Miracle (boyxboy)

Chapter Fifteen

Over the next couple of weeks, I conducted more deliberate experiments. I developed the habit of carrying my notebook and Ezra's pheromone blocker everywhere I went, and after multiple forays to the grocery store, the park, the bank, and just roaming different parts of town, I had made some important discoveries.

First, I definitely had a different effect on different people. I only seemed to impact guys who were in or past puberty themselves. Kids and pre-teens seemed oblivious, but anyone old enough for hormonal acne and embarrassing vocal drops had at least some measure of noticeable response when I got up close.

Some seemed disgusted by me, while others had an obviously lecherous reaction. Only a few seemed inclined to act on it, though I had yet to figure out how to predict which ones would. Most gave me dirty looks... of one sort or another. A few, like Marvin, went out of their way to avoid me. I noticed that every time I went to the dollar general he would disappear into the back, and some other clerk came to ring me up. It meant I couldn't pick up cigarettes for Mom anymore, which made her pretty mad, but I told her I hadn't seen her friend at the store for a while and thankfully she let it go.

What had surprised me most was a heavyset guy in his forties who worked at the local Walmart, who behaved in much the same way Pete did. He straightened his vest, smoothed his thinning hair, and blushingly offered me a free Coke from the vending machine by his checkout counter. The difference was, as he scanned my pack of M&M's and the novel I was buying, I got the clear impression that he was gay regardless of my pheromones. I don't know if I would have picked up on it if I hadn't been studying people's behavior all week. But once I realized it I had to give him a smile of solidarity. There was another gay person in Prickly Pear. Who would have thought?

As I walked out the sliding glass doors, I wondered if that guy was as lonely as me.

The second thing I learned was how my moods factored into the potency of what I was giving off. I didn't have any tools to measure output, so my only available gauge was the behavior of men around me, which varied from person to person. It was a maddeningly imprecise way of trying to study the phenomenon, but at least there was enough of a pattern to draw a few reliable conclusions.

Fear was by far the greatest trigger, and that was disturbing because it was hardest to control. Ironically, when I started getting nervous about someone's reaction to me, their reaction intensified—and so did the likelihood that other men in the vicinity would notice me as well, and from greater distances away. That, in turn, increased my alarm, which devolved into a dangerous, self-perpetuating cycle. I learned quickly to excuse myself to someplace private where I could spritz the blocker formula down the front of my pants as soon as someone started giving me the heebie jeebies. I'd spray my neck and underarms too, for good measure. And while it made a distinct difference, just as Ezra promised, I also found myself wondering how much of the effect was a placebo. I believed the spray made me safer, so I calmed down. Which then actually did make me safer.

Had Ezra's tests accounted for that? Or was the 70% figure he'd quoted based solely on the chemical properties of the liquid? I guess as long as it worked I shouldn't have worried about it, but I was curious to the point of frustration. How had he measured it up to this point? Did he have living test subjects? Or had he moved beyond clinical trials to a real world case study—meaning me? Was he using me right now to further his research?

Anger was another state of mind that got me into trouble. In general, if I went out among people while I was in a bad mental place, I ended up attracting a lot more of the scarier kinds of guys. Or the guys that I attracted were scarier about it, I wasn't sure which. That was going to take more experimenting.

I kept the watch on, like Ezra asked, and spent hours trying to determine if its readouts indicated how much pheromone I was giving off. But I hadn't been able to work up the courage to talk to him after his last visit. He hadn't called me either, not even to scold me for cruising around town like I had been. The more data I collected, the more tempted I was to reach out to him. I had so many more questions. Did he know the correlation between mood and pheromone production already? Did he have a way of predicting which men would react with violence? How exactly did the spray formula work? Could the watch be programmed to alert me when my levels were getting bad? That would be incredibly handy.