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 Eleven - Part 2
   The thing about Karen is, I knew exactly who she was.  At the top of our
street was the main road that led out of town and into Manhattan.  On the
other side of that busy road was the railway line.  And between the main
road and the railway line were the little cul de sac streets that contained
the poorest houses in Upper Cranston.  Don't get me wrong.  The cost of
real estate in our area had pushed even these undesirable residences into
the hundreds of thousands.  But many of the residents had been there for
thirty or forty years, when you could pick up one of those little box
houses for ten or twenty thousand.  While the sleek white colonials of my
street housed purring Lexuses and Mercedes, these houses boasted rusting
Dodge vans and obsolete Neons.
   Angela and I hadn't made many friends yet, but one couple that we did
know were Steve and Elaine.  Steve was a young trader who I had known from
my previous company - he was just getting started, but he was tipped for a
great career.  Elaine was his high-maintenance girlfriend, peroxide blonde
hair down to her buttocks, half a dozen studs in each ear, tattoos on her
arms and hips.  They had bought one of the entry level houses by the
railway, and fixed it up into a cozy little nest.  We went over to each
other's houses occasionally for a beer, and it was at their house that I
first saw the lovely creature who was to become the center of my whole
life.
   Karen was a cheerful eleven-year-old with a huge black dog called Bono.
She would wave at Steve and Elaine as she passed us by while we were
sitting on the porch.  She seemed like an ordinary little girl, but Steve
and Elaine shook their heads and laughed.  "Jailbait," whispered Elaine,
her lip curling.  "She's doomed.  I'll bet you she'll be pregnant by the
time she's fourteen." "Her parents are weird" added Steve, giving his
intelligent, ironic smile.
   Karen's mother was one of those large, unsightly women who seemed to
have given themselves over completely to poverty and self-indulgence - the
sort you see sitting alone in the all-you-can-eat restaurants, staggering
up to pile more calories onto her plate.  Her husband, on the other hand,
was a small, thin Chinese guy.  You would think she just had to roll on top
of him to crush the life out of him, but the rumor had it that he was a
fearsome drunk who beat his wife mercilessly.  "And who knows what he's
been doing to that little girl," added Elaine, ominously.  Their house was
an eyesore - lean-to car-port, rusting hulks in the yard, trash on the
front porch.  Apparently the Chinese guy had married the whale in order to
get a green card, but for completely unknown reasons they had stayed
together.  And between them they had created this lovely little diamond. 
Strange are the ways of the Lord.
   Karen didn't come to the pool as often as the other girls, and when she
did, she never seemed to quite belong to the group.  She would play with
them at times, but at others she would sit a little apart, dipping her legs
into the water and gazing off into space, or sometimes swimming and playing
in the water on her own.  Perhaps even children have an instinct for those
social distinctions that make some people and families more desirable than
others.  Karen seemed to be marked as an outsider.
   She was average height for her age, well-built, with a sturdy, athletic
body.  Sometimes you could see a hint of her mother's unfortunate genes in
the fleshiness of her chin or the texture of her thigh, but whatever
misfortunes they would bring her were still far in the future.  Her skin
was a lovely honey color, burnished by the summer sun.  She had a wide
mouth with a ready smile, and perfect white teeth.  Her eyes had a definite
Asian slant, her pupils a shining dark brown inside pure whites.  Her hair
was black and straight, cut at the shoulders.  Her upper lip had just a
trace of dark hair, and her eyebrows were strong and well-defined.  She was
a lovely girl by any standard.
   She had two swimsuits, both of which turned me into a virtual mass of
jelly.  One was a light blue bikini, not exactly glamorous, but such a
lovely frame for that gorgeous form of hers.  The other was a shabby old
one-piece, that looked like it might have been bought in a thrift shop.  It
was decorated with the stars and stripes, and it would have been an
embarrassment on any other body.  But I'll admit that on Karen, it was the
garment I dreamed about at night.
   The thing is that over time the elastic round the edges of that swimsuit
had grown a little loose.  So although it was supposed to hide more than
the bikini, it was actually a treasure-box of lovely revelations.  If I sat
in the right position, I could glance to her side and see clearly into the
gap between the loose swimsuit and her delicate little breast.  I could see
the line between her golden tan and the white skin of her chest, and
sometimes I could even see the whole, puffy little mound of her breast, all
the way to the dark, soft nipple in the center.  I would feel myself
blushing, my breath caught in my throat, my mouth dry as a desert, as I
allowed myself to take in that magical sight.  And if I stood in the water
and waited patiently, I was sometimes rewarded with an even greater
treasure.  As she sat on the edge of the pool, her swimsuit would pull away
from her thighs a little, revealing a hint of her lovely female essence. 
Once or twice, as she shifted her position with that playful restlessness
of childhood, I had even been rewarded with a clear view of her dark,
mysterious slit.  Oh my god, the fantasies that followed those tantalizing,
magical glimpses!  Of all the girls by the poolside, Karen was far and away
my favorite, the object of my evening fantasies, the one whose body I had
explored the most thoroughly in my mind.
   Never in even my wildest dreams did I imagine the incredible adventure
that awaited me.
   It began on a warm afternoon in September.  The pool was closed for the
season, and school was back in session.  I missed the long, fantasy-filled
afternoons by the pool, but I was also glad to be back at work and away
from those impossible dreams.  I was sitting on my porch, sipping a cold
drink, and reading through a report I had just printed out, when who should
walk past but Karen with her dog Bono.  I didn't expect her to recognize
me, and she didn't greet me, but just as she had walked past my house, Bono
somehow got free of his leash, and bounded into my yard, chasing after a
terrified squirrel.
   "Bono", she shouted, but the dog ran off round the side of my house.
   Karen hesitated, but I told her "Don't worry, you can come and get him."
And she raced round the side of the house, finally dragging Bono back to
the front.
   "Sorry," she said, flashing me a brilliant white smile.
   "That's okay," I said.  "Bono's a good name for a dog."
   "Yeah, his real name's Jackson, but he loved bones ever since he was a
kid.  So we always call him Bono."
   "You're Steve and Elaine's neighbor, aren't you?" I could see her
hesitation as she considered how to deal with this advance from the neutral
to the personal.  "Yeah." She said it with a "whatever" sort of tone.  But
then she added, perhaps to make up for her awkwardness, "Elaine's pretty,
isn't she?"
   "Yeah, she is.  I'm Jason.  I used to work with Steve."
   "Hi," she said, still hesitant.
   "Want a Coke?"
   She glanced at the cooler beside me with its ice-cold drinks.  She knew
she should say no, but it was a hot day, and I could see she was tempted.
And after all, we were neighbors, not strangers.  "Okay, thanks," she said,
and gave me that brilliant smile again.
   And there she was, sitting beside me on the porch.  I hoped no one I
knew would walk past - I wasn't sure how I would explain this liaison,
innocent as it was.  We sat in silence for a moment, then I asked her about
her school, and mentioned a couple of other kids I knew in the school,
children of our Upper Cranston acquaintances.  My heart was beating hard
and irregularly in my chest - I honestly didn't know where I was going or
what I was doing with this - but that comment of Elaine's kept on coming
back into my mind, to give me courage.  Karen was "jailbait." She was
doomed to pregnancy by fourteen.  She wasn't protected like all the other
middle-class girls in the town.  I wanted to protect her, even as in my
fantasies I violated her.
   I honestly wasn't very experienced at conversation with
eleven-year-olds. I was thirty-two myself, not quite old enough to be her
dad, but not so far from it.  So even though it made us both feel awkward,
I stayed with the cliches.
   "What are you going to do when you grow up?" I asked.  She seemed to be
fine with it.
   "I want to be an actress," she said, her eyes lighting up a little.  "I
love movies.  Or a model."
   "Really?  Have you done any modeling before?"
   "No, but next year I'm going to enroll in John Robert Powers." I guessed
this must be a talent school of some sort.
   "I hope it works out for you."
   Karen gave a little sigh.  "The only thing is, it costs twelve hundred
dollars for a season, and my mom and dad will never pay for it.  So..." she
looked up at me with a resigned smile.  "I guess it's just a dream."
   "Don't you think it's our dreams that make life worth living?" She
smiled vaguely and said, "I guess." And she downed the rest of her Coke and
stood up.  "Thanks for the Coke," she said.
   "So why don't you get a part-time job?" I asked.  "Pay some of it
yourself?"
   "Oh, sure," she said.  "Like someone's going to give a job to an
eleven-year-old."
   "Hey, I have an idea.  You know, photography's my hobby.  I'm pretty
good, though I say it myself.  I've sold quite a few of my pictures to
magazines.  Why don't we try a model shoot?  If I can sell the pictures,
I'll give you half.  Anyway, it can't hurt to try." My heart was suddenly
pounding in my chest.  I could hardly believe the proposition I had just
made.  Any girl in her right mind would run off as soon as she could,
perhaps tell her parents.  But Karen...?  There was something about her
that made me feel she would deal with this differently.
   She stood there for a moment, holding Bono close to her side.  What she
said next surprised even me.  "I'll do it for twenty an hour."
   Did she know how much I wanted this?
   "You mean, even if I can't sell the pictures?"
   She stood there, smiling, and gave me a little nod.  "A job's a job",
she said.
   And so, the very next afternoon, she came for our first modeling
session. She was dressed in a pair of clean white shorts and a light-blue
halter-top, and there is only one word for the effect of this combination -
sexy!  Even a fusty old schoolmistress would have to agree.  I felt my
insides turning to water at the very sight of her.  I would be spending the
next hour photographing this lovely creature!
   The photo shoot went incredibly smoothly.  She seemed to be completely
comfortable in front of the camera.  We worked in my photo studio, which
was virtually the entire ground floor of the house.  Angela and I had
converted the living room into a multi-use studio, with a full range of
lighting equipment as well as a battery of tripods, cameras, filters and
lenses.  I had Karen stand in front of a white screen while I snapped her
in a variety of poses.  I hardly needed to tell her which pose to strike -
she seemed to know instinctively what to do, from the pert little forward
thrust of her chin, to the hardly-noticeable pushing-out of her lovely
little buttocks in their delicious white sheath.  She smiled dazzlingly,
and honestly, by the end of the session, I really thought I might have some
images I could show to a modeling agency or a teen magazine.
   We worked together for an hour a day all through that first week.  One
day we took shots in the yard (I made sure that we stayed in the areas
discreetly hidden by my neighbor's fence), and the next I drove her down to
the river, where we were suitably anonymous - a young father and his
precocious daughter, perhaps.  After each session I immediately paid her
twenty dollars, which she stuffed in her pocket with a little white smile.
I was careful not to behave in any way that might be considered
inappropriate or illegal - though believe me, my imagination was running
wild half of the time, and I had to constantly turn round to adjust the
monstrous bulge in my pants.
   On Friday, after another session out in the yard, I offered her a
popsicle, and we sat together on a swing bench left by the previous owners,
sucking on our popsicles and chatting.  We had worked hard together through
the week, and the ice between us was well and truly broken.  Karen told me
some more about her family.  She was an only child, and wished that she had
a brother.  Wouldn't she prefer a sister?  No, she'd always been more
comfortable around boys.  She told me about her mother, who she found
embarrassing and suffocating, and her father, who she hated and feared.
   "He's a bastard," she said, shocking me with her adult demeanor.  "When
he comes home drunk, he'll beat anyone or anything that gets in his path.
One day he locked my mom in the closet and threw out the key.  She nearly
died in there, not like he cared.  He was passed out on the floor while I
had to call a locksmith to let her out."
   "Does he hurt you, too?"
   Karen looked at me for a moment, as though weighing how much she should
tell.  "He tries," she said finally.  A tear rolled out of her eye.  "It's
just that - this is the first time I've ever been able to talk about it.  I
mean, the woman from social services comes over sometimes, but we all lie
to her just to get rid of her - I mean, I'm not stupid - I know that if I
talk too much they'll take me away and put me with a foster family, and you
know where that can lead to."
   She gave a little sob, and for the first time in our whole relationship,
I leaned over and touched her.  "It's okay," I said softly.  "You're safe
here."
   "I just don't have anywhere to go to get away from them.  All I can do
is take Bono out and wander around.  Thank god for Bono - he's my only
friend."
   
  
Eleven - Part 2