C.A.R.P. Ch. 05

Part Five - Sophomore Year, Fall Semester

Whatever I expected out of my sophomore year, that isn't at all what happened. Between the events of the fall and the events of the spring, I started to learn just how much not only I was changing but my outlook and perception on life itself was changing.

I've mentioned this before, but Dr. Igarashi had a way of essentially convincing you that you'd come up with an idea she'd actually suggested to you. I'm still not entirely sure how she did it, whether it was some sort of hypnosis trick or neurolinguistic programming or just good old-fashioned conning, but a lot of the core beliefs that I adopted in sophomore year I'm betting came from her suggestions and not from my own deductive reasoning.

Our second partner, Chelsea, wasn't even close to what Julia and I had thought she'd be like, and she arrived under rather chaotic and unexpected circumstances. It was the first time an entire second wave of students were rolling onto campus, and I'd sort of expected... well, I'm not entirely sure what I expected. But having the freshman alphas show up before anyone else? That wasn't even in the realm of what I'd considered.

As you probably remember me telling you, during my freshman year, the betas all showed up basically a week before the alphas did, but I guess that was only because we were the first class, because that never happened for any of the following years. In those, the freshman alphas always were the first to show up for the fall semester, ahead of any additional students that were being introduced to the campus.

This gave the older alphas a chance to explain things to the newer alphas how things were going to go, and to set expectations properly about what was and wasn't fair game. Each of us was given a handful of students to 'mentor,' and I drew three names - Ali, Jake and Brianna, each of whom had loads and loads of questions, but all of whom seemed like they were good enough people. They didn't just have questions for me, either, but also Julia, who was kind with her time and willing to be open about how unusual the program was, but that it worked.

I did notice during freshman orientation that there were a lot more women in the alphas for this incoming freshman class than there had been in ours. It was thirty-five women compared to the fifteen men in the class. Based on that, I remember deciding that each year would be different than the preceding year. I'd find out next fall that I was right, but I shouldn't skip ahead too much when I'm telling you about all of this, because the order of my discoveries figures into some of this, I'm sure, even if I can't see it.

The three people I were mentoring were very much in the same vein of what kind of person I was - mostly a loner, not a strong friend group, not a lot of family attachments with a strong sense of drive to make a mark on the world that lasted beyond when we were gone. Ali and Brianna both had interesting paths mapped out for themselves that I could barely wrap my head around. I'm sure you know them both, though, based on where they are now. Ali Ferguson is the CEO of FarDream Industries, which has the telecom company, the electronics company, the food company... I've lost track of how many fingers in pies FDI has. Brianna Greene is the US Ambassador to China. Jake's not doing anything these days, for reasons that'll become clear later.

The freshman alphas had shown up about ten days before fall classes were scheduled to start, and their betas began trickling in literally the next day, first thing in the morning. They were pretty much in line with our alphas - they were all ridiculously fit, beautiful and sexually aggressive. As soon as they showed up, since our alphas knew what to expect, they typically didn't leave their dorms all that much for the next day or two.

One of the things that Julia and I had talked about was that we weren't sure if our later partners were going to be transfer students with a year's equivalent of education or freshman. The Friday before the week of classes starting, an orientation was called, and all of Class 1 (that was us, the first class of CARP) were brought into the large lecture hall, which could hold about 150 people total.

"Good morning, students of CARP," Dr. Igarashi said from her podium up front. "This coming year in particular, we have been presented with a very strong opportunity, so we are going to be taking advantage of that. What this means for all of you is that none of your round 2 partners will be US born citizens - it's vitally important that the work we do here transcends such petty boundaries as country borders, and as such, a more globalist outlook is needed. Because of that, you will find that your new partners will come from countries all around the world, and for many of them, English may be a second, third or even fourth language. This will require a bit more patience in your initial months, so we are asking for extra patience in getting to know your new partners. We will, of course, offer the option of splitting in between semesters if you feel it isn't working out with them, but we ask that you wait until at least the beginning of December before making your mind up in such matters, and keep the most open of minds until then. Language barriers may present a bit of a challenge, but I have faith that you will all be able to work through it and find your common ground on which to build your foundations together."

The good doctor paused for a moment, looking over our sea of faces, a smile upon her lips. "They are all, like you, second-year students. I'm sure many of you have been wondering about that, but we will be bringing in outside students for most of the years to give you partners who will only get a partial education here at CARP. We feel like that's important, as it lets philosophies outside of our own get mixed and entangled with what we're trying to do here. So, in many years, we will be getting transfer students to add to your existing unit. Not all years, but most years."

I remember distinctly making a mental note of the way she phrased that, and wondered what sort of implications it was going to have down the road. Any time the good doctor stressed words in her speech, it was a cue for us to pay close attention to what was coming next. That meant at least one year, we wouldn't be getting transfer students, which probably meant incoming freshman.

"It's also important that you know they won't be arriving soon - they've already arrived. While we've been going over what your second year here will be like, they've been moving their things into your dorm rooms. You don't need to rush into sexual activity with them immediately, as we recommended you do with your initial betas. These people are here to center you emotionally, to bring you into focus, and as such, you should try your best to be as open and trusting with them as you can. We ask you to keep a lot of secrets here at CARP, but you should have no secrets from any of your partners and so be open and caring to those whom you let into your lives."

There was a quiet murmur going over us in the crowd. I think we didn't like the idea of someone just wandering into our dorm rooms and making themselves at home while we weren't there, but it was in line with what we'd signed up for, so none of us could complain too much. It was just that sort of subtle line push that the university was great at - finding what we were comfortable with and edging that just a little bit further down the line.

"Classes start on Monday, and if any of you have any severe problems with whom you're paired with, you can come and see me personally in my office," she said. "I think we rooted out anyone who was racist, misogynist or hateful during our screening process, but I have to admit there is always the possibility of someone slipping through the cracks. Anyway, that's it, and I'll see each of you during your one-on-one sessions sometime this month. Get out of here and go have fun!"

"Non-US citizens, huh?" Julia asked me as we slowly waited for the auditorium to empty out. "That'll be wild. You hoping for anything in particular? A sexy French girl? Some slinky Indian girl?"

I remember laughing, shaking my head. I wanted to remind Julia that she was more than enough for me, but I knew that it'd only anger her. She was into the whole thing of us forming a group right from the start, and was always disappointed when I showed any signs of traditionalism. "I'm going to go into it with an open mind and no expectations. We'll just play it all by ear. If I'm not expecting anything, then there's no possible way I can be disappointed."

"You know how good Dr. Igarashi is. You think she's going to disappoint?"

"I think that no matter how good anybody is, they occasionally make mistakes and sooner or later, I should be prepared for that. Remember, she didn't get all of the freshman class right, did she?"

"She did well enough that I think your trust wouldn't be misplaced."

We were some of the last people out of the auditorium because we weren't in any rush, and I liked the idea of giving whoever it was we were about to be introduced to some time to get themselves situated as best as they could.

Sure enough, when we arrived, our new partner was waiting for us, although maybe that's not the right way to phrase it. She wasn't sitting in the living room just waiting for our arrival; she was busy adding things to the room to give it a bit of her own personality.

"Josh! Julia! So chuffed to meet you both!" It took me a second to get a good look at her, because she was wearing a long black trench coat, but whatever I thought I was going to find, Chelsea wasn't it. She was born in London to a Dutch mother and a Chinese father. Her parents moved with her to Berlin when she was ten, and so her accent is this insane hodgepodge of like seven or eight things stuck into a blender, but mostly posh European. Her long hair hung down just past her collarbone, blonde at the tips but fading into black. She had, well, has very soft and mischievous features, a first impression that she's very much lived up to in the intervening years. She's about half a foot shorter than I am, which means she's nearly a foot shorter than Julia. The long trench coat threw me at first, because it seemed very buttoned up, and far too warm for the late summer weather. "I'm Chelsea and I can't wait to fall deeper in love with both of you."

"What do you mean deeper, Chelsea?" I said to her. "You don't know almost anything about me. We've never met."

"Just because we've never met, silly boy, doesn't mean I don't know anything about you," she said with a grin as she moved to sit down on our couch in the living room, crossing one leg over the other. "I've been studying you for a couple of months now, ever since Dr. Igarashi proposed I join your merry band of tree shakers. Not just you, but both of you. I've watched all the interview tapes from your time spent talking to the faculty, learning what things you and Julia are both going to need emotionally moving forward."

Julia smirked, almost daringly. "You're awfully confident of yourself, aren't you, sister? Can you sum things up into a few key points?"

"Naturally, love," Chelsea said, leaning back to get comfortable on the couch. "Let's start with you. You project an air of total confidence, which means there's two things you need more than anything else. You need unconditional faith in your abilities, and you need someone to tell you 'no' every now and then."

"No?" Julia said, sitting down on the other end of the couch, almost daring me to move and sit down between them. "What do you mean 'tell me no?'"

"You're a force to be reckoned with, Julia. You're powerful and passionate and sometimes you have a tendency to push instead of asking, to assume everyone's going to go along with whatever ideas you have, and while that's great for you getting what you want done, it's not exactly what the family's going to need all the time. Josh is going to have to learn how to tell you no every now and again, and when he does, I'm going to support him so that he doesn't feel like a bad guy."

"Hmmm." Julia hadn't realized that she could sometimes be overly pushy, but I'd mostly just written it off as 'Julia being Julia' instead of recognizing it was something we could work on together. "Okay, I can see how it might come off that way to someone on the outside-"

"I'm not always going to side with Josh, naturally, and we don't want to discourage you from having all those crazy ideas, but we need you to remember that there's limits to everything, and just because you want something doesn't mean I have to want it too, or that Josh has to," Chelsea said, a playful grin resting on her lips. "Don't worry; we'll get it all hammered out together. In between the hammering I expect Josh to be giving us both regularly."

"And me?" I asked. "What am I going to need?"

"You need three things, Josh. You need someone to ask you regularly to talk about how you're feeling. You need someone to get you to talk about it when you feel stressed. And you need someone to look after you when you don't know you need it."

"How are you going to know when I need it if I don't know I need it?"

Chelsea smiled at me, and it wasn't condescending or judgmental. It was soft and kind in a way I hadn't known I'd needed up to that point. "You're a creative person, Josh. That means you've probably been dealing with Imposter's Syndrome your entire life, that sense that you don't belong, that you haven't earned whatever success you've gotten in life. All creative people deal with that to some extent, those that aren't raging narcissists, anyway, which you're not. From time to time, especially when you start to achieve some level of success, you're going to be afraid you don't deserve it, when you very much do."

I remember thinking at the time that this woman completely had my number, and she wasn't angry or talking down to me. She made me feel like my fears, while relatable, were without merit and that I should work to grow past them. I sort of knew that Imposter's Syndrome - that feeling that you've somehow snuck in the back door and that you're going to be found out and ejected from whatever community you've found yourself a part of - that was something I'd felt with every success in my entire life. Hell, it was applicable to my first year of time with CARP. And it was the sort of warmth that her smile held that made it all so much easier to take.

"And you're in it for the whole deal?" I asked her. "You're on board with being a part of, what was it that Dr. Igarashi called it, a polycule? This polycule?"

"Oh absolutely," she giggled. It was the most inviting sound I think I'd ever heard. "I mean, just look at Julia. She's gorgeous. I could just eat her up. In fact, I will. Regularly. And you, Josh. I know you don't think of yourself as handsome, but you are to me, in a way that I think you work very hard to hide from people at large."

"Oh?" I asked her. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Your attire, your fashion, the way you present yourself to other people. You like to put on a disguise, that of the mysterious artist, hoping the smoke and mirrors will obscure the parts of you that you think aren't the most appealing, without realizing that people love flaws in others, because it means they have something to bond over. Nobody wants perfect people. They want someone whose scars match up with their own."

I looked at her with a doubtful smile. "You don't have any scars."

"Of course I do, Josh," she said to me. "I've got abandonment issues, that sense that my world could collapse at any moment, and I'll have nothing to hold onto. You'll need to reassure me that you two will always be there for me and that you aren't going to abandon me, even when times get rough."

"Why on earth would you have abandonment issues?" I said, as she slowly moved to stand up from the couch. I'd been leaning against the doorframe to the master bedroom the entire time we'd been talking, as if I wanted to be able to bolt from the conversation at any point.

"When I was ten, my parents' work took them from London to Berlin, and I found myself being taken entirely out of my comfort zone, as my whole world was upended," she said with a sigh. "I know, rationally, that they were doing what they had to do, but it's left some part of my brain always afraid that everything could drop out from under me at any moment, that everything I've worked hard to build as a social structure in my life could suddenly be gone without warning." She looked up at me and it was perhaps the first time I'd seen vulnerability in those almond shaped eyes. "That was a strong draw in what Dr. Igarashi offered me, especially since I wasn't feeling particularly accepted where I was before here."

"Which was where?"

"Oxford," she said, with a slight smile, as she moved to open the trench coat and expose what she had on beneath. It wasn't quite a perfect match for her Oxford formal clothes, but it was pretty close, with the white Oxford blouse and a black rope tie loosely done around the neck. The skirt, however, wasn't the strict pure black it should've been, but instead was a plaid of mostly blues with hints of white on the high-waisted skirt. She had dark tights beneath it that ran down into classic black school shoes. "I missed the school uniform when I was in Germany, and when I got to Oxford, they were very strict on the subfusc attire, something they said equalized us all. But even with that, I felt like Oxford was just an unstable, constantly shifting foundation, with so many people dropping out or being unable to keep up their tuition." She looked down at her feet, that bit of nervousness taking deeper root in her for the moment. "We were like that. Mum and Da couldn't afford to keep me at Oxford, no matter how much they tried. But Dr. Igarashi had seen potential in me, and she came to offer me a place here, with you." She looked up and pursed her lips in a cheeky little pout. "I thought the schoolgirl outfit might stir the loins a bit and make me more fetching in your eyes. Was I wrong?"

Julia giggled, rolling her eyes. "You more than thought, Chelsea. You knew. I told Dr. Igarashi that Josh always gets hard at the sight of a pretty girl in a plaid skirt." She wasn't wrong.

"How's about it, then, love?" Chelsea said, slowly closing the distance between us. "You and Julia haven't sent me packing, but you haven't exactly welcomed me with open arms yet."

"You pass my muster," Julia said. "Josh?"

I looked into Chelsea's dark brown eyes and past the overly confident façade she was putting on, there was the genuine fear that I might reject her, that I might turn her away, that whatever opportunity Dr. Igarashi had promised her here would evaporate on some whim of mine she hadn't predicted.

But she was gorgeous.

She was absolutely right, that I was feeling Imposter Syndrome, right then and there. That I thought someone somewhere had made a mistake, and that I didn't deserve any of this. But I'd heard Chelsea say that I did deserve it, that I did deserve her, and the last thing I wanted to do was for her to feel rejected. It was in that moment that I made the decision to embrace my new life, to go at it full force and not look back.

I leaned my head down, sliding one of my hands across the back of her neck, as I brought my lips to hers and kissed her. I'd intended for it to be soft and reassuring, comforting and restful, but Chelsea had other ideas, and her lips attacked mine like she'd never been kissed in her entire life, and she never wanted it to end, her tongue practically invading my mouth as both of her arms wrapped around me tightly, one hand on my back, the other on my ass, pressing my body against hers with surprising strength.