Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2008 08:38:52 -0700 (PDT)
From: traumarei <traumarei@yahoo.com>
Subject: Middle School Empath

Middle School Empath
by Traumarei

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. It's not based on any particular TV,
book series, or magic system invented by anyone else. Any similarities to
anything written by anyone else, or to any real-life characters for that
matter, are purely accidental.


Let me tell you, it's hell being an empath in middle school. Especially if
you're gay, which I am, I think. Oh, who am I fooling? Middle school is
hell, period.

I admit it. We should have had some idea what I was in for. After all, the
gift kinda sorta runs in my family, between Aunt Jean and Great-Grandpa
Steinbraun. Of course, Aunt Jean was different because she'd had it since
she was 8 and halfway figured out how to deal with it by the time she hit
my age, and as for Great-Grandpa... well, he wasn't around much to share
any information. Too busy serving as Envoy to the Siberian warlock council,
or something like that. Not that he necessarily would have been much help
either, what with all the weirdo gifts and powers he wound up
having. Besides, I doubt they even had middle schools back when he was a
teenager.

Come to think of it, I remember the last time I saw him, back when I was 10
or so at a family reunion. He was shaking my hand, like he did with all the
younger kids, when he paused and looked at me for a moment. Then he looked
back and forth between me and my dad, and got a look on his face like
someone had just told him the best joke he'd heard in a long time. All the
rest of that day, I couldn't figure out why he kept looking at me and
grinning.

I figure he knew *exactly* what was going to happen. Asshole.

See, I grew up on stories--told mostly by other family members--about how
my dad was a real terror growing up. I think Great-Grandpa'd had to be
pulled in several times to straighten things out when Dad was a
teenager. So I guess he has a reason to be happy about Dad having to deal
with tough kids and the situations they get into. The joke's on him, as
they say. I just wish I wasn't the punch line.

################################################

It all started back in fifth grade, just after I'd turned 11. Mom started
noticing that my mood would go up and down depending on who I was around.

At first she was real happy, thinking I was some kind of mood-sensor like
they've had every now and then in her extended family. So how's a
mood-sensor different from a telepath? Damned if I know. I guess it has to
do with keying into energy fields or something like that. Not so much
getting into the inside of someone else's head and feeling what they're
feeling. In practical terms, what it meant was that I didn't have as much
control as a mood-sensor would. At least, that's what it seemed to mean
when I first started to develop the gift. Some "gift."

But I'm getting ahead of things.

So anyway, at first it was a lot like that mood-sensor thing, except that
sometimes I would get all weepy for no obvious reason. Let me tell you,
it's hell getting weepy when you have a brother who's three years older
than you are. They say it's the werewolf taint that makes Joel so quick to
attack other people's weaknesses, but I don't believe it. I remember what
he was like before he was 12 and the werewolf stuff kicked in. He's just a
psychopath asshole older brother.

Not that I should need to put in the psychopathic asshole part, since as
far as I can tell that just goes with the territory. No one really has cool
older brothers like you read about in those stories, who protect you from
bullies and teach you how to throw a ball and explain to you all about
puberty and stuff. When I was 9, my brother told me that girls get pregnant
if you they drink milk out of a container right after a boy has drunk out
of it. After eating an apple, of course. For three months I wouldn't eat
any apples, AND I made sure to wash my glass just as soon as I had drunk my
milk. I wouldn't drink milk at all from the little cartons at school. Joel
thought it was the funniest thing on earth, when my folks finally found out
about it. Dad wasn't so pleased. Joel couldn't sit straight for two days
afterwards. Of course, that was all my fault too, as far as he was
concerned.

So anyway I kept getting depressed for no reason. Then when I wasn't
depressed, I would get mad as hell about *being* depressed. It was only
later that we realized I'd been sitting next to a girl who was starting her
periods early, with killer mood swings. We figured that out after she went
after her little brother with a kitchen knife one month. It took 28
stitches and two nights in the hospital before he was fixed up. After that,
a note was sent home to the parents of all us boys who were in the same
class with her, and the school nurse took us aside and told us that we
needed to stay away from her on certain days of the month, and all the boys
were transferred away from her table and out of her study groups. After
seeing her little brother's bandages, I wasn't inclined to argue, or laugh
about it either. Miraculously, I started feeling better after that.

PMS is so wonderful. Who would have ever guessed that as a boy, I would
have to deal with it personally? Of course, when my folks figured out what
had been going on, it just added fuel to my brother's claim that I wasn't
really a boy at all, but actually a girl. Have I said how much of an
asshole he is?

So that should have been a clue that maybe I wasn't a mood-sensor after
all. But nobody did anything about it, and there weren't any other problems
for the rest of fifth grade or sixth grade either. My mom even said
something about growing into my gift, and how we might be able to get it
trained once it had stabilized. She thought that might happen in another
year or so, if things kept up the way they had been.

Then seventh grade hit.

I don't know what happened over the summer. Maybe nothing. Maybe it was
just me growing up. Okay, I do know one thing that happened. Back around
the end of sixth grade, I started experimenting a little more actively with
what felt good down there, ya know? My first orgasm was a couple of weeks
before school let out for the summer. The first couple of times, it was
just this cool new thing my body could do. Like grossing people out with a
really good fart. But then summer started, and I started experimenting a
little more, and whammo. Instant habit. It just kept getting more and more
intense, as I got better at doing it. Soon I was jacking off two or three
times a day, and experimenting with vegetable oil from the kitchen, and
jacking off in all kinds of weird places, like up in the apple tree out of
sight from the house with all my clothes off. Like I say, I went a bit
nuts.

Yes, my family knew about it, in a vague sort of way. My dad had had The
Talk with me almost two years before. You have to have The Talk early with
magic-bearing folk, if you don't want to run the risk of really bad
accidents. Like, crosses between humans and sheep, or boys just into
puberty who are enslaved to a succubus. Needless to say, my dad's version
of The Talk involved a few topics I don't think most of my friends at
school had to think about. But along with the rest of it, there was the
standard masturbation-is-normal talk, along with a bit more than the usual
along the lines of masturbation-is-a-good-way-to-control-your-urges.

So anyway, that summer he had to have noticed that I'd suddenly started
spending a lot more time by myself, behind locked doors or out in the
woods.

Joel, of course, could smell it on me, or at least so he claimed. Damned
werewolf nose. He only teased me about it when the folks weren't
around. I'm guessing he knew that if he did it when they were around, they
wouldn't be too happy about it. Might even tell stories about finding him
in embarrassing circumstances when he was about my age. And I knew they had
stories to tell, though I hadn't quite understood what was happening at the
time.

So suddenly I've got a 2-3 times a day jacking off habit, and by the time
midsummer rolled around I wasn't thinking about it as anything like letting
out a fart. Instead, very clearly in my mind, it was SEX. Or at least, it
was gonna be sex someday. Still kinda like target practice, but by the
Divine Triune I was 12 years old now and I had figured out what the gun was
for.

################################################

And so, like I say, I went back to school, and spent most of the first week
in a daze, with my emotions pulled here and there and everywhere with what
everyone else around me was feeling. Let me tell you, seventh graders are a
messed up bunch. Guilt, and anger, and sheer meanness, pride and horniness
and silliness, sadness, and loads and loads of confusion. And yes,
confusion is an emotion, and it rolls off middle schoolers in shitloads. If
ever anyone is stupid enough to give middle schoolers guns, most of them
won't last a day. They'll all be shooting themselves or each other, on
purpose or by accident. And maybe we'll all be better off.

Of course, I was just as messed up as all my peers. Worse, maybe. At least
your typical middle schooler only has to deal with one set of emotions on a
roller coaster, traveling at warp speed, without brakes or a side
railing. Not 200 or more of them at once.

Actually, with so many other kids around the emotions all kind of canceled
each other out. I went around in a haze, but at least it wasn't being
pulled too much in any one direction at a time.

In fact, it was almost a week before I figured out what was going on. I
just thought I was tired. Growth spurt, maybe. And I *was* growing. Good
news for any 12-year-old boy. I was getting taller, and my cock was growing
too, getting longer and thicker just since the end of the previous school
year. That made me pretty happy. I was counting the days until I'd start
squirting. Anytime now would be fine with me.

Even once I figured out what was wrong, I didn't say anything about it to
anyone for several more days. After all, what could they do more than what
they'd done before? Which was pretty much nothing except encourage me to
stay as calm as I could, and keep out of emotionally charged
situations. Like THAT was an option in middle school. I did some reading in
the family library out of some books that talked about emotion control, and
tried out some of the meditation exercises they recommended. They seemed to
help.

And so I got through the first three weeks of school pretty much okay, or
at least well enough so that no one seemed to notice. Of course, it helped
that mostly I wasn't the sort of kid that people notice all that much,
either at home or at school. I mean, yeah, basic how-are-you-doing stuff at
the breakfast table, but I don't show very much of what I'm thinking or
feeling, ya know? My business. I figured this was my business, too. It
helped that Mom was all busy with some kind of magic-handling stuff, and
Dad and Deidre were helping her. (I haven't talked about Deidre before now,
because she wasn't that big a part of my life now that she'd gone off to
college. We saw her at home in passing, but she was always busy studying or
spending time with her friends, somewhere not at our house.)

The fourth week, things got a lot worse.

On Monday, I spent fifth period with hallucinations running around the
inside of my head. Yeah, I said hallucinations. I wasn't seeing the inside
of other people's heads--I'm an empath, not a telepath, thank the
Triune--but by this time my emotions had gone so out of whack that the
chemicals my body was being flooded with were screwing up my brain.

And so I saw Mrs. Mulfort take out her chalk, and point it at the
chalkboard, and out shot a large purple spider that started *eating* the
chalkboard, its claws scratching horribly over the dark green surface. At
least I was right about that part. The sound, I mean. Mrs. Mulfort always
screeched her chalk against the chalkboard when she wrote.

Come to think of it, maybe being a telepath wouldn't be as bad. Knowing
what other people are thinking, that's one thing. Being forced to feel
whatever they're feeling is something else entirely. It can really mess
your head up.

I had to grab my desk and hold it onto the floor so it wouldn't be sucked
into the vortex that was now occupying the middle of where the chalkboard
used to be. I figured my books were a goner. Oh well, it wasn't like I
cared that much about them anyway. They were only schoolbooks, after all.

Later, my friends told me that my whimpering was the first sign something
was wrong. I'd closed my eyes by that point, and was doing my best to hold
onto the desk. After a few minutes, I regained my sense of where I was,
although I kept my eyes closed as long as I could.

"Richard? Richard?" That's my name, though I prefer to be called Rich.

"Yes, Mrs. Mulfort?"

"What happened here?"

I saw a spider crawl out of the chalk of the ugliest teachers in seventh
grade. "I think it was my new allergy medications." The school thinks all
of my family have serious allergies. It helps explain when weird things
like this happen.

"Do you need to see the nurse?"

"I think I'll be okay if I lie down a while."

She made a decision. It's the hard choices like these that they pay you to
make if you're a teacher in my school. "Faye! Why don't you help
Mr. Thompson down to the nurse's station?" Funny how the kids she likes get
called by their first names, while the rest of us are Mister- and
Miss-whatever.

I would have told her I could make it by myself, except that actually I
wasn't sure I could. Besides, it never did any good to try to change
Mrs. Mulfort's mind anyway. Only four weeks into the semester, but I
already knew that.

So Faye--a good-looking girl (hey! I notice, even if I'm gay) and a friend
since third grade--walked me down to the nurse's station, and handed
Mrs. Mulfort's note to the secretary, since the nurse had taken off for
some reason or other that I didn't care about and the secretary didn't
say. She told me to stay there as long as I needed. I took a nap for the
rest of the afternoon, then got up in time to catch the bus home.

That night I went to bed really, really early. The next morning, I snuck
two pills from the big bottle of Scorchitol, the generic, high-powered drug
we use to dampen pretty much any out-of-control manifestation of mana. (No,
that's not the official name for the medication, just what we call it. It's
more accurate anyway, at least for how it makes you feel.) I'd never had
more than a half-pill before, but I figured this was a good time for it.

That day--still just Tuesday, if you're keeping track--went like a dream,
if you count me feeling like I was asleep most of the time. You don't
realize just how much of your brain activity is wrapped up in your magic
until it's shut down. Or maybe it's just that in order to shut down the
magic, the drug has to shut down most of the brain as well.

No hallucinations. That was a plus. Not much other thought either. Not so
good. I told my teachers they were experimenting with my prescription, and
they let me shuffle from class to class, lost in my mental fog. Friends
helped me out some. They didn't know what was going on, but did the best
they could.

I said some pretty hilarious things that day, or so they told me
later. Fortunately, no one held it against me much, except for Jaime
Cobwell who asked me if I like the way she looked. I figure she shouldn't
have asked on a day when I was clearly out of it if she didn't want an
honest answer. Good thing I didn't care that much if I was on her
I'll-date-you-in-hell list.

################################################

I'd forgotten that there would be a letter from the school about my trip to
the nurse's station the day before.

Mom wasn't any too pleased with me when she found out I'd been sick and
hadn't told anyone. I didn't say anything about the Scorchitol, but I was
in enough trouble even without that. The final result was a very long
conversation I really didn't feel up to having, seeing how brain-dead I
was, and a decision that I would stay home the next day while my mom and
dad tried to find someone who could help figure out how to help me get my
head screwed back together.

By now it was obvious to everyone that this had something to do with my
empathy, though just *what* wasn't really clear to anyone. I was doing my
best not to say much about what was going on, which was made easier by the
fact that the whole thing wasn't very clear to me either.

What it all meant was that the next day I would be home alone, bored, since
Joel was in school and everyone else was working. It would be late the next
afternoon at least before they could get someone over to poke and prod and
try to figure out what to do with me.

So the next morning I got up, waved off the rest of my family--with a
particular smirk at getting to see Joel have to take off for school while I
got to stay home--then went back to bed, with mighty promises to
everyone--well, mostly to my mom--that I wouldn't do anything that would
cause problems or get me in trouble, at all, ever, or at least until there
was someone else in the house who could help if something bad happened. Or,
more likely, who would just act helpless while I keel over and die.

Sorry. Bad attitude there. I'm trying to watch that.

My bed was nice. But as it happened, I had actually been sleeping a lot
over the past couple of days. Not being at school and not having taken any
Scorchitol that morning, I wasn't feeling especially sleepy or anything. I
kept giving it a good try, for 20 minutes at least. But the longer I stayed
in bed, the more energetic I felt, and the less like lying down.

Okay. Since I was home alone with time on my hands, I decided to try
something I'd read about in one of the books that I couldn't practice when
other people were around. This was a deep focus exercise, something that
helped you narrow your mental attention so you could sense feelings--or
other things--from further away. Not something I particularly wanted to get
better at. But it was also supposed to help develop your control, and I
certainly needed that.

The book was in the other room, closed up in that part of the library that
we weren't supposed to go into when no one else was around. But I
remembered it well enough. I closed my eyes, focused inward in the
particular way the book had said, and started my chant.

I started feeling the effects right away. It was like I was a bird
spiralling higher and higher, my vision extending further and further
toward the horizons. Cool! It was a real rush. Through the trees that
surrounded our house, I could see small lights blinking in the distance,
and I knew these represented the minds of our closest neighbors. I
carefully avoided steering closer to any of them; right now, I wanted to
try out the technique, not risk getting pulled into someone else's
emotions.

After about 15 minutes I pulled back, spiralled inward, and mentally landed
back inside my body. That was as long as the book recommended for a
first-time run. I felt great. This was the sort of practice I really
needed, I could tell.

And that was when I made my dumb mistake. Lying there in my bed, still
feeling that tingling sense of wellbeing from my trance, I didn't think
about the decentering exercises that would pull me up and out all the way
back to my normal state of consciousness. Instead, my mind went to that
other thing boys my age do when they're home alone with time on their
hands, and my hand went to my cock, and I started feeling happy in a
completely different way.

And then, just when things were getting good and my brain and body were
starting on the long jump up into the sky, where things keep getting better
and better--

My brain spiraled out of control, and I felt myself reach out to connect to
someone else who was feeling the same things I was feeling, and I thought
that for a single moment I could sense someone else, someone in overalls on
a farm at least 10 miles away, with his hand on his cock, pumping. And I
felt my brain crack as my penis exploded, and suddenly I was by myself on
my bed again, breathing in sharp, heavy gasps and wondering what the hell I
had just done to myself.

I was real careful the rest of the day not to do anything else that might
cause something unexpected to happen. I didn't jack off again either,
though it felt like I was wasting a unique opportunity. It's not everyday
that I get to spend hours alone, uninterrupted, inside my house. In fact, I
couldn't remember the last time it had happened. I could have danced naked
through everyone's bedroom, posed in front of all the mirrors, looked for
porn in Joel's room. (Okay, I don't think I would have done that. Not for
ethical reasons, but because he would have pounded me if he found out, and
he definitely would have found out.) I could have tried every ointment,
hand lotion, and cooking oil in the house to see what made the best lube. I
certainly would have tried to see if I could get around the porn blocks my
folks had put on the computer in the downstairs family room.

Instead I put on my briefs, and my pants and shirt too just to avoid
temptation, and spent the rest of the day reading school books and comic
books and playing computer games. Nothing too stimulating, right. You don't
realize just how much you think about sex until you're home alone, in ideal
jacking-off conditions, trying hard *not* to think about it. I'd done the
decentering exercises by now, three times actually, but still there was
this kind of faint buzz in the back of my brain, like I was still plugged
in somehow since my meditation session. I didn't want to take any chances.

################################################

Late that afternoon, the house started filling up again. First was Joel,
who took a look at me sitting on the couch and kept right on into the
kitchen for his after-school vacuum cleaner imitation. Then around 5:00, my
mom got home, followed by my dad. Early for him. Either work was lighter
than usual--not real likely, the way things had been going lately--or he'd
made time to come home early. I got a warm feeling inside, knowing that
what I was going through was important to him, even though I also expected
that the whole let's-help-Rich-with-his-problem thing would be a bit of a
pain, and I didn't expect that my dad or anyone else would really know that
much about what I was going through or how to fix it. If they did have a
clue, I figured they would have already done something more than they had.

That warm, glowing feeling didn't last too long once dinner was over and
Aunt Jean arrived.

I love my Aunt Jean. She's a caring person who remembers everyone's
birthday and always has something to say to everyone. Too bad that most
often it's advice about something we've done wrong, or involves some kind
of comparison to her three perfect children. Her presents aren't usually
much fun, either.

Okay, you got me. I don't really love my Aunt Jean; I think she puts her
nose in other people's business, and she has a really irritating voice. Not
to mention what she says with that voice. I don't know how she survives as
a mother of three boys, who I can tell you get into every bit as much
trouble as Joel and I do. More. They do their best to hide it from her,
though. I used to wonder why she wasn't a lesbian because she hated
guy-talk and guy-jokes so much, except that looking at Carl--that's her
husband--I suppose being married to him is the next best thing to being a
lesbian, because as far as I can tell he never disagrees with a single
thing she says or acts like, well, a real male in any way. He doesn't even
laugh at fart jokes. Or maybe she puts up with him because he's really good
in bed.

I can't believe I just imagined my Aunt Jean's sex life. I need to go soak
my brain in Drano now.

So anyway, Aunt Jean arrived after dinner with Uncle Carl and the three
Widmore stooges (Widmore is their last name), ages 16, 14, and 11, who kept
smirking at me the entire time their mother was talking.

Has anyone in my family ever heard of the idea of privacy?

She asked me a few questions (no, I didn't feel dizzy when I sensed other
people's feelings; I couldn't tell if there were any particular patterns in
who I was sensing and not; I couldn't read thoughts). Then she lectured me
for about 20 minutes, gave me a slim book titled "Plugging Into Your World"
and told me to read it, and said she'd need to spend a week with me, not
this next week but the week after, helping me to learn control
techniques. Until then, I needed to take a single pill of Scorchitol each
morning and avoid reaching out to other people mentally or doing anything
else to exacerbate my sensing. Yes, she used the word "exacerbate." Then
the the adults went off to the study to talk about Council business, while
"the children" were left to keep ourselves amused in the family room.

I was the chief source of amusement, of course.

"Plugging into the world around you," smirked Rod. He was the
11-year-old. "Would that be like plugging in a dildo?" I swear, I don't
know how or where a kid that young finds out about all that smutty stuff.

Of course, he's only a year younger than I am.

"Oh Richie, he's so *sensitive.*" This was Tark, the 14-year-old. I gritted
my teeth.

"Knock it off." My brother. Miracle of miracles.

"Why? Does it bother you, having a brother who knows what you're feeling?
Do you think that when you jack off he--"

Wham! Eric, the 16-year-old, was holding a bloody nose. It's really not a
good idea to get a part-werewolf mad at you.

"I will keep my COCK to MYSELF and YOU will keep your MOUTH to
YOURSELF. And away from my cock." There was a kind of grim look on my
brother's face.

What the hell?

I wasn't going to find out any more about it today. "Time to go, boys."
Aunt Jean was glaring from the doorway. To my surprise, she was glaring
mostly at her own boys and a little at Joel. Not at all at me. I wondered
how much of the previous exchange she'd heard.

After Aunt Jean's clan all trooped home, I could tell my mom wanted us to
spend some time rehashing everything that we'd already figured out we
*didn't* know about my whacked-out brain. Dad succeeded in derailing her,
though, and we spent a nice enough evening watching a shoot-em-up adventure
movie. Rambo 27, or something like that. It was a lot of guts and an action
plot, and that's all I really cared about. No messy "sensitive" feelings
anywhere to be seen. Thank the Triune.

################################################

The next day--Thursday --went a lot better. I still was plugging into other
people's feelings, but it wasn't nearly as bad as it had been. Like my
brain was wrapped in a blanket, kind of. At the same time, I was still
alert enough to keep up in my classes and hold as close to an intelligent
conversation with my friends as you ever get in middle school. I guess it
made a difference, taking the right amount of medication.

My friends. The whole friendship thing is kinda screwed up, if you're from
a magic-bearing family. A lot of the people where we live--that's central
Michigan, as I don't think I've said yet--have some idea that members of my
family and a few others around have something a little bit odd about
us. Some people know a lot more than that.

My friends--Faye, Steve, and Gavin, mostly--are somewhere in between. Gavin
knows the most, since his mom is actually connected to one of the
magic-bearing families. Faye knows that my family has some kind of odd
abilities that manifest in different ways for different ones of us, though
she doesn't know about my brand spanking new,
let's-feel-what-everyone-else-is-feeling tendencies.

Steve knows that my family is kind of weird, but that's about it. He's also
the most recent of my friends; I got to know him partway through sixth
grade, after he had moved into our area at the beginning of the school
year. It's not like he could do any harm by knowing too much--everyone who
already needs to know about us does--but I didn't want to hit him with too
much at once, ya know? If we stay friends, I'll tell him more sometime. I
think it'll probably happen; he's a cool dude, and I'm pretty sure I could
trust him with my secrets.

Mostly, we all just hang out together and goof off. Faye's a good sport
about it all, though I think sometimes she wishes there were some sensible
girls she could hang out with. Girls who wouldn't think it was too weird
that she wants to be a design engineer when she grows up, like her
papa. Whatever. We do different stuff.

Mostly what we have is a school friendship. Middle schoolers are pack
animals, if you haven't noticed, and they'll rip anyone to shreds who
doesn't have a pack around him or her. The girls are at least as bad as
guys that way.

I got through the day okay. Later, waiting for the bus, I pulled Gavin off
for a minute to explain what had been going on. I figured someone at the
school ought to know, and he was the best choice.

"So what's the big mystery? You spit in a soup bowl and get Darcy
pregnant?" He knew about the whole drinking-from-the-milk-glass incident
from third grade.

"Ha ha. Very funny. No, it's like this. I'm actually, um. Yeah. Kind of a,
um. Yeah. Well."

"A werewolf, like your brother?"

"Do NOT compare me to that shithead. No, I, um," I sighed,
"I'm-kind-of-an-empath."

"An EMPATH? Cool!" Okay, maybe he wasn't really shouting it, but it sounded
like it to me. "So, like, you can go around and tell what the teachers are
thinking whenever we have a test?"

"No, shithead. What you're talking about is a telepath. Empaths don't get
thoughts from other people, they get feelings."

"Oh. So, like, if I got really mad, you'd know about it and get mad back?"

"Well, if it wasn't working right. Which it hasn't been, so far at
least. I'm supposed to get some training for it in a couple of weeks. I'll
be missing some school." I eyed him. "So if I, uh, start doing something
crazy, just get me away from other people, okay?"

"Like that'll work. 'Teacher, teacher, I know what's wrong with Richie!
Just let me drag him off here away from everyone else, where I can do
God-knows-what to him.' 'Sure, we never really liked Richie anyway. Do
whatever you want.'" He snorted.

"Good to know you've got my back."

"Can I have your pet lizard, after you croak and die?"

"I don't have a pet lizard."

"My point."

We walked back to the bus stop, and Steve eyed us kind of
curiously. "Family, uh, business," I said.

He shrugged. "I know you got secrets, Rich. It's cool. Maybe someday you'll
feel up to telling me some of them."

I felt bad. The weird thing was, I got a flash of what he was feeling just
then--despite the Scorchitol--and he wasn't actually mad at all. A little
sad, maybe. Mostly, just friendly and, I don't know, kind of like you might
feel if you wanted to help a friend. It was nice. Like I said, he's a cool
dude.

################################################

Things went okay for the next few days. Taking the Scorchitol, I did start
to miss the feeling of magic around and inside me. It got more irritating
as time passed. I'd try to see just a little bit better, but my eyes
wouldn't adjust. I'd try to detect someone's mana, and nothing would
happen. It reminded me of what this guy said once, who came around
lecturing about magic. He said most of us with magic were so screwed up in
other ways, if we didn't have magic we probably wouldn't survive to become
adults. That the magic was somehow forced to develop, to help us compensate
for our puny bodies. Well, my body's not puny, but maybe that's the magic
too. Anyway, I knew for sure that I didn't want to go without it any longer
than I had to.

The drug kept my empathy under control, fortunately. It wasn't completely
gone, just muffled, I guess. That got irritating too after a while, like
words in the background that you keep trying to understand but
can't. Yippee yay.

And then there was what the curled-up piece of paper lying next to the
Scorchitol bottle called my "decrease in libido," once I got worried enough
about my lack of interest in jacking off to actually dig the thing out and
read it.

I'd been way too spaced to notice this the day I took it on my own. The
night I started my one-a-day drug routine, I curled up in bed with my boy's
best friend, only to find that it wasn't as excited as usual about coming
out to play. Eventually I teased an orgasm out of it anyway. The next day I
couldn't even do that.

Then Saturday hit, and I was off the meds for the weekend. I swear I spent
half the day with my hand on my cock. I was doing it everywhere--in the
shower, on the toilet, out behind the garden shed, up in the treehouse,
humping against the floor while reading a book, taking a shower again after
dinner, and then in my bed at night. After seven orgasms, it was a tired
but happy boy who went to sleep that night. And Sunday was almost the same,
with the extra benefit that because of my empathy problems, I didn't have
to go to church that day. Deidre volunteered to stay home with me, and
chatted the whole time with with some of her friends over the
phone. Mr. Big got happy five times that day.

And then Monday we were back to I'm-not-yet-ready-for-puberty. That was the
night I finally went looking for the slip of paper in the medicine
cabinet. When I understood what I'd read--I'd heard the word "libido"
before, mostly from my folks talking about how out-of-control my big
brother's was--I swore (quietly), then slouched off to the TV room. I
almost swore again when I saw the smirk on my dad's face. He'd taken
Scorchitol before. He knew. I hated him.

And so the next week passed, with a little less in the way of
self-entertainment options than usual. Saturday and Sunday, and the penis
marathon again.

And then I was packed up to Aunt Jean's for a week in--well, hell isn't
*quite* the right word for it. Mental boot camp, maybe. With spectators.

################################################

Aunt Jean and family didn't actually live that far away from us. Just a
couple of hours, which isn't that much in our part of the country or for
our kind, who have ways of getting there--and getting in contact--faster
and more reliably than most people.

She knew her stuff, I'll give her that. Or rather, she knew *some*
stuff. Whether it was what I needed to learn or not was an open question,
at least as far as I was concerned. By the end of my first day there, I was
starting to think that maybe she was a lot more of a mood-sensor than an
empath. The title of the book she'd given me should have been a clue. I
mean, really. "Plugging Into Your World"?

Give her credit. She had her own suspicions on the matter, and she did her
best to adapt what she knew to whatever it was I was doing. But all she
knew how to teach was what she knew how to do. And she'd known how to do it
since she was 11, so it was hard for her to put into words just what she
knew what to do without even thinking about it. None of her boys were
empaths--thank the Triune--so she'd never had the experience of training
anyone else, except one little girl whose gift was so much like hers that
we suspected it had to have been her dead brother's child, born out of
wedlock. (Aunt Jean was actually a cousin of my mother's, and so thankfully
didn't share quite so many genes with our part of the family.)

She did her best. The fact that I hated every single minute I was there
wasn't, completely, her fault.

The thing I always forgot, during the times between our visits at her
house, was just how strictly Aunt Jean ran everything in her
household. "Regimented" was the word--and she was the colonel. No wonder
they ran wild whenever they got away.

It didn't stop them from having their fun with me, of course. Lots of
little things. Like pins in the sheets, pricking me when I got into bed at
night. Cayenne pepper on the toilet paper, when I just happened to need to
use it. Smudges and stains on my clothes that I knew hadn't been there when
I wore them last--including one stain I was pretty sure was from Tark
jacking off into my shirt. I did my best to hide my tears of fury, knowing
that the more reaction I showed, the worse they would be.

Telling wasn't an option. Even if I got someone to believe me, the looks on
their faces told me I would regret it. Word would go out, in my family and
probably at school, that I was a tattle-tale, a sissy. Any secrets or
weaknesses they knew about me would get whispered around--including things
that weren't necessarily true. My life for the next six years would not be
worth living. I was no telepath, but those were the thoughts I had when I
looked at their faces. I didn't put any of it beyond them. So I sucked it
up, and did my best not to be where they could get at me quite so easily
and so often, and plotted my revenge for the next time they were at our
house.

On other fronts, the exercises did seem to work. I got vastly better at
controlling my access to emotions, even when Aunt Jean would broadcast
feelings like anger or disappointment so powerfully that I could hardly
breathe. All without changing her facial expression in the slightest. I
thought I knew, now, how she controlled her family.

The last night I was there, she sat me down for what I could tell she
thought of as the Obligatory Talk on the Powers and Privileges of Being An
Empath. Most of it was stuff a five-year-old could figure out. Really! I
mean, deliberately taunting people with their greatest fears? Okay, maybe
her boys would do that, if they were empaths--they sure liked doing it now,
without the buzz of being able to *feel* how well they'd succeeded--but I
wouldn't. Not without being provoked, anyway.

Then she spoke to me about sex.

"With practice," she said, her eyes beady, "empaths can learn to share what
they feel with those whom they love. It is a very great gift. Do not abuse
it." I blinked, not sure that she could possibly be saying what I thought
she was saying. The scowl on her face convinced me. It convinced me as well
that she was quite certain I, as an almost-teenage boy, in no way deserved
such a great gift, and would certainly abuse it the very first chance I got
and every chance thereafter. Maybe she knew her boys after all.

Anyway, though, I didn't suppose it would be an issue for my anytime
soon. None of the exercises I'd done with her had shown the slightest sign
that I was anywhere near being able to project my emotions into or onto
someone else.

################################################

My family killed the fatted calf for me, or at least a couple of fatted
chickens. Aunt Jean swelled and smiled under my mom's compliments and
thanks, though she never mentioned all the work I had put in. Over supper,
we talked over what my routine for the next week would be, going back to
school. (Thankfully, the Widmore bullies had stayed at home; it was just
Aunt Jean who brought me back to my house.)

After she left, my dad asked a couple of carefully casual questions
suggesting that he wanted to know how I thought my training had gone and
whether I was ready to go back to school, regardless of what Aunt Jean
thought. I told him I was ready. By the last day, I'd been able to handle
anything she could hit me with, even if it wasn't quite the same way she
expected me to be doing it. (More on that later.) How hard could it be?

That's one of those questions you never, ever, ever ask, because the Fates
are always listening and you won't like their answer.

That was Saturday. That night, I jacked off three times, happy to be in my
own house, my own bed, my own room. (While I'd been at Aunt Jean's, it had
been only once a day, rushed while I was in the shower so I wouldn't get
caught by the Widmore juvenile delinquents or broadcast something Aunt Jean
would sense during my lessons. I wondered what her boys did for emotional
privacy when they were jacking off.) Then on Sunday, I did it four
times. The last time I took an hour to do it and used vegetable oil from
the kitchen, which I rubbed all over my cock and balls and legs and
chest. I came so hard I almost had a stomach cramp. It was purely great.

Then Monday morning, and back to seventh grade.

I had a theory that if I jacked off Monday morning, it would take the edge
off my horniness. I was still worried about what had happened that one day
I stayed at home. I hadn't talked about it to anyone, and nothing like it
had happened since, but I didn't *want* anything to happen either,
particularly in the middle of school.

Besides that, I was pretty close to deciding I was definitely gay by that
point, something I'd been thinking about in my spare time ever since about
halfway through the summer. (Jacking off all the time to mental images of
sports stars is a pretty big clue.) All the more reason for me to avoid
hardons whenever possible during school. So I set my alarm 15 minutes early
that morning, took a morning shower, and took care of business. Then off to
school, joy and happiness, yippy skippy.

I didn't even make it to fifth period this time. Instead, it was third
period when I got a caught a burst of anger from a girl sitting next to me
and tried to deflect it off, and things started to avalanche.

See, the method Aunt Jean had taught me was all based in feeling emotions
but letting them slide around you. I couldn't quite do that. Instead, what
I would do was temporarily absorb the emotions, then boomerang them back
again into the surrounding ether before they could take hold of me. It
wasn't the same thing, but it had the same overall effect, at least when we
tried it out at Aunt Jean's house.

Two problems with that. First, the emotions I was deflecting were mostly
being generated by Aunt Jean. No matter how powerful or intense they were,
they were rational, the thoughts of a carefully disciplined, mentally
controlled adult. Second, the ether around Aunt Jean's house was pretty
calm overall. Like most of us magic-bearers, they lived a good half mile
from anyone else. So I always had a pretty calm pool to boomerang the
emotions back into.

That's not the way it is in middle school. First, the emotions that middle
schoolers feel when they get really caught up in their feelings are
violently, irrationally insane. I couldn't deal with them the way I had
Aunt Jean's emotions, slinging them out again before they really affected
me, because as soon as I let them into my brain, they started making me
crazy too. It was like acid eating into me. (One of my less pleasant
memories, by the way. Come to think of it, I believe that was Cousin Rod's
fault, though he was only 6 at the time. One more for the balance sheet.)

Second, the ether in a middle school is so crazy that you *can't* dispel
any emotions into it. It's like pissing in the middle of a
rainstorm. (Something I also did once.) It's just not gonna dry out no
matter how hard you try.

Okay, I admit it. That last comparison wasn't really any good. It's just
that I've wanted to say something was like pissing into a rainstorm ever
since fifth grade, when I heard Gavin say it and was instantly jealous.

So when I went to boomerang Julia Wentworth's anger out into the ether, it
didn't work too well. Eventually I got myself back under control, barely,
using some of my meditation techniques, but my brain was still
supercharged, both from Julia's emotions and from what I had felt leaking
in from the ether when I lowered my shield to boomerang them out. Oh yes,
and from the panic I felt afterwards when I wasn't sure I would be able to
get my shields back up.

Steve was sitting beside me that class, as it happened, and he could see
that something was really wrong. He put his hand on my arm and whispered,
"Are you okay?" Oddly enough, his touch didn't make me feel any worse,
though I could tell he was feeling a little bit horny, which set off my
cock-barometer in turn.

"Nope. I'll be okay. Just need to last through the end of the period, then
go and sit down somewhere."

"I'll go with you." And he stayed right next to me the rest of the class
period, another five minutes or so, and helped me gather up my things. Then
he walked over with me to a semi-deserted bench in a corner of the quad.

I just sat there for a minute, breathing deeply. Then I opened up my mind
in the calming exercise Aunt Jean had recommended, as something I could do
in between class periods to let the emotions sweep freely into and out of
me, letting go of the stress and all the extra emotions. Or some kind of
crap like that.

Mistake. Big, big mistake. Do you know what it feels like to suddenly make
contact with 9 boys at various locations in the school around you,
simultaneously having orgasms in 9 different bathroom stalls?

My mental shields broke as if they didn't even exist as I immediately went
into orgasm myself, falling over off the bench and saved from cracking my
skull on the pavement only by Steve catching me at the last moment. I was
only barely conscious, muttering "Oh, fuck, Triune, fuck," and pushing my
crotch against my hand as I came and came.

And maybe it would have been better if Steve had let me fall on the
pavement. Because what happened next just made things even
worse. Overwhelmed by sensation, as boys newly reaching their peak replaced
the ones who were finishing up, my brain struck back, and picked the worst
possible moment to jump the hurdle and figure out how to project what I was
feeling.

And so a wave of emotion washed out of me, an irresistable surge of lust
that targeted every adolescent boy in the building.

The effects were immediately obvious. Beside me, Steve gasped, dropped to
the pavement and fumbled open his blue jeans, pulled down his briefs, and
started stroking. The scene was repeated across the quad.

Telling it now, it all sounds like a scene from a porno movie. But at the
time, it was agony. I was out of my mind, with lust, with pain, with a body
that had been in orgasm now for much longer than it was ever designed to
be. As the other boys started reaching their climax, it fed back into me,
mounting higher and higher in a cycle I had absolutely no way to break.

The class bell rang. Beside me, Steve came, spilling semen onto his own
fingers. Dimly in the distance I could hear anger, shouts, the sound of a
fire alarm going off. Mercifully, I faded at last into unconsciousness.

################################################

I woke to a quiet background hum and the sight of my great-grandpa, sitting
beside me in a chair next to my hospital bed.

It was an unusual hospital, situated out there several hours from the
nearest large town. But there are over a thousand magic-bearing families in
central and northern Michigan, and they need someplace to go when they get
the kinds of problems that drive regular doctors crazy.

"How are you feeling?"

I sat a minute, thinking about it. That was one of the things about
Great-Grandpa: he made you want to think about things before you said
anything stupid.

"Fine, I think," I said at last. It was true. The back of my mind was
quieter and more peaceful than I had felt since the beginning of last
summer. Up until then, I hadn't even realized how loud the inside of my
head had become during those last few months.

"I'm holding the shield for you," he said. I nodded. "Empath" might not be
the right word for Great-Grandpa, not with everything else he can do, but
it's a starting-place.

I looked over toward the door. "No one else will come in until I tell them
to," he said, correctly interpreting my glance. "I figure you've had enough
poking and prodding at you for a while."

"What happened?" I asked. I could remember the memories clearly, but I
couldn't make sense of them. Besides, I'd seen one of my teachers shooting
a spider out of her chalk just a few weeks before. I wasn't making any
assumptions about the reliability of what I remembered.

"You went into a feedback fugue. Fancy talk for saying that your brain was
wide open, emotions kept coming in, you kept trying to send them back out
again to get rid of them, but nothing was able to interrupt the circuit
until you lost consciousness." His lips thinned. "I've already had some
words with your aunt about teaching things she knows nothing about."

I shivered. This was Great-Grandpa, but it was also someone whose anger
could stop wars, or start them. I would not have wanted to be Aunt Jean.

He spoke again. "I didn't do anything too terrible to her. After all,
things stopped just before they reached the point of irredeemable
stupidity. Barely." His lips thinned again. "And your parents *finally*
called me, as they should have done long since. And here I am." He looked
at me again, and this time it was only my great-grandfather I saw, not one
of the 20 or so most powerful magic-users on the planet. "So," he said in a
very gentle voice, "Do you want to tell me about it?"

And so I started talking. I told everything to him, starting with the way
puberty had affected me that summer, and then what had happened once I
started back to school. I saw him smile faintly as I mentioned how much I
liked jacking off, but honestly, it didn't even occur to me not to say
anything about it to him. After all, it was Great-Grandpa. EVERYTHING had
happened to him, and nothing could shock him.

Besides, you just don't hold things back when Great-Grandpa asks. No one
does. Even if I live as long as he has, even if I get to be 113 years old
and three times past president of the global Council of Warlocks, I will
never be what he is. Empath is one thing. Truthsayer is one
thing. Great-Grandpa is something else.

He wasn't shocked or surprised when I told him I thought I was gay. He's
had wives and partners of both sexes in his day, and maybe some nonhuman
ones too if some of the wilder stories are true. Maybe that's one of the
reasons why I'm not that worried what my family will say once I tell them
about me. He did smile, again, when I told him about feeling a spike of
lust for Steve, that day in the classroom just before everything went nova.

"I'll teach you, of course," he said when I was finished at last. "A day or
two, some exercises, and you'll be as good as new. Anyway, you've been here
since yesterday. It's high time we sprang you from the clinker." With that,
he walked to the door--held out his hand, and suddenly I was clothed again,
in clothes I had been wearing just the day before in school--then gestured
me to get up, while he pushed the door open.

I stood there, amazed. The hallway outside my room was full. My folks,
Joel, and Deidre (though not, I was pleased to see, Aunt Jean and her
brood). Gavin. And, to my surprise, Steve as well.

"We figured he deserved to know what was going on," said my mom, following
my gaze.

"Actually, I was amazed you hadn't told him about us already," said Deidre.

Joel grinned. "Death by sex, little bro." He shook his head. "Only you." He
was smiling, but there was a dark look in his eyes I didn't know how to
interpret.

"Yeah, but what a way to go!" said Gavin.

It occurred to me suddenly, looking at them all, that they'd all been
worried about me. Really worried. It made me feel warm inside, and just a
little scared myself at how close it must have been.

"Well, let's get this show on the road," said my great-grandpa. Everyone
started shuffling out toward the exit.

On the way out to the car and back to the house, I was able to talk with
Gavin and Steve a little about what had happened after I fainted. "You
should have seen it, it was awesome," said Gavin. "After you fainted, I
mean. Mrs. Tannenbaum"--that was our principal--"she was so angry she
screamed herself hoarse. Someone had pulled the fire alarm, so soon the
fire trucks were pulling up. And then your dad was there, Rich, and he kept
the paramedics from pumping you full of stuff."

Stuff that probably would have killed me, if they'd gone ahead and done
it. Later on, I found out that Gavin had fought off the nurse until my dad
got there, telling her that I had a rare medical condition, just diagnosed,
that I had told him about just that day, that the paperwork hadn't come
through on yet. He also said that if they *did* give me something, and I
died, he'd make sure the police and my family knew so that they could sue
the school district for every penny they had. He got a three-day
suspension, but he probably saved my life.

"And then your great-grandad got there." Gavin's eyes were huge. "He was so
fucking awesome."

"He showed them this card, and they backed away," said Steve. "He talked to
Mrs. Tannenbaum for a minute, and she calmed down and started getting
things going again. Well, as normal as they could be, after all of that."
He grinned. As far as I could tell--and my empath abilities were running
fairly close to the surface right then--he wasn't a bit embarrassed about
what had happened the day before. Everything else from then was still hazy
to me, but I had a clear picture in my head of Steve's cock, spilling semen
all over his fingers and hand. I blushed.

"So what are you all doing here in the middle of the school day?" It was
about 2:00 in the afternoon, a half hour before the middle school let out.

"I, um, decided I didn't really need to go to school today," said Gavin. I
looked at him oddly. It really didn't seem like a Gavin sort of answer. I
didn't find out about the suspension until after he'd left to go home that
evening.

I looked at Steve. He shrugged. "My folks don't mind. Actually, they think
it's pretty cool that I would skip school to visit a friend." I worry about
Steve's folks sometimes. It's not like they don't care, it's more like they
don't remember he's only 12 and not really old enough to be making those
kinds of decisions on his own. Sometimes I wonder if they're hippies, still
stuck in the 1960s.

"Faye wanted to come too," added Gavin. "But her parents wouldn't let her."
I shuddered. Faye's parents were pretty strict already. Who knew how they'd
react to hearing that all the boys in her school had pulled out their
penises in the middle of the school day and whacked off together? We'd be
lucky if they didn't pull her out to go to an all-girls school. For that
matter, we'd be lucky if we all didn't get arrested.

I was glad when Steve changed the topic. "It was great finding out the big
mystery about what your family actually does." He snorted. "Magic. And here
I thought you were running drugs." He sounded a little disappointed.

"Hey, there were drugs, too." Then I had to explain to them all about the
Scorchitol.

Gavin snickered. "A drug that made it so you couldn't jack off? Oh, man. I
would die."

"Tell me about it," I grumbled.

"Could you really feel it when every boy in the school came?" asked Steve.

And so I explained to them how it was when I felt emotions, and what it
felt like that day when my mind ripped open. By then, we were riding back
together from the hospital in the back of Joel's car. The asshole was up in
front driving, but he was listening to the radio station, so we were able
to have a private conversation.

Afterwards they were both quiet for a bit. "It was my fault, I think,"
Steve finally said in a low voice.

"What do you mean?" asked Gavin.

"I was feeling pretty horny when I touched Rich, there in the classroom. I
think I musta set him off somehow." I hadn't mentioned anything about Steve
touching me during our conversation.

"I don't think so," I said. "It was gonna happen anyway. The real mistake
was opening up right during lunchtime, when half the middle school was in
the bathroom jacking off."

"Yeah, for a gay boy like you, that must have been quite a treat," laughed
Gavin. Then he froze.

I froze too. I'd told Gavin just once, earlier that summer, that I thought
I might be going gay. He'd promised never to say anything about
it. Asshole.

The conversation was quiet the rest of the way back to the house.

################################################

My folks invited Gavin and Steve to stay for dinner. Gavin declined, saying
he had to go home. I wondered if that was really true or if he thought it
would be a bad idea for him to stay, after the way he'd blown it in the
car. I didn't encourage him either way.

Steve stayed, to my surprise. He hadn't been over to my house very often,
and never for dinner before. All through the meal, he kept cracking jokes
and generally making a good impression with my family. I could tell he
connected with my great-grandpa especially well.

Afterwards, we went up to my room to talk some more about things. That's
when I found out about Gavin and the nurse and the detention. Steve also
told me it was fine with him if I was gay, and that Gavin had known that
too. "I'm pretty sure that's why he said something," he said. "Cause he
knew I wouldn't freak out." I still wasn't completely happy with Gavin
spilling the beans without asking me, but it made me feel a little better
about it.

For himself, Steve told me he wasn't sure if he was gay or straight. "I
like sex," he said bluntly. "Who or what with, I don't really care." He'd
made out with a couple of girls, enough to make him shoot, but he liked the
idea of having fun with guys too. "Maybe we can have some fun together
someday," he said. I said I'd think about it. By then it was getting late
for a school night, and my dad drove him home.

Training with Great-Grandpa over the next two days was really great. He
said I was a true empath, with the potential to be a truthsayer and
empathic projector, which was a lot different from being a mood-sensor. I
was glad. I didn't want to have anything more in common with Aunt Jean than
being two carbon-based life forms. I'd skip that too, if I could.

He also taught me techniques to shield myself, to get rid of excess
feelings once I had them, and to share my emotions with someone else. "A
mood-sensor tries not to get too deep in the stream of emotions. An empath,
on the other hand, needs to experience depth of emotional sharing. It's
necessary for your emotional balance, and for the proper growth of your
talent." He paused.

"At your age, that means sex, with someone you at least like a lot. In
short, you need a boyfriend." He grinned at the astonished look on my face,
then took me off to have a similar conversation with my parents, where (to
my surprise) he repeated pretty much the same thing to them, in pretty much
the same words.

I guess I shouldn't have been so surprised. Great-Grandpa has a reputation
for saying what he thinks, in plain language, no matter who he's saying it
to. I doubt my parents would intimidate him much after standing up to the
Council of Wraiths.

"With a budding male empath, you don't want the kind of self-centered
personality that can come from celibacy and sexual frustration. To avoid
that, Rich needs to get laid on a pretty regular basis." He grinned. "I
remember Josh and I drove our parents up the wall with all the time we
spent out in the old barn, when I was just a little older than Rich is
now." By then I was beyond embarrassment, in some kind of zen land where
logical thought ceases to exist.

They took it surprisingly well, I have to say. My dad nodded, and my mom
had a blank look on her face, which was about as good as I could have hoped
for from being told her 12-year-old was gay--that had gotten into the
conversation somehow, though I don't know if it was really a surprise to
them--and was going to be having sex. Afterwards, we had an excruciating
conversation in which my mom cautiously told me that she understood I'd be
wanting to have young friends over to the house and spending time privately
together with them in my room. She'd make sure to respect my privacy, and
hoped I would use the lock on my door. I nearly choked.

And that's pretty much it. The next day, Great-Grandpa went back to
Siberia--or wherever he was staying right now--and I went back to school,
where I found it was remarkably easy to live down the embarrassment of
having fainted in school in light of the embarrassment that all the other
boys were going through about the events of that day. Some people may have
suspected I played a more central part in that event, but the ones who knew
something weren't saying anything, and the rest didn't really want to
know. Once again, I was amazed at just how hard people will try to forget
something they really don't want to remember, or pretend it never happened.

About a week after the event, a boy who had been sick that day made a joke
in the lunchroom about jacking off. He got a weird look on his face when he
realized no one was laughing.

I kept practicing my exercises and reported back to Great-Grandpa by phone
or letter each week. I'd get an answer about every two or three weeks. He
said that based on what I said, it sounded like things were coming along
well. I didn't have anymore uncontrolled outbursts of empathy. Over time, I
got better and better at shielding--and also at picking up and sorting
through my classmates' emotions without it frying my brains out.

################################################

Fast forward to the present. Seventh grade, end of the year. I'm 13 now,
big for my age. Big down there, too. Six inches already, and I'm still
growing. I started squirting over Christmas break, about a month before I
turned 13. Things are pretty good.

Eventually the school decided--with encouragement from some
magic-handlers--that the whole thing had been some kind of bizarre
experiment. The fact that it only affected the boys seemed to make this
easier for them to believe--as if something that left all the girls
unaffected couldn't really have happened anyway. It's really
weird. Amazingly, the word never did seem to get out to the parents, so the
school administration didn't lose their jobs and the girls weren't all
pulled out to private schools. I did hear, though, that some sixth graders
came home with a brand new appreciation for a part of their anatomy they'd
only known was good for peeing with before.

I've got a boyfriend now, too. Steve, actually. He thinks he's gay. I think
he's horny, and that he likes the way it feels when I set up a cycle so
that his orgasm and mine feed into each other.

In the meantime, I'm not complaining. I have someone to get my rocks off
and share emotions with. Together, we can almost hold our own against
wolfboy--I mean, Joel. He leaves us alone a lot of the time.

We haven't done anything else yet besides give each other hand jobs and rub
off on each other. I'm still working myself up to the idea of blow jobs,
though I'm pretty sure I'll like them a lot when we get there.

Buttfucking just seems nasty. It's hard for me to believe I'll ever want to
do that, no matter how many Nifty stories talk about how cool it is. (Yeah,
I got a computer with the porn unblocked, for a few sites at least. I get
to read Nifty because it "helps me deal with my sexuality by reading
stories about other gay youth." What a scam.)

Steve's parents are happy with him being gay. They think I'm a good
influence. Mostly, they think that if he can talk himself into believing
that he's gay, they won't have to deal with another teenage pregnancy in
the family.

His mom gives us this big, starry-eyed smile as we're on the way up to his
room, where we're gonna rub our dicks together and squirt our nuts
out. Weird. I mean, hey, my folks are okay with it, but it's not like
they're standing next to the bedroom cheerleading, ya know? Keep private
stuff quiet. Don't ask, don't tell. Especially don't tell. Ugh.

I've also spent some time figuring out how to send a wave of lust into
someone that will immobilize him. (I haven't gotten it to work on girls
yet.) So far, I've had several football and basketball players standing in
the middle of the hall as drooling messes. It made Steve laugh out loud,
the first time I showed him. So long as I'm not too obvious and let them go
after a second or two, I figure there's no harm done. Hey, we're always
trying for new attack techniques that can't be blocked or fought
against. Better still if they leave the other guy fine afterwards. With
moves like this, I figure I could be the first attack-specialist empath!

Sometimes when I'm feeling especially horny, I'll go find some
out-of-the-way place during class break or lunchtime, in the library say,
where I can lie down, open up my mind, and listen in on all the boys
jacking off. It's a real turn-on. I know how to do it now without frying
out my brain, and it feels really, really good. The first time I told Gavin
about it, he said I was a pervert. When I told Steve about it, he asked if
I could hook him into what I was feeling. The next day, we were lying down
in a back room of the library together for half of lunch break, holding
hands as we came over and over again without even touching ourselves. We
had to go into the bathroom afterwards and throw our underwear
away. "That's a lot better than drug smuggling, isn't it?" I asked Steve
afterward. He agreed. I have to tell you, it's great being an empath.

(c) 2008 by Traumarei. All rights reserved.

Author's Note: First off, thanks for reading; I hope you liked it. All
feedback appreciated.

I've been reading stories on Nifty for several years now, but only recently
started posting stories of my own. Other stories I've had posted so far
include:

- Good Friends (Gay: High School)

- After School (Gay: Masturbation)

- Borrowed Time: Part 1 (Gay: High School). I hope to add to this one over
time.


My biggest interest is in writing about the feelings young people deal with
when they're first figuring out they might be gay. I like stroke scenes and
writing stroke fiction sometimes, but for me, emotions are a big part of
the turn-on.

Let me know if you want to see more stories set in the universe of Middle
School Empath. I can see several possibilities, including a story about
Rich during his high school years, and possibly one about Joel's
experiences when he first started grappling with his werewolf "taint." I'm
guessing that one will be posted in Bisexual: Science Fiction or Fantasy
(if it ever gets written), since Joel is really, really not gay... Let me
know what you think.