Chapter 15B

They put the bar on the rack of the stoutest bench and manhandled six of the largest plates onto it.

"That's 300 pounds," Steve said. "We know you can lift that, but let's work up gradually, so we'll know when we start to get close to your max."

I crawled into position and put my hands on the bar. Steve and Doug moved into position to spot for me.

"Uh, guys? I don't think I need a spot for this. I feel better if you weren't standing too close, OK?"

They shuffled away and watched from the foot of the bench. Doug smiled as he peeked up my short-cropped top. I smiled back and then picked the bar off the rack and did one press with it and put it back. It was fairly easy and I hadn't even had to tap my adrenalin.

I sat up and they added another pair of 50-pound plates. This time it wasn't as easy. I had to strain a bit to press 400.

The room got dead quiet while the next pair of plates were added. With the bar at 500, I could pick it up, but I had to reach for the juice to press it. It felt weird, feeling the steel bar flex under all that weight when I picked it up off the hooks.

With 6 plates on each end, the bar flexed under the weight before I picked it up. I used the power and it instantly became effortless to press. The only problem I had was reconciling the mass and inertia of the bar with its apparent lack of weight. It felt like I should be able to make it move quicker than it did; that it was moving in slow-motion.

When we got up to 1000 pounds, there was a bit of creaking of metal as I shifted the weight off the rack and it transferred through my arms down to the bench supports. I was beginning to feel the weight, even using the adrenalin.

The guys started loading on smaller weights and I asked about that.

"It's because all the big plates we have are already on the bar," Steve told me. "We're going to load up everything that will fit. I think we can get another 500 on. You up for 1500?"

"Sure."

"You don't seem to be having any trouble so far. Are you still OK with this?"

"I'm fine. Let's do it."

With 1500 pounds on the bar, it flexed absurdly. The smallest weights on the ends would have slipped off, but for the locks on the ends of the bar. This was everything that could be loaded, all three-quarter's of a ton of it.

I assumed the position and reached up. I decided that the prudent thing would be not to take any chances and risk getting hurt. I closed my eyes and let my body drift into the trance-state. When the faint sounds of the room faded, I started breathing quickly to put oxygen and adrenalin into my blood. It was a strange sensation, feeling jazzed from the adrenalin and drifty and floaty at the same time.

I picked up the massive bar and positioned it directly over my chest. I lowered it smoothly and raised it just the same way. It was still easy.

"This isn't helping," I thought. "I'm holding almost all the weight in the room and I'm nowhere near my limit. This isn't even much of a strain. It's just slow to move."

Locking my feet under the bench for leverage, I let the bar drift forward and sat up under it. Then I stood with it over my head and did a press in that position. I thought about doing a curl, but that would have meant releasing the bar while I rotated my hands, and that was too much of a risk with the guys so near.

I sat back down and rolled backward, letting the bar back down onto the hooks. I detranced and took my hands away. There was an audible release of breath from everyone in the room to have that much weight at rest again.

"Ah, well... that was amazing," Roger said. "You are beyond just being strong. No one should be physically able to lift that much, never mind pressing it, then sitting up and standing with it!"

He and Doug and Lamont pulled the weights off the bar and hung them back on the racks. When the three of them had left for the showers, Steve sat down next to me on the bench.

"Did you have any trouble at all with it?" Steve asked. "Did you learn anything?"

"No. And yes. I learned that I'm going to have to crack my Physics book more. If I'm going to be tossing the odd ton around, I need to know about inertia and mass and stuff. That hadn't seemed all that relevant before, you know."

As the fire faded from my blood, I felt a slight stiffness. The muscles in my arms and shoulders were tensed and bulging. It felt like I still held the weight. I laughed as I recognized what it was.

"Something funny?" Steve asked.

"I'm pumped," I told him. "I think I've found the weight I need to be using during a workout."

"No shit! Well, we'll just have to find something heavier for you to lift. We'll just have to be more creative."

"You don't have to do this," I told him. "I kept this from you because I didn't want to drag you into it. This isn't your problem."

"Yes, it is. Anything that affects you is my problem."

"I'm very glad to hear you say that. It makes me feel lots better. But you didn't seem as surprised as everyone else when I almost broke the power-lift machine. Why?"

"Well, because I suspected something already. You're quite a handful when you, um, get excited, you know."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. Damn, Sam. Even girls who are attracted to me are usually scared I will hurt them if we get, um, you know. It's a serious turn-off to have someone beg you not to hurt them."

"You don't have to worry about that with me."

"No, I certainly don't. For the first time, I'm with someone I don't have to worry about hurting. I can relax. It's fantastic."

"The shoe is on the other foot, now."

"Yeah. Now I'm the one who has to beg for mercy. Damn, what a turn-on!"

"It makes you hot to be with someone so much stronger than you?"

"Damn right! You're the best thing that's ever happened to me. I'm going to have to work hard just to keep up. I feel so relieved that this is out in the open now."

"How long have you suspected?"

"Since Jim told me not to be surprised if I noticed that you were different from other girls."

"Oh? And what else did Brother Jim say?"

"I thought he was going to lay that, 'you treat my sister right' rap on me. He laughed when I told him I had no intention of hurting you. I asked him what the hell that was about and he told me I'd find out in time. He wouldn't explain what he meant and I've been trying to figure it out ever since. Today I understand. You're special."

"I'm a superheroine." There, it was out in the open at last.

He looked at me as if he thought I might be kidding him.

"No, really. I go out and do battle with the forces of evil for the good of all mankind." Such was the superheroine creed as I understood it. I may have picked it up off the back of a comic book. I don't remember.

"Now I know you're shitting me."

"No shit. Of course, the forces of evil mostly turn out to be purse snatching punks and amateur stick-up men, and guys who think gang-rape is a neat party game." I deliberately didn't mention my encounter with The Torturer. I didn't want to have to explain what all went on that afternoon, especially since I wasn't completely sure how I felt about it myself.

"Um, OK. Whatever." Steve didn't buy it, but he wasn't going to call me a liar to my face. I thought maybe that was just as well. I had told him the truth. If he didn't believe me; that was OK. What he didn't believe probably wouldn't hurt him. If he found out later that I was telling the truth, he couldn't say anything about it.

We took our showers and dressed without returning to the subject. I think Steve was trying to assimilate what he had learned and been told and deciding how he was going to deal with it. I knew just how he felt, since I was still having many of the same problems with what I had become, so I let him work on it by himself.

The unusual session in the weight room had run shorter than usual, so the lunch period was still in progress by the time I got back to the main building. Rather than go straight to my locker to restock my bag with my English and Math books, I stuck my head in the lunchroom to say hi to some of my friends, but a food-fight had broken out and the entrance was packed by all the non-combatants making a hasty exit.

English class was the usual challenge. Not to succeed, but to stay awake. The real mental challenge to diagramming the parts of a sentence was to avoid the distraction of wondering when the heck I would ever put this particular skill to use in later life. It all seemed terribly artificial and contrived.

When it was time for Gym, I was again distracted by Neeka broadcasting still another climax right into my head, making me pause on the shallow steps in front of the building and lean against the balustrade until my legs quit shaking. This was a good one, and I almost lost my steel balls when my pussy convulsed in sympathy.

My curiosity about her suddenly hyperactive sex life was making me crazy. Nevermind that it seemed to be satisfying me as well and that I hadn't had to dash into a restroom stall all day. I wanted to know what the heck was going on. Neeka had almost never had sex at school before, and now she seemed to be insatiable.

"You'll know soon enough," I told myself. "Patience." And I walked on to Gym class, taking small steps and breathing deeply to get my head clear.

I didn't see Coach Sue until we had dressed-out and walked down to the field. I knew to expect something, but the change came as a surprise to the rest of the class. The chatter began as soon as we turned through the gate in the vine-covered fence and saw Coach standing in her usual spot next to the bleachers and it did not quiet until she blew her whistle the second time.

The change was impressive. Instead of the usual baggy sweatsuit and cap that hid everything but her face, she had on a pair of nylon running shorts and, miraculously, a cropped t-shirt. The shirt was modest by almost any standard. It revealed nothing but the lower hem of the sports-bra she had on under it, but it left her ripped abs and concave stomach bare. The shorts showed off her well-turned legs quite well. I would have picked something briefer, or with a side-slit, but that was just quibbling. Sue looked like a completely different person; and from the comments I was hearing, a much improved one.

"Would you look at that!" Heather said, her squeak audible above the general noise. "She's a girl!"

"And what a bod!" Angie added. "I had no idea she looked that good."

Polly said, "Every time I've seen her, she's had sweats on, or that horrible brown dress of hers."

"You think we could look that good if we keep doing these dumb exercises?" Angie asked no one in particular.

There was no answer, but everyone had been reminded that there was a point to all this running and jumping. That building your body meant something other than the bulging muscles that so many girls claimed would ruin their appearance. Apparently the lesson was well-taken, because everyone was much more into the calisthenics than usual. Even the girls who usually slacked off whenever Coach wasn't looking did all the repetitions of each exercise.

I took the opportunity to see how much effort I could spend without drawing on an adrenalin boost. Clearly now, the way for me to keep my power controlled was to remain as calm and 'zen' as possible. Without the boost of adrenalin or the total body control or trance, I was still very strong, but there seemed more of a connection between the amount of energy needed to do something and the apparent effort it took. It seemed to me to be like the difference between using a tool with some mechanical advantage, like a wrench with a long handle, and using a power tool. In the first case, I could feel the resistance as I applied force; while in the second, the effort and the force seemed disconnected.

The minivan rescue and the episode in the weight room showed me that I could draw on an immense amount of power when I needed it. Power that was going to be a couple of orders of magnitude of overkill for all but the rarest of situations. More than ever, I needed to be able to control it. At least now I had a solid working hypothesis and a sound plan: stay calm. As long as I kept my glands in check, I could gage how hard I was pulling, pushing, or hitting. If I got excited, or pissed-off, the gloves were off and anything could happen.

Some of the more mystical or spiritual aspects of the Kung Fu lessons seemed much more relevant to me. I wondered if perhaps some of the more spectacular things I had heard of martial artists doing were possible because they had somehow tapped into the same power that I had. It felt good to think that, because it meant I wasn't unique. In other words: I wasn't alone; I was just a gifted amateur who had discovered how to tap a power that had been around for centuries. It made me feel warm and fuzzy to think that I was a member of a special group who had this gift.

In the comics, superheroes who normally worked alone always seemed to be teaming up or even forming societies, or leagues, or clubs. I knew I shouldn't be trying to use fiction as a guideline, but I understood how even the most solitary of them would want to get together occasionally to be with other people who had similar abilities — abilities that set them apart from the average girl on the street.

While we went through forty minutes of routine calisthenics, I thought about all this, and about the things I had been able to do because I had these abilities. By the time Coach blew the whistle and we headed back to the locker room, I had my head back in good order and I felt better about who I was and what I was doing than I had in days. I didn't even feel frustrated at having to fake my workout. Instead, I felt calm and at peace with myself.

As I skipped along while everyone else trudged back to hit the showers, I started making plans for after school. I had worked out everything I wanted to do whole rest of the day when I remembered none of it was going to happen because Mom would be picking me up after school for the visit to the Doctor that I had let her talk me into.

My elated mood dropped back to zero and my feet became like lead. I was fine. I didn't need a doctor. Doctors meant nothing but humiliation ad embarrassment to me. Intellectually, I knew that this was just the legacy of having been brought up by Yvette — the mother from Hell — but I still felt a pain growing in the pit of my stomach at the thought of the pending examination.

"What if he finds something wrong with me?" I wondered. "What if he wants to put me in an institution so I could be 'studied'?" The risk seemed unjustifiable to me.

"What if you quit being so scared of going to the doctor?" a more rational voice in my head asked. For a second, I thought it was Neeka, but then I realized that it was just my conscience nagging me. This was the doctor who had provided my Pills on trust and Mom's promise that I would be in to see him soon. He certainly didn't sound like the type who would turn me over to the government to be an experimental animal.

I still couldn't manage to get back my good mood, but I suppressed the urge to run away and hide until after my appointment time had passed and tell everyone that I had been kidnapped by lesbian dwarves from Venus who probed me with their strange superscientific devices. The Venusian Lesbian Dwarf fantasy kept my mind off the visit to Dr. Bonner at the cost of making me wet thinking about all the things that the VLDs might want to do to me.

I was picturing different ways of being probed by the cute little Venusians when Sue caught up to me and put her arm around my shoulders. I startled me, both because I hadn't seen her coming, and because she never touched any of us casually.

"Hi, Sam! You look distracted this afternoon. Everything OK?" She said, cheerfully. She seemed as relaxed as I had ever seen her.

"I guess. I've got a doctor's appointment after school and I'm not looking forward to it."

"Just a check-up or are you having something done? You looked OK during class, but now you seem a little down."

"Just a check-up. I was having such a good time in class that I forgot about having to go. Now that I've remembered it, it seems like my whole day is ruined."

"Oh, I'm sure it won't be that bad. Have you been to this doctor before?"

"No, this is a guy that Mom goes to. A gynecologist. This will be my first time going to him."

Sue nodded and smiled. She misunderstood my apprehension, and I wondered if I should set her straight.

"And you're afraid he will find out you are sexually active?"

"No, I think Mom already told him all about that." I thought that Mom had probably passed on even more information about my sex life than she had mentioned to me. Mom was just being motherly, in her own way. "It's just that the doctors I've been to in the past have been really unpleasant. I'm just gun-shy."

"Well, I'm sure this one will be different. But good doctors are hard to find. Sometimes you have to overlook the poor bedside manner if they seem to know what they are doing," she told me.

I wanted to ask about her own experiences with doctors, and gynecologists specifically, but we were already back to the locker room and I had to take my second shower of the afternoon.

When I got in the shower, I found that my jewelry was just as popular as before. Everyone seemed to want to have another look and I tried to be nice and let them look and admire as much as they wanted. Some girls wanted to go beyond looking, and had to handle the bells, the chain, the rings, and me. The 'me' part wasn't that surprising, but that they would be bold enough to do it in a crowded locker room — was. It was all under the pretext of seeing for themselves how deeply the rings went, and how they could be flipped up and down, and no, they didn't hurt when they did that, and so on. Still, once Polly ran her finger across my nipple to see what happened to the rings when my areola crinkled up, it seemed to signal the start of Fondling Season and I found myself being touched, stroked, and pawed by one girl after another.

Some of them came around more than once, getting bolder each time. I escaped for a moment by excusing myself and running for the shower, but that just changed the venue, not the attraction. I was about to become exasperated with it and shoo them all away, but all the attention was improving my mood and the stimulation certainly wasn't doing me any harm at all. After I had toweled off and dressed up to my waist, I found my breasts once again open for business as Polly found a few girls who hadn't had a close enough look yet and she insisted on giving them a guided tour.