Chapter 4: College Jitters

August 5th - August 17th, 1987

“NO!! SARAH!! NO!!” Joey cried just before he fell out of the bed.

Nearly falling out of bed after him, I said, “Joey! It’s okay! It was only a dream!”

“NO! I SHOT HER! I SHOT SARAH! I REMEMBER! I DID IT! IT WAS ME!” Joey continued as he struggled to get free of the covers.

I realized he was lost in the emotions his dream had produced, and just as he got to his feet intending to run, I tackled him back to the floor and held onto him with everything I had while he went into a hysterical fit.

The twins helped the best they could but left to use the toilets once Joey had worn himself out. Before Joey dropped back asleep, I had managed to piece his dream together from the fragments his terrified mind had recalled.

His dream was a combination of real events and imaginary ones, the imaginary ones having come from Steven’s tampering of Joey’s memory. From what I saw, Joey had taken on the role of both Steven, himself, and Tammy’s old master, where he raped, enslaved, brainwashed, toyed with, mistreated, and finally shot his sixteen-year-old sister in the head.

The worse part was Joey had done almost everything he experienced in the dream, and at the time, he had loved doing it. While he had been settling down from his fit, I found Joey still believed he had killed his sister and wasn’t listening to me, even when I thought directly to his mind.

It took me a while to go back to sleep, and when the twins woke me up doing their morning rounds, I snapped at them and sent them away with their feelings hurt.

I was relieved to find Joey’s sense of reality had returned, but I could still see the horror in his eyes. He didn’t say a word to me, just moved towards me and started crying.

The weekend before our very first Halloween together in first grade, our moms took us out to get Halloween costumes together. I was so excited about getting to go trick or treating in a real subdivision, I think I must have been talking the moms’ ears off repeating everything Joey had told me about it and what our plans were that year. I didn’t notice how reserved Joey was until we got back from the store and he didn’t want to play.

At that time, I didn’t know much about Sarah besides she had been Joey’s sister and had died. Joey never talked about her, and whenever Margaret mentioned her around the two of us, Joey would get frustrated and want to leave the room. Sarah’s bedroom was like a shrine where all her things were kept exactly where she had left them.

When Joey told me he didn’t want to play after getting back from the store, I recognized the same feeling of frustration along with something painful. It just suddenly clicked in my head that it had been Sarah who had taken him trick or treating last year, and my talking about it had stirred up his feelings.

In a burst of empathy, I hugged him and said, “I’m sorry she’s not here to take us both.”

He started crying, which only made me cry, then his mom wrapped her arms around us and ended up crying a little too, all in front of his house. My mom ended up shewing us inside, and then the moms made us some hot chocolate as Joey started telling me everything about his big sister.

From that day on, Joey and I never pretended to be tough around each other in private. I can’t tell you how many times we had shared tears over things we wouldn’t even admit to our parents. Though, most of those tears were out the fear of one of us moving away before we became immune to that worry. The older we got, the less crying we did, but we never held it back if we had the need to do so.

Not hiding our tears and/or fears from each other was one of the most sacred brotherly things we did together. I suppose that’s why Joey got so upset with me after I had that dream freshman year. Instead of going to him with it, I had shut him out.

I fell asleep holding Joey’s head against me, but I don’t think he went back to sleep at all. For when I opened my eyes, Joey lifted his head and smiled weakly at me, saying, “It’s about time you woke up.”

I asked him, “Are you okay?”

“No. Tim, I want to go find her. I want to forge my way into college, join that fraternity, and find out if my sister is alive or not.”

“Joey, we can’t join that fraternity. Ron knows we’re not old enough. He’d blow the whistle.”

“Can’t the twins do something to make him forget us?”

“Where did you get that idea?”

“Your dad said something about how the twins might be able to blank some of my memories if I couldn’t handle them.”

“Oh,” I said, blinking while I absorbed that fact.

I then shook my head and asked, “What about Jason? He’s going to join it too, and I doubt they can make him forget us very easily.”

“Then we’ll just make them transfer to another school. Look, you know I can’t do this without you. I can’t promise you anything in return because I don’t have anything to give you. But without you...”

I said with exasperation, “Will you stop? I didn’t say I wasn’t going to help you find her. But we need more information to plan this out right, and I have some ideas of my own that you might not have thought of.”

Joey and I spent the entire morning exchanging our ideas, arguing over which made more sense until Joey finally agreed we simply had to have more information before we could do anything.

We found that Ron and Jason had left that morning to get Jason ready for the initiation into the fraternity. Usually, the fraternity only allowed new members to join during mid-semesters, right after the initiates had endured a vigorous and intensive bodybuilding program run by the fraternity’s upperclassmen.

Because Jason had been able to continue his bodybuilding while in hiding with his parents, the fraternity was making an exception for Jason by holding his initiation ritual the week before classes began. They apparently had been impressed by his determination when he proved to the fraternity’s higher council he had surpassed their entry requirements by nearly 50%. And I’m sure Ron had a hand in getting Jason’s entry approved.

Even if I didn’t already know there was an ulterior goal behind the fraternity, it was plain there was something fishy about it. Anyone accepted into the fraternity stayed in it until they graduated, their members having the highest grades and the largest muscles. Their parties were the best, their sexual habits were always safe, and no one ever saw a member high on drugs or even smoke a cigarette. They were too good to be true, but no one seemed to find that suspicious.

Joey and I had gotten most of this information from Pete, but once he couldn’t tell us anything else, he pointed us to the exact kind of person we were looking for.

Fredrick Paul Brown - Fred to his friends and Freddie to his loved ones - had just graduated from Northwest State and happened to be an alumni of Gamma Alpha Eta, the fraternity Ron was a member of at Central State. Joey and I couldn’t believe our good fortune of finding that Fred had undergone the same programming Ron had. I wasn’t able to detect whether his hidden personality was still there or not, and there was no sign of any overlooked memories, but his mind was littered with foggy blank areas, and his huge muscular body was probably proof enough. No one could get that big without something extraordinary making him do it.

Fred was friendly enough to talk to us about Gamma Alpha Eta and such, but he kind of brushed us off after fulfilling his duty to his frat brothers. His mind was full of expectations about his new job waiting for him three states away. After a few minutes of discussion outside his parent’s home, Joey convinced me we had to take him home and see what my dad could make of him.

Twenty minutes later, Fred was packing his suitcase with excitement equal to landing that job he wasn’t starting for another week. He couldn’t believe his new boss had given him the extra time to go and live with his two new best friends before moving away and probably never seeing them again.

Joey and I became completely consumed in preparing for our self-assigned mission. Surprisingly, my mom and dad didn’t even try to talk us out of it once our intentions became clear, but my mom later clued me in why.

“Timmy, I’ve been talking to Dr. Cain. She explained to me that what you’re doing right now is trying to take back control.”

I objected, saying, “I’m not trying to control anything. I just want to help Joey.”

“Listen to me. Your life was hijacked and you were helpless to prevent what happened to some of the people you were closest to. This quest to find Joey’s sister is your way of trying to take control of your life back and, in some sense, take revenge from what happened to you all.”

When I opened my mouth to protest again, my mom said in her parental no-buts tone, “Just hear me out. Your father and I think that despite the risks involved, focusing on this will help both you and Joey regain your confidence in yourselves and in each other. But don’t think for a moment that what you are doing isn’t being motivated by your emotions.”

I sighed and said, “I know. But I’m doing it more to prove to Joey how much I trust him and how I’ll stand by him no matter what than trying to prove something to myself. And after everything we just went through, I’m not going to take any chances. We’ll be very careful.”

“So, you’ll promise me you’ll contact us before you take any action against this man and his people?”

“Unless they discover us, yes. I promise.”

“And what will you do if Joey doesn’t agree with you? He’s not anywhere near normal yet, and he’ll likely be emotionally disturbed for months. He’s going to be susceptible to making bad decisions while he’s stressed. If you are trying to prove something to him, where are you going to draw the line?”

“He can’t do anything without me there and he knows it. Joey’s already agreed we both have to be sure of something before we do it. Besides, he’s more scared of getting caught than I am. If it becomes too much, he can drop out and go home.”

“Just him?”

I shrugged and said, “It’ll depend on whether we’re getting anywhere or not.”

At that point, my mom basically said they had the right to pull the plug on this whole operation if they felt we weren’t properly prepared, but then promised she and my dad would do their best to help us.

My parents mainly helped by testing and launching surprise attacks on the cover personalities Joey and I were constructing. I knew they were doing it so they could feel a little more comfortable knowing that we were safe behind a mental cloak that even they couldn’t penetrate.

The mental cloak that Melissa helped me develop was nowhere near as thorough as her own, but I believe that was because Melissa’s cover personality had been formed over years of growing up in a hostile place, obtaining its own set of memories which were from real events.

Joey’s and my cover personalities were composed of as many real memories as possible, but because we were only halfway through high school, and most of those memories were inappropriate, we had a lot of trouble filling that area in with something that felt believable.

We were under a great deal of pressure to get our cover personalities worked out, forge our enrollment at Northwest State, gather as much information as we could to help us prepare for college and getting into the fraternity, all while dealing with the hysterical fits Joey had nearly every night after waking up from another nightmare.

My dad’s people running the Grodmen Academic Foundation took care of getting us accepted at Northwest State and my dad somehow supplied all the documentation to enroll under false names.

I barely had time to say goodbye to Holly before she and Tammy left Wednesday for a university in Texas. I felt so guilty for not spending any more time with her, but she didn’t seem to be upset with me. I couldn’t help feeling she had lost interest in me, especially the way she just told me to take care of Midge and left with only a peck on the cheek.

But I didn’t have time to dwell on Holly’s departure. Joey had decided it was time to wake up his mom and dad, and on Thursday morning, he kissed them both, hoping they would make faster recoveries than he and Suzi had.

Based on Dana’s and Jerry’s recovery from their wipes which had gone a lot quicker the Joey’s and Suzi’s, we believed the first two or three days were the most important in restoring someone to their former selves. Joey believed that because he had gone through the experience himself, he would have an easier time helping them than any of us. But once their memories started to come back, Joey was overwhelmed by their emotional hell, and I spent the whole day Friday trying to keep him busy while my mom and Joey’s paternal grandparents took over the job.

Saturday was truly a day of hell. While classes didn’t start until Monday, we were supposed to have moved into the dorms on Friday. Both of us knew we weren’t ready for college, but we had prepared too much to wait for the following semester. The idea of going back to high school seemed completely out of the question, but we simply didn’t feel we had had enough time preparing ourselves for passing off as college ‘men’. High school classes didn’t start until the following Monday.

Fred ended up being the deciding factor that had us pack our bags that night. He convinced us we were only feeling what every college freshman felt before leaving home for school the first time, and that there were always a couple of guys who looked too young to be in college.

Even the fact that Joey and I only had to shave more than our lip once every two weeks didn’t seem to persuade Fred’s assurances we were as ready as we could be. Of course, he didn’t know what we had been preparing for. As far as Fred was concerned, we were just two really young looking guys who had needed his assurances and insight about college life. He didn’t know that while he was telling us everything he remembered from his college experience, my dad was picking his brain with a small but extremely sharp mental blade.

The things my dad was able to pull from the foggy areas of Fred’s memory convinced Joey that Sarah was alive and a slave at one of the state universities. The first thing my dad pieced together was a memory of one of Fred’s daily visits to a medical laboratory where at least twenty medical students were working.

Fred just walked right in, took a form from a bin near the door, wrote his name, the time, and his student id number on it, then removed his shirt and looked for the first available station. The two lab assistants at the station he picked took Fred’s blood pressure and other measurements, then Fred removed the small pin from his pierced nipple and stood still while one of them inserted a short needle into the top hole, puncturing the skin inside.

Fred didn’t seem to feel anything but a mild tingle as the lab assistant extracted several cc’s of a faintly yellow liquid. The extraction took several minutes to complete, and once the assistant seemed satisfied by the amount, he called the other one over while removing the syringe section, leaving the needle section stuck in Fred’s nipple.

The first assistant took the syringe away while the other returned with another syringe filled with a clear liquid. She attached the syringe to the needle, then proceeded to inject the contents into the same place the other had come from. When she finished, the syringe and needle were removed, and Fred automatically reinserted the sterilized nipple pin, put his shirt on and left.

Apparently, he did this three times a day without having any conscious memory of doing it, and this seemed to make up the largest portion of the blank spots in his memory.

But not all of them. In fact, the most important piece of information we got came from a week he couldn’t consciously recall living.

A few weeks after his initiation into the fraternity and the programming of his mind by an unseen person, one of the senior brothers told Fred to meet some of the other new members outside at 2:00am, and to follow the instructions given to him by the masked stranger who showed up.

When a woman appeared wearing a black ski mask, she ordered the group to close their eyes and to put on the blindfolds she passed out. One by one, they were led into what felt like a school bus and were told to go to sleep. He never knew how long he had been asleep or how far away he had traveled before waking up in a hospital-like waiting room.

A nurse rolled a cart into the waiting room after he waited patiently in the room for a good hour. She passed out a clipboard of forms and a paper grocery bag to each of the ten young men there, then told them to fill out the forms and to write their names on the bags before stripping and putting all their clothes in it.

They followed her orders without question, then once they were all nude, she led them all down the hall to a room filled with physicians. They were given physicals, gave blood and urine samples, ran through an assortment of other tests and scans, then finally were told to lay down on a gurney and were knocked out by an injection.

Fred woke up finding his right breast burning like a bitch, but having been ordered to ignore it, he didn’t touch it or complain about in the least. Just like with Tammy, Fred found himself still nude, in strange unknown surroundings, and completely committed to please his mistress.

The woman who he and four others pleasured for six exhaustive days was not someone we had seen before, but it was perfectly obvious that while she was a telepath, she wasn’t talented or even smart enough to perform the kind of programming we had been finding. In fact, she appeared to be a spoiled brat who didn’t want to do any of the work to obtain what she wanted. It was clear she was dependent on someone else’s skill and generosity, sometimes mentioning what she was going to ask for next.

Each day they were run through the same routine, waking up in the hospital, being run through the battery of tests like cattle, then getting knocked out just to wake up with their breast feeling like it was on fire. But with the wild and frenzied sex they had after they woke, Fred didn’t seem to notice it all that much.

When Fred’s mistress would get tired of the five men’s attentions, she would entertain herself by having them wrestle and eventually fuck each other. Fred had never considered sex with another man before, but he didn’t hesitate when his mistress said so.

Fred woke up once hearing an unfamiliar voice talking to his mistress. He only caught a glance of the other woman before Fred was told to go back to sleep. Even though he didn’t get a good look at her, both Joey and I swore it looked like an older version of the woman who had met Joey’s dad with the man we were looking for.

So that was when we knew we were on the right track.

When my alarm went off at 6:00 am Sunday morning, both Joey and I tried to reach over and shut the damn thing off, neither of us succeeding because we got into each other’s way.

When I gave up and let him do it, I felt the satisfaction he got from knocking it off the nightstand, but then I had to reach down and drag it over to me by the cord to finally flip the alarm switch off.

Joey had experienced two hysterical fits during the night, and neither of us had gotten much sleep because of it.

When I sat up and tried to shake the cobwebs from my mind, Joey’s arm hooked itself around my chest and pulled me back down.

“We’re not leaving until 9:30,” he simply stated. “Go back to sleep.”

“But,” I started but was hushed by Joey’s finger over my lips.

“Shhh. I’m sleeping,” he muttered.

I looked over at him and watched his relaxed face as he breathed. It was nice to see him like that. Over the past week, his expression was always anything but relaxed, and it once again made me wonder if it was the right thing to be rushing him into this while he still didn’t have all his memories back.

For some reason, Joey couldn’t recall anything about what we did in the cell before he was brainwashed. Joey kept saying that he felt like he had lived two lives that were completely separate. With a little help, he could recall anything in his life up until the weekend Penny and Steven had kidnapped me and Suzi. Everything from that point up to and including our time spent in the cell together was completely shut out by some kind of defense mechanism. He remembered everything after that clearly. In fact, those memories and the slightly distant emotions associated with them popped into his mind at random intervals all day long.

So from Joey’s point of view, he just seemed to have woken up one day a new person without any warning. I didn’t understand why he blocked it out, but I wasn’t about to force those memories to come back when he was dealing more than he could handle already.

“You know, you worry too much,” Joey suddenly said.

Without opening his eyes, he moved closer to me and snuggled up to my side, placing a kiss on my shoulder before resting his head on it.

While Joey trusted me, I knew the trust was somewhat forced. He needed me, so he had to trust me. And he did care a lot for me, but it was more because he remembered he did. That was a lot like the remembered habits such as kissing me on the shoulder. That might sound deceptive, but it wasn’t really. Joey did a lot of things out of remembered habits. He had to or he wouldn’t know what to do in most situations. The problem was he didn’t necessarily feel the emotion that should have been behind those types of habits.

This Joey simply wasn’t the Joey he was struggling to act like. But it wasn’t due to the lack of trying. Joey truly wanted to be his old self and he thought acting like him would be the best way to become him.

I supposed I was used to the hollowness those actions felt to me. The fact that he was trying was all that really mattered. The hell he went through sometimes from just being in the same room with me was all the proof I needed to know he was worth every bit of my time and effort to help him. There were moments where I could feel Joseph’s hatred of me pouring out of him, but then somehow Joey would tamp it back into the corner of his mind it had come from. I honestly didn’t know how he did that.

Seeing he was at peace with himself for the moment, I sighed and let myself fall back asleep.

The twins didn’t bother us that morning, and even though my mom and dad knew we had planned on getting up early, they didn’t try to wake us up either. It was well after eight o’clock before I awoke again, and the first thing I saw was Joey’s sleeping face within ten inches of mine.

I studied his face, noticing how different he looked from back in junior high. I counted seventeen whiskers on his lip, thirteen on his neck and chin, and noticed for the first time he had a scar on his forehead from a long-deceased zit. His face was widening and hardening, but still had some of that soft boyish look to it yet. I felt so calm and happy just being able to study him like that, not knowing when the next time I would be able to do so would be.

Something moved in the space between us, and it took me a moment to figure out what it was. I watched Joey’s dick finish hardening while hearing his breathing change in pattern, then felt my own morning hardon arrive.

I was watching our dicks rise and fall, wondering if they would touch as they hardened and softened with our breathing. I wasn’t thinking about doing anything, it was just an innocent wandering thought.

I was surprised when Joey moved his hips forward where our cocks rubbed against each other, and I looked up to see what his intentions were. His eyes didn’t leave our dicks’ rubbing against each other, and when I felt his hand on my tool, I had to look down to see what else he was going to do.

He let go of my dick a moment and rolled over so that his back was to me, then guided my hand to his own hard cock before taking my dick between his legs.

“Joey?” I said with a tremor in my voice. “I’m not sure we should do this.”

He sighed, then released my softening dick and rolled onto his back.

“Where’re the twins when you need them,” he joked with a forced smile.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Don’t worry. I just thought you’d like to relive some memories,” he said without looking in my eyes.

“I don’t want to do anything that you don’t want to do, so don’t do something like that again unless you feel like doing it, ‘kay?”

“Yeah ... Then um ... Uh ... Never mind.”

“What?”

“Shit. I want to do something horny. I thought maybe the twins would like to ... you know...”

“What, blow you?”

“No.”

“You mean fuck?”

“That’s what I was thinking. But now I don’t really know now what I want. Actually, I do know, but we can’t do that yet.”

“I want to go see Suzi too,” I said, recognizing the emotion he was emitting.

Despite it being Sunday, Joey, the twins and I were meeting Dr. Higgs, Suzi, Brad, and John at Oakley Senior High for lunch. Dr. Cain suggested doing it there as it held no negative memories for any of us.

“We better get up and get ready then.”

We were surprised to find that my mom and dad hadn’t called down for breakfast yet, so once we had eaten, we went to check on our parents. I went with Joey to his parents’ room, and we were greeted at the door by Joey’s grandmother.

“Mornin’, Grandma. How’s Mom and Dad?” Joey asked, trying to peek in the cracked door.

“I’m afraid they’re still a mess, honey. We had to separate them yesterday when your mom got terrified of Tommy. He’s in the next room with your grandfather, and right now, your mom is sleeping. I wish her parents were still alive. I just don’t know her well enough to do anything more than hold her and talk about you.”

“At least Uncle Paul will get here today. Maybe he’ll be able to help,” Joey stated.

He wasn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know. It just seemed to be the appropriate thing to say.

(I had never met Joey’s uncle Paul, his mother’s brother. When I was eight or nine, Joey’s dad had told me Paul was sort of the black sheep of the family, though he wouldn’t explain why. Years later, Joey told me it was because Paul had moved to Canada to escape the draft in the mid-sixties. He was still technically a wanted man. Joey’s dad was an only child.)

“Have you seen my mom?” I asked Joey’s grandmother.

“Not since she left around three this morning. She had to help me calm Margaret down and stayed to talk a little while. Timmy, your mother worries a lot about you. And about you too, Joey. Try not to worry her any more than you have to, alright, boys?”

“Yeah, alright, Grandma,” Joey said, giving her a kiss on the cheek. “Shit, Tim. Worrying must run in your family, you know?”

I said as I backed away, “Well, I’m going to go find her so she can stop worrying about me leaving without saying goodbye.”

I was only ten paces away before Joey caught up with me.

I asked, surprised, “You’re not going to see them?”

“Grandma said she didn’t think they were ready for that yet. Shit. Now I’m wondering if maybe we should just wait until January. I want to be here for my mom and dad when they’re ready for me, you know? I really wanted them when I was coming out of it.”

“But everything is set. Come to school with me today, and go to your classes tomorrow and maybe Tuesday, then come back here Tuesday night. I’ll tell all your teachers you had a family emergency, and then you can come back to school when things are all right with your folks. You heard Fred. They don’t even start looking for new recruits until the second or third week. You just need to show up for classes so we know if there are any Gamma Alpha Etas in them and stuff.”

“I don’t want to leave you there alone, though. Couldn’t you just come back with me?”

“I’ll be all right. Shit, Joey. This is nothing compared to what we just went through. I can handle anything that might come up.”

“Let me think about it,” he said with a worried frown.

“I guess my mom and I aren’t the only ones who worry.”

We reached my dad’s master bedroom and pushed the oak doors open to go in. I was surprised to find my dad carefully listening to my mom’s tummy with his eyes closed.

I asked softly, “What are you listening for?”

My mom said softly and happily, “He’s not listening for anything, dear. He’s probing your little brother or sister.”

Both Joey and I must have dropped our jaws at the same time because it made my mom laugh, breaking my dad’s concentration.

My dad said, “I think it was just my imagination. There’s only one embryo. Not two.” Then he noticed us and asked, “Morning, boys. Want to have a feel?”

My dad guided both Joey’s and my mind to the barely detectable mass within my mother’s womb. It couldn’t have been a week old yet since it hadn’t attached itself to the lining of her insides. Actually, it could have been anything, and I wouldn’t have believed the small mass was an embryo if my mom and dad hadn’t sworn they had witnessed it leaving her fallopian tube earlier that morning.