Chapter 1

I couldn’t believe it. I had barely turned eighteen years old that very morning and I couldn’t function very well for some reason. Nothing made sense. I was very weak and sluggish, yet everyone behaved as if I was normal. I felt drugged or weak or something, but people pushed me to keep about my day as if everything was normal and natural with me.

“Dude, it’s your birthday! Cheer up already! You are now an adult, after all,” my best friend told me, not showing any sympathy for my plight, either.

“Lindsay, can’t you tell that something is wrong with me today? I don’t feel like myself at all. It’s just weird as fuck,” I exclaimed.

Oh, did I mention that my best friend in high school was a girl? Well, we weren’t lovers at all, but she usually treated me much better than this. Platonically speaking, that was. Now, she was kinda off and so was everything else ... and everyone else.

I was still a virgin, too. An eighteen year old male virgin! Talk about a cliche, right? Teenage boys get little sympathy and almost no slack to begin with, being seen as highly disposable and entirely worthless vermin by many people. We’re treated as pariahs, overcharged for car insurance, cut zero slack by authority figures, you get the picture. We’re seen as walking hormones and threatened by parents, girls, etc. Daddies love to scare us with serious bodily harm if we show the nebulous “disrespect” to their daughters, etc. If nerdy like me, we get bullied with impunity, especially by teenage girls, who can do no wrong in our society.

“Earth to Charles? Anybody home? You okay?” Lindsay jolted me out of my deep contemplation.

“Not really. Normally, you pick up on this shit, girl. I’m feeling ... weak. Sluggish. Lethargic. Low energy, worse than Jeb Bush,” I cracked a joke to try to cut the tension a bit.

“Well, I’m slackin’ a little, I guess, but if you’re able to tell a joke, then you must not be too bad. It’s probably an iron deficiency or vitamin D or something like that. Have you eaten breakfast this morning?” Lindsay inquired now.

“No ... that must be it. Skippin’ breakfast. Food just ... sounded nauseating, even my usual favorites,” I told myself as much as her.

That had to be it, right? Nausea killed my appetite and thus left me weak ... yet even now, the thought of actual food repelled me. Maybe it was time for an energy drink, maybe not. It wasn’t like school provided any Rockstars or Kickstarts, and there was a decent chance that those would make me nauseated, too. Well, it was a week until graduation, I had already missed prom night due to not having a date. Lindsay had attended it and she was less than impressed. Maybe she just wanted to spare my feelings, though her date had been a real “panty waste,” to use her own words.

“I just wish that it was senior skip day, so I could go back to bed. I feel as if this week will be a real trial for me. Just to get through it. I just don’t feel my usual drive or hustle. I don’t feel my usual ‘morning person’ urge to go about my day and stuff. I feel as if I’d been drugged or something, you know,” I announced, making Lindsay raise an eyebrow.

“I don’t know for sure, Charles, but it’s possible that you’re dealing with clinical depression. I’m bipolar myself and that’s another possibility. Both involve severe lack of motivation and energy, only the second one goes into the other extreme as well. You might want to look into it, dude,” Lindsay at least had the decency to show a little more interest in my plight.

That was more than I could say for my mother, stepfather (talk about your useless scumbags), stepsisters (you think that one’s bad, try two!!!), and my half-sister, the last of them fourteen and as infallible as the Pope ... according to my parents. If Chelsea farted, they would claim that it didn’t stink. It wasn’t as bad with Natasha and Heather, but it wasn’t much better, either. I was just glad that I would soon be able to move out and leave this all behind. The military or the police, who knew what they would make of me, but I was willing to chance it. I just wanted out of there.

“Yeah, it’s possible. It’s also possible that I’m just ... tired of my family and their bullshit. The sooner I can get away from them, the better. You know the routine. My stepfather thinks that I’m a pest and the moment I’m gone, good riddance to me. Well, the feeling’s mutual. Why Mom married that loudmouth dipshit and became a better mother to his brats than to me, I have no fucking clue.

“She barely tolerates me, too, but at least in the past, it was benign neglect. Lately, she had been snooping on me, watching like a hawk for me to slip up. Ugh. I think that she must just hate my father and blame me somehow for whatever happened, or didn’t happen, between them. Something bad happens, it’s always somehow my fault, even when they clearly did something to me. ‘You’re the eldest, it’s your job to keep them in line.’

“How am I supposed to do that whenever I babysit them and try to enforce anything, since both Mom and Jerry undercut me? They can get with sheer bloody murder, they know it, so they just ignore me and ride roughshot over me. The sooner I’m gone, the better. Fuck ‘em. Hell with them all!” I snapped on my way to my homeroom.

“Wow ... I thought that I had it bad! I do, but not like that. At least I’m an only child,” Lindsay shrugged, not sure what else to tell me.

There she was, of course. Amber fucking Dumont! Golden hair, baby blue eyes, a perfect complexion, and no time for me! None whatsoever. Then again, Mrs. Cortez was my teacher in the homeroom ... and in Spanish. She was easy on the eyes, too. I always got straight As in her classes, too. She was my only other friend in high school, other than Lindsay. Even the other nerds hated me for some reason.

I could only guess that it had something to do with either Lindsay or Jessica Cortez. Happily married, as far as I knew, though I never met her other half, not once. Plump, busty, earthy, and sultry in the classic manner of a Tejana, too. Damn, she was a looker! Whip-smart, too. I was conscious of my status as “teacher’s pet” with her, the only teacher to view me that way at all. I was actually better at history than Spanish, but Coach Brown (yes, he was the varsity basketball coach, too) actively loathed me, so I barely managed Bs in his class.

“Charles, are you okay?” Mrs. Cortez now asked me, leaning over me in a way that exposed not only her gorgeous bosom, but also the veins in her flesh.

Wait, I never noticed her blood vessels before ... why did I notice them now? Then there was her carotid artery ... it was as if her skin suddenly became a bit more transparent, which didn’t seem to be normally the case. What the hell was wrong with me? Ever since dawn, I had felt ... weak. I had noticed blood vessels, even capillaries. I now recalled how the veins in Lindsay’s flesh showed and she wasn’t exactly thin. What the actual fuck ... now even Amber’s veins stuck out to me, throbbing as if beckoning me somehow. I felt as if I should sweat, but I couldn’t.

“No ... I don’t know what it is, but I’m ... just feeling weak right now. Sluggish. It’s hard to explain,” I admitted to Mrs. Cortez, not realizing that others eavesdropped on us.

“In other words, you finally feel what you are! Congratulations on learning what a wimp you are! Now, maybe, just maybe, you can fix the problem!” David Schuyler smirked now.

Even Amber seemed to think that David had gone too far this time, and she was his girlfriend!

“David, you don’t have to be so cruel! He’ll be out of your life soon enough! I know that you can’t stand him, but don’t waste time thinking about him. Think about what we did on prom night and we’ll do again after graduation!” Amber Dumont, class valedictorian, who normally seemed to view me as an insect to be squashed, actually kinda took up for me.

“Yeah, well, next time it’s my pleasure, not yours. It was very one-sided on prom night, you know,” David grimaced.

“If that’s how you feel, maybe we should just ... break up! I was gonna make it all about you, babe, but I don’t like having it thrown in my face when you were too drunk to get it up for anything else!” Amber threw her “promise ring” from David across the room into his lap.

“You asshole! You just cost me my girlfriend! Meet me after school!” David snapped.

“I’m still your homeroom teacher until this week is over, David. There will be no fighting on school grounds! If I were you, I’d kiss and make up with your girlfriend instead of worrying about punishing Charles for what you did to your own relationship. It’s not his fault that you’re a pendejo,” Mrs. Cortez put David in his place for now, making Amber blush even as the bell rang.

I was really glad to get out of there, but Mrs. Cortez stopped me before I could go just yet.

“I’m sorry about that, but if you’re not well, hopefully it’s just fatigue from all of the studying that you must have done lately for the final exams and the SATs. If you ... think ... otherwise, you can always check in with Mrs. Murphy,” my teacher referred to the school nurse.

“Thank you, Mrs. Cortez. I’ll ... probably feel better later. That’s likely it ... just fatigue,” I told her, feeling on some instinctive level that I didn’t want anyone poking or prodding me at all in some kind of clinical setting.

“You don’t have a lot of friends here, I know, Charles, but since I won’t be your teacher much longer, when not in class ... just call me Jessica, okay? I want you to know that I think of you as a friend. I could really use a friend right now, anyway. You, Lindsay, and ... Amber. So far, you three are my only friends here.

“I don’t even get along with my fellow teachers, none of whom are happy that I got tenure before Joachim Brown. I’m not sure why they care. He got tenure six weeks ago himself. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. Here I am ... ranting about my own troubles when you have enough of your own ... and we both have classes to start,” Mrs. Cortez surprised me by putting my head on her bosom for a moment.

“He’s the golden boy, Mrs ... Jessica. That’s why. They don’t want someone else beating him to something that he sought for himself,” I told Jessica as we separated and both had to rush now.

That was ... strange. For whatever reason, Mrs. Cortez, or Jessica as she preferred me to call her, had been very ... familiar with me, one of her own students, right then. It also explained something about why Coach Brown resented me. I was friendly with a woman who had made him look bad. Of course ... guilty by association! I’m not sure how I had anything to do with her winning tenure months before him, but he was never very level-headed for a teacher. Now, THAT probably had something more to do with it. His ... personality left a lot to be desired. To put it succinctly, he was a jerk.

Speak of the devil, he taught my first period ... and I was thirty seconds late for his class.

“Mr. Mazzini, in the future, no matter how much fun you’re having in the homeroom, try to be here on time. We might have only a week left, but I’d like to see us finish learning our history, shall we? Whatever you think of me, this subject matters. If you’re hungover, maybe that will teach you not to sip too much Chianti or amaretto at night with dinner, eh? Or maybe have a little more fettuccine with alfredo sauce to help you absorb the alcohol,” Coach Brown indulged a number of ethnic slurs, which was odd from him.

“Whatever, Giacomo!” I called him by the Italian version of his name.

Just because he was black didn’t mean that he could take out his frustration over being named Joachim on me.

“Mr. Mazzini, I’ll let that slide this time, just because I was a little rough on you and you look like death warmed over, but no more of that,” Coach Brown snapped, clearly feeling a bit defensive because I had pointed out his hypocrisy in my own subtle way.

Just then, I could sense something else about Coach Brown, David Schuyler, who was also in my history class, and several others, even Kat Summers, the captain of the cheerleading squad and Addy Swearingen, the school’s top wrestler. Fear. They sweated buckets around me quite suddenly for some reason. It was as if they could instinctively sense danger, but couldn’t make sense of it. When I asserted myself, somehow, that triggered it. It was as if something in my voice had alerted them to real peril or jeopardy to their own sorry hides.

I could see the veins on their skin, once more, making me freak out as I sat and listened to Coach Brown stammer out the lesson. He kept looking at me as if a lamb staring at a wolf or something, rather shaken up for once. It was heady wine in a way, but it also reinforced my isolation from everyone. Why did he suddenly quake in terror of me after spending all school year instilling real fear that he’d flunk me without a cause? It made no sense, especially as weak and lethargic as I still felt.