward silences that he and his father seemed to have become adept at in the past months.

As the session came to a close, Dr. Fong told Tim that in just the hour they’d spent together he was able to come to a diagnosis of clinical depression. Dr. Fong told Tim that he hoped he felt comfortable enough with the environment they had created to continue seeing him. Dr. Fong recommended a treatment that included a continuation of their sessions, in conjunction with the use of an antidepressant called Anafranil. Dr. Fong explained that the drug was used to treat patients diagnosed with depression, as well as obsessive-compulsive disorder, and he also found it to be especially effective with depression in teens.

In actuality, Dr. Fong knew the drug was no more effective than Zoloft, Prozac, or Luvox in teens. But his wife worked as a pharmaceutical sales representative for Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, the company that manufactured the drug Anafranil. When given a choice among antidepressants, Dr. Fong always prescribed Anafranil in order to boost his wife’s sales numbers, even if it was only by a small increment. Dr. Fong wrote Tim a prescription and told him to schedule an appointment for the following week, which Tim did.

When Tim’s father picked him up from Dr. Fong’s office, Tim handed him the prescription. Kent said, “What’s this?”

Tim said, “Some kind of antidepressant.”

Kent liked the fact that Dr. Fong had wasted no time in administering concrete treatment to his son. If all that was needed to get him back on the field was a pill, then this process would be easier than Kent had first imagined. Kent said, “Okay,” and drove to the CVS pharmacy nearest to their house.

Before going to sleep that night, Tim looked at bottle of pills. He was curious about their effect. Dr. Fong had told him that the pills must be taken regularly for a few weeks before any effects would be felt, but the swallowing of the first pill was symbolic to Tim. It was an admission that something was wrong, that he could not handle whatever he was feeling without the aid of drugs. Tim swallowed his first Anafranil, and as he was lying in bed he took out his phone and sent Brandy a message on her Freyja account that read, “I missed eating lunch with you today.” She sent a reply that read, “Me, too.”

chapter

fourteen

F
ive weeks passed.

T
im Mooney was starting to feel less disconnected from his life and also less concerned with the things that had made him feel this way. From time to time, he even imagined what it would be like to meet Greg Cherry, and he came to the conclusion that Greg Cherry was probably a very nice person if he possessed qualities that lured Lydia Mooney all the way to California to live with him and even marry him.

K
ent saw the change happening in his son. He was less brooding—not necessarily happier, but certainly things between them seemed to be more civil, more amicable. Kent continued to date Dawn Clint. Things were going well between them, so well that Kent knew the next time they saw each other would likely result in a sexual encounter. He felt that their last date could have ended in this manner had he wanted it to, but he was too nervous. He had convinced himself that, after such a long time without sex, he might not be able to perform. Since that last date, Kent had visited his doctor, told him about his concerns, and asked if he could get a prescription for Viagra. His doctor obliged him, writing a prescription that could be refilled five times for five 100-milligram tablets. Kent was excited to see Dawn again.

D
awn was excited to see Kent again as well. She found it slightly strange that at the end of their last date, after a long kiss at her front door accompanied by her giving his buttocks a playful squeeze, and an outright invitation to enter her house, Kent declined her offer. She decided that he was probably nervous about engaging in a sexual relationship with the first new woman after his wife. This served to further reinforce her estimation of Kent as a nice guy. She was happy to take their relationship as slow as Kent dictated. She kept herself busy by focusing on her daughter’s career.

The producers of the reality show
Undiscovered
contacted Dawn to inform her that they found Hannah’s application to be among a chosen few that exhibited certain qualities they were looking for. Hannah was being advanced to the next round of the casting process, which included the production of a short video showcasing some of her talents and her home life. After the video’s review, the producers would then decide if she would move on to the next round of casting, which would consist of a personal interview with the executive producers of the show in Los Angeles. When Hannah was informed of all of this, she asked her mother if she could post something about it on her website to let her fans know that she was about to be famous. Her mother discouraged her from doing this, remembering her own experience with the television pilot she’d had a role in. She told Hannah that she hadn’t made it on the TV show yet, and even if she did, it was a much more celebrity-esque thing to do to let her website fans find out about it for themselves. Dawn had a feeling that Hannah’s website might hold her back in the future. She thought about shutting it down, erasing any evidence of its existence, but the money generated by the website was good, and Dawn had seen countless compromising photos and videos of beauty pageant contestants and other minor celebrities surface into the mainstream media that only served to augment their exposure. She chose to leave it up.

H
annah continued to exchange illicit text messages with Chris Truby. This exchange escalated to include images and videos of various forms of masturbation from both parties. Hannah did all of this in the hope that she would eventually have sexual intercourse with Chris. They attempted it twice, but both times the act turned into some version of oral sex or masturbation, the last one culminating in Chris asking her to insert her finger into his anus while he masturbated. Hannah found this request disgusting but obliged him, assuming she would be able to maneuver herself onto his erect penis. Instead he ejaculated within seconds of her finger being inserted. She was becoming discouraged with the situation, but still felt that Chris was the best candidate with whom to lose her virginity. Hannah kept her dealings with Chris a secret from any of her Olympianne squadmates. She would tell them about it once she had accomplished her goal, and she would omit any of the things that she found strange or disgusting, such as the insertion of her finger into Chris’s anus at his behest.

C
hris Truby found his interest waning in any form of pornography that didn’t involve women humiliating or penetrating men. He began to find that the only way he could achieve an erection and eventual orgasm was to at least imagine being tied down, spit on, abused, or otherwise compromised at the hand of a dominant woman. He understood that this was making his encounters with Hannah difficult, and he tried various methods to reorganize the way he thought about standard intercourse. He extensively researched masturbation techniques on various websites designed to help men associate sexual pleasure with vaginal intercourse.

The most common of these methods seemed to involve a product called the Fleshlight, which was a latex cylinder with an opening at one end that was fashioned into the shape of a vagina. The opening was designed for a man to insert his erect penis so as to simulate vaginal sex. Not having the access to purchase such a device, Chris researched how to build his own and was directed to a website with intricate instructions. The easiest of these to build was only good for a single use, but this was acceptable to him. The makeshift device’s two main components were a Nerf ball and a cardboard paper towel tube. Chris had both of these items, and he found it easier to make the device than he thought it would be. He shredded the Nerf ball as instructed into small pieces, discarding the outer pieces of the ball that were coated in paint. Chris used a layer of duct tape to seal one end of the paper towel tube, filled the tube with the shredded Nerf foam, and then pumped a generous amount of hand lotion into the tube. The instructions on the website he read also said that, to further simulate the feeling of an actual vagina, the entire device could be microwaved for forty-five seconds. Not wanting to alert his parents to what he was doing, he omitted this step. And, to further conceal his activities, he hid the used devices in his backpack until he left for school the next morning, at which time he would throw them into his neighbor’s trash can, fearing that there might be some reason for his parents to look through their own trash and discover his makeshift vaginas.

Once he had the first device built, he achieved an erection by watching one of his favorite videos, which included a man sealed in a latex vacuum bag, with only one opening in the material for his mouth, drinking urine directly from a woman’s urethra as she squatted over his face. With an erection achieved, Chris held his device on the bed in the estimated position that Hannah’s vagina would occupy if they were to have vaginal intercourse in the missionary position. He opened an image of Hannah’s face on his phone and set it down on his bed under his own face, in a rough estimation of where her head might be if they were actually having sex. Chris thrust his penis into the cardboard tube filled with Nerf foam and lotion, forcing himself to think about sex with Hannah. After the fourth such attempt with the fourth such device, Chris was able to achieve orgasm. He felt that he would eventually be able to have sex with Hannah.

A
llison Doss continued to implement forced vomiting in her dieting strategy. She had gained a certain amount of expertise and felt that no one could possibly know what she was doing. Although she preferred using the ipecac syrup to induce vomiting, she mastered the skill of using her own finger to trigger the desired reaction. She found it necessary in certain situations, where she hadn’t anticipated food being served but was clearly expected to eat.

Despite the pleasure she got from eating and then forcing herself to vomit, she found it more and more difficult to control her cravings for food. She attributed this to the fact that she was allowing herself to taste so many things. When she had limited her diet to celery, tuna, and water, she’d found it easy to forget what other things tasted like and therefore simple to have no cravings. Allison convinced herself that she would eventually wean herself from forced vomiting, but not yet. She was still enjoying it and she felt that she could still control her cravings.

She sent Brandon Lender ten more messages on Facebook. He responded to none of them.

B
randy Beltmeyer viewed Tim’s suspension as a sacrifice he made in the service of protecting her honor. It made him immensely more attractive to her, and in the weeks that passed, she spent as much time as she could with him. But her mother, Patricia, made it virtually impossible for her to find more than a night a week and some extra hours after school. She told Tim about her mother’s overbearing nature and made sure he understood that he should only ever communicate with her through her Freyja Myspace account. All of her other methods of communication were monitored by her mother. Tim agreed to keep their relationship a secret from her mother, if only because he wanted it to continue.

Brandy began to use her Freyja account almost exclusively to communicate with Tim, abandoning most of her other Myspace friends and neglecting her blogs and posts. She came to understand that she’d created the account at a time in her life when she felt very alone and it had served its purpose. It found friends for her and gave her interaction with people who valued what she had to say. Tim had replaced these people, and he had replaced them in a more meaningful way. He was real, and the things they discussed were not lies or based on a false identity. She didn’t feel as alone as she had when her parents first moved. Eventually, she even removed some of the friends she had gained who were interested only in having sexually explicit conversations with her. She deleted all of her e-mail conversations with these friends and all of her own blog entries as well. She even removed all of her photo albums and replaced her profile picture with an image of a painting of Freyja she’d found online.

She and Tim shared their first kiss in the Goodrich Junior High School south parking lot one day after school, and after that they agreed to consider themselves an official couple. This designation included many behaviors they had already adopted, such as sitting together at lunch and leaving notes in each other’s lockers. But it also included new behaviors, such as holding hands and publicly recognizing each other as boyfriend and girlfriend.

They were content to kiss from time to time and do nothing beyond this. They each found happiness in the other’s company, and they felt no need to push what they had into a level of physical intimacy that neither of them felt comfortable with yet. And although Tim might have felt some sexual urges at one point, he found that they were waning. It was a side effect of the Anafranil. He was aware of it and not altogether disappointed. He assumed a sexual relationship would only complicate his life, and he was happy with the level of simplicity he had achieved.

P
atricia had gained a few new members in her Parents Against The Internet watch-group. She used her relationship with her daughter as an example of how parents and their children should interact with regard to the Internet and its use. She remained unaware of her daughter’s secret Myspace account.

D
on Truby saved enough money to purchase a Girlfriend Experience with Angelique Ice and considered himself lucky that his wife was leaving for another Saturday night so soon after the trip that had allowed Don his first encounter with Angelique. Once again, however, Rachel did not visit her sister. Instead, she made a second rendezvous with Secretluvur, and this time she spent the entire night with him, just as her husband did with Angelique Ice. Don and Rachel both found their experiences with their respective partners fulfilling in ways that the same experience within their marriage never could be. When they returned home the following morning, after each of their acts of infidelity, they were surprised to find that their relationship seemed to have improved somehow. They were more cordial with each other and happier in general. They each realized that sexual encounters outside their relationship made their relationship itself far more tolerable. They resigned themselves to living lives of constant infidelity, perhaps with Secretluvur and Angelique Ice or perhaps with multiple partners. Rachel had been receiving responses to her profile on AshleyMadison.com from several potential partners. As well, Don had performed several more searches on TheEroticReview.com and found a moderate number of prostitutes that offered the Girlfriend Experience, each of them unique and interesting to him for reasons that included varied hair color, tattoos, piercings, breast implants, and so on. For both Rachel and Don, the exact natures of their new adulterous lives had yet to reveal themselves, but they had found some happiness that didn’t exist before in their relationship.

A
fter two weeks of his wife, Tracey, withholding sex, Jim Vance agreed to schedule a vasectomy. He made the appointment as far in the future as he could, giving himself ample time to prepare psychologically for what he assumed would be a terrible ordeal.

D
anny Vance and Brooke Benton had been content to scale their physical relationship back to where it was at the beginning of the year. As a result, Danny found it much less difficult to concentrate on football. In addition, Coach Quinn realized that no matter how much he wanted to teach Danny and the rest of the team a lesson about obeying their superiors, he was in contention for another head-coaching job at a high school in a neighboring district. His record this season would mean more to the athletic director of that district than any lesson he could teach his players. So he allowed Danny to pass and pass often. This decision fueled the Goodrich Junior High School Olympians through a five-game winning streak, as they defeated the Scott Shining Stars, the Lefler Lions, the Lux Lightning Bolts, the Mickle Missiles, and a team Danny considered to be among the two best teams in their district, the Dawes Trojans. This winning streak left them with a six-and-one record going into the final two games of the season against the Pound Squires and the Culler Cougars. Danny knew they could lose one of these games and still make it to the district playoffs. Of the two teams they had left to play, he felt the Squires would give them the most trouble.