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Fifteen Years Old - P.B. Jones
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P.B. Jones 15

Hitchhiking, and with no particular destination in mind, I was picked up by a man driving a white Cadillac convertible. A burly guy with a broken nose and a flushed, freckled Irish complexion. Nobody you’d take for a queer. But he was. He asked where I was headed, and I just shrugged; he wanted to know how old I was – I said eighteen, though I was really three years younger. He grinned and said: “Well, I wouldn’t want to corrupt the morals of a minor.”

As if I had any morals.

Then he said, solemnly: “You’re a good-looking kid.” True: on the short side, five seven (eventually five eight), but sturdy and well-proportioned, with curly brown-blond hair, green-flecked brown eyes, and a face dramatically angular; to examine myself in a mirror was always a reassuring experience. So when Ned took his dive, he thought he was grabbing cherry. Ho ho! Starting at an early age, seven or eight or thereabouts, I’d run the gamut with many an older boy and several priests and also a handsome Negro gardener. In fact, I was a kind of Hershey Bar whore – there wasn’t much I wouldn’t do for a nickel’s worth of chocolate.

Truman Capote  ·  Answered Prayers

15

Hans Castorp

Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg)

Thomas Mann

"...when at age fifteen he had the chance to watch from a front-row seat as the Hansa, a new double-screw mail-steamer, was launched from the docks of Blohm and Voss, he painted a strikingly good watercolor of the trim ship..."

15

Victor Frankenstein

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

Mary Shelley

"When I was about fifteen years old we had retired to our house near Belrive, when we witnessed a most violent and terrible thunderstorm..."

15

John the Savage

Brave New World

Aldous Huxley

"“You are fifteen,” said old Mitsima, in the Indian words. “Now I may teach you to work the clay.”"

15

Amory Blaine

This Side of Paradise

F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Amory had rather a Puritan conscience. Not that he yielded to it—later in life he almost completely slew it — but at fifteen it made him consider himself a great deal worse than other boys..."

15

Ernie

'The Swan'

Roald Dahl

"He took the gun and the box of bullets and went out to see what he could kill. He was a big lout of a boy, fifteen years old this birthday..."

15

Maurice Spandrell

Point Counter Point

Aldous Huxley

"He was only fifteen at the time, but that was how he felt and thought..."

15

Adrian Albert Mole

The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole

Sue Townsend

"Dear Aunt Clara, I am a fifteen-year-old schoolboy. My grandma tells me that I am attractive..."

15

Monroe Stahr

The Last Tycoon

F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Her talk of kings had carried him oddly back in flashes to the pearly White Way of Main Street in Erie, Pennsylvania, when he was fifteen..."

15

Charles Bovary

Madame Bovary - Provincial Matters

Gustav Flaubert

"In the corner behind the door, only just visible, stood a country lad of about fifteen..."

15

Alex

A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess

"That was everything. I’d done the lot, now. And me still only fifteen..."

15

Billy Behan

Billy Bathgate

E.L. Doctorow

"I was fifteen years old and I had a hundred dollars in my pockets..."

15

Henry Chinaski

Ham on Rye

Charles Bukowski

"I was 15 years old and in love with her and I was covered with boils and there was nothing that either of us could do."