Girls jerk off more than boys?

After Algebra, I was in the north stairwell on my way to Social Studies when it happened again. With little warning, Neeka's climax slammed me against the railing, making me hang on with my eyes shut and my knees banging together until it subsided enough for me to climb up to the landing. I wanted to say something, but she had never intruded on my sexual adventures and I felt I had to return the courtesy. Still, I planned to ask her about it at the next opportunity.

I spent the next fifty minutes alternating between teasing Mr. Locke and being bored out of my mind by his droning recitation of the events leading up to the storming of the Bastille. When the bell rang, I dashed to the gym, gnawing an energy bar on the way.

I had just finished changing into my weightlifting outfit when it happened again. This time it seemed even more powerful than before, and I had to lie down on the bench while the waves of pleasure crashed over me. When I was able to sit up, I felt both drained and energized at the same time. I was torn between being jealous of Neeka and being glad that I was the one getting the free ride.

My mind was on so many other things while I was working out in the weight room that I slipped-up a couple of times and did something I shouldn't have been able to do. The first time, I was doing curls with a pair of 40 lb. dumbbells. I was feigning effort as I had learned to do, when I suddenly had an itch between my shoulder blades and I reached back without thinking and casually scratched it without putting the dumbbell down first. I realized what I had done as soon as I did it and looked around to see if anyone had noticed. Steve and Doug were looking in my direction and I smiled at them as I resumed my set. I couldn't be sure if they had seen my slip. They weren't staring or anything. Just looking. I was used to that.

The second time, Roger and Lamont saw me lift a barbell from the hooks before Lamont was ready for it. I was standing there holding it over his chest, looking like nothing was happening for a good second or so before he reached up for it. After he took it from me I thought to check the weight. It was nearly 300 lbs.

I watched as Lamont did one very tough rep with it and then I waited until he had it fully extended before helping him get it back on the hooks. When he had recovered, Lamont sat up and looked at me, deciding what to say. Finally, he decided to say nothing at all, which was worse than most anything he could have said. I saw in his eyes that I was busted, that he knew I wasn't being up front with them, and I felt ashamed that I had been trying to fool them. Still, I didn't feel comfortable telling them any more than they already knew, so I kept my mouth shut and went on with my workout, thinking all the while that maybe this whole weight-room thing hadn't been the best idea I'd ever had.

While I curled those dumbbells, I could feel the weight of them. I could lift them, but they didn't feel heavy. When I tore the roof off that minivan, I felt the resistance. I felt the metal bend and tear. It was strange. I didn't feel that strong. It was just that when I pushed or pulled really hard, things moved or tore. I was starting to realize that I had been in a kind of state of denial about the minivan incident. Everyone kept saying, "You tore the car in half! You ripped it in two!" But I just didn't feel like I was either strong enough or had exerted myself enough to have done that. When I did it so easily, it really scared me. I mean, I've had harder times opening bags of chips - really.

I'd started out by pushing myself to see how much I could do, how strong I would get. Now, I felt scared that I would get too strong and I wouldn't be able to control it. I was beginning to have a daydream about the climax of some cheesy monster movie, where the giant booger stomps through the city smashing houses and cars flat. Only the monster in my daydream was me. Whenever I thought of it, I would laugh it off, but the image kept coming back.

I realized that I was on the verge of over-analyzing and obsessing about things again, so I put the dumbbells back on the rack. Instead, I went to a machine that the wrestling team guys almost never used. It was a power-lifting machine with a bar attached to a cable that ran through some pulleys to a stack of weights. Like most of the machines, you could select the amount of weight by poking a small bar through a hole in the weights to hook up the amount you wanted.

I was in a sour mood, so I plugged the small bar into the bottom hole in the weight stack, engaging all 1000 pounds of weight. Surely I wouldn't be able to lift this much, and everyone would see me straining and realize what a joke it all was.

I tried hard not to work myself up for the effort. I relaxed as much as I could before I reached down for the bar with the steel cable connected to the middle. With my knees bent, my back straight, my shoulders square, and my head up, I pulled hard against the bar.

I felt the slack go out of the cable, and I felt the slight give as I put tension on the machine. I heard a couple of clicks as weights shifted on the stack, but that was all. I was pulling as hard as I could, and the weights hadn't budged an inch. After a couple of seconds of straining, I eased off and let go of the bar, rising to a standing position.

I was glad. I was relieved. I was even happy that I had failed to lift the laughably huge amount of weight. I wasn't the super-strong monster of my imagination. There was some other explanation for the minivan after all.

Then Lamont spoke up behind me calling everyone's attention to my effort, "See? She's not all that strong, after all. Hey, what do you expect, she's just a girl!"

'Just a girl'. Those words echoed in my head. The calm I had tried to keep evaporated in an instant as my face flushed red and I became suddenly pissed. 'Just a girl.' That was the very attitude I had wanted to eradicate, and here he was, throwing it in my face. I was so mad I wanted to spit. Then I did spit. I spit on both hands and I squatted down with a flood of adrenalin rushing into my system and one thought on my mind — "I'll show him!"

I gripped the bar so tightly I could hear the chalk on my palms squeak. It sounded a lot like overstressed metal and I took that as a good sign. I threw my head back, closed my eyes, and hauled on that bar with every ounce of strength I had.

When I straightened my legs and came up to a standing position, something felt wrong. Even though I knew the machine was designed to allow someone of average height to pull the bar almost to mid-thigh in a straight-arm pull, the bar kept rising until I had curled it up under my chin. I thought the selector bar had slipped out and the weight was off the cable. It was just too easy.

I opened my eyes to see the whole stack of half a ton of iron weights halfway up the cinderblock wall, teetering at the top of the rail. Concrete dust puffed out around the bolts holding the machine to the wall. There was a sudden loud ping as one of the strands of the steel cable parted.

"Sweet Jesus!" I heard Lamont say. All of the mocking tone was gone from his voice.

"Sam?" Steve said, in a voice full of concern. "Honey, put it down. Put it down slow. The cable's over-stretched. It's going to break and someone could get hurt."

The 'someone could get hurt' woke me out of my startled state. I lowered the bar smoothly to the floor, doing it as quickly as I could without dropping the stack of weights. Even so, when they hit the bottom of the track, there was a loud thud and a few creaks as the frame settled back against the wall. I could see where the bolts had been pulled a half-inch out of their holes and there was a small crack running through three of the concrete blocks that hadn't been there before.

I stared at that crack like it might open up and swallow me. If I had put any more pressure on the cable, either it would have snapped like a rubber-band, or the whole machine would have been ripped out of the wall. Just like with the minivan, it hadn't felt that hard to do.

"It's the adrenalin," I thought. "I thought it must be, but now I'm sure. Without it, I'm strong, but things feel heavy — I can feel the effort. With it, there is just no normal feeling of weight or resistance. I can destroy things without breaking a sweat. I can lift a half-ton with no problem. I can tear a car apart with my bare hands like it was tissue paper. That's it. To stay in control, I have to stay in control. If I get mad, or excited, or pumped up, the adrenalin will flow and the power will come. I only need to be tranced to be able to do the mental stuff and turn my skin. That's it. That's the secret. I know how to control it now!"

I was so happy that I was grinning broadly as I turned to face the guys. In hindsight, that wasn't the best expression to show them. It made me look like I was showing-off.

Steve jumped to my side and asked, "Are you all right?"

"Sure," I grinned. "Never better." I'd just blown my cover to bits, but nothing was going to sour this moment for me. Fortunately, Steve was more realistic.

"Good! OK, guys. None of this leaves this room! Are we crystal clear on this?"

"Yeah, Steve," Roger said, sarcastically, "I'm going to go out and tell the next person I see that Sam power-lifted 1000 pounds and almost tore the building down. How stupid do I look?"

"We'll talk about your unfortunate looks some other time. But that's another good reason to keep this in the team. OK?" Steve looked around for an answer from everyone. He had suddenly gone all protective of me and it was so sweet of him to do that. It made me feel all warm inside. Then something he had said clicked. He had called me 'honey'. He had never called me by a pet name before. I leaned against him and he put his arm around me. It was weird. I had just shown them that I was easily stronger than all of them put together and here Steve was acting like I was a fragile flower.

One by one, the rest of the guys acknowledged his order to keep quiet about what they'd seen. Roger nodded and waved his hand like it was the only smart move.

Doug said, "No problem!"

Lamont was still stunned, but he managed a hesitant nod. He had been edging away from me since the weight went up and he was about to fall over a bench if he wasn't careful. I reached out toward him to point it out and he flinched at my gesture and plopped down on the bench hard. Lamont looked like he was running over all our past conversations in his head, counting up the times he might have pissed me off. He had been caught in mid-taunt and he was trying to figure out how much apologizing he needed to be doing.

"I guess that cat is out of the bag," I said, "Not that I'm not relieved. But I didn't want to put this burden on you guys."

Steve stroked my back affectionately. I got the impression that if we'd been alone, he would have been stroking more intimate places. I couldn't figure that part out. He had just found out that his girlfriend was many times stronger than he was and he was acting like I was his sweetie-pie. He even called me 'honey'. Was he that turned on by muscle power? I had been trying for respect here. Had I missed that badly?

"Don't worry about it, Sam," Steve assured me. "We'll never tell a soul. But maybe now you'll quit trying to kid us."

"Hunh?"

"Oh, come on. Do you really think we're that stupid that we can't tell when someone is faking? I mean, that's just insulting. You've been jerking us around since day one and it's been getting harder and harder not to say anything."

Doug nodded and Roger grinned. Lamont looked surprised for a second, then got this shit-eating grin and tried to look like he was in on the gag the whole time. My estimate of Lamont's IQ dropped a few points at that, but if the other guys were prepared to ignore it, I would go along.

"My acting wasn't too good, hunh?"

"No, honey. I'm afraid not."

Now that the secret was out, Steve could relax. Apparently, he had been holding back more than the fact that he knew I had been putting them on. I thought about asking him not to call me 'honey', since that was what Mom called me, but it was sounding better to me every time he said it, so I let it go. It sounded like I owed him more than a few courtesy points anyway.

"Sorry." It sounded lame as soon as the word was out of my mouth.

"Yeah," Doug said, waving off my poor excuse for an apology. "So, the big question that's on all out minds is: how strong are you, anyway?"

"To tell the truth — and it is the truth, I swear — I honestly don't know. I don't know how, why, when, or where it's going. But I can do things that sometimes scare the snot out of me."

As soon as I said, 'do things' I knew a demonstration was coming up. Well, I owed them. I had insulted their intelligence — everyone's but Lamont's anyway — and I owed them. I looked around and spotted a piece of metal bracing lying in a corner of the room.

"What's that?" I said, pointing.

Roger picked it up. It was flat, about two and a half feet long, and had a hole in each end.

"It's a brace for the weight rack," he explained. "Everybody kept tripping over it, so we took it off. The rack is bolted to the wall, like the power-lift machine used to be, so it wasn't doing anything but getting in the way." He handed it to me. It was a good, sturdy bit of steel.

I took it by both ends and thought about how jumped-up I had been when I tore the roof off the car. The adrenalin had been flowing strong then and I wanted to tap into the flow again. As I thought about it, it came easily, a familiar rush of power through my body that I had been using all along without realizing what I was doing. When the feeling was right, I did my pretzel trick and handed the bent metal back to Roger.

"Holy Moly!" he said. I think he was more impressed by seeing me bend the brace than almost pulling the machine out of the wall. He turned the warm steel over in his hands and passed it along to Doug, who spent a few futile seconds trying to straighten it out again.

"Now that is truly impressive," Doug said. "And I was thinking about asking you to arm-wrestle. That would have been embarrassing."

"But I might have let you win!" I said, jokingly.

Doug became instantly serious. "Not funny. If you're stronger than me, it's OK. Some are, some aren't. I compete to see who's the better wrestler. The idea of someone letting me win is an insult to me and to the idea of sport in general. You're supposed to do your best, and the best athlete will win. If you don't play it that way, then we're all just sitting in here jerking off. Pardon my French."

"You're right," I said, chastened. There was a lot of idealism here and I had been undermining it. "I'll remember that. Nobody likes to be told that their hard work is pointless. I'm sorry I said that." I paused before I tried to change the subject. "Nothing wrong with a little self-abuse, though. I've been known to engage in it on occasion, myself."

My little joke provoked a few chuckles and broke the serious mood. As a way of showing there were no hard feelings, Doug picked up on my comment.

"Aw, don't give us that! Girls don't jerk off."

"Silly boy. Girls jerk off more than boys. We just don't brag about it as much."

"Bull!"

"Oh, yes! You go into any girl's bedroom. Everything you see that is small enough and round enough and smooth enough that isn't nailed down has managed to find its way between her legs at one time or another. Hairbrush handles are a favorite. So are candles, bottles, pillows, and plush toys. Electric toothbrushes are good substitutes for vibrators because no one would be shocked if you leave one lying around. I used to use the hand-held shower-massage to bring myself off over and over. I had to quit because I kept using up all the hot water."