Mostly Harmless

I hate to admit it but my awareness in sexual matters was not the best during my school days.
I would always laugh along whenever my frinds would crack any riske joke which they did with metronomic regularity, pretending to get every bit of it. The reality on the other hand was quite the opposite of that. More often than not, I had no clue as to the reason behind their raucous laughs and it requires skill and practise to laugh that pretensious laugh and not get caught. You have to take care never to look directly at anybody in the group for too long, gently pass the glance from one to another or just look into oblivion. I never told them about my ignorance for the fear that they might think that I was stupid. I wanted them to find that out on their own.

I clearly remember one of these incidents when I was reading a magazine with some of my friends in the library. We accidentally came across a condom advertisement. They burst into peels of supressed laughter pointing to the condom in the advertisement. I joined them in their revelry wondering all the time what in the name of god is wrong with them. The idea that an innocuous nipple ( The rubber cap on a bottle from which a baby nurses for people getting ideas in their head) for children could be the source of such intense joy was incomprehensible for me however hard I tried.

Eventually, when the effort required for the pretension started taking its toll on me, I had to turn to one of my juniors. It was humiliating all right, but my friends were capable of giving an entirely new meaning to the word humiliation. I couldnt afford to be treated as fodder for all the mockers and scoffers for the rest of my school life. A minor tradeoff when compared with the entire repercussions of the situation, that could be.