I have a new PE teacher, Mr. Kablutis, who is ugly but undeniably fascinating. He’s a tall, angular, awkward guy whose parts don’t seem quite matched, and everything about him is knobby or hairy: big knees and elbows, big calf muscles and shoulders, crew cut over a big nose which holds up his big plastic glasses. We make fun of his name, which seems as awkward as he does. We don’t have a locker room in the eighth grade, but a classroom whose windows are covered over with black construction paper because the boys are required to change, for PE, into red cotton shorts, T-shirts, sneakers, and—the essential thing—jockstraps. What are they for, these odd elastic contraptions that lift our twelve-year-old genitals and frame our buttocks with their wide straps? We sit at desks to change, and put our clothes on the wire shelf underneath us. I hate this; I don’t want anyone to see my unclothed body. I know there’s something wrong with it, especially when I start to sprout dark pubic hair, something that seems out of place, mistaken, impossible. I become obsessed with the idea that I don’t want anyone to see my new pubic hair; somehow it’s the absolute locus of shame. I borrow a razor from my parents’ bathroom cabinet and shave it off, but then I look doubly ridiculous, pink and scraped, the stubble sprouting again, and I wriggle around in my desk chair, trying to hide myself beneath the square foot of Formica desktop.

Since there’s no office or cubicle, some days Mr. Kablutis changes too, at the teacher’s desk in front of us. A strange transformation, one I take in deeply, though I know I’m not to look at him steadily but must steal glances while I appear to be busying myself with my tube socks or my shoelaces. Off come his nerdy glasses with the hunk of tape holding the frames together at the temple; off comes the ugly shirt, the chiseled shapes of his pectorals with their twin patches of hair revealed; down go the khaki pants and the boxer shorts; and suddenly he’s nude, his knobbiness and hairiness suddenly all of a piece, put in perspective somehow by the naked totality of him, his penis thick and pendulous against the heavy, dark-haired balls.