The Guidance Counselor - Chapter 1 (Patreon)

Every day, her heels would tap fiercely on the floor.

Tack, tack, tack.

Every boy in the classroom would lift his head up to face the open doorway, hoping to catch a glimpse of her walking down the hallway. They would all stop what they were doing – even breathing -at the sound of those heels. That sound was a gift from heaven, granting us a fleeting divine vision for only a second. That second was enough to relieve us from lectures about Homer’s Odyssey or about logarithms or from a terrible pop quiz gone wrong.

There would be false alarms though.

Sometimes that “tack, tack, tack” would be from Mr. Sullins, the principal, wearing really nice dress shoes.

But when it was her, Ms. Nicole Johnson, our hearts fluttered and we gazed at her with doe eyes. She had become a legend in St. Joseph’s Academy as the Number 1 Hottest Faculty Member. She may been the ONLY hot faculty member in the entire school’s history. And for a an all-boys Catholic high school, we boys were desperate for a woman to ogle at.

Okay, sure, we had female teachers.

Mrs. Carroll taught world history, and Mrs. Bernot taught computer science. But they paled in comparison to Ms. Johnson, not just in appearance but also in attitude and personality. Mrs. Carroll was somewhere in her fifties and was 100% done with the world and its history. She had little to no patience for rowdy students and had no sense of humor. From behind, Mrs. Carroll appeared to be desirable; a large wide ass and a tall profile with long dirty blond hair. However, whenever she turned around, I shuddered. She dabbed on too much makeup, in my opinion, making her lips blood red to the point where it felt uncomfortable to look at her. Maybe I would have thought differently of her if she didn’t wear so much makeup.

Mrs. Bernot meanwhile was on the opposite spectrum, giddy and excitable to the point of being cringe. She was slightly younger than Mrs. Carroll and did have nice child-bearing hips. Big eyes, wide smile, and shoulder-length blond hair. Sounds attractive on paper. But in practice, not so much. Whenever she tried to make you excited about how to use Microsoft Word there was a moment when it felt too much, you know? She hardly dressed nicely and had that “Soccer Mom” vibe (indeed, she had five kids, which was not surprising once you got to know her), and was the antithesis of Mrs. Carroll’s jaded, cigarette-fueled nature.

Unlike Mrs. Carroll or Mrs. Bernot, Ms. Johnson did not teach a class; she was one of the four guidance counselors. St. Joseph’s was a fancy college-prep school. They gave us resources that no other public school had, or even most standard Catholic schools. Every student once a month met with a guidance counselor to talk about their feelings and their goals and their work.

As a guidance counselor, Ms. Johnson would often watch students in the hallway when we switched classes. Sometimes she’d be talking to other teachers or guidance counselors, surveying the scene like a prison camp. Whenever she walked past us, we boys would elbow each other and grin as we turned around to stare at her ass, a lovely ass rivaled only by Kim Kardashian. If she wasn’t wearing her pantsuit, she would wear a pencil skirt, and oh my God– we boys would gawk like you wouldn’t believe. And that face, oh that lovely face. Before I knew Ms. Johnson, I never imagined that I would be so attracted to a woman with short hair. She had a boyish look, yes, but she rocked it and drew me in. Brunette too; society had driven me to prefer blonds at an early age but Ms. Johnson broke that spell. She had a wide, almost chubby face with a wide forehead surrounded by a bobbed haircut. With her tight pantssuit, she rocked the look. Somehow both mature and girlish at the same time. Ultimately, I realized that she had the amiability of Mrs. Bernot and the professionalism of Mrs. Carroll; the best of both worlds. Ms. Johnson was approachable while also appearing mature and stern.

We often asked incoming freshmen during lunch who they would rather fuck if they were stuck on a deserted island, Mrs. Carroll or Mrs. Bernot? It had to be those two. Because everyone knew that the easy answer was Ms. Johnson.

She had been working there for only a year before I entered St. Joseph’s. She had gained notoriety within months of her first day. Before I even saw Ms. Johnson, classmates were already talking about her based on rumors the upperclassmen spread. They claimed that she offered a senior a handjob, and that she alluded to giving oral sex. None of them were based on any facts, of course, and were largely pranks started by seniors to get the freshman to say stupid things to her.

I had my fantasies go on about her for three years because, alas, I didn’t get Ms. Johnson as a guidance counselor.

I got Mr. Henry Gary.

A boring, overweight, old, white, balding man with glasses.

The dude was pushing seventy, and he didn’t exactly showed any signs of wanting to retire. He was in it for the long haul and actually enjoyed working.

(And “Henry Gary”? That’s like two first names. What’s up with that?)

You couldn’t imagine how fucking bummed out I was about that. Already a freshman and my dreams got crushed. Everything was a letdown already. I didn’t want to fucking talk to this old guy about my feelings. I wanted to talk to Ms. Johnson. At least the other two guidance counselors looked somewhat younger and more alert and vibrant. No, I got the old guy.

Meanwhile one of the biggest assholes of my generation, Tom Rizzo, got paired up with Ms. Johnson. Because of how our last names fell in alphabetical order, he often sat behind me in our assigned seating for homeroom and any other class we had together. He would slap both of my shoulders and say, “I got another meeting with Ms. Johnson, dude! Sucks to be you!”

I didn’t get it. People like Tom always got the good shit. He was from one of the richest families in town. They owned the nearby Rizzo Farms. He had an allowance since the day he plopped out of the womb. The kid couldn’t fucking tell the difference between algebra and calculus and he was the one who got paired up with Ms. Johnson. That was the shit I had to hear almost every other morning in homeroom.

For three years at that school, I begrudgingly went to Mr. Gary’s office and sat there relatively despondent. He knew right away that I was a “quiet kid”. He called me “reserved”. I fucking hated that word. He said it a lot. “I know you’re more reserved than your fellow classmates, but you can always tell me if anything is going on, you know.” By the end of junior year, he actually emailed my parents because he was concerned about my well-being. The Virginia Tech shooting was fresh on everyone’s minds, and memories of Columbine sparked discussions about “the quiet kids” of the class. That was embarrassing as fuck. You can’t exactly shout to a guidance counselor, “I DON’T WANT TO TALK TO YOU I WANT TO TALK TO THE HOT LADY!” now, can you? Figures. They pay attention more to awkward kids like me rather than the kids who say shit like they want to shoot birds with BB guns and then we all get surprised when they shoot up the school.

I couldn’t relate to anything that came out of Mr. Gary’s mouth. He often made dad jokes and kept referencing an old sitcom called Mister Ed and had no interest in what a video game was. At least the other to male guidance counselors had seen The Matrix or could tell the difference between a GameCube and PlayStation 2. And I know looking back today I was a very disgruntled horny teenager. Mr. Gary was just doing his best looking out for me, and I might not have appreciated it.

In our last few sessions together, I started to talk a little more to him to get him off my back and not embarrass me in front of my parents. I told him about my artwork. I made up some shit about how I tried to draw but couldn’t find the confidence to keep going. I said I was suffering from the equivalent to a “writer’s block”. I kept saying that I would start drawing a line but immediately became very self-critical and too discouraged to continue drawing. That was a bold-faced lie; but I kept pretending to struggle with drawing to keep up something to talk about with Mr. Gary.

The truth was I drew smut.

I don’t mean sex…

No, I drew women farting and burping.

You gotta understand: growing up in Catholic school and with a repressed Catholic family you have no idea who to talk to about this. Back in middle school I knew that my classmates knew what sex was, but I was left in the dark. They taught us abstinence-only when they taught us about sex. I never knew how it was in public schools, but in Catholic schools you weren’t so much bullied as you were left out of the conversation. You knew you were a cool kid if you talked about sex with your fellow classmates. If you didn’t understand any of the slang, well, then I have bad news for you. I had no idea what they were talking about when they joked about “oral sex” or “golden showers” or “blowjobs”.

But I also didn’t get most of those jokes for the longest time primarily because my sexual interests deviated from the norm. It took me ages to realize that men “normally” masturbated by hand. Instead, I dry-humped the floor or my bed. The air jerk was lost on me. The earliest memory I have jerking off was when I was somewhere in the single-digits. I was in the living room alone watching the rat from the 1973 Charlotte’s Web movie eating a lot and getting drunk. I don’t know why I found that scene arousing but I did, and I didn’t even understand that what I was doing was connected to arousal. I never told anyone because somehow, deeply embedded in my understandings of societal taboos, I knew it was “weird” without really understanding why it was weird. I also didn’t know if I was fucked up in the head for masturbating that early in life. Was it normal? Was it not normal? I had no idea. It was better not to tell anyone and avoid the potential complication altogether.

When I entered middle school, the Internet had just started to become popular, and  I explored my fetish like never before. The early 2000’s was a wild west of Internet content. I had the unfortunate experience of being pranked to watch2 Girls 1 Cup and Mr. Hands. And I remembered when YouTube didn’t have ads every five seconds and still had the raw video of Budd Dwyer’s suicide uploaded. The farting community started out really small, as most niche things did. I had my list of favorite videos that I watched over and over. I was the last generation to have physical media hidden away in my bedroom for masturbation purposes. Back in ’98, I used my Game Boy Camera to sneak pictures of women’s asses in public and developed a private collection of pictures of candid butt shots. I peeked in my mom’s health magazines hoping they talked about how to cure a bloated belly, because usually they would publish a stock photo of a woman with her pants undone. I also generally kept department store catalogs of women in tight clothing. My mom ordered so many that she never realized when one was missing. I still have those magazines and catalogs stashed somewhere in my bedroom. It’s weird to think they don’t even mail those anymore. I practically own ancient relics of a bygone age.

I still remember a time in my life when I wasn’t that unhinged. Oddly enough, I used to actually be grossed out by burping and farting. I will never forget when I saw The Nutty Professor movie with Eddie Murphy in 1997. The post-credits scene had the entire family laughing at their burps and farts. I gagged and told my mom I had to leave the theater right away. I was that close to throwing up.

But you know what I was always into? Bloated bellies. Like that one Charlotte’s Web cartoon movie. That was my first fetish since I was a kid. I called it the “mother fetish” - the fetish from which all others came from. It’s the only one I didn’t know exactly where it came from. Because going back further I remember fragments of dreams about women with big bellies. Yes, I had awkward moments as a kid in my single-digit years when I was aroused at the thought of my aunt and mom being bloated after eating. They often overate and unbuttoned their pants. I think around freshman year of high school was when I fully realized, “Oh that’s really fucking gross” and stopped feeling that way. I didn’t know if that was normal or not either, and I was deathly afraid to speak about this to anyone. The fetish community online wasn’t evolved yet with Discord servers and messaging groups. They were nameless faces giving a thumbs up at fart content that popped up on the Internet. I still have on a flash drive somewhere ripped commercials from Limewire of Gas X commercials showing bad CGI of women becoming “inflated” with gas. That drove me wild as a kid. I thought that was the hottest shit ever. Fetishizing the belly was always with me, even in the crib. Much like the First Mover argument in Catholicism trying to prove the existence of God, my “mother fetish” was always there as far back as I could remember, unveiling more and more fetishes for me as I grew older.

Things shifted when I saw a certain episode of Sabrina, the Animated Series that changed everything. “The Bat Pack”. In the episode, Aunt Hilda’s long-lost vampire friends persuade Sabrina to help them steal blood from a blood bank. They faced only one problem – the blood bank had dozens of cloves of garlic protecting the vault. The vampires, obviously allergic to garlic, persuade Sabrina to eat all the garlic. Every. Single. One. The result is her lying on the floor with a distended belly, belching out loud. From that moment on, everything changed. I suddenly equated belching with the relief of being bloated. Farting also came after that.

Boom. Suddenly the grossest thing imaginable became sexually arousing. YouTube wasn’t a thing back then, so I had to resort to using the old TV Guide (yes, the paper one) to figure out when that specific episode of Sabrina, the Animated Series would air. I would do anything in my power to record it on the VCR without having to explain to my parents what I was doing. As a kid, I didn’t want ANYONE to find out I was recording this. I just couldn’t. I understood that “this is my deepest darkest secret” impulse every kid has had about something innocuous. One grateful day, both of my parents were out of the house, and it happened to be the day that “The Bat Pack” aired. I recorded that episode and the VHS is still tucked away in my closet, my most prized possession of my infernal desires. That was my porn. Think about it – something as innocent as a kid watching his favorite cartoon. My parents had no idea. Nobody did. It was my little secret out in the open. That’s the magic of fetishes. The conventional world tries so hard to censor sex and nudity – but there are many other things out there that arouse us than just sex and nudity, things that fly under the radar and don’t make anyone blink twice at them. I’ve often wondered if that’s how fetishes arose – alternatives to the taboo of the norm.

So, consider myself for a moment as a horny, stupid teenager in high school, unable to talk to anyone about my weird turn-ons. It wasn’t like now where zoomers openly share what turns them on and go “lol” without a care in the world. People very much gave you shit if you deviated from the norm when I grew up. There were terrifying moments when I felt like I was about to be “outed”, much like being gay. In fact, if you showed even the slightest hesitancy to a conventional turn-on people would instantly suspect you of being gay and start making fun of you. Imagine the apprehension I had as someone who wasn’t actually gay but wasn’t turned on by conventional porn or your stereotypical skinny bikini model.

Someone once brought up fetishes at the lunch table and started joking, “Who the fuck would be turned on by farts?” They pretended to fart by blowing a raspberry and everyone laughed at the notion. I sweated bullets sitting at the far end of the table, hoping nobody could read my thoughts, hoping that my facial expression wouldn’t betray me.

So, for three years at the school I watched Ms. Johnson's ass jiggle down the hallway. She had gained weight over the years. The width of her delicious rump widened to a more pleasing degree, jutting out like a balloon. Her pencil skirts and her pants became increasingly tighter and tighter around the waist, her buttons straining more and more. She was full of meat – thick, juicy meat.

My secret desires drove me wild, because I did actually witness Mrs. Carroll and Mrs. Bernot burp on different occasions. It happens sometimes. Teachers have to be in the room all the time and cannot excuse themselves to go to the bathroom. There’s going to be an awkward moment when they try to suppress a rolling belch but they might fail. They do what I call a “hiccurp” – a cross between a hiccup and a belch. It’s something like a “hic!—urp!”.

The memory of Mrs. Carroll belching during one March morning is forever engraved in my mind. I felt conflicted at the time, being that I only found her vaguely attractive, but her belch was so deep and manly that I couldn’t help but be aroused. She was talking about Hatshepsut, the Egyptian pharaoh, when she suddenly a put a fist to her mouth and went  urrrrraaaaap! like a frog. And she waved it away with a brief, “Oof. Excuse me.” Nobody dared to chuckle or even snicker.

Mrs. Bernot hiccupped when she taught us how to look up the C drive on the command prompt. Like Mrs. Carroll, she quickly excused herself and went on with the lecture. Most students were too busy anyway trying to figure out why their computers weren’t listening to them to really think about it or process it. I must have been the only one flustered.

I constantly imagined what kind of burp Ms. Johnson would let out if she were in front of me, what kind of fart would come out of that ass. It had to have been bassy. I pictured every possible scenario. She’s alone in the hallway, feels one brewing, she looks to the left and then to the right, the pressure is killing her. She lifts her leg in that tight-ass skirt and lets loose a monster’s groan. She was down-to-earth enough with the boys to enjoy a fart joke . . . right? The curiosity pounded me. And her belches, they must have been bassy too. I once froze with amazement when I witnessed her from a distance as she suppressed a belch in the lunchroom, keeping the beast inside as the belch puffed out her cheeks. I imagined what it would be like had she not restrained herself, had she been walking alone in the hallway with no one to judge her. Would she let it loose even slightly louder? Even if she deemed all those functions gross, immature - can she not help but embrace that orgasmic release?

For three years I was forced to chat with some mumbling geezer, while trying to hide my erection from hearing Ms. Johnson’s voice in the office next door, imagining her sighs and groans in that sultry voice.

She plagued me almost every day at that damn school. And in a world where I felt like I couldn’t even speak such thoughts out loud, I obsessed over it.

At the start of my senior year, Mr. Gary tried a different approach. I still remember that day clearly. I walked in and he was cleaning his glasses with a cloth. He smiled at me as usual but instead of asking me how my day was and stuff like that he said, “Jason, it’s the start of your senior year! Big things are going to be happening.”

I gave a lifeless, “Yep.”

He was used to the strained awkward silences by now, so he bounced directly to his next point of interest. “I want to apologize, Jason, for any uncomfortable circumstances I might have brought up last year.”

I wanted us to stop talking about that right away. I shrugged soullessly and said, “It’s all right.”

“Here I am seventy-one years old and there are still some things I need to get a hang of with the current generation. About your drawing...er...I ran into your parents on Back to School Night last week. Your father seemed to give the impression that art was nothing more than a hobby for you rather than your life calling.”

Ah shit. Of course. I never actually told Mr. Gary about my home life and how my dad hated the fact that I was more into art than literally anything else that would “make money”.

I tried to dodge this bullet the best I could with incoherent mumbling. “Yeah. That’s. Just my dad. You know. Whatever.”

And then he stared at me by lowering his glasses. “Is there anything you want to tell me about that?”

“No.”

After a beat, he switched gears, and did that thing old people do where they slap their thighs when they get to the point. “Okay. Here’s what. Next session, I’d like to try something new. You’re still having trouble drawing?”

“Yeah.”

“I spoke with one of my colleagues and he has this theory about writer’s block and how it could be applied to artists. If it’s all right with you, I want you to draw something here next session.”

Oh, Jesus Christ.

I fought hard to roll my eyes.

“Um, Mr. Gary, it’s getting a little better. Really. This summer has been good.”

“Oh, well that’s good. I just was thinking how you’ve yet to decide what colleges to apply to or even think about. Art. Animation. Those are big dreams. The industry is tough. We could set some goals, maybe get a personal project going, something nice to show in those college applications. You know what I mean?”

I hadn’t actually thought about that. I needed to build a portfolio.

For once, I actually gave in. With a sigh and a nod, I said, “Yeah. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.”

“Good.”

We talked about my upcoming classes for the semester, and how I should spend my free periods drawing. He had even spoken with Mrs. Bernot about the computers available during free periods and how some of them have animation software on them. I myself didn’t even know they had that capability. When I was horny, I would spend my free periods Google image searching Princess Peach or Lara Croft in the computer lab.

The bell rang. He stretched and looked up at the clock on the wall. “So next session,” he said, winking, “bring your easel, hehe.”

“Heh, yeah.”

He stood up and then heaved. Mr. Gary had always been a big guy. This time I noticed that he looked sweaty and probably saw bright lights like when one gets up suddenly with a faint head. He shook it off and went back to his desk.

“See you later, Jason,” he said.

“See you, Mr. Gary.”

And then the funniest thing happened after that.

Mr. Gary fucking died.