Chapter 5

After I left the library, my mind started to clear from the hormone fog it had been in. It was then that the reality of what I had done was started to hit me.

I had stolen Ileana’s panties after taking her in the student lounge area. It was an insanely, intensely stupid idea that had sounded good to me in my post orgasmic stupor, but now could only serve to leave a trail toward who had been inside her.

The rest of the day I was expecting to be asked to report to the office, to be met by tall, burly men with badges and guns.

If I could have disposed of her panties during the school day, I would have. But I couldn’t think of a plausible way to explain why I had girls panties in my backpack. If I took them out in the bathroom to throw away, what if someone suddenly came into the men’s room? There I would be, caught, the evidence in my hand.

Of course, in hindsight, I realized I didn’t have to worry at all about getting caught disposing of her panties. I owned a frelling time machine, for lack of a better term.

But, at the time, this didn’t occur to me. I had evidence that could tie me to her, and I was running on fear. I had to find a way to get rid of them, and it couldn’t be at school, and definitely not at home.

That night I sneaked out of the house, tied Ileana’s panties to a rock, and sunk them into the Wabash river.

But simply stealing Ileana’s panties was just the outward sign of something that had changed within me that day. I took something from her, because I wanted to give something to her too.

I had never thought that I would even have the opportunity for procreation. Now, possibilities surrounded me, and I was drunk on the idea. It was a foreign concept to me.

I had said that I was unpopular among my peers. That was putting it mildly. I wasn’t just unpopular, I was a virtual pariah. It seemed that, to those around me, anything I was interested in was tainted, and had to be eliminated.

Classmates routinely banged on my bedroom window, terrorizing me at all hours of the night. There were nights I wouldn’t get any sleep, as my classmates would terrorize me in shifts.

The tires of our family cars were slashed so often, we had to not only build a garage to protect them, we had to then install a security system and surveillance, because the garage would then be broken into, and the tires slashed again.

Even man’s best friend was denied me. We dared not have a dog. We found that out the hard way, after the second one was poisoned and died.

In short, my peers made my life a hell. And I knew I wasn’t alone. I was sure that, across the country, kids with well above average intelligence were being bullied and tormented.

But, what if it didn’t have to be that way? Sure, eventually my peers would (hopefully) grow out of their juvenile ways. But what if there was a way to change the landscape?

The reason why people like me were ostracized and tormented was because we were the exceptional ones, the ones who could see and do things that the average teen or preteen couldn’t.

But, how would lives improve if there were more exceptionally smart people? People like myself wouldn’t be the outliers, but a reasonable demographic in the community. What if, instead of one Bradley Wheeler in a grade level, there were thirty? What would the community look like then?

I would have to play the long-game. I couldn’t relieve my own torment, but I could stop it before it even began for an entire generation.

All I had to do was ensure that the DNA from a high intelligence individual was given the chance to be passed along to future generations.

Well, it’s a dirty job, but someones got to do it.

I had to admit, my plan did smack a little of Eugenics. But, I assured myself, I wasn’t trying to create a master race. I was just trying to help future bright people not have to go through what I had to endure.

So I decided that, to borrow an older term, very soon people would start to notice that there had to be “something in the water”.