Awkward encounters with the girls and with myself

Jumping backwards in time just a little bit, because I missed a bit of relevant history that's come back to me. These fragments I cannot really pin to a specific age, but I am guess that it would be the 12-13 range. I should mention a few things.

I think it was around this age that I experimented with smoking myself. And actually, it would be an overstatement to call it "experimenting" because I did it alone, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. And the goal was not to really experiment with smoking, but to play in the fantasy around it. It was not difficult for me to do this, because of my mother being a smoker, and there always being them around the house. This made it such that, at least from my perspective, I didn't even believe that I needed to leave the house to do this. I would just go into the bathroom. In hindsight, this is probably another example of self-absorbed stupidity, because even though the house had a smoker living in it, I think it was still quite likely that it would be known that something was "off" if I were experimenting in the bathroom. I am trying not to be embarrassed even writing about this, because I realize how silly it sounds.

But I did "try" it a few times. And every time I did, I would get an insane adrenaline rush of anticipation, and arousal. But I really didn't know how to do it, and never learned to inhale, and honestly was not really interested in learning. It was all about exploration of the fetish. On one occasion, I had been rummaging through a box of stuff in the closet of the bathroom, and I found a pack of cigarettes that had been stashed away. It was unopened. And it was apparently some sort of special thing, because the package identified it as a commerative Apollo-Soyuz something or other, and might have even had Russian text on it. I have no clue where this came from, but it was obvious that these were just being stored, never to be used. And I don't have the faintest clue how old they were. Maybe they were opened, actually. I don't really remember. But they'd been "forgotten" for sure. So, on this one occasion, I got the idea to take them down, and take one and pretend to smoke in front of the bathroom mirror. This obviously got me very aroused, and I was able to translate this in my mind into it being a woman, and voila. New stimulus for masturbation. This happened at least a handful of times, and eventually would evolve into me spending longer periods of time in the bathroom, putting on makeup even, all so I could look more like a woman and pretend to smoke. And of course, it culminated in fulfilling the plan to actually smoke, with the makeup, in front of the mirror. There was a lot of shame mixed in with the arousal, and it was confusing too. Because I was doing things that I knew were "wrong". And I also knew enough about sexuality to recognize that there was a mixed signal in there somewhere. But I now also know that there's a difference between a) wanting to be a woman, b) wanting to be with men, and c) pretending to be a woman in order to fulfill a fantasy that involves women to whom I did not have access.

I know that it was not unnoticed. There would be times where my mother would yell into the bathroom, "What are you doing in there?!" to which I would, of course, reply "Nothing!"

One must assume that I did a horrible job of concealing the evidence, and that they probably thought I was potentially a very strange boy. Though, much as mentioned earlier in the "No Birds, No Bees" entry, they never said a word to me (that I recall) about any of this.

The one other thing from the early history that just came back to me was a conversation with neighborhood kids. One time, I was outside playing with a few of the kids on the next block. There were a couple of girls (twins) who were really nice kids, same age as me (though, a grade behind, if I remember correctly), and then an older girl, maybe 2 years older, who was nice, but slightly on the side of being prone to trouble. One time, the older girl asked me if I smoke, and I didn't want to say no, because I thought it would be uncool, and I didn't want to say yes, because I was uncomfortable with that too. And I definitely was probably interested in angling for a possibility of seeing these girls smoke (which did not happen). So I said yes. She asked me what kind I smoked, and I said something really stupid like "whatever", and I remember her responding with something like "Yeah? Anything you can get your hands on, huh?" and I felt really stupid because the reality was that I really didn't smoke, and that I felt like an ashamed little fool.