Chapter 1

My name’s Mark, and I’m not the hero of this story. This story doesn’t have a hero. I guess I’m the protagonist, since that’s the guy that drives the action, and, boy, does this story have action. Before I launch into this narrative, I should tell you about my family, since that bunch of dipshits is at the center of this tale.

My mom is named Tami Lynn. Don’t laugh; it’s true. If your first thought was “Wow, that’s white trash”, you’re right. My mom (and I will switch between ‘my mom’, ‘Mom’, and ‘Tami Lynn’, depending on what’s happening and how I’m feeling) got pregnant with my sister at fifteen. The guy stayed around just long to put his pants on after knocking her up, so there went that bright future. The result of that mistake was my sister, Karli Jo. Now, as that train wreck of a name indicates, my mom is an idiot, but she is a gorgeous idiot and, three years later, when she was eighteen, my dad came into the picture. Tami Lynn got pregnant right away, but my dad stayed around. He stayed around until Tami Lynn about bankrupted him and basically drove him away. I was three when he left, and it was not an amicable split. She really thought he should be grateful that a woman who looked like her would be with him. He wanted to take me with him, and I want to go, but that hateful bitch called my mother wouldn’t let me.

Now would be a good time to emphasize the fact that Tami Lynn is, indeed, stunning to look at. She’s average height (so, what, 5’7”?) with a heart-shaped face, big blue eyes, and thick blond hair, natural blond. Below the neck is spectacular. She bounced back from having two kids without a scratch, so to speak, and since she loves exercise, she’s kept everything tight, and there’s plenty to be kept tight. She’s got long legs for her frame, a great rack (probably in the 35-36C range), and an ass you could bounce a quarter off of. Of course, she’s only thirty-three, but still, with two kids...

I know you’re thinking it’s weird of me to describe my mom like this, and you’re right, but, and I cannot stress this enough, I have no family feelings for my mother. She kept me from my dad, and I grew up watching men throw themselves at her and her lap it up. She’s not a whore, because whore’s actually put out, but she wasn’t shy about taking gifts from guys who thought they had a real shot.

If you can do simple math, I said Tami Lynn was fifteen when my sister was born and she’s now thirty-three, so that means Karli Jo is eighteen. She’s a senior in high school, and she’s looks like a hybrid of her dad and Tami Lynn. Her face is a little more angular, her hair tends toward brunette, but gets red highlights in the summer, and if her boobs aren’t quite as big as her mom’s, they’re still more than a handful, and she’s a little taller than Tami Lynn to boot. She’s also just as much of a selfish cunt as our mom, and, just to put the cherry on top, she’s into cheerleading. My trailer trash mom, of course, thinks this is the best thing ever.

We were barely scraping out a living, mainly because Tami Lynn thinks almost any real job is beneath her, when she met Craig. She met him at the gym. Did I say were were barely making a living? Yes, I did, and we were, but Tami Lynn always managed to keep a gym membership, and one day, when she was doing squats, Craig apparently caught a look at her high-cut leotard crawling up the crack of her ass and decided to strike up a conversation.

Which is how we became the Brady Bunch. Well, not really the Bradys. Craig’s last name is actually Bradley, but that is how we all came, after Craig and Tami Lynn got married, to live in his big house, just Craig and Tami Lynn and Karli (who dropped the ‘Jo’ after the wedding; it didn’t go with her new social pretensions) and Cameron and Madison. Yes, Craig had two kids himself, a boy named Cameron, and a girl named Madison. Cam and Maddie, Cam the same age as Karli, and Madison not quite two years younger. For those keeping score at home, that makes Cam and Karli eighteen, Maddie seventeen, and me fifteen.

Now, you can see why Tami Lynn was interested in Craig; he’s basically a male version of her. Dude goes an easy six-three, in great shape (he swims and bikes and lifts and skis and ... whatever else you can do) with dark hair and I guess what you call chiseled features. He also waited until he was through with puberty to have kids, so he’s forty to Tami Lynn’s thirty-three.

Cam and Maddie are the Golden Children. That’s literally a pretty good description of them: after twenty minutes outside on the first sunny day of spring, they’re both the color of a Kraft caramel. Their hair is that shade of light brown/dark blond that unveils gold streaks in that same twenty minute span. Cam plays football and baseball at school; Maddie plays volleyball and dives for a club team in the summer. That gives you an idea of the kind of shape they’re in. Their mom was a spectacular-looking blond who was a competitive swimmer in college. The Golden Children split the difference between their parents, with Cam looking more like Craig and Maddie looking more like their mom.

All in all, a great-looking family: Craig and Tami Lynn, the Golden Children, and Karli, all knockouts in their own fashion. Craig and Tami Lynn get constant compliments on how beautiful their children are, then people look at me.

Oh, yeah, about me. Now as the narrator and protagonist of this fucking story (and I’m not just using that as an intensifier; there really will be a lot of fucking going on), you should know a little about me. I’ll try to be as reliable a narrator as I can, so let’s start by describing myself.

I’m a little below average height, wiry if you’re being kind, skinny if you’re not, with a buckshot spray of freckles across my face. Now, this is where, in other stories like this, the narrator says something like “but I’ve got a fourteen-inch cock as big around as Schwarzenegger’s forearm.” I don’t, not even close. I don’t know, mine might be a little bigger than average, but that could just be an optical illusion because I’m so skinny. I am, however, really good at school. I do well in all my classes, but I really like science, especially chemistry, and now that I’ve mentioned that, we can get to the meat (heh, heh) of this tale.

I was in the science lab with my friend, Eugene. The Chem II teacher, Mr. Prothro, had let us in to work on a class project. I was working on said project, but Eugene was a little distracted. You see, Mr. Prothro had asked a former student, a guy who was now an engineer, to give us a presentation on his career. Mr. Engineer thought it would be cool to bring along an optical laser to show us the kind of tools he used. He was right; it was amazing cool, the presentation was great, everything was awesome, but the laser was still in the lab (he needed it for presentations to later classes) and now, instead of helping me measure chemicals, Eugene was distracted by the awesome tool on the work table. I admit, I was getting a little pissed off; I might not have been paying as much attention as I should have to the amounts I was mixing, I don’t know, but I do know that I finally said, “Eugene, would you stop fucking around with that thing and help me!”

Well, Eugene jumped (I kinda yelled), flipped the ‘go’ button on the laser, and bumped it. It fired, right into the beaker in front of me. There was a flash and a ‘whoomp’, a cloud of crystals, and a smell kinda like oranges and peppermints. I kinda panicked when I realized I was breathing in an unknown mixture of chemicals (I told you I hadn’t paid much attention to the amounts) that had been ionized by a laser. I felt light-headed, but then I realized that I was hyperventilating. I took a few deep breaths and felt my heart rate slow. Now, I didn’t feel woozy, but I did have a strange tingling running through my body. It faded even as I became aware of it. I looked at Eugene.

And it was weird. I could see he was upset; I don’t mean I could infer it from his body language, I mean I could see his adrenaline and stress levels and emotional state, but even that’s not right. It’s not like I could actually see them on a readout, but I knew what they were. I knew his heart rate had spiked and his cortisol level was through the roof. At the same time, I could see him more clearly than I ever had before. I don’t know how to explain it, I just know that it was like before I was seeing him in 720 and now I was seeing him in 4K. He was about to cry, so I said, “Eugene, calm down.” Well, he kept spiraling, so I snapped, with a little more force, “Eugene, calm down!”

And it happened. I saw it happen, or felt it happen. The stress indicators went down, his mood went up. I was in shock, because I knew I had done that, and I knew because I could feel the feedback in my system.

It knocked me for a loop, let me tell you. I was still stunned when we went to lunch and I realized that I could see anyone I concentrated on the way I had seen Eugene. It was kinda like that old horror trope, where you can hear everyone’s thoughts and it drives you mad, but it was actually easy to turn this off. I could actually sort of put whatever this was in ‘sleep’ mode. My mind was reeling as we left lunch, but I got another jolt in fifth period. At lunch, I had seen Alesha Watson, a really pretty girl in our class. In the middle of History II, I kinda zoned out and thought of her.

And I was there. Not physically there, but I could see her, like I had seen Eugene and the other kids at lunch, and I realized I kinda had total control of the view. I could see close, I could pull away, I could move around her (she was in Algebra I, by the way, a class taught by Ms. Montague), I could see her mood, which was kinda low. I pushed at her mood indicators (don’t ask me how, but I could), and she got happier.

This left me with a lot to chew on, and I spent the rest of the day, testing parameters. I found that once I had focused on someone in person, their information was in, like, a database or something that I could access. I found that I could alter mood and outlook, and I discovered that I could affect their mood independent of myself, or if I chose to, I could tag along on the mood ride with them.

By the time school was over, I was dizzy. I rode the bus home, did my homework, and ate dinner in a fog. I went to my room after dinner, and there I made the discovery that would set everything in motion.

I had a book open, but I wasn’t really reading it. I was thinking about everything I had learned that day, how I could find people by this unique signature that I could identify, how I could interact with them, influence their mood, and what the results of this might be. That was when I heard the water start running in the shower. Cam and I share a bathroom between our bedrooms. Cam was apparently taking his evening shower. I really just thought of it as trying to figure out more about these strange abilities I had, but when I went into admin mode (that’s how I had begun to think of it), I got a real surprise.