Ayla and the Blackmailer By Diane Castle

Monday, September 4
Whateley Academy

“With our ass in the air and our heads in the ground
There’s no sense of despair, without sight, without sound
We hold our ears and shut our eyes
Distant screams morph into lullabies
We beat indifferent drum, we pound it till we’re numb!”

I yawned and stretched, as NOFX rocked out, screaming “We March To the Beat of an Indifferent Drum” on my stereo system.

It was an expensive little system, but it was worth it. It had quadraphonic sound and a sub-woofer, all in a package smaller than an old boom box. It played songs off my MP4 player, and it re-charged the player, and it let me cue up playlists on a four-week schedule. The playlist/schedule feature was why I had shelled out the money for it. The playlists in conjunction with the schedules meant that I could have NOFX as my alarm clock Monday through Friday, while letting me sleep in on the weekends, as well as playing Brass Monkey during scheduled study times… Plus a few hundred other possible arrangements if I wanted to put in the time to micro-manage my own life.

The stereo system did a lot of other tasks also, but frankly it wasn’t optimal for everything. For example, my computer was better for playing movies and videos. I had splurged before I left Gracie and Janet, and purchased a high-end laptop computer with a holographic screen and a fold-out ergonomic keyboard. It was going to be arriving today, along with the accessories I had ordered.

Well, in theory it was going to be arriving today. As we say in business, “the difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, there isn’t any difference”. You’d be amazed at the number of academics and analysts who don’t understand that.

It was strange. I was worth 300 million dollars, and I still felt poor. Yesterday, I had met a slew of kids who had nothing, and yet I was the one who was worrying about purchases for school.

Jade had really made an impression on me, even if I didn’t want to admit it to anyone. She had no family (that she would want to claim), almost no clothes, and little else, Her big treasures seemed to be a stuffed toy and a small stack of comic books. She had invented herself and acquired her few clothes over the summer. She was literally a self-made woman. And yet she seemed less concerned about bank balances than I was.

Vanessa and Sharisha were both inner-city black girls. Vanessa’s mom was working herself into an early grave just to keep them going. And Sharisha’s situation was even worse. What was I worrying about? Buying an expensive laptop and a high-end portable stereo system. I really felt like such a prick.

Sometimes I really hated the way I felt. But I couldn’t help it. Just a month and a half earlier, I had been one of the wealthiest people on the planet. I had been looking at a 12.5 billion dollar inheritance. Now I was looking at about two percent of that. I had been part of a family whose net worth worldwide had been pegged by Forbes at 750 billion dollars. Now I wasn’t even a part of that family any more. My big sister Gracie and I had carefully invested the full 300 million I had gotten from the family, and I had easy access to several million dollars over the next twelve months. But…

But I still felt poor. I felt like I had to scrimp and save, even though I had more money available that very second in just my liquid accounts than the people around me might earn in a lifetime. That made me rich, according to everyone around me. But I just felt poor. I felt like I had so much less than I was used to. So much less than I ought to have. Two months ago, I wouldn’t have thought twice about buying a private jet for myself. Now I was worrying about spending eight hundred dollars on a portable, programmable, stereo system to go with my old MP4 player.

I climbed out of bed, feeling groggy. The three-hour time difference was going to take some getting used to - not that I was ever one of those early-morning people. I had to push myself to get going early in the morning, and if I didn’t get enough sleep the night before, I was a slug. A grouchy slug who needed at least two cups of real coffee.

I had a mental to-do list that I needed to get to while the other ‘freshthings’ were still getting moved in. I wondered if many kids other than Beltane played GURPS enough to get the origin of that word. Still, this was Mutant High, so anything was possible. There might be dozens of devisers who not only played GURPS but who routinely whipped up new games that made GURPS look like Chutes and Ladders.

First on my list was the standard matutinal list, beginning with a shower. There was no way I was going to pass up a shower. Not when I was now getting to shower with the girls. I mean, this was the only good thing about my otherwise sucky physical appearance. If I had to be ‘cute’ and have breasts and a girl’s bubble butt, then I was damned well going to get the perks out of this too. At least until enough girls hammered me with their mutant powers that I couldn’t walk to the bathrooms anymore.

I slipped out of my pajamas. I slipped on my silk bathrobe and shower clogs. I had nearly worn a hole in the carpet back at Gracie’s, pacing back and forth while debating whether to splurge on a bathrobe, even if it wasn’t even the most expensive bathrobe Pierre Cardin made for men. I took perhaps fifteen anguished minutes before I finally ‘went wild’ and bought it on-line. It wasn’t close to the quality of my old one, but it was far nicer than the terrycloth thing Gracie still wore.

I grabbed my toiletries kit off the back of the door, snagged one of my new towels, and headed out. Walking into the bathroom this time was different from last night or yesterday afternoon. Before, the bathroom had been empty, or empty enough that a hottie taking a shower had been able to ignore me. It wasn’t empty now. All four shower stalls were occupied.

I brushed my teeth and flossed while I was waiting for a shower. Vanessa and the tanned blonde were out before I finished. I watched in amazement as each one wrapped a towel around her hair before drying off.

The blonde dried off in a blur of super-fast motion that had her boobs and butt jiggling like jello. Wow.

Vanessa dried off her front… All of her front… Those luscious breasts, with those perfect tips, jiggling sensuously as she dried them… That delicious torso… Those gorgeous hips… That perfect little…

I had to swallow before I could talk. “Uhh, sorry. I.. uhh…” Okay, so I still couldn’t talk.

She looked down from my face. “And you’re, umm, pointing. That’s not okay in here.”

I looked down and realized that I had a tent. My robe was jutting up and out as if I had a flagpole hidden in there. “Oh crap.”

The tanned blonde looked, and finally spotted the problem. “Hey how come she’s gotta thing sticking up like a guy or something, and how come I don’t know her, we met all the girls yesterday, right?”

Vanessa closed her eyes in exasperation. “Jay Jay? This is Ayla. Ayla? Meet Jay Jay. Jay Jay was with me on the tour, and she’s a speedster. Jay Jay? Ayla was with Belle and the redhead you thought was so hot.”

Jay Jay babbled, “But they said that was for the TGs and Ayla’s a girl isn’t she? And…”

She stared down at my tent again and finally figured it out. Okay, so she wasn’t a speedster between the ears.

I admitted, “Yep. It’s the one I was born with. The rest of my body is all due to my mutation. So I look female, except between my legs. So I’m supposed to use the girls’ showers.” All right, maybe that last part was a fib. But I was pretty sure Jay Jay wouldn’t figure that out any time soon.

Vanessa kept on drying off, which was frankly mesmerizing. She said, “Then maybe you ought to use the girls’ showers instead of just watching ‘em.”

I grabbed my toiletries kit, hung it outside the shower Vanessa had been using, hung up my robe, hung the towel where it wouldn’t get wet, and started showering. But I could hear everything in the bathroom.

Jay Jay insisted, “But I look at the other girls, and you do, and we all do, I mean, we’re all lesbians, Rosalyn talked about this yesterday, and she said it was okay to look, as long as you’re not pushy about it, and…”

Vanessa said, “I know, Jay Jay. But Ayla’s sort of flaunting her.. interest. Or didn’t you notice she had a hard-on you could’ve hung a flag on?”

I rinsed my hair and said, “I’m sorry, all right? I just… Well, you two are gorgeous. I was just going to take the next open shower, but then you started drying off, and…”

Jay Jay burst out, “It’s Ayla, she’s really cute but she’s got a dick, I mean a real wiener, a big one, and she had a hard-on!”

I put conditioner on my hair and said to the throng outside the shower, “Okay, so I really like Vanessa. And she’s hot. So sue me.”

Someone said something I couldn’t catch while I was rinsing the conditioner out of my hair, but Vanessa insistently replied to her, “Look, I told you yesterday! I’m bi. I like Ayla. She’s cute, and smart, and nice. She likes me. So lay off!”

So I added, “After all, you wouldn’t want me hanging around you, when I’ve got a trouser snake. Right?”

Jay Jay, however, was curious. “So, like Nikki and Toni are both TG and they’re both turning into girls and they don’t have, you know, what you have, anymore, right? So are you gonna lose yours?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “The doctors I talked to aren’t mutant experts, and the one expert who looked at me is the last person in the world I’d trust. So I don’t know. But I’m hoping not. I liked being a boy. I wish I was still a boy. I don’t want to look like a girl, and I’m probably still changing, so I have no idea how things are going to work out. Maybe I’ll find a way to go back to me, and I’ll get moved out of Poe. Maybe my mutation will get much worse, and I’ll get moved out of Poe. For right now, I’m here, and we have to live together. Okay? Jay Jay?”

Vanessa said, “She’s long gone. She sped out of here about sentence two. Don’t waste your time giving her a five-page lecture. She won’t hold still for it.”

A voice I didn’t recognize laughed, “Don’t waste your time giving her a five-word lecture! She won’t wait for the end of that one either!”

“Oh knock it off, Bunny. You heard Jay Jay yesterday. Did she listen to Rosalyn for more than three words at a time? No.”

I stepped out of the shower and slipped on my robe as hastily as I could so everyone wouldn’t get a flash of my package. I just happened to emerge as ‘Bunny’ was stepping into the next shower. Holy crow! I mean, HOLY CROW!

Bunny was the ‘bimbo number one’ from the train depot. The one with that airhead voice. And she was built. Majorly built. I mean, there was no way a fourteen-year-old norm could have curves like that.

Between Bunny and Vanessa and a lot of the other babes here, I was going to be permanently ruined. I was going to spend the rest of my life going, “Nah, that Playboy Playmate of the Year is a dog. I went to high school with a hundred babes WAY hotter than her. And I saw a ton of them naked, too. Not interested in this bow-wow.”

Oh, by the way, the hot Hispanic with the red stripe down the middle of her hair? It wasn’t a dye job. It looked like it was part of her mutation, because she had a matching red stripe right down her bush. Which was very nicely trimmed. VERY nicely trimmed. I looked to make sure. Then I had to leave the bathroom and get back to my room, because I was tenting again. In a major way.

My throbbing boner made it impossible to tuck it back between my legs, like Gracie always wanted me to, or even to put on a gaff and hide The Evidence. I finally gave up and just got dressed.

I put on a white satin bra and hooked it in back. I was never going to get used to wearing a bra. I was never going to get used to HAVING to wear a bra. I was never going to get used to being stuck with a pair of boobs, even if they were A-cup mounds instead of the gazongas that some of the girls on the floor were slinging around.

Even if I still had Mister Happy And His Luggage between my legs, everything else about my body was wrong. I had a feminine face that everyone kept telling me was ‘cute’, and I had a female body. I had girls’ hips and a girl’s butt. I couldn’t even fit in boy’s clothes with anything approaching a degree of comfort.

I told myself that repeatedly, as I slid on a pair of satin panties, pulled up a pair of pre-distressed designer girls’ jeans, and shrugged myself into a couple pre-ripped tops.

And I was never, ever, EVER going to adjust to the fact that I liked wearing silky lingerie. It didn’t matter that I had always liked silk pajamas and silk sheets. It didn’t matter that I had worn silk Pierre Cardin boxers back when I was Trevor James Goodkind, scion to billions. Wearing girls’ underwear just had to be wrong. Liking to wear girls’ underwear just had to be a perversion.

I was living on a floor with four transgendered girls. And I liked all of them, and they didn’t seem to be perverted or weird. At least, not in that way; they had plenty of other weird things about them. I didn’t mind that they wore lingerie. I just minded that I did.

It didn’t bother me that Toni was happy that she had turned into a girl. It didn’t bother me that Jade was desperate to have her body fixed to what her brain wanted: I was almost the converse of her sitch, so I sympathized more than I wanted to admit out loud. It didn’t bother me that Billie had been transformed almost instantly into a girl and seemed okay with the change. But it terrified me that Nikki was getting used to being a hot redhead.

If she had been a normal boy, and in less than a year had changed internally to the point that she was almost used to being a girl, then what could happen to me in, say, one school year? I didn’t want to turn into a girl! I didn’t want to end up being an attractive chick who was good with that. I wanted to be a boy again!

I tied the laces on my Doc Martens and told myself that I was going to find a way to get changed back to a boy. I was at Whateley Academy now. If there was anyone who could help me, that person was likely to be here.

I was just leaving my room when I saw Toni and Nikki moving from their room toward Billie and Jade’s room. Toni asked me, “Ready to get the rest of the crew?” I grinned and nodded. It felt strange to be a part of any ‘crew’, especially any crew with girls like Nikki and Toni and Billie. Frankly, they were so hot that Victoria’s Secret models would be bingeing in jealousy.

Of course, Toni was the one who zipped up to the door, bounced to a halt, and actually knocked. Billie opened it right away. The three of us invited them for breakfast almost simultaneously.

“Are you interested in breakfast?” I asked. Holy crow, that sounded so stupid compared to everyone else. I needed not to be so stilted and nervous around people who were likely to become some of my closest friends. Or maybe my only friends, once everyone on campus knew I was a Goodkind. I wished I could be as casual and relaxed as Toni. Not that I was going to tell her!

“Ravenous,” Billie answered Nikki’s question. Considering the amount she had packed away at dinner the night before, I didn’t think she was exaggerating.

Jade was reading away. She looked up from her information packet and asked, “I was about to ask if anyone minded if I brought Jinn along, too?”

I was sure Toni was hoping for that. Even after last night, I wasn’t completely sure. I mean, from what Jade had said, Jinn was just a ‘copy’ of her. Just a PK construct with a copy of Jade’s mind. And Jade was nice. So far, I’d met Jinn as a crazy cabbit (or was that a cwazy cabbit?), a mischievous stuffed lion, and a fuzzy blanket. So why was I so edgy about this?

Jade wisely ignored me and reached over to a small pile of clothes. She touched them. I was expecting a flash of energy or something, but there was nothing I could see. Nikki twitched, so maybe she could see something happening.

The clothes rose up into the air and re-arranged themselves in the order you would expect if you had just walked out of them. Then suddenly, they popped outward as if they were inflating at high speed. And it was over. The clothes were filled out as if an invisible girl were wearing them. Well, an invisible girl wearing the clothes, and a rubber Madonna mask, and a wig.

Everybody else watched as if this were a simple bit of excitement. But it really freaked me out. Did Jade need to touch something to stick Jinn into it? How much material could Jinn control at once? How strong was Jinn when she was cast into something? What if Jade could toss Jinn into my clothes from thirty feet away? What if Jade could cast Jinn into every brick in Poe Cottage? How long could Jinn stay in something, and how fast could Jinn move while holding something, and how far away from Jade could Jinn go? Depending on her limitations, she might be anywhere from ‘minor practical joke’ material to ‘biggest threat on campus’ material.

“Sorry,” the other girl said, rubbing her hands against the mask to smooth it into place. “Let me just get my face on.”

“You know,” Fey said, “back in the olden days that meant something very different.”

Everyone else chortled, but I was having a hard time coping. I was having some pretty horrific mental images to overcome. Jade pointing at someone and sending Jinn into their body, then making them move helplessly like a marionette. Jade lobbing Jinn into someone’s clothes and then watching as Jinn shot straight up at 200 miles an hour until the victim was beyond the pull of Earth’s gravity and was launched into deep space. Jade touching a pond and animating all the water in it, to drown an entire squad of opponents. Jade slapping a building and ‘possessing’ every brick and girder in it, to bring a five thousand ton golem to life.

You know, all of this would be a lot easier if I hadn’t been raised my whole life to think of mutants as fearsome and dangerous. How do you un-learn an entire lifetime’s worth of experience? I was going to have to work on that. Or at least I was going to have to work on pretending better.

We strolled off to breakfast, Jinn cavorting about with Toni and Nikki. I walked along with Jade. I tried to sound casual as I quizzed her, “So tell me, how much stuff can you animate at one time, and how long does it last?”

Physical contact needed? Less than two hundred pounds total? Around an hour? Limited speed? Her answers were a big relief. Assuming she was telling me the truth. But there was still no reason she couldn’t slap someone my size, cast Jinn into their body and clothes, and launch them into outer space. If Jinn could fly at maybe 25 miles per hour and go straight up, and last for about an hour, that would leave some poor schmuck 25 miles above the Earth’s surface, with no oxygen and one hell of a long fall. Anybody who could survive that wasn’t in Jade’s weight class: they were in Champion’s weight class. I could go heavy enough to defeat something like that, and she probably couldn’t touch Hank through his PK force field, but it looked to me like there were lots of kids around here who couldn’t beat an attack like that.

Breakfast was about what I expected. After the previous evening, I was expecting food for one army, with some subtle opportunities for better dining. There were enough scrambled eggs to fill four warming trays, each of which would cover a computer desk. There was enough bacon and sausage to make the domestic pig go extinct throughout New England. There were slices of ham ranging in size from ‘delicate eater’ to ‘dinner for one tiger’. There was a swimming pool of coffee, in a series of coffee urns the size of hipbaths. There was an enormous spread of fresh fruit. There was a bakery’s worth of rolls, muffins, sweet rolls, biscuits, croissants, and tea-rings. You name it, there was fifty pounds of it somewhere on that long line.

Billie proceeded to tear through the line like she was trying to grab enough food for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Nikki went straight for the vegetarian option. Toni went for what I would guess was the ‘standard American girl’ fare, with reasonable amounts of a nice variety of foods. Jade worked her way after Billie with a look in her eyes that I wasn’t used to seeing. It was a sort of amazement, and a disbelief that it was all real. I wondered how long it had been since she had decent meals cooked for her. Seeing the look in her eyes made me rather uncomfortable.

But I still did as I had planned, and looked for the wheat amidst all this chaff. I grabbed one of the whole-wheat croissants with some unsalted butter, a small slice of what looked like a real Swedish tea-ring, and some fresh fruit. I supposed that Billie needed those calories to fuel her powers, but she was missing out on some quite good cooking by opting for the volume approach.

The hall was a lot more crowded now. Some of the kids were obviously eating with parents. I saw a few other kids who were packing it away like Billie, but this was a ‘red flag’ day, so there weren’t any overt displays of mutant weirdness to terrify the baseline parental units. I had a feeling that by the next evening’s dinner, the place would be full to the gills. I also had a feeling that, once we had a green flag day, everything including gills would be out on display.

After we finished eating - well, all of us except Billie were finished - I headed off for my first task of the day. This was something I had carefully scheduled once I knew I was coming in on the third, instead of later in the week.

I walked into admin and was helpfully directed to the counseling office. Someone whose nameplate informed me that she was ‘Valerie’ pointed me to a chair and told me that Mrs. Hawkins would be ready for me in just a few minutes.

Father always judged people like Mrs. Hawkins by their promptness. A doctor might have a reason to be hours late due to a medical emergency. But counselors and lawyers and accountants did not. I waited for fifteen minutes. I checked, and there was no prior person delaying Mrs. Hawkins. She just couldn’t be bothered to be prompt. Strike one.

Mrs. Hawkins opened her door and ushered me into her office. She was around sixty, with white hair put up in a prissy style. She had an expensive ergonomic chair behind a nice computer desk, which was carefully oriented so that I couldn’t see the computer monitor. That seemed particularly unhelpful, given the reason I was here. The chair for me wasn’t very comfortable, which seemed just plain mean, given her chair. Strike two.

“Of course, ma’am.” I was going to treat her politely.. right up until she demonstrated that I was wasting my time being polite.

“Thank you. And call me Sarah,” she insisted unctuously. Oh God, she was one of those. The people who see a Goodkind, and dollar signs instantly flash in their eyes. “It’s really so interesting to have a Goodkind here at Whateley, you know. I’m sure you have all kinds of questions about mutants that I can help with.”

Yep. I wondered how many counseling sessions she’d wait before springing some idea that would ‘help both of us’. Or was she the type who tries to spend enough time with me that she can ask for a mink coat at Christmastime? This was strike three, plus perhaps an additional ten or twelve strikes.

I carefully said, “Actually, I’ve made some friends, and they’ve been very helpful with that. I was hoping to get my class schedule organized. That’s why I made the appointment. I think that you should have my school records from Chilton, and my other educational records as well.”

She pursed her lips smugly, “Excellent. I knew you were going to be an excellent case. Focused, academic… You’re all paid up for the school year. I assume that you won’t need to look for a campus job?”

I shook my head with a small smile. “I really don’t think that’s necessary, unless there’s a job opening for high-end financial planners.”

She said, “This is excellent.” She was starting to sound a little too much like Montgomery Burns for me. “Are your parents going to be spending a lot of time checking on your progress here?” She didn’t sound like she would enjoy that.

I admitted, “No, they’ll never check. They disowned me when I manifested my powers.”

She almost grinned at that. “All right…” She obviously couldn’t care less if I had been kicked out of the house by my parents and hideously mistreated, as long as I paid my bills on time. She just didn’t want to deal with troublesome parents or mentors or sponsors. Okay, that was definitely another strike against her. A strike the size of the Teamsters.

She said, “Now let’s get right to it. You’ll want to take some placement tests so we can put you in the right classes. Right?”

I nodded, “Yes. That’s why I scheduled this meeting and came in first thing this morning.”

She pulled a thick sheaf of papers out of her desk drawer. “Good. We’ll begin right away.”

I started to object, and then I realized that this ‘pop quiz’ approach was probably better than the approach at Chilton, which often led to kids cramming with tutors to prepare for the placement tests, so that some of those kids got in over their heads within weeks.

She led me to a small study desk in a quiet room next door to her office. “I’ll just pull out the relevant papers, and let you get started. And please, don’t tell anyone else about this. You wouldn’t want everyone else to get an advantage over you, would you?”

Hmm. That was one way of looking at the issue. “I won’t. I don’t think it would help anyone to be stuck in a class that was too advanced for them, would it?”

She looked a bit surprised at that. “Umm, no, that wouldn’t be good either.”

‘Either’? With that attitude, she just picked up another strike. This woman was not exactly earning my trust.

Even with my school records on her computer and all the time she had wasted before calling me into her office, she didn’t have a complete set of tests ready for me. She pulled out tests for English, English and American Lit, math, French, Latin, classical Greek, world history, general science, and German. That seemed like enough to keep me busy for the morning, but hardly enough tests given all my prior coursework.

I focused on the tests, instead of the counselor. The English and Lit tests were really easy. Honestly, didn’t people read anymore? ‘Name three of the Canterbury Tales and describe the essence of each tale in one sentence.’ It would serve her right if I chose the Miller’s Tale and the Reeve’s Tale. The world history test focused mainly on American and Western European history, which suited me just fine. I suspected that some students from other countries found that bias rather annoying.

The math test was easy, at first. I had already taken Algebra I and Geometry at Chilton. But the trig and calculus questions were obviously beyond me, so I stopped right there, with just a very quick glance through the rest of the test to see if there was anything else I knew. What was the point of looking at later questions on things like ‘Ito integrals’ and ‘Brouwer degree’, whatever the heck they were, if I couldn’t do the calc parts?

The language tests were simple. In my opinion, you can’t test languages adequately with a written test. You need oral and aural parts. So I zipped through them. I mean, I had been going to French Camp and German Camp for long enough to speak both languages fluently. So the basic vocabulary and grammar questions were just a waste of my time.

I saved the general science test for last, since I didn’t know the breadth or depth of the material I would face. It turned out to be largely basic science. I had taken biology and physics courses in junior high, so I did fairly well until I got to the advanced science sections. Did they really have entering freshman students who understood the ‘stoichiometry of the vadose zone’ and ‘tensor calculus for string theory’? I didn’t even know what the ‘vadose zone’ was. It sounded like something out of Marvel Comics.

It was still well before lunch when I stopped. Mrs. Hawkins had been marking my papers as I worked, so it only took about twenty minutes before she was ready with my results.

She sat down at her computer and began slapping my schedule together. “Now first of all, since you have so many required courses covered, you would do well to start with Introduction to Superpowers, which has a theory class and a lab. Also, I think that you’ll need Costume Shop I, and Basic Martial Arts…”

I stopped her, “I’d really rather focus on academic requirements and move toward college placement courses as soon as possible. I don’t think I need a costuming class or martial arts. I’m not planning on becoming a superhero.”

She looked shocked that I would question her obviously superior judgment. Great. I could tell how this discussion was going to go. “No, dear. This isn’t for being a superhero. You need these courses right now. Your records mention your intersexed state as a possible ‘visibility’ issue, and I could see that as soon as you walked in the room. You need to learn how to alter your clothing so that you’re not constantly being pointed out as a target for gay-bashers and deviants. I’m definitely putting you down for Costume Shop I. First period. And you certainly need some martial arts training. In case you hadn’t noticed, you are a Goodkind. Almost everyone on this campus has either been harassed by Humanity First! or knows someone who has been. You need to learn to defend yourself.”

I tried again, “I have a power that’s well-suited to defense. I can become immaterial, and walk away through the nearest wall. Or I can just walk through the bully and leave.”

“No, no, no!” she fussed. “It isn’t that simple on a campus like Whateley. There are people who will attack you from hiding. There are people who can launch mental attacks or energy attacks. There are people who can suppress powers. There are people who can build gadgets that can do things to you. You need Basic Martial Arts!”

“But you’re filling my schedule up with mutant courses. I won’t have any time left for academics! That’s what I care about. I want to work towards a Masters in Business Administration, with an emphasis on financials. That means Accounting, Business Administration, and Mathematics courses.” I held up the curriculum book I had already read through. “I want to take these three courses.”

I showed her the particular specialty courses I had marked. “World Literature: Special Topics” with guest lecturer Dr. Paul Zinn of Yale, which was a special class on Saturdays from 8 to 12 am. “Superpower Law I” in fifth period. “Stock Market Options as a Realization of Stochastic Processes” in third period.

She looked something up on her computer. I couldn’t see the monitor from where I sat, so this gave her an extra sense of control. She firmly said, “Oh no. “Super Law I” is a junior/senior only class. You won’t be allowed to take that.”

I pushed, “Why not? I have extensive background in international legal and financial issues. I’m probably better qualified for that class than ninety percent of the people in it.”

“Rules, dear,” she said smugly. “You cannot take a junior/senior class unless you are officially a junior or senior.”

She shook her head no, “Not at Whateley. We have too many students who can make you change your mind, one way or another, regardless of the ethics involved. So we have a strict ‘no exceptions’ policy.”

She went on, “The stock market course is a seniors-only course open only to gadgeteers, devisers, and exemplars who have fulfilled the prior coursework. You’re not even close on that. You’ll need.. let’s see.. trigonometry and pre-calculus, calculus I and II, real analysis, complex analysis, probability theory I and II, and several other prerequisites. If you were a baseline, this would be a third- or fourth-year course in math grad school.”

“All right, that seems reasonable,” I pretended. “But what about the ‘World Literature: Special Topics’ course by Professor Zinn? It’s on a Saturday, and I don’t see any prereqs.”

“I’m sorry, dear. It’s only for students who have previously taken American Literature and either European Literature or English Literature.” She obviously wasn’t sorry.

I pushed, “But I have. I believe my test results demonstrate that I have an excellent background in these areas.”

“Really, Ayla, you should trust my judgment. I have been doing this job for far longer than you’ve been alive,” she smarmed.

I tried again. “I’ll make you a deal. We’ll go with your schedule, if you’ll put me in Zinn’s world lit class. And then we’ll talk about these ‘personal study’ courses in the curriculum.”

So we argued a bit more, and I finally ended up with a schedule that she liked, and that I could tolerate until I could get someone else - someone rational - to change it.

“So. Let’s see… You have Costume Shop I first period, followed by Spanish I and Powers Theory. After lunch, Basic Martial Arts, then Powers Lab, and finally that trigonometry/pre-calculus course you’re insisting on. For personal study courses, you have Civics, and you have Business Accounting I. Civics (personal study) has an optional meeting time of four to six Wednesday afternoon. Business Accounting (personal study) has an optional meeting time of four to five on Tuesday and Thursday. Plus your Saturday morning class, ‘World Literature: Special Topics’. I think you’re going to be back here in a week asking me to let you drop a couple of these classes…”

“I hope not,” I said. I didn’t say what I was actually thinking. But how hard could this be? I already knew business accounting, and Civics was trivial. A lot of my classes weren’t even academics. What, I was going to be assigned extra homework in Costume Shop and Martial Arts? I didn’t think so.

I left her office as quickly as I could without being rude - she wanted to ‘chat’ with me about my being a Goodkind and also a mutant - and I hurried off to lunch. The crowd was even bigger than at breakfast, and there was even more food laid out.

Chef Marcel ‘casually’ strolled out when I moved up to the food line, and managed to place a small bowl on one of the tables just as I reached it. I gave him a smile and took the bowl. Man, was this what I thought it was? I picked up a salad and a sandwich too. Arguing all morning with a jerk was hard work.

I took my repast and sat down with the gang. We seemed to have acquired our own table, well off from the center of the dome, so that we had a great view of the outdoors. It looked like the ‘power elite’ were taking over the central tables, so we were likely to be allowed to sit out here in the wastelands.

Billie was wearing a new outfit, and it really looked good on her. I mean, Billie was a hottie to start with, but those jeans-and-flannel-shirt outfits weren’t doing her any favors. She looked way better in this.

I took a careful bite of my ‘surprise’, and closed my eyes with pleasure. Tuna ceviche! Man, was that good. And the onion was marvelous. What was it? Vidalia? Walla Walla Sweet?

I still made sure to catch Billie’s comments. She had her new clothes done in a matter of minutes at Rogers’ Fabric Boutique in Dunwich, thanks to a bit of direction from one of the superintendents of the school.

One of the school superintendents just took her on a little trip? And he was a friend of old family friends of hers? Billie had pull that she didn’t even understand. I needed to explain the facts of life to that girl. Assuming she’d listen to me. But that sort of conversation should be done in private, not in the middle of a cafeteria.

Especially not in a domed cafeteria like this. There was some sort of weird sound channeling going on. Every once in a while, you could hear little pieces of conversation that were apparently from no one who was nearby. I wondered if this was like some acoustically-engineered rooms I had seen, where, under the right circumstances, you could hear a whisper from the other side of the room. I made a mental note to avoid having the really private conversations in here.

In the meantime, I made sure to get the phone number for Cecilia Rogers’ business. An expert seamstress was more valuable than gold, even if not many people realized that. An expert seamstress who could use mutant powers to put together an ensemble like Billie’s in a matter of minutes was probably worth her weight in plutonium.

After we finished eating and chatting, I made sure to walk past the lunch line and thank Chef Marcel. I was right: he had used Vidalia onions in the ceviche. We had a quick discussion in French, during which he let me know that Chef Peter was going to have something special for the teaching staff at dinner, and Marcel would make sure there was a little for me as well.

He insisted in French, “But you cannot tell anyone else! One cannot cook a three-diamond repast for 3000, and a number of the students here can eat as much as ten normal people!”

Okay, I had to agree with that. Billie and Hank alone could probably eat the entire output of a French three-diamond restaurant with thirty covers.

Once I was out of the cafeteria, I pulled out my cell phone and dialed a number I had just heard.

“Rogers’ Fabric Boutique! How may I help you?” The voice sounded young and cheerful. I was guessing from what Billie had said that this was Cecilia Rogers herself.

I grinned, even though she couldn’t see it. “I certainly hope so. I’m a new student at Whateley, and I just saw what you whipped up for my friend Billie. I was hoping that I could come by in the next day or so and maybe get a few new outfits, starting with a couple school uniforms.”

“That sounds very nice dear, but if you’re not a senior, you’ll need a chaperone or else a pass to ride the school shuttle into town.”

I said, “Thanks for the information. I’ll see when I can get into Dunwich.”

So now I had a couple new items for my to-do list: getting a pass into Dunwich, arranging shuttle transportation, and meeting with Cecilia Rogers.

I walked back to Poe and found Vanessa, who was lying on her bed looking over the options her counselor had given her. Vanessa lying on her stomach in just a t-shirt and shorts? Definitely worth finding.

We talked about her schedule, and she opted for fourth period Basic Martial Arts and Business Accounting I (personal study), since I would be in them too.

I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face. I knew that meant lots of private study time together. I knew business accounting inside and out already, so I was figuring this was an easy ‘A’ for me, and a chance to show Vanessa what I knew. Okay, a chance to show off for Vanessa.

I got back to my room and started thinking about my afternoon agenda. I wanted to get all my textbooks while the selection was still good, but I wanted to get to Dunwich to check out Rogers’ Fabric Boutique. I was expecting that the uniform selection at the Whateley store would leave a lot to be desired.

Someone was knocking on my door. Someone small and sort of timid, based on the hesitant little taps. So that pretty well ruled out Toni and Billie.

Oh. It was Jade. I opened the door and gave her a smile. “You can knock louder than that. I won’t mind. And if I have my music going, I might not hear anything too quiet.”

She looked hesitant. “Could you come over to Toni and Nikki’s room? We need to talk.”

Oh crap. They’d talked it over as a team, and decided that they didn’t want the hassle of a Goodkind rep dragging them down. I knew it was too good to last. I gave her a nod and followed her next door.

She finally spoke in little more than a whisper, “Look, someone delivered a note for you. They slipped it under our door. They got the rooms wrong. It’s.. it’s a blackmail note.”

WHAT!?!?! I nearly exploded right there. I looked around to see if anyone else might overhear, and I decided to hold off for a second.

I demanded, “Where’s the note?” I almost channeled Janet and asked for ‘the fucking note’.

Billie pointed to Toni and Nikki, who were poring over an ordinary page of white paper. I was too pissed to be sociable, and I nearly ripped it out of Toni’s hands. I read it twice before I could even calm down enough to unclench my hands.

Don’t worry. However far they may be from your heart and mind, rest assured that they aren’t far out of our sights. Particularly that so-called sister of yours. Play things right and we give both you and her a wide berth, and never talk to you again. Play things wrong and the very least that will happen is that those innocent young girls you’re living with will find out that their sorority sister used to look a lot different.

We’re looking for someone else, not related to you. All you have to do is get the name and address of every girl living in Poe Hall. It should be easy. Right now, everyone’s moving in. They all have addresses on their luggage.

Write the information down, fold the paper up, and leave it under the bust of Edgar Allen Poe in the entryway to your cottage. Wednesday, exactly at noon. No tricks. Complete this successfully and we will never again bother you or yours.

I finally realized that everyone else was talking. Jade was whispering, “It’s just bad handwriting, and it was supposed to say, ‘Trevor’.”

“Trevor Goodkind,” I confirmed, pointing a thumb back at my chest. “And someone is going to pay for this! I’m going to tear somebody apart… Once I find out who’s doing this.”

“I can understand that,” Billie nodded. “I’ve been threatened a lot lately, myself. But that just brings us back to Jade’s question. What do we do about it?”

“We?” I looked around. I realized that I had been standing there, planning on going it alone. Planning on being alone for the next four years. And the crowd around me had different ideas.

“We,” Toni insisted. She looked around as everyone else agreed with her. “We’re all new here at Whateley. We all have gender issues to deal with here. And we’re going to be together for quite a while. So if one of us gets in trouble, the others need to help out if it’s at all possible. That way we have our own support system here.”

“Makes sense to me,” Nikki nodded, then put her arm about my shoulders and moved so we sat together on the bed. She said, “Look, all of us have problems here, some worse than others. And we all need to stick together, it just seems like the right way to do things, doesn’t it?”

Nikki stuck her tongue out at Toni and gave me a quick squeeze. I had to concentrate on the extortion note to keep from getting a raging erection.

“So,” Jade piped up. “We thought we might make up a false list, you know use silly names and stuff that might actually be true given where we live right now. Then stick it under the bust and keep watch to see who comes for it.”

“A plan!” Toni agreed with a bounce. “We have a plan now. Let’s do it!”

“Umm, a thought here.” Nikki quietly tapped Billie on the shoulder. “Could these people be looking for you? With what you’ve told us, I think that might be the case.”

I thought that Billie was only one of the potential targets. She had told us about those assassins. But Hank had some mutant-hating soldiers who might be looking for him, and probably had some sympathetic higher-ups. Jade had Melodious Silvertongue, who might want to make sure that she never came back to his hometown, not to mention that creep of a father. From what Vanessa had told me, it might be some super-powered thug from New York City looking for Sharisha. Or the target could be any of the Poe people whom I hadn’t met yet.

“All the more reason to find out who’s behind this,” Toni answered. “So we can figure out what exactly it is that they’re after.”

“Right.” Billie’s eyes had taken on a rather frightening reddish tinge, but they returned to her more normal look as she calmed down. “So let’s get started on this fake list, shall we?”

I finally used my brain for more than a microsecond and said, “Good plan. Let’s meet in my room in ten minutes. I need to do something first.”

I needed to do what I should have done first. What Father would have glared at me for forgetting. I went down to Mrs. Horton and got a large ziplock baggie. The note and envelope went into the baggie as evidence.

I looked over the envelope and letter. Not a lot of visible evidence, unfortunately. The name on the envelope was hand-written, but obviously disguised to the point of near-illegibility. The paper looked like it had been printed using a decent laser printer, so that probably wasn’t going to be traceable. The envelope and paper looked like ordinary stock. Still, they went into the envelope in case there were usable fingerprints or DNA. Or something.

If I had still been a member in good standing of the Goodkind family, I would have turned this over to Goodkind Security and let them run forensics on it. But I couldn’t be sure who I could trust around here. Would going to Security here be a help or a hindrance? Could it tip off the extortionist or extortionists? I had no way of knowing.

Then I took the evidence into my room and hid it where no one was going to find it.

I rolled up the baggie-protected envelope into a tube and put a rubber band over it. Then I held it in my fist and very carefully went light. I put my hand through the wall directly underneath the light switch and five inches above the floor. Then I let go of the baggie and slid my hand back out.

There was another basic problem. As far as I could tell, there was no point in believing ANYTHING in that note. They knew about me, and they knew about Gracie. But they weren’t asking for money. Yet. Just information. Or so they claimed.

If they knew about the Goodkinds, then why weren’t they worried about the standard approach the Goodkinds would take with extortionists? Did they have a spy watching me? If so, then why didn’t they use that spy to get the information on the people in Poe? There was something fundamentally wrong with this picture.

And everything in that note was probably a lie. There might only be one blackmailer, claiming to be more than one person. There would probably be a much larger demand if they got away with this: there was no way I was believing that ‘we will never again bother you or yours’ routine. Extortionists never worked like that. They bled you and bled you, until even Count Dracula couldn’t get a drop out of your veins.

And there was something drastically wrong with the larger picture. How could anyone put Gracie and Trevor together with me and Whateley? When we filled out my Whateley application, we hadn’t mentioned Trevor Goodkind, just my new name. The only people who could know this much information were the people I told my story to yesterday afternoon…

…And anyone who could overhear that conversation.. and anyone who could use magic or psi to eavesdrop…

But the people who listened to my story all knew the truth about Poe, so they knew the extortion attempt was doomed to failure. So how could I track down some non-Poe person at Whateley who had eavesdropped on us?

Before I could stew over that too long, people began knocking on my door. First, it was Nikki and Toni. Then Hank showed up, looking sort of embarrassed about going into a girl’s room. Man, that kid sure wasn’t a girl anymore. Billie came long a bit later, after Toni got us started on our list of names. We had sixteen double-occupancy rooms to fill up with pseudonyms for each floor except the penthouse. There were only maybe twenty-one new kids on our floor, but I had heard that there were several sophs being left back on our floor too.

Hank grinned, “Okay. Room 216. I.P. Freely, Yellowfalls Montana.” I think everyone else in the room groaned.

Toni grinned and said, “Doh!” Then she said, “Okay, Marge’s roommate is… Umay Kmee Wan, Dubuque Iowa.”

Nikki said, “My turn! Room 215. Merle Lynn, London England, and her roomie Gwen Nevere, same town.”

Hank flopped back in his chair and groaned, “Ugh! Pun damage. I may not be able to move for three turns.”

And so, what had started out as utter fury turned into utter silliness.. and a kind of bonding I had never expected.

Once we had the names all written down on a sheet of paper and ready for our trap, we started talking about how we would set things up to ensnare my extortionist.

Before we got too deeply into that, Mrs. Horton was at my door. “Ayla? Your packages are here. Would you come down and sign for them?”

I almost smiled. “No, it’s my new laptop with all the accessories I ordered.”

Hank said, “This ought to be good. What does a Goodkind order as accessories for a laptop?”

Toni grinned, “A voice dictation system that comes with its own steno pool?”

So we all trooped down Mrs. Horton’s office, and I didn’t have to carry anything back upstairs. I unpacked and checked everything out while my peanut gallery admired the gear.

The laptop was souped up even beyond the standard high-end equipment. But what made it all worthwhile were the full ergonomic keyboard, and the visor for the holographic screen, and the security system. I could type at my maximum speed - which seemed to have improved a lot over my old forty words a minute - while looking at a more-than-full-sized screen.

I put on the visor and tried out the keyboard with the holographic screen. I gushed, “This is going to be great for writing papers.”

Toni insisted, “Oh, come on! Don’t tell me you got that for schoolwork! Where’s Duke Nukem and Halo?”

That boy was all boy between the ears. No doubt about it. I carefully gave him a look that meant ‘great idea’. What the girls didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them…

After I put all my new toys away, we grabbed the rest of the crew and trekked off to dinner. Oddly enough, as I slowly moved along the main dish line, Chef Peter just happened to walk out and set down a plate that had a four-ounce filet of fish, drizzled with a translucent orange liquid.

He whispered to me, “It’s a filet of arctic char with a pistachio-orange vinaigrette. Don’t tell anyone. It’s supposed to be for the staff only, tonight.”

I took the small plate back with me, along with a small casserole of what was probably baked fall veggies, and a tossed salad. The fish was obviously a carefully prepared filet. I could see the finely-chopped nuts and orange peel in the light vinaigrette that was poured over and around the filet. I took a bite.

“Mmm,” I moaned. I think my eyes fluttered closed. Oh, that was perfect. Now I just had to eat it without looking like I was having an orgasm. The fish was perfectly prepared, and the vinaigrette was a vivid accompaniment. The pistachio taste in the vinaigrette had a rich, long-lasting finish that I didn’t think came just from the chopped pistachios.

After I finished dinner, I walked back to the steam tables. Chef Marcel and Chef Peter casually strolled out and pretended to clean up a bit.

I complimented Chef Peter on the char en vinaigrette, and even I took a guess, “Did you use pistachio oil in the vinaigrette? Because the finish was amazing. Really rich and long-lasting.”

Chef Peter blushed with pride and admitted that he had used pistachio oil and fresh orange zest. Chef Marcel definitely made the ‘rubbing thumb against first two fingers’ gesture, telling me they had bet on my tastebuds, and he was expecting to be paid.

Then Chef Marcel started to tell me how to get the good coffee at breakfast. Just as he was in the middle of his explanation, he looked up and stopped.

A supercilious blonde walked up and began speaking French with us. “Oh! It is such a pleasure to find someone else who speaks something other than American English. What a hideous mélange it is of everything you have ever heard!”

Chef Marcel instantly dropped the foodie bit and went into a talk about Paris, as if that was what we had been discussing all along. “But the Rive Gauche is no longer what it was when I was your age…”

That told me something about the blonde, and what Chef Marcel thought of her. I played along with Chef Marcel, chatting in French about Paris, until he had to get back to work.

The blonde said to me, in a fussy little tone, “I am Kismet. I am from Belgium.”

“Oh! Where in Belgium?” I had been to Belgium. And if she wanted to chat in French, I was fine with that. She was attractive, with a willowy shape that her European-styled dress made the most of.

“Antwerp. Have you ever been there? It is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe.” She led me away from the food line, and toward a group of people who might as well have been a painting by Manet: ‘Europeans turning up their noses at their bourgeois surroundings’.

I had been to Antwerp, and it was a nice place, but I wouldn’t have listed it in my Top Five European Cities. However, I wasn’t going to say that to a Belgian. Especially not a pretty Belgian girl. Most especially not a pretty Belgian girl who might be able to blast me into the next state if I pissed her off. “Oh, I have been to Antwerp with my family. I really enjoyed it. You have some marvelous restaurants. I particularly enjoyed ‘t Fornuis and In de Schaduw van de Kathedraal.”

I waited just a second so that her whole table would hear me reply in my best French, “Oh, I am from New York state. I am an American.”

One of the girls at the table looked up at me and smiled. She said in French, “Oh, now you are teasing. You have a Parisian accent.”

Oh, I would have been happy to tease that one. She was a gorgeous brunette with long, intricately-styled black hair and a lovely oval face. She looked to be about my age, and curvy for fourteen. She wasn’t as curvy as Vanessa, but it was pretty obvious that she was going to have a dynamite figure in a few years.

“I am Charmer. I am from Monaco. This is Charge. This is Automa-tech. And this is Cytherea…”

If Charmer was hot, then Cytherea, the blonde sitting next to her was HAWT. Blond, with tresses that looked like they trailed almost down to the floor when she sat. A luscious face with pouty lips. A body with all the right curves. She smiled at me, and I could feel an allure that…

Oh. Right. A glamour, like Fey had. Frankly, Nikki’s was noticeably more powerful.

I continued in French, “I am Phase.” And, since everyone I knew was finding out, I went ahead and spilled the beans. “My real name is Ayla Goodkind. Yes, I am one of those Goodkinds. That is why I have spent so much time in Europe, and why my French is.. adequate.”

Kismet laughed, “Adequate? You sound like a true Parisian. I know Bretons who do not speak French nearly as well as you do.”

Charmer smiled, “I know Parisians who do not speak the language as well as you do.”

Cytherea just purred, “How interesting. A Goodkind.” But her eyes had that ‘dollar sign’ look to them. I’d have to watch out for her.

Charmer grinned and then said something that I was pretty sure was Italian. It might have been a question about how well I spoke Italian, if I had to guess based on my knowledge of Latin.

So I guessed, “I’m sorry, but my Italian is dreadful. However, my German is quite good, and I am learning Spanish.”

Charmer happily reverted to French and said, “My father is in the wine export business. Villabianca Wines. Goodkind Import/Export is one of my father’s major clients.”

I smiled, “Ah, yes. My brother Paul met with your family the last time we were in Monaco. It’s a very lovely area. Unfortunately, I had to settle for a lovely dinner and a moonlight swim while my parents went to the casinos and conducted a little business with the Prince.”

Charmer gave me her best attempt at a regal smile. “Ah, Prince Rainier. I have been presented to him and the Princesses. In fact, I am here by Royal Decree, and they are my sponsors. Someday I shall be the Royal Wizardess of Monaco.”

Ah, yes. The nouveau riche who had aspirations of becoming part of the royal court. I recognized it at once. I’d certainly seen it enough when the ‘royal court’ was only the Goodkind inner circle.

Judging by the faces around me, everyone at the table had heard this story more than enough times already. Kismet and Cytherea were more than happy to derail the conversation by introducing me to the rest of the table, who all just happened to be from Western Europe.

On my way back to our table, I heard some upperclassman mutter at me, “Gonna start hanging out with the Beret Mafia, kid?” I managed not to laugh at that until I got back to our table and shared the joke.

When we got back to Poe, Mrs. Horton was rounding up all the freshmen for a big announcement. Tonight and the next night were going to be Poe parties. Video games and partying down on the first floor, and discussion groups on the next three floors. While “welcome to Whateley” sounded really useful, and “being a sexual minority” would be relevant, the one that caught my attention was the “graduation, careers, and legacy” discussion up on fourth floor.

I checked with Vanessa to see what she wanted to do. But she didn’t look too good. She moaned, “I’m really sorry, but I have a rotten headache. It’ll be gone by tomorrow or tomorrow night. It’s just something I get every month.”

I kissed her on the forehead and said, “Okay. How about I tuck you in bed and get out a heating pad for you?”

Without Vanessa to dance with, I figured I would skip the dancing part of the party. I wouldn’t want to dance with any guys, and all the girls I knew were lesbian or TG. The lesbians wouldn’t want to dance with someone packing pork, and asking a teammate like Billie or Nikki to dance just seemed.. well, weird. Besides, who in their right mind would want to dance with me? I was probably too angry and too nervous to go dance anyway.

I decided to go up to the senior sunroom and get in on that ‘graduation and careers and legacy’ talk. But first I made a detour to my room to get some supplies.

I walked up the stairs and into the fourth-floor sunroom. I noticed that it really wasn’t any nicer than the sunroom we had down on our floor. Okay, the paint was newer, and the furniture was a bit better, and the television screen was a bit bigger. The ceiling light was more expensive, but too tacky for my taste.

Everyone in the room looked like a junior or a senior. At least. A couple guys looked like they were college-age, and one of those guys looked like a junior or senior linebacker for a major university football power.

The tall blonde from the train station was there, and… Holy crow, she had wings! Real, angel-type, feathery wings! She looked so much like a real angel that it was freaky. No wonder she wore those bulky coats in public.

Next to her were a hot, willowy redhead, and la crème de la crème of all blondes. I mean, this blonde was like the dictionary definition of ‘exemplar’, and she was dressed like a mallrat. If she looked this hot in an old hoodie and grubby jeans, then when she put on a sexy minidress and heels, she probably caused cardiac failures in hetero men within a hundred-yard radius.

Man, I was going to have an erection 24x7 if the women around Whateley looked like this blonde and Nikki, not to mention Billie and Toni and Vanessa and Bunny and… Well, the list was pretty enormous before I even got out of Poe.

The mature-looking linebacker spotted me and growled, “Hey kid, are you sure you’re on the right floor?”

It wouldn’t do any good to lose my temper when I wanted to appear rational and businesslike. So I just said, “As long as this is the graduation and careers discussion, I am.”

Oh crap, this was where everything always went south. But there was no getting around it. They would have to know sooner or later, and the sooner they knew, the less likely it was that anyone would feel I had deceived them. “I’m Ayla Goodkind. You can call me Phase.”

I sighed, “And neither am I. I’m not recruiting for Goodkind Research, or the MCO, or anything like that. I’m not even a Goodkind anymore. I was kicked out of the family when I manifested my mutation. I’m here on my own. I want to hear about the careers aspect, because regardless of what you go on to do, you’re going to need an expert investment counselor. Right? Someone to advise you on legal issues related to lawsuits. Someone to arrange your financial structure so you’re less vulnerable to legal problems and financial crises. That’s what I plan on doing as MY career. So I’m looking for potential clients already.”

The linebacker growled, “So what kind of cred do you have, shorty?” Man, had this guy taken a course on how to win friends and influence people?

I calmly said, “I currently manage nine figures worth for myself and a few others.” That was literally true, if you considered that I was managing my money for Gracie and Janet too.

The ultra-blonde in grubbies stared at me intently and asked, “What type of investments are you looking at?”

I just got this weird feeling that she was doing more than staring at me. I said, “The highest profit-to-risk ratio issues over the next six months are all based on my knowledge of Goodkind International business dealings. Nothing that would be considered illegal trading according to the SEC, but still information you couldn’t get, unless you spent the next month poring over Goodkind International subsidiary portfolios and reports. New products and technologies they plan to release soon, the products that are more likely to succeed, and the competing companies I expect will take hits due to that kind of market impact. Companies that might benefit from future reorganizations or target-audience changes in other Goodkind International subsidiaries. The easiest way to profit by that sort of information is through arbitraging. I prefer put and call options, because they’re simple and less affected by external financial issues and SEC investigations, like some of the more complex derivatives. But longer term, I’m currently recommending arbitraging of international currencies.”

I answered, “Then first, we need to look at your entire financial structure and see if you should be investing at all yet. If you’re going to need liquidity in the near future, then lots of financial tools are simply not going to do what you want. Think about yourself and your significant others first. Are you going to be buying a house in the next three years? Do you even know where you’ll be in three years? Do you need life insurance or ADD insurance so that your family will be provided for in the event that you run into Deathlist or something?”

“Ugh. That sounds an awful lot like the full-fledged superhero package to me.”

I smiled, “Actually, that’s for your everyday baseline too. Goodkind International makes an effort to make sure that every person working for them has sufficient medical and dental and vision care, plus life insurance, ADD insurance, and 401Ks or IRAs or one of their private G.I.K. retirement funds. You don’t have to be a superhero, or even a mutant, to need ADD insurance. How many non-mutants do you know who got seriously hurt through no fault of their own?”

“Good question,” I said. “That’s exactly the sort of question you need to be asking everyone who purports to be a financial adviser or investment expert. And the more perfect the opportunity sounds, the more you need to investigate it more closely.”

I carefully explained, “I would get the standard broker’s percentage if I was managing stocks and bonds and derivatives for you. I would get the standard real estate agent’s percentage if I were finding a house for you. I would get the standard contractor’s percentage if I were modifying land or a house to meet your needs. I would get the standard agent’s percentage if I were negotiating a book deal or a movie deal or a commercial or a personal appearance.”

I pointed out, “It’s a lot of money, regardless of the age of your money managers. That’s why you need a money manager you can trust, who is also effective at making your money help you. And the one money manager you can trust absolutely is the one who has so much more money than you do that it would never be worth the effort to cheat you. So that’s either me, Giles Walcutt, or Warren Buffett. I doubt you can afford to hire Giles or Warren.”

“Don’t kid yourself, frosh. There are tons of genius kids around here, and a ton more out there who already graduated from high school. And college. And grad school.”

I nodded, “I am aware of them. I’ve worked with some of them. I’ve even fired some of them. You don’t need the brightest mind on the planet. You need someone who understands how financials work in the real world. You need someone who understands how to invest, and where to invest, and when to invest. You need someone who understands your personal financial structure, and how that works with your life. And you need someone who isn’t going to screw you over because you’re a mutant. If you don’t think I’m the person for that, then don’t hire me. But it will be your loss.”

The uber-blonde cut him off, “Ahem! Before this turns into something unpleasant, let me intervene. Why don’t we give Phase a chance to demonstrate her financial skills? She can come back in, say, six months, and show anyone who’s interested how her system performed against, say, the market average and the top forty mutual funds.”

I smirked at her, “Excellent suggestion. In fact, that’s almost exactly what I’m proposing. Here’s my card…” I handed out a few ‘smart’ business cards I had paid good money to have created. “…You can plug these into any smart-card reader. On each one you’ll find my resume and my proposal for the next six months. You can see ahead of time where and how I’ll be investing, and what the top fifty mutual funds are currently selecting for that time period, and you can follow along for yourselves if you want.”

We looked at each other, and I knew damned well she hadn’t picked that timeline and that proposal at random. She was some kind of esper, and she had plucked it out of my head. But had she done more than that? She had certainly seemed a lot more confident about financial advising by the time I finished.

She looked at me and said, “If you’re done with your sales pitch, we were going to discuss graduation first, careers second, and legacies third. If you want, you can stick around.”

I nodded, “I want. I’m interested in all three. Even if I’m not graduating in the next two years.”

She smiled just a little, “Then I’m Zenith. This is Angel, and this is…”

The rest of evening of the talk went more smoothly. A couple people including Zenith led the discussion about graduation and careers. Interestingly, the two people that I had pegged as superhero material (one of them was the linebacker) were both uninterested in a career in spandex. I found out in passing that Zenith was a junior and the dorm fixer. Hmm.

The legacy discussion was more argumentative. Apparently, the class of 2007 had to decide this term what their ‘legacy’ was going to be, so they could do the work next term. Zenith tried to moderate the discussion, while everybody put in their own two cents about what their class’s legacy ought to be. Frankly, I thought most of the ideas were poorly thought out. Did Whateley really need more miles of tunnels? Or a new concert hall?

Apparently, Beltane wasn’t the only Poe person who thought someone ought to upgrade the heating systems for the outlying cottages. It seemed to me that it would be a lot simpler and more effective to look into devises or gadgets that could improve the insulating qualities of the walls and windows. I guess that didn’t sound sexy enough to be a Whateley legacy. I could imagine the discussions already. “The Class of ‘99 built this incredible holographic arena! And we upgraded some insulation??”

I finally got bored with the lame ideas, and left. I went downstairs and checked in on Vanessa. Sharisha was still off at the party. Vanessa was happy to have someone sit beside her and hold her hand and talk to her for a while, as she lay in her bed with my heating pad over her forehead.

I went to bed before Sharisha came back from the party, and I fell asleep just thinking about Vanessa’s smile.

Tuesday, September 5
Whateley Academy

We are Rome, Aztec Mexico, Easter Island paradigm
We are followers of Jimmy Jones, cutting in the kool-aid line.
We are Animal Farm Pigs, we are a Terry Gilliam film
We are fear Oligarchy, we are wolves in wolves’ clothing,
We are this planet’s kidney stones.

This morning, it was “Wolves in Wolves’ Clothing”, another of my favorite old NOFX songs. I took off my pajamas, slipped on my robe, and grabbed my toiletry kit.

Billie was on her way out as I arrived, but Bunny was drying off. Wow. Riptide was sitting on one of the benches, shaving her legs. All the way up. WOW. Vanessa was slipping off her nightie and standing there naked as she adjusted the water temperature. WOO HOO!

Fortunately, another shower came open before every girl in the bathroom realized I was packing some major wood.

When I stepped out, I saw the Latina that I had spotted at the train station. She was undressing and getting into another shower stall. She still had that gorgeous long black hair, and that killer body. But now her skin was green! She also had a second set of arms and a tail, which I guess she was able to hide under her regular clothes. Rip said something to the girl in Spanish, and I caught enough to know that the girl’s name was Pilar, and Spanish wasn’t her native language. Was she Brazilian or Portuguese? Everyone else in the room was treating Pilar’s appearance as normal, so I was guessing that they had all seen this before.

After I dried off and put my robe back on, I took care of my face and my teeth. I took a few more ogles into the mirror at the hotties behind me. Then I went back to my room and got dressed.

The crew straggled off to breakfast this time, with me arriving after Billie but before Jade and Toni. Chef Marcel strolled out while I was in the food line, and with a few subtle pointed fingers let me know where to find the good coffee and the real cream.

By the way, whoever was baking the coffee cake left it in the oven a few minutes too long.

I walked back to Poe and found that I had some mail. It was from Anderson, Perelman, and Howard. I recognized the company at once. They were a large investment group in New York City. And they were responsible for administering the Hilton trust fund that had paid me $150,000,000 not that long ago. If they were going to try to get that money back, they were in for the fight of their lives.

No, that wasn’t what the letter said. But it was nearly as annoying. I had been trying to get an equal amount out of them as Gracie’s inheritance. But apparently, there wasn’t any money there. After Greg had left home to become Gracie, Father and Mother had talked Mother’s side of the family into re-writing the conditions of the trust, so that Gracie was completely cut out of it. How could they?

So Gracie still didn’t have any money. But I’d paid off the mortgage on the house. And Gracie was living with someone who had enough money. I decided. Gracie was going to get a Bentley for Christmas. And I was going to hire someone to find one that looked as much like her old Bentley as I could manage.

After that, I decided to have a little talk with Mrs. Horton and find out if there were any security cameras or monitors that would tell me who had slipped into Poe the day before to deliver that extortion note. Not that I was going to tell Mrs. Horton why I was after that kind of information, when I didn’t know her well enough to trust her yet.

I raised my hand to knock on her door, and before I could tap she said, “Come in, please.”

Mrs. Horton was sitting behind a sturdy oak desk. It looked like it had seen better days, but was still doing fine in middle age. Like Mrs. Horton.

I bit on my lip as I tried to think how I could word this so I could get what I needed, without giving away more than I wanted to release. “Can you tell me if there are any security systems or monitors that let you know who isn’t supposed to be coming into Poe?”

Of course, she wanted information. “And why would you want to know that?” She had this look in her eye, like she was expecting me to admit that I was planning on sneaking hookers into the dorm at night.

I tried not to sigh. “I don’t want to know how to sneak people in or out of the cottage. I just need to know if there’s any way to tell if someone who wasn’t supposed to come into the dorm sneaked in, say, around lunchtime yesterday.”

“She insisted, “Yes, I’m sure. Let me explain a little something, Ayla. Whateley, because of its rather unusual status, has some very exacting rules about what we house parents can and cannot do. So all we can have around Poe are some passive wards. Magical wards, I mean. I can tell whether someone came in or not, or if someone has been skulking around the dorm. But the wards are very minimal, for a lot of reasons, some of which you are not entitled to know about.”

“Perhaps. But probably not. They’re designed to be unnoticeable to mages and psis. Still, someone as powerful as Fey can tear gaping holes in a significant ward without even noticing. They’re not a hundred percent proof of anything, in any case. But they have to be subtle enough that the students don’t even know they’re there. Conversely, that subtlety and faintness makes them less useful.

“But we have to have some minimal wards up, because we cannot admit we are the LGBT dorm. So we need some minimal screening to keep other psis and mages from reading everyone in the dorm who would be susceptible to that. We tell others that this is the dorm for those with mental problems, who are otherwise functional.”

I groaned, “Oh. So I’m nominally in the Loony Bin. Given my feelings about my body, that seems brutally appropriate.”

I went up to my room and thought. Unless things were far more complex than they looked, the note could NOT have come from a Poesie, or from one of the admin people. They already knew the secret of Poe Cottage. The secret of Poe Cottage? Great. Now I was sounding like Nancy Drew.

But if it didn’t come from a Poe person, where did it come from? Unless Mrs. Horton was lying to me - and I didn’t think she was - it would take a mage of considerable skill to pull apart her wards, sneak in, sneak back out, and repair the wards so carefully that Mrs. Horton couldn’t tell.

I didn’t see the admin people as being a reasonable source for the leak, anyway. When we filled out the Whateley admissions forms, we had put down ‘Ayla Jane Goodkind’. Even the admin people shouldn’t have been able to come up with Trevor James Goodkind.

That was the key point: the extortionist had to know Ayla was also Trevor; but the extortionist also had to be too stupid to see that a Goodkind would not submit to this sort of extortion without drastic retaliation. What was my blackmailer up to? There was no way to know until I had more intelligence about the goals of the blackmailer. So we needed to go through with planting the fake list, and see who picked it up.

Could the information linking Ayla with Trevor have been picked up when I told the others about my history? I needed to talk to Beltane about this. If I could trust her. She looked trustworthy. But I had learned the hard way that when a lot of money was involved, most people were simply not worthy of trust. And if this was extortion and blackmail, then eventually this might be a demand for a few million dollars. Hmm. Maybe I had better wait until after we sprang the trap for our blackmailer, just in case.

I trekked over to the Whateley campus store. Which was far larger than any campus store I had ever seen. It was larger than the campus store at Yale. It was more like a Wal-Mart than a campus store.

As I walked around and saw some of the stuff that was for sale, I revised my opinion. Throwing knives? Brass knuckles? Body armor? Supplies for mages? Was that really ‘eye of newt’ in a four-ounce jar? Okay, this wasn’t a Wal-Mart, it was the local Evil-Mart. About all they were missing was “Henchman in a Can”.

I went to the uniforms section. Ugh. Pleated skirts and knee socks for girls? Gag me with a spoon. I looked through the selection, and I even tried a few things on. Which was miserably depressing.

The boys’ shirts and blazers didn’t fit my shape well. No, they were all cut for someone built like Hank. Or an NFL running back. And the boy pants didn’t come close to fitting me well, but I was NOT going to buy one of those skirts. Unfortunately, pants that were the right length and large enough in the seat didn’t fit me around the waist and looked wrong in the leg.

The girls’ blouses and blazers fit me reasonably well, but not what I would want to be seen in. The materials weren’t first-rate either. And there was no way I was going to walk around in those skirts and knee socks. An optional beret? Oh, give me a break!

I looked over the selection and decided that I would be happier with two uniforms that were each half girl and half boy. Like me. A girl’s blouse and blazer, plus a boy’s pants and socks. That ought to give the administration a headache.

But I wasn’t pleased with the fit or the material or the non-existent tailoring. I decided that I would just see what Cecilia Rogers could do instead. So I would have to wait until it would be reasonable to get a pass into Dunwich.

After that, I went back to Poe, to hassle Mrs. Horton some more. She wasn’t thrilled to see me, but she certainly seemed willing to have me drop in some more.

I smiled, “This time I hope I’ll be causing less of a problem. I’d like to know if I can hire someone. I’d like to get someone who can help me out weekly by doing my laundry and cleaning my room. And I’d like to hire someone for a more immediate task. I’d like to pay someone to help me renovate my room. I’d like to paint it, turn the two beds into bunk beds, and do a few minor things like upgrade my studio cooler and hang a couple hammocks.”

She pursed her lips a bit. “Bunk beds are no problem. We have several sets of bunk bed connectors in the storage room. You can check one out. I would need to see the paint color choices before you paint. And I would want to see where you would put the hammocks, and how you planned to hang them up. We’ve had students who hadn’t thought that part out, and they ended up tearing big chunks of plaster out of the walls instead of getting their bookcase or knick-knack shelf up.”

She nodded at my apparent cooperation. “And, you wouldn’t be the first student who wanted to pay someone to do your personal tasks. Most of the kids who do that are over in Melville or Dickinson. But I have a list of Poe kids who have said they were interested in a little extra income.” She reached into a drawer and pulled out a sheet of paper. She looked it over and asked, “What about Jade Sinclair? She’s…”

I stopped her with a raised hand, “I don’t think so. I like Jade. She’s probably going to be on a team with me. I don’t want to make things awkward between us with this. Believe me, I know about stresses between social strata.”

She looked at me with an appraising eye. I couldn’t tell whether that was good or bad. She looked back at her list and said, “What about Jody Cooms?”

“Good,” she smiled. “I think you’ll like Jody. Everyone does. Her handle is ‘Plastic Girl’. Lots of the other sophomores call her ‘Plass’. She just put her name down on my list yesterday afternoon, so she’ll be happy to get such a quick result. She’s a very hard worker. So I expect to hear that you’re not taking advantage of her.”

I stared in astonishment at Mrs. Horton. “Why on earth would I do that?” She gave me a puzzled look, so clearly she didn’t understand. “Hiring someone and then mistreating them is the best way to ruin a productive relationship. It’s also the best way to end up screwing yourself over, if you’ll pardon my French. You hire someone who can do the job. You pay them what they deserve. You let them do the job. You don’t pull a Naomi Campbell and browbeat them or throw things at them. That’s just begging them to mistreat you in turn. You earn their loyalty at the same time that they earn yours, or there’s little point in hiring them in the first place.”

I would never understand some people. If you hired people and treated them like Leona Helmsley did, you got exactly what you deserved. If you hired good people and treated them properly, you got what you deserved. Was that so hard to figure out?

I shook my head no. “I don’t pay minimum wage.” At her shocked expression, I explained, “Minimum wage is for kids flipping burgers. It’s for kids who don’t care how things look afterward. I pay enough that my employees feel they have a vested interest in keeping me happy.”

Mrs. Horton gave me this look like she had never seen me before. Then she said, “I think that you and Jody will manage just fine.”

It turned out that Jody was one of the sophomores who had been asked to stay on second floor. Not only was she a very helpful sort who made a natural adviser for the newbies, she also did a ‘Plastic Man’ thing where she could bounce off of kinetic impacts, so she wouldn’t get hurt when the uncontrolled froshes rammed into her by accident.

Jody wasn’t in, so I went further down my to-do list. I went back to the bookstore for books and supplies. That was more interesting. I picked up a karate gi for Basic Martial Arts: woman’s gi, man’s jockstrap with cup. Sometimes I really hated my stupid body. If I ended up staying in some form of martial arts class - yeah, sure - I’d need some extra gis. But I was planning on getting out of basic martial arts as soon as I could, so I was going with the bare minimum.

Then I browsed the books. My books weren’t all that interesting, except for all the epic poems and the background texts for my World Lit class.

But there were a ton of cool books for other classes. I spent a couple hours reading through books on business management and business math. I was going to need calculus for a lot of this stuff. Then books on avatars, and introductory magic, and advanced powers theory, and on and on. Several of those books lost me in the first ten pages. There was a book in the ‘powers theory’ area on the mathematical physics of pattern theory. Yowsers! That one lost me while I was still in the preface.

I had dinner with most of the gang. Toni was bouncing off the walls in anticipation of another night’s partying. Jade looked wide-eyed as she talked about some of the people she had met. Nikki was grumbling about her father not adjusting to her changes. I was trying not to talk at all.

I walked out of the cafeteria and went around to the outside of the crystal hall. I stood a couple feet from the glass dome and stared in at the ravening horde. How was I going to find my extortionist among this crowd of kids? I watched, hoping to find someone eyeing the gang suspiciously. All I got for my efforts were a huge number of guys drooling over Nikki, several black guys giving Toni the once-over, and a few weird kids peeking at Billie.

I heard something behind me. It sounded like high heels on the brickwork. I didn’t turn around. I had already noticed that I could see a faint image of myself on the glass, so I just stared until I could spot the person coming up from behind.

Oh Jeez! It was that ultra-blonde from the cafeteria Sunday night. The one who looked like she wanted to gut me. I started preparing. I went as heavy as I could, and I prepared for a sneak attack from behind.

She stopped about two yards behind me, and she just stared at the back of my head. Then I felt it. It was like a shove.

It felt like she was pushing me right between the eyes, only about two inches inside my skull. I’d never felt anything like that before.

I didn’t know how to defend myself from a real psi. I only knew what I had been taught by Mother and Uncle Theo. I concentrated really hard on something that occupied my entire mind. I focused on stock reports and tried to mentally analyze the market fluctuations.

I must have blocked whatever-it-was well enough, because the blonde took on an expression of furious frustration. I felt the ‘shove’ lessen and then vanish.

Just about then, I heard a couple nattering girls ambling up the nearby walk. One of them called out, “Tansy? Are you over here?”

The angry blonde behind me whirled around and rushed over to rip into the other girls. I turned and stared. The other girls were two more hot blondes who had that ‘pack’ look.

One of the girls whined loudly enough for me to hear, “But Tansy, you told us to meet you, we’re just doing what you said…”

The other one interrupted, “And anyway, you’ll never guess what happened to Majestic over the summer! Let me tell you…”

I stood there, feeling like the blonde had just hit me over the head with a brick. I walked numbly back toward Poe, although I wasn’t really aware of my surroundings until I reached the cottage.

Was that Tansy Walcutt? Had ugly, tubby, creepy Tansy Walcutt gotten the uber-blonde genes? Had she gotten the mutation that no one like her deserved? Was that really Tansy Walcutt? How did a vicious bitch like her luck out so much, when I was so screwed over? No, life isn’t fair. I already knew that. But, karmically speaking, this was insane.

This was just what I needed. The girl who had done her best to make my life hell since second grade was now one of the beauty queens of my high school, and was out to get me again. Only this time, she had psychic powers or something that she was going to use on me.

On the upside, Vanessa was feeling much better, and she wanted to dance with me at the Poe party. So we danced for a long while, and then we went up to my room for some private time. We necked for a long time, until I thought I was going to go off like a firework.

Wednesday, September 6
Whateley Academy

It’s ok, allow yourself a little hate
Hatred is not so bad when directed at injustice
You can turn the other cheek, just don’t turn the other way
Enemy of the planet we finally have a common aim
a reason to forget about our differences
and stand as a united front
It’s up to us, we must expose,
Humiliate American errorists
We’ll start with one
The war has just begun

NOFX was shouting out “American Errorist” and hurling me out of the bed. At least I had gotten a good night’s sleep. Well, other than having to get up and change my pajamas after one especially wild dream about Vanessa that…

No, there’s no way I’m ever telling about that dream. Don’t even ask. File it under ‘N’ for ‘nunnayerbizniss’.

Then it was off to the showers. Ahh, the girls’ showers at Poe. I was smiling before I even walked in.

And it was more crowded than I had expected, with a roomful of naked and near-naked girls all ignoring me as they chatted wide-eyed about the big news.

Vanessa and I had slipped out too early. Two fundies in the pay of Angel’s father had tried to kidnap her right from the middle of the party. From what I gathered, the would-be kidnappers had mutant powers too. If it hadn’t been for Jinn’s non-human senses and Mega-Girl’s strength, the bozos might have gotten away with it. As it was, all they got away with was several hundred bruises and a few broken bones.

So Mary’s father is The Reverend Goodhope the televangelist? Man, that sucks. I guess that a lot of people at Whateley have family problems like I do.

On the upside, everyone was so busy talking about the incident that nobody noticed that I was staring at them. And there are a lot of stare-worthy women on this floor. No normal bathroom of fourteen-year-olds was ever going to be like this. Hell, no normal bathroom of eighteen-year-olds was ever going to be like this! I had a tent you could have sold to Ringling Brothers by the time I finally left the room.

After breakfast, I finally managed to track down Jody. She was busy being helpful, apparently. I didn’t butt in, but it sounded like Jody was trying to get Jay Jay to be more considerate of her roommate, and Jay Jay was interrupting after every two-point-four words to zoom off on some crazed tangent. But Jody stuck it out. That girl had the patience of a saint.

I gave Jody a half hour to recuperate from that before I bugged her. Her door was open, so I tapped on the frame. “Knock-knock! Are you Jody?”

She was only two or three inches taller than I was, but she was kind of chubby. She had a round, cute-but-not-gorgeous face under short dark-brown hair. She needed a better haircut for her facial shape, but I wasn’t going to say that until I knew her well enough that I could say that to her as a friend. She had ordinary brown eyes that smiled easily. She could pass as a norm better than anyone on the floor, except maybe Jade.

Oh yeah, Jade had certain ‘passing’ issues of her own. Somehow, I kept forgetting that.

We sat in my room, and I outlined what I would want her to do for me. “I figure the main tasks would be cleaning the room weekly - you know, dusting and vacuuming and some polishing here and there - and doing my laundry weekly. You could do your laundry when you do mine, and use my laundry detergent and stain removers too.”

Jody had some suggestions about what I might like for cleaning, and how to handle the laundry tasks. I let her run with it. She’d be happier doing it her way, and I couldn’t see that there were any drawbacks to her ideas. Not only was she a lot friendlier than a bunch of the upperclassmen I had met, but she had lots of energy, and she just naturally had that let-me-help-you attitude that would make her an enormous success in a field like public relations or personal services.

It occurred to me that she could make a fortune as a personal assistant to someone like Lindsay Lohan or my sister Heather. Not to mention that she could double as a secret bodyguard. And she could soak up a lot of punishment if some dimbulb starlet threw a frying pan at her or something. Not that Heather would ever let a frying pan come within a yard of her perfectly-manicured nails, but I had heard plenty of stories about rich-bitch temper tantrums. Jody would never have to worry about getting hurt if, say, Lindsay Lohan got drunk and tried to run her down with a car.

Then we talked about what I wanted for upgrading my room. When I talked about painting the room, she grinned and showed off. She stood up and did a ‘Mister Fantastic’. She stretched her arm out until her fingertips touched the corner of the room at the ceiling, and she whisked her hand back and forth like she was painting with a small brush. We decided that I would get the paint before lunch, and then she would get started on painting my room right after lunch.

She hopped up and trotted out of the room, telling me that she had some old overalls that would be perfect for the painting work. Oh. Okay. But if her overalls got ruined, I was going to buy her a new pair.

I watched her leave, and it occurred to me. She had a nice smile, and was very likeable, but she wasn’t sexy or striking, like most of the girls on the floor. That must really suck at a place like Whateley. She was the epitome of the ‘she has a great personality’ blind date. And teenagers weren’t exactly known for their perspicacity when it came to girlfriends.

Take me, for instance. I had latched onto the babe with the biggest hooters on the floor.

Okay, Vanessa had a ton of other great things going for her. But if she had looked like Jody, would I have given her the time of day? I just didn’t know.

While I beat myself up about my potential shallowness, I walked to the campus store. I already knew exactly what I wanted, so it only took me a few minutes while they mixed up my paint. I went a little heavy and easily lugged back three one-gallon cans of paint and a shopping bag full of painting supplies: a paint roller with three roller brushes, three paint trays, half a dozen small brushes, three disposable paint edgers, edging tape, enough clear plastic tarps for everything, and a painter̵