If I had to make a list of the thoughts running through my head as Audrey drives us to a nearby pond, the list would look something like two parallel universes. 

In one universe, I tell Audrey the truth about my peen. I tell her that I lied, not because I wanted to deceive her, but because I thought it was essential that I impress her. 

I confess the cucumber deception. I tell her all the insecure, self-hating, self-sabotaging thoughts that ran through my head from the moment Becky Spade made that comment about my banana, to the time Nick Spears pantsed me in front of the school. 

I tell Audrey how it felt to have my peen plastered all over social media, like it was the punchline to some joke everyone but me thought was funny. I tell her about quitting social media, and how doing so eventually made me feel free, but how at first, and for quite some time, I felt isolated and alone. 

I tell Audrey about Elroy's hair-brained, but well-meaning scheme to help me regain my confidence, even if I thought it was about me gaining inches. I tell her how I turned into a bit of a monster, snapping at Elroy when the Chub Potion Number Nine didn't work. How I was so obsessed with size that I demanded Chub Potion Number Nine 2.0, even though I thought it might kill me - because better dead than small, or so I thought. 

I tell Audrey how I very nearly lost my dick to a crappy product called the Extender 2. How the pain in my peen at that moment was nothing compared the pain in my heart, that pain that you feel when you come up short.

I tell her how Elroy's sister, Judy, saved me, and how she said that the only thing I could do was learn to accept and eventually love the penis I have. And how I was trying to do that, or at the very least, not touch my penis so that it could heal, when Audrey unleashed her art project on the school. 

I tell her how Free The Peen made me feel. How at first I felt as though it was directed at me. How it stirred up a subconscious feeling that I would never measure up, that I would never make her happy. And that most of all, that if I told Audrey the truth, it would destroy me. It would destroy us. 

But that version feels like too much information. Or as the voice inside my head screams over and over again: TMI, Peter! Which is why the other list of thoughts running through my head is much shorter. It boils down to one item: if I keep my mouth shut, I'll see Audrey naked.

I know it sounds like I'm lying. But don't girls like the strong silent type? Han Solo didn't confess his love to Leia. He didn't get all mushy, or share his feelings. He didn't ask her about her plans to defeat the Empire, or if she liked being a princess. He said: I know. And it worked! It totally worked! If there's a lesson there, and I think there is, it's that girls do like the strong silent type. 

Of course, Han Solo wasn't hung like an Ewok. 

"Peen for your thoughts?" Audrey says.

Peen for my thoughts? What's with this girl? Was that some kind of twisted joke?

"I think the phrase is penny for your thoughts," I say. "Penny."

"That's what I said, penny."

I swear I heard her say peen. But there's no point in arguing.

"Did you think I said peen, Peter?"

I look over at Audrey. Her eyes are fixed on the road.

"Yeah."

"Let me guess, you can't stop thinking about my art project?"

We drive in silence for another mile before I say something.

"What were you thinking?" I ask.

"You mean what inspired me?" Audrey asks.

That's not exactly what I meant by the question, but it seems like a polite place to start, so I say, sure.

"Well, it's hard to say exactly what inspired me," Audrey says. "To tell you the truth, the project just sort of grew organically."

"No pun intended."

Audrey giggles.

"No pun intended," she says.

I feel the car begin to slow down. A few hundred yards down the road I see a cluster of oak trees.

"This is the spot," Audrey says.

As we approach the oak trees, I see a patch of gravel just big enough for a car. Audrey slows to a crawl as she eases her car between the trees. Behind us, I see only oak. We are hidden from the road. Ahead of us, through the trees, I glimpse a small pond.

"I can't be the only person who knows about this spot," Audrey says. "But I come her a lot, and I've never seen another soul."

Then Audrey puts the car in park and turns off the ignition. She places her hand on mine and says, "I wanted to share it with you."

But neither one of us moves. The air is too thick with secrets for us to find the door handles and exit the car. For now, we are stuck here, anchored by what has gone unsaid for too long.

"It started last year," Audrey says.

"That's when you started collecting the dick pics?"

Audrey's face recoils in horror, and I instantly regret my question.

"Collecting?  Peter, I wasn't collecting them. I can assure you, no girl collects dick picks. We just get them."

"Get them?"

"Yeah, boys just send them. Men too. If you have an email address, a phone number, or social media profile, you just get dick pics. If you're a woman."

"You just get dick pics?" I ask.

"Why are you so surprised?" 

Audrey tone is somewhere between hurt and disbelief.

"I just... I mean, I've heard of dick pics, but I just assumed..."

"That they were rare?"

"Yeah."

"That's because you've never sent a dick pic, have you?"

Although my dick has been plastered all over the internet, I've never sent a picture of it to anyone. In fact, that's the last thing I'd ever want to do. If there were some kind of way to unsend, or retrieve my dick pic from the internet, I'd do it in a heart beat.

"Of course, you haven't, Peter. You're one of the good guys."

"But... I don't understand..."

"Guys like Nick Spears and the rest of the football team send dick pics all the time."

"Why?" I ask.

"Power."

"Power?"

"That's right - Power. They know you don't want to see it, and they don't care. They're literally forcing their dicks into your inbox."

To hear Audrey describe it, a dick pic sounds like an invasion, or an assault. And I guess it is. Because while I wouldn't mind girls sending me naked pictures of themselves, I do understand how it feels to be bombarded with something you don't want to see, when all you want to do is check your notifications, or read your email. I mean, I quit social media because I couldn't take the fact that everywhere I looked some jerk was posting a picture of my dick as the background for some silly meme. 

"They sent a lot of dick pics to you?" I ask.

"Hundreds every single day," Audrey says. "I complained. I told that idiot Principal Boone that boys at school were sending me pictures of their dicks, and all he said was, boys will be boys. So, I changed my phone number. But somehow they got my new number. And I changed my social media handles, but that didn't matter either. I even changed my email address."

"Did you go to the cops?"

Audrey laughs.

"Now, there's a bunch of enlightened guys," she says. "Yeah, I went to the cops, but they said they couldn't do anything since they didn't know who was sending the pics. I mean, they're cops. Isn't it their job to investigate and solve mysteries?"

"Didn't you have their numbers? Their social media? Their email addresses?"

"They set up dummy accounts. I never really knew who the boys were, not for sure, but I could tell by the way the football players were grinning at me that it was them. I just knew."

"So, then what happened?"

"It was just before finals last winter," Audrey says. "I was really stressed because I had started taking extra classes to graduate early."

"Graduate early?"

"Yeah, I thought that if I couldn't stop the dick pics, I could get away from the guys who were sending them. Graduate early, change all my accounts, change my name if I had to, and just disappear. But it didn't work."

"Why not?"

"Because I flipped out," she says. "I was studying all the time. I wasn't sleeping. But I was also getting dick pics constantly. I guess football season was over, and they couldn't think of anything else to do."

"I don't follow."

"I started forwarding the dick pics to Principal Boone," Audrey says. "At first, I sent just a few with notes attached saying that he needed to do something. But then a funny thing happened. Each time I forwarded a dick pic on to Principal Boone, I felt better, like I was forwarding my nightmare along to someone else. It was like... it was like each one was just disappearing into a black hole. Does that sound crazy?"

"No."

"Well, when you send one thousand two hundred and seventeen dick pics to your high school principal, people tend to think you're crazy."

I'm stunned by the number. And for some reason, I feel compelled to do the math. Free The Peen targeted ten boys, which means each guy sent her at least one hundred and twenty dick pics. Actually, they sent a lot more, because the next thing Audrey tells me is that Principal Boone saw only a fraction of her library. After all, these boys had been sending Audrey dick pics for nearly a year.

"I think it was a contest for them," she says. "Who knows how it started, or why they picked me. For all I know, they got it in their dumb heads that I wanted to see dick pics because I sketch nude models in charcoal. I mean, it's not like those dumb jocks know that's how artists practice."

Audrey's logic makes sense to me. I'm no artist, but I know that art students learn early on to sketch nudes. It's just the way art works, the way art has worked for thousands of years. But to the warped minds of John Wayne High School football players, a sketch of a nude model is an invitation to send the artist a dick pic I guess.

"So, Principal Boone expelled me. He was really pissed. I think seeing all those dicks made him uncomfortable. Well, guess what, they made me uncomfortable."

"And that was the inspiration behind Free The Peen?" I ask. "Revenge on the boys who sent them, and revenge on Principal Boone?"

Audrey shrugs.

"At first," she says. "I started working on this project months ago, before I even met you. I thought, why should they get to go on with their lives like nothing happened? Why do I have to pay for their bad behavior?"

Audrey's eyes find mine.

"I wanted to hurt them," she says. "I wanted to expose them. Pun intended. You see, it occurred to me, looking at all these dick pics, that I had all these peens, but no faces. I didn't even know which peen belonged to which boy. And that's when it hit me: they are powerful because they are anonymous."

"So, you thought that if you exposed them to the school, they wouldn't be anonymous anymore?"

"That was my hope," Audrey says. "I thought that if the school saw all these dick pics, they'd treat them the way teenagers do."

"Laugh and make jokes?"

"Yup."

"They did just that," I say. "In fact, the joking and the teasing outed each of the boys. I guess, their teammates recognized them from the locker room."

I search Audrey's face, but I don't see the smile of sweet revenge. Instead, I see relief mixed with pain. She unmasked the peens, but I can tell that in the moment of truth, this project wasn't about making the boys feel as miserable as she felt.

"I had this idea..." Audrey begins. "It was kind of silly, I guess. But I had this idea that if I exposed the peens, I would somehow dismantle the patriarchy at the school. I know it's weird, but I just thought everything about that school, it's all about dick. It's all about worshiping dicks. A group specific dicks. The patriarchy, you know."

I know exactly what Audrey is talking about. I've experienced it firsthand.   

"But I thought, well, the idea was that if everyone saw that these dicks aren't so great, that some are small, and some are funny looking, and some look kind of discolored, and others are kind of crooked. Anyway, I thought that if everyone saw these dicks, that if they somehow were no longer anonymous, that these dicks wouldn't be so powerful. That the patriarchy wouldn't be so powerful. That's what I wrote in the artist statement when I submitted the portfolio with my college applications, anyway." 

"That makes sense," I say.

"Really?"

Audrey seems surprised, not that her idea about taking down the patriarchy makes sense, but that someone else would see the world through her eyes.

"Yeah, it makes sense to me," I say.

Suddenly, Audrey throws herself at me. We hug, holding each other in a tight embrace, as if it's us against the world. That feeling of holding Audrey feels so good that I want it to last forever. I feel her warmth against me. Her breathing. Her heart beating. 

Then I feel her boobs brushing up against my chest. And suddenly that's all I can think about. Boobs, glorious boobs. Well, boobs and the throbbing erection in my pants. That throbbing erection, all three inches of it, is a lie. It's the lie, the one that can destroy me and Audrey. 

I want to think of a way to tell her the truth. I want to open up to her the way she just opened up to me. I want her to know how good she makes me feel, even if I'm not even close to the manly image of myself that I've created in my head. 

But I can't find the words. And as our embrace loosens, I feel the moment slip away. 

"Let's go swimming," Audrey says.

And like a lightening bolt, she's out of the car. I get out too. 

"Take off your cloths," she says.

Across the car, I see Audrey bend down. She's taking off her jeans. She's taking off her jeans! Then she stands up and takes off her shirt. I catch a glimpse of Audrey's bare breasts through the windows. I can't believe I'm about to see her naked.

"You can't skinny-dip with your clothes on, Peter. Time to get naked."

I gulp. Naked. She wants me to get naked...

Thanks for reading!

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