Ugly duckling

Her name was Barbara, she lived not too far away from us across the railroad tracks in a shack of a home that her poor family rented. Barbara was an outcast, she attended school with us but no one spoke to her much. She had some deformities that made her walk with a hobble and her face was almost gruesome. One side of her face was misaligned and her left eye was enlarged, the left side of her jaw protruded down and to the left making her lower lip always hang partly open.

I must say that for a bunch of middle school aged kids, we did well, I never remember anyone making fun of Barbara or giving her a hard time. But still, she was outcast. The teacher rarely called upon her in class because she knew that it was embarrassing for Barbara to speak. She could talk, but it was a slurry and drooling speech that seemed to agonize her as she spoke. At recess, or in the lunchroom, she sat nearby but alone. Many times I caught Barbara staring at me during class, she would smile at me but never spoke.

Between her house and mine was a large lot full of railroad maintenance materials, big piles of gravel, crossties, sand, culverts, scrap metal, and all sorts of other stuff. This “junkyard” was a favorite playground of mine. I was often hanging out there, sometimes just playing, sometimes hunting rabbits with my dog and a pellet gun. I never knew that Barbara often watched me from a dark window in her house across the creek.

When I started high school, we saw no more of Barbara, nobody really missed her, I guess I may have wondered what became of her but I figured she was sent to some “special ed.” facility or something. By the next summer, after my freshman year, I was becoming a horny young man, and my trips to the junkyard playground often became masturbation sessions. Sometimes I would crawl up into a large culvert and curl up there to beat my meat, but my favorite spot was a tiny shack that was in the edge of the woods, it may have been an old ticket booth or something, it was tiny, about six foot by six foot with a shelf along one wall. The shack was all grown over with vines and brambles and I felt safe in there knowing that no one would dare pick their way through the briars and snakes to gain access to the old shack. It was my “fuck shack”, I arranged the junk on the inside so that I could have room to sit and face the shelf, the shelf was about waist high, a good place to spread out a girlie picture, with plenty of room beneath it for me to stroke my young dick. Before long, I had a collection of photos of beautiful women, some clipped from magazines, some were catalogs showing pretty women in bras and panties, and I often had some kind of lube, hand lotion borrowed from my mother and carried there in a plastic bag. I kept all my “stuff” carefully stowed on a board overhead in the rafters of the tiny shack.

One day I discovered that my stash appeared to be disturbed, the clippings were out of order from the way I had left them, this gave me reason to look over the premises, and I could detect that someone else had indeed visited the shack. I resolved to figure out who had discovered my “fuck shack”, I would not feel safe jerking off in there until I did.

I spent a couple of days just watching the area from a distance while riding my bike but saw nothing. On my next trip to the shack, I got a funny feeling as I approached it, something just didn’t seem right. I backed away and hid among a pile of old machinery. I sat there for twenty minutes or so when I saw movement at the door of the shack. A small figure slowly emerged from the building, carefully closed the door, and began picking it’s way through the vegetation. It was Barbara! I watched her as she hobbled her way across the creek and up the bank towards her house.

I entered the shed just a minute or so after she had left, I carefully observed the site trying to discover what she was doing there. Sure enough, she had looked through my stash again and I could detect a new musky odor in the small building.