Susan and Gatsby

Susan Hartley, the sexiest girl in high school, has to write an essay on The Great Gatsby. She asks Greg Dittmeyer for help. Guess what he demands as payment?

When I was in high school in Canada in the early 1980s, one of my classmates, Scott, was clearly an independent thinker who enjoyed questioning the value of everything we were taught. “What practical use does geometry have?” he’d query our math teacher. Scott would similarly challenge the French teacher: “Why do we have to learn French? Let’s be realistic: In this city, French is way down the list of languages commonly used. We’d be better off learning Italian or German.” The teachers hated those types of questions because Scott raised strong points which they often found difficult to refute.
Scott’s biggest pet peeve, however, was that he saw no value whatsoever in studying literature. His most persistent complaint was, “How is recognizing the symbolism in Moby Dick going to help any of us get a job…unless that job is being an English teacher?” By the spring of 1982 I had the perfect response for Scott as to why English lit was a practical subject: It got me into the sack with shapely Susan Hartley.
My name is Greg Dittmeyer. Susan Hartley had been in my class since the fourth grade. Even then, an observant boy could tell Susan was going to be on the busty side. She was wearing adult-type female undergarments before her 10th birthday. By the sixth grade, Susan had developed quite the figure for a girl not yet in her teens. When it came to feminine charms, she was certainly in a league of her own at our elementary school. One day when Susan strode down the hallway, jiggling all the way, one 12-year-old classmate whispered to me, “Wow! She should be dating 17-year-old high school boys.” It was hard to disagree with that assessment.
Looking back at those days, Susan was probably a lonely girl. She didn’t seem to have a lot of female friends and she had the boys in the school thoroughly intimidated by her mature physique. She tried her best to stay anonymous. Susan was the type of student who would never raise her hand to ask or answer a question voluntarily. In retrospect, Susan probably wasn’t the brightest penny in the jar when it came to schoolwork. You would never see her winning academic awards, but she managed to pass every year. (As my down-to-earth father would say whenever he encountered an attractive but vacuous female, “God did not create her to solve the world’s problems…but who cares? She’s gorgeous.”)
Along with her fabulous, eye-catching bust, Susan had a cute face with a small turned-up nose. She always wore her dirty blonde hair cut short. (If she had long, flowing hair, I believe the males in my class would not have been able to stand it. Noticeable erections would have been an issue.) After the school dress codes were liberalized in our county, I recall Susan being among the first girls to wear shorts and sandals to class. Damn! She even had sexy toes…at least it seemed that way to me.
One day in the fifth grade, purely by chance, I ended up holding hands with Susan for about five minutes. Whenever we had a fire drill in elementary school, the standard protocol was to grab the hand of the nearest classmate and exit the building in pairs. (I never quite followed the logic in that; I figured in a real emergency pairs would create something similar to a logjam at the doors with two people struggling to get through at the same time.) Be that as it may, one sunny spring day, the fire alarm went off when I was at the back of the classroom looking something up in a reference book. Lo and behold, the closest classmate to me was Susan Hartley. We both knew the fire-safety rules, so we reached out and grabbed each other’s hand and headed toward the exit. I noticed that I was the only boy in my class who was hand-in-hand with a girl. A few of my buddies, who hadn’t yet figured out that girls possessed certain charms, gave me disapproving looks. One or two more worldly boys figured I had hit the jackpot and gave me a thumbs-up. The drill, apparently a success, ended with every kid in the school standing in the playground, hand-in-hand with a classmate. Then the principal gave the all-clear command to go back inside.
“Uh, Greg…” said Susan in her soft, appealing voice. “You can let go of my hand now. The fire drill is over.”
“Oh, yeah,” I muttered. Displaying a quick sense of humor, I added, “I guess it is…darn it.”
I can’t state it as a fact, but I think Susan giggled at my off-the-cuff comment. That was the last physical contact I had with her for seven years.
When I was in high school, the education system in my part of Canada was streamed into three groups. Basically, those groups were the scholars, the average students, and the dregs. Since I was a good student, I was in the classes where the pupils were expected to be strong academically. Since Susan Hartley was basically a C student (with D cups!) I was never in any of her classes. She was still very prominent, however, turning heads whenever she sashayed down the corridors. I once caught my very strait-laced geography teacher eying the voluptuous Susan as she passed by him. He was probably pushing 60 at the time. “A penny for your thoughts, sir,” I kiddingly whispered to him. To his credit, he was completely forthright. “My thoughts are probably the same as yours, young Mr. Dittmeyer!” he firmly responded before sheepishly retreating into his classroom.
The school year was coming to an end. High school would last one more year for me and my peers in the academic group, but for everyone else my age, 1982 was their graduation year. That was the case for Susan. One afternoon in early June I came home from school to an empty house. However, there was a note on the kitchen table that was written hastily by my mother. It said, “Greg: Susan Hartley called at 3:45 p.m. looking for you. She said it was urgent. Phone her ASAP at this number.”
I think I looked at the calendar to make sure it wasn’t April Fools Day. Nope, it was June 9. “I had known Susan for nine years. Not once had she ever phoned me or said more than a couple of sentences to me at school. Our fifth-grade fire-drill conversation may have been the most personal verbal exchange we ever had. Why on earth would this sexy girl be calling me now? I didn’t linger very long to ponder the question. I picked up the phone.
Susan answered on the second ring. “Greg?” she said. “Oh, good, you called back. Thank you. It’s been a long time since I talked to you.”
I was tempted to say, “Yeah, pretty much forever,” but I withheld all comments and let her continue.
“I have a schoolwork problem,” she said. “I think you can help me solve it. My parents can’t know about this. I can’t really talk about it over the phone in case one of them hears me. Can I meet you in ten minutes at your house?”
I got a little tongue-tied. “Sure,” I eventually said. “Do you know my address?”
“Of course I do, silly!” and then she told me the correct street and house number. This startled me. We had both lived on the same long street for a decade, but my house was not particularly close to hers. I didn’t know her address for certain—but somehow sexy Susan Hartley knew mine! Interesting! I said I would be waiting for her. I omitted the adverb “lustfully”.
Susan was definitely in a hurry to ask or tell me something as she arrived in just eight minutes. I quickly let her in the front door. I politely said hello. If someone had taken my pulse at that moment, it would have been off the charts. Like a true gentleman, I composed myself. I took her light satin jacket and hung it in the closet. I observed Susan was wearing a pale blue blouse and faded jeans. I didn’t look at her jeans at all. She was a luscious sight! She sat down beside me on the living room couch. I was worried that Susan could hear my heart thumping in my chest.
“So…how can I help you, Susan?” I asked her.
“Well,” she began with a concerned tone to her voice, “I’m supposed to be graduating at the end of the month. Here’s my problem: I need to make sure I pass my English course. If I don’t pass, I don’t graduate. Period.”
I didn’t know much about how the mid-level English courses worked at my high school, so I probed Susan for some information. “Do you need help studying for a final exam?” I asked.
“No,” Susan replied. “There is no final exam. However, there’s a major essay that’s worth 50 percent of the entire course mark. I need to get around 40 out of 50 on it to pass. It’s American literature. I’ve never been good at literature, but I failed another English course last semester. If I fail this one, I’ll be one credit short for my high school diploma. I’m supposed to be going to college in September in a food services/hospitality program. If I don’t get my diploma and have to repeat high school English the fall, my parents are going to go berserk.”
“So how do I enter the picture?’ I asked.
You’ve always been excellent at literature, right?”
“I’ve done alright,” I modestly confirmed.
Susan continued, “I have to submit a 2,000-word essay about The Great Gatsby and how its main characters reflect America in the 1920s.”
“Well, that’s a fairly straightforward assignment,” I stated.
“That’s easy for you to say!” Susan informed me, her voice rising. “I don’t know anything about America in the 1920s, and this book has me lost after only a few pages. There are piles of ashes and a weird billboard advertising an oculist. I had to look up what an “oculist” is in the dictionary.
“That’s another word for an optometrist,” I pointed out. “It’s not quite the same thing, but close enough.”
Susan interjected, “Yeah, I only learned that this afternoon. You’re a natural at this type of thing, Greg. I’m not.”
Susan was becoming panicky, so I tried to calm her down. I instinctively grabbed her hand. It was a little bit sweaty, like mine had been since the minute she walked through the door. “Luckily,” I said, “The Great Gatsby happens to be one of my favorite novels. I know it backward and forward. I love F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing style. When is this essay due?”
“Tomorrow at 3 p.m.,” she stated.
“What?” I shouted. “How far have you gotten with it?”
“Nowhere, really. I had been putting it off until yesterday. I got to the word oculist, knew I was in trouble, and decided to phone the smartest person I know…you. There’s no way I can write 2,000 words in less than 24 hours about a novel I can’t hope to understand. Therefore, Greg, I need you to write this essay for me. You will be well paid for your time and trouble.”
Susan was not kidding about being able to pay me generously. I knew her family was well-to-do. Susan always dressed stylishly and every year she seemed to have a new, expensive winter coat.
“Greg, I have a personal bank account with over $3,000 in it,” she told me. “It’s my mad money. I’m free to spend it as I please. I could easily take out $500 without my parents questioning it. Is $500 enough for you to do this for me? They’d be suspicious if I withdrew any more than that.”
I sensed I had plenty of leverage in these negotiations, so I decided to do a bit of bluffing. “Susan, I’d love to help you,” I said, “but I have my own school assignments that need to be completed in the next day.” That was an absolute lie; I had no homework at all.
Becoming more and more frantic, Susan tried to negotiate with me. “I can up your payment to $600. If the essay gets a really great mark, I’ll make it $700. How about that?”
I took a deep breath and said, “Hmm.” I paused for a few more seconds and said, “Well, Susan, you’re obviously in a bind here, and I will help you out.”
“Oh, good!” she exclaimed. “I’ll go to the bank tomorrow and bring you the money in exchange for the essay.”
Then I dramatically said, “I don’t want your money, Susan. I want something else instead.”
Susan sensed what was coming next. “I want you,” I stated. “Your body has been driving me crazy for years. I want to thoroughly fuck you.”
Remarkably, Susan wasn’t angry or annoyed by my bluntness. She merely said, “Join the club!”
Now I was confused. “What?” I asked.
“Greg, I might not be good at schoolwork,” Susan pointed out, “but I’m not stupid. I find two or three anonymous notes every week that have been slipped into my locker. This has been going on since the seventh grade. Some of them aren’t even anonymous. Most of them are unbelievably crude. You want to fuck me…just like every male student in the school who isn’t queer.”
I had to laugh. “Guilty, I guess.” Then I added, “Not about the notes. I’ve never written you a note, Susan, but I fully admit I want to fuck you. We males are wired for sex—and you have been an obvious, desirable target for a long time.”
“Yeah,” Susan said with a tinge of sadness in her voice. “My mother warned me about this when I got my first training bra in the third grade. That year I had a more prominent chest than most of the sixth-grade girls. That’s tough to deal with when you’re eight years old.”
“Well, to be fair, I didn’t notice you or your chest until grade four,” I said with a grin.
“Greg, I lived 50 miles away in a different city before the fourth grade,” Susan informed me, “so I attended a different school.”
I just had to laugh. “I keep putting my foot in my mouth, don’t I?”
Susan deadpanned, “I agree.”
“You agree that I keep putting my foot in my mouth?” I said.
“No,” Susan said. “I agree to fuck you in exchange for you writing the Gatsby essay! I save $600 and you’re a nice guy. You’ve always been a nice guy. I think it will be fun.”
I was now having difficulty breathing. “Fun is not an adequate description for this, Susan.”
Susan said. “Fine, you’re the English expert. I’ll leave now so you can begin work on the essay.” She paused for a moment and said, “You don’t have any homework tonight, do you, Greg?”
“How did you know?” I asked with a smile.
“You guys are usually very easy to read, Greg,” Susan explained. “I could tell what you were thinking when you saw that I was desperate. Just like I knew you wanted to fuck me in the fifth grade when you held my hand during the fire drill.”
I got right to work. The essay was a cinch. I had written a similar paper on Gatsby two years earlier, so I used it as a template. Truly, it was more like typing than writing. The words flowed from me onto the pages. It’s amazing how fast and well you can do something with the proper motivation. I estimated its length to be 2,700 words—more than enough to cover the assignment’s minimum requirement.
Early the next morning I telephoned Susan to tell her I had completed the essay and that I’d personally drop it off at her house. “Sure,” she said. “We can walk to school together.” A few days earlier, my walking Susan to school would have been a big deal.
“How about Friday night?” I asked Susan as we approached the school. I did not have to elaborate about what I meant.
“Sure thing,” she replied.
“I can borrow my parents’ car for the night,” I said. “We can go to a motel. There are a few in town that have hourly rates for such things. I want to take you out to dinner first, though, just to show you I’m not a total pig.”
“Of course you’re not a total pig,” Susan insisted. “The guys who drop those awful notes in my locker are total pigs. You’re just a partial pig. By the way, book the motel for three hours.”
On Friday I took Susan to a small Italian restaurant. We had a great meal and a lovely conversation. Even though we had been classmates, we really didn’t know much about each other, so we had plenty to talk about.
I then put my hand gently on Susan’s wrist and said, “The motel is booked from 8 to 11 p.m. Shall we go?”
“Yes, please. Give my pussy a good workout. You’ve earned it.”
At the motel, we checked in as “John and Jennifer Smith.” The clerk joked that we were the sixth couple named Smith to show up since his shift began. I noticed the man giving Susan a lecherous look. I wasn’t angry; I was too happy for that. “She’s the total package, isn’t she?” I bragged. We got the key and rushed to room #24.
Of course, I was extremely horny, but I began to have other feelings than merely lust for the beautiful Susan. We actually delayed our coitus for about 20 minutes, just embracing each other and exchanging passionate kisses. Finally, Susan, the dear girl, stated, “The romance is lovely, Greg, but I came here to fuck you. Let’s do it.”
That was all the encouragement I needed. I had been fighting an erection since the moment we entered the motel lobby. I disrobed Susan, paying particular attention to her gorgeous mounds. I cupped them. fondled them, sucked on them, and ran my throbbing penis between them.
“Having fun?” Susan naughtily asked me.
I snickered. “I told you, Susan, fun is an inadequate term to describe having sex with you. You are awesome.”
Susan gave me oral sex. She seemed experienced at it. One particularly passionate lick put me over the edge and I came on her face an in her hair.
“Well, that caught me off guard,” Susan said lovingly. “I wanted your load in my pussy.”
I pointed to the clock. “Susan, sweetheart, we still have the room booked for another two hours and 40 minutes. I’ll try to oblige.” Oblige I did. Twice.
I didn’t see Susan again until Monday afternoon. She approached my locker and said, “If it’s okay with you, Greg, I’m going to book that motel again for this coming Friday night.”
“Certainly!” I agreed. “That wasn’t part of our deal, though. Can I ask why?”
“I got 49 out of 50 on the Gatsby essay,” Susan happily informed me. “I believe you’ve earned a bonus.”