Disclaimer: the Dragon Ball franchise is the property of Akira Toriyama and Shueisha.

Childhood's End

Trunks studied his reflection in his bathroom mirror, noting the baby fat that kept receding from his face and his features that were becoming more angular and reminiscent of his father's. He recalled his mother and grandmother's habit of pinching his cheeks ever since he had hit his growth spurt, cooing how he would have been a carbon copy of his father if it were not for his coloring and his hair that submitted to gravity. His body was also growing out of the little boy's small frame and was now threatening to tower over his parents.

He ran his hand, which had calloused and enlarged, over the lower half of his face. After several sweeps from one ear to the other, his reflection scowled back at him disappointedly. Once again, he did not feel that prickliness that indicated presence of facial hair. It was not like Trunks thought he would look good with stubble or a mustache, but the fact that his body had started secreting the hormones responsible for them meant that he had just entered the next phase into adulthood. Not to mention, his fellow classmates were starting to sport band-aids on their faces, which hinted that shaving had been added to their daily routine. It filled Trunks with insecurities as to whether he was underdeveloped or lacking on the manliness scale.

Still clad in his wrinkly boxers from last night, the setting around Trunks changed from the marble tiles of his bathroom to the sliding doors that covered the walls of his dressing room. Placing his palm over his yawning mouth, he dismissed the Orange Star uniform that remained unused in it's plastic casing and began rummaging through his expansive collection of clothes sealed with Capsule Corp. logo.

Gone were the baggy T-Shirts that had been replaced with form-fitting tank tops, and the brightly-colored cardigans and jerseys had been ditched in favor of the more edgy leather and jeans vests and jackets. The only appearance detail that had been carried over from his childhood was his trademark boot-length sneakers, which he slipped into after settling on a combination that made him look both suave and badass.

With his air car capsule and key stuffed inside his pocket, Trunks swung his school bag over his shoulder and marched out to join the family around the breakfast table. However, the partially-opened door to the adjoining room caused him to backpedal.

The fifteen year old took in what used to be the playroom of the richest boy in the world, now filled with cardboard boxes marked for charity. The shelves had been emptied of the robot toys and action figures that once lined them; the floor had been swept of the remote control cars, planes and spaceships stationed in the middle of miniature metropolises, and the boxes pasted with sport champions stickers that stored balls, bats and gloves had all disappeared.

Before Trunks knew it, trips to the amusement park or the zoo were no longer something to look forward to, toys and sweets commercials had lost its effect on him, and stunts and monologues of self-important superheroes dressed in gaudy customs ceased to drive him to the edge of his seat. However, this sight before him that embodied the remains of the childhood that he once had did not evoke his lamentation; on the contrary, for a child who was beyond his years he had longed for the day to be freed from the shackles of being a minor who needed babysitting and whose opinion did not count. Though, he wondered if he will come to miss those carefree days, filled with rapture and newness, like most grown-ups say they do when life and the responsibilities it imposed on them wore them out.

Trunks made his way to the stairs, passing by and greeting back the bots dusting off the furniture, replacing the water in the vases or vacuuming the floor. He began humming the latest song stuck to his mind when he gripped the stairs' railing to descend the stairs with a single jump, only to leap backwards, yelping when he almost stepped on a floating blue orb, which turned out to be his baby sister's head.

Bra looked as though she was scaling down a mountain. She clutched with her chubby, small hands each step at a time as if it was a ledge and reached down the next with one bunny slipper-clad foot. When she reached the midpoint she looked down over her shoulder, and scowled in frustration in the same manner as her father when she saw that she still got a long way to go.

"Your pick-up has arrived, princess." Trunks, who was leaning against the wall, offered amusedly with a bow, putting on the airs of a storybook hero who had just arrived to save the damsel in distress.

"Shh, don't tell momma," Bra looked up at him, one chubby finger against her pursed lips. "Bra promised poppa to keep it a secret!"

Trunks' perplexity at her request turned to shock when he watched, agape, her small form levitating off the stairs. Then, while still being airborne, her shoulder-length hair scattered around her as she leapt down like a flying squirrel and landed at the bottom of the stairs.

"What the..." Trunks asked no one in particular and hopped down beside Bra, who was still spreading her arms wide like a ballerina who had just performed a grand jete.

"I can also do this!" Bra boasted, her father's devilish smirk drawn on her cherubic face. She demonstrated as she punched the air on the opposite side of her brother, kicked and then spun around with an upper kick that collided with his leg.

Trunks, who was caught off-guard, could not contain the cry that shot from his throat as bone-crushing pain seethed through his leg. If he were not a Saiyan, someone would have called the ambulance, he would have spent the next month or so in a hospital bed with his broken leg suspended, and he would have become the laughingstock of the school for having his ass kicked by his three-year-old sister!

Trunks looked at Bra, who maintained a fighting stance, smirking at him tauntingly as she motioned with her fist for him to bring it on. His mind raced for an excuse to his earlier wimpiness, and memories resurfaced from his first tournament seven years ago when Mr. Satan fooled everyone who had bought into his fake heroism after getting owned by a pat on his cheek. Trunks hated himself for imitating the old poseur to the letter, and he clutched his stomach, winking as he mock-groaned, "Ouch, you got me!"

"Yay, Bra's strong!" Bra squealed, jumping up and down while throwing her hands in the air victoriously. "Poppa even said: 'you have more Saiyan blood in you than that good-for-nothing wimp!'"

That quotation felt like a kick to the groin to Trunks as he knew that his father had been referring to none other than him, who had not as much as practiced his kata since the Majin Buu days.

Trunks picked his sister up in his arms, and as they made their way to the dinning room he tuned in her story of how she got their father to cultivate her dormant Saiyan powers.

Some while ago, two-year-old Pan had been afflicted with the chicken pox and Bra had no one to play with for a while. One weekday in the late morning, she had gotten bored dressing up her dolls and headed downstairs to nag their grandparents to take her out for a ride. As she made her way to the living room, she heard sounds coming from the kitchen, and found their father in his sweat-drenched training pants, gobbling his late morning snack, which was actually more of a full-course meal by earthlings' standards.

After he had cleaned his plates, Bra followed him out to the gravity simulator like a stray puppy, all while stubbornly rebuffing his brusque attempts to shoo her away. After he had entered the gravity simulator he closed the door in her face, and in the end, after a lot of waterworks and creating dents with her fists that she had hammered at the door, he gave in, in exchange for breathing no word about it to her mother.

Trunks correlated Bra's tale to that of his first training session with his father seven years ago, and how his mother had received them when he had shown up around the dinner table with a broken nose. In her shock and horror, his mother bolted upright with a cry escaping her lips, her heels clanking against the floor as she trotted towards him with eyes wide with concern. Seeing her panic-stricken reaction to his injury, Trunks was quick to reassure her, faking a sheepish smile as he told her that he had gotten careless. Overcome with unease as she knelt before him to match his height and frantically began checking his body for any other injuries, he blurted out, attempting to lighten the mood, that his father had promised to take him to the amusement park if he landed a hit on him, which he did.

Next, the laugh that Trunks had released for effect died out, looking worriedly back and fro between his parents. His mother glared at his father, the look on her face was that of one who had put two and two together, while as his father kept looking back at her unflinchingly, not bothering to placate her or making up an excuse. The tension that had muted the family of three continued to loom over them until bedtime arrived, with the parents heading in opposite directions. Trunks, who in his preschool years had seen too much soap operas of cheating and divorcing parents with his grandmother, could not help but imagine the worst as guilt ate at his heart. And hours of sleep were stolen from him as he stayed up all night to think of a plan to get his parents to reconcile.

However, it turned out that getting worked up about it was for naught when his mother on the next morning greeted them with a sing-song voice as she took her seat around the breakfast table. His grandmother chortled, 'why, dear, you're glowing today!', thinking that he will not catch on to the innuendo due to his young age. He remembered how his discomfort had doubled when his mother reacted to that allusion with averting her eyes coyly, redness coloring her cheeks and smiling fondly as if she had recalled something recent. His father that morning had that relaxed air about him, as though all of the restlessness and agitation that had been governing him since Gokuu's voice had spoken to them in his mother's lab had been sucked away from him. For an eight-year-old who was too precocious for his own good, Trunks did not want to imagine how they had made up!

Though Trunks already knew his father no longer had it in him to take his frustration and insecurities out on little kids, he understood why he had reservations about training little Bra. What if his mother brought up that old incident when voicing her objection, or if some accident that he had not foreseen occurred and it put a cold wall of tension between them again?

"By the way," Trunks asked as something occurred to him, "why didn't you use the elevator now that you can fly and reach the buttons?"

"But I heard momma tell auntie Videl that using the stairs helps you lose weight." She ran her hand in circular movements over her stomach, "Bra's eating like a hippo and she can't control it; if she doesn't make up for it with lots of exercise, she'll become one!"

"I've got good news for you, princess: thanks to your Saiyan blood, you'll never gonna get fat, no matter how much you stuff your face!" Trunks chuckled. While Bra got their father's proud side, she also got their mother's obsession with beauty matters. One of Bra's little anecdotes that was a testament to the latter was that one time when their mother got back from work, only to find her room in a messier state than what she had left it in that morning. Her evening dresses were thrown in a heap on the bed, her jewelry collection was out of the burglar-proof safe, her makeup and perfumes were scattered on the vanity table and her stilettos and matching clutch bags littered the floor that was stained with nail varnish.

In the center of the mess was Bra, who was sitting on the vanity stool, wearing one of her mother's glittering evening tops that looked more like a dress on her small form. Several jewelry pieces adorned her neck, wrists, all of her fingers, but not also her ears that had yet to be pierced. What had caused their mother's desire to spank her to abate was when she got a look at her face: thick layers of blusher covered her cheeks, eye shadow strayed from the outline of her irises wide with fear, and teeth smeared with lipstick peered through her agape mouth. His mother clutched her stomach as she laughed, and her punishment was reduced to not buying her the new talking doll that was out, which made Bra bawl indignantly, her tears liquidizing her makeup and dirtying the top that she was wearing. In the end, Bra had gotten their father to buy her what she wanted in secret, and she had kept it hidden, like a tree in a forest, among her expansive doll collection.

The siblings arrived at the dinning room that was filled with the clinking of cutlery against plates and the scent of caffeine, citrus, curd, egg yolk and freshly baked goods. Trunks greeted the older members of their family and Bra parroted him chirpily as she slid off his arms to take her high chair beside their father, who was pouring maple syrup over his mountain of waffles. Bra reached over the table with a fork in her small hand to add all the stuff that she liked to her plates while lovingly adding some for her father.

Omelet, sausages, cupcakes, pancakes, brownies, croissants, crepe and a cup of decaffeinated coffee. As Vegeta noted the yellowish and brownish hues of his daughter's selection and its sugary and fatty scents he admonished, "You should balance your meal with some milk and fruits, Bra."

Bra stopped midways from tying her napkin with cute animal patterns around her neck, her big, bewildered eyes looking up at her father.

"You're older than Pan, aren't you?" Vegeta questioned, fingers interlaced as he looked at her sideways. "At this rate, people will think the opposite if you continue cutting milk from your diet and end up lagging behind her in height."

Bra scrunched her nose, the little girl who enjoyed playing the know-it-all big sister in front of the awe-struck Pan picturing the prospect of having the roles reversed. Finally, she begrudgingly pushed aside her coffee and with a scowl asked her grandfather, to whom the milk jug was the nearest, to pour her a glass. She gulped it disgustedly and stuck her whitened tongue out when she finished, as though it was a bitter medicine.

Trunks, who always held his father up on a pedestal and regarded him as his role model, could not help but feel indignantly jealous as he noted the difference in the tone and manner with which he treated and disciplined Bra and him.

Back when he was a child, if he cried, his father would bark at him to tough it out. If he prodded him to take him to a baseball game, fishing or any of the outdoor excursions that he had overheard his classmates mentioning whenever they recounted their weekends with their fathers, he would shrug his arms off of his, snapping at him to bug off. And while his father could not care less how many people whose days were ruined by his son's antics, when being nagged by his mother that he should play a more active role in raising him, his choice of punishment would make being grounded in his room seem like a day in the arcades. Until dinnertime, Trunks was to do push-ups using only one finger, and with the gravity pushed to the maximum it felt like someone was using his back as a trampoline, and the process would turn into something akin to making out with the floor.

When he arrived at school, Trunks hopped off his air car and encapsulated it. As he made his way to the school building, fangirls stopped their gossiping to squeal in unison their morning salute, while as school faculty members on the way made him make several pauses to reprimand him for his class-cutting. The only reason why they had not as of yet suspended him or made him do after-school chores as punishment was because the ministry of education had classified him as 'gifted'. Also, having graduated two generations of the renowned Briefs family would add to the school's reputation, and they did not want to risk displeasing him and end up losing him to whatever rival school he would switch to later on.

If they thought his class-cutting was the worst they were going to deal with, just let them wait until Goten arrives next year to retake his place as his partner-in-crime. They will not know what had hit them when they see the school covered in graffiti, the sadistic teachers and bullies become victims to their pranks and their tricks in the science lab turn the school into a carnival of smoke, colors and startled cries. What will be amusing about it was that everyone will know it was them, but with their experience of covering their tracks over the years they will lack any proof to pin the accusation on them.

Trunks entered the boys' locker room; first period was math exam and he needed to get his pencil case, calculator and geometry kit. When he reached his locker, it did not surprise him to find more scratches added to the lock, which indicated that once again, someone had tried to open it with a lock-pick. Repressing a groan, he unlocked his locker, which once parted regurgitated several weeks' worth of love letters that rained on his feet. The pastel-colored envelopes gave off scents that ranged from vanilla, strawberries and women perfume. Some were sealed with heart stickers, and they were marked in the back with neat, delicate handwriting that indicated it was by a female.

Kneeling down and looking right and left to make sure no one was seeing him, Trunks pointed a finger at the heap and with a ki beam incinerated it to ash. He had read enough of those to know what they were about. The majority were bad prose that punctuated on his good looks and his 'princely' charm that was actually more derived from his status as the world's richest boy. They all ended with either a self-deprecating note like 'I know you're too good for someone like me, but it makes me feel better writing this' or they outright ask for a reply, which they would never see. While Trunks tried to be as respectful and considerate as he could to the opposite sex, he would rather have them think that he was an ass than feed them a false hope that will waste their time.

Trunks rummaged his locker for what he had come for, noticing that once again his personal belongings, including all of his stationery, were gone. On the back of the locker, the old cupid hearts had been erased and a new one was added with his name and that of the latest girl that had broken into his locker. Next to it was a photo of a girl with a bar over her eyes, wearing his sports shirt with her red, silky panties gleaming from beneath the hem. She was holding his cologne as though it was a trophy, and at the bottom of the photo, next to the lipstick mark, was written: 'next time, it will be your heart that I'll break into!'. She had also added her email address in case he became turned on by her picture and wanted to see her in his boxers next.

Trunks rolled his eyes, slammed his locker shut and rushed to the school store. It was a pain continuously replacing his stuff that the obsessed fangirls regarded as some treasure locked in a chest. He wondered if he will get this much love mail if the company went under or if he had an accident that distorted his face beyond recognition.

First period ended and the class around Trunks erupted in complaints over the exam's difficulty. As for Trunks, who remained silent, solving each problem felt like beating a videogame final boss in a single turn with a level 99 party equipped with the best secret weapons.

He stretched, folded his arms behind his head and looked out of the window. The weather was too nice to waste this day indoors, not to mention, the latest issue of his favorite comic magazine was out today and he was itching to know what happened to his heroes after those cliffhangers. After reading and discussing the new plot twists online through his phone, he will have lunch at the usual place and buy the manager and waiters' silence with a big fat tip. Through sixth to eighth period, he will battle his way through the new handheld Giant Robots game, and at the end of the school day will zip to Goten's school to pick him up and unwind until evening.

As he was about to get up and split before the next period teacher arrived, he found himself surrounded by two girls in form-fitting blouse and ultra miniskirt - they looked classy and yet a bit sleazy. One hopped onto his desk, while the other plopped down on the chair next to him, facing him.

"It's been a long time since we've seen you in class, Briefs-san," the one sitting on his desk said with a flirtatious lilt, swinging her leg up and down against his knee.

"I couldn't skip a test, could I?" Trunks forced a smile, now how will he get rid of these two who will cling to him like flies to honey?

"Tomorrow's physics," the other let out a dramatic sigh, crossing her legs to reveal her garterbelt-adorned thighs.

"Yeah, I know what you mean; I didn't do quite well in the last exam," the one sitting on his desk placed one perfectly manicured finger against her glossed lips. "I'm afraid to go to Hertz-sensei; he's such a jerk. He'll yell and make fun of me if I told him I still don't get it after his crappy explanation…"

She trailed off, pleadingly eyeing Trunks, who kept displaying that forced smile. Next, she parted her legs to give full view of her panties, and as much as he hated to admit it, his heart skipped a beat at the sight of lace and creamy flesh.

Whenever the exam season approached, he found himself flocked by those who bitch and whine about this 'meanie' teacher or that 'dumbass' teacher, all while flashing him puppy dog eyes or showing a little leg to entice him into volunteering to tutor them.

At one time, Trunks had accepted out of pity when a girl managed to convince him with that sob story about her abusive father, who will beat her up and cut her meager allowance if she failed. However, it had turned out that it was just a ruse to get into his pants. Instead of paying attention to what his hand was writing or pointing at, she would gaze at him as she nudged his feet under the library table. When the feet technique did not seem to work, she would switch to tantalizing him with a little cleavage as she unbuttoned her shirt and fanned herself to escape the nonexistent heat.

He examined their clothes, which he recognized from the symbol on the breast pockets and patterns on the indecently short skirts as one of the designer brands that his mother bought for Bra. If they were from a wealthy family, they would have already tried to find common ground by mentioning whatever important thing their parents did for a living and whether they had any past dealings with Capsule Corporation. However, it seemed that these two were planning to replace whatever sugar daddy that was funding their expensive wardrobe with him, and they were trying to tempt him with the prospect of a lingerie fashion show and a threesome with horny partners.

"I'd love to give a hand, but unfortunately, I'm stuck with my internship at the company in the afternoons." This had always been the lie that he offered to get him out of this, and since it seemed that taking over a conglomerate such as Capsule Corporation required a lot of grooming, everyone readily bought it.

"Aww," the two moaned disappointedly. They then eyed each other, smirked and closed in on him from both sides.

"Maybe next time then?" they purred as they wound their hands around his elbows and ground their breasts against his biceps. They ended with pressing their lips to his cheeks, leaving a lipstick mark on each.

The snap of a pencil breaking and the gritting of teeth emanated from the boys in the background; they could not stomach how all the girls fawned over a single boy who got the looks, the brains and the money to boot. Their rage was soon added to that of the fangirls, who cried disapprovingly and glared territorially at the retreating floozies.

Trunks was frozen like a statue in his seat. He could still feel the lingering heat of their breasts on his goose-pimply flesh, and their lipstick marks tickled his cheeks as the overhead AC circulated air around the class.

Trunks was shaken out of his daze by the cough of the second period teacher who had just arrived. He cursed, wiping the rouge smudges off his cheeks: he now should suffer through an hour of reiteration of stuff he already knew until he gets his chance again!

A movement in the front row caught his attention, and he found the two seductresses waving at him. He felt redness creeping to his cheeks when they winked as they blew him a kiss, and during class, images of lacy panties and garterbelts kept popping in and out of his mind.

Over the recent years, the way that he perceived girls had changed. Back when he was a child, he regarded girls as merely the opposite of boys. They were into dolls, flowers, dresses, ribbons and the color pink. They loved to describe things as "cute", "pretty", "gross!" and "eww!". The ones taller than him had breasts, which he also as a child had thought of as warm and soft things that he loved to bury his face into whenever his mother was hugging him. Now, depending on how aesthetically pleasing girls were, he found his eyes straying downwards from their faces. His hormones then would surge, his imagination running wild as he pictured those soft, delicate bodies without that opaque layer of clothing.

Goten stood by his school's gate, through which students began to flood out, facing the direction that his lifelong friend's Ki was emanating from. He hopped up and down and dealt a series of punches to the air around him, feeling antsy and a little impatient. He was taunted by the fact that if it were not for the crowd around him, he would have already placed two fingers on his forehead and teleported to the passenger seat next to Trunks.

Music that was getting more audible by the second was heard from the distance. Goten's frown turned upside down when he spotted the dot that was Trunks' air car approaching from the horizon, getting bigger and bigger until he could see the sunlight reflecting off Trunks' sunglasses and his lavender hair that was being combed back by the wind.

"Yo!" Trunks stopped his car that remained afloat in the air by his friend, giving a two-finger salute while offering him milkshake.

"Stop flaunting that you can afford to skip class!" Goten admonished with a laugh as he accepted the cold beverage and hopped beside him in the car.

"Here…"

"What's this?" Goten asked, eyeing the box spotted with a brand logo and neatly wrapped with a ribbon.

"You're always squinting or putting your hand above you eyes to shield them from the sun," Trunks explained, pulling a lever that elevated his car back into the sky. "I didn't know what to get you, so I chose the same one as mine."

"Wow, thanks, buddy!" Goten gushed elatedly as he unwrapped the gift, examined the workmanship in the frame admiringly, wore it and checked himself in the side-view mirror. He had been planning to save up the change from his lunch money and buy one of the cheap ones that they sold on the street.

Aside from lunch money, Goten was also getting an additional allowance from his brother who was now a professor assistant and working on his PhD. However, he did not get to enjoy spending it on sunglasses, cell phones or trendy clothes since its destination once Gohan had deducted it from his paycheck was the bank account that his mother had opened for his college savings. Well, since he had not been born with Gohan's brain, which could have guaranteed him a scholarship, there was no way he would avoid ending up in a blue-collar job without paying an arm and a leg for college tuition. Goten had thought about getting a part-time job to enjoy the finer things in life, but he could not get one without his school's approval and that of his mother who will insist on also saving his wages for college.

"So, where to next? The beefbowl joint? Ramen?" He exclaimed as he remembered something, "Oh, I know, the boys in class mentioned that there was a new Giant Robots fighting game in the arcade, let's check it out!"

"Actually, I'm heading straight home," Trunks informed, keeping his sight on the road ahead of him. "The homeroom teacher cornered me this morning and demanded that I turn in all of last week's homework. Besides, I've been working on something big!"

"Something big?" Goten prodded, "Like what? Like what?" Whatever Trunks was working on in secret must be something that will be both a source of enjoyment and a source of trouble. Like, last time, it was upgrading his air bike and challenging a biker gang in an acrobatic race in a construction site. They had narrowly escaped capture by the police when he teleported them out of there; the gang on the other hand had not been so lucky.

"Fake IDs," Trunks declared, lowering their altitude as the radar alarmed that a plane was approaching. "I'm gonna sneak into a nightclub, have a few drinks and challenge some college suckers in a game of poker. Maybe even let myself be hit on by hot college girls!"

"Poker? That's lame!'' Goten commented disappointedly, though he did not mind the part about socializing with sexy older women. "The first place we gotta hit when we pose as grown-ups is the strip club; unless you meant strip poker with hot college chicks!"

"And who said you're gonna tag along?" Trunks questioned, his tone changing from mirthful to cold.

"What?" Goten's shocked cry was lost in the roar of the plane that soared above them, his sunglasses sliding to the tip of his nose to reveal his puzzled eyes. "Why? We always do everything together!"

"Well, with that childish, squeaky voice of yours, we'll be found in an instant!" Trunks removed his eyes from the sky to point an accusing finger at him.

"I'll keep my mouth shut the entire time, I promise!" Goten emphasized on his word with drawing his hands together.

"You're scatter-brained and too honest for your own good, Goten," Trunks rebutted relentlessly as he rose high in the air. "You're bound to do something that will blow our cover!"

"No fair!" Goten slammed his fists on his thighs furiously. "I'm gonna tell your mom!"

"Why... you backstabber!" Trunks cried irately, taking his eyes off the sky once again to bare his teeth predatorily at him. "Are you gonna rat on your best friend?"

"Hmph! You're the one who's leaving me out and hogging all the fun to yourself!" Goten huffed, folding his arms over his chest as he turned his face away sulkingly.

"Like I said, what's the use of taking you along if we're gonna end up in the police station and chewed out by our mothers?" Trunks lashed out, losing his patience. "Besides, if you're that desperate to see a girl naked, why don't you do a search on the internet or something?"

"How can I?'' Goten grumbled, "mom made Gohan install parental control into my computer and frequently checks my history!"

The scene shifted back to Trunks' room that was bathed in the late afternoon sunlight. Trunks was lying on his stomach on the bed, working through his pile of homework, while as Goten was sitting at the desk, surfing the internet as he took occasional handfuls of the cookies that grandmother Briefs had baked. They had ended up making a deal that Goten would not breathe a word about the fake IDs if Trunks allowed him to use his laptop to look at naked girls pictures. Trunks had also consoled him that he will take him along next year and will think about making a stop at the strip club. Trunks did not know if it was due to having a feminist of a mother, but strippers, models, porn stars and every woman that solely relied on her looks and sexuality to make an impression turned him off. Besides, he did not want to be lumped together with losers who got their kicks from watching a woman undress, shake her naked hips and smile from ear to ear as pictures were taken of her by hundreds of cell phones.

"Trunks, she's flat down there, how does she pee?" Goten exclaimed shockingly, pointing at the first result that he had clicked on.

"Because men and women are built differently, Goten," Trunks laughed amusedly as he wrote a set of chemical equations in answer to the homework question. "You'll learn more about it in biology next year!"

"Oh!" Goten placed a finger on his chin as he looked ponderingly at the woman who placed her red, long nails on her thighs that she had parted for the camera. All he knew about women was that they had breasts, had a weaker build than men and their voices did not change nor did they need to shave when they grew up.

"You know," Trunks teased, rubbing his wrist after writing a long paragraph answer, "once it occurs to you that she's posing for money and that countless other guys must have ogled her and masturbated to her pic, all the appeal is lost!"

"Aww, you killjoy!" Goten pouted. "What's 'masturbated' by the way?"

"It's touching yourself while having lewd thoughts about a certain woman."

Goten did not understand why he would want to touch himself while thinking about a girl. Did Trunks mean like when wrapping your arms around yourself and imagining that you were holding her?

With that lingering puzzlement, Goten clicked the next arrow, and became hypnotized by the size of the thing that popped up on the screen. "Whoa! I've never seen boobs this big before!" He almost had a nosebleed as he tried to figure out her bra size. "They're huge! They're even bigger than your-"

Goten smacked his mouth shut, but Trunks narrowed his icy blue eyes at him as he guessed the word that finished that sentence. A shiver traveled up Goten's spine as the bed behind him creaked and suddenly, he found Trunks standing behind him. His body broke in a cold sweat as Trunks craned his head over his shoulder to take a closer look, and the bed creaked once more when he went back to his homework, commenting offhandedly, "They look fake!"

"How do you know?" Goten piped shockingly as he turned around in his chair, straddling it.

"Her buttocks are glued to her pelvic bones, with no fat layer in between to make them look proportional in size to her chest," Trunks explained, not lifting his eyes from the molecular structure that he was drawing neatly with a ruler. "Not to mention, her hips are too narrow and her ribs are poking through her skin."

"But look at her face." Goten folded his arms over his chest and tilted his head. "She looks healthy enough, and she's unbelievably pretty!"

"Her cheeks and lips are unnaturally plump, which makes her reeking of surgery. With surgery nowadays, even a butt-ugly witch can become Miss World."

"Still, you gotta admit that thanks to surgery, the number of hot girls is on the rise!" Goten murmured, his bubble already burst as he could not help but imagine how this woman looked like before inflating her face like a balloon.

The silence that followed was broken by the humming of the laptop's processor and pencil scratching. Goten could not help but be mesmerized by the envied speed at which Trunks wrote down his answers, without pausing to contemplate them or referring to his books. If it were him, he would be stabbing his forehead with the pencil eraser in bafflement and end up opening the window to fly over to Gohan's for help. And even then, Gohan would refuse to help with anything further than explaining the mechanism and solving an example, since 'he will be on his own in the exam'!

Goten faced the monitor again and the clicking of mouse blended with the sound of the pencil. He laughed as something occurred to him, "You know, just a few years ago, all what we talked about was toys and games. Our interests have changed, even the things that we do behind our mothers' backs have gotten more extreme!"

Trunks chuckled reminiscently, and added as he raised his tea cup that cooled down by now, "And here's to us talking in a week or so about what we did last Saturday night with our girlfriends!"

At the mentioning of that, Goten had to ask, "Say, Trunks, what kind of girls are you into?"

"Someone who isn't loose, an airhead or a silicon deposit!"

"I wonder where you can find that?" Goten laughed at the Trunks-like answer. He interlocked his hands behind his head and rocked himself in the chair. "Girly girls can be found in malls and outside of beauty salons, while as nerds hang out in the libraries or in bookstores. Imagine if it will turn out like one of those teen movies… like when the nerd undergoes a makeover and transforms into this entirely new girl to catch your attention… or like when the girly girl throws away her romance novels and starts reading the papers to impress you with her vocab!"

Trunks laughed at his exploration of the topic. However, his laughter died out when he caught something blue out of the corner of his eyes.

"What's wrong?" Goten turned around in concern, and flinched as he found Bra, suspended in midair. She looked like a piglet with her nostrils, cheeks and chubby hands pressed against the window, and his fright doubled as he noted that her big, blue eyes were glued to the monitor and the X-rated picture displayed on it!

"B-Bra…" Goten approached her, extending one shaky hand and plastering a smile that turned out panicky and creepy.

"Mom!" Bra shrieked, flying away from the window, "Trunks and Goten are looking at a girl showing her no-no part!"

"Bra, wait!" Goten cracked pleadingly as he slid the window open.

"Bleeeeeh!" Bra turned around, sticking out her tongue as she pulled down one eyelid. "Mom is talking on the phone with aunt Chichi right now. Bra is a good girl; she'll tell mom to tell aunt Chichi that Goten is a bad boy who peeps at girls!"

"Please, don't!" Goten leapt off the window and flew after her. He dreaded the verbal lashing and the tightening of the surveillance on him when his mother finds out that her Goten, who she had raised with her hands, was heading down the road of becoming another Muten Roshi: the person who she regarded the biggest loser on earth. "Let's make a deal: I'll play with you and your dolls, I'll play house with you, you can even dress me up and apply makeup on me!"

They circled each other for a while, until Bra made an emergency landing in front of the gravity simulator and pounded the door. "Daddy, that creep is chasing Bra!"

Trunks watched through the window with his face in his palm. He felt sorry for Goten when his father slammed the simulator's door open and fired a ki blast that made him drop like a fly sprayed with insecticide. His friend was fretting over nothing: his mother will write it off as 'teen curiosity' and suggest to get a girlfriend instead. Maybe also, being the romanticist that she was, would volunteer with a wink to play the matchmaker for them.

Matching your parents' height only to find out that you are not yet on equal footing with them… getting your driver's license only to find out that you cannot drive wherever and for how late you like. Detecting the change in your voice, starting to shave, getting your ID, graduating high school... adolescence felt like a purgatory between childhood and adulthood, and he still had a few years to go to enjoy all the freedoms that life had to offer.