Lonnie Hicks (www.lonniehicks.com / Chicago Ill)

She liked the ugly boys, always did.

All the girls in her school liked the jocks, the handsome boys, the heart throbs and the ones with perfect teeth, good hair or rich families. These were not for her. These ones did nothing for her at all. She looked at them and nothing made her heart beat.

So she retreated into a sort of shell, pretending outwardly to like the same boys that the other girls liked. Eighty percent of the girls were chasing those 20 percent of the boys who were handsome-desirable.

She put up the posters in her locker of the movie stars; she pretended to swoon over them and the local boys and even participated in the “he looked at me today, undressing me conversations” that went on in the locker room and pretended to agree.

The girls in those conversations always pointed out why these pretend stories were true: he was looking at me, at my chest the whole time.” The unspoken assertion was that I, the speaker had a great chest and that was why she was attractive to the handsome ones.

Others had wildly exaggerated notions of having beautiful and magical eyes. “He just could take his eyes off me in study hall, Nicole would hear, 'just couldn’t stop looking, staring at me. Guess it’s my eyes he likes.”

Others subtly put their legs up on the benches while pointing out that they thought their legs were ugly but the boys seem to like them, what did everyone think?

Or it was her butt, “Is my but too big, ' the innocent query would go out to anyone listening.

Humility resounded often with 'I just don’t know what they seen in my lips. I think they are too big.'

If you were the listener you had to agreed with the speaker pretending to give support but then hurrying on to point out your own attribute, whatever you thought that might be, while being carefully to point out how crude the boys were in all this and that all they wanted to get into your pants, were Neanderthals, or jocks, or drunks, or rich boys with big cars trying to get the girls on a lonely road at night.

Nicole didn’t participate except to look blankly at them, and pretend not to hear the comments, but applied her self all the way through high school pretending to be like the rest of the girls.


But the summer before she was to enter college she visited the college of her choice and sat in freshman orientation and saw him, the ugliest boy she had ever seen. No, not ugliest, that is not the right word.

He simply looked like no boy she had ever seen in her life and she was instantly fascinated by him, how he looked, how he walked, and his intense stare. She felt drawn to him in that hall and she had never been drawn t oa a boy before in her life; and she guessed that he must have seen her staring.

How to describe him without sounding coarse; he would be, she thought, seen as ugly but more importantly with an animal like aura about him; that was it-he seemed almost like an animal at rest, a powerful animal one that would pursue you if he had chosen you, consume you even with his eyes- dark liquid black, he was like a beast man, a primeval force of nature in human form; and if he focused on you for a second he could consume you in a kind of blue fire.

She was drawn to him feeling it in her entire body and decided to wait until after the session and meet him at the door way out. She rose when he rose, moving to head him off at the door, determined to accidentally bump up against him watching his huge frame, gliding toward the door noting that others, male and female, simply gave way to him, sensing what she sensed in him, some great magnetism, some great power.

She reached the door and gently bumped him watching as he gently, ever so gently reached out for her, his hand moving around to her back, guiding her through the door way holding back the others who meekly allowed this.

She felt his huge hand in her back; his deep, almost animal eyes, lay gently upon her and she froze.

To be continued.