Chapter 3

Mike had come home with me after school, stayed for dinner but went home early. I was sitting in my back yard hoping Samantha would show up and thinking about my 'armor.' It had worked perfectly in that it had kept anything from making contact with me. But I couldn't do anything about the whole mass and momentum thing. I supposed that if I were backed up against a building I could anchor my shield to that ... but I couldn't count on that every time.

Actually, the more I thought about it the more relieved I became. I really hadn't thought it through. If it had worked the way I had wanted it to it would have looked odd. Shit, it would have looked absolutely freaky. Since my reactions seemed to be faster, I decided that I would start working out – enough so I didn't look like a total weakling. Then I could always appear to be fighting normally but my opponent wouldn't be able to hurt me and with my strikes backed up by the force of my telekinesis anyone dumb enough to challenge me would be in for a big surprise.

"Hey, Jake." Came the pleasant quip a split second before the thought entered my head that Samantha hoped I wasn't embarrassed by her having saved my ass this afternoon. A lot of guys would have had their pride hurt, having a girl come to their rescue, but it never bothered me. I make overtures to pride of course; I never groveled or begged to not get beat up. For some reason, in my mind, getting the crap beat out of me by some thug twice my size was nowhere near as humiliating as begging that thug not to beat me up. Of course, I wasn't a masochist – once the beating started, anything I could do to shorten its duration or if someone or something intervened, well, I took whatever I could get.

"Hey, Sam. Have a seat. Thanks for this afternoon." I added to allay her concerns.

She plopped down in the lawn chair across the table from me. If I tilted my head just right the umbrella shaft perfectly dissected her face – but I didn't want anything in the way of her angelic features. She was once again wearing loose fitting clothes and I didn't know if it was because of the cool evening or if she was keeping to her promise to not display her body to me.

"Well they were doing it because of what I did, why didn't you tell them that you didn't talk to the cops?"

"Wouldn't have done any good."

"They might have believed it. If they knew you like I do then they would've known that you would never do anything logical like call the cops." She said chuckling. "But then, if they knew you like I do they wouldn't be beating you up, they would be asking you for help with their homework."

As she spoke I knew that she still felt guilty about instigating another beating for me. I couldn't tell her that it hadn't hurt one bit.

"You know, I've decided I'm not taking it anymore. I asked mom if she would buy me a weight machine and I'm gonna start taking self defense classes." Mom had agreed and I didn't even have to use my power. If I were to start winning fights I needed to look like it was at least a possibility that I could do so, besides looking more masculine would also help my other plan.

"Jake, you don't have do all that. For one thing stop being such a smart ass and you wouldn't bring so much of this on yourself."

"I get beat up anyway. At least my way I get some sort of moral victory out of it. But I've decided that college isn't going to be like high school. I'm not going to be everyone's punching bag anymore."

"You certainly don't compromise much do you? When you decide on a course of action its balls to the walls and take no prisoners. I'd worry about you, but with your determination I think I had better worry about the other guys instead."

I was still getting messages from her mind and she did indeed think that whatever I set my mind to, I would be able to accomplish – in spades. It heartened me to know that a woman as confident and capable as Samantha held me in such esteem.

I had decided it was time to start 'Project Samantha', as I had named it, so while she talked I began focusing my thoughts, reviewing my plan. I wasn't going mess around with her emotions, how she felt about me as a person since my new power had told me that she all but loved me already. What needed to be changed was how she viewed me. I felt that if she were physically attracted to me then a romantic situation was inevitable. I was, however, concerned that if she suddenly changed her opinion of me overnight then she may get confused or even suspicious, so the plan I had was to slowly change her opinion. It gave me a buffer and made it more likely that my meddling wouldn't be discovered. For an eventual romantic connection with Samantha I would wait for a lot longer than my current plan would take. Hell, I had been waiting years as it was, and that was without hope that the situation would change.

I sent <Jake has attractive eyes> as the first of many adjustments. I would give her this suggestion several times per day for the next week then assess the progress. If the assessment proved positive then I would move on, if it still hadn't taken, then I would increase the frequency until it did.

That was when I noticed that she was looking at me with puzzlement. I realized that I had been staring at her, without saying a word, for quite a bit longer than would be normal. It must have appeared that I had drifted off into a daydream in the middle of our conversation. Crap. I wasn't picking up anything anymore and was concerned that she might think that I was having a sexual fantasy about her. I tried to make it look as though I was lost in thought.

"You know, I was just thinking that you took an awful chance intervening like that today. Thad and those guys could have hurt you pretty bad."

She continued to stare at me for several more seconds and I was beginning to think that she was daydreaming when she responded with a start.

"They wouldn't dare touch me." She snorted, "if those guys got rough with a cheerleader, or any girl, as far as that goes, they would be ostracized. Popularity is far too important to those weenies."

"Well, I hope you're right, because now they know that you talked to the cops. You should be careful, you know, just in case."

We talked long into the evening and I didn't get any more images from her mind. A few times that night, when she thought I wasn't looking I caught her watching me with a small smile on her face and it filled my heart with gladness to see her enjoying our time together. But then, I suppose that if she didn't like it we wouldn't do it so often.

My plan worked better than I hoped. By the time the week was out she was watching my eyes a lot more. At first I wondered if maybe it was because she was trying to catch me ogling her, but the look in her eyes didn't reflect that sort of sentiment. I noticed that during our evening discussions, where before we would often sit side by side or back to back watching the stars, she now began positioning herself in such a way that she could look me in the face without moving too much. Finally I caught the thought that she considered my eyes to be dreamy.

My next adjustment was that she would like my hair. It didn't have much body and pretty much just hung there. I suspected my suggestions were working when she decided that I needed help in that area and after several failed attempts to style it herself she escorted me to a hair salon in the mall and spent considerable time with the stylist deciding what to do with my incorrigible sandy locks.

By Halloween I was working on what I considered to be the hardest part. Making her believe that my face was attractive. I wasn't horribly disfigured or anything but my sharp angular features were generally not considered handsome. This was going to take some time so I had planned to give her at least three weeks of conditioning before going on to the next step.

The working out was beginning to show and while I wasn't bulking up as quickly as I had hoped, I did have a bit of tone and some definition. I felt better too. The bullies were leaving me alone (Thad and his crew weren't the only ones) and that was probably due mostly to the fact that my hobby of being a smart ass had taken a back seat to my Project Samantha. But like I told her, the bullies didn't always wait for me to give them a reason.

I was eating lunch. Mike had stayed to ask his teacher some questions after class and was still in line getting his lunch so I was alone at the last table in the cafeteria, when Dan and his bunch of plug uglies showed up. Dan wasn't a jock like Thad. He and his friends were druggies, meth freaks and equal opportunity bullies. They would strong arm people for money, be loud and obnoxious with stuff only they thought was funny and basically do their best to piss off as many people as possible.

It was the day everyone was supposed to wear their Halloween costume to school but I had foregone that particular tradition for this year. It never mattered anyway, dressed up or not; someone was going to give me shit. Last year I dressed up as a mad scientist (complete with a dry ice smoke generator in my backpack – it was pretty cool, or so I thought) and got beat up twice.

"Nice costume dude ... I mean dweeb ... I mean dweeb-dude." Dan broke up at his own joke and his crew followed suit. Apparently they had been out in the parking lot drinking (and/or whatever else) their lunch.

"He must be dressed as Nerdy McNerdston." Said Jimmy, Dan's best friend. They all laughed uproariously at that one.

Just as the laughter was settling down the newest member, a freshman named Paul tried putting his two cents in, "But that mask is really over the top."