It started out as just an ordinary day. Mom was passed out on the sofa. I should explain — Mom had gone into a serious depression after Father left. She would make sure that Charlie and I had food and clean clothes — I guess she cared. She just couldn't stand the times alone. So as usual, this morning she was passed out on the sofa after her date last night. Charlie and I had to get ourselves up, get ready for school and pack our lunches without making a sound loud enough to wake her up.
The school bus, when it finally arrived, was packed with all of the other kids from our side of town. Charlie found her usual seat with her friends. The only seat left for me was next to the biggest bully in the school, which I was loath to take. I stood in the aisle for a long time, hoping the bus driver wouldn't notice me standing there, but a delayed glance toward the front of the bus let me know that wasn't going to happen. The ol' witch was a stickler for the rules and wouldn't move the bus until everyone was seated.
I gingerly slid into the seat next to Billy, just letting the edge of my ass rest on the corner of the torn vinyl. As I expected, I got a sharp kick in my back from Billy's foot and ended up on the muddy floor, accompanied by a chorus of derisive laughter from the chumps in the seats around me. The same thing had happened yesterday and the day before and so on. It was my own personal version of "Groundhogs Day." It was going to be a long school year.
My name is Douglass, with two 's's, and a high school senior at age 14. Yes, I'm smart — so sue me. I'm also small for my age and mad as Hell at all of the abuse I get heaped upon me for what I am. It's not like I'm making it harder on the other students; I made a deal with the school a long time ago to separate my grades out from the rest of the class so that I wouldn't screw up the curve for the other kids, but that almost made things worse. Being the smallest kid in the school, not just my class, made me the target of anyone who was frustrated with their lot in life, I guess. And that included a lot of the teachers and staff.
Physical Education, or P.E. as it is called, was pure torture for me. I swear only sadists apply for jobs as P.E. teachers as I had never had one that didn't relish humiliating me in from of my classmates. Fortunately, after a particularly embarrassing episode last year — one that made YouTube — I settled out of court with the school district. I was excused from any and all P.E. for life.
Being what I am, a girlfriend was out of the question. Of course, up until last year, I hadn't given that particular gender any special thought, although recently, well, I knew all about hormones and stuff; I just wasn't prepared for them to be so overwhelming. I was beginning to be obsesses with girls. They intruded on my thoughts during the day and my dreams at night. Of course when a 9th grade girl dreamed of dating a senior, mine was not the image that came to her mind. And, with rare exception, a 9th grade girl's mind was not all that appealing to me.
The only bright spot in my school life, other than my sister Charlie, was my physics science class. Mr. Griggs was an anomaly among the faculty in that he actually knew what he was teaching. In a former life, he had been a physicist for some major engineering company and had a number of patents filed in his name. He donated the residual income from a couple of those to the school and had been able to fund a physics lab at the high school that was better than most university labs I had visited. I spent every free class and most afternoons working in the lab. If it hadn't been for the Math and English requirements I needed to graduate, I would have spent all day in that quiet sanctuary.
Charlie was a senior, too, but she was 18. She was smart, too, just not quite at my level. She was everything I wasn't and more. She was a cheerleader, Class President and very popular. If I hadn't been her brother, I think the daily torture I experienced would have been worse than it was. I never complained to her about any of the bullies, a fact which surprised a couple of her dates. She had dated a couple of jocks who had taken particular pleasure in making my life a living Hell before they had hooked up with her for a date. When she didn't say anything to them about their behavior, one or two of them had assumed it was OK to beat the shit out of me and had harassed me in front of her.
It was funny to watch their faces as the full fury and wrath of my sibling ascended upon their crotches. Charlie only knew one move and that was a swift kick in the gonads and she didn't pull her punches. The realization that they had screwed up generally flashed through their eyes milliseconds before they passed out from the extreme pain of their balls being mangled. But Charlie couldn't be around to protect me all the time, especially in the boy's restrooms. I was intimately familiar with each and every toilet in the school and several of the lockers. I had figured out how to get out of the lockers — it took me about two minutes to get out the first time when I was 12 years old — but it is harder to escape when someone is holding you upside down by your ankles and dunking your head into the swirling water. I had learned not to carry anything in my pockets, as I had lost two calculators and three house keys that way.
On this day I escaped from the confines of the bus without too much more damage. With Charlie there, none of the kids other than Billy did anything too overt as they all wanted their balls to remain undamaged. But they still managed the occasional clandestine kick or shove. I made the dash to my locker and slipped into my first class, English, just as the bell rang. Mrs. Bascom glared at me with a private little grin softening her harsh features. She seemed to know what I was going through — she hadn't turned as ugly as she was recently; she had been born ugly and had grown up ugly. But she was a good teacher and had a good heart. She had survived and so would I, but that knowledge didn't mean I had to like what happened to me while I was surviving.
I endured the class time and then the advanced Math class. The Math class was a new free-study style class for advanced students who had finished the regular curriculum, but still needed to fill the class time. Other than Charlie and I, there was only one other student in the class. There were several textbooks on advanced and theoretical math for us to work through, the idea being that we would finish one textbook during the year, then take a final. Charlie had started her second text book already; the other student was still on the second chapter of the first text. I didn't really have anything to do as I had done all the work including taking the final exams for this class over the summer vacation. I had tried to get out of the class, but they needed my butt in the seat for this hour so they could get the government's money.
I was finally able to run to the science building, my sanctuary. Mr. Griggs wasn't in yet, so I set up the labs for the first class of the afternoon. It wasn't normal for Mr. Griggs to be late, but it had happened before — he was dating the French teacher, Ms. Brisard, and sometimes he waited too long before leaving the teacher's lounge to get to the science building on time. So I didn't think too much about his tardiness.
When he hadn't arrived after lunch, I began to get concerned. I prepared to teach the lab — I had done that before — and started to look around for Mr. Griggs. I had just checked in his office and hadn't seen his coat and his keys when the bell rang for class. That wasn't unusual if he was over with Ms. Brisard, but he usually stopped by the lab first to see if everything was OK. He kept joking with me that because of some of my experiments, he half expected one day to just see a large crater where the lab was.
I ran through the lab with the bored students, helped a few of the slower groups, put out a fire started by a couple of idiot jocks and locked up after they had all left after class. It was 1:00 and I had the rest of the day to work on my own projects or to help Mr. Griggs on some of his projects.
I took the keys from Mr. Griggs desk and unlocked the door to his private lab. I thought perhaps he had gotten involved in something, but it was all quiet and dark. I locked his lab back up and put his absence out of my mind for the time being. I had a couple of knotty problems to solve on my own project and I was already focusing on those.
Mr. Griggs let me work on the second floor. This was a place for future expansion and additional classrooms, but as yet, it was just me and my equipment on the second floor. I had one project with a set of lasers Mr. Griggs and I had built from surplus military parts and I was fine tuning the output to reach power levels that were approaching the incredible. I could get it to blast through almost anything, but it was unstable and undependable after about 10 minutes. I had just gotten it to stabilize by adding a cooling fan. I had wanted to talk to Mr. Griggs about that, as that shouldn't have made a difference. But it did and I was stumped for a reason why it did what it did. I know you're not supposed to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I was always looking anyway.
The other side of my lab was dedicated to some ceramic and magnetic superconductor projects. This was mostly tinkering on an odd theory I had had one night about the interrelationship between gravity, magnetic forces and time. For the past couple of months I was just playing around with three large ring magnets set at right angles to each other. I had just re-wrapped the wire around them last week. The 4 X 4 inch thick iron rings were two meters in diameter and were fixed in each of the X, Y and Z axes. It had been a bitch cutting the notches at the 90 degree intersections of them and then getting them all joined together, but Mr. Griggs had talked the shop teacher into letting one of the graduating seniors use this as his senior project for graduation. Mike had done a great job on it — I think he was relieved as he was looking at not graduating if he didn't complete a senior project. He was more of a 'hands-on' kind of guy and was hands-off the books. He wasn't dumb, but he had a tough time learning things in a classroom environment. But give him an engine or a piece of wood and he was a whiz.
Mike and I had developed a strange relationship, both of us somewhat in awe of the other's capabilities, but not jealous of them either. He was one of the few seniors who wouldn't torment me and I was one of the few people who didn't talk down to him. I wouldn't say we were friends, but we were comfortable around each other.
Mike helped Mr. Griggs and me around the lab when we needed muscles, like building the test beds and platforms we used for some of our projects. He had just finished the laser test bed last week and I was anxious to get it set up. I had been able to get the laser mounted and a couple of the mirrors, but that was all.
Things like wrapping the wire around the magnets were a bit beyond Mike's grasp at the moment, but he had watched me carefully, asking surprisingly apt questions. If we needed to do another wrap, I was going to let him do it.
Tonight I needed to finish connecting the wires inside the magnets and to do that I needed to be inside the sphere they created. It was weird inside those rings and I went in as little as possible; it gave me the creeps. I also had to strip to my skivvies and make sure I took off my Father's old watch. It was the only thing either Charlie or I had left of him and we shared it, she wore it one week; I wore it the next. Mom never talked about him — nobody talked about him. It was very frustrating, not knowing. Was he a hero? Was he a turd? Both Charlie and I had tried everything we knew how to do, and I knew how to do a lot. It was like he had just disappeared.
The watch was all we had, and my name. I was Douglass Kirby Hornsby, Jr. I guess I took after my Father; I was slender, brown hair, dark eyes and skin so fair I could get sunburn from a box of Raisin Bran. Charlie was a twin of Mom with blonde hair and blue eyes, both were around 5'6" or so, slender and each had a body that wouldn't quit, Mom's is just a bit more mature. Yeah, I know they're my sister and my Mom. I'm 14, not blind...
I was inside the sphere and had just finished with the wiring. My legs were cramping, sweat was dripping in my eyes and I wasn't paying attention to anything else in the room. I get pretty focused when I work. Charlie says I could shut out a stampede when I am thinking about a problem.
I heard the High Voltage Output generator spinning up and then the switches that powered up the magnets were flipped on, way too fast. I started to turn to see what was going on, but my muscles wouldn't work. My mind noted that this was an odd effect of being inside the three magnetic fields. I also noted that I was no longer touching the bottom rings but was now suspended in an approximate fetal position in the center of the sphere. I tried to turn my body to the right and rotated away from the direction I wanted to go at a right angle. Eventually I was able to bring my line of site around so that I could see into the lab.
What I saw angered me. It was an odd emotion for me to feel at that moment or at any time. I didn't get angry. I had no offensive weapons, other than my mind. I was the proverbial 90-lb. weakling. I had long ago decided that anger was not a productive response for me, as there was very little I could do about anything anyone ever did to me. In retrospect, while it may have seemed a mature thing to do at such a young age, it probably caused me more grief, as many of my tormentors seemed only to want to see me get mad. My being stoic wasn't nearly as satisfying for them and in their tiny minds, I suppose they felt justified about increasing the violence.
So, anger was a rare emotion for me and it was, at that moment, focused on that asshole, Billy; the bastard from the bus. As I watched him, I realized he must have been watching me in the lab for a several weeks, as he seemed to know his way around my lab fairly well. He had known to spin up the HV generator before engaging the magnets, though he had probably fused several circuits by doing it so fast before the output stabilized. Still, the fields with the new wrapping seemed to be holding nicely. He also knew how to turn on the laser and engage the aiming HeNe (Helium Neon) beam first. And he knew about the mirrors, too, as I saw him adjust the HeNe beam towards the sphere.
I noted absently that the light of the HeNe beam didn't penetrate the exterior magnetic fields very far; just enough to make a visible spot on the field outside the magnetic sphere. Billy probably didn't notice, but I did. I also noticed it was 5:37 in the afternoon and the second hand had just swept past the half minute mark.
He wandered over to the sphere and looked at me trapped inside. I cringed away from the hatred I saw in his face; his vacant eyes, the sneer.
"So long, Dickwad," he said. "If it's any solace, you'll get to die in a cage, just like your ol' man."
He saw my Father's watch and slipped it into his pocket. I hardly registered the theft, as I was still stunned after hearing what he said. That fucking asshole knew things about my Father, our Father. I was so preoccupied I didn't even notice him go over to the laser and turn it on. I did notice the searing pain that seemed to radiate to every nerve ending in my body and every synapse in my brain seemed to short out.
5:47 pm. That was the first thing I noticed. I had survived the laser! Billy was beating on it with a big wrench. Of course! The safety switch Mr. Griggs had made me install that shut it down after 5 minutes of continuous use. The laser would only come back on after it had been reset internally and Billy probably didn't know that. It had been off for 5 minutes and I was still alive!
Billy came back over to the sphere and peered inside. I didn't move, I didn't breathe. I was still bunched up, frozen by the magnetic fields, so moving wasn't really an option. The way Billy was looking inside was odd, like he was trying to see past me, as if I wasn't there.
"Good riddance," he muttered as he stumbled off, leaving the HV generator running. There was no 'dead-man's switch' on it and it would continue to run until something burned out or someone turned it off.
I heard the lab door close behind Billy, leaving me trapped in the sphere. I waited for several minutes. Someone would have to hear it running sooner or later. The custodial staff cleaned in this building first, so they should be here soon. I could only wait. So I did.
I woke again to the sounds of silence and in total darkness. It was after 6:30. Damn! I had missed the last bus and would have to walk home. Again. On the bright side, the custodial staff must have shut down the HV generator. I thought it odd they hadn't seen me in the sphere and done something to get me out; or to call 911.
I slipped out of the sphere and picked up my pants. As I tightened the belt, it felt odd. I looked down and the belt around my normal 25 inch waist was cinched down to about 4 inches. It didn't hurt, but it looked weird. I loosened the belt to the normal notch and had to hold my pants up. I mean, it looked like my body was there, but the pants just went through me like I wasn't there. I put my shirt on and tucked in the tails. That helped a little.
I picked up my backpack, slipped into my jacket and started the long walk home. As I stepped out of the science building and into the empty parking lot, it started to rain. Just fucking sweet. The street lights were off, of course, due to budget cuts. I guess the city felt that anyone stupid enough to walk on the dark streets deserved anything that happened to them.
Suddenly a wave of fatigue washed over me. I was exhausted. It was probably a reaction to all the muscles being flexed for so long in the sphere. All I wanted was to be home in bed. I could picture it in my mind —
-And, suddenly, I was there.
It surprised the shit out of me, too! One second I was standing in the rain in the parking lot of the High School, the next second I was in my room, lying on my bed, backpack in hand.
I was beginning to think something had happened in the sphere. Duh?
I walked over to the mirror on my closet door and looked at myself to see if I could see any visible changes. I would have peed my pants, had I had them on. Somehow, they were still on the bed along with my shoes, but I was standing in front of the mirror. All I could see was my shirt hanging in mid-air. I looked down — well, at least my skivvies were there. But I wasn't in the mirror. No head, no arms, no legs, no dick. Nothing.
I looked down at my body. I could see myself, still dressed in the skivvies I had on in the sphere. I could see my bare legs, all ten toes and my arms. But there was nothing in the mirror but my shirt.
My curiosity overcame my panic. This had to be just a trick of the light or something. I went into the bathroom I shared with Charlie. It had better light. I stared at the mirror and saw nothing.
'OK. I'm invisible, ' I thought to myself. 'Not the worst thing that could have happened, I guess.'
I remembered the quick trip home — OK, I teleported home. Let's not get all technical and paranormal, OK? Anyway, I thought back to what had happened; I had imagined my bed in my mind and I was there. I wondered if it worked the same way with my body. I imagined seeing myself, that I was really there and I watched in amazement as I slowly shimmered into view.
'Cool!' I thought. 'I've got to show Charlie!'
I thought invisible again and my shirt fell to the floor. 'Wow!' was all I could think.
I turned to open the door to Charlie's room and missed the doorknob. My hand just kept going through the door and my body followed. I started to say something but stopped with my mouth hanging open.
Charlie was lying on her bed in a way I had never seen but often imagined; several times a day, in fact. She was naked and masturbating. She must have been at it for a long time as her body glistened with a sexy sheen of perspiration.
I couldn't resist. Hey, I was 14 and she was a babe! She was the hottest girl in the school, possibly the entire county. And, I was 14!
I reached out and touched her left nipple. A spark of energy passed between us and she arched her back in orgasmic bliss.
"Oh, Dougie, yes!" she wailed; then realizing what she had said, she tried to sit up. "God, I did NOT just fantasize about my brother!"
I touched her right nipple lightly with my index finger. Charlie sank back onto the pillows, her eyes rolling up into her head as she fainted. I watched her as she came back to her senses. Hell, I stared at her phenomenal body, imprinting the image of it into my photographic memory.
As she started to come around I moved carefully on to the bed and positioned myself between her spread thighs. Her virginal pussy was on display, open and drooling. I could smell the aroused scent of her, though I had no idea that's what it was until later.
I had read about this, licking a girl down there and suddenly I could see the attraction. She was beautiful, delicate and intriguing. So different from my equipment, with which I was very familiar. I couldn't resist and lowered my head to her center. I touched her with my tongue at the top of her slit, not directly on her clit, but near.
Charlie shuddered and then sighed. "Oh, God, yes! Dougie, I love it, but if you're screwing with my head, I'm going to kill you. But don't stop, God! Don't stop."
I didn't. Using only the tip of my tongue I explored her intimate parts with care and curiosity. Her hands came down, trying to hold my head and they passed right through it. It felt weird when her fingers went through, for her, too, as she paused then drew her hands back up to caress her tits.
She was building to a huge orgasm and when it came she arched her cheerleader's body into an arch, only touching the bed at her shoulders and her feet. I stared at her a while longer as she drifted off to sleep, a smile on her face.
I slipped back to my room, turned visible and got dressed. I went downstairs and made a bologna and banana sandwich for dinner. I didn't normally eat that combination — that's all there was in the kitchen. I had missed dinner and Mom was very clear about not eating the leftovers. If we weren't on time for dinner, we weren't allowed to eat it — at least that evening. It would show up later, reheated, on a later date. So I grabbed what there was and that was bologna and a banana.
I was sitting at the table when Charlie came in. She was dressed in an old football jersey, her hair mussed and a very satisfied look on her face. She blinked at me twice before she realized I was sitting there.
"When did you get home?" she asked me. "You weren't on the last activity bus."
"I caught a ride," I mumbled, stuffing another bite in my mouth. I wasn't a good liar at all, especially with Charlie.
"Oh? With who?" she continued.
"'With whom'," I corrected.
"Well?" she laughed, "with whooom?"
"uhh," I delayed. "uh, I, uh, Mr. Griggs."
"Oh?" she said, a funny smile on her face. Amazingly, she let it drop.
As she walked by, I could smell her scent, the same as I had smelled in her room. I sniffed quietly, I thought, to inhale the wonderful odor but she glanced back at me suspiciously. One thing I had managed in my short lifetime was the perfection of a perfectly bland innocent face. I used that face now, only Charlie had seen it before and was immune to its effects.
She had the grace to blush, but again, did not push the issue. She fixed herself a sandwich — same variety as mine had been — and took it back to her room to eat. I sat in the living room for a while, staring at a college level text book, going over the events of the day in my head. What did I know?
One, Billy had tried to kill me and he had stolen my Father's watch.
Two, I could turn invisible.
Three, I could teleport, at least to specific points.
Four, I could walk though doors.
Five, Charlie was hot, really hot and she was starting to get suspicious that something was different about me.
So, to the first point, Billy was a dead man, as far as I was concerned. I had no malicious thoughts about him, but he stole my Father's watch. And he knew something about my Father that I didn't. He would tell me first, then die.
Two, three and four. These would take some serious investigation. Were the changes permanent? Were these all the changes or were there other things I could do now? And most importantly, were they lethal. As cool as they were, I wasn't ready to stop living yet.
Five, I was going to have to be very careful around Charlie. She was very smart and I had already lied to her — not my strongest suit. I wanted to tell her about this; I told Charlie everything and she had told me everything, well, up to recently, that is.
Charlie and I had been inseparable from the time I could walk. Where she went, I followed. She never pushed me away, though it must have been a pain for a young girl to have her little brother tagging along. But our Father was gone and our Mom wasn't coping very well. Hell, she wasn't even trying to cope; to a little kid it she just fucking gave up. I knew now she was just trying to cope, but when I was 5 years old, I didn't understand. Mom partied at the various bars until late and came home drunk. If she was fucking around, at least she didn't bring it home.
Charlie was a tomboy growing up and was always the first player picked on the pick-up games at the local playground. I was always the last one picked, but the games were just for fun and we played that way. Until the day the boys wouldn't pick Charlie anymore. I hadn't noticed, but the older boys had. Charlie was now a 'girrrrl' and they didn't want to play with girls, especially since she could beat any of them single handed.
I found Charlie the afternoon this happened locked in her room. It was obvious she had been crying, but when I found her, her eyes were dry and her shoulders squared. Sports had been her life up until then. She couldn't play with other girls without getting frustrated. Charlie was competitive. She wanted to win fair and square against a good competitor. But when you can't play, you can't win.
Charlie turned to learning and books and I followed along. This happened when she was 12 and I was 8. She got us bus passes and library cards. She had to forge Mom's signature to get them, but that was old hat to her by now. We spent every day of the summer and every afternoon in the city library, reading and learning. I had been precocious before, now I was voracious. I read everything, remembered everything. Charlie and I learned I had a photographic memory or what is now called an eidetic memory. With that knowledge, Charlie started force-feeding me books. Even in her early teen years, she was aware of how much time I would waste in school if I didn't skip over grades, so she had me tested out of grade school and into Junior High School. That took a year. I started Jr. High at 10 years old
With Charlie's help I learned to apply what I knew. In other words, I learned to think, to ask questions about what I knew using what I knew. We studied logic and philosophy one summer. If something didn't make sense, I wanted to know the answer why not. In four years I had skipped over several grades and entered high school as a freshman. Two years later I was a senior, but I had finished all the requirements for graduation during the summer. I just had to put in the time.
Charlie knew she couldn't keep up with me, but she could push me. So she pushed me to learn more and more. She learned, too, but she was doing this for me.
It was only when Charlie started to date late last year that we started to grow apart. Suddenly, the very boys who wouldn't play baseball with her now wanted to play other games. She was popular, she was pretty. Hell, she was fucking gorgeous with a Playboy body, a Vogue face and a Scientific American mind. We didn't mean to grow apart, but I guess I wasn't the person with whom she wanted to share her newest innermost thoughts anymore.
At first it was just on her dates that we were apart, then she would visit with her current beau at lunch, then after school, then study dates and long phone calls. The time apart grew longer and more frequent. Oh, we were still close, but by the time we were seniors, Charlie lived in a different world than I did.
I had chosen to let her go, to slip away. That's why I didn't tell her about who was bullying me. Too often she would see the bruises or the torn clothing, the lost calculators, the wet swirly hairdo or the underpants fluttering from the flagpole. She knew a little of what I was going through, but not who, unless she caught them in the act. When that happened, God have mercy!
So I was going to have to decide what to do about Charlie. I wanted her to know, I wanted to share this with her. Although, after this afternoon in her room, I wasn't sure she would take too kindly to my 'helping' her masturbate.
I went upstairs about 10:00. Mom could be home this early if it was a slow night at the bar, so Charlie and I avoided her by being in bed when she would get home. She was OK sober, like at dinner, but she drank to forget and did a pretty good job of it. She seemed to know it was unpleasant for us to be around her when she was that way and so she avoided us when she was drunk. Some would call us a dysfunctional family, but they can go fuck themselves, too. Mind their own fucking business, OK?
I had just finished soiling a tissue when I heard my door squeak. It only did that when you were trying to be quiet, which was kind of ironic.
"Dougie?" I heard Charlie whisper. "Are you awake?"
"You know I am, Charlie. You waited until I was finished jerking off. Thanks, by the way."
"Don't be crude, Dougie. I was just being polite."
She came over and sat on the edge of the bed. This, a nocturnal visit, was rare, especially lately.
"Uh, Dougie, earlier this evening, uh, well, were you in my room?"
"Did you see me?"
"Um, no. But I thought, well, I thought — Shit! I think I may be going crazy."
"What happened? Do you want to tell me about it?" My dick had a life of its own and wanted in on the conversation, too, the way it was standing up. Charlie had been looking down at her hands, but I noticed her gaze had shifted to my groin as Mr. Dickie grew.
"I, well, I was, well, uh, doing something and"
"Something personal?" I interrupted.
Charlie glared at me and then burst into laughter. "Yeah, same as you were just doing, OK, Jerk?"
"Just want to get all the facts, Ma'am," I said, in a very bad imitation of Jack Webb.
Charlie rolled her eyes. "Anyway, in the middle I thought someone touched me and I saw you — No. I didn't see you with my eyes, I had overpowering thoughts of you. Then it happened again and then, I felt someone or something 'down there', you know, licking me."
I was quiet. This was almost too much.
"Were they any good?"
Charlie slapped my thigh. "Dougie!"
"Well?"
"The best. Ever."
"Damn! I wish I could take credit. The best ever? Really?"
"Oh, God, Dougie. You have no idea..." Charlie's voice got small as she realized she was talking to me. "Dougie, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said anything, but when you showed up here early when I thought I was alone and then when you smelled me, well, I'm sorry. I got suspicious."
"Hell, yes, I sniffed. What was that smell, anyway? It, well, I've smelled it a couple of times at school in the halls. I was just curious."
Charlie looked at me, then down at Mr. Dickie. "You're growing up too fast, Dougie. That smell is, well, that smell is all girl."
"All girl?" I asked.
"Think about it, Smart-ass. Now, good night."
"'Night, Charlie."