We were all silent for a minute until the kid next to me – who had been having so much fun with himself – stood up. His name was Hank, called Handsome Hank by a lot of girls in school because of his surfer good looks and his impressive body, and he was one of the freshmen who had held his own with me on the court that week. With whatever part of my brain was still working, I expected him to be a strong competitor over the next week of tryouts. I noticed that my hands were white and shaking as he said, “Well, dudes, that was pretty impressive, and I don’t know about you but I need to blow a load or I’m going to pass out. Anybody who’s interested, come talk to me and I’ll tell you how to get to my house. We can have a good old fashioned J/O party and do some renegade team building of our own to get ready for these fuckers next week. It’ll be a good ice-breaker for whatever crazy shit we have to do in here on Monday.”

A couple guys shook their heads and split for the door, but most of them looked interested or at least philosophical about the suggestion. As some chatter finally started up in the room, Hank turned to me where I was still shell-shocked. “What about you, Tommy? Want to come pull your pud with us?” He laughed eagerly.

It took a second for me to reengage with the world and another moment to accept that this was for real, but as soon as I did I realized the danger I was in. “Uh, no, that’s cool, man. Thanks.”

Hank frowned. “Come on, dude. I know people are saying you’re a little standoffish, and I can understand that, but come on. I clearly can swing a bat in your league, too…” Horrified as I was by my growing reputation, I could see what he meant: he was a lot closer to soft than when he was trying to get away with getting off earlier, but the shape moving behind his shorts showed that he was wearing boxers and had nothing to be ashamed about. “And how are you going to deal with this team if you won’t mess around?”

I flushed furiously. “Ah, no, man, it’s not that. My dad’s back from a business trip and I need to eat dinner with my parents. Next time for sure. I’ll, uh, you know, you have a good weekend.”

Hank’s frown relaxed into a smile and he slapped me on the shoulder. I ducked out of the room even as he turned and said, “All right, who wants to go watch some porn and use up some KY?” I realized, walking shakily to the front where my dad was waiting in his Beemer, that I had just taken a rain check to masturbate with a group of near-strangers. Such, I suppose, is the mad life of a Raider.

A life I could never share, I realized that weekend. I spent Saturday in a fog of grief and despair, realizing that I could only drop out of tryouts. The shame of revealing myself in front of men like Hank and Joe was unthinkable. I had never really realized before how incredibly small my dick was, despite the porn I had watched and the surveys I had read online; it’s impossible to understand something like that until you see a guy jerking off in front of you and fucking a girl into unconsciousness with a dick almost three times your own size. And he’s only the Fifth! I kept thinking, over and over, like an evil chant. And like most other people in my generation who feel bereft and homeless, I went to the mall.

This seemed like a bad idea. Several groups of girls from high school went into peals of giggles when they saw me or suggestively called me to their tables, forcing me to new levels of creativity in pretending I hadn’t seen them. Even the sight of housewives staggering or dropping their bags as they caught the stunray of my sex appeal lacked it’s usual charm because it only reminded me that I could never satisfy them and was doomed to a life of loneliness and blowing my salary on every penis-enlargement scam in the world. I was ruined, and I knew it, and it sucked – and even thinking that reminded me that no girl would ever suck me, which made me want to cry.

Going to the mall was actually the best decision of my life, however. I couldn’t know this because I would not until some time later become aware of that fact that Northtown Mall was a social center for retired supernatural beings of every order, explaining a great deal (though not all) of the bizarrely-dressed people who wandered around there all the time; unfortunately, the Goth kids have no excuse other than being weirdos. And as I was distracted by a woman walking out of Macy’s and shattering several hundred dollars of China in her sudden wave of lust inspired by me, I bumped into an elderly lady wearing some limp leaves around her head and a cloak with holes in it and carrying what looked like a decorative apple stolen from some store display where they gilded everything.

I felt terrible because she was so old it looked like her skin might turn to powder any second, and I quickly apologized. “Oh, I am so sorry, ma’am, I didn’t see you there. Are you all right? Can I get you anything at all? Do you need to sit down?”

The woman fixed me with a watery eye and quavered like a cracked teapot, “Well, you are a good-looking specimen, aren’t you? Nice ass.”