The Foreign Exchange Student

The 30-Year-Old Virgin Wizard is an Internet legend stating that a person can be endowed with magical powers and become a "wizard" if they reach the age of 30 without engaging in sexual intercourse.

- KnowYourMeme

*

Battle was raging. An explosion momentarily flashed in the sky above, filling my senses with light and sound. When the ringing stopped, screams and shouts took their place. I couldn’t make out the words, only the anguish, the pain, the desperation. I could smell burning, and also something else. Something rancid.

I realised my eyes were closed, from the earlier flash or from terror, I didn’t know. I forced them open, and saw chaos. Smoke billowed into the sky, rising from craters littering a wasteland. It was impossible to tell what this place had been before, as any trace of it had been decimated. There were shapes moving. People running or staggering, mostly, although some others, crouched down, their bodies contorted in a way that surely couldn’t be human. None were close to me. I seemed to be standing a small distance back, surveying everything as though watching a film. But that rotten smell in my nostrils, and the rumbling ground beneath my feet, told me that I was most definitely here. A part of this battle, even if I did not want to be.

“Get down!” a voice screamed. I understood the words, but couldn’t move my body. I stood where I was, eyes now wide open, as bright lights rose up in the distance, and curved in an arc towards me. At first they were one single mass of white light, but as they got closer, I saw they were different colours: yellow, purple, green, red. They split out further, ten lights, then twenty. Pink, blue, silver. For a moment I was transfixed by their beauty.

My fear returned as I heard the noise. A shrill, horrible screeching. I wanted to cover my ears, to run away, but still, my body did not move.

The lights were so close now that I could make out their physical shapes. These were not just beams of light, nor some kind of blazing missile. Inside each of the lights was a distinct, human-shaped body. As I realised this, the shrill screeching began to make sense. They were words.

“Take me, James!”

“James, I love you!”

“Please, make me yours!”

Then they were on me. I was surrounded by writhing female bodies. I could now move again, but it was no use. I tried to push them away, but everything was so soft, and wet, and… nice. The voices were no longer horrible, but inviting, and the rancid smell had given way to something sweet and delightful. I slowly stopped resisting, and sunk deeper into the mass of womanly body parts. Pleasure washed over the entirety of my being, and I sunk deeper still.

The battle was over. I had lost…

*

I woke up with an erection. This was not uncommon for me and, after seventeen years of living, I had all but mastered a technique to take care of such a problem. I grabbed my phone, but had barely opened Incognito when there was a thunderous bang on my bedroom door. Without giving me a chance to respond, Hayley burst into the room and shouted, “James, it’s time for school, and Mum says stop playing with yourself or you’ll go blind!”

“I wasn’t playing with myself,” I shouted back, but Hayley had already vacated the room, and I could track her movement downstairs and into the kitchen by her loud stomping. That girl had too much energy.

I begrudgingly closed the tab on the browser and began getting dressed, trying my best to ignore the ‘stirring in my loins’. I didn’t know where my loins were, or what effect stirring them might have, but the phrase sounded more impressive than ‘getting horny’. And getting horny was something that I thought about a lot. This was normal for a boy my age, I knew, but acting on my impulses would have consequences that other teenage boys did not consider. Masturbation was fine, insofar as it helped to control my urges, but were I ever to actually have sex…

Confirming that my mum and sister were both downstairs, which was easy to do, given my sister’s shouting, I unlocked and opened the bottom drawer of my desk. Inside was a pile of porn magazines which I kept as a diversion, and also because I appreciated the novelty of seeing boobs in hard copy. I gently moved these out of the way, and then lifted the drawer’s false bottom. Here was what I truly valued: the result of years of research, scribbled in notebooks and stored on memory sticks. Opening an old red notebook to its back page, I crossed out the number 4590, and replaced it with 4589. Another day closer.

Hearing the approach of stomping feet, I hurriedly replaced the drawer’s false bottom and locked it. “I’m just coming,” I shouted preemptively.

“Mum said you would be,” Hayley shouted back. “She said that’s the bit that makes you blind.”

After gulping down a few mouthfuls of cereal and berating Mum for corrupting the innocence of her only daughter, I set off for the bus stop. Hayley had already left, as the bus to her school arrived six minutes before my one, and I wasn’t going to give up those valuable few minutes at home just for the sake of accompanying my sister.

It was a pleasant day, weather-wise, with a warm breeze pushing me onwards, and sunshine bouncing off the familiar row of terrace houses as I passed, making them appear slightly less grotty than usual. It was the first day back at school for the summer term, and despite my unfulfilled loins, I was feeling surprisingly good. Something about this Easter break’s combination of all-night gaming and Netflix binges seemed to have given me an energy boost. It wouldn’t be long before the tedium of coursework and exam prep brought me back down to earth, I was sure, but for the moment, I felt ready to face all that life had to throw at me.

There was a girl I didn’t recognise at the bus stop. A short girl, slim, with long black hair arranged elegantly over one shoulder. The strange thing was her outfit: she was wearing what was unmistakably a Japanese school uniform, complete with a short navy-blue skirt, a white blouse with a sailor-type collar, and a red ribbon. She held a phone weighed down with Hello Kitty phone charms, and looked up from it when I approached. She gave me a smile that was almost dazzling in its oriental beauty, exuding a charm that I had only ever seen in especially high-end Japanese pornography.

I began to smile back, before catching myself, and turning to face the other direction. This was exactly the kind of situation I needed to avoid. Besides, what the hell was up with a Japanese school girl appearing at my local bus stop? I turned back around, half-expecting the girl to have vanished, having only been a figment of my masturbation-deprived imagination. She was still there, and was still smiling at me. Creepy. But also… Cute. Despite myself, the corners of my mouth began to twitch upwards, when the decrepit school bus pulled up with a screech and a choking puff of exhaust fumes. I almost ran on board, taking my usual seat in the back left. I watched as the Japanese girl boarded after me, and listened to the hushed, and not-so-hushed, comments of my fellow students.

Lawrence, a boy in the same form as me, loudly proclaimed, “Man, she’s a cutie! That’s some anime shit.” Most of the bus seemed to agree, but the girl herself didn’t react to the observation, or didn’t understand it. She seemed to be more concerned with finding a seat.

The bus started with a jolt, and the girl stumbled, bringing to mind images of Bambi. She caught my eye, and then looked at the empty seat next to me. I pointedly placed my bag on the seat, and turned to stare out of the window. I felt like a dick, but this was a necessary step for the rest of my life. Sitting next to a girl on the bus might seem innocent enough, but who knows what sequence of romantic events it could lead to? Better to nip it in the bud early. I breathed a sigh of relief as I heard some of the shrill-voiced Year 11 girls invite the newcomer to sit with them. Crisis averted.

I put my earphones in, turned up the volume, and surreptitiously tucked my erection into the waistband of my trousers.

*

“Damn, I was gonna ask how your Easter was, but it looks like you were ripped up and glued back together,” I said.

I was long past the age of needing to specifically categorise who my best friend was, but gun to my head, I would have said Dan. Dan was a small, glasses-wearing kid with a mop of brown hair, who always turned up to school half-asleep. He was the only boy in our class who didn’t seem to have experienced any of puberty’s effects yet: he was short, couldn’t grow any facial hair, and his voice was still pretty high-pitched. And at that time, he was wearing a cast on his left arm, and had bandages wrapped around his forehead.

“You know how it is with lacrosse. It’s a contact sport. Besides, getting killed and coming back to life – pretty appropriate for Easter.”

“Did you seriously just compare yourself to Jesus?”

“Yeah, I guess I did.”

We both laughed. Sustaining injuries was a pretty common occurrence for Dan, given how passionately he threw himself into his various hobbies without regard for his size. A few months ago he had appeared at school in a wheelchair, and I had taken much delight in pushing him down the corridors at high speeds. This had culminated in a collision with the awards cabinet, and despite sustaining further injuries as a result, Dan had saved me from weeks of detention by claiming that the accident hadn’t been due to irresponsible pushing, but by the overly polished floors of the school. In short, Dan was a good dude, even if his willingness to endure pain bordered on the masochistic.

“Anyway, how are you doing?” Dan asked. “You looked a bit traumatised when you came in.”

“Yeah, well…” I looked around the form room, and pointed to Lawrence. “Listen.”

Dan obligingly turned toward Lawrence, who was in the middle of telling a group of classmates about the “Japanese angel” who had graced his presence on the bus this morning. “She looked incredible, man. And when I made a joke, she proper went ‘tee hee’ at me, with her hand in front of her mouth and everything, like an anime. Yeah, like that show with the superheroes. That one girl with the great arse…”

Having apparently heard enough, Dan turned back to me, a slight smile playing across his lips. “So, this new girl on the bus. Did you feel like your chastity was threatened?”

My face reddened slightly, but I knew I had to accept some amount of mockery from my friend. It was a weird situation after all, and Dan was one of the few people I could talk to about it, so a bit of ridicule was fair enough.

“Not threatened, but, you know. She was a cute girl. A really cute girl. Like, out of this world cute. It was a shock to the system.”

Dan continued smiling. “You can’t only talk to other men until you’re thirty, you know? You need to at least be able to handle seeing a cute girl.”

“That’s the thing though. It wasn’t just seeing her. She was smiling at me. Me, specifically. And I’m pretty sure she wanted to sit next to me on the bus.”

Dan’s smile faltered. “What, really?”

“Yeah, I think so. I didn’t let her, obviously. Who knows what kind of effect a girl’s pheromones could have on me?”

The classroom door opened, and Mr Panchal scuttled inside, looking slightly flustered. Following close behind him, tiptoeing into the room and staring shyly at the floor, was the girl from the bus.

“Shit man, it’s her! Didn’t I tell you she was cute?” Lawrence exclaimed, drawing looks of disgust from the girls in the form.

“Settle down, Mr Williams.” Mr Panchal spoke without much vigour, as though he could well understand Lawrence’s outburst. “This is a new member of our form group, Reiko. Did I say that right – Ray-ko?”

The girl looked up at Mr Panchal, smiled, and gave him a small nod.

“Erm, very good.” The teacher was silent for a few seconds, just staring back at Reiko, before he apparently remembered he was in front of a classroom full of teenagers. “Reiko has joined us from Japan, hence the, um, uniform. I’m honestly not quite sure what prompted the school to trial an exchange student programme, especially when we don’t even teach Japanese… Regardless, I am sure you will give Reiko a warm welcome.”

“We sure will, Sir!”

“Your ‘welcoming’ will be monitored very closely, Mr Williams, so watch yourself. Now, let’s see… You will be doing Biology, English, and History. Oh, the same subjects as James. How about you sit next to him?”

Lawrence turned around to stare daggers at me, as my blood went cold, while other areas became pleasantly warm.

“James hates girls, Sir! Put Reiko-chan next to me.”

“Do you know what Gore Vidal said, Mr Williams? ‘Anyone who is prepared to run for president should automatically be disqualified from doing so.’ I believe that the same applies here. Now, Reiko…” Mr Panchal gave the girl what he must have intended to be an encouraging grin. “Please go and sit next to that boy there.”

Reiko obligingly took her bag over to my table, and pulled out the chair. Before sitting down, she put her mouth close to my ear, and whispered, “Hello,” in a thick Japanese accent.

It turned out that the pheromones of such a girl were very effective indeed.