Chapter 1

We had been hacked!

I mean, what else could it be? What I was seeing on Mom's computer screen couldn't be what it appeared to be at face value!

These were the thoughts that went through my mind as I tried to get my breathing back under control. I had been staring at the screen and the awful text that I had been reading for over twenty minutes.

There was no movie special effect to cause a ripple in the air. There was no return to normal after a hallucination. The awful truth was still in front of me, unchanged from how I had found it just about a half hour before. I just could not wrap my seventeen-year-and-nine-month-old brain around it.

I looked away and tried to focus on something else. I rebooted the computer. I checked the firewall. I ensured that the anti-virus and anti-spyware software were active and had the most recent updates. Quick scans showed that there were no Trojans or other intrusions in the operating system. Then I reopened that terrible log file.

The text on the screen was still there and it had not changed. I was just coming to a full realization of what it implied. I knew that this was bad. This was very bad. It meant disaster for our family if this got any farther than my eyes until I could figure out what to do about it.

I couldn't think straight for a long time. I just knew that I had to do something. After another few minutes I got my ass in gear and began to act.

I put a blank DVD-R in the drive and let it spin up. I copied the whole log file of Mom's instant messaging software and pasted it into the word processing file. Then I saved the file to the hard drive and burned it to the DVD-R. Then I deleted the document file and cleared the application history so that it would not appear in the recent file list. It only took about five minutes max to get all this done.

Then, I purged the instant messaging log files, deleted all temporary files on Mom's computer, and cleared the cache and page file. The only remaining evidence of what had been in that awful instant messaging log file was now on the DVD-R in its slim jewel case in my hand. That was the hand that was still shaking slightly over what I'd discovered this afternoon about my mother.

I was now the protector of a dark secret and I did not know how to keep it that way.

We live in a subdivision just outside a nice small-to-medium-sized town. My dad is the owner of a successful packaging fabrication company making boxes and shipping containers for everything from quick-frozen fish to computer disks.

My mom is an associate for a local realtor, even though she doesn't really need to work. With the income that Dad's company brings down, we live very well without the money Mom brings in. It is not that we are so eaten up with greed that we need Mom's income. She simply feels the need to be her own person. She expresses that sentiment through being successful in her own right.

My sisters and I have heard Mom and Dad talk about this more than once. Dad gets mildly irritated at Mom's insistence on continuing to work outside of the home when we really don't need the money. Mom holds firm that she needs the work to help fill the need to feel her self-worth.

We've heard her say to Dad on more than one occasion that she feels more freedom to have her own career now that Penny, Kelly, and Ron ... that's me ... are all in high school. She has been exercising that freedom full time over the past four years to become one of the top associate realtors in her office, a franchise of a national chain. For six years before that, she had only worked part time, despite Dad's mild dislike of the idea.

At the same time, she has shown everyone in the community what a bundle of energy she is outside the office. She has volunteered with youth sports ever since my sisters and I first started playing.

I played baseball with average skill until I got into high school and got turned on to computers and girls. My two younger sisters became great fast-pitch softball players. They still play fall ball for the high school's senior and junior varsity teams. Dad takes pride in playing slow-pitch softball on his company's team in the local industrial league. Even though he is the company's owner he has evidently been a regular player since he was in his teens.

Mom comes to cheer and work concessions for his games. People in town sort of classify her as the typical "Super Mom." She has even helped out down at one of the local senior retirement centers as a volunteer off and on for the last two or so years.

She also takes great pride in having kept herself in great physical shape over the years. Even though she started pumping out us three kids almost annually starting when she was nineteen and had been married to Dad for just over a year out of high school, she has maintained what men anywhere would call a "killer body." She keeps up her terrific physique through a routine of healthy diet and lots of regular exercise. I've even had to shut up a couple of my friends when I heard them talking about her and using terms like 'fox' and 'MILF.' She IS my mother, after all!

But I have to admit that, even as her teenage son, I can see why the gazes of so many men lock in on her when she enters their field of view. She stands 5'8" and has light brown hair with highlights that gets lots of personal attention from the most exclusive hairdressers in the community. These ladies ensure that they keep Mom's hair framing her pretty face like a halo.

With a slender frame and medium-sized tits ... not that I pay attention, you understand, I'm just observing ... and very well-balanced curves at the hip, she could easily pass for a late twenties fashion model instead of a thirty-seven-year-old mother of three. It is not really surprising that she figures prominently in the glamour shots that frequently adorn the covers of her realty company's property listings catalogs.

Except for Dad's ongoing disappointment at her decision to maintain a full time career, my parents appear to be happy together. My sisters and I have rarely seen them quarrel.

We have all gotten along as a typical family does, I guess. My sisters and I get on each other's nerves no more than typical siblings in modern families.

The whole family usually sits down to dinner together in the evening at Mom's insistence. She wants us to have at least one special time of day when we are all together. She insists on this so that we can enjoy each other's company in a family setting and talk about our lives and our hopes for the future.

Tonight, though, I did not hold out much hope for the future. I just picked at my food and grunted in monosyllables during the evening's table conversation. If the other family members noticed they did not say anything about it.

After supper Penny, the youngest, cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher since it was her night in the rotation. Mom and Dad went to the den to watch Fox News. Kelly and I went upstairs toward our rooms.

"What's eating you, Ron Jon?" Kelly asked as we hit the top landing of the stairs. "Adele stiff-arming you or something?" she teased. Sixteen-year-old Kelly, like my other sister, fifteen-year-old Penny, called me Ron Jon, after the famous surf shop, to tease me about my one-time-years-ago-expressed desire to move to California and take up surfing. The closest I had ever gotten to that was hours spent years ago on my old skateboard that now sat in the garage having not even been used in over two years.

Adele Kostas was my current infatuation at school. She and her folks had moved to town just before the school year started last fall for our senior year. She was really cute. She was a tall blonde who probably stood 5'9". This would have allowed her to look up only about two inches to be able to look me directly in the eye. If only she ever would!

Adele dressed nicely, but conservatively enough to hide what I suspected was a pretty nice figure. The girls in my class all seemed to tolerate her well enough. Heaven knows it was tough on her, being a move-in for this last year of high school, and trying to fit in with girls who had been together since kindergarten.

But she seemed to get along all right. I guess the other girls put up with her because she appeared to pose no threat to them. As shy as she seemed to be, the other girls never thought she would ever try to attract or move in on their boyfriends. They were nice enough to her to invite her to some of the parties and other girl get-togethers. I understand that she rarely went, though, primarily because her parents were pretty restrictive. I would not have ever thought that I would be attracted to a girl like Adele. Other friends, like my best friend, Clete, had encouraged me every now and then to ask Adele out. It just had not happened yet.

"No, Kel," I answered her question. "I haven't even spoken to Adele in a few days." I realized that I had not been paying attention closely to my surroundings since before supper. My mind was still churning about what I had learned today.

I was still sharp enough to know that I needed to look like I was okay or Kelly would get suspicious and keep after me until she got it out of me. We may have the typical boy-girl teen sibling friction thing going on like in any other family but we had always been able to talk about stuff together; probably more so than my friends and their siblings. The connection with Penny and me was slightly more distant, but Kelly and Penny seemed to be pretty close.

"You want some of us girls to get her primed for you? I'll bet we could convince her that you were the class stud and get her hot for your bod," she teased.

Kelly and I had discovered long ago that we could talk about intimate things without too much embarrassment. We had spoken often of things of a sexual nature in our conversations. When we were eleven and ten respectively we had done a quick one-time show-and-tell with our naked bodies but had never done it again after that. We each knew when the other had finally had sex for the first time years later.

Kelly knew about me and Elaine McGraw finally doing it behind the National Guard Armory gym after the winter dance last year, just before Elaine moved to Florida. She also knew that I had not been with anyone else since then.

I also knew that she had given in to Kyle Sickles a few months ago. It was actually more like she finally wore Kyle down. She had been so ready to lose her virginity long before Kyle had worked up his nerve to take her up on the offer. It had finally happened at an outing with their friends at the lake when they got away from the crowd for a while and did the deed in a picnic shelter. She had told me that it was an interesting experience but nothing to rave about. She did not really share any interest romantically or sexually with Kyle, even though they still got along and spoke at school. He had a new love interest now that seemed to be the real deal.

Neither of us had even considered our other sister as much of a sexual being. Lately, though, it was becoming impossible to ignore the fact that Penny's body was really beginning to 'blossom' as the adults would say. Penny's vocabulary was also definitely expanding when our parents were not around.

When I did not blush at her teasing, Kelly zeroed in on me. She knew that I usually reddened pretty quickly at sexual teasing. "Okay, Hot Shot. Give. What is eating you so much? You don't usually get this distracted."

Kelly pushed on into my room with me and closed the door behind her. I sat at my computer desk as she plopped on the bed and crossed her legs under her. I'd be lying if I said that I did not give a quick glance at how her tight shorts snugged up against her pussy. But even that could not warm me up enough to overcome the dread I had been feeling over the past couple of hours.

I looked into space for a few minutes without speaking. I was gently swiveling my task chair back and forth slightly as I thought about whether to bring Kelly into the dark world where my mind was beginning its travels at this moment. I knew that she would need to know sooner or later and, as my closest sibling in age and temperament, it seemed only fair to make it sooner.

I pulled the DVD-R I had burned earlier out of my desk and put it into the drive of my computer. I hesitated for a moment but finally clicked to open the file. When the word processor activated, I got up to lock my bedroom door.

"Here, Kelly," I said. "Sit here and read this and then tell me what you think." I indicated that she move to my chair. She did so and I sat on the bed. Neither of us said anything for as long as it took her to read what was on screen.

I heard her breath catch not long after she began to absorb what she was reading. After she had moused down a couple of pages, she stopped and swiveled around to look at me. She was frowning with disapproval. "Gee, so my brother is a pervert! I did not realize just how much you were into erotic internet stories. Why are you showing me this? Are you hoping to get me hot so you can work out your sexual frustrations on your sister or something? Grow up, for God's sake!"

She got up to leave but stopped halfway to the door. She looked at me with curiosity now mixed with disdain as she asked, "What is wrong with you? Why are you showing me that stuff?"

I did not react like she had expected. I was not acting like a little kid caught peeking at his sister in her underwear or something like that. Nor was I acting embarrassed. She saw the signs of apprehension beginning to etch their way across my face.

"That's not an erotic story," I replied evenly. I looked away for a second and said, "And I did not get it off the internet." I hesitated as my heart pounded so hard that I just knew that Kelly could feel my pulse from four feet away.

Finally I looked back at her and found the courage to say, "I got that from Mom's instant messaging log file."

Kelly recoiled like she had been slapped. She stood there stunned for a second and then took a threatening step toward me. "You lying shit! Don't..." She saw that I had not flinched at her anger and that I was still sitting quietly on my bed with a mixture of anxiety and sadness on my face.

She stopped moving and talking for a second. Then she moved back to sit at the computer chair and re-read what she had been examining before. "You're telling me that Mom wrote this?" she asked in a voice that I had to strain to hear since it was so soft.

"Mm-hmm," I mumbled. I did not trust myself to say anything, as it would probably sound like a croak coming from my dry throat at the moment.

"Ron," she said. I noticed that she did not call me Ron Jon this time. She knew this was some serious shit. "Are you trying to tell me that our mother has been sexting?"

We all had friends that had gotten caught up in the fad of sending text messages either through IM clients on the computer or through cell phones. Texting was very convenient for staying in touch with friends and acquaintances and it was fun to do remote innocent flirting without any consequences. It could really be a turn-on in some cases. When the content got very racy and into sexually explicit terms then the texting became 'sexting.'

Sexting had gotten a foothold in the adult dating community as well, if you could believe the articles in the e-zines online. Several newspaper articles and reports on television had given sketchy revelations about how people used electronic devices and their own shorthand codes for sending and receiving sexy messages.

I had also seen articles telling about how some adults used this method to satisfy their sexual imaginations and partially fulfill their sexual fantasies without any consequences. But some had used it to arrange for actual meetings with strangers; or even with folks they already knew.

Some even used sexting to arrange to cheat deliberately on spouses or significant others ... or both. The wife of one of the church pastors in town had evidently gotten caught up in this, if the rumors we had heard around school were true. Her husband had caught her and divorced her just before he had quit his congregation and left town.

"Kel," I began, "Mom told me that her computer was acting sluggish and asked me to clean it up and get it back up to speed for her before she left for work this morning. I took the opportunity to look to see if I could prevent what had slowed it down in the first place.

"I noticed that her IM log file was huge. I guess I got curious. When I opened it I saw ... that. I should have erased everything and kept my mouth shut, I guess. But..." I just shook my head. The emotions I was experiencing were just too much for me to speak coherently.

Kelly was still looking at the computer screen when she said, "I just cannot believe that Mom would be doing this kind of stuff. I mean it is just so unlike her. I thought she and Dad were okay. They seem so happy together--except for the ongoing disagreement over her working. You would think that as sexy as she is and as hunky as he is, even at their ages," I turned sharply at this to look straight at her, "they would be tearing up the sheets together every night without the need for any of this."

"How can you talk so blatantly about ... Mom and Dad and ... sex and stuff?" I stammered.

"Hey, I'm only trying to analyze this like anyone looking from the outside in," said Kelly with a shrug. She evidently had more of a comfort level with this subject than I did. "Any woman above the age of twelve would recognize that Dad is a hunk. And any straight guy older than ten would be getting a hard-on after seeing Mom in a bikini. Face it, Ron Jon; we come from some very nice-looking breeding stock." She was back to calling me Ron Jon again.