Sociopath? (5 page)

* *

He sighed. “It would be nice if Mom or one of
the girls would have this talk with you but I guess it’s not going
to happen so I suppose it’s up to me. Do you know anything about
menstrual periods, Lane?”

“No.”

“Okay, here’s the way it works. When a girl
reaches puberty, which you’re probably almost there, she has what
are called periods. That means, every month she has a few days when
she bleeds from between her legs. It’s going to happen one of these
days so don’t be scared when it does. It’s just a natural thing. I
snuck into Annecy’s room and got some Kotex.” He brought one out.
“See, you just put them down in your panties. They’ve got these
adhesive strips that make them stick on. They soak up the blood. I
put a package in the bathroom under the sink. Some girls have bad
stomach cramps when they have their period. I also snagged you some
pills called Midols. They’re in the medicine cabinet. If you start
your period and have a stomach ache, take one of them. They say it
helps to put a hot water bottle on your belly too if it’s really
bad. Do you have any questions about any of this, Lane?”

“It sounds yucky. I don’t think I’m going to
like it.”

“Probably not, but you’ll have to get used to
it because you’ll be putting up with it for a long time.”

She was glad it was Rafe who told her about
periods. She probably would have been embarrassed to talk to her
mother or one of her sisters about such personal stuff but there
was nothing she couldn’t talk to Rafe about.

* *

No parent had ever attended any of their
parent-teacher conferences.

“God,” said Mr Leslie, “if I had a son like
Rafe Vincennes, I’d want to go to his conferences just to collect
all the kudos. He’s never gotten anything other than an A in his
whole school career. He’s going to graduate next year with an A
plus average and take all advanced courses in what would normally
be his senior year and the kid’s only 14. He got the highest SAT
scores any Benedict student ever received. He’s got the most yards
per carry of anyone on the football team; the most home runs on the
baseball team and the highest point per game average on the
basketball team. They’ve got what seems to be a dream child and
it’s like they don’t even notice!”

“Well, you know, he’s got eight brothers and
sisters. Maybe they just got tired of being parents.”

“It’s turned him into a self-sufficient
little shit, I’ll say that for him. It doesn’t seem to bother him
any. He appears to be totally self-reliant.”

“I was teaching elementary when Linda Dee had
him in her class. She told me she thought he was a sociopath.”

“What the hell was she talking about? I’ve
never seen anyone more well-adjusted than Rafe Vincennes.”

*

Rafe had learned a lot about smiling by then.
He still didn’t do it frequently but he knew when it would do him
the most good. He spent a great deal of time studying people when
they weren’t aware of it. He sensed that he wasn’t quite normal
(although he’d read up on sociopathy by then and he was far from
convinced that he fit the classic definition). Because he
mistrusted people, he ignored what they said but watched to see
what they actually did instead, which usually wasn’t the same thing
at all. Humility, for instance. It was supposed to be an admirable
quality, but that was just lip service. Humility was more often
viewed as arrogance in disguise.

The reality was that it was easy to mold the
opinion most people had of you because, unlike him, they would
usually buy right into whatever you presented to them. You couldn’t
take credit for things you couldn’t achieve, of course, or you’d be
looked down on as a braggart but someone had told him once that it
wasn’t bragging if you could back it up and Rafe could always back
it up. He hadn’t found anything yet he couldn’t excel at if he set
his mind to it. Like chess. One of his teachers asked him if he’d
be interested in learning how to play chess and within a month,
Rafe was winning every game. Mr. Dean hadn’t seemed upset about it
though. He told Rafe he only wanted to see if that’s what would
happen like he expected it would and it did, so Rafe guessed it was
sort of a test to check a theory Mr Dean had about him.

He felt like what he was doing was building a
library of emotional reactions so that he could call on the most
effective one depending on the occasion. He knew when he should be
a little cocky (making the winning touchdown in football, for
example) because that’s what people wanted and expected and when he
needed to lend a sympathetic ear. He knew how much it pleased
people when he flattered them (“we would never have won if the
defensive line hadn’t been so awesome). He grinned a little to
himself. He’d become a whiz at faking sincerity and the smile was
part of that. He had checked its effect many times since Miss Dee’s
class and found it could change enemies into friends and suspicion
into trust and that when he turned it on full-bore, the happy
recipient could almost always be convinced to see things his way.
He’d also learned that it worked equally as well with males as
females.

The truth was that his old school counselor
had been right. He didn’t much care what people thought of him, not
really. It was more like an intellectual challenge. He approached
it like he would about learning any subject. Pleasing People or
Physics. You could get an A+ in either one if you put the time and
effort into learning the relevant formulas.

If there was one thing he couldn’t do
anything about, it was his eyes. If he stared at some people too
long, he could sense them getting nervous so he’d taught himself to
only look at them directly for a few seconds before turning his
gaze. He used the smile to deflect attention from the eyes. When he
looked away, they only saw curly black lashes, as long as any
girl’s.

~ ~ ~

By the time Rafe was 13, he was sexually
active. What he did with Lane didn’t count. That was a special
thing that was self-contained in a whole different compartment in
his life. That would always exist no matter what else happened. He
owned Lane and always would.

He was still as lean and lithe as he had been
as a child but his body was harder now and stronger. He still made
people think of a feral cat. His movements appeared so sinuous and
languid that it was always surprising how quickly he was suddenly
somewhere else. The eyes of school girls, and sometimes teachers,
followed him down the hall, drawn to those narrow hips clad in
tight jeans. His face had become more refined too with nothing left
of the little boy. Now he was all high cheekbones and chiseled
features. He still wore his black hair a little too long so that he
was always having to brush it out of his eyes. He had no idea, or
maybe he did, how many females had the urge to reach out and brush
it back for him. Sometimes, they were so much older, they flushed
thinking about having such thoughts about a 13-year-old. The black
eyes that made some anxious drew others, although they didn’t make
even those people feel comfortable, more like they were turned on
by the possibility of living dangerously. He was tan as a gypsy,
all over, because when he sunbathed on the boat, he preferred being
naked.

So, if anything, when it came to females, his
biggest challenge was narrowing down his choices. He gravitated
toward the older girls because they had cars and a car meant being
able to get to the cabin on Mount Vincennes where they could have
sex in private. There was never any competition for the cabin now
because all the others were grown and gone. Even Annecy was 19 and
in college. So it was his own little sexual kingdom and he took
full advantage of it.

Sometimes, when he heard a girl moaning
beneath him as she reached her climax, he silently tipped his hat
to Lane. She’d been his little sexual guinea pig. Because she
trusted him so much, she was completely open and unself-conscious
about telling him what felt the best and he transferred those
revelations to the other females in his life.

It worked out very well because so many
girls, he’d learned, weren’t like Lane. They were shy and backward
about letting you know what pleased them. They just left it up to
him to guess, but he didn’t have to guess. He knew exactly what to
do. It was one of his claims to fame, although only expressed
inwardly, that no female ever left the cabin without having been
brought to orgasm. He didn’t see them as notches on his belt
exactly but he placed a mental checkmark beside each name as she
sighed in satisfaction.

“My God, how did you get so good at this at
13?” they would ask, “I’ve slept with college men who haven’t a
clue how to satisfy a girl like you do.”

And that was a good time, he’d discovered, to
flash his smile and then lean down to kiss them so they didn’t want
to talk anymore.

*

His worst problem with girls turned out to be
how to gently get rid of them when he was ready to move on. He
never fell in love with any of them. Actually, he thought of them
as being more or less interchangeable. He’d learned to call them
all Sweetheart. That way he’d never hurt their feelings by saying
the wrong name if he forgot just which one was giving him a blow
job at the time. He liked a lot of them just fine but he always
looked forward to seeing what the next one would be like.

*

After some trial and error, he found that it
was best just to be blunt.

“I’ve really enjoyed being with you,” he
would say to cushion the blow, “but I’m not a one-girl kind of guy.
Let’s just remember the fun we had and let it go at that. Now,
c’mon, Sweetheart, and give me a kiss good-bye”.

Sometimes they were pretty unhappy. He’d had
criers and he’d had screamers, but usually all he had to do was
stare them down with those unsettling black eyes and they subsided
quickly enough. They probably knew anyway what to expect because he
had definitely developed a reputation for lovin’em and leavin’em
and even though some of them might have hoped to change his nature,
most likely they guessed shortly into it that it wasn’t going to
happen.

* *

At fourteen, he became involved with the
bored housewife on the next estate over from Heron Point. They met
when they were out on their respective boats. Sun-worshipper that
he was, he’d been lying on the deck, baking, enjoying the rocking
of the waves, listening to the seagulls cry, breathing in the fishy
fragrance of the bay. He heard her call over, “hey, neighbor!”
She’d recognized the name of the cigarette boat, Hard Charger, from
having seen it tied up to the Heron Point dock.

He stood, naked. “Hey, neighbor,
yourself.”

He enjoyed hearing her catch her breath a
little seeing him but he made no move to put on his trunks. She
herself wore a turquoise bikini. He thought she was probably in her
middle 30’s, a very beautiful middle 30’s. She was sleekly golden
from head to toe - a lovely gold body, long gold hair, gold-flecked
hazel eyes.

“I’m Alexis. I live next door to you.”

“Are you the people who bought Bay
Front?”

“Yes, we just moved in about a month
ago.”

“You’ll like it here - we’re a friendly
bunch.”

Flirtatiously, “how friendly?”

“Most of us are very friendly and a few of us
are extremely friendly.”

“And which one are you?”

“Depends on how friendly you want me to be.”
His cock was getting hard. He looked down at it and grinned that
quick grin. “In fact, I think I’m feeling friendlier by the
minute.”

“My husband’s in Hong Kong. It’s been pretty
lonesome being where you don’t know anyone. Would you like to come
over for lunch?”

“No,” he said, “I’m not hungry but I’m open
to a better offer. I’m not much of a game player, Alexis,
(chuckling inwardly as he said it, thinking if he had been
Pinocchio, his nose would have just grown about a foot), just tell
me what you want.” It was a setup on his part, of course.

“I want you to fuck me, does that answer meet
with your approval, Sir?”

Bingo! With that response, he knew exactly
what role he’d need to play. He thought most females gave you clues
about their innermost sexual desires right away if you could read
them and he had an innate ability to interpret those signals. He
knew with this one, he’d have to be the master, whether she
realized it about herself yet or not.

“That’s the answer I was looking for.” (And,
in a way that was true). “I’ll meet you there.”

“Oh, by the way, what’s your name?”

“Rafe.”

*

It was his first time with a mature woman and
he had to admit it was one hell of a learning experience. The first
time, he fucked her in the hot tub and she went down on him on the
deck. Then they did it all again on her big brass bed. In the
morning, she woke him sucking his nipples and fondling his balls
and when he was stiff, she got on top and rode him hard until they
lay beside one another, panting and replete.

*

“Where were you, Rafe,” Lane asked him when
he came whistling down the hall. “You’ve stayed out late before but
never all night.”

“I slept over with a friend, Laney.”

“I never knew you had a friend, Rafe.”

And that was true. He was friendly to
everyone but friends with no one. He’d never invited another guy
home with him to go riding or boating, didn’t hang out after
school. He felt no need to confide in anyone about anything.

“Well,” he said, “I expect this will be a
short-term relationship.”

*

When he walked into her waterfront mansion
the next time, she was spread-eagled on her kitchen table with
dollops of whipped cream covering her nipples and her box.

“Dessert first, Baby,” she told him. “Come
and eat me.”

He slipped out of his shorts which was all he
was wearing.