One afternoon, Nicholas Notts was reading a book on Roman history at his desk. He closed the book and looked out his bedroom window. He often took forlorn glances out his window, wanting to explore the world and get away from his controlling parents. His parents mean well, but they have meticulously controlled his life since birth. Since a very young age, Nicholas has been confined to a wheelchair due to a medical condition. Once Nicholas became paralyzed from the waist down, his parents felt the need to protect their son from the dangers of the world. They homeschooled him, forbade him from using the internet, and only allowed him to hang out with other children that they knew well and trusted. As a result of his upbringing, Nicholas was very well-read, intelligent, and thoughtful, but was as sheltered as they come. Now that Nicholas was 18 years old, the desire to break away from his parents’ grasp grew stronger each day.

His parents bought him a telescope and a binoculars because he convinced them he would chart the stars and watch for birds, but he mostly used the binoculars for spying into the lives of his neighbors. From his window, he could see three different yards. Directly across from his window was the Shaw house, where Mr. and Mrs. Shaw lived. From his window, Nicholas could see the left side of the Shaw house, including an unused bedroom. Nicholas remembered that there was a girl who used to live there--Dana--but she had been gone for many years to college. He assumed it was her bedroom still. Then there was the Rubin’s house that abutted the Shaws to the rear. Nicholas had to go all the way to the right of his window in order to look far enough across to the left to see the Rubin’s house. He needed his binoculars to see anything in detail, but he could see the entire back of their house, including a second floor balcony, and a little garden area that Mrs. Rubin kept very tidy. He liked watching the Rubin’s three cats mill about the yard and try to catch birds. But more than that, he loved the occasional glimpse of Mrs. Rubin that he would see when she was walking around her bedroom in her negligee, or sometimes in a bra and panties.

Because Nicholas’ parents hardly ever let him use the internet, he had to go through the urges of puberty using whatever he could. Most times, that meant stealing one of his mother’s clothing magazines or sale papers and looking at the women’s lingerie and underwear sections. He first learned how to masturbate to a store’s sale paper picture of a red-haired woman with a plain white bra. He remembered being so shocked at the strange white liquid spilling out of him that he was embarrassed and had to destroy the sale paper and pray his mother didn’t find it had gone missing. Luckily, she did not. Other times, when he could not acquire a sales paper, he used the medical textbook he had in his room that had a sterile illustration of the woman’s body, complete with nipples and vagina. It was not much, but he had to satisfy his urges. When Nicholas finally got his binoculars, he was delighted to find he could see into the Rubin’s bedroom, though it was obscured by a screen. He had a real, live woman to jerk it to, and he was completely willing to ignore the fact that Mrs. Rubin had a frumpy body, and sagging breasts. She was 48 years old and was not the ideal “girl next door,” but Nicholas did not exactly know that.

Sometimes in public or in the glimpses of TV he would get from the rare visits to a friend’s house, Nicholas would see a younger woman with an attractive body, a small waist, large breasts, and so on. He was constantly amazed when he saw these women, having become accustomed to Mrs. Rubin and the boring illustration in his textbook. But, seeing this type of woman was rare and he was still in the dark about the female form, and sex was entirely foreign to him. His mother chose to skip that subject in his homeschooling lessons, and he didn’t volunteer to hear about sex from his own mother. He was also too sheepish to ask his dad, who wouldn't have much to offer on that subject had Nicholas asked, because Mrs. Notts was the only woman he had ever been with. Nicholas was tired of his boring life confined to his prison of a room. He knew so much about history, philosophy, mathematics, and the world from his reading, but he longed to experience it himself. He wanted to meet and talk to people, he wanted to travel, he wanted to touch and be touched by a woman.