My Twisted World Read online

  In just a week into my summer break, my mother told me that father and Soumaya were going to Morocco, and I would be forced to go with them. This news upset me tremendously. I then asked how long this trip would be, and I was told it would be eight weeks. EIGHT WEEKS?! I could not believe what I was hearing. I threw a big tantrum.

  For one thing, I was never enthusiastic about Morocco. The country is very backwards, and that made me very uncomfortable. They didn’t even have the latest video games. And to be forced to go there for eight weeks? That would take up the entire summer and the first two weeks of high school. It was even longer than the last time we went, and I thought that was too long. I wouldn’t be able to play WoW at all for two whole months. The prospect devastated me. I begged my mother to not let me go, but father and Soumaya insisted on bringing me and Georgia, and my mother was probably looking forward to having two months without children to look after. The decision was made, the plans were set. They already had a plane ticket ready for me. I was going to Morocco. I bet they all knew I would protest against going, which is why they told me last minute.

  The last day of mother’s week was the day before we would depart. Mother took me and my sister to a barbeque at the house of her friends Alan and Rebecca. I was very sad for the whole day. I didn’t do anything at the barbeque except swing on their swing in misery. When we got home I played WoW for the very last time. I took advantage of the few hours I had left on it. My mother allowed me to stay up until midnight playing. I acquired a very nice piece of armor for my character. I didn’t want to leave it.

  When we arrived at father’s house the next day, I heard even more upsetting news. Father had to work for the first few weeks of summer, so he would joining us in the middle of the trip. It was only Soumaya taking us to Morocco! I always hated traveling with Soumaya. She made everything so difficult.

  Baby Jazz will be coming along with us, of course, and the stress of looking after a whelping baby while traveling will put Soumaya in a bad mood. I was not happy at all.

  As I expected, the journey there was a disaster. Baby Jazz cried a lot during the trip, and Soumaya wasn’t at her best of moods. We didn’t take First Class, and we had to make three stops; once in Michigan, again in Paris, and yet again in Casablanca, before taking a small plane to Tangier. It was a miserable journey, the complete opposite of the great time I had a year ago on the trip to Malaysia.

  We took a taxi to Khadija’s house right after we arrived. Khadija went home to Morocco on a different plane a few days before us, and she was already settled in. After unpacking at Khadija’s house, we walked to Soumaya’s father’s huge house where I met Ayman again. I remembered playing with Ayman on my last trip to Morocco… He grew up a lot since then. To my dismay, he was taller and stronger than me, despite being two years younger. I was always short and physically weak… that’s how it’s been all my life. We instantly became friends again after catching up a little, and I played hide-and-seek tag with him and his two younger brothers.

  I disliked having to be in Morocco for the whole summer, but I tried to make the best of it. Ayman made the time I spent there more fun. We often went out by ourselves to explore the city of Tangier.

  Ayman knew where everything was, and Soumaya trusted him to show me around. Georgia sometimes came with us. We had a few good times together, and we got along well.

  The Thompsons joined us in Morocco a couple of weeks after we arrived. Georgia was happy that Alessandra, Josh, and Isabella were there to play with her. I was not happy about it. I was so scared of girls at that time that I kept my distance from Alessandra and Isabella. I didn’t want to admit to Ayman that I was scared of girls though, that would have been embarrassing, so I just told him that I thought they were too immature. He didn’t understand this, because I myself was very immature at the time.

  For my 14th birthday, Soumaya organized a small party at her father’s house. Most of the guests were her Moroccan friends, and some of them didn’t even know that the party was for my birthday. I was a bit annoyed by this. They had a cake arranged for me, and when it was brought out everyone gathered to wish me a happy birthday. That would be the last time I spent my birthday with more people than just my family. I was amazed that I was actually fourteen. Fourteen sounded like such a big number. I didn’t feel fourteen. I still felt like a kid, and in all appearances, I was.

  Father couldn’t even make it for my birthday. I was a bit upset about this. He came a few days after it.

  Once he arrived, we toured around Tangier and a few other areas as a family. Khadija and Ayman sometimes came along with us. Soumaya’s father owned a house on the beach, and we usually went there for beach trips. I caught a virus while swimming in the ocean once, which caused me to get extremely ill. I spent a whole week of the vacation in bed, aching and vomiting. I was never that ill before in my life. Whenever I would think about Morocco in the future, I thought about that horrid experience.

  At one time towards the end of the trip, when I had a sleepover with Ayman at Soumaya’s father’s house, he showed me some European porn videos in the middle of the night. I could observe the act of sex in much more detail than that one glimpse I had at Planet Cyber. I didn’t want to look, but my curiosity got the better of me. To see a video of human beings doing such weird and unspeakable things with each other revolted me. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. And yet, I noticed I was feeling aroused. I felt desire to do those things, to have sex with the naked women I saw in the video. It was a funny feeling that overwhelmed my whole body. I could feel my penis getting hard. This is when I noticed that I was finally going through puberty. Heavens save me.

  The trip was way too long, and towards the end I felt depressed and homesick. All I wanted was to go back home and play WoW, and yet I had to accept that once I did get home, I had to start high school right away. I supposed that being able to play WoW again would make up for that, though. And it would sure beat staying in Morocco for any longer. I was growing tired of it.

  14 Years Old

  I felt a wave of relief when we arrived back in the United States. We had to travel separately from father again because he had a different flight schedule, but it wasn’t that bad on the way back because I was looking forward to playing WoW again.

  I only had one free day before I had to start school. When I got back to mother’s house, I gave her a big hug… That was the longest time I had been away from mother. After that, I immediately asked if I can go on her computer and play my game. I logged onto my character, which was just the way I left it two months ago. I said hi to all of my online friends and tried to catch up on everything.

  The dreaded day arrived all too soon. I had to start High School. School had already begun while I was still in Morocco, so I would be the “new kid” again. That made it so much worse. My father drove me there on the first day. When we got there, I was intimidated by all the huge high school boys, and I cried in the car for a few minutes, telling my father that I was too scared to get out.

  I had to go, and eventually I did. We walked to the main office where I ran into Brice Miller. We greeted each other before I was led up to join my first class of the day. Alfred Graham was in that class, and he helped me settle in.

  During lunchtime, Alfred showed me around the whole school. I started to feel a lot more comfortable. He introduced me to some of the other freshmen. In the courtyard, I met Pascal and his clique of friends. I immediately took a disliking to them. Pascal was cocky and popular, so I felt intimidated. He was like the Crespi equivalent of Robert Morgan. As I met a few more people, I ran into Keaton Webber! I didn’t expect to find any more people I knew at Crespi. It really took me by surprise. I hadn’t seen Keaton since he left Topanga Elementary at the end of Fourth Grade. Keaton was still the arrogant jerk he always was at Topanga, and he had his own clique of skateboarder friends, such as Andy Moussa and Aaron Amman.

  As I expected, I failed to make any new friends. I was so overwhelmed by the bruta
lity of the world that I just didn’t care anymore. On the very first week, I had my first experience of true bullying, not just the teasing I had at Pinecrest. Some horrible Twelfth Graders saw me as a target because I looked like a ten year old and I was physically weak. They threw food at me during lunchtime and after school. It enraged me, but I was too scared to do anything about it. What kind of horrible, depraved people would poke fun at a boy younger than them who has just entered high school? I thought to myself.

  After the first few weeks of high school, I concluded that my time at Crespi would not be pleasant at all. I withdrew further into the World of Warcraft, neglecting my homework and spending all of my free time playing it.

  As a late birthday present, father bought me a new laptop that was able to run WoW. It wasn’t a very powerful laptop, but it performed adequately. This enabled me to have more time playing my game.

  During father’s week, Soumaya was always on my back about how much time I spent on WoW, but since my room was on the bottom floor, secluded from the rest of the house, I was able to sneak as much time on it as I could.

  While I was playing WoW after dinner at mother’s house once, I heard my sister watching the new show Avatar: The Last Airbender on the television. I decided to check it out. I soon found myself really enjoying it. It was a magnificent story set in a fantasy world where people can control the power of the elements. Once I watched the first episode, I was hooked on the story. Prince Zuko was my favorite character; he was a banished prince who was trying to regain his rightful place in the world. I always related to him. Avatar: The Last Airbender became my favorite T.V. show.

  My mother informed me that she was just on the phone to Arte Ellis, and he told her that James now played World of Warcraft. I was very pleased to hear this. I could now share my greatest interest in the world with my good friend… my only friend. I then went over to James’s house for a sleepover, which I hadn’t done for a while. He showed me his WoW character, who was only level 20. We weren’t on the same server, so we couldn’t play it together. The only way would be for one of us to start over, and we were too immersed in our characters to do that. I was fine with that. James was really fascinated by my level 60 character, and most of the time he would just watch me play, anyway. We also played a lot of Halo 2 together.

  Having these common interests with James reminded me of the good old days when we were children; when we were both interested in skateboarding, and before that, Pokemon. This nostalgic experience provided a small respite from my sufferings at school.

  My life at Crespi got even worse. Alfred and Brice apparently told everyone how weird I was at Pinecrest, and people in my own grade started to tease me. They found out that I didn’t like being called a skateboarder, and it was true. Because I failed to become good at skateboarding, I developed a hatred for the sport, and whenever someone called me a skateboarder, it reminded me of my failure and I got very angry. The whole school started calling me it just to anger me, along with other insulting names.

  They teased me because I was scared of girls, calling me names like “faggot”. People also liked to steal my belongings and run away in an attempt to get me to chase after them. And I did chase after them in a furious rage, but I was so little and weak that they thought it was comical. I hated everyone at that school so much.

  It got to a point where I had to wait in a quiet corner for the hallways to clear before I could walk to class. I also took long routes around the school to avoid bullies. My parents began to consider not letting me continue there after Ninth Grade.

  When winter break came, I felt like I had just landed on a peaceful island after swimming through a horrific storm. It was such a fine relief. The break was to last for three weeks, and I was sorely disappointed that two of them would be at father’s house, while only one was at mother’s. I hated being at father’s house because Soumaya became more and more suspicious of how much time I spent playing WoW, and she would place limits on my playtime whenever she caught me playing it. I wasn’t able to do my five-hour-long events to collect rare armor pieces for my character while I was at father’s house.

  It was during this winter break that I experienced my first masturbation and ejaculation. It was one of the most peculiar and memorable experiences of my life. At this point I was officially going through the stages of puberty, and I had lots of sexual urges. I often fantasized about hot naked girls while rubbing my penis against my mattress at night. One time, while doing this, I felt an intense stirring numbness all around my fully erect penis, and it extended all over my body. It felt magical and ecstatic, and I kept rubbing my penis on the mattress. That was when the orgasm happened. I couldn’t believe how much pleasure I felt from that. I looked down at my penis to see that my semen had poured out all over it, like a volcanic eruption of white, sticky fluid. What was happening to me? I thought to myself with nervous excitement. It was like nothing I had ever seen or experienced before, something completely out of my world. I felt really guilty afterwards, so I refrained from telling anyone about it.

  I started to masturbate on a regular basis. At first I only did it by rubbing my penis on my bed, but it eventually escalated to looking at pictures of girls online while rubbing my penis against my pants, fantasizing about doing sexual things with them. I didn’t know how to access any porn sites, so I would just browse regular websites until I found a picture of a hot girl to masturbate to.

  I developed a very high sex drive, and it would always remain like this. This was the start of hell for me. Going through puberty utterly doomed my existence. It condemned me to live a life of suffering and unfulfilled desires. Even at that young age, I felt depressed because I wanted sex, yet I felt unworthy of it. I didn’t think I was ever going to experience sex in reality, and I was right. I never did. I was finally interested in girls, but there was no way I could ever get them. And so my starvation began.

  The boys in my grade talked about sex a lot. Some of them even told me that they had sex with their girlfriends. This was the most devastating and traumatizing thing I’ve ever heard in my life. Boys having sex at my age of Fourteen? I couldn’t fathom it. How is it that they were able to have such intimate and pleasurable experiences with girls while I could only fantasize about it? I frequently started asking myself. This was an all-boys school… How in the hell were those boys even able to meet girls to have sex with? I wondered. I hoped they were lying. I hoped against all hope. Hearing that really shook me to the core. Words cannot describe how much hatred and envy I felt for those boys. That hatred would only fester the more I suffer from my sexual starvation. I was too scared to tell anyone about it, and I hid it well… for a time.

  These recent events cause me to withdraw even further away from the world. I drowned all of my misery in my online games. World of Warcraft was the only thing I had left to live for. My grades at Crespi dropped dramatically. I just didn’t care anymore. I hated that school. I didn’t think about my future. The only thing I gave any serious thought to was my WoW character. I had become very powerful in the game, and I was in one of the best guilds. With this guild, I participated in lots of five-hour raid events to collect better gear and armor for my character.

  Mother moved to a new house with a swimming pool that she was able to lease for a fair price. She picked me and my sister up from father’s house and took us there as a surprise. It was located near the old blue house, though in a nicer area. This was on a day that I had an event on WoW in the afternoon, and I was very concerned about whether or not I would make it in time, so when we got to the new house I didn’t even look around and immediately hooked up my laptop to play WoW. I was that obsessed.

  After being bullied so much in Eighth and Ninth Grade, I became more shy and timid than I ever was in my life. I felt very small, weak, and above all, worthless. I cried by myself at school every day.

  The very last day of Ninth Grade was the worst. I was having P.E. at the gym, and one of my obnoxious classmates named Jesse was br
agging about having sex with his girlfriend. I defiantly told him that I didn’t believe him, so he played a voice recording of what sounded like him and his girlfriend having sex. I could hear a girl saying his name over and over again while she panted franticly. He grinned at me smugly. I felt so inferior to him, and I hated him. It was at that moment that I was called to the office. When I got there, my mother was waiting for me to take me home. I cried heavily as I told her about what happened earlier. That was the last day I ever set foot in Crespi Carmelite High School.

  Crespi was finished. I thought I could finally relax. Little did I know that the worst was yet to come.

  My parents shocked me with very horrible news. They were planning on sending me to Taft High School. Taft had five times as many students as Crespi, it was a public school, it had girls in it, and it had a bad reputation. I had never been so scared in my entire life. How could they do this to me, after knowing what I went through at Crespi? Taft High School would eat me alive and spit me out. I felt so betrayed by my parents.

  On top of that, they told me I had to go to summer school at Taft very soon. I failed a few classes at Crespi and I had to make up for them. The summer was supposed to be a time of peace and relaxation.

  This was turning out to be the worst summer of my life.

  I went with my parents to the Taft Orientation event, and it was a horrific experience. I felt so dismayed at how large the school was, and how intimidating all of the tall students were. I even begged my parents to send me back to Crespi, because I knew Taft would be much worse.

  I had a foul time at summer school. I remember how I used to hate it when my parents made me go to summer camp. Summer camp was like heaven compared to summer school at Taft. I got lost on the first day. I was so terrified that I hid in the hallways during break time. I spent my time at summer school gruelingly waiting to go home so I could feel safe playing WoW.