Chapter 8: Meeting Karen

I walked home, or perhaps I glided home, I can’t remember. I would have an image of her in my head, and then it would be replaced by a different and sexier image. I smiled all the way back. I stopped off in the garage, hid the uniform and stuffed my dirty clothes in the overnight bag, then popped in the back door. “I’m home.”

From somewhere in the house, my mother yelled, “Did you have a good time?”

“Yeah, I did.”

I climbed the stairs to my room, flopped on the bed and napped till dinner. After dinner, I watched some TV, checked that I had all my homework, and went to bed early.

The next day, school was ... school. You probably don’t want to know more about it. I did see Melissa in the hall, surrounded by her retinue, and she smiled. And making sure they didn’t see her, she blew me a kiss.

I was finding that I wasn’t having to pay much attention to class. I’m not sure what the deal was, but it was almost like the material was already familiar to me, and that I didn’t have to learn it so much as review it in order to understand and retain it. This was definitely new.

And somehow I always knew when the teacher was going to call on me because that silly warning bell would go off in my head, and the teacher would address the next question to me.

I took out one of my notebooks and turned to a clean page at the back and started listing data items, in no particular order.

1. Individual only, can’t influence groups. 2. can send body response stimuli, e.g. pleasure, relaxation to an individual. 3. can make an individual like/trust me. 4. connection with teacher: intuition about subject; know when attention is focused on me; foreign language pronunciation.

And that third one may need some further investigation. I realized that the few suggestions I had sent Melissa to “like” me and “trust” me seemed to last beyond the encounter in which I sent them, almost like they became ingrained in her, getting stronger with repeated applications.

What else? I couldn’t think of anything right now, but the preliminary list raised some questions. I wondered if, for example, I could also send signals of fear/pain/dislike or any other kind of normal human response. And why I would want to. Could I make a person distrust me? Why would I want to?

Can I grab a person’s knowledge, for example Mr. Grimes’ knowledge of geography so I wouldn’t have to read that excruciatingly dull book? Or am I only able to “hear” the knowledge when they are thinking about it specifically, like when they’re lecturing?

Why is it I can’t influence groups? Do I have to be in some kind of direct interpersonal contact in order to establish a connection, like in a conversation, for example?

No, that last one couldn’t be true because I had clearly influenced people who I did not know and was not having a conversation with, like the night nurse at the hospital with the amazing rack, Nurse Kudrsicki. Oh, and Cathy McKendrick in Science class, I had never met her but she certainly got aroused when I mentally fondled her boobs. I wondered what they looked like unencumbered by clothing.

It didn’t seem that I could embed hypnotic suggestions in people’s minds, either, so no convincing rich patrons to give me huge amounts of cash as a gift, and no suggesting to the cheerleading squad that they all should strip naked and have wild sex with me and each other. I could trigger sensations, but not plant specific hypnotic suggestions as if they were the plantee’s own ideas.

Not having that one hurt, as I thought I could come up with some really interesting scenarios.

I also didn’t seem to be able to “read” minds, in the commonly understood ESP sense. I could transmit, but I couldn’t receive. A shame I couldn’t take the apparatus into the shop and have it repaired, but apparently it wasn’t designed to perform that function.

There were a few incidents where I had sent a stimulation message and then I had had an orgasm and the subject (Melissa) piggybacked on my orgasm. It was like I had opened a channel for arousal or orgasm, and my own feelings were transmitted in some non-specific manner. I did not yet understand this.

Lastly, I decided that it was clumsy to always rely on the word “signal” or “message” to describe whatever mechanism was enabling me to manipulate sensations and feelings. I needed something more specific, an active verb.

I decided on the word “channel” to describe specific actions, such as stimulation of the clit or the nipple.

And I decided that I needed to coin a new word, “linkcast”, for transmitting generic feelings such as pleasure, like or trust (or dislike or mistrust). I couldn’t use broadcast, because that’s a general transmission available to anyone listening, but this connection seems to be a direct and unique connection to a single individual via some kind of encrypted link.

There was a lot to think about. And now I had time to do it because I wasn’t having to pay that much attention in class and was still able to pick up the material much faster than almost anyone else. I hoped that would start to improve my grades.

I was already getting the not-so-subtle hints from the parents about prepping for college -- better grades, extracurricular activities, after-school job, all the things that were a part of your “permanent record” and were supposed to make colleges look upon your application to matriculate with benevolence.

I’m going to skip a big chunk of time here. The details of my school life are of little interest except insofar as they help to detail my progress in understanding these “talents” I have been given. I’ll summarize some things I learned over the next few months, leading into late spring.

First, I found I could, as I thought, send certain negative stimuli, such as dislike and fear, even pain. But things like dislike and fear were harder because apparently the feelings that make you dislike someone or fear something are more specific to the individual. I didn’t seem to be able to make a person “fear” me because I was not able to key in to the specific thing in their mind that evoked fear.

A person might fear an authoritarian figure, or fear a bully, but not all people would fear the same trait in a person. But all people, for the most part, seem to share a common sense of pleasure or desire. And almost all people share a fear of, for example, falling from a great height, so I could stimulate that. (But, again, why would I want to?)

Next, it appeared, much to my regret, that I could not vacuum up someone’s knowledge. It looks like they have to be thinking about it in the forefront of their brain, such as if they were talking about it, or perhaps reading about a subject that was familiar to them. So I could understand quickly what my teachers were trying to teach because I could key in on their understanding of it, but only when they were explaining it.

That one was a bummer, as I had entertained some fantasies about completing high school, college and graduate school in the space of a year. Now I will have to sit through all those classes.

And I still could not influence a group of people, only individuals within the group, and only one at a time. That experiment had led to some amusing sojourns at the mall, for example sitting near a table of young suburban wives out shopping and trying to send signals of lust or passion. Didn’t work, because it was too generic a feeling and it did not apparently work on a group. Nor could I send a general “have an orgasm” message to the group.

But I was able to stimulate an individual member of the group, for example by mentally rubbing her clit or inserting a virtual dildo. So the specific image or metaphor seemed to be important. In fact, I was able to do it to several members of the group, but only one at a time. It was interesting to watch them excuse themselves and walk carefully to the ladies room. But that was a lot of work.

So that seemed to rule out the scenario where I would influence the populace and be elected by acclamation as benevolent dictator. Being a dictator probably wasn’t that much fun anyway.

The group thing also did not seem to work with invoking feelings of like and trust. I could do it with any member of a group, or even with individual members in succession, but not the whole group in one fell swoop. And additionally, the like/trust message only seemed to work when the person was focused on me, such as if we were having a conversation, or they were listening to me speak. They needed to be focused on me while I was focused on them. Disappointing, but it was what it was.

I still saw Melissa around school, but we never found another opportunity like the first one, at least not yet. And her friends seemed to always do everything together, and she was part of that group. They went to class together, they walked home together, they ate lunch together. On the weekends they went to each other’s houses and when they weren’t there they were on the phone together. When the hell did they study? So it meant I never got to see Melissa alone, and she was still too young to “date”. I hoped there’d be another dance or other social function where we could find some alone time together.

In the meantime, I was still horny all the time. I was a teenager, so what else was new? So I was looking for opportunities, at least until Melissa was again available. It’s high school, so lots of girls, all of whom view their male counterparts of the same age as unsophisticated drooling simpletons with no social skills. They were looking for more urbane, debonair suitors, like sophomores.

But where there’s a will there’s a way. So I identified some likely prospects and looked for things we might have in common -- same classes, same after-school clubs, etc. Not all of them worked out, but there were one or two successes.

One was Karen Sunderland. I kind of knew who she was because, of course, we had been in the same schools together, though we didn’t have friends in common, and really hadn’t had much in the way of common interests. She was another who had been one of these lanky, beanpole girls who didn’t stand out from the crowd. But the ages between, say, 12 and 14 bring big changes in the most unlikely ways.

Karen, for example, filled out very nicely over one summer. Her hair, which had been kind of long and stringy blonde, now was cut beautifully and framed her face which had turned out to have a classically beautiful shape. But best of all, from our 15-year-old perspective, she had grown boobs. Not just boobs, but boobs. The kind where you do a Three Stooges double-take and say, “Whoahhh”.

It must have been difficult for her, because she was getting all this attention, not because she was smart or sang like an angel or had strong opinions, but because she had big tits. So I understood where she was coming from, in a way. Still, great boobs, no denying it.

Karen, it turned out, had an interest in math and had joined the math club. Well, I liked math, and was pretty good at it. Math Club was supposed to expose you to topics not covered in class, but which might be accessible and of interest to math geeks, like me and Karen. So, I need some clubs anyway, so why not Math Club. Wednesdays after school, with Mr. Gilbert, one of the math teachers. I signed up.

So on my first Wednesday, I joined the rest of them, who had already been in the club for some months and knew how things worked. I was the newbie, and like nerds everywhere, the new nerd has to show that he’s got the intellectual cojones to play with the big kids.

I am not intellectually disciplined. I find something I am interested in and study it until my interest wanes, or I find something else I’m more interested in. In the Club, they were playing with one-dimensional calculus, simple differentiation and integration with one variable.

They had been deriving the principles from a geometric approach, as most beginning calculus classes do, and had now advanced to differentiating fairly complex equations using the chain rule to perform the differentiation. Sounds more complex than it is. And I had, fortunately, read up on it the previous year.

So Mr. Gilbert welcomed me to class and told me to just follow along as best I could and I’d figure it out soon. He said to the class, “We were looking at various tricks of solving these complex equations which aren’t easy using the simple forms of differential calculus. Let’s try one.” And he wrote an equation involving the derivative of a trig function with a variable of the 3rd degree.