Chapter 6B

After a couple of blocks, I felt better. I even remembered to ask Jim and Bud why it seemed that the other boys had been avoiding me when I expected just the opposite.

They looked back and forth at each other before Jim answered.

"I think it's that you are so gorgeous that they are afraid to try to talk to you. I mean, you are so far out of everyone's league that it just isn't funny, you know."

I was still puzzled. I asked, "But why am I 'out of their league'? I'm the same girl I was last week. Well, three weeks ago. Well... maybe I'm not." I thought about all the changes that I had been through in the past month and especially over the last weekend. Had I changed that much? I had figured that it was just my new breasts that made me different, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had changed in just about every way it was possible to change.

Physically? That was the obvious part. Mirrors had become an essential part of my life. Without them I simply could not see the lower two-thirds of my body. Yes, they are that big.

Mentally? Certainly. And not just the powers that I was still learning about. I had changed in some fundamental way as a result of the pain I had undergone and the trials I had been through. I had goals and responsibilities that I had never even dreamed of having before. I had done things that I had only seen in the movies or read about in fantasy novels. I had gone from being a prisoner of my mother's psychosis to being a heroine. It was still a heady feeling to think of myself that way.

Sexually? Last week I was a virgin. Since then I had made love to members of both sexes. The girls were great. Bud was fantastic. If that wasn't a profound change I didn't know what would be.

Emotionally? I felt like I had grown more emotionally than any other way. The things I thought were important to me before seemed absurdly trivial now. Cheerleading was the best example. Before, being on the squad was the high point of my life. Today, I had walked away from it as not being relevant to who I was or what I needed or wanted. I had to choose between spending time jumping and shouting in front of hundreds of fans to whom I was merely side-line entertainment, or learning the skills that would enable me to save lives and protect others from harm. The comparison struck me as funny and I laughed. Neeka smiled and hugged me around the shoulders as we walked. She had probably been following my thoughts and knew what made me laugh. When I looked at her, she nodded. Finding Neeka, more than anything else that had happened to me had had the greatest affect on who I was becoming. You have no idea what it's like to know that the person next to you knows every thought that goes through your head. If they don't run away screaming in terror it validates you as a person. It tells you that you are one of the good-guys, not some crazy wacko who should be in a padded room in a quiet facility away from normal folks. Neeka knew me. The real me. As long as she stayed with me I knew I was a good person. That knowledge made all the difference in the world.

I was a new person all the way through. I was so relaxed around other people that I was making a new friend every day. More than one a day, if I counted Sheriff Bob. I decided not to count him as a friend yet, though. He was a business associate. To him, I was a politically-convenient resource he could call on to pull his ass out of hot water. Already, if not for me he would probably be bound and gagged in the trunk of his own car, wondering if his SWAT team would shoot him or his wife while trying to bag his kidnapper. I did have that advantage in our relationship; someone who called themselves his friend might promise to come to his aide when he needed them. I had already come to his rescue in the dark of night without even knowing who he was. He said he always paid his debts; and that one would be accruing interest for a while.

The main difference was that I wasn't the slightest bit scared of people any more. Knowing that you can't really be hurt has a way of liberating you. I tried to remember the last time I had been intimidated by someone, but the only one I could recall was my mother — my biological mother. Even she had lost her hold on me. Once I understood her, our roles had reversed and I had become more concerned with her well-being than she with mine.

Bubba and Leon had scared me at first, but it was more over what they might do to my friends and family before I could stop them. Once I knew I was strong enough to beat them, they held no real terror for me. If those two didn't scare me, then there wasn't likely to be much walking around on two legs that could. Knowing that I could pound someone into sand if they pissed me off bad enough had a great deal of influence on how I related to people.

I stopped stock-still on the sidewalk as something we had learned about in History came back to me. It was a section on feudalism than included the term 'noblesse oblige'. Roughly, it means that if you are lucky enough to be in a better position than someone else, due to factors outside your control, then you have an obligation to behave kindly and generously toward those not as fortunate as you. At the time, it seemed a silly, elitist idea, right up there with 'droit du seigneur', which meant that the lord of the manor got to screw the brides of his underlings before their husbands did. Was I operating out of a sense of noblesse oblige? It certainly looked like it on the face of things. It's unsettling when something you think of as purely academic and irrelevant suddenly turns out to apply to you. I had always thought of History like Latin and Algebra, as subjects that I was forced to study because they were part of the curriculum. I never expected any of it to become, you know, 'real'. "All we learn from History is that we learn nothing from History." I was proving Hegel wrong.

I examined my revelation even closer. Had I actually just drawn a parallel between my life and something I learned in school? Was this me, standing on the sidewalk in my school clothes with my bookbag, thinking about the philosophical basis for my view of morality and how it applied to correct behavior in social settings? I was a socially-deprived high school girl whose main concern up to this point in her life had been how to sneak out on a date or how much make-up I could get away with wearing.

Suddenly, something really scary did occur to me; something that explained why I was having all these strange thoughts. I understood for the first time that one of my mental powers was increased intelligence. I was actually getting smarter.

My classes today had seemed effortless, almost boring. I thought back and remembered that they had been getting easier for a week or so. I had attributed it to my enforced study regimen, but as I mentally reviewed my homework sessions, I remembered each chapter of each book, each exercise and each math problem I had done. I found I could recall each conversation I had had with every person almost as if I had a video machine in my head. My memory for the last week or so was nearly photographic. Although that term was probably misleading. The mechanism of memory was more likely to be holographic in principle than... STOP THAT! "Jeez, Louise," I thought, "Was this what it meant to be smart? To drown in digression? To endlessly overanalyze every thought? And wasn't I doing it again?" "GAAAAAAA!"

I hadn't been aware of saying that last bit aloud until Bud said, "Are you all right, Sam?"

"No! I mean, yes. Oh hell. Get me home before my brain melts and runs out my ears. I'm having an argument with myself and I'm coming out on the losing end." I remembered a moment ago making a play on words with Georg Hegel's famous quote. I was in deep doodoo. Any minute now I might be emailing Stephen Hawking to debate his position on the nature of spacetime.

"God!" I thought. "How do you turn it OFF!"

I looked at Neeka with desperation in my eyes. She said, "Your brain sounds like an engine racing with the transmission in neutral. You need a problem to apply all that intelligence to. I mean 'to which you can apply all that intelligence'. Shoot! I'm absorbing it from you. Being in your head is gonna make me smarter too. 'Intellect by association' — what an idea! You need to remember that your brain can be a lethal weapon, too. Don't point it at yourself.

"OK, your choice is either work on a problem or stop thinking. You were asking why boys weren't all over you today. Did you think about that before?"

"Yes. I decided to table the subject until I could conduct field interviews and collect some hard data."

"You mean talk to these bozos? You think they are a representative sample?"

"No, but they are the only boys who could be motivated to tell me the truth."

"Very well. Why not continue the research?"

"An excellent suggestion, Doctor Morgan." The research subjects were looking pretty lost by now. They knew we were talking about them, but they weren't too sure if they would like being research subjects.

"As I was saying before I got distracted, why am I 'out of their league'? Jim?"

"Well, the more beautiful a girl is, the more the guy feels that he has to be worthy, you know?" Jim said.

Bud jumped in with his two cents. "Yeah, and if you get brushed-off by an OK looking girl, it's bad. But if you get turned down by a real fox, it's humiliating."

"So the better-looking a girl is, the less likely she is to get a date? What's wrong with this picture?" The male ego was a truly convoluted thing.

"Good-looking girls go out with good-looking guys. It's like a law or something," Bud said.

"Well that explains you two," I said.

"Hunh?" Jim said, with an echo from Bud right behind.

"Well, I'm attracted to you. Neeka is attracted to you. The Hendersons are too. I think we're all above average in the looks department and we all think you two are a couple of righteous hunks." That got nice smiles from both of them. Flattery will get you everywhere when dealing with the male of the species, I noted. In fact, stroking a boy's ego was probably even more important than stroking his cock. I remembered how all that stuff I had said to Bud in bed this morning had really got him going. His ego kicked his cock into overdrive. I had always heard that boys thought with their genitals, maybe there was something to that. If I could solve the riddle of the male sex drive, that would be a problem worth studying. Finally, something on which to focus my new intellect!

"So how should I go about getting a boy to talk to me?" I asked. If I could get some practical advice, I could have a starting point for a series of experiments.

"Just say 'hi'." Jim said. "It doesn't take much. If I guy knows a girl is interested, that's all he needs."

I couldn't believe it was that simple. If I picked a boy out and went over and said 'hi', he would feel empowered and talk to me. Otherwise, I could stand in a room full of boys and the only ones who would talk to me were the ones with egos already so inflated that they were the last ones I wanted to be around. That type only thought about themselves, only talked about themselves; they were totally one-dimensional. So the interesting boys were the ones that I would have to approach. This was a really screwed up system. At least it was weighted in the girl's favor. I could pick and choose.

I remembered Bambi telling me that men would throw themselves at my feet. My problem was that I wanted them standing on theirs, not groveling at mine. But if all I had to do was tap them with my magic wand to get what I wanted, perhaps that would be enough.

Bambi also told me I was a goddess. I did not want to be a goddess. I wanted to be normal. I chuckled at that. 'Normal' was completely out of the question. I was going to have to work to come to terms with the new me. I knew that, but I was learning that it was going to be a lot harder than I thought. Everything seemed strange. It was like I had moved to a new world where everything I thought I knew was wrong and I had to learn how to act all over again.

Neeka left us at her house to tell her mother that she was home safe and Bud and Jim and I walked on to ours. Bambi was waiting to talk to me, so the boys went off to get a start on their homework. I got the impression that them attending to homework before doing anything else was a habit they picked up from me.

"You look troubled," she said.

"I made an unpleasant discovery on the way home."

She waited patiently. I could talk about it or not. I decided it was something she needed to know.

"I found a new mental power. One that in hindsight should have been predictable."

"You're getting smarter." She said, nodding.

"How did you know that?"

"Listen to yourself. It's obvious every time you open your mouth. Last night when you were talking to Bob Foster he had a hard time relating to you at first. What he has seeing and what he was hearing didn't fit. Once he accepted that you were some kind of female super-spook he was able to cope."

"I just tried to talk his language."

"And did it so marvelously well that he thinks you must be the product of some secret government program to breed super-agents. That's why he dropped the questions about you. That's why he decided it would be healthier for him not to know. You remember when he talked about 'who you work for'? He thinks you are here to get some seasoning in field-work before your agency calls you back in."

"Holy shit. 'Pardon my French'."

"He thinks I'm your control. You should have heard him on the phone today when I called to follow up on your requests. It was all, 'yes, ma'am' and 'yes, Mrs. Reynolds, I'll get right on that'. He even mentioned 'inter-agency cooperation'. The man has completely forgotten that I've known him and his wife for years."

"I just wanted to impress him."

"Oh, you impressed him all right. Look what came by courier while you were at school." She handed me a leather wallet. When I flipped it open there was a badge and an ID card inside. The badge said Special Deputy. The ID was for Samantha Kramer and the photo was the one from my school yearbook.

"He said this was the easiest way to guarantee you would get full cooperation from other law enforcement agencies. Flash this and they will know you are a brother officer."

"Does this mean I can arrest people?"

"You bet. Although I think your arrangement calls for someone in the Sheriff's department to get the credit for any arrests you make. That way you won't have to appear in court when they go to trial.

"He said he could send you some handcuffs and mace and even issue you a firearm if you wanted, but he thought your methods were likely to be as effective as any hardware he could provide."

Something about him mentioning my 'effective' methods raised a flag. I asked, "Did he say anything about the kidnapper from last night?"

She looked at me hard before she answered, as if she was afraid of my reaction to the news. "He's in the hospital. The doctors are trying to reconstruct his knee. It's 50-50 whether he will keep the kidney."

I took a deep breath. I remembered that I had not even been tranced when I did that. I had hit him too hard both times. I might have killed him. It would have been easy. I needed to learn control before I got into any more fights. Until I learned to use my abilities effectively I would be a loose cannon. No wonder the Sheriff was so cooperative. He had seen me nearly kill someone with just my little patent-leather mary-janes.

"You're right about the costume. I'm going to need something rugged to work in." It felt funny thinking of it as my 'work'.

"I called Mr. Morton first thing this morning." She said. "I decided not to beat around the bush. I told him you needed a super-hero costume; a real one. He was quiet for a very long time. Then he asked if you wanted a cape with it. I told him that was for the fictional characters; that we were talking about the real thing. I told him that this was extremely confidential. He was offended. He told me that all his work was strictly confidential. Then he asked if it needed to be bullet-proof. I told him it needed to be as impervious as possible and as light as possible and as flexible as possible. He promised to have some designs for you to look at tomorrow when we go back to pick up the rest of your wardrobe. When I hung up he was quit excited. I'm still not sure he believed me, but he seemed genuinely enthusiastic."

I brightened right up at that. I had forgotten about all the new clothes I would be getting. The bulk of the clothes we had picked out had either had to be altered or assembled from scratch.

"Do you think Morton will be able to come up with something useful? Doesn't he just do sexy clothes for large-breasted types, like us?"

"Don't underestimate Mr. Morton," she said. "He's been in business for quite some time and he has a few tricks up his sleeve. For instance, I know he does a lot of work for some movie studios down in Miami. One-off costumes are a staple item for him. Many of them are quite, ah, outlandish."

"I didn't know there were movie studios in Miami."

"They're mostly direct-to-DVD and mail-order companies."

"You mean pornography?" I was shocked and appalled. Well, titillated and intrigued, anyway.

"I do mean pornography. That's what Morton means when he says 'confidential'. He doesn't dare let on to his society customers than he also sells clothes to porn stars and exotic dancers. He can do both because his shop is state-of-the-art computer-operated hardware. He makes most everything to order, except for the few racks he has up front. No stock means no warehouse, no insurance, no inventory tax, no guessing fashion trends. Do you remember how he measured you?"

"The computer with the cameras? I thought that was kind of high-tech for a dressmaker."

"It's the key to his business. He showed me his back room once when I told him how surprised I was that he was able to produce custom orders so quickly. He's rather proud of it."

"So that's what he meant when he said he could get a better fit on some of the clothes that I thought fit perfectly already."

"The things he makes for you will all fit like a glove. That's why I think he's the best choice to do your costume. He can do it fast, we know it will fit, and his specialty is unusual or unique clothes for women with figures like ours."

"Great! I can't wait to see what he comes up with."

"After that I called around to see about martial arts training. You would not believe the number of karate, aikido, judo, kung fu, bushido, kendo and ninjutsu academies there are just in the city limits. After talking with a few of them I had almost decided that you would be better off taking several different classes to see what would work best for you.

The last man I spoke with seemed to have the best solution. His name is Xaiolong Li and he teaches a style of Kung Fu he called Jeet Kune Do." She tried to pronounce each syllable as she had heard it. It sounded funny hearing her trying to imitate a Chinese accent.

"I don't know much about Kung Fu, but it seems to me I've heard of that style. I think it was in a movie — no, I saw it in a TV program on that guy who was in all those movies, Bruce somebody."

"Bruce Lee. Yes, you may have seen a biography of him. I remember seeing a few of his movies when I was younger. If I remember right, he was responsible for the slow-motion photography film technique you see so much of in movies now."

"Was he a director, too?"

"No, he was just so fast that that was the only way they could get him on film."

"They had to slow the film down so they could see him move? Jeez, how good was this guy?"

"Good enough so that 30 years later he is still revered as one of the great masters of the art, apparently. Anyway, Mr. Li teaches this Jeet Kune Do style, which he says combines the best elements of all the other styles into a more practical form. He said that the emphasis was not so much on form as effect. I gather you don't want to spend weeks trying to learn to stand like a crane or move like a snake?"

"You gather correctly. I just want to be able to have enough control so I don't hurt someone any more than necessary."

"Then your first class is Wednesday afternoon right after school. He is about three blocks out of your way coming home, so you won't need me to drive you over there every day. It's the old mattress factory on River Street. Do you know where that is?"

I nodded. Bambi had certainly been busy making all these arrangements.

"I also got in touch with the fitness equipment company. Would you believe they are going out of business already? Anyway, I was able to get a good deal on some mats and some other things that they had in stock that they were looking to liquidate below cost."

"What other things?"

"Let me surprise you. The mats are down there now. The rest will be delivered or installed by the contractor when he finishes redoing the room. I wasn't able to give the contractor much to go on. If you have any ideas now is the time to tell me about them."