Simple Truths of Life - стр. 18
After the second operation on the toe of the other foot, I returned to the village where I soon began to walk normally again.
Eventually, another time had come when my father arrived to the village to take me and my mother back to Moscow for the new school year.
On the first call, a new girl in our class and school caught my eye. She was not the only new person in the class; moreover, most of the people were new, as people from several classes merged into one.
I remember how in the dining room one of the classmates asked her friend to talk to me about sex. There was no conversation, but I took it as another sign that girls like me. But this did not help my fear of speech and terrible insecurity because of the fact that there were new faces everywhere who, so far, did not know that I stuttered.
Mom used to take me to the doctor all those years, but the pills that he prescribed did not help me with the speech. I was even once brought to the “healer” who recited some mantra, conducting almost dances with tambourines. It is funny, but after her session I really started talking completely normally and regained my confidence in myself, the confidence that was destined to leave me again when my mother in the village had a quarrel with her sister, Tatyana. They almost got into a fight, and I began to worry that something irreparable, or maybe fatal, could happen.
Once we were sitting on a bench on the ground floor of the school – not far from the biology class. It was a break, and of the many people passing by, my gaze fell again on the new girl in our class, and her eyes looked at me, while she quickly flew past us with her friend.
Once in the literature class, when the lesson had not yet begun, her friend asked my buddy if he wanted to be her boyfriend. The girl who liked me asked me the same question, and I answered in the affirmative.
On that day, when I came home, I finally put a fat cross on myself when I began to masturbate, rejoicing that I have a girlfriend and “will” have sex. Obviously, I had no sex, since I was so afraid of starting to stutter during a conversation that I stopped going to school.
On one rare day, when I did come to school, that girl came up to me and asked if I had not forgotten that I was her boyfriend. We talked a little about our institute plans, and then she slowly walked off.
The next day, in algebra, the teacher heard the conversation of that girl with her female table partner, and for the whole class said that she had become an adult. One of the guys with whom we studied since elementary school proudly shouted “me!” to someone's question regarding who was responsible for taking the girl’s virginity.