Pete and the Mysteries of Puberty

From toddler-hood through High School I was best friends with a boy named Pete. Pete was six months older than me, but from as far back as we could remember I was always very much taller than he. We were an inseparable pair, and because of the difference in our heights, and the contrast in our coloring – I had pale skin, blue eyes, and white-blond hair, while Pete had black hair, brown eyes, and skin that verged on olive – we were often tagged by the grown-ups around us with that word despised by all red-blooded boys: “cute”.


 Like most young kids Pete and I were pretty shy about our bodies, although because we so often changed, bathed and slept together from such an early age, there was never any question of modesty between us. We sometimes did “naughty” things together, like sneaking a skinny-dip in the neighbors’ pool, but aside from some comparing when we were very young – Pete was circumcised, and I am not – and one or two solemn, scientific discussions of the possible reasons for and mechanics of our occasional morning erections, we never as kids did anything that could be even remotely described as sexual. And why would we? We had no idea people could do such things, and had we known, we would have been at a complete loss to understand why anyone would want to.

I was on the late side of average in reaching puberty. My first hairs didn’t sprout until I was almost thirteen, and I didn’t ejaculate until about six months after my birthday. But Pete was really late. At the start of ninth grade, when he was already fourteen, except for him being a bit taller his body looked different than it had when he was ten.


Two years before that, during the first part of seventh grade, another boy told me about masturbation. I tried it that very night, with spectacularly gratifying results. Naturally I told my best friend about it on the very next day. But on the following day Pete reported back to me that, although he’d followed my instructions exactly, he hadn’t experienced any of the wonderful sensations I’d described.

There followed a period of three or four weeks during which we strove manfully (boyfully?) to get Pete off. I critiqued his technique and demonstrated my own; he tried different grips and rhythms, and rubbing his little dink on the bedclothes, a pillow, me; I even gave him some “hands-on” assistance. But the same thing always happened: Pete’s little peter would at first stiffen and stand up, but then, no matter how, or how vigorously, or how gently it was stimulated, it would slowly shrink back to its usual worm-like state.

After about a month of this Pete quite understandably refused to try any more. I learned not even to mention jacking off to him, because it only made him mad. If a bunch of us boys were standing around trading jokes and stories, and the topic of masturbation came up, Pete would go silent; and if the subject didn’t change quickly, he’d quietly walk away. As for myself, at about this time I became friends with a new kid in our neighborhood who became my regular jacking buddy. But I never ceased to think of Pete as my best and closest friend.

Over the course of ninth grade Pete finally went through puberty. At the very end of the school year, days before his fifteenth birthday, he proudly informed me that he’d finally managed to give himself an orgasm – and that he’d ejaculated, too!

Now he was keen for us to do stuff together. I should have been receptive; my other friend, an Army brat, was about to move away; but I was coming up on fifteen too, and I had conceived the idea that such boy-boy activity was childish stuff, unworthy of men or older boys. Pete and I did fool around about a dozen times that summer, but once we started high school in the fall I flatly refused to do it any more.

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