Chapter 140: I Decide to Become an Internet Millionaire

Thursday, April 28, 2005 (Continued)

I was still in a bad mood fifteen minutes later, and cursing how stupid people could be, when Julia and Ava arrived. "What a pain in the ass that was! I can't believe how stupid they all were. Did they honestly think I could have ten different conversations, with forty different people all trying to butt in?"

Julia said, "Yes, they were stupid, but they wanted to be around you because you're a big deal to them. The good news is that it's probably going to happen to you most of the times you visit the middle school, so you're going to get lots of practice at handling it. Have you given that any thought?"

"How can you call that good news? That's just more pains in the ass. And, 'No, ' I haven't given any thought to how to handle it. I've just been cursing it."

"I agree that it's a pain that such things happen, but they do, and they're going to get worse. So how are you going to handle it?"

"I suspect you don't consider, 'By staying away from middle school, ' an acceptable answer?"

"It's probably going to happen in high school too, once you're rich. It might also start happening at your soccer games too, and other places you go. Practicing on the middle-school kids is good news because you do HAVE to learn. You can't keep running away. Nor can you allow yourself to get so pissed off every time it happens, otherwise you'll be going through life permanently pissed off. You're a very sweet guy, but you're too worried about offending people by standing up for yourself, even though they're offending you at the time. This is definitely one of those situations where you need to 'toughen up'. Do you agree?"

"{Sigh}. You're right. How do I handle it though? It was chaos, so surely the only answer would be for me to do a lot of very loud and very rude screaming, to tell them all to get lost?"

"That'd be one approach, but not ideal if you don't want people to think poorly of you. I've got some better ideas, but let's talk about it tonight, after I've had some time to research it."

"Huh. How could you possibly research that crap?"

"The same way I research almost every other problem serving you brings up - I google it initially, and sometimes ask Mom later. This problem is one every famous person has, which is surely common enough to have material available online. It's probably even common enough to have had psychological studies done on it. I'll research it while you're at Katelin's house, and tell you what I find later."

"Ahh, thanks."

"All part of the service. What did you think of the Ducklings?"

"I thought they were pretty silly, actually. I think Donna did a superb job of telling them what they had to do, but when it came time to do it, their brains turned to mush. Nice pussies though, haha. The annoying thing is that the only thing we can do at school is talk, but conversation is what they're worst at. Your idea of my having a house next to school would have been perfect! We wouldn't have had to talk much, and we would have completely avoided all that fame crap."

"Yeah, but we can't do much about it now. The Ducklings were very disappointed that everything got messed up, and would love another chance with you. I didn't say much to them, mostly repeating what you'd already said, and that you'd get back to them through Donna."

"Thanks. I can't say I'm in any sort of hurry to repeat that lunch. Because of the mess at the end of it obviously, but even the time before that wasn't particularly enjoyable."

"They're your project, so I shouldn't give you advice about that."

"Yeah, I know. Changing the subject, why do you think the fame stuff was so much worse this time than when I had lunch with Carol's group?"

"Maybe because the first boys yelled out so loudly and excitedly. You know what troublemakers soccer players are, haha. It might be because Carol and Donna have been talking you up more. Or maybe when you walked through middle school after Carol's lunch, people regretted missing you, so when they saw you today they came running."

"Yeah, I guess it could be any of those."

"Personally I think it's because that shirt shows your nipples off so well, haha."

My classmates and even some of my teachers remind me of that frequently enough that I didn't need Julia to mention it. We discussed less embarrassing stuff for the rest of lunch.

Other than Katelin's excited interactions with me (she'd somehow got the impression that I was an amazingly wonderful person), and her excited double-checking that I'd be coming to her place just before dinner this evening, only two things worth mentioning occurred before the end of the school day: some guys caused me a little trouble, and Chloe was troubled, as follows.

When I was packing up my desk after a class ended, half a dozen unhappy looking guys approached me and one of them said, "We'd like to talk with you about something."

"Sure. Talk away."

"We'll wait until the class has emptied some more."

#1: <How about we don't volunteer to stay in a room alone with six annoyed guys.>

I said, "I'll be emptying along with everybody else, so you might end up talking to yourselves. I suggest you start talking now, and you can walk me to my next class." I finished packing my bag, and stood.

One of them moved to stand between me and the door, saying, "We want to talk in private, not in a crowded hallway."

"You can talk in private all you want, but I'm walking to my next class. It's in A Block, so we can talk while we're between blocks if you like."

I walked sideways away from the direct line to the door, past a couple of desks, getting me clear of the would-be conversationalists, and giving me an unobstructed path out, which I took. There were still several of our classmates in the room, and I was prepared to yell out to them to get help had the six guys done anything stupid, but it proved unnecessary as the six followed me out of the room.

I walked a little faster than my usual pace out of this block, and across to A block. I'm extremely good at walking through crowds, so my six followers had to run to stay with me. When we were outside, three of them fell in alongside each side of me, and one of them said, "We don't think it's fair that so many girls are spending time with you."

#3: <"Fair"! Are they really as moronic as that?>

I answered, "That all depends on how you define 'fair', doesn't it?"

"Huh?" | "What do you mean? | "No it doesn't; it's not fair."

#3: <Yep, morons.>

"English isn't my best subject, but even I can tell that 'fair' was the key word in your complaint. You described the entire situation as 'not fair'. So please tell me what you mean by that?"

"You're not going to talk your way out of this, smart-ass!"

"I'm trying to get YOU to talk, not me. You said 'it wasn't fair'. What does 'fair' mean?"

"You know what fair means! Everybody knows that."

"When I didn't have any girlfriends for the years before this one, did any of you think that was unfair and make any efforts to get me one?"

"You're not being fair NOW."

"I think it's fair that the girls get to choose who they spend their time with. Don't you agree?"

"That's not what we mean..."

"You complained that so many girls were choosing to spend their time with me, so presumably you don't like the girls being able to choose for themselves. The only possible solution to that is to force the girls to spend their time with specific boys. Leaving aside the rather interesting issues of who will be doing the choosing and the forcing, have you considered discussing this new approach to fairness with the Principal? He's big on fairness, so maybe he could help you force the girls to behave the way you want." It couldn't do any harm to remind them about the Principal.

"Listen, asshole. We don't like it that YOU are encouraging so many girls to chase you. THAT'S not fair!"

I pretended shock, "You don't like me being NICE! Wow. I never realized I was being so underhanded, sneaky and unfair. All these years my parents have been telling me to be a nice person, and it's actually unfair. Who'd have thought!"

I wasn't doing a very good job of placating them. They were so stupid I was unable to resist being facetious, although - in my defense - I had wisely stopped myself saying some of the most inflammatory thoughts that'd crossed my mind.

We'd just arrived at then entrance to A Block, and I probably should stop enjoying myself at their expense. I stopped walking and addressed them, "In all seriousness, every one of you would love to have so many girls chasing after you. And if that happened, you'd laugh your head off at anyone complaining about you being unfair. What you're really complaining about is that you can't compete with me. Competition is THE essential part of finding girlfriends. You don't expect the Principal to allocate one girl to one boy at the start of the every year, do you? Is that your idea of fair? God help the poor guy who got Jenny Coniff." (Imagine your worst nightmare of a girlfriend. You'd happily choose that girl's uglier sister over Jenny Coniff.) "Boys compete for girlfriends, and girls compete for boyfriends. That's how it works for everyone, including me and all of you. If you want to do better, then try harder. I've heard each of you make rude comments to girls in class, seen you leering down their blouses, and other macho crap like that. You've never seen me do that stuff. If you choose to behave so unattractively to girls, then it's obvious that girls won't be attracted to you. Next time you're sitting in class, look at how most of the guys behave, and ask yourself what girl in her right mind would want anything to do with any of them! Unlike what you said, I don't encourage so many girls to chase me. The simple fact is that 90% of the guys in school drive girls away by being assholes. Any guy who's even moderately nice gets plenty of choice."

I had worked out a speech to give to guys when my 'unfairness' became too much of an issue, but this wasn't it. Instead I was 'stealing' from the speech I'd half-prepared for when Carol flashed her tits in one of my classes soon. It seemed the better of the two approaches in this circumstance.

The guys had been aggressive when I'd been pulling their chains, but they'd calmed down and listened when I'd started talking seriously. If we'd been alone in a room together, their aggressiveness might've come out, but with dozens of other students walking past continuously, they'd controlled themselves. Because they were listening, and because I enjoy teasing morons, I couldn't resist adding a little joke (they wouldn't get it yet, but my other minds did). I said, "Actually there's another way of getting girls to like you: be rich, girls love that! Instant popularity! About a week ago Julia suggested I think about buying a house, so I've started looking into making money. If you guys want to have lots of girls chasing you, why don't you spend some time after school researching ways of making a good bundle of money. There are thousands of ways, especially on the internet, because it doesn't care how old you are."

"Don't be stupid; we're only sixteen..."

"At my home we've only got one computer that the whole family shares. It's several years old, has got a pathetic dial-up connection, we're fairly poor so I don't have a lot of money to invest, and I'm only FIFTEEN; yet I think it's possible to make good money using the internet. If you guys don't want to even try, that's your choice, just don't come complaining to me about how unfair everything is. Especially as you've got far more free time than I have, because I spend damn near all my time studying the 11th grade classes."

The internet suggestion was crap of course. Once I win the millions we hope for, people are certain to ask me how. I don't want to tell them it was from roulette, so I vaguely intend to say, "I did something very clever on the internet." I thought it'd be a good cover story, so I was using it now. I continued, "I've told you two guaranteed ways of getting girls to chase you: be nice to them, or get rich. If you make an effort, all of you are capable of doing both of those. I'll be interested to see how you get on, and I certainly won't complain of unfairness if you succeed. Good luck and goodbye."

I slipped inside the main doors of the block. Half of the guys were in my next class, but I left them outside to discuss the issue among themselves.

#1: <I wonder whether they'll decide just to beat us up next time?>

#4: <Yeah. Six to one is a bit of a worry. One - or even two - wouldn't worry us, if we got some warning, but six wouldn't go well.>

#3: <It's a pity we aren't as good at sprinting as we are at marathons. If they attack us, we're going to take some lumps. Look on the bright side though, we're miles below our previous years' numbers of beatings, even with a six-to-one attack.>

#4: <I'll be extremely pissed off if we get another broken arm though. That was a pain. Let's try to avoid that, shall we?>

#3: <I'll try to remember that.>

[In the next class, the guys didn't offend any girls, so I was hopeful that they'd listened. By the end of the next school day their behavior had descended all the way back to normal (it should really be called "subhuman", except that virtually every boy acts that way). I guess they must've decided to gain popularity by becoming rich, haha.]

The afternoon's Chloe event went like this. Chloe approached me and asked what it was she needed to do to become my girlfriend. She asked with considerable passion and anxiety, which was wonderful to see.

Holding back my smile, I less-than-helpfully replied, "I very much appreciate that you want to become my girlfriend, Chloe, and I thank you for the compliment you are giving me, but - and I know this sounds backward - you're such a lovely person that I don't want us to quickly jump into a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. If I was only interested in my own pleasure, I'd instantly agree, but you're far too lovely a person for me to give into my selfish impatience like that. For your benefit, I must not give in to my feelings for you until I think you're ready."

"But I don't know what I need to do to get ready. If you tell me what it is, I'll do it. I promise I'll do it, because I really want to be your girlfriend. PLEASE tell me?"

"I want you to be my girlfriend too, but I also want you to be happy about your whole life, not just the part of it that is our relationship. I know you don't understand now, but you'll eventually realize that what I'm doing is being your friend. To me, that's the most important part of being a boyfriend. I value you for who you are, rather than just for your body, and 'who you are' isn't quite ready to be my girlfriend yet."

"But I REALLY want to be. I don't understand why you can't tell me what I need to do. It'd be a lot easier for me to do it, if I knew what it was. That makes sense, doesn't it?"