Sometimes I hate being the only boy in the girls’ locker room. Usually that coincides with my fellow cheerleaders deciding to tease me. Not verbally, visually, in the showers. That can be quite annoying. Not that I get any help from the girls’ coach either. She just smiles and say that I have no one but myself to blame.

Principal’s office. A tired looking woman is shown in. The Principal rises and welcomes the woman.

Principal: I’m very sorry to have had to ask you to come here Mrs Dupont but we have received complaints from several parents regarding your daughter in the locker room.

Mrs Dupont (sighing and near to tears): Oh, no not AGAIN! Why can’t they let sweet little Bobbie alone. She has not harmed anyone. And I thought the court order would have settled all that. It clearly states that Bobbie is a GIRL!

I had always been fascinated by cheerleading, or was it cheerleaders? They were just so cute in their uniforms. So happy and positive. The way they moved. Yes, I really liked cheerleaders. I dreamt about dating one. And then there was the choreography. Yeah, sounds strange for a newly minted high school freshman boy but I had a thing for choreography. I just couldn’t stop watching dance videos. Lately I had started to wonder how to improve the stuff I watched.

Anyway, my fascination with cheerleaders was the reason I was watching the tryouts. I wasn’t the only boy watching. The stands were not exactly crowded but there were a fair number of both girls and boys, mostly boys though, watching the tryouts. Some of the girls down there were good, some not so good. Watching a particularly bad example I just couldn’t keep my mouth shut. That’s a character fault of mine. Speaking before thinking. You know, open mouth, insert foot.

“I’m a T-girl on the prowl”

I was shocked, absolutely shocked to hear that from the absolutely fabulous girl that just had appeared as out of thin air beside me when I was about to sit down at my table in a very classy and expensive restaurant. However, I was even more curious, so I invited her to join me for dinner. She was not only incredibly beautiful and sexy but also one of the funniest and smartest girls I ever had had the pleasure of having dinner with, and believe me I have met many, many beautiful girls.

I wasn’t exactly thrilled to change schools for my junior year. That meant that I would try to fit in a school with already established groupings. Awkward. To make things even more awkward I was the only new student in junior year apart from the more notorious one. A transgender girl started at the same time as I.

I was 28. I was between jobs. I was homeless. The breaks with my parents were final. My girlfriend had just dumped me. My best friend from high school had only barely failed to kill me. I needed a break!

Please note that this story is not tagged “Advanced Bru readers”.

I knew it was a big mistake to go on stage again after I had stopped touring when Covid-19 struck. The last two years had been the best of my life and I had absolutely no wish to resume my stage career as Daisy Sweetheart, the soppy singer/songwriter. Especially since it was obvious that this concert would be a disaster. I hesitated before going onstage but my manager gave me a shove and I walked out there. If only I hadn’t swiped that book from my sister five years earlier.

This is the third and last of three connected stories begun in ”Mousy Trap”.

This is one of my rare sequels. Quite obviously it’s a sequel to Mousy Trap, well, sort of.
However, it can read as a stand-alone story.

I’m Jane. I don’t fit in. I’m a girl despite what I look like. I’m weird. I’m a tomboy, a terrible one. I’m an outsider.
And that was already before we moved and I had to change schools before my sophomore year in high school.

That’s how I presented myself the first day in the new high school

I had worked from home all day in case I’d have to go to my children’s school urgently so when the school bus stopped on the street I could see my son running to our house, sweep up the door and dash up the stairs with his modest skirt flapping and tears ruining his makeup. Then I heard his bedroom door bang shut.

I turned to my daughter who had traversed the distance to the house in a more leisurely pace.

”The experiment was not a success?”
”You could say that.”

I was really looking forward to starting high school. For one thing my parents had assured me that this time we would live in the same place for at least five years. This meant that I wouldn’t have to change schools before I graduated. Just imagine, going to the same school for my entire high school experience! So far the only constant factor in my life had been the inconsistency. Ever since we moved from my ”native” Finland when I was two we never had lived in the same place for more than two years. This had really not been good for my social life.

I really should have known what a mistake it was to try to drown my sorrows after being dumped (again). And this time I had made such efforts to make it work.

I really shouldn’t have let Rolf take me to a bar to seek oblivion in the bottom of a glass, or more precisely lots of glasses.

We really shouldn’t have tried to chat up those two freshman girls from The Other University and thus by definition losers.

The only good thing was that Rolf had chosen a bar where we were unknown and unlikely to meet anyone we knew nor ever to return.

To be honest I was worried about starting high school. All right, I was terrified. Middle school had been bad enough for my friend Phil and me. And that school was a good and smallish school. The high school we were going to was huge.

Fortunately I had a big sister that not only could coach us but, amazingly, was willing to. Though she did warn us that in school she would not recognize us or in any way admit she was related to me. After all she was the new head cheerleader.

My freshman year in high school was quite remarkable. I managed to go through an entire year without making anything at all out of it. Well, scholastically I did reasonably well. Socially? I might just as well not have existed. I failed to get into any sports team. I failed to excel in any other way. I failed to get even ONE date, and that was definitely not for want of trying. I had no real friends. I had a few acquaintances that socially were as remarkable as I but that was all.

At the end of that year the school had come to the realization that the cheerleader team couldn’t possibly be at all events where they were wanted. The decision was taken to create a JV cheerleading team. Cheerleading was an exclusively female thing in our school. However, there was nothing in the rules that stopped a boy being a cheerleader provided he followed the rules. The rules would be the same as for the senior team. Same conduct rules. Same dress code, including wearing the skirted cheerleading uniform on match days and a nice dress at required obligatory social events.

I may have been a bit deranged but I decided that this was my opportunity to stand out, and get close to cute and popular girls. Best case, even share a locker room with them! I mentioned it to Carl, the nearest thing I had to a friend, and he just looked at me and shook his head. Well, I wasn’t to be discouraged by that.

This is the conclusion to the interconnected Amy Amstel stories started in “My Date as a Teenage Girl Model”. If you haven’t read the earlier stories I suggest you start there (330+ Kudos clickers can be wrong but the odds are in your favor). The stories about Amy Amstel are mostly self-contained though.

Transatlantic flights seldom are fun. If you start from Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport terminal 2 you don’t exactly get off on a good start either. If you really are a bit too tired to work it’s even less fun. Flying west I try not to sleep on the flight since that really messes up my sleep-cycles. I was a bit surprised to find a scraggy teenager in the seat next to me. Not the usual passenger in first class. I decided that a long chat with the boy would be preferable to pretending to work. It didn’t start too well. When I introduced myself, Harry Howard, and told him that I was editor–in-chief of the most important fashion magazine for men the boy looked horrified. Apparently not a fashion aficionado. Well, I could have told that from his clothes. Jeans and white T-shirt as well as disheveled hair. Despite that he had a “groomed” look if you looked closer. Actually if you looked very closely he was kind of “pretty”. Shaped eye-brows, holes in his ears, just a hint of mascara remaining on those very impressive eye-lashes. Intriguing.

My recent story "Girlyfriend" got a comment from BarbieLee that it was a reverse story. Since Barb is a selfproclaimed Oklahoma cowgirl I responded by threating to write a "Reverse Cowgirl" story in her honour. Here it is.

This is a sequel to ”My Date as Teenage Girl Model”. You really should read that first (can be read as stand-alone). This time it’s told from Darius’ point of view.

I had really enjoyed my date with ”Amy Amstel” but I thought that was it. I was mistaken. The (very) local TV-station got hold of it and made a silly piece about it. This caused me and Andrew some discomfort. Andrew made a joke out of it and I – well, I just let it blow over and that was it, I thought.

A couple of weeks later I was asked to come over to Andrew’s place. Why? We never interacted. Well, apart from the “date” but that was definitely with Amy and not Andrew, remember. When I got there I was getting very worried since a representative from Amy Amstel’s agency was there. Had I got myself involved in some breach of copyright or anything like that? Honestly, it was just a bit of fun! So what if I’m a bit obsessed with Amy Amstel? I’m not a stalker. At least I don’t think so. The situation was worse than I thought at first. They offered me a summer job. A completely outrageous, ridiculous job bordering (on the wrong side) of lunacy.

In the High School corridor walking between classes:

I dearly love my twin. I may complain about the consequences but I really do love Alexis. Fraternal twins, of course. We couldn’t be more different. Alexis is the younger one, by 28 minutes. Already as a baby Alexis was small and prone to get sick. I on the other hand have always been “robust”. I’ve always felt very protective about Alexis. That’s how I got dragged into the “Girly-girly swamp”.

Document dated August 15:
Request for Andie (a neat line crossing out the name which has been replaced by hand with "Andrew") McPherson to attend her ("her" crossed out. By hand: “his”) sophomore year as a girl. Various attachments including psychological evaluation.
Note by Principal Smith: Rejected! Unnatural!

Some time ago Barbie Lee sort of challenged me in one of her blogs (https://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/blog-entry/78714/illegal-make...).
At the time I was not really in a shape to do anything about it and didn’t get a silly enough idea. Let’s see if this is silly enough. As for those who think I write too short stories: This is the longest I have posted here. It's also more narrative than most of them.

12 years from now.

My fiancée Mary and I were spending a quiet day in my flat when the door-bell rang. When I opened the door I found Tom, well really Thomasine, my fiancées tomboy younger sister there in tears and carrying among other things the ruins of her prom dress. As it turned out not only her dress had been destroyed. Andrea, their bratty freshman brother, had totally flipped out and hadn’t stopped at the dress but also destroyed Tom’s jewelry and even got in a cut or two with a pair of scissors in Tom’s hair. She looked a mess. All she had left were her shoes and panties and the prom was only a few hours away. Disaster!

There was only one thing to do. I went into my bedroom and got out MY old prom dress.

Mary (rather upset): Peter, why do you have that dress?

I was rather surprised. I thought she knew. This could be awkward. Well, we’ll take care of that problem later. Now we had more important things to take care of. As I started to check if my dress could fit Tom I absentmindedly answered:

- It’s my old prom dress. I graduated from West Peak.

Mary (with a gasp): The infamous West Peak Academy for Young Ladies?

Well, some may call it infamous. I prefer famous. A fame that I’m proud to be partially responsible for. You see, I’m the only boy ever to graduate from that high school/boarding school.