Chapter 1

My parents went out of town and left me with a babysitter and I'm mad as hell!

I'm a normal healthy average American male. At least that's my opinion. But I've been cursed all my life with parents that don't understand me or what it's like to be a kid.

It started right when I was born. My given name is LeRoi Aloysius Jenkins. LeRoi, for you that don't know, is French for 'The King'. If that doesn't make you groan, then how about it has nothing to do with royalty, per se ... but that my parents are Elvis fans. Would have been better to actually be named Elvis, I'm thinking.

Compared to that ... and there's always some kid since kindergarten who found out that it meant king or royalty ... Aloysius is nothing. To make matters worse I was always a little sickly until I hit puberty, and I couldn't even resolve the taunting by allowing myself to get beat up on the playground. I won't bother with complaining that my name also invoked memories of a charlatan TV preacher. I got grief for that, too."Preach us something, Leroy ... we might send money!"

So that's why I don't have a lot of friends except for other oddballs like me, and tend to amuse myself instead of socializing a lot. Or any.

Which drives my parents nuts, to the extent that they won't leave me alone for more than an hour. Just because of some misunderstandings that my hobbies have created with various and sundrie government agencies and NGO's.

First there was an accident where our neighbor's house caught fire and burnt to the ground when something went wrong with my Argon Laser Starling Eradicator. It worked perfect, not activating until the Starlings flocked to roost and caused ambient noise to exceed a certain level. Sound triangulation located the roosting trees, then IR video sensors zeroed in, the laser fired and POOF! No Starling, just a puff of black feathers floating to the ground. And the fire rate was 120 bursts a minute so, until the fire, things were going perfect. Rake up a couple trash bags of feathers the next morning and you're done. I figured I'd patent it, go into production and make a mint selling it to small cities all over the country.

How was I to know that some damn dumbass birds would perch on the neighbor's rain gutter. Starlings don't do that. Usually.

Bad enough that the feds came and took my laser away, but PETA filed charges of animal cruelty. I was lucky that my parents had some pull and one of their friends was a local lawyer with a great sense of humor. The attorney took that case pro bono because he had it in for those pinheads, over him once dying his cat black for a halloween party, and got them to admit in open court there was absolutely no 'cruelty' involved.

How could there be when the pests were squawking and flapping one second and the next they didn't even exist. In that way, the system worked perfectly. They couldn't even point to one maimed bird.

Then there was the case of my homemade medium range missile. I found an intact JATO bottle on Craigslist and set it on top of a Ramjet I built from plumbing parts from Home Depot and some machined titanium scrap. When the JATO bottle fired it lifted off and got the air rammed through the bernoulli to critical velocity then the jet lit off and took the thing to Mach 1.5 or so. What I forgot was that when it got down range a couple hundred miles I'd lose contact even though I'd stuck a 2 kilowatt CB power amp on the RC transmitter. Still wouldn't have been a problem, except my dumb luck it crashed dead bang into some farmer's hog shed and killed his prize boar.

Of course the feds came around again and this time they also confiscated my NC machining equipment.

Evidently PETA doesn't really give a shit about domestic hogs.

Then there was my turbine powered homemade street luge. My parents said I was lucky, I was going about a hundred when I came to the end of Lakeside Drive and something went wrong when I pulled the lever and the drag chute didn't open. Probably because I used the chute pack as a head rest. Whatever. Instead I went off the bank, the kart dropped but I kept going and skipped across the water like a flailing rock. I told them that's how I planned it for safety but they didn't see it that way. Hell, I only broke a collar bone, along with an inadvertent enema, but you would have thought I was paralyzed or something. And, by the way, to my knowledge no fish were injured, but PETA wrote a letter of complaint to the local paper, just on principle.

Anyway, most of my geek friends' parents forbade them to hang around me after that and obviously no girls wanted to be around me, either. I had a healthy sex drive but no outlet but for net porn and Rosey Palm.

So my parents had a huge conflict. Besides their Demon Seed son, they were also inflicted with a compulsion to enter every freaking contest or sweepstakes they came across. They won their fair share of them, too. Problem being a lot of them were vacation trips of one kind or another. Which they usually turned down for the discounted cash alternative because if they couldn't take me, they couldn't find anyone to guard me, as my dad put it.

Finally though, they actually won the daddy of all travel sweepstakes, a one month around the world trip for two on an international airline with free hotel rooms and meals paid. The kicker was there was no cash involved and if they didn't take it, they lost all their travel miles anyway.

One morning I woke up to find Mom and Dad were taking the trip and my cousin Abby was conned into babysitting me. They called it 'keeping me company' because it bugged them I needed watching but they knew it was all the same.

Now I was 17 years old and it had been almost a year since I destroyed anything, or caught something on fire, and I told the 'rents I was tired of being treated like a baby. I threatened to sue for emancipation but they just laughed and said no judge in his right mind would grant it. In fact, with my record, he might rule that I remain a minor till age 21. Or 30.

If anyone in the family was more different than I was, it was Abby, who now preferred to be called Abigail. She belonged to some cult or something and dressed plainer than if she was Amish.