The hardest thing about Dampgate Senior Academy was not the classes themselves, but being able to pay attention in them. Take for instance the Geography class that Vic had been sitting in. Plate tectonics themselves were not that difficult of a concept, but why did Mrs. Laramie insist on delivering her lectures while sitting on her desk? And why did she have to have her legs crossed? And why did she insist on wearing a skirt and black boots? And why did she rock those legs ever so slightly in a rhythmic way that made you completely tune out the words and wait what kind of mountains were they talking about again?

Vic almost startled himself to attention and then nervously looked around the classroom to see if anyone noticed. They didn’t. The boys, and dare he say, some of the girls, were focused too much on Mrs. Laramie, while other students seemed to actually want to concentrate on their studies. Vic envied them, because as an eighteen-year-old boy, a man, by someone people’s standards, though he would disagree, Dampgate Senior Academy was a lot to handle.

He’d certainly seen enough, and definitely heard enough, especially after hours when lying awake in the boys’ dorm, to know how things worked around here. He tried to explain it away in his head as something perfectly normal – what could one expect in a school attended only by senior boys and girls, these things were bound to happen. But the fact that they occurred so openly, and everyone seemed to laugh about it, well, he wasn’t sure that after his first week he quite recovered from the initial shock.

Mrs. Laramie went on about the various rock formations caused by plates moving one under the other, or rubbing against each other, much like the rubbing of her legs against each other, when Vic lost focus again, and thought about what had made things easier for him the first week.

He considered himself lucky, because he was happily adopted by a group of nerdy friends, if the label ‘nerd’ could even be applied to anyone in a place like Dampgate. Between their various … extracurriculars, as Vic preferred to refer to them in his head, they seemed to be at least somewhat interested in academics. There was already one guy in the group, and three girls, and one of those girls, Marcia, sat in front of him in Geography, and provided stiff competition for Mrs. Laramie when it came to occupying his attention.

Marcia was the bubbly one of the group, versus Liz who was more studious and Agnes who was more prickly. She was the kind of girl who got real close to tell you something loudly and put her hand on your arm without realizing what she was doing to you.

Now all she was doing was existing, but any time Vic looked forward, all he could do was spy the outline of her bra underneath her white button-down shirt, the one that hid from the world her modest chest, and then also at the plaid skirt she was wearing, the one that hid from the world her ample bottom; standard uniform for the girls at Dampgate. He could see the flash of reddish-brown skin of her knees and upper calves, that area between the skirt and the socks that drove him crazy no matter where he looked.

There were plenty of girls here who clipped theirs up so that their skirts would end inches north of their knees. There were two in particular, Kit and Laine, who circled Vic like vultures, with their heavy makeup painted nails and ways of talking that made them sound less smart than they actually were. An intentional act, and he was glad he already found his group of friends because their hungry looks did not make him comfortable.

He thought he’d figured Kit and Laine out – they were easy to peg … in more ways than one. But Marcia was mostly a mystery to him. A sweet intoxicating mystery that sat close enough for him to smell the shampoo on her long black hair.