PrivateTim

When three U.S. diplomats ran off a mountain road in Bosnia on August 18, 1995 and were killed, it was front page news in the NY Times. It would not have been a secret he was related to Senator Danfield, nor that he was gay. Not really tough stuff to find out.

It doesn't work like that. One day you have this sweet 12 year old kid who does pretty much what you tell him. You love surfing with him, you go to his water polo games and swim meets and all is hunkey dorey. Then he turns 13. Oh my gawd, what have you done to my sweet little boy, where did he go. Usually it takes longer for the rifts to grow, but in Will they are accelerated because of his environment and unique world. Brad hasn't been one of those, "call me Brad" dads, he's been pretty conventional. We have no reason to suspect that Brad has not been a disciplinarian with Will the first 12/13 years of his life. There are just much more limited way to get in serious trouble when you are 12 and younger. I think expecting your 14 year old son to NOT go to college parties is pretty reasonable. Asking your kids where they are going, who they are going with, what they are doing is normal parenting all the way through high school. Telling them when they had to me home is pretty standard too. I get the need for dramatic and poetic license. Will feels a need to party like a college student when he is 14. Brad feels a need to stop Will from partying like a college student when he is 14. Each should understand that the other is performing as expected. Yes, so I could count the number of times I drank in high school on one hand. The guys at the USC SAE house who knew me knew that. The evil concoction the convinced me to consume (Sangria) had fruit slices floating in it. How bad could that be? Bad. Very, very bad. I was so sick still when I got home Sunday my mother thought I had the flu.

OMG a Matt fan and JJ fan commenting in the same chapter.... Oh how things change in the next couple of years.

Status? Richer than Croesus. It is one thing when people think you are well off, but attitudes change when they find out you have FU money.

We don't really know how much JP has because of course it is crass to discuss such matters, but his trusts from the Crampton family have to be sizeable and with Stef probably managing them partly, and the spike in land values in the Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, JP must be loaded. I also think Brad is up there too. More than tax laws it is location, location, location. I don't know how far out Mark thought this story out, but he could not have picked a better place than Stanford and the environs of Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Mountain View et al. It is not a coincidence that Silicon Valley encompasses Stanford. In a sense Stanford created it along with an assist from the U.S. Navy. Stanford grads Bill Hewlett and David Packard got the ball rolling and it snowballed with a constant flow of venture capital supporting Stanford researchers and more success bred more venture capital. There are a LOT of very wealthy Stanford professors based on 1% or even .5% of ventures they helped birth. By 2020, if Wade isn't a multi-billionaire, he really messed up someplace.

Did all guys just fuck first, and then get to know each other afterward? It is interesting on what you pick up on the second time through. The answer to Wade's question above is, "yes". In the gay community, by and large, fuck first, talk later. I am the only person in my circle of friends who knows the first AND last name of every guy I've slept with and I knew their first and last names before we slept together.

It is an indication of how fucked up Matt is in his single minded pursuit of Carl. Matt thinks he is playing Carl and has no idea he is the one being played

Yes. Absolutely.

Matt is a dipshit (like Will) who doesn't understand what he has because he can't see beyond the end of his dick.

By the way, is there an updated dramatis personae? I was away a couple of years so I just finished the last few chapters of Black Widow and it's been 10 years since I read some of the stories, so I forget how Cody figured into the story (I don't recall him being a blood relative) and Kevin, and some of Will's hook-ups like Colin (a Carmichael I believe) and despite Will being all into Colin (and then Conway), he is all but forgotten.

Frankly I thought Casey was too direct and was directing Will's thought process rather than being Socratic. Has the Gap "Year" actually started? My impression was Will graduated mid-year. He is the same grade as Travis and Crawford.

Well you needn't have worried, the little shit, like a bad penny, keeps turning up. Oh man did this guy Tim have great insight! 🤣

Damn was I smart in 2011! It is okay that Robbie came in with an alternative view, but I think he was too forceful and I think Will was getting a healthy dose of reality, which he needs more of, not less. Not almost cringe, completely cringe.

Hunh I looked in the thesaurus and didn't see 'asshole' as a synonym for 'high-spirited' 😁 He is not alone in the CAP series. Sorry, but that completely pisses me off. Tony might or might not be gay. The freaking gay community can be so judgmental when no one in the gay community wants to be judged themselves. Just because you fuck a guy and like it, or a guy fucks you and you like it, does not mean you are gay. Sexual orientation and sexuality are much more complex than that.

That was one thing about this place I didn’t like. It looked there would be a lot of fucking work. I’d plowed through it pretty easily last night; it had only taken me an hour and a half. Still, that was just our first day, so I was pretty sure it would get a lot tougher. Not sure what Will expected in going to one of the highest rated, most exclusive private schools in the nation. Most of the kids at H-W are there because they want to be and they want to get into Stanfurd, Princeton, Harvard, etc. To do that, to do what JP and Brad and Robbie did isn't easy. If it was anyone could go. Yes you can go to Malibu High and get into an elite school, but it is so much harder on so many levels. If you slack in a public high school you are lucky if one or two teachers notice and kick your butt. At H-W every teacher will notice and kick your butt, even the janitor might make a comment or two. The school is dedicated to the success of its students.

From the comments I get it was a long time between chapters. I am digging this thing where you can reread a book and all the chapters are there. Thanks Mark for taking time away from your family and job to write these wonderful stories.

Wow, what great insights from this reader! (well someone has to say it) Of the approximately 7 guys I exchanged blow jobs with in high school, all 7, involved large amounts of alcohol. I would nurse one beer, pretending I'd had many more. 5 of the 7 were one time things. None of my friends and I EVER discussed what happened directly. Someone would usually make a 'wow I was so drunk last night I don't remember anything' and that was the end of it. I assume all the guys were straight and the assumed I was too and I was officially at that time. I didn't get that liking to suck might mean I wasn't straight, because the thought of anal sex at that time just grossed me and I didn't even learn about rimming until my junior year in college and thought THAT was the really grossest thing ever. But as you mature, which is I think another word for 'having experiences' and growing from them. Maturing also happens when the chemicals in your body that are turning you from a boy to a man, slow down their assault on you. Will might be able to hang with 17 year olds physically, but his emotions and maturity are not there yet. He is still a 13 year old boy. This was one of my favorite chapters because everything rang so true to me based on my experience and as I remember, Mark's experiences too. Gathan is a teen, even though he's been written as an adult to a large extent, he is still an immature teen as we've seen in many instances in this book. The highs and lows of teen emotions are very real and not necessarily their fault, they are partly chemical in nature too. But I have known two teen boys who committed suicide over high school break-ups. One of the two was the night of his going away party to college, where he was off to Texas on a baseball scholarship. Teen angst is real.

“Let’s go see some fish,” I said after we’d done a couple of hits, and led him off to the aquarium. We ended up having a really good time. I love the ocean, and I love marine life, so I pretty much showed him around the place. This is why Will needs to be at UCSD or USC to study Marine Biology. He could do Great White research in the Farallon Islands.

Will goes all psycho when people pry into his business, but he thinks he can butt into everyone else's. CU-SeeMe was around in 2000.

Well if you don't know, who does? 🤣🏄‍♂️ I know what Lark would do, he is a complete perv and will be until the day he dies. The question is, what would Will do? He seems to no moral compass on sexual matters and a convenient one in other matters. I know it appears a quaint, antiquated notion to many but I think this general lack of morality is why we have four teens trying to rob a young woman so they can have a barbeque.

I don't think he could be in Palo Alto and not be part of the Crampton - Schluter scene. His character may not appear, but given JP's being a stickler on manners good manners alone would dictate a level of engagement. We shall see what the Master decides....

And it only gets worse from here on out... Bradley needs to learn to choose his words more carefully; not get backed into a "I'll tell you someday" moment. You can easily go through $100k on a few days in Vegas and not realize it. Brad needs to be an adult and decide what he should and should not talk about in front of/with Will. Brad had no business revealing anything about Scott Slater to anyone, Robbie included. This family talks way too much.... and needs to learn to lock their bedroom doors too, while we are on it.

Well as I said, Gap Year is only 4 years later (in 12 years of real time) and Gathan would just now be getting ready to graduate from Stanford, assuming he stayed.

I had to quote Matt to fix his tiny font and to say, I think at 44 he knows even less today then when he was 30. It is a amazing to get older and realize how much you don't know. One thing I've learned about politics is you are better off being a Big Fish in a Small Pond. In a small town in a smaller state you can win statewide office or a mayorship easier. Pete Buttigieg is graduating high school, just like Gathan and Darius, and in 12 years he'll be mayor in South Bend. That would never happen in CA. We now know how Will is three years from now. He stops falling for every guy he has sex with. Gawd I hope Travis sticks around. Is Gathan a narrator in any other story? By Gap Year Gathan should be a senior at Stanfurd. I would not call the charges "trumped up". He was naked in bed with a 17 year old. I don't know what the AOC was in Ohio in 2000, it is 16 currently. But again, a small town, a police chief, used to getting away with stuff, might have sent his officers to mess with Gathan and Kristin and could have found alternatives to stat rape. It is not like it was purely made up like oh...... Russian collusion....