Chapter 10

“If privacy had a gravestone it might read: ‘Don’t Worry. This Was for Your Own Good.’”
—John Twelve Hawks, The Dark River

I FELT GUILTY. Really, really guilty.

I was having sex—I’m a good bit older than Clinton, so when I was raised oral sex was still sex—with two teenage girls, one of whom was my sister. I was only moderately upset about the incest angle. I suppose SOL was partly responsible for that. I’d enjoyed a lot of brother-sister incest stories on that site. I could almost always figure an erection was in the offing if the story was written halfway decently. I didn’t have a big fascination with getting girls pregnant. I’d done that and pregnant women can be a bitch. But the forbidden nature of the contact, the tension that came from a brother and sister near in age—especially twins—the subtle opportunities, all added up to build more tension in my mind than the standard boy meets girl/boy fucks girl scenario.

But not my sister. Yuck! Ish! Gag! In 1952, my sister was already the biggest bitch I knew and well on her way to becoming a pregnant bitch. When she left home the next year, she never returned. I visited her out of filial obligation at her home in Missouri about five years after I got out of college and she was still a bitch. The Em of V3 was so different from the Emily of V1 that I could barely register her as related.

But one thing I had avoided on SOL was anything that smacked of intergenerational incest. Mother/son, father/daughter, uncle/niece ... They made me sick. I even had trouble with stories where a guy in his twenties, thirties, or forties landed a fourteen-year-old as the devoted love of his life. In the world I lived in, that was disgusting and abusive. Men went to jail for that. So did women.

And that is what had me feeling really, really guilty. In my head, I was eighty-one years old and I was having sex with not one but two seventeen-year-old girls. I had great-grandchildren almost that age! I should be in jail. Maybe if I’d been sent back to 1952 into my fourteen-year-old body, I wouldn’t have felt so guilty because I remembered myself and the girls in that era. A kid like me would never have had the opportunity to have sex with one of them. But this wasn’t 1952. This was 2018 and the kids I saw that year as V1 were children to me. What the fuck was I doing?

On the other hand, my fourteen-year-old body didn’t give a fuck about what the old fart was thinking. And, in fact, it was all too ready to take whatever opportunity was given to it to hump and come.

I was feeling really, really guilty.

The circumference of a circle is 2πr. The area of a circle is πr^2. Now, how do I find the volume of a sphere? It seemed like it should be the area of a circle times the circumference. So how did that come out to V=4/3 πr^3?

I’d been practicing and reviewing my math facts in my head ever since I first saw my textbook. Technically, I was enrolled in Algebra 1 and the problems I currently reviewed were geometry. But I’d had all these classes before. Granted, I’d been older when I took them. In the V1 timeframe, we had Algebra 1 as a freshman, geometry as a sophomore, algebra 2 and trigonometry as a junior, and ‘advanced math’ as a senior. We didn’t really get into pre-calculus or calculus until we were in college. My goal in this timeline was to test out of as much math as I could so I could focus on something else. The advanced curriculum for our high school said that I should be through calculus by the time I graduated. I’d finished the entire Algebra 1 workbook and was trying to review geometry while I could.

Mechanical engineering had been fine my first go-round. I’d done well and retired after forty-five years in my profession. But I had the opportunity to do something else this time around. I had a notion that I’d like to write books. To do that, I needed a heavier load of English than I’d taken the first time around. To get a heavier load of English, I needed to get clear of my math requirements.

It took me forever to find out what the requirements were for graduation. I didn’t intend to rush through my high school years and graduate early so I could be the youngest in my college classes. That just didn’t make sense. The first time through, there weren’t that many options. I just took the courses the school said I needed to take. The only choice I can remember was what language I needed to study and whether I’d take chemistry or physics as my second science requirement.

Mom and Dad had enrolled me for my freshman classes and wisely kept the load in the first semester to a minimum. Once they saw I was going to be out of school for at least two if not three months, they enrolled me in classes that they thought I could catch up on at home. I had Algebra 1, Freshman English, Human Geography, and Health and Wellness. I’d need to pick up additional credits in order to catch up with where I should be by the end of freshman year. If I could test out of Algebra 1 and move straight to Geometry, it would help.

I saw the school had a physical education requirement. Not likely that I’d get to that this year. I bet no one in gym class was working anywhere near as hard as I was in Physical Therapy.

V1 had complained that ‘they weren’t teaching kids’ in school these days. I was beginning to change my opinion about that. To my V3 mind, the curriculum was more advanced as a freshman than it had been the first time around. Molly was helping me. Francie was helping me. I was looking forward to going back to school and learning something new.

I had another thing on my mind that was causing me to lose sleep at night. Apparently, I was going to have plenty of nights alone to lose sleep during. Francie hadn’t come back after Monday afternoon. Em told me she was sick and the doctor was concerned about the baby. And Em didn’t stop by after her date Friday night. She’d proceeded to break up with Robbie and was out ‘with a group of friends’ for the evening on Friday.

Meanwhile, my eighty-year-old head was puzzling about the nature of traveling between realities. One of the things that always puzzled me when I read do-over stories was the butterfly effect. Supposedly, any change in a reality could affect—sometimes adversely—the entire world. A butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil or something and the eventual result is a typhoon in Japan. The stories I’d read all had protagonists who went back to their own timelines with the knowledge of everything that would happen in the next thirty to fifty years. I always wondered how Tom winning a longshot ticket on the Kentucky Derby would affect the lives of all the people who in his first time around had bet and won a small amount of money or even a large amount and now the result was significantly different. Person A never won a million dollars because the odds had changed so severely by Tom’s bet. Therefore, Person A could not pay off the mortgage and the family fell apart. Or perhaps Person B got a lot of money for the ‘Place’ bet that he made and left his family to run away with his mistress to Antarctica or some God-forsaken place.

Everything a person did affected what would follow, including a ripple of events changed by that one action. If I had not come back to become V3, V2 would have died. He’d never have made love with either Francie or his sister. Would Em have become Mrs. Robbie, forever bitter because he just couldn’t flip her switch on? Would Francie be sick and under doctor’s care with her baby if V3 hadn’t licked her to a delirious orgasm? Was I carrying some germ that affected her? It made my head hurt.

I suppose, though, that I couldn’t claim to affect the continuum. After all, V2 had not lived this life before. There was no future for me to change. My foreknowledge was non-existent, though I had excellent historical knowledge. I sure didn’t need to study history. I didn’t know who was going to win the next election, what team would win the world series, or when the stock market was going to spike or crash. The future was as unknown to me as it was to everyone else.

I guess that should have relaxed me, knowing that no one in this timeline had already had a life lived up to 2050 that I was going to change by licking Francie’s pussy. But in fact, I became more acutely aware that everything I did was going to have an effect on the future. Basically, I wasn’t supposed to be here. If there was such a thing as fate or a plan for this timeline, I screwed it up by living.

I didn’t have nightmares that week, but I didn’t sleep well, either.

Now that I was mobile, Molly’s hours had been reduced. I’d moved to crutches but had to have the kind which fit up in my armpits because I couldn’t support my weight on my hands yet. I was getting better at it. I had weights on my wrists and ankles all the time. I did my routine exercises before Molly got there in the morning and had even succeeded in doing a pushup. Sit-ups were no problem and I hammered twenty-five out easily. I was upping the number gradually but Molly didn’t want me to stress anything. She suggested doing my basic routine twice a day rather than doubling the number at once.