"Naah," he answered. "I can't overtrain." He then winked at me, and whispered "it's a secret."

" I wish I could be as strong and muscular as you are, Tony," I told him. He paused in his curls and looked at me.

"I think you have a great body already. But you could easily get as big as me, bigger probably, 'cause your older. The same way I did." Now he had my attention.

"Check this out," he said, and pointed to a spiral notebook on his desk under the computer. I pulled it out and opened it, and on the first page there were a few pictures on Tony, in a bathing suit on a beach, but at a much younger age, maybe about 6 or 7 or so. The writing underneath said "Wildwood Crest, 7 years old." I could tell it was him, that beautiful face and eyes, and an average skinny body for a 6 or 7 year old, but nothing out of the ordinary.

"You had a normal body at 7 years old, so when did you start getting so big?" I asked.

"Turn the pages, and see," he replied.

The next page was Wildwood Crest again, this time at 8 years old. Tony had grown A LOT from 7 to 8 years old, and now looked like a slightly bigger than average 8 year old - nothing too out of the ordinary, even though it was more of an improvement than you'd expect to see in a boy going from 7 to 8 years old. His shoulder muscles had really built up in that year, and his chest showed some real muscle - not the ribs-poking-through look that he had at 7. The page after that, at 9 years old, started showing really radical changes to his body. Noticeably increased muscularity and definition, and a much bigger bulge in his bathing suit than any 9 year old I've ever seen. I turned page after page and saw Tony's development from a cute but average bodied 7 year old, until the last picture in the notebook, captioned "Wildwood Crest, 12 years old" In that picture, Tony was similar to the way he looked now, only a bit smaller in muscle and height.

"We go to Wildwood every summer, my mom and me. We're going there in two months, after school's over for the year." I realized Tony's 13 year old picture would continue the incredible growth that he'd documented over the previous 6 years.

"So, how did you go from a normal 7 year old to how you are now at 13," I asked him.

"I work out!" he said with a grin.

"Yeah, lots of people work out, and nobody looks like you do at 13 year old!"

Then he began to tell me how, just before his 8th birthday, he was biking around town when he came across this gypsy carnival troupe setting up a number of tents on the outskirts of town. I remembered that carnival troupe really well. They stopped by our town every few years. Their carnival was always kind of lame, old and decrepit. And, it seemed to be more about fortune tellers and freaks of nature than rides (which is what I like). Anyway Tony said he peeked his head inside a tent to see what was going on, and he saw the Carnival's strongman doing exercises. The strongman was, as you might expect in a Gypsy carnival, a bit scary looking, with the hugest arms Tony had ever seen - even bigger than in the Muscle magazines he so loved to look at. His whole body was huge with bulging muscles, but his arms were unbelievable - almost abnormally huge. This excited him, he said, and he continued to watch. Eventually the strongman, a guy named Ivan, saw him watching, and they became friends of sorts.

During the week that the carnival was in town, Tony hung out with his new friend the Strongman most afternoons, eventually convinced that he too wanted to be a strongman.

"Anybody can be a big muscular man, Tony" Ivan told the worshipful boy. "The trick is to make the most of your exercises." He then shared the secret.

To make a long story short, the secret Ivan told Tony was that a special plant, prepared in a special manner and eaten in a special way, could basically super-charge your body, making you respond to exercise something like ten times faster than normal without any chance of over-training, and increases your potential growth too. And not just in muscle size and strength. A student could take the plant, and his studying would become easier as the effort of learning actually made him more intelligent. "But brains is not what I desired out of the plant," Ivan told Tony with a smile.

"There is only one problem. You see, the plant will only work on certain kinds of men. I think you may be too young to know if you are the right kind of boy or not." Ivan then told Tony how to find and prepare the plant, and at last gave him this warning:

"The plant need only be taken once. Even eating it every day will not be different from eating is just that one time. Once you have eaten the plant, your body will never be the same. You must be careful with how you treat your body, for it will respond to the least stimulus. When I was first given the plant, when I was 16 years old, for the next week I did nothing but dumbbell curls over and over again. Barely 5 hours of sleep each night, just curl after curl. I didn't seem to get tired at all. Little did I know that once you have consumed the plant, you cannot overtrain. My arms grew too much that week, and ever since then, my biceps have been out of proportion to the rest of my body. Of course, little boys like you grow more slowly than older boys like I was. (That part of the story really got my attention.) But still, always remember to work out your whole body equally."

"And that was 6 years ago," Tony told me. "I found and prepared the plant like Ivan said, and ate it, and since then, my body has responded better to exercises than anybody. Not just my muscles, too. When I study really hard, it seems like my brain gets smarter. When I'm running, it's like the further I go, the more energy I have. And," he grinned at me, "the more I jerk off, the bigger my dick gets!." I looked down and saw that his raging hard on was back. "And that happens a lot more than it should. I've been studying up on it, and I know that I jerk off more than most guys my age do- or guys any age do. Ivan didn't tell me about that side effect."

By now, I'd heard all I needed to hear. I wanted to be a part of the secret. •