Author's Note:
this is the second book of the Zip Files, 'the Saga of a Lesser Supervillain'; covering the adventures of a particularly perverted high school senior by the name of Zachary Zilch. Known to his classmates as Zip, he has just discovered he has the ability to control womens' clothing, and only women's clothing, with his mind. Having discovered these powers (and tried them out on his Biology teacher), he then sets out to try to sleep with every single girl in his class.
While there is an ongoing 'metaplot' that is slowly unfolding, the early books in this series are relatively episodic, and you should be able to mostly read whichever ones strike your fancy. While there are long-term consequences that carry over from story to story, these are mostly consequences that take a while to gestate (um, so to speak...), so don't necessarily come up immediately after the story in question.
This book is a little different than many others in the series; for a couple of reasons it has a 'softer touch' than many that come before and after. After all, this represents Zip's sophomore outing, and while he may have started to figure out the physical ramifications of his new powers, he still has to get used to some of the social and emotional ramifications of what he is setting out to do. This story, among other things, is probably about the closest Zip gets to behaving, in his own twisted way, in a 'heroic fashion' - at least for the foreseeable future. Anyways, enough rambling - on with book 2!
Chapter One - Leotards
When it comes to a man trying to seduce a woman, it is said that confidence is key. But, Zip was swiftly finding out, it was not sufficient.
Right at the start of his self-proclaimed 'quest' to nail every girl in his class, Zip was not currently having a lot of luck. Sitting in the middle of Miss Sablier's classroom, he knew for a fact that each of the four girls around him was ovulating, or close to it. He knew that, inside his pants, he had a weapon that would make their jaws drop in disbelief should they ever see it. These two facts, combined, had so far amounted to one giant honking pair of blue balls and little else.
On Monday, he had tried to talk to Iris Stone, seated behind him, clad in her usual fetching attire of a big bulky leather jacket and teeny tiny denim shorts. She had flipped a page in the magazine she had been looking through, and then pointedly turned her head and talked instead to one of the other girls next to her.
On Tuesday, he had tried repeatedly to initiate an interaction with fit and pretty Kimberly Kim, on his left. She had spent the entire time interacting solely with her phone, giving off no sign that she even knew he existed.
On Wednesday, he had gotten a little desperate. Trying to engineer a meet cute, he had made Rebecca Ramsey's purse tumble over, giving him an opportunity to chase after her and give her her phone back. She had taken it, given him the most curt thank you he had ever had in his life, and then took off, leaving his attempts at a follow-up line bouncing off her short and hypnotically-swaying skirt.
That just left one - unless he wanted to try to pester the same girl over and over without breathing space, which seemed like really bad tactics even to him. Summer Skye, seated on his right. On Thursday, he waited, feeling butterflies in his stomach. Being his fourth choice, he had put the least effort into observing her or figuring out what she was into. Her seat was also conspicuously empty, while almost the entire class was full. He began to have the sickening feeling that he would be striking out entirely this week, which was not going to be good for his momentum or his ego, or his aforementioned confidence.
Then, Summer Skye finally entered. And Zip's jaw promptly dropped.
He had saved her for last for a reason: while in no way short of drop-dead gorgeous (no girl in the 'Joke Class' was), she was also the exact opposite of his 'type'. Zip, to be blunt, liked him some T&A. He liked hourglass figures, big round bottoms, and giant sloshing racks. Summer was not ill-equipped in the 'A' department - though small, hers was extremely muscular and very nicely toned. But she didn't have a whole lot in the 'T' area - they were small, though admittedly very perky. Her overall build was short, slim, and slender.
He had never really learned enough about her to know why that might be. But now, it was blindingly obvious. For the slender girl had just sprinted into class, obviously well aware she was late - wearing the skin-tight high-legged leotard of the school gymnastics team, and very little else. Besides that it was basically sneakers, socks, and her athletic bag thrown over a shoulder. Thumping her incredibly taut and toned ass down into her seat - wiggling against it protected by a very thin and meager coating of red lycra and nothing else - she breathed deeply. Then, turning her head she noticed Zip staring at her. Her eyes glanced down, at her own barely-covered body, and then back up at him, and she blushed slightly. "Sorry," she said, squirming self-consciously. "I... I didn't have time to change after practice..."
Through the shock of seeing her - and so much more of her than he expected - a series of warning lights promptly started to go off within the meager 'dealing with women' center of Zip's brain.
Several things were very off. Girls did not apologize to him. Ever. Nor did they feel the need to justify their wardrobe choices to him. Period. Most of all, being caught by him staring at them made them mad, or disgusted - it did not make them squirm self-consciously the way Summer was doing. Getting her eyes up off her leotard-clad body, Zip got it to her face - and finally noticed that there were some tears in her eyes. Clearly something was up.
"What's wrong?" he promptly asked her - and immediately cursed himself for dropping such an obvious line. But, it turned out to work.
Summer sighed, and briefly looked away. But, from the expression on her face, she needed to unload on someone... and Zip was someone, even if he might not, in her estimation, be much of anything else.
"I... uh... well, to be honest, I just had a big fight with David, in the locker room, so I didn't have time to change." She paused for a moment. "My boyfriend," she clarified for him, realizing Zip was probably not clued into the social scene enough to know that. She rolled her eyes, and sighed. "Well, ex, now..." she said.
The warning bells upgraded to alert klaxons. This was very not normal. If girls didn't do any of the other things already mentioned, they really, really, really never dropped Zip such an obvious opening as mentioning they were currently without a boyfriend. Quite the opposite really. In his brief career attempting to chat up girls, he had had several ladies drop a casual mention of her boyfriend by around about the third sentence... only to find out later through the grapevine that they had none.
Zip decided to go with his gut.
"There's more to it than that," Zip said. "You're not telling me something."
Having turned her face away, growing lost in her own sorrows, Summer had clearly drawn a mental line under their brief conversation and already considered it 'over'. But at this line, she spun her head back around and gasped - her moist eyes growing wide.
"That's true," she said.
