Some people are born to be the main character, with a flock of sidekicks that would follow them even to the toilet. Wu Yi-Hsiang was that type of guy. He and his boys would stand there in a row with their heads lowered, always spitting into the urinal before they fished out their dicks. They spat again when they were done. I could never figure out what their ritual was for.
I was not part of their equation. Wu Yi-Hsiang came to lord over our class within months after the start of junior high. As far as I could tell, the class could be sorted into three groups depending on how well you knew him. I didn’t belong to any of them. Usually, there was no chance for us to even talk.
“How come you all spit?”
“What?”
“Before you pee. Why do you spit at the urinal?”
I was on lunch duty with Wu Yi-Hsiang that day. His usual partner was absent. We were carrying a canteen tray through the courtyard. It didn’t feel right to be quiet the whole time, so I said what had been on my mind. He said nothing. As we walked together in the shade, shadows from the branches played across his face. I noticed a strange change in that shifting light: one of his cheeks twitched faintly, and for a moment, his eyebrows scrunched up.
I wasn’t sure how to read that look. It was as though I’d tossed my question at a glass wall.
I dreamed of him that night. We walked under a canopy of swaying trees through a never-ending corridor. The air around us brightened like film left exposed in the sun, drenching every surface, flooding every space. Wu Yi-Hsiang’s face was close to mine. Steam and the smell of boiled radishes billowed out from the tray. The white light kept expanding, photons in fission. Wu Yi-Hsiang spat. He pulled down his zipper and took out—
I woke up in a sweat. My dick was moving involuntarily, each throb bringing a bizarre thrill. Soon after, I felt a cold spot spreading across my stomach. I sat up. The fan creaked as it turned, sending along a weak breeze. I pulled open my pajama pants and briefs to a fishy smell and found the fabric stained by a pasty liquid. Our textbook had covered this topic, so I didn’t feel any reason to panic.
After changing my clothes, I lay down and fell back asleep, savoring that happy sensation while wrapped in thoughts of Wu Yi-Hsiang.
Ta Kang spoke to me the next day. He pulled me toward the cleaning supply closet in the corner of the classroom and said, all secretive: “You must not tell.”
Ta Kang was a thick boy. Being this close to him made me uncomfortable. But as one of Wu Yi-Hsiang’s most trusted confidants, his status was far higher than mine. I made sure not to show any sign of annoyance.
“Wu Yi-Hsiang wants to mess with the Old Toad,” he said.
“Mess with how?”
“Just to give her
little lesson.”
Old Toad was our English teacher. She was not old and did not look like a toad, but nicknames didn’t require any logic, just as there was no logic to who Wu Yi-Hsiang chose to mess with. As a teacher, Old Toad was the conformist type, not particularly inspiring or annoying. If she had any real fault, it would be the way she repeated her catchphrases.
Ta Kang laid out their plan. “Wait for Old Toad’s most famous phrase, Do you understand what I am saying? The whole class will jump up and give her a minute-long ovation, then sit back down as if nothing had happened. The next time she says it, we’ll do it again. She won’t be able to get on with the class.”
Everyone was in on it. I just had to do my part.
We had class with Old Toad that very afternoon. She was five minutes late. I sat there picturing myself making a mistake and not matching everyone else’s applause. I didn’t want to be the one to screw up Wu Yi-Hsiang’s plan.
Slowly, methodically, Old Toad buckled on her microphone. She slid a new piece of white chalk into a chalk holder and asked us to open our workbooks. I carefully listened to her every word as she called on people to read their sentences. She picked up the cup of popsicle sticks from the lectern and rattled it around before drawing one. Each stick had a student’s seat number written on it. Old Toad had a form of punishment where she would add more sticks with the same student’s seat number to the cup, increasing the chances of calling on them. It was more teasing than punishment, so people in class put up with it without much pushback.
It took eight minutes for Old Toad to say the golden words. I shot out of my seat like an arrow. Clap clap clap.
The whole class turned to look at me. I was the only person who stood up.
“Do you have a question?” Old Toad asked.
The seats around Wu Yi-Hsiang burst into an uproar. It was all the kids who went with him to the bathroom, faithful followers who did anything he told them to. Ta Kang’s giggle sounded like squeaky scooter brakes, a noise at odds with his heavy figure. Wu Yi-Hsiang smiled as he exchanged glances with his lackeys. I then understood what had taken place.
There was no logic to who he chose to mess with.
ispers rose from every direction. My feet shook as though I’d done a day of wall sits. I was not the type to ask questions—the thought of having the whole class listen to me felt like death—nor did I normally interact with teachers.
They were still looking at me. The floor beneath me was caving in like quicksand.
Meanwhile, I was getting hard. Long, slow tremors spread out from my groin. I felt it swell until it pushed against my briefs.
That night, I jumped into bed in a hurry, squeezed the body pillow between my legs, and began to grind back and forth. I pictured Wu Yi-Hsiang talking carefully to Ta Kang over the details of his military operation. Their plan was executed with surgical precision, smashing this loser for an overwhelming victory. It was what he wanted: I was lied to, made a fool of, humiliated as I stood up and clapped alone in front of the whole class. He had dealt me a death blow. This was Wu Yi-Hsiang’s victory. Victory! Victory! Victory!
I came hard into my briefs. There was a lot this time. With my back to the ceiling, I felt the sticky liquid touch my belly.
After that day, my status in the class shifted, the way a red envelope became wastepaper once its seal was broken. Other kids in class no longer found it unusual to see Wu Yi-Hsiang’s people messing with me. Wu Yi-Hsiang never got his hands dirty. He usually delegated the work of tormenting me to subordinates like Ta Kang and admired the results from afar.
“You really want to know why I spit at the urinal?”
I’d been locked into the cleaning supply closet that day after school, and Wu Yi-Hsiang himself made a rare appearance. He stooped down to speak to me through the grids of the air vent. The closet was divided in half, with mops and buckets on the shelf and brooms and dustpans underneath. Leaning forward with the brooms crammed behind my back, I only had enough room to squat.
Wu Yi-Hsiang stood up and spat through the vent at my cheek. His spit was warm and felt like cough syrup as it slid down. He then stepped onto a chair. From below, all I could see was his crotch. He pulled down his zipper. He had fair skin, but his dick was dark, full of small veins and wrinkles. He wiggled it at my face. Urine shot out and poured onto my forehead. I closed my eyes by reflex.
“Do you get it now?”
He spoke in a deadpan voice without a hint of mockery, as earnest as a priest in the confession booth.
Urine wasn’t any kind of liquid. It had its own scent and texture that was nothing like water as it slid past my eyelids. A thread of cold was mixed into the warmth. Was this from temperature differences between the parts of his bladder? The fabric of my uniform quickly absorbed the wetness. It surged down on me, layer upon layer, seeping across my chest and sticking to my belly. My underpants were soon soaked, and I felt my hard dick pressed tight against Wu Yi-Hsiang’s piss.
On many of the nights that followed, I relished the aftertaste of this moment and the complex sensations it left throughout my body as I grinded against my quilt and pillow. Each time, the flights of pleasure left me filled with a warm and tender gratification.
A few weeks later, Wu Yi-Hsiang and his posse stopped having time for me. It was almost time for midterm exams. An air of austerity, audible in the clicks and scratches of mechanical pencils, settled over the room. At our Taipei prep school, all the high-scoring anomalies were placed together in the same class for “preferential treatment.” Crammed into Old Toad’s popsicle cup were the names of the finest students from the gifted programs at the top elementary schools—Ren-Ai, Jinhua, Dunhua, Zhongzheng. Twelve were Mayor’s Award winners. None of us acknowledged this, just as in Chinese chess, where kings cannot face each other on the same open column. We all downplayed our achievements, including Wu Yi-Hsiang, who denied rumors that he had competed in the elementary school math olympiads.
In the week before exams, people didn’t even talk during free period. After school, classrooms were kept open for evening self-study. Everyone stayed except for those with private tutors. The overhead fluorescents never darkened, casting the classrooms into a never-ending day.
Wu Yi-Hsiang’s sidekicks still went to the bathroom in a convoy. They would give me a nod whenever I passed them.
On the day of exams, we switched classrooms and sat in randomly assigned seats to prevent cheating. Afterwards, papers with our scores were taped to the front and back of the homeroom door. It was easy to see how each
student ranked. All one had to do was flip through the acrylic folders under the class schedule to see everyone’s test scores since the beginning of the school year.
Wu Yi-Hsiang walked to my desk after exam scores were posted.
“Take out your textbook.”
He leaned against the desk next to mine and extended his hand. The air was suddenly sucked out of the room. Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked over at us. Each turn of the wall fan would pour wind down his sleeve and collar. The hair over his ears was trimmed in an arc, just long enough to fit the school’s dress code, but enough to catch the breeze, lifting with each gust. He tilted his head a little. Each eye appraised me from a different angle.
“Take out your textbook.”
He looked at me matter-of-factly, as though we were conducting some routine checkup. I guessed that he wanted to copy my notes. He’d just seen our class’s midterm results. I was first place by a wide margin, while he was somewhere around sixth.
I looked down and picked up my backpack. My notes were the most thorough for national language class. I picked up that textbook, which was squeezed between my parent-teacher logbook and a folder full of quiz papers, flipping through it to make sure all my notes looked good before handing it over. ...
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