Prolific: Farm Life Multiplied

Started 1/25/2022

== Disclaimers ==

1. While this starts before the main character is 18, no sexual situations begin until after he turns 18 and thereafter has to move to an apartment for the summer on his own. All other characters are over 18 as well, all subsequent characters are college-aged or older.

2. If you're not comfortable with the mind-control sub-genre, relax, it's a fantasy with some magic, there's nothing forced here, and I hope the ideas play out with some happy-fun aspects.

3. All names are completely invented. Remember, in a world with 8 billion people, if you're one in a million, there's 8,000 people exactly like you.

== Chapter: A Messy Childhood ==

The term 'prolific' typically describes authors or poets, composers or performers, and sometimes chefs. I humbly beg you consider my alternate definition: My life. I'll shed some color, you can decide.

My name is Kevin Kuiper. The below is, more or less, my life story. Some parts are pretty old so you're going to have to remember or imagine a time when phones were attached to walls.

Growing up, I never knew my father. I didn't even know his name. Mom would only ever say that she didn't know his name either, and that some things "Just happened."

In any sane universe, given her rampant alcoholism, I'd have been taken away.

If so, I could have had foster parents and a normal childhood.

Instead, my mother's on-again off-again functional alcoholism translated to her having various jobs as physician's assistant, paralegal, short-order cook, and accountant's assistant, which made sense because although she was a drunk, she was really damn smart.

Her career path was a sequence of jobs that required either daily attendance or some plausible excuse. Since she used excuses fast, she had to move on.

I have vague memories of being super-young and reasonably well cared for - she read to me, played games, encouraged my storytelling and science explorations (though visits to the park were sometimes stumbling on the return trip).

The happy-drunk lady that was 'mom', who cared for me, I ended up caring for when she 'fell down' a bit too often. This made life more and more unreasonable as time passed.

We lived in a crap-den apartment above a busy college bar, so sleeping through the night was more of a life skill than most people have to acquire. It got loud after 3 pm, and there was no way it was good for studying or reading if I had to concentrate.

Silicone earplugs were vital.

My mom introduced me to the public library when I was in kindergarten, and with her permission/urging, I went there directly after school. In those days, we kids just walked around the town with no one watching, because no one was. We were kids, part of the landscape. It wasn't until later that people obsessed about exactly where their kids were every second.

Library closing meant I had to leave by 8:30 pm, or earlier if certain busybody librarians went prowling looking for who I was attached to. I figured out what their schedules were, though, and sought out other places to spend my time.

Did I mention we were in a college town?

The college library, the "Kale Center", was a complex of several interconnected buildings instead of being just one. Some time in 2nd grade, I found a student ID card on the ground outside the Gaston pub where we lived, and it turned out it opened the door to the almost-always empty Mathematics library. From there I could get through the Cartography Library, and then to the Economics Library (each of them had names but who cares, everyone called them Kale-math, or Kale-econ, etc.).

Less populated ones were better, but I stuck around Kale-econ since the student union bistro trashcan was next to the library door.

I ate a LOT of dinners at Kale-econ! Students don't eat all the food they order, and I was damn hungry a lot of days. I wasn't dumb, though, I packed out my trash and left no traces. The bar downstairs had a kitchen and I could get food there sometimes but I had to be cagey about it, and some cooks were cooler than others.

In 4th grade, I started seeing (to my great surprise) someone as short as me walking the Kale hallways. She was a small person, in those days called a dwarf or a midget. I watched her enough to copy her walking gait (oddly stiff-hipped) in the mirror at home, and, with some extra sweatshirts and a stagecraft wig I co-opted (stole) from the theater department, the resemblance was good enough I got away with it!

This ability to blend into a college-aged crowd and yet keep to myself meant I was seldom bothered, though I was whispered about, I could tell that much. Sometimes some student would help me with a door or whatever, which had the added benefit of not having to get out my (lost/stolen) access badge.

To say my schoolwork didn't suffer from these adventures and time spent reading irrelevant books would be a lie. Sure it suffered. But, I read a ton of other stuff that ended up benefiting me in odd ways later - based just on whatever seemed interesting at the time.

At the end of the semester, the second semester after I got into the Kale-econ, I found there was magic in finals week: beautiful free stuff, everywhere!

It wasn't just furniture and clothes that people threw out behind apartments, it was books and papers and supplies, too. They just dumped them in the trash cans - in libraries, behind the greek houses, dorm dumpsters, everything. I brought a lot of it home to either my mother's applause or condemnation, and it didn't matter if she yelled, she usually let me keep the stuff I grabbed because I defended it and she was tired.

Some of what I got was moving-out Found Greatness. We got new furniture, cookware, silverware... and I got BOOKS! I liked books. Sometimes I'd read the same one a Third Time (even though I remembered it) just for the experience.

Something else I got and treasured, though only in semesters after that: class notes.

Most college students take notes. The quality of these notes (upon my wide survey) is highly variable. Good or bad in legibility, cogent thoughts, diagrams, doodles, and how-to specifications, it didn't matter. I sought them out because I could find out what was being said in those classrooms I couldn't get into.

I got to be a connoisseur of notes. After a while, a glance would tell me if they were useful or not, a subject I cared about, etc. Some even smelled like pee or beer, so I had to watch for that, too.

So, that's how I spent my childhood. I didn't go out and play with other kids. We didn't get along. They were always talking about stupid crap and yelling and screaming and running for no reason, and I didn't get that.

It was almost like they didn't have to clean up their mom's puke at night.

Plus, importantly, our apartment wasn't near them anyway. Our bar was a mile or more away from anything like a house (dorms, student apartments, sure, but not houses). Even if I'd had a friend and they were reasonably close, I couldn't keep a bicycle. Behind the bar, they'd always get stolen or wrecked, no matter how I disguised them or locked them up.

So, I just couldn't go over to other people's houses, except for special occasions maybe.

Instead, I lived my life in this set of odd hangouts, wandering in and out of libraries and with my adopted gait and costume, I could walk around campus mostly unobserved. That freedom let me do what I wanted, knowing I had the home-bound shame of an alcoholic mom that would give me huge spankings if I did the wrong thing or got in a fight at school or anything.

In my regular school, though, they asked stupid questions, ones I'd figured out long ago. I just stayed quiet and mostly answered incorrectly to keep them off my back. I figured out early, no one likes a smarty-pants kid. And, getting too many right answers meant having to do more work.

Calculating what homework to do and how many to get wrong, I carefully maintained an average in lower-middle tier status.

If someone found out I was smart, they'd want to talk with my mom.

If they talked with my mom, she'd embarrass me, I'd embarrass her, she'd give me a whupping when we got home, AND we stood a chance I'd be sent somewhere else to live, away from her massively dysfunctional ass and ... that would be bad, she'd said that, and I'd heard it from cops, too.

Anything different was bad.

So, I stuck to my process, and mostly stayed under the radar.

Mostly.

== Chapter: H.S. Sophomore Year ==

By the time I was a sophomore in high school, I didn't need a disguise anymore, and could walk around the college campus at all hours, unperturbed, with one of many lost student badges.

Since I needed money (for clothes or whatever), I found an unofficial part-time job just off campus at the Tri-Delt's ("Teedees") doing kitchen and cleanup work. Great girls! They gave me min-wage in dollar bills and all the free dinner leftovers I wanted. Frankly, that was worth more than the money, since digging through garbage had its own risks.

They were sexy, too, but everyone knew I was underage and they treated me like a little brother, which had perks of getting to ask frank questions in exchange for sitting through the frequently sob-story answers.

I had joined the cross-country team my freshman year, and luckily my coach threw some donated running shoes to me so I didn't kill my feet like in track season when my shoes quite literally fell apart.

On the plus side, though, it turns out that with crap shoes you have to run in toe-strike form. When you're always doing toe-strike, your calves get big and your times go down. Bingo! I was pretty good, and won enough that I had to slow down. My coach must never meet my mother. Ever. Polluting my "normal" school life with my home life? Not Happening.

Friday, October 29th, 10:15 am, I went to gym class like normal.

At the locker room door, my PE teacher stopped me. He said, "Nope. Head to the office. Ms. Beevins [the school secretary] asked me to move some boxes for her and I told her I'd send you. Head out."

I understood the reasoning.

My gym teacher was the soccer coach, and I'd briefly gone out for soccer the year before (and was good because I could run fast all game without getting too winded). I found out about cross country, and switched to that. He didn't like me leaving, and tried to shame me into coming back.

I'd been shamed my whole life, so I knew what that was like and the kind of people that did it. Dodged a bullet there, I knew, but I did have to put up with his shit afterwards 'cuz if I told him what I REALLY thought, yeah, that would get my mom called.

Heading up to the school office, I got in the door and saw Mrs. Beevins, who pointed at the conference room. "In there."

I nodded and went in.

Several people were at the conference table, but no boxes. The school principal, Dr. Clark, motioned me in anyway, then shut the door behind me and pointed to a seat.

Oh, shit!

"Have a seat," he said, sitting down himself and turning on an old-timey cassette tape recorder.

With him were five other people: My AP calc teacher, Mrs. Ardent; my AP chem teacher, Dr. Srinivath; the school social worker Mrs. Veldt; and my sophomore English teacher, Mrs. Jakkob. Some lady in a business suit was there, too, but I didn't start analyzing that until later.

I was freaking out but trying to appear calm.

Dr. Clark said, "Kevin. You're not in any trouble... Yet, at least." The others laughed, like this was funny or something, but then went back to being serious-faced. I felt a pit of worry filling my stomach.

He gestured to Mrs. Jakkob.

She said, "Kevin. At the beginning of the year, I set a list of books, 125 of them, as Assigned Reading Selections. I said, some of the books are hard so pick ones you can have lots of opinions about. Then, you were to write a 'reaction paper' about that week's theme, using what you read as examples. Remember that?"

"Yes, ma'am." Teachers liked 'ma'am' and 'sir', it's like it mattered or something.

"You misunderstood, and for the first week, I let it go because you'd picked 7, and not 2, but that was fine since you did such a complete job with the paper. Remember that?"

"Two? You said 7. Or, it was on the board."

"I said, two. That's not the thing, though. I meant, 2 for the semester, not 2 per week. For the last eight weeks, your papers have been on seven different books, Each Week." She looked at some papers in front of her. "Last week, here. You found common themes of adventure seeking in 'Troilus and Cressida', 'A Separate Peace', 'Dune', 'Fahrenheit 451', 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof', 'Alice's Adventures Underground', and 'The Dhammapada'. That last one wasn't on the list."

"You said I could bring in other works, if they fit! I asked you that?!? In class, you said..."

She cut me off with a wave, "Okay, yes... I did." Inhaling, she asked, kind of irritated (and I was tuned into that) "Did you read all of the books already, or, are you spacing them out?"

"Uh..." I hemmed a little, I wasn't sure what she wanted. "Almost? All, except one. I... kinda skimmed 'Stranger in a Strange Land'. I read it in 4th grade and I remembered most of it, so ... yeah, sort of?"

She nodded and asked, "Name something you thought was interesting in Moby Dick."

I'd read that one the previous summer, everybody kept comparing some movie to it. It had lots of fun bits. My face lit up, "Yeah! Uh, right whales always surface the same number of times, no matter if they're being attacked."

Mr. Clark said, "That's enough. Srinivath?"

"What reagent will turn a carboxylic acid to a primary alcohol?"

I knew that one. "Sodium hydride."

Mrs. Ardent interrupted Dr. Srinivath, "Last week, in the homework problem sheet, I had some 'for fun' problems, remember?"

I smiled at those. "Yeah. Those really were fun. Thanks."

"You doodled on your paper for the one on wolves and rabbits. It looked like a matrix?"

I got nervous. I knew I wasn't supposed to know that yet. "Uh... Yeah? I ... saw that somewhere, it seemed... useful."

"Relax... just wondering. If the wolf planet was in a binary star system, with alternating short and long growing seasons, how would this change?"

I chortled, almost laughed, "Duh, add a column, coefficients are the ratios to the other seasons..." I saw she was smiling, which I took to mean she'd caught a mistake, so I covered with, "But... I'm just guessing, though, we... haven't..."

Dr. Clark said, "Enough." He looked at the lady in the suit, who nodded seriously. I was sure I was in trouble. Instead, he turned to Mrs. Veldt, the social worker. That was never good. I had talked with her early on, and she promised me she'd never let anything I said hurt me.

She had seemed trustworthy, so I told her a carefully edited version of the truth.

He looked at her and said, "Edna? I mean, Mrs. Veldt?"

She looked at me. "Kevin. Your mother... is a singular individual. I've met her."

I must have gasped when she said she'd met my mother. My stomach turned over and the bottom fell out.

She continued, "Relax, though, I'll get to how. So, I asked around, and some people said she has substance abuse problems. I understood from you, clearly, that I was to never, ever contact her. And, I didn't, officially. I went to a bar where she was, and we talked about how hard it is to be around kids, but also a little about statistics."

My face must have continued betraying my horror at hearing this, but also more than a little confusion. I didn't know my mom had that much math.

"Like I said, Kevin, relax. She thought I was a nobody, had no clue I was from the high school, nothing. I didn't give it away. I just listened."

I was seriously wary.

Mrs. Veldt turned to Mr. Clark and she said, "I'll support whatever decision you come to. I'd like to suggest immediate matriculation."

That was a fancy word for starting college, and I wasn't sure I wanted that.

She continued, "At least, though, some kind of emancipation. I've assessed, he has age-appropriate emotional maturity, but his life skills are better than my aunt, and she's 58."

All eyes went back to me, then to Mr. Clark.

He turned to me, his chair mostly faced towards me. I wasn't sure what was going to happen.

His face said he was considering something and said, "Kevin, my father was an alcoholic. I've been where you're sitting." He paused for a moment and let that sink in, and it dawned on me what that life might have been like for him. I think I might have started getting tears in my eyes.

Continuing, he said, "The next few minutes, the next day, can make a world of improvement in your life. I'll give you some options, or you can ask for a compromise, is that okay?"

I nodded. He seemed like a fair guy; I'd not met him before but I'd seen him in the hallways. It wasn't ever a good thing to meet the principal, I was pretty sure but he seemed pretty reasonable so far.

"Option one. You stay at home, we forget this meeting ever happened. You graduate early if you want, or on time with your friends."

"Option two. You quietly move out of your house and into an apartment building with a security code. The state pays for your rent and food. You still come to school here, graduate when you want, nobody knows."

"Option three. You graduate immediately and go live in a dorm, either here, or __(redacted)__ State, or any other state university. Then, whenever you want, you can transfer to Yale, or U Toronto, or MacAlister, or Oxford... They'll be glad to have you. No worries about tuition, room and board with those, they'll give you a free ride."

I kind of sat there, stunned. I didn't quite know what to do.

The other lady at the table said, "My name is Dr.Kleinschmidt. I'm the college's Admissions and Student Life Dean. I have some questions."

My stare and half-nod gave her the go ahead.

"You've been attending big lecture classes and hanging out on campus for 3 years already, that we know of. I've checked. I actually got reports of a kid hanging out in Kale-econ starting about 8 years ago, and I suspect that was you, wasn't it?"

I thought about lying, but I figured they weren't too confrontational so far, so I fessed up. "Yes, ma'am."

"Thought so. Sometimes it happens, we usually let it go unless there's a mess - vandalism or emotional mess, either way. You kept to yourself, though, so I let campus security know to give you a wide berth."

My faith in my disguise ability went out the window. "Oh."

"We have 22 students who are 16 or under. There's a scholarship hall for them. It's not bad. Free meals, some allowance for snack foods and incidentals, a house-mother to suggest that you clean your room sometimes, you know. But you can talk to them; they'll probably tell you she's great."

I was swayed. I admit I paused a long time without saying anything, maybe a full minute. Finally, I asked, "When...?"

Mr. Clark answered. "Whenever. You can even still finish the cross country season, and maybe track in the spring. We have home-school students do it."

I wondered what that would be like.

It was a lot to take in.

== Chapter: College Life ==

Suffice to say, I moved out. Life was soooo much simpler!

Mom was upset, of course, and threw fits, and tried coming to see me, but my house-mother Mrs. Haffarrerr intercepted her and campus security arranged for very few and very supervised visits.

I lived most of the next two years (under her 'supervision') at Murphy, a scholarship-hall ("Schol-Hall") on campus, smack-dab next to all the academic buildings. I made some friends there, and got a reputation as a space cadet because I'd always be thinking of things I'd read and didn't pay "enough" attention to what was going on around me.

After 2 years, they kicked me out of Murphy, right at the year-end before summer. I was about to turn 18 and they had an under-18-only rule. I was plenty upset even though I'd seen it coming - I had a sort-of home there - my first sane home! Life outside seemed exciting and promising, but mostly turned out to be far more inconvenient.