Chapter 1

Meet the Fisher Family.

(Narrated by Clarence)

My name is Clarence Fisher and I’m the oldest child in our family. At the start of this story, I was nearly an adult: my eighteenth birthday was just a few weeks away. Our mother, bless her heart, died a few years ago, so we lived with our father in a luxurious mansion in Florida. We were a family of four boys and a dad: half a Brady bunch plus one, my dad would joke. Hunter is the middle child, a jock, my father’s favorite: he had just recently turned sixteen. The twins Tad and Chad were just over two years younger than him. My dad and mom had both inherited businesses from their parents: we’re what you might call “Old Money.”

I should mention that I am sort-of the black-sheep of the family. Dad, the twins, and Hunter all are athletic natural blonds, with a hint of red-hair from Dad’s Irish side. By contrast, I was a brunette with thin hair, hirsute, naturally slouching, and already I was a bit overweight probably due to my proclivity for video games.

I was sitting at the breakfast table, reading the news on my tablet over a cup of coffee, a nice late start to the weekend. This quiet calm was shattered as Hunter waltzed in, bouncing a baseball hand to hand. He missed a catch and the ball bounced on the table, spilling my coffee. “Sorry dude,” was his non-apology and he started talking about his baseball game from last night. As usual, I hadn’t attended, and I couldn’t figure out why he kept telling me about them. He was undeniably the “jock” type both in body and attitude. Although the twins enjoy sports, they also loved video games and were part of an active dungeons and dragons group. They were still young looking boys, thin and only recently hitting puberty.

“That’s nice, Hunter,” I responded flatly.

“You know, maybe you should take a little interest, or just get off your fat ass sometime.” Hunter loved to insult me: I’m gay and sensitive about my weight, so I knew he was trying to get a reaction out of me.

Just then the twins came in, still clad in pajamas. They were talking about some online game they were playing. Hunter really hates that stuff. “You guys should get out and do something outdoors! Those games are for losers that can’t handle reality!”

One twin sighed and the other rolled his eyes. This was not the first time Hunter had made that point. “We’ve got a big tournament this afternoon and we’ve got to...”

“Yeah, whatever,” Hunter interrupted, “I’ve got real plans for this afternoon: a date with my girlfriend.” He gestured at us, “Not like any of you guys know about girlfriends.” He smirked, using the insinuation that I was gay as an insult. “Or sex for that matter: I probably get three times as much action as all you nerds put together.” Unfortunately, he was right about that. It was obvious why, looking at his strawberry blond hair, blue eyes, high cheek bones, and nice lean physique: he was sexy as fuck. He was a moron and a douche-bag, but try telling teenage girls that.

By contrast, the primary sexual encounters I’d had were with a slave we owned, and they were a secret that Hunter had found out about and liked to hold over my head.

I suppose I should explain the slave thing. Like many weird things about this country, it started in our state of residency: Florida.

Florida had been having lots of economic trouble between flooding and poverty. The all-Republican legislature had led to an ever-widening gap between the rich and poor. The state needed revenue and they eyed an untapped resource: legions of poor, white-trash boys and men that mostly became criminals, beggars, and prostitutes.

And so slavery was legalized. You might have thought the 13th and 14th Amendment abolished slavery, but a Republican-packed Supreme Court handed the state a win: it accepted the ridiculous argument that those Amendments only applied to people alive during their passage! Slavery had effectively been put back into the states’ hands, undoing the effects of the Civil War. People started calling Florida a “New Slave State.” It was embarrassing and I often thought we should leave.

Regardless of my feelings on the matter, there were two main reasons people became slaves: they were breaking the law, or their family could enslave their teenage males for financial or other reasons before their 18th birthday.

At first there were plenty of criminals to enslave, but enslavement scared a lot of would-be hoodlums away from serious crime or at least the state. But by that point, the state depended on slavery, and so the police began enforcing laws very harshly, particularly against poor boys who they thought would fetch serious money at auction whose families wouldn’t be able to contest it in court: they received a small percent of the sale personally as a “commission”, and the police force received a somewhat larger percent, so there was plenty of motivation to find reasons to arrest any cute teenagers they ran into.