Mrs. Katherine LeMott was eligible and ready to retire two years before Tony Benitoni stepped into her English class. But the district was already short on English teachers and hiring constraints would have forced the cancellation of core courses if she left her post. Students will not be able to take classes required for graduation, argued the department chair in an effort to keep her another year.

Mrs. LeMott agreed to stay on as the senior AP English teacher, provided she was assigned two sections of “less demanding” classes. And that is how Tony Benitoni ended up in her Creative Writing E-104, which his guidance counselor promised would be the easy English grade he needed to graduate in June.

Being old-school and not feeling very inspired at the beginning of her forty-second year of teaching, Mrs. LeMott assigned her junior and senior creative writers with their first essay: What I did on my summer vacation. The students thought she was kidding, but she was not laughing. Apparently the cliche was real.

And as Tony Benitoni reflected on his summer, the one creative thought of his entire life popped into his head, and he realized the title of his essay would be: Who I Did On My Summer Vacation. Very little of his story was embellished.

***

So I went to the prom with Patty. And afterwards we all went back to her parents place. They have a really cool finished basement with a big screen TV and ping pong tables and sliding doors that lead to a stone patio with a pool that is shaped like a fish with a fountain where a blow hole would be on a whale.

I scored some grain alcohol which I added to our Snapples during the pre-prom party at Mrs. Dunkin’s house, so by the time we got to the prom, Patty couldn’t keep her hands off me. There is something about grain alcohol which really gets women out of their panties, or at least it has this effect on girls’ ambitions.

We sucked face the whole way to the Prom and when we got there, Patty was so horny she said she had to go to the bathroom and I was coming with her. And when she said this, she gave me a delirious smile.

So I went to the bathroom with her and some of the other girls were like, “What is he doing here?” And Patty was like, “He’s doing me here.” And they all shut up and left and Patty pulled me into one of the stalls and I sat on the back of the toilet while she undid my cummerbund and gave me the best hummer I ever had.

We danced some at the prom and the grain wore off and we both had a headache and I was sure the best of prom had come and gone, and then on the way to Patty’s house, in the limo with my friend Pete and his girlfriend Laura, we shared a joint that Pete got from his older sister, and this restarted the party. So when we got to Patty’s house we slipped behind the fountain at the blow hole of the whale and instead of more fellatio, Patty demanded some satisfaction in the way of hard-on intercourse, which I was proud to be a part.

It was her first time, and the only time we did it.

She broke up with me the following Monday, with no explanation, and did not answer my phone calls for the rest of the summer.

I might have pursued her harder (I think this is a pun or something) if Susan and I didn’t have the conversation we did at the fish pool, later on prom night.

It seems that Susan’s date got drunk at the prom on a single beer and passed out. She was disappointed, and quite frankly, so was I.

She said guys suck.
I said girls suck.
Sometimes good, and sometimes, not so good.
Susan laughed and said she knew all about things sucking.
I said I was sure she did. And she winked at me and told me I was cute.

So when Patty wouldn’t take my calls on Monday, I called Susan and she agreed to meet me for an ice cream at the Hero, not too far from where we both live.

We each got a cup of ice cream and while I ate mine, Susan mostly twirled the spoon in hers, like she was frustrated, which evidently she was, because we were in the woods behind the Hero as soon as it was dark.

I would call Susan again, but she never gave me her number and I never gave her mine, and while we both know people who know people we know, neither of us made the effort.

So school is out one week and I am thinking about calling Patty, or maybe calling Susan, when I run into Cindy at the mall.

Well, it’s not really a mall, more like a shopping center, but with some mall-like stores that connect on the inside and with the Cinema 5, where Cindy and I, on a limb, make the sporadic decision to see Mission Impossible. Cindy calls her Mom and tells her she is seeing a movie with some friends, and I don’t call anyone because my parents wouldn’t miss me if I was gone for a whole week.

Anyway Cindy has great breasts. Which I know because my hand accidentally slips into her shirt during Mission Impossible and her nipples are so hard I am glad not to lose an eye. My hand also slipped into her pants and I find out that she is moist interested in me.

We met at the mall again the next day and had sex in the fitting rooms at JCPenney’s. There were not that many shoppers, and a few were predictably deterred from trying on clothes on account of the animal sounds Cindy and I were making. Finally a manager threw us out on suspicion of shoplifting, but he could not call the police because we had no unpaid merchandise. I told Cindy I thought the theft had already taken place, and she giggled. I am sure it wasn’t her first time, but that was funny anyway.

I never heard from Cindy again.
I think her family moved to Minnesota.
It’s a shame because I was kind of fanatical with her.

I had a bit of a lonely spell until I met Marissa on the Fourth of July. She was a dependable spirit that wore no bra and flashed her tits at me when I asked a group of girls if any of them knew Betsy Ross. I was just talking sh*t and have no idea why Marissa pulled up her shirt when she did. Maybe she misunderstood the question. Anyway, I detected earnestness and asked her if she had seen Mission Impossible, which she had not, so I suggested we do that the next day, and she met me for the matinee.

I tried to put my hand in her pants (having already seen her boobs) but she would have no part of that and pulled my hand away and said she was having her period. This set me back some. She must of sensed some disappointment and made up for it by rubbing my pants in the crotch area until the Mission was complete.

It seems that Marissa has a twin sister Melissa and they like to mess with people by trading places with each other, like in that stupid Disney movie. So apparently, and I am not really sure because I can’t tell them apart, when Marissa went to the bathroom halfway through the movie, Melissa came back. In any case, she was not having her period and did everything she could to encourage me to put my hand in her pants. Which I cautiously obliged.

I would like to say my relationship with the -issa’s went farther than that, but I want to get a good grade on this essay and don’t want to be accused of plagiarism.

Our Catholic Church has a picnic the second Sunday every July, complete with services, horseshoes, bingo, and pot luck Bar-B-Que.

I have known Vanessa a long time from Catechism. Probably since we were three or four years old. She was actually the first girl to ever kiss me. It was in the fifth grade during Vatican Bible School, but I didn’t like it when she kissed me then. Now I like it when she kisses me, which is from time to time when we are alone. Once she walked me out to the cemetery behind the Church and said “Anthony Benitoni will you take my virginity?” We were only in seventh grade then, and I promised on my mother’s grave that I would. Someday.

But Vinnie the Peach was there first.

This summer during the church picnic, Vanessa and I wandered off into the woods and I kept my promise. (The thing with Vinnie is between her and God.)

In case you are wondering if I am capable of a long term relationship, I am. Debbie and I slept together for the rest of the summer. It was easy since our neighbors were away at Cape Cod and left Debbie the key to their house so she could feed their cat, and get her pussy satisfied twice a day. Debbie was in my math class when we were freshmen. She has big boobs which she would purposely rub up against me when I asked her for help with math homework. She is very presumptuous.

While I was finishing the summer with Debbie – and it’s not going to work once school starts – I also had romantic relations with Monica and Rita. Not all at the same time, of course.

I had a part time job this summer at Angelo’s. It was not a big deal or anything. I just wiped off tables, emptied garbage bags, and cleaned the bathrooms every 2 hours. Monica worked at the AT&T store in the same strip. She was hot, so I tried to impress her with free slices of pizza. I was taking a big risk on this, because I could have been fired. But I gambled that Monica would be worth it, and she was.

Rita lives across the street from us. Actually she lives across the street from the house where Debbie was pussy sitting. Rita is old, like almost 24 or 25. She works nights at some manufacturing facility that makes soap dispensers or toilet seats or something. She has kinky black hair and a high waist. She is pretty tall and I like tall women. At least as much as any other women. One afternoon when I was coming out of the neighbor’s house after a successful rendezvous with Debbie, she was taking in her empty garbage can or getting the mail or something and asked me what I was doing.

This caught me by surprise, so I told her the neighbors had a leaky faucet and I was fixing it as a favor.

Rita told me she had a leaky faucet that needed attending to and asked me if I would look at it.

She had a leaky faucet all right. It was leaking all over the place when I got to it. And I was more than happy to stop the leak.

I am not really a plumber, but that is how my summer ended.

***

Over the years Katherine LeMott had developed several systems for grading papers without reading them, and for this first assignment she chose the volume method. She ordered the papers from longest to shortest and started assigning grades from A+, A, A-, B+, B, B- and so on until she reached C minuses, which was the lowest grade that could be earned in Creative Writing. Among her colleagues she often referred to E-104 as her ‘A-is-for-effort’ class.

Mrs. LeMott might not have even noticed Tony’s work, had he not put his most clever idea ever – being the title of his essay – in bold 26 point font. As she put the B minus on his paper, the title grabbed her, and most uncharacteristically, she proceeded to actually read what one of her students had written. She only made it to the second paragraph when she scribbled out the effort grade and changed it to an F minus.

Mrs. LeMott forwarded the essay directly to Principal Dunmore and Tony Benitoni was summarily suspended from school for the entire second week of the academic calendar, for unspecified violations of the school’s Code of Conduct. Tony spent most of this week not reflecting on the consequences of his missed education, but having repentant monogamous sex with Rita Montgomery.

(Ed. note: The preceding essay by Mr. Benitoni was heavily edited for grammar, spelling, and other atrocities against the written English word, and the reader may want to consider the greater offenses herein.)

###

2015 Kirt Van Buren