Caleb 3 - Going Home
It took a huge amount of control to not imagine the driver of the car that had just cut me off, almost forcing me into the median, having the same 'accident' as Todd had had in the classroom.
However, the memory of Harold Bleasdale forcing his will onto Andrea and Bob flashed before my eyes. I felt my rage refocus onto him - even though he was likely in a deep, dark hole - and then onto myself. Then I felt a little sick.
The usual moments of sheer terror aside, the drive home was giving me time to judge myself in the balance - the new me, anyhow. It was uncomfortable, but I told myself that it was necessary.
It was a scale, I had decided. At one end, the very worst, there was Harold. He'd barged into a party and started assaulting and molesting people. There had been not a single sliver of remorse. Even when he'd forced his victims to enjoy what he'd been doing to them, he'd only done it to enhance his own perverted satisfaction. I still didn't know if it had been his own limitations, or another facet of his awfulness, that had led to Bob and Andrea's horrified between-states, where they'd both enjoyed the crimes committed against them and hated them at the same time.
I wondered what Harold had been like before he'd found his power. Had he been a reasonable guy, or had he always been a predatory asshole? I found myself hoping for the latter, for obvious reasons.
That only established one extreme, but it was all I had at the moment. It was time to move on to my own case.
I examined each instance where I had used my power. I tried to evaluate my motives for using them, and also the effect they seemed to have had on my victims.
I decided I couldn't be held accountable for Josh's dream. I'd come to conclude that I had indeed caused it, but I'd been a horny teen indulging in some idle fantasizing. There was no way I could have known that it would affect him in any way.
I could, in good conscience, claim the same about Angela lifting her shirt. I still hadn't known I'd had powers, or even had the slightest reason to suspect it. I did, however, wonder whether I had somehow made it easier for Harold to control her. Were people who had been influenced once easier or harder to influence again?
I doubted it would have made a difference. I had not influenced Bob in any way, and Harold had had no trouble controlling him as well.
My first real conscious attempt to control someone was the girl in the line for breakfast. I realized, guiltily, that I didn't even know who she was. I never actually saw her face, being so focused on her ass. I made her take her phone out of her pocket. On a scale of zero to ten, how bad was what I'd done?
I concluded that since she'd suffered no harm or embarrassment, and that neither she nor anybody else seemed to have noticed anything out of the ordinary at all, I would score it a one out of ten, with Harold's behavior being the ten. Not a zero, though. I had forced someone to do something that they were not going to do, almost purely for my own gratification. I could have picked a more innocent test. I'd gotten a better look at her ass out of it.
I was starting to feel a little unhappy with myself.
I moved on to the next incident. It didn't make me feel worse right away. Instead, it gave me real pause.
I had known Kyle and Jennifer for all the time I had been at PSU. They were friends. I'd had long conversations with both about their feelings for each other and knew that they wanted to be together as more than just friends.
I had initially thought that I was doing them a service by allowing Jennifer to break through her fear and show her true feelings for Kyle, but was that the case?
How did I know that during our conversations, they hadn't been telling me what they thought I wanted to hear? Maybe there were other reasons they hadn't gotten together. Out of nowhere, my mind conjured a soap-opera scenario where they were blood relatives, born of infidelity, and had become friends - and resisted becoming more than that - as a way to look out for each other while hiding the shameful truths behind their births.
Fuck!
Had I just forced an incestuous relationship on them?
I physically shook off the notion. I was getting stupid and crazy.
What my random musings did illustrate most clearly to me was that using my power to affect other lives was wrong. I didn't have - could never have - enough information to make those decisions for others, especially not via freaky, quasi-magical powers that I deployed without their knowledge or consent.
I had taken away their free will, no matter that it was done with the best of intentions.
I paused there, again. Had they really been the
best
of intentions?
Had I done it just to help them, or had I been helping myself, too? I'd needed another test, and I'd decided to escalate - and oh, how I had escalated. I'd gone from a girl taking her phone out of her back pocket to a girl grabbing her friend and kissing him out of nowhere, in public. An image of Harold and Angela kissing flashed in my mind, and, once again, I felt sick.
It's funny how the mind works. Through rumination and turmoil, mine settled on a single number: 'six.' Just like that. I almost laughed aloud.
My motives hadn't been wholly selfless, and I'd certainly knocked both Kyle's and Jennifer's lives onto a very different course. I'd also caused them some public embarrassment for good measure. The only reason it wasn't a higher number, I decided, was because I hadn't pushed them to do anything more extreme, and I hadn't imagined them feeling differently about each other. That seemed important, for some reason. Even though I'd violated them terribly, I hadn't actually changed their
minds
.
Still, six was not a good score on the 'sleazometer.' I never wanted to score that high again.
Then there was the kiss. Sue.
I considered my motivations for that. I had already convinced myself that I had power, so there'd been no real need for further proof. It hadn't been an escalation from the test with Kyle and Jennifer - and thank goodness for that. In a word, it had been gratuitous. In another, it had been selfish. Sue and I were good friends, perhaps best friends. How could I have done something like that to my best friend?
I knew that she had offered to take my V-card, and I thought that if I had wanted to take her up on the offer, she would probably have gone ahead with it, but I'd forced her to kiss me when she'd had had no intentions of doing so.
Sexual assault. Technically not, since she had kissed me, but it felt even sleazier to try to rely on a legal system that very obviously did not account for powers like mine being real.
I couldn't even claim it had been a drunken mistake. I'd been stone-cold sober, not driven by drugs or lust or any extraneous emotion other than whimsy. I'd treated a sexual assault
whimsically
.
I figured I should complete the analysis, even though I was already well in the noose. I weighed what harm it had caused.
I didn't think that anyone in the canteen had seen the kiss. It had happened quite fast. People were used to seeing us together, and Sue was not shy. I had seen her multiple times with her tongue down a guy's throat in public.
So, she's a slut and that makes it all right?
SHIT! I didn't mean that. I meant that she wouldn't have been embarrassed to be seen kissing someone in public.
Arguing with yourself is not fun. There's nowhere to hide.
I decided on a Six for the kiss - Although the effect on Sue wasn't as bad as that on Kyle and Jennifer, my motivation for doing it was more suspect. I tried to ignore the feeling that it should be a higher number. I had already decided that six was as bad as I ever wanted to get to. My self-reflection wasn't going well.