Just like every other kid I knew, I took my CAP test on the day I turned fourteen. I hadn't had any idea of how well I'd do on it, and I was very curious to see my results. I scored a 5.8. It looked like I'd be staying on Earth, to provide a snack or two for the 'dickheads' who were expected to arrive here within a few short years.

I was disappointed with my score. Who wouldn't be? The next morning, at school, I'd been forced, mostly thru peer pressure, to show my CAP card to everyone in my circle of acquaintances.

Most of my friends had scored less than 6.5, just like I had. Everyone tried to cheer me up, telling me over and over again that my CAP score wasn't the end of the world. I almost laughed in their faces, because scoring less than 6.5, when you're a male, is pretty close to being the end of your world.

I was called out of third period English and told to report to Mr. Harkness, the ninth grade guidance counselor. When I got to his office he had me sit in one of the chairs lined up in front of his desk and asked me for my CAP card. When I handed it over, he put it in some kind of hand held card reader and spent the next ten minutes making notes on a pad of paper he'd placed on his desk.

After he was finished making his notes, he started asking me all kinds of embarrassing questions. He asked me if I'd gone through puberty yet, wanting to know if I'd gotten armpit hair and hair in my groin area. His questions scared me a little, but they tended to creep me out a whole lot more. After all the embarrassing questions, he asked me about my home life, about my parent's recent divorce, and about a hundred other things that made absolutely no sense to me. He didn't indicate to me, at least in the early parts, anything about why he needed to know any of that private information.

"Jimmy, pretty soon now, your body is going to be entering puberty. When it does, there are going to be some important changes. These changes will be to your body, and to your mind. A lot of your interests are going to begin changing as a result of these physical and emotional changes you'll soon be experiencing. It's all a normal part of growing up and maturing as you become an adult male. For several years now, ever since this CAP testing was first mandated for fourteen year old's, I've been trying to convince the powers that be that the current CAP scoring is unfairly punitive for the vast majority of late bloomers such as yourself."

"Everybody takes the same test when we turn fourteen. What makes you think it's so different for me?"

"Well, that's a great question. The simple answer is that there are a lot of things that make it different for you. The test measures your Capacity, Aptitude and Potential. All three of these measurements will probably change significantly once you have gone through puberty. There is a wider range of subset scores that make up your final CAP score. Sexual abilities, mental focus, aggression, abilities to cooperate, lead or follow, as well as all the different marks you've been given for how well the test shows you'd probably react under certain types of physically and emotionally stressful situations.

"To a great degree I'm forced to admit, how the boy scores initially is usually an accurate predictor of how the adult man will later score if later retested. Having admitted this to you however, there is simply no question in my mind that, after you have gone through puberty, several of the most critically important subset scores will be altered in a significant way. This is probably more true in your particular case than it would be with many other pre-pubescent children, primarily because of some of the recent emotional stress you've undergone with the divorce of your mother and father."

I left Mr. Harkness's office with a head that was filled with more questions than answers. I'd asked him to give me some specific examples of ways in which my going through puberty might improve any future CAP score I might earn. In essence, every answer I received from him had only been s restatement of the Confederacy rules that said he wasn't allowed to do any coaching of children in subject areas which might possibly assist them with any future CAP testing they might choose to undergo.

He told me the main purpose for our interview had been to allow him to collect additional raw data to assist him in gaining increased empirical information that he hoped would lend weight to a report he would soon be presenting to the Confederacy. More than this he refused to share with me.

The one positive fact I'd taken from this interview had been his confident assertion that all these subsets that together made up the whole of CAP scoring, could be altered, for the better, if certain changes could be made by any individual being tested. I was left with a strong feeling that he'd been trying to encourage me to do something.

I could easily see how my abilities might be improved, especially after I grew stronger and more physically capable. I couldn't see where my future growth would have any effect on my potential. I wasn't that sure what the Capacity part of the scoring really measured. When I'd asked the counselor about that, he'd refused to define the term for me. Even so, I felt sure he'd been trying to get me to start thinking about what I might be able to do to improve my future CAP score results.

Up until that point in my life, I hadn't shown too much interest in girls, or in many of the social changes that had been taking place ever since they'd told all of us about the impending invasion of the 'dickheads'. I'd always figured I'd get interested in girls when the time it was supposed to happen finally arrived. I hadn't connected that interest with how I might score on my CAP test. What Mr. Harkness had told me seemed to be arguing that there was definitely a strong connection between those two things.

That isn't to say that I hadn't observed some of the social changes occurring at our school however. Changes like the way so many of the girls attending my school had begun dressing to draw attention to their bodies, or the way whole groups of them had begun to act around anyone with a high enough CAP score to someday become a candidate for being extracted from the planet.

In a way, I had thought I understood all of that, but, after talking with Mr. Harkness, I was no longer convinced that I actually did. I already knew some things about sex. I already knew about blow jobs and fucking. I'd seen stuff on the internet, of course, but none of what I'd seen had held much interest for me.

Some of my friends were really into all that stuff already, but I wasn't. One other thing I'd gotten from the interview with Mr. Harkness had been the definite idea that I soon would be more interested in it. I'm sure I already knew that, just from what I'd learned in Health Education, but, until he'd spoken to me about it, I'd never really given too much thought to how much being interested in that kind of thing might effect how I might score on any future CAP testing I might participate in.

After my interview with Mr. Harkness, I started paying a lot more attention to the way other people my age were acting around each other. This was especially true when it came to my interest in watching the goings on around Alan Carruthers. Alan was fourteen years old, like me, but he was about five months older than I was, and he'd gotten a 6.7 when he'd taken his first CAP test. Alan was always talking about girls too, even from back before he had turned fourteen, from the time before he had taken his own CAP test.

I'd already seen several hundred examples of the ways people had started treating him differently after he'd gotten those qualifying marks on his CAP test. We weren't really friends, Alan and me, but we both were members of the Chess club at school, and he lived pretty close to me. He was also the only kid my age that I knew for sure had a high enough CAP score to be eligible for extraction by the Confederacy.

A lot of the other kids I knew, most of the boys in fact, were always talking about Alan. Mostly, they would say things about how lucky he was to have such a high CAP score. Naturally, after saying that, it would then lead to them telling anyone who'd listen about what they'd do, and who they'd do it to, if they had only been lucky enough to be standing in Alan's shoes.

There were definitely a lot of girls who had been trying to get Alan's attention ever since his CAP testing results had become common knowledge. Sometimes, a few of these girls would get into fights over him. Real fights too, not just arguments, or two or more girls yelling at each other. It was pretty pathetic, and, whenever these fights happened around him, I could see how embarrassing they were for poor Alan.

You probably wouldn't believe some of the things girls said to him either. Right there in class sometimes, or while we were at lunch. Some of the worst things were said to him right out in the school hallways, when he was just walking to and from his classes.

Some of these girls had no shame at all. I'd been sitting at the same table as Alan and had heard him telling Fred Nathan, his best friend, how he wished now that he hadn't told anyone about his score. I could understand what he meant.

When puberty finally got around to hitting me, about three months after my birthday, it really hit me hard, throwing my whole world all out of kilter. My body started changing almost over night, including my voice, which had embarrassingly started breaking up in mid-syllable, seemingly whenever I spoke to anyone.

All my emotions, especially anger and self pity, began constantly hammering away at me in my head. I'd wake up in the morning, and be pissed off about something stupid, like the sound my mom's alarm clock made, or the fact that she hadn't bought me the brand of cereal I'd casually mentioned once that I wanted to try.

Mom and I started having these little fights. For the first time in my life, I started talking back to her. It came to a head one morning when I shouted at her and screamed for her to shut up. I really felt bad about that, almost as soon as the words left my mouth.

When my mom told me I was grounded for a week for my screaming at her, I felt even worse. Of course, being grounded gave me plenty of time to wallow in even more self pity.

I was sitting up in my room, about two months after puberty first started hitting me, when I first discovered how good it felt to rub on my dick. Again, this was something I'd heard about and hadn't particularly believed. Within a week, after I'd done a lot of preliminary self exploration, I was spanking the old monkey at least twice a day.

I liked it, especially those times when I'd have these great fantasies about me having a high CAP score, like Alan's. I finally understood what all those other day dreaming boys had been carrying on about.

Having discovered that physical outlet seemed to improve my other behavior in front of my mother, and with all my friends at school. I didn't have the time or the energy to always be arguing or complaining to her, or them, about how bad things were in my life. I'd much rather be up in my room "studying" on my computer. I got in plenty of "studying" after that, abusing myself until my dick finally got too painful to do anything more with it. I'd give it a rest for a day or two whenever that happened, but only until it felt ready to take even more punishment from my hand.

It was right about this time when Alan fell so publicly in love with Heather Loomis. Heather was the best looking ninth grader at our school. She was probably either the second or third best looking girl in the whole high school. Danielle Forester had a better face than Heather's, and Trudy Bennett had a cute face, and a body that was absolutely incredible, but both of them were seniors.

Tanya Gardner was pretty, and she had a great body, but she had such a stuck up personality that almost none of the boys I knew wanted to be around her. We might jack off thinking about doing stuff with her, but none of us wanted to actually go out with her. Not that she wanted any of us either. Her boyfriend was some college guy.

For my money, I'd rate Danielle first, Heather second, and Trudy a very close third. Tanya would come in a distant fourth, or even worse. It was funny how it happened, but only a few short months later, Trudy took over first place in my mind, and Danielle slipped to third. This came about because of the effect puberty was having on my priorities. Heather remained solidly in second place.

The whole school knew that Heather had thrown herself at Alan, and that she had gone over to his house one Saturday and actually begged him to fuck her. I heard this directly from Fred, and he told me that Alan had been the one who had told him about it.

It soon became obvious that Heather's life had now become totally centered around Alan. Rumors had it that she had promised him that she would fuck him whenever and wherever he'd let her in return for his promise to choose her as one of his concubine's whenever it was his turn to finally be extracted. The rest of the time, when she couldn't fuck him, she seemed to be spending on trying to make sure that Alan didn't get any sex from any the other girls who still wanted to hang around him to try to get him to like them better.

I also heard, again from Fred, that Alan had promised him, Fred, the other spot he had available for a concubine. Alan even talked about how he'd be fucking Heather whenever Alan was off fighting the 'dickheads'. One thing was certain, if you saw Alan, you didn't have to look very far to also see Heather and Fred.

A few guys who were jealous of Alan, started spreading rumors that Heather probably wasn't the only one of the two of them who were sucking Alan's dick.

On my fifteenth birthday, I went and took the CAP test again. This time I scored a 6.4. No one talked to me about where I'd improved, or what else I might be able to do to earn that last critical tenth of a point. It was certainly frustrating for me to be so close, especially when I had absolutely no ideas about why my score had improved like it had.

I didn't tell anyone about my retaking the test, not even my mom. I'd found out that her CAP score was only a 4.3, and that my father's was a 6.9, but he no longer lived anywhere near us. According to my mother, he'd met somebody else, and they were living together in a city about six hundred miles from us. All I knew was that it had been more than a year since I'd even gotten a phone call from him.

For some reason, his having a qualifying CAP score had made me feel better about my own chances. It was probably mostly wishful thinking on my part, but I became convinced that I'd inherited his genes and not those of my mother. I was naturally hoping that this was true, and that I'd improve my score some more when I took my next test on my sixteenth birthday.

I had really started growing when I hit puberty. I went from about five three to five eleven during the ninth grade and that following summer. My body started filling out too. By the time tenth grade started, I weighed about one sixty. I'd always liked to swim, so I went out for the swim team. I made the team, but there wasn't any one event where I was strong enough to swim in individual heats at any of the meets. I did swim on two different relay teams though, and we did well enough in those two events to allow me to get my varsity letter.

In the Spring, I went out for track too. I ran the 800 meters, and the 4 X 400 team relay. Again, my times weren't that sensational, but I did enough to earn myself a second varsity letter. I was also elected Treasurer of the school's Chess club in the tenth grade, but that was really because no one else had wanted the job. Alan was elected president, of course.

I wasn't the only person who had improved their CAP scores. There were at least ten people in our ninth and tenth grades who were now qualified with a score of 6.5 or better after they went and got themselves retested. Four of the newly qualified students were girls. The five new boys immediately started making things interesting at school.

The girls started getting a lot of attention from guys too, but they kept the guys from doing too much in front of everyone else. They also made it plain that any fighting among the boys would end the fighter's chances for being considered by any of them.

The new guys were way different when it came to wanting to get public attention from, and increased competition among, the girls. Three of the boys had publicly announced that the two girls they would be picking had to prove first that they were willing to be bisexual with each other. Cameron Baill and Vanessa Cochran both got suspended for two weeks after they both put on a little girl on girl show in the school cafeteria trying to impress Jason Flanders, one of the boys who'd demanded that both his future picks had to first pass the 'must be bisexual' edict.

I had spent much of my free time online, attempting to get all the information I could about whatever criteria I'd need to improve on in order to raise my score that last little bit. I had found quite a lot of general information to look through, but I really wasn't able to find too much that addressed specific areas being tested, or how to improve on them. I had a lot of hope that the swimming and the running would increase my subset scores under the subsets concerned with either aggressiveness and competitiveness.

I was absolutely certain that I was getting stronger, not just bigger. By the time I had reached the six foot mark in height, and had gotten my weight up to one eighty, I was definitely starting to feel more physically competent. It changed the way I carried myself and acted when I was around other people. I became more willing to speak up and share my opinions, both in class, and in any social groups which I felt a part of. I had started feeling more confident in myself. The increase in my size probably had quite a bit to do with that. My CAP score, being so close to 6.5 by then, had undoubtedly helped increase that confidence also.

We were well past the halfway point of tenth grade when Alan, and two of the other boys, along with an additional two of the girls who had newly qualified themselves as sponsors, were all picked up at the local mall on an early Spring Saturday morning.

There was no real surprise that so many would be extracted at the same time, because most of the qualified sponsors had begun hanging around with each other by then, hoping that the number of qualified volunteers being in a single place together would tempt the Confederacy into making an extraction attempt. It must have worked, because, the following Monday at school, their being picked up for extraction was almost the only thing anyone was talking about.

I felt bad for Heather. She'd been attending a birthday party for one of her relatives when the pick up was made. Alan had chosen two other girls to accompany him. I didn't feel sorry for Fred though. His announcing to people that Alan was committed to picking him as a concubine had caused Alan quite a bit of embarrassment, not to mention ridicule, from some of the boys in our school.

Fred had actually been right there with Alan when the pick up had occurred. Several kids who'd been in the mall when the pick up happened had said that the Marines had used their stinger on Fred, after he got so upset at Alan's not really picking him like he was supposed to have promised. Apparently, Fred got very upset and vocal while protesting Alan's change of plans for his concubine picks.

I took the test for the third time on my sixteenth birthday. I guess the third time's the charm, just like everyone says. I scored a 7.0. I'd been praying for a 6.5, so getting a 7.0 really surprised me. I knew that those five extra tenths had made me eligible for four concubines, not just the two I'd been hoping to get.