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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.