Some people will think I was crazy, and some others will think I just got really lucky. People who've known me for any length of time will know I'm not either one of those things. I am stubborn though, and I'll be the first one to admit it. I like to get my own way about things now too. So, whether or not I'm crazy, lucky, stubborn, or willful doesn't really matter. I'll tell you my story, then you can decide for yourselves what you think.

I'd always felt that I was really lucky in one way. I met the girl I was positive I wanted to spend the rest of my life with at a very young age, we both were only four years old. Queenie and I were first introduced on an early fall morning when my mother enrolled me into Mrs. Castro's Nursery School. Queenie's real name is Regina Louise Castro, and I'm the one who first gave her the nickname, Queenie. That was maybe two or three weeks after we had first met.

Queenie's mom owned and ran the nursery school. Mr. Castro had elected to remain behind in Cuba back when Queenie and her mom had gotten on a distant cousin's old fishing boat and hot footed it away from their soon to be former homeland. Queenie was only a few months old at the time.

The Coast Guard had rescued the twenty two people on that old fishing boat just moments before it broke apart and sank. At the time the boat had first started sinking, it was only twenty three miles from the Florida coastline. Some of Mrs. Castro's Miami relatives had enough political pull to get the people at the local INS office to issue her one of those special green cards they have, the ones the State Department gives out to people who would probably be killed, or at least imprisoned for the rest of their lives, if they were to be sent back to wherever they'd been trying to escape from.

As soon as she had legal resident status, Mrs. Castro moved out to California, filed for a divorce from Mr. Castro, then opened up her own children's nursery school.

The money she needed to do all this came from the contents of this huge brownish green purse that she had brought with her on the boat. The purse had been made from the skin of a boa constrictor that Mrs. Castro's own mother had killed. The money she brought with her from Cuba, old American ten and twenty dollar bills, was the money that Mrs. Castro's mother and aunts had managed to squirrel away from their pre Fidel Castro (no relation) earnings as "hostesses" in some of the mob's gambling casinos in the wide open city of Havana, back in the 1950's.

I met Queenie at her mother's nursery school, minutes after my mother had signed me in for my first day attending there. All the kids attending that school were outside in the school's small playground area, and Queenie came up to me and pushed me, and the tricycle I was then riding, over on our sides. While I was laying on the ground trying hard to keep from bawling, Queenie pulled the little trike upright, climbed up on the seat, and started peddling away from me. I'm not sure, but I think that was the actual moment when I first started loving her.

What I do know for sure is that she and I were inseparable by the end of that first day. I think what appealed to her about me was the fact that I didn't cry, I didn't tell any of the staff about what she'd done, and, most importantly, I didn't try to retaliate.

An hour after she had pushed me, I was sitting at one of the little tables they had in the school, trying to color on some pieces of scrap paper that one of the teachers had given me. Queenie took a seat in the little chair next to where I was sitting and put a brand new box of Crayola crayons in front of me. A big box, one of those sixty four different colors boxes, and she also brought her own scrap paper. For the rest of the day, she and I did everything together.

When I had to go to the bathroom, in the early afternoon of that first day, it was Queenie who volunteered to show me where the boy's restroom was. Not only did she show me where to go, she came in with me and waited for me while I did my business. Neither of us saw anything out of the ordinary in her doing so, since we were only four years old, and still totally innocent.

I nicknamed her Queenie because she always had to be the boss, the one in charge. She had told me that Regina, her real name, meant queen. It seemed to suit her too, and it wasn't long after that before everyone, even her mother, started calling her Queenie.

Fast forward now about ten years, Queenie and I are in eighth grade, in Mrs. Jessup's class, and the teacher is explaining to the whole class about the Darjee's, the Sa'arm, the Confederacy, and CAP testing. It had only been a few months since the President had gone on the television to tell the American people the bad news about how the 'dickheads' (the Sa'arm) were going from planet to planet, killing everything in their path.

He went on to explain about how the Confederacy Defense Forces were going to be composed only of volunteers from Earth. It was these volunteers who would be doing the actual fighting against the invaders. The other aliens that made up the membership of the Confederacy would be helping us by providing us with the advanced technology we'd need, but they wouldn't be taking any active part in any of the actual fighting. Our volunteers would be trying to either defeat the Sa'arm, or else trying to divert them away from attacking the Earth. The way he explained things, it didn't look all that promising for our planet. My mother had told me at the time not to worry about it because our Army would probably defeat those aliens before I was old enough to be drafted or volunteer.

Mrs. Jessup was explaining to us that we'd have to get CAP cards just as soon as we reached the age of fourteen. Congress, the UN, or some other group had passed a whole bunch of new laws declaring that everyone aged fourteen and up would now be legal adults. All adults needed to be tested and issued a CAP card.

Most of the kids in our class were already fourteen. Some were fifteen already. When Mrs. Jessup started explaining about Confederacy volunteers and extractions, including how all volunteers could pick from two to ten concubines to go with them, depending on how well they scored on their CAP tests, my ears certainly picked up.

Later, as Mrs. Jessup was filling in all the details, like the lowest score you could receive to still qualify for extraction, which was a 6.5, or how each concubine had to do anything their qualifying sponsor told them, she even included the part about how they'd be having sex with them. I'd never heard the other kids in the class being so silent or so attentive as they were when she was talking about the sex stuff.

I knew that the things she was telling us was having a strong effect on me. I was constantly squirming around in my seat behind my desk. Several times I had to put my hand down and push my hard on over to a more comfortable position, one where it wasn't straining against my underwear and making my dick hurt.

I noticed most of the other boys in class were squirming around just like I was. A lot of the girls were sitting around the class giggling about what Mrs. Jessup was talking about, like they thought all of it was pretty funny. Queenie wasn't giggling though, she was listening closely to what was being said, and she appeared to be concentrating fully.

After school that day, Queenie and I were walking back home together. We didn't hold hands or anything, because we weren't into being like that. I knew she loved me, and she knew I loved her. We didn't have to go around kissing and holding hands like some of the other, immature, kids did. We knew we'd be getting married someday, and then we'd do all those things married couples did. Queenie was the first one to speak.

"Are you going to volunteer to go off on that Confederacy thing?"

"I might. I'd need to find out more about it before I can decide if I want to or not. How about you?"

"I don't know. I think one of us might have to. Have you been listening to what they've been telling us on the TV news? Those aliens are eating all the people they find on the planets they've attacked. They've been doing it for like thirty thousand years already, and no one has been able to get them to stop, or keep them from overrunning their planet. They've succeeded in defeating hundreds of planets. This Confederacy thing seems like our only real chance. We need all that Confederacy technology help if we want any chance at all of saving Earth."

"If you go, I'll go too."

"You can be my concubine." Queenie laughed when she said it, but I was looking right at her when she spoke, and her eyes weren't laughing, only her lips.

"You'll be my concubine, you mean. Who gets better scores on tests? Who gets better grades? Me, that's who. I'll take that CAP test thing, and then we'll see who gets to be the concubine."

I took my CAP test two weeks later and scored a 6.8, not bad. I probably should have scored higher, but I was marked off for not being much of a leader, for having a low sex drive, and for not being aggressive enough. I didn't know how they knew any of those sex things about me. I didn't have any experience with any sex stuff. As for the leadership score, well, I'd always let Queenie be the leader. She likes bossing everything and everyone, not me, and she was really good at it too. I usually agreed with most of the things she wanted to do anyway.

I used to always try to stay in the background, ready to help her out if she ended up needing me to, or if she wound up getting herself in a jam from trying to do some of the things she was always thinking up. We worked well together. If we'd both tried to lead, we wouldn't have gotten anything accomplished. Queenie knew the things I was best at anyway. She always seemed to know what things she could rely on me to get done whenever the two of us were working on one of our projects together.

Queenie took her test about a month after I'd taken mine. She had gotten marked down on some things too. All her sex scores were higher than mine had been, which made me curious, because neither of us had ever done any of that sex stuff with each other. She got marked off a little bit on her intelligence, and for her low creativity, and her loyalty scores weren't anywhere's near as high as mine had been. She'd also scored much higher on aggression and leadership than I had.

She ended up with a higher overall score than I had. She had a 7.2. I believed the Confederacy test rewarded her strengths more than they had mine.

She was pretty hard to be around for the first week or two after she took her test and ended up scoring higher than I did. As far as I was concerned though, we'd both qualified to volunteer for the Confederacy. We could both leave Earth and try to keep the 'dickheads' from eating all the people who wouldn't be able to leave.

We had our first really big fight when we started talking about who we'd take for our six combined concubines. I had just assumed that she'd be taking my mother and sixteen year old sister, and that I'd be taking her mother, and Elena, one of her best friends. Elena hadn't scored well when she'd been tested.

Neither of our moms had not done well on their CAP tests either. Kelly, my older sister, had really bombed out on hers. I'd always suspected that she was a real airhead, but, come on, a 4.2? The two extra picks that Queenie would be getting, I hadn't really given that much thought to.

A large part of the reason why I'd wanted to become a Confederacy volunteer in the first place had been to keep my family safe. I'd just assumed that Queenie felt the same way I did.

When she first told me that she was planning on picking Darryl Cloward, this sixteen year old, muscle bound, football clown who lived two houses down from her, I got a bit upset. Even after she agreed she'd use her second and third picks on my mother and sister, I remained upset. She told me she had no idea who her fourth pick would be, just that she'd already decided that her last pick needed to be another boy.

I'd have been okay with things, maybe, if she had said she'd pick another one of her girl friends to take, and that this Darryl guy was only for my mother, her mom, my sister, and her two girl friends. Her picking two guys left no doubt in my mind, none whatsoever, about what she really intended.

When I brought that up to her, she countered my argument by telling me that I'd have her mother and her friend Elena too. AS IF! Like I'm going to be doing those kinds of things with her mother? I asked her straight out if she was planning on letting those other guys sleep with her.

"Of course, don't be stupid. Haven't you been paying any attention at all to what's been going on?"

She explained some of the parts she thought I'd missed, about how concubines were being taken to new planets so they could have lots of babies, to make sure that the human race survived, even if the Sa'arm did over run Earth.

She explained the need for the other two guys by saying the Confederacy wanted to promote a diverse gene pool. She said she'd need to have babies by other guys, not just me, to do her part to help keep the human race alive. All the guys, including me, would need to sleep with all the girls, including my mother, hers, and my sister.

I just looked at her while she was telling me all this. She was being totally serious. I finally told her there was no way I was sleeping with any of my relatives, and that I wasn't going to be sleeping with her mother either. I ended up yelling at her, and calling her some pretty nasty names too.

The next month was very strange for me. I'm sure it was strange for Queenie too. For ten years we'd been closer than Siamese twins, then, suddenly, we're spending every waking hour trying to make sure we don't get any closer to each other than we absolutely have to. I felt like I should hate her.

Most people who found out what we'd fought about took Queenie's side of things. A few saw my side of things, but even they said I was overreacting, blowing it up all out of proportion. My mom and my sister agreed with Queenie about the need for her to take two other guys.

I didn't need anyone to agree with me about my position on this. I'd already made up my mind, and that meant I was going through this mourning process, trying to get over Queenie, trying to put her completely out of my mind.

Another month went by, and I was actually starting to be able to think about other things again. Not all the time, but sometimes. It was a big improvement. Most of the kids in our school knew who the other kids were, the ones with qualifying CAP scores. Queenie and I both started getting a lot of attention from people hoping to catch on with us, hoping to get a free lift ticket to the stars.

Queenie started it, she started going out on dates with different boys. Darryl Cloward was one of them. I had girls coming up to me and offering to have sex with me, telling me they wanted me to try them out to see if I'd like them enough to maybe pick them if we were ever both at a Confederacy extraction at the same time. I'd thank them for their nice offer, then tell them I wasn't interested.

Rumors started going around the school that Queenie had started letting some of the boys she'd been dating fuck her. I hadn't expected anything like that. At first, I didn't believe the rumors, but I'd have had to be blind not to see the way she was acting around certain boys at school. She was letting boys put their hands all over her ass, and I saw her getting picked up from school by two different guys once. One of them was Darryl, but I didn't know the other one's name.

One day I couldn't stand it anymore, so I just went over to where she was sitting, on the other side of the class from where I sat, and asked her if the rumors were true or not?

"Which ones?" She looked curious when she asked me.

"The ones about things you've been letting some of the boys do." I knew my face was red with embarrassment. Talking about personal things in public wasn't something I was comfortable doing, but she and I never saw each other outside of school anymore.

"You'll have to be a lot more specific than that, Dave." She was smiling, and she had this special glint in her eye, the one she got when she was really enjoying making a fool out of somebody. I'd seen that look before, a lot, but never when I was the one who was the butt of her humor.

"Fucking guys!" For some reason, even though I hadn't consciously intended to do it, I'd shouted the words at her.

"Which guys?" That glint was still there, and now, I recognized it as one of her most malicious ones. She was really enjoying herself at my expense. I knew I'd been the one who approached her, giving her the opportunity, but I still didn't appreciate her using it.

"Never mind. You've already answered my question." Somehow, and I don't know where I summoned the strength from, because her answer had taken all my strength and my ability to think rationally, away from me, I managed to walk across the classroom and sit back down in my chair. I was numb. I felt a little dead inside. I'd always believed all this would blow over somehow, and that she and I would get back to being the way we'd been before we started fighting. Now, I knew we would never get back to the way things had been. We wouldn't get back at all. It was over.

If I'd ever had any doubts at all, after that incident in the classroom, they were laid to rest after I opened my school locker after my last class that day, and found a list of names that Queenie had stuffed through the locker's vent holes. It was a list of names, three columns wide. On the top, in Queenie's neat script were written the three headings ... Sucked ... Fucked ... Sucked & Fucked.

There were three names in the Sucked column, only one name in the Fucked column, but in the last column, Fucked & Sucked, there were seven names. I noticed Darryl's name in the last column, along with one or two other names that really surprised me. Guys I'd believed were good friends of mine.

I crumpled the list up in a tight ball and stuffed it in one of my pockets. I was shaking as I walked home. Some of it was anger, but a lot of it was me being in some kind of shock. As soon as I was back at my house, having first made sure that my sister, Kelly, and my mother weren't home yet, I went to my bedroom and started crying.

I know, I was being a sissy. I'm not saying I wasn't, but you try loving someone with everything you have in you for ten years, and then face a situation like I was facing. After you do that, write to me and tell me again how big a sissy I was being. Besides, I only cried for about a half hour. I got some matches and burned that list of Queenie's, then flushed the ashes down the toilet. I was flushing a lot more than those ashes, I was flushing a ten year loving relationship too.

When I turned fifteen, I scheduled myself to be retested. A lot of the other kids were doing this, and I wanted to see if my troubles with Queenie had affected my CAP score. I was hoping that all the anger and disappointment I'd had since my last test would somehow help raise my scores.

I did improve in my leadership skills, probably because I hadn't been letting Queenie make all my decisions for me. I also made big improvements in those sub scores dealing with aggression and discipline. I guess day dreaming about killing several people, on almost a daily basis, would tend to increase my scores in those particular categories.

I'd had slight improvements in other areas, ones where I'd been strong before. The only area where I'd had my marks go down, was in my loyalty scores. That didn't surprise me either. What did surprise me was what the retesting had done to my overall score. I'd slipped to where my new CAP score was a 6.4. I had lost my qualifying status for Confederacy extraction. Oh shit.

I checked with the Confederacy clerk at the testing site, and he assured me that my new score had, in fact, replaced my old score. I was no longer eligible to volunteer for the Confederacy forces. The only way I could get off the planet now would be as someone's concubine.

I shared this new information that evening with my mother. My sister heard my mother's screaming, and she came down the stairs from her bedroom to find out what the problem was. She was easily able to piece together what had happened by the things my mom was screaming at me.

Having Kelly refer to me as a "dumb ass hole" might have been the lowest point I'd felt since my troubles with Queenie first started. The girl had a 4.2 CAP score, and had gone out and purchased one of those little shields people wore pinned to their shirts or blouses to brag about their score. Kelly was the only person I'd ever seen who had one of those showing where the score being displayed wasn't at least a 6.5. She was so stupid, I'm not sure she even understood how poorly a person needed to do in order to score down in the low fours.

Kelly belonged to this new political group at the high school. All the groups members wanted to put up a bunch of signs, in English, telling the 'dickheads' that the people of Earth only wanted to be their friends, so please don't eat them now that they've come. Appeasers of the first rank I'd say. I hoped they all gathered in one place to greet the Sa'arm if they ever landed. If I was still on the planet when they came, I was going to make Kelly a placard to carry. It would have the word "snack" printed on it. She'd have probably carried that sign too. Hell, for all I knew, the 'dickheads' would be able to read English, and would have themselves a good laugh about it.

Our school was the location for a Confederacy extraction team about four months after I'd gotten myself retested. I was there, as was my sister. Queenie, and most of the student body of the school were there as well. It was a school day, and the Space Marines on the extraction team threw an interdiction field over the entire campus. No one could get either in or out. We got an announcement, over the PA system, telling everyone to gather together in our school auditorium. It took fifteen minutes to get everyone gathered up in there, and believe me it left all of us packed in pretty tightly.

Queenie was one of thirty six people who got their names called for extraction. The Marine who was in charge of the extraction started getting everyone who wanted to try to get picked as a concubine to come over to the front and left sides of the auditorium. All the sponsors had been gathered together and moved up on the stage by then.

No one at my school, other than my sister, Kelly, had been told that I was no longer qualified to be picked up and extracted by the Confederacy. I made my decision about whether I wanted to try to get myself picked by someone or not, and began heading over towards the right, moving towards the back of the room. I was looking right at Queenie as I walked. I knew she was shocked to find out that my name wasn't on the list of people being extracted.

The thirty six sponsors managed to pick about a hundred concubines. It took about an hour before the last sponsor had picked his final selectee. I was somewhat surprised to see Kelly picked as a concubine not long after the sponsors went down and began to look over all the willing candidates. Kelly had her top and her bra off. Her breasts looked better than I'd thought they would. She seemed very happy at having been picked, and she caught my eye and waved at me. She tried shouting something to me, but she was too far away for me to understand what it had been.

As her new sponsor was leading Kelly and another girl away, I saw Queenie hurry over to Kelly and excitedly begin talking with her.

Five minutes after I saw Kelly and Queenie talking together, one of the Marines from the extraction team approached me to tell me that one of the sponsors was interested in interviewing me. I knew it would probably be Queenie, so I told him I had no interest in talking to, or leaving with, anyone. I watched him go back and speak to Queenie.

I took my third test on the day I turned sixteen. I was confident that I'd pass this time. I believed I'd scored so poorly the time before because I was still very upset over the trouble I'd had with Queenie. She'd been gone for several months by the time I went in to be retested. I still thought of her, but not like I used to do before.

When Queenie had picked her four concubines, she'd picked two of her girl friends first, Elena and Helen Hartigan, another girl in our class. She'd also picked her art teacher, Miss Conway, and only one boy, Darryl Cloward. She'd waited to the very end to pick him. A lot of that time she'd spent looking over at me and crying.

There were a few times, over that twenty minute period when she was looking at me, the tears rolling down her face, that I'd wanted to walk back over to where all the hopeful, possible, concubines were still lined up. I managed to fight off the urge though.

I thought my CAP test had gone well. I was surprised, after going to the clerk's desk, to find that my score had slipped yet another tenth of a point, down to 6.3. I'd gone down in the subset of scores having to do with my emotional adjustment. Everything else had either gone up just a tiny fraction, or down by a similar amount.

The important thing was the final score still left me Earth bound. I wondered if I should join Kelly's group of 'dickhead' appeasers? I felt pretty stupid for willingly giving up the ticket I'd once had that would have taken me to the stars.

Since Kelly's pick up, my mom had been increasingly angry, sometimes getting verbally abusive towards me. Now that it was just her and me in the house, she let me know, in no uncertain terms, how much she'd been counting on me to be her ticket away from the approaching danger. She began going out drinking after work with some of her girl friends more often, using the booze to calm some of her fears, and maybe hoping to get lucky if she happened to be in a bar or restaurant when an extraction took place.

Ten months after the extraction that took place at our high school, the Confederacy had another one in our town. This time, it was at a restaurant over near where my mother worked. She was there. I was notified, through the mail, that my mother had been extracted as a concubine. I felt relief. My mother had received some money right after Kelly was extracted, I don't know why, or how much it was. The Confederacy paid off the mortgage on my mom's house and notified me that she'd gifted me with all her worldly goods when she left. I was pretty well off then, thanks to losing my whole family to the Confederacy.

Truthfully, having my mother and sister off planet was a huge relief for me. I'd been feeling worried, and more than a little bit guilty after retesting that first time and losing my extraction eligibility. I hadn't wanted to take them as concubines, but I would have.

I'd found out, through some of my research on the internet, that Queenie had been correct about me being expected to get all my concubines pregnant. I had liked Mrs. Castro, but I don't think I'd have been able to do it with her. Hell, I'd pissed in my pants until I was five years old or so, too busy playing to take time out to get to a bathroom in time. Mrs. Castro had helped me change out of my wet pants, after my little accidents, and into the extra pair of clean ones that my mother always kept for me there at the nursery school.

Having a lot of free time on my hands, now that I'd pretty much withdrawn myself from all social activities, I spent a lot more time on my computer. I learned a great deal too. You'd be surprised at all the information you can find on the internet. I started investigating some of the published reports about data collected on the many subset scores that made up the CAP scoring.

I found that there were several online news groups devoted entirely to this subject. I wasn't the only one trying to find some way to increase my score by a tenth of a point or two in order to qualify to be a Confederacy volunteer. There was a wealth of information about how various subset scores were weighted. Some was merely conjecture, but a lot of it had undergone rigorous modeling to validate the accuracy of the underlying assumptions.

One of the first things I learned that I thought might be a valuable piece of information was that you couldn't cheat the test, but you could change yourself in ways that were known to increase your scores. I made a decision to try to make some changes.

I selected the three most obvious areas where my scoring had been less than impressive. I'd always scored low in leadership, in aggression, and in my sexual abilities and capacities.

Of those three, I believed my best chance for making a meaningful positive change was in the sexual sub score areas. I didn't think I could really do too much to increase my leadership scores, because being a leader wasn't something I felt comfortable with. I decided to be less of a follower though. I also went down to the local gym and signed up for a beginner's boxing class to try to improve my aggression scores on the next test.

I'd almost never been involved in any types of physical altercations. If people tried to confront me, or to pick fights, I'd just turn and walk away from them. Surprisingly, it usually worked. If that didn't work, I'd make an attempt to deflect their anger until someone in authority happened by to diffuse the situation. I'd always been normal sized for my age group, and usually had Queenie with me most of the time anyway. Queenie had more than enough aggression for both of us, so I hadn't faced too many of those confrontational situations.