Chapter 1: Pom-Poms and Pheromones
The liquid in the beaker was the color of weak lavender tea. Sherman squinted at it through his thick glasses, the lab’s fluorescent lights bouncing off the glassware. His lab partner, Maya, had already bolted for the weekend, leaving him to finish calibrating the spectrometer. He was pretty sure she’d mixed the wrong ratios for their Polymer Gel project, but proving it meant cross-referencing three different chemical logs.
He reached for his water bottle, his eyes never leaving the screen of his laptop, his fingers fumbling. His elbow caught the edge of the beaker.
“No, no, no—”
It tipped. A cold, slick wave of the lavender liquid sloshed over his wrist and hand, splattering across the keyboard. He gasped, more in annoyance than alarm. It was just a surfactant base, probably harmless. A little sticky.
He grabbed a wad of paper towels, mopping frantically at his keyboard, wiping his hand. The stuff had a faint, metallic scent, like wet pennies and ozone. As he scrubbed his palm, he brought his fingers too close to his face, the smell sharp in his nostrils. A drop of moisture clung to his lower lip. Without thinking, his tongue flicked out to catch it.
It tasted like nothing. Like static.
He finished cleaning, shut everything down, and headed out into the sharp autumn evening. The taste was already forgotten, buried under the usual background hum of his thoughts: the unfinished problem set, the empty mailbox on his dating apps, the looming pressure of another weekend spent alone in the library.
A shortcut behind the gym saved him seven minutes. He took it, headphones in, listening to a podcast about quantum entanglement. The practice field lay in the shadow of the gymnasium, its cracked asphalt worn smooth by years of drills and now slick with the first frost of autumn. The bleachers were half-collapsed, draped in tattered orange fliers for last year’s homecoming. Beyond them, a grove of skeletal trees whispered in a cold wind.
Then he heard the sharp, synchronized voices.
“V-I-C-T-O-R-Y! That’s the wildcat battle cry!”
He paused, peering through the chain-link fence. The cheerleading squad was running through a routine, their red and white uniforms bright against the grey dusk. They were a machine of perfect, swinging ponytails and practiced smiles. Sherman felt the familiar, dull ache of observation. He was a spectator to a world that operated on a frequency he couldn’t access.
The base of a pyramid formed. A flyer, a girl with a tight blonde bun and fierce eyes, was hoisted up. She balanced, one foot in the linked hands of two bases, then launched herself into a soaring liberty. It was impressive, a testament to muscle and trust. Sherman watched, clinically at first.
Then the flyer at the top shifted her weight. She descended smoothly, her legs splitting into a perfect, horizontal line as she was caught, her torso lowering until her chest nearly brushed the knees of the base. It was a controlled, athletic move. But the sheer flexibility of it, the raw physical confidence, the way the uniform stretched—it hit Sherman like a physical blow.
A bolt of pure, undiluted arousal shot through him, hot and shocking. It wasn’t romantic. It was base, chemical, a nineteen-year-old's body reacting before his brain could censor it. He flushed, guilty and glad for the fence between them.
And then everything changed.
The girl in the split froze. Not a wobble, but a total, statue-like arrest mid-motion. The bases holding her froze. The entire squad, mid-clap or mid-step, went perfectly still.
The podcast droned in his ears about linked particles. Sherman pulled one earbud out, confused. Had the coach blown a whistle he hadn’t heard?
As one, every head turned toward him. Sixteen faces. Sixteen pairs of eyes, locking onto his position by the fence. The practiced, plastic smiles melted away, replaced by something wide-open and ravenous. It wasn’t recognition. It was like the moment before a strike.
They dropped their pom-poms. The flyer was lowered carelessly, her feet hitting the asphalt with a thud she didn’t seem to feel. The coach, a middle-aged woman with a clipboard, shouted, “Hey! What are you—?”
Her words died as the squad moved. Not a run, but a swift, synchronized, hungry stride. They bypassed the gate. They came straight for the fence. Their movements were eerily unified, a tide of red and white and intent.
Sherman’s mouth went dry. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic bird. This was wrong. This was deeply, terrifyingly wrong.
The first girl to reach the fence didn’t climb it. She pressed herself against the cold metal, her fingers curling through the links. Her eyes, a vivid blue, devoured him. “Hey,” she breathed, the word fogging in the cold air. It wasn’t a greeting. It was a claim.
Another girl joined her, then another. They formed a line against the barrier, a human tapestry of wanting. One of the bases, a solid girl with powerful shoulders, actually gripped the fence and shook it, making the whole section rattle. “Come here,” she said, her voice low and rough. “Come closer.”
The flyer who had done the split pushed to the front. Her fierce expression had transformed into something desperate and soft. She blinked slowly, like a cat. “You’re beautiful,” she whispered, and it sounded like a prayer.
Terror and a grotesque, swelling excitement twisted together in Sherman’s gut. This wasn’t him. He was the guy who got overlooked in the dining hall line. He wore mismatched socks. He couldn’t talk to the cashier at the bookstore without rehearsing.
But he had done this. The taste of static. The liquid. His own stupid, untamed reaction.
The coach was yelling now, grabbing at shoulders, trying to pull girls back. They shrugged her off like she was a minor nuisance. Their world had narrowed to the lanky, frozen figure on the other side of the chain-link.
One of the girls, her movements dreamlike, began to actually climb, her sneakers finding purchase in the diamonds of the fence.
That broke Sherman’s paralysis.
He stumbled back, his glasses slipping down his nose. He fumbled to push them up, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps that plumed in the air. The thing inside him—the power, the consequence—was a live wire, buzzing and dangerous. He could feel it, a new organ, humming in time with his panic.
He turned and ran, his long legs uncoordinated on the frost-slick asphalt.
The sound that followed him wasn’t shouts of anger or confusion. It was a chorus of longing, a dissonant harmony of voices calling him back, saying his name—a name he was certain he’d never told them.
He didn’t stop until he was locked in his single dorm room, his back against the door, the only sound his ragged breathing and the pounding of his blood. The fear slowly receded, replaced by a dawning, awful understanding. Then, a smile touched his lips. It felt foreign on his face.
He walked to the small, cracked mirror above his sink. He looked at his reflection—the messy hair, the surprised eyes behind thick lenses. He saw a ghost of the boy he was an hour ago.
“Okay,” he said to the quiet room, his voice steadying. “Okay. Let’s test the parameters.”
He spent the next two days in a state of hyper-focused experimentation. He was a physicist, after all. Sort of. The scientific method was his only anchor.
He started small, alone in his room. He thought of Professor Meeks, his ancient, sour Calculus III instructor. Nothing. He thought of the friendly, grungy barista at the campus coffee shop. A flicker of warmth, maybe, but no overwhelming urge to sprint across campus. The effect, it seemed, needed a genuine spark to ignite it. A specific target. And it had to be that kind of spark.
On Sunday afternoon, he ventured out. The campus was quiet. He saw a girl from his Lit class, Jessica, reading on a bench. She had a nice laugh. He focused, let himself notice the way her hair fell over her shoulder. A mild, appreciative hum in his chest. He walked closer, sat on the far end of her bench. She glanced up, gave a polite, distant smile, and returned to her book.
So, proximity alone wasn’t enough. It needed intensity.
He stood up, his heart beginning to race. He looked at Jessica—really looked—and let his mind wander. The fantasy was clumsy, but it was enough. That hot, sharp bolt shot through him again, a private, internal lightning strike.
Jessica’s head snapped up. Her book slipped from her fingers. She stared, her mouth slightly open. The polite distance in her eyes evaporated, replaced by a dazed, consuming focus. “Sherman?” she whispered, her voice thick. “I… I never noticed how green your eyes are.”
“My eyes are brown,” he said, the words automatic.
“They’re perfect,” she breathed, shifting to stand.
He broke the gaze, turned, and walked quickly away, his face burning. He heard a soft, frustrated sigh behind him. When he dared a glance back a minute later, she was picking up her book, looking confused and rubbing her temples.
The parameters were mapping themselves out. Trigger: his own focused, sexual arousal. Target: the specific person it was directed toward. Effect: an overwhelming, compulsive attraction in the target that overrode normal social boundaries and even immediate recall. Duration: unknown. Radius: seemed visual, but needed more data.
It was real. It was terrifying. It was his.
A giddy, unhinged laugh bubbled in his throat. All those years of invisible existence. All the awkward silences, the unmatched swipes, the hollow echo of his own footsteps in crowded halls. They were over. He held a key to a door he hadn’t even known was locked.
He walked, hands in his pockets, seeing the campus through a new, predatory lens. The world was no longer a series of obstacles. It was a menu. The thought should have disgusted him. Instead, it felt like power finally fitting itself into the empty space inside his chest.
On a bulletin board cluttered with ads for used textbooks and upcoming yoga workshops, a neon pink flyer caught his eye.
ΛΔΦ Presents: THE NEON JUNGLE
Saturday Night. 9pm. 1717 Magnolia Drive.
BYOB. Vibrators Get In Free.
The letters were jagged, printed over a stylized panther. A sorority party. The inner sanctum. The kind of event where, a week ago, he would have stood outside for ten minutes, heard the thump of the bass, and walked home, telling himself he had better things to do.
He reached out and peeled a tab from the bottom of the flyer, the phone number curling in his fingers. A lab needed a controlled environment. A party was a target-rich field. Variables everywhere. It was perfect.
He went.
Saturday night, he stood on the cracked sidewalk of Magnolia Drive, looking at the pulsating colonial house. Music spilled out into the cold, carrying with it the shrieks of laughter and the smell of spilled beer. Red and blue light flashed from the windows. Bodies were silhouetted against the blinds.
His old self screamed to run. His new self, the one with the static on its tongue, adjusted his glasses and walked up the steps.
The door was open. He stepped into a wall of sound and heat. The living room was a sea of moving bodies, strobe-lit, tangled. A girl in glitter face paint bumped into him, spiking his shoulder with a plastic cup. “Oops! Sorry, sweetie!” she giggled, not looking at him, already swallowed by the crowd.
He was invisible again. Just another lanky guy in a plain shirt. The power was quiet, a dormant circuit. He needed to activate it.
He pushed through, finding a relatively quiet corner near the back patio sliding door. He leaned against the wall, observing. He saw them. A group of Lambda Delta Phis, obvious in their matching but customized jerseys, holding court on a large sectional sofa. They were flawless in a way that felt manufactured—straight white teeth, shiny hair, laughter a little too loud. He picked one at random. She had a sharp, elegant bob and was holding a red plastic cup like a scepter. She looked bored, surveying her domain with a cool, disinterested gaze.
Sherman focused. He let the noise of the party fade. He looked at the girl with the bob—the arch of her eyebrow, the disdainful curve of her lip. He imagined what it would take to shatter that coolness. The thought itself was the spark. The bolt hit, a focused surge of want directed like a laser.
Across the room, the girl’s cup dipped. Her head turned, slowly, precisely, as if on a tracking system. Her bored eyes scanned, locked, and flooded with a warmth so sudden it looked like fever. She stood up, her friends’ conversation halting midsentence as they watched her.
She walked straight through the dancing crowd, people parting for her determined stride. She stopped inches from Sherman. The smell of her perfume, expensive and floral, mixed with the beer sweat of the room.
“You’re not drinking,” she said. Her voice had lost its lazy drawl. It was urgent, intimate.
“I just got here,” he said. His own voice sounded strange to him.
“I’m Tara.” She didn’t wait for his name. “This music is terrible. Do you want to see the upstairs? It’s quieter.” Her hand came up, her fingers brushing the fabric of his sleeve. “I have to show you this… sculpture in the hallway. It’s terrible. You’ll hate it.”
It was the worst, most transparent line he had ever heard. And it was being delivered to him by a girl who, fifteen seconds ago, looked like she’d rather be anywhere else. A wild, triumphant laugh threatened to burst out of him. He swallowed it.
He looked at her hungry, waiting face. He looked past her, at the swirling chaos of the party. He had an entire laboratory of variables here. One test was just the beginning.
“Sure,” Sherman said, a slow smile spreading across his face. “Show me the terrible sculpture.”
Tara’s hand was on his arm, her grip firm and proprietary as she led him through the throng. No one looked at him. They looked at her, and then their eyes slid away, uninterested in the awkward boy she was pulling along. They ascended a carpeted staircase, the bass from below vibrating through the handrail. The upstairs hallway was darker, lined with closed doors and a single, ugly abstract painting—presumably the “terrible sculpture” in her lie. She didn’t even glance at it.
She opened the third door on the left. It was a bedroom, clearly belonging to someone’s little brother. Sports pennants on the wall, a model spaceship on a shelf, a twin bed with a navy blue comforter. The only light came from a striped novelty lamp shaped like a rocket.
She closed the door. The sound of the party became a dull, distant throb. In the sudden quiet, her breathing was loud.
“So,” Sherman said, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat. “The sculpture was…”
“Shut up,” she said, but it wasn’t angry. It was desperate. She stepped into him, her body pressing his back against the door. Her hands came up to frame his face, her thumbs tracing his jawline. “Your skin is so soft. How is your skin so soft?”
Her mouth found his. It wasn’t a kiss; it was a consumption. Her tongue pushed past his lips, tasting of vodka and lime. Sherman stood frozen for a second, his brain short-circuiting. Then instinct, crude and hungry, took over. He kissed her back, his movements clumsy, his glasses digging into the bridge of his nose. He fumbled to take them off, setting them blindly on the dresser beside the door.
Without them, Tara was a beautiful, eager blur. Her hands were everywhere, pulling at his shirt, yanking it free from his jeans. Her own jersey was over her head in one swift motion, tossed to the floor. She wore a lace bra the color of champagne. He stared, his mouth dry.
“Touch me,” she whispered, grabbing his wrists and placing his palms on her ribs. Her skin was furnace-hot. “Please.”
He did. He learned fast. His initial awkwardness burned away in the pure, focused heat of her need. There was no game, no seduction, no wondering if he was doing it right. Every fumble, every rough grab, she met with a gasp and pulled him closer. She was a mirror reflecting his own desire back at him with a terrifying, amplified intensity.
She undid his belt buckle with frantic fingers. The button of his jeans popped. He helped her, shoving them down his hips along with his boxers. The cold air of the room hit him, followed by the shocking heat of her hand wrapping around his cock.
“Fuck,” he hissed, his head thudding back against the door.
She sank to her knees. Her blonde bob swung forward. He looked down, watching in a state of surreal disbelief as she took him into her mouth. Her tongue was flat and hot, swirling around the head before she took him deeper. Her eyes were closed, her brow furrowed in concentration, like she was performing a sacred duty. She moaned around him, the vibration shooting straight up his spine.
He tangled his hands in her hair, not guiding, just holding on. The sensations were too much—the wet suction, the scrape of her teeth, her nails digging into his thighs. It was raw, sloppy, and profoundly obscene. He’d watched porn, but this was different. The smell of her perfume, the taste of her lip gloss still on his mouth, the muffled cheers from a party downstairs that had no idea what was happening in this childhood bedroom.
“I want you inside me,” she panted, pulling off him with a wet sound. She stood up, pushing him toward the bed. He stumbled, his knees hitting the edge of the mattress, and fell back onto the scratchy comforter.
She hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her skirt and panties, shoving them down her legs. She didn’t climb onto the bed. She straddled him, one knee on either side of his hips, and hovered there for a second, a sleek, blurred silhouette against the rocket lamp. Then she reached between them, took his cock in her hand, and sank down onto him in one slow, inexorable slide.
Sherman cried out. The sensation of being inside another person was a shock that obliterated thought. It was tight, impossibly hot, and wet. She was so wet.
She began to move, riding him with a ferocious, rhythmic intensity. Her head fell back, tendons standing out in her neck. “Yes,” she chanted, a breathless, ragged word. “Yes, yes, fuck, you feel so good, you’re so deep…”
He gripped her hips, his fingers pressing into the soft flesh, finding bone. He helped her, driving up into her as she came down, the bedsprings creaking a frantic, rhythmic complaint under them. The model spaceship rattled on its shelf.
He was a quick study. His body, denied for so long, was screaming at him to finish, but his mind—that cold, analytical part—was watching, learning. He could feel the power humming between them, a closed circuit. Her arousal was a feedback loop, magnified by his and beamed back at her tenfold. She wasn’t faking. This was a compulsive, chemical frenzy.
He rolled her over, pinning her beneath him. The shift in angle made her shriek, her legs wrapping around his back, her heels digging into his ass. He fucked her harder, faster. The clinical observations shattered. There was only this: the slap of skin, her choked sobs of pleasure, the sweat making their bodies slick. He was grunting, animal sounds he didn’t recognize as his own.
“Come in me,” she begged, her voice broken. “Please, I want to feel it, please, Sherman…”
The sound of his name on her lips, in this context, triggered his climax. It ripped through him, a white-hot detonation that left him blind and shuddering. He drove into her one last, final time as he emptied himself, a long, pulsing release.
He collapsed on top of her, his weight driving a soft oomph from her lungs. They lay there, slick and tangled, breathing in ragged unison. The party sounds seeped back in.
Slowly, the fever broke. He felt it leave her body first. The desperate tension in her limbs melted away. The hand that had been clawing at his back now lay flat, fingers twitching slightly.
Sherman rolled off, staring up at the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling. His heart was a triphammer against his ribs.
A minute passed. Two.
“Oh, my God.”
Tara’s voice was different. Small. Clearer.
Sherman turned his head. She was sitting up, pulling the comforter over her bare chest. She stared straight ahead, at the opposite wall. Her expression was one of dawning, horrified clarity.
“What… what did I just…” She looked down at the mess between her legs, at him lying naked beside her. Her face paled. “Who are you?”
“Sherman,” he said. His voice was hoarse.
“I have a boyfriend,” she whispered, not to him, but to the room. “He’s a law student. He’s in D.C. this weekend.” She brought a trembling hand to her mouth. “I don’t do this. I don’t… fuck strangers in my little brother’s bed.” She looked at him, and now her gaze was sharp, bewildered, and filling with a disgust that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with her own actions. “Why did I do that? I felt like I was going to die if I didn’t…”
She scrambled off the bed, gathering her clothes, holding them in front of her like a shield. “You need to go. Right now. Get out.”
Sherman sat up. He felt empty. Clean. Powerful in a cold, profound way. He reached for his glasses, put them on. The world snapped back into sharp, intelligible focus. He looked at Tara, at her smeared makeup and terrified eyes, and he understood the final parameter.
The effect wasn’t permanent. It broke, like a spell, after climax. And it left confusion, shame, and no genuine connection in its wake.
It was perfect.
He dressed slowly, deliberately, while she turned her back, struggling into her skirt. He didn’t say another word. He opened the bedroom door. The hallway roar of the party felt like applause.
As he descended the stairs, he adjusted his shirt. He could still smell her on his skin. He felt the eyes of the partygoers on him again, but this time, he knew it was just his imagination. He was invisible once more.
He stepped out into the biting autumn night, the cold air a baptism. He took a deep, shaking breath, and then he started to laugh. It was a quiet, incredulous sound that turned into something fuller, darker.
It worked. It fucking worked.
He had a lot more experiments to run.