Jack Merrick had been born a true loser.
As a child he had a propensity for injury in the safest areas and could never keep a friend longer than a month. As he grew up, his problems grew worse. He acquired a small stutter and a type of lankiness that lends itself to clumsiness. Furthermore, he attracted bullies like magnets attract iron and thus even his average looks became quickly hid by cuts and bruises. His unwillingness and inability to fight back seemed to only increase the poundings.
As a student he had only slightly better luck. He was bright, brighter even than most of his teachers, but he always seemed to suffer from bizarre twists of fate. His tests would constantly be lost by his stricter teachers and he was one of the few students in the world that had to take special precautions NOT to have his homework eaten by dogs.
With the girls, Jack had not even tried. He knew deep in his heart that no matter how romantic or perfect he was, something would backfire to make it a traumatic event and Jack already had more than his share of those. So while the rest of his high school had their mating rituals and triumphs, Jack kept his head down and stayed out of their way.
And so the fates toyed with Jack’s life for 18 years as Jack sunk deeper into himself. Then all of a sudden, Jack’s luck finally showed up.
It was on his 18th birthday. No one had congratulated him, no one had even remembered, but Jack had grown used to this. Jack in fact had grown too used to it as he climbed to the top of his high school’s gym.
It had been after school when most everybody had already gone home. He hadn’t meant to jump; in fact he had become far too jaded in his life to even consider suicide. He had in all honesty come up to enjoy the view of the horizon and the feel of the wind on his face. However, with his luck being as one-sided as it was, he should have known better than to push it.
Why there had been a coil of wire on the roof, Jack never knew, but he had still tripped on it that fateful day. The plunge had been short and sudden and his life didn’t even bother flashing before his eyes. When he hit the ground face first the world went dark and that was it.
He woke up an hour later. He had failed even to die. Clutching his head, he swore with words that he had not even known that he knew. Yet through the pain he felt…different. Jack didn’t know what it was, relief at surviving the fall, perhaps, or maybe a brief feeling of immortality? He looked at his hands and they seemed more real as if they hadn’t been real before.
Jack hadn’t realized it then, but what he had just experienced was a karmic snap. This is when someone who has had nothing but the worst karma for a long time suddenly gets the other extreme in one big blow. What this meant, Jack was about to slowly discover.
Jack first noticed his change of fortune when he examined himself after the fall. Though he ached all over and had a migraine that would kill a bull, he had no serious injuries. He had survived the fall relatively unscathed and unmarked. Breathing a sigh of relief, he had walked home alone and listened to the robins in the trees. Had he been less shocked by his brush with death, he may have noticed that he knew exactly what they were singing about.
The next day, his headache had dulled to a mild roar. It was as if his brain was slowly throbbing to some strange frequency and pitch. It was uncomfortable, but not enough for him to try and weasel out a sick day. So he popped an aspirin and headed off to school where he began his first lesson in his new luck.
It was in his first class of the day, calculus. The teacher was droning about some mathematical concept that Jack highly suspected he would never so much as glimpse at in his later life and so he let his attention wander. His eyes began scanning the classroom and he briefly caught the eyes of Christi Baker gazing absent-mindedly at the window behind him.
Christi Baker was a cheerleader, and as such had developed a very shallow and bitchy attitude toward most of the school. She had the type of blonde-hair that actually affected I.Q. and it fell just past her shoulders in just the way to truly drape. Down lower, as Jack had often noticed, she wore a tight miniskirt with long toned legs that were kept so silky smooth that they actually gleamed. Up above she wore a tank top that not only accentuated, but also mostly revealed her large d-cup breasts. Jack had the traditional adolescent fantasies about her and had derived much voyeuristic pleasure from watching her fidget and shift her weight. He knew deep inside that such a woman was so far out of his reach that it wasn’t funny, but it made him feel good to dream.
He had gotten lost in his thoughts and thus didn’t notice that she had noticed him. “Ugh, that loser is staring at me,” he heard her say. He looked around embarrassedly to see if anyone was going to turn and laugh at his brief voyeurism. No one seemed to hear it though.
“I lucked out,” he thought guiltily as he took another glance at Christi. She was staring out the window again in her usual daze.
“I wonder if I have time for a pedicure before cheer practice today,” he heard her muse. Except this time, watching her, he realized that she hadn’t said anything.
“Telepathy,” he thought cynically. “No way. No possible way. I can’t be hearing her thoughts, it’s not possible.”
All of this he thought and knew deep down in his soul. He knew that in reality one could not see into people’s minds, that such powers were myths and fantasies. However, since Jack had spent most of his life trying to forget reality this knowledge was only so much water under the bridge.
Nervously glancing around the room he tried to see into the minds of those in the room. Most were daydreaming or thinking about trivial matters. A couple thoughts had surprised him though. Sayoko, a shy Asian girl who dressed ultra-conservative with a cross every day, had been recollecting the hot night she had had with her boyfriend the night before when Jack had tuned in on her. He lingered a bit, but left before his arousal from his psychic voyeurism became “noticeable.”
Eventually though, he returned to his original subject, Christi, and delved deeper into her mind. He could nearly see the realms of her mind as he explored. He knew where the memories were and accessed one out of random. It had been of a blowjob she had given to her boyfriend, Curtis Miller, the school’s all-star quarterback and all-around asshole, underneath the stadium’s bleachers. Jack remembered with pain all the black eyes that Curtis had given him over the years and an evil thought crossed his mind.
He tried to shake the thought from his mind, but another memory caught his attention. It was one of him being thrown by Curtis down the stadium’s steps. Except this time, he was seeing it from Christi’s eyes and feeling her joy as she laughed at the sight of Jack bouncing down like a human ball. The evil thought caught hold. Jack decided to try an experiment.
He continued his tour of Christi’s brain, noticing for the first time how much empty space there was in a human brain. Jokes about airheads danced in his head as he found what he was looking for. He smiled as he glanced at the nerves and hormones that ran the animal brain and reflexes. His smile began to pulsate with megalomania when he found the cerebral cortex. Cracking his metaphorical knuckles, he went to work.
