C.A.R.P.
Part Three — Freshman Year, Spring Semester
When spring semester rolled around in my freshman year, things were already starting to evolve and I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of any of them. A handful of students had left CARP during the winter break and that meant the campus wasn’t quite as packed as it had been before. We were told during our first assembly in January that 6 alphas had left as had 3 betas. Now all three betas who had left were paired with alphas that had left, but that also meant there were now three betas without partners, and as such, they would be floating from room to room each week, trying to find a pairing they could integrate with.
Believe you me, the way they’d phrased it made more than a handful of people start whispering and gossiping, but Dr. Igarashi told all of this that the administration had planned for this, and that it would happen every spring semester. They had anticipated that it would be more alphas leaving than betas, as the betas were more invested in remaining with the program than the alphas necessarily were. I’m glad I made a mental note of that, because it would come back into play a lot later.
Each week, the unmatched betas would be put into a new room with an existing alpha/beta combination, to see if they would be able to be integrated into the alpha’s unit. If not, no harm no foul for anyone involved, and the beta would move on to another room the following week. There was two male betas and one female beta, and of the two male betas, one was straight and one was bi. To my mind, that meant there was a decent chance that the one female beta who wasn’t attached wouldn’t even make it to my room—I figured she’d pair up early on with one of my fellow alphas, considering there were thirty or so others she could match up with.
It turned out the unattached beta came to stay with us second week in February.
Her name was Paige.
Everything that Julia was, Paige was the opposite of. Julia was a massively tall California blonde with massively large breasts. Paige was a tiny little Jewish girl from New York and a very slender bust. Julia’s sport she excelled in was tennis. Paige was a gymnast. Julia was loud and boisterous. Paige was quiet and snarky.
She didn’t move everything with her into the dorm room, obviously. Just a travel bag’s worth of clothes, enough to get her by for the week. And, as I found out, not a whole lot of underwear.
“So what did you do to make your alpha all skittish and run, Paige?” Julia asked her on the day she moved in. The two of us were sitting on the couch watching TV, being that it was a Saturday afternoon. We’d been told Paige was moving in with us the day before and to not leave campus for the weekend. Julia had on sweatpants and was wearing one of my t-shirts, something that felt vaguely territorial now that I’m looking back at it. She had her calves resting across my lap, her blonde hair up in a messy ponytail.
Paige, by contrast, was only wearing tight workout shorts and a sports bra when she came into our room, and good lord were they practically painted on her skin. She had her brown hair braided up and around the top of her head like a halo, although eventually I’d see it hung down to just barely brush across the tops of her shoulders.
“I made him cum too hard and he was afraid he was gonna get addicted,” Paige said tossing her bag onto Julia’s bed. For the week Paige was staying with us, Julia had decided to give Paige her own bed and just sleep with me in mine. I think Paige could intuit that before she even entered the room.
“Yeah right,” Julia snorted. “I know my way around a dick better than almost anybody, and if I’m not driving Josh to madness, it’s not possible to make a guy cum too hard.”
“Challenge accepted,” Paige said, moving over to the door to lock it before walking around to stand in front of the couch. “But when he says stop, I get to sleep in the bed with the two of you for the whole time I’m here if I wanna. Deal?”
“Hey, I—” I started to say.
“Deal!” Julia cut me off. “And when he doesn’t, you gotta be naked any time you’re in the dorm room for the rest of the week. Fair bet?” She slid her legs off my lap and offered her hand out to Paige, who took it and shook it.
“Game on, girl.” Paige reached down and pulled her top over her head, tossing it onto the bed, revealing her small, adorable tits with large puffy brown nipples that looked already stiff as hell. Then she dropped down onto her knees in front of me. I was also wearing sweatpants, so it made it easy for Paige to just reach in and pull out my cock. “Oh shit,” she giggled. “I like the size of that hog you got there, chief. Fuck, I’m definitely having a go at that before I’m outta here at the end of the week.”
“You think you deserve it?” Julia said as Paige wrapped her fingertips around my shaft and began to slowly stroke it. “You think I’m gonna let you have free reign with my alpha?”
“I’m just gonna make sure I make a good first impression, sweetie,” she shot back with a laugh. “So let me show off why I’m worth having around.” And then she opened her mouth and pushed her face down onto my dick until I could feel her tongue brushing against my balls. She held there for a long moment before slurping her way back up my cock, her cheeks sinking in as she made it as loud and intense as possible.
“She better than me, Josh?” Julia said. “And you’d better say no.”
“She’s not better, no, but she’s voracious, Jules, and she’s not letting up.”
Paige’s fingers were doing this gentle clenching of my nuts in this insane way that Julia actually learned how to do later and it was coaxing a release out of me much faster than I wanted, but then Julia made it even worse, because she put her hand on top of Paige’s head and started pushing her down faster, holding her there longer. I half-expected Paige to reach out and push Julia’s arm away, but instead when Paige’s other hand did move, it was up to push between Julia’s legs, which made my big blonde badass gasp suddenly before giggling. “Oh, well played, East Coast,” she breathed out as Paige’s hand tugged down the front of Julia’s sweatpants enough to get her fingertips pushed into Julia’s snatch, as my beta opened her legs a little bit wider to let Paige really start to finger her.
We were a weird triangle, as Julia reached over with her other hand to grab mine, folding our fingers together while she kept forcing Paige’s face to keep bobbing and bucking against my lap, and Paige kept working her hand against Julia’s clit.
I was trying really hard to keep my composure, but I had resorted to breathing in sharp snorts through my nose with my eyes closed, holding my chill as best as I could. After half a minute of that, though, I felt Julia nuzzling up against me. “Oh, g’head, JT,” she whispered to me. “I won’t mind sharing the bed for a week. But only if she swallows it all.”
“Here it comes, Paige,” I said. I knew Julia had said we’d only let her in the bed if she swallowed, but I didn’t want Paige to think it was expected of her, because that’s not the kind of guy I am. And yet, despite the warning, Paige didn’t let off, and if anything, tried to get even more of my cock into her throat. When I started cumming, it was right up against the back of Paige’s throat, and she did not relent in any way.
She did not spill a single drop.
The next week was just weird because a lot of the time, it felt like Julia and Paige were sort of having their own private squabble about who was going to take care of me, how they were going to do it and what we’d talk about afterwards.
I don’t want you to think they were arguing all the time. It wasn’t even so much open hostility as much as it felt like there was lingering tension between the two. What was even stranger was that a couple of times, they went to go workout without me and came back looking a little disheveled and maybe even a little bruised but still laughing about it.
Paige’s previous alpha, Will Bierko, had been too much of a momma’s boy and just couldn’t focus being so far away from his family back in Canada, so he’d decided to go back to the middle of nowhere again and be home with them, despite her best efforts to try and keep him happy. I’d had a couple of classes with Will and to be honest, I hadn’t cared for the guy much because it felt like he was looking to find flaws in everything and hadn’t taken time to appreciate the opportunity he’d been given. That said, I hoped he was happy back home. I’d find out more about Will much, much later, but we’ll get to that when we get to that, because it was quite a bit down the line. But remember his name, because I’m definitely going to circle back to it eventually, because it plays a big part in the story eventually.
Will Bierko.
Put a pin in it.
On Friday night, we had a drunken fumbling threesome (my first, obviously) where I fucked both of them within the span of an hour, and fell asleep between them, drenched in sweat, sticky and messy and completely drained. They were both off to dreamland before I was, which left me alone with my thoughts for a little bit.
I’m not going to string the tale along too long without getting to the punchline, so I’ll skip to the end—after the seven days, we’d all agreed that it had been fun, but that it wouldn’t work moving forward. Paige packed up her things and was off to another dorm room by the afternoon.
Paige was, sorry, is a great girl, and it wasn’t that we didn’t like her, but her and Julia were both fighting with the exact same level of top dog energy, which meant they were always going to be struggling to have the last say.
She ended up staying with a guy named Nate, who was studying political science. Right, Nate Michaels. You guessed it. If you’ve been attentive, you’ve probably spotting Paige around in the background during some of Nate’s rallies now that he’s running for Senator. He’d turn thirty just a week before he’d be sworn in, if he wins, of course. Who am I kidding? Of course Nate’s going to win. But that tells you just how far all of us have come in the seven years since our graduation from CARP. Those of us who graduated, anyway. She’s part of Nate’s team still. We were actually decent friends while we were on campus.
One of the things I realized early on was that each of us alphas were sort of unique on campus. I mean, I wasn’t the only one to get it, but I think I might have realized it the earliest. It wasn’t like there was a “writer clique” on campus, because I was it. I was the writer among the alphas. Oh, I wasn’t the only artistic person—far from it. We had an actress and a musician, and I know Barry who was the advertising guy liked to think himself as an artist even if most of us disagreed with him.
But each alpha was really the only one in their field in the freshman class. It meant the forty-something of us represented one of the widest cross-section of intellectual fields I’d ever seen. We were all interested in talking to each other about their particular specialty.
The betas, on the other hand, were a wide-ranging collection of physical prowess and beauty, each of whom seemed incredibly dedicated to their alpha. Oh, somebody else’s beta would happily talk to you and even befriend you, but they always put their alpha first and foremost.
Julia and my’s relationship got more intense and maybe a bit more complicated as the spring went on. When we were off campus in the city, I referred to her as my girlfriend, something that always made her smile. We found lots of things to love about San Francisco. We did both the heavily touristy shit as well as went diving into the nooks and crannies of the city. I found Amoeba Music to be the kind of Ground Zero of cool tunes I’d been looking for my entire life. We’d been in a few times during the fall semester, but during the spring, I’d sort of claimed it as a second home. Julia was sort of laughing at me but I ended up taking a small box full of used CDs with me from the store and brought them back down to Montara nearly every time we stopped by.
I haven’t talked a lot about Montara during my story, because I think it’s sort of important to stress—none of us really ever saw much of Montara. Betas would take their alphas out to go surfing sometimes, or down to hang out by the Point Montara Lighthouse, but believe me when I tell you Montara is a tiny goddamn coastal village with nothing else going on. The “city,” if you can even call it that, ends at 16th Street.
And as crazy as CARP was, our population never eclipsed that of Montara. We were told that each freshman class would be 100 students, a 50/50 split just like we’d been, although additional students would be added along the way. At the start of my senior year, the campus held less than 500 people on it, while Montara had a population of 2,600.
I do know a handful of businesses sprung up in Montara as a result of all the students, even if we weren’t off campus that much—your typical college town staples like a pizzeria, a taqueria and a couple of coffeehouses. But for the most part, we were just this little campus up in the hills that everybody in Montara didn’t think much about. I’m pretty sure Dr. Igarashi wanted it that way.
I’ve talked a bunch about the campus but let me tell you a bit about our classes and teachers. Our professors all struck me as incredibly smart and well-prepared, something I’d never had in any other school I’d ever been in. I mean, I never went to any other college, but I’m pretty sure at colleges across the country, the professors weren’t studying up on the students before classes. But at CARP, our professors knew loads about us before we’d even set foot in their classes. The teachers in the fall semester had likely had whatever notes Dr. Igarashi had during her recruiting, and when we’d come back in the spring, the professors had shared notes among themselves, so anything a professor had learned about us in the fall was immediately known by all our spring professors.
They came from all across the world, and I’m pretty certain they were all experts in their field, but you need to remember that this was 1998, and most of the world’s information wasn’t on the Internet yet. Hell, most of the world wasn’t even really familiar with the term Internet at that point. My econ teacher was from Germany. My physics teacher was from London. My Spanish teacher came from Mexico City. My Post-Modern Literature professor came from Chicago. I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point.
Another thing I feel is important to call out was that all our professors were incredibly focused on application, something I’ve never heard from other people talking about their times in college. Lots of college students spend endless amounts of time talking about theory and doing rote memorization, but everything at CARP was about “how would you use this to effect change” and that way of thinking became ingrained in all of us. We were results focused, and doing something just for the sake of doing it wasn’t that appealing to any of us by the time we were heading towards the end of our freshman year. We wanted things to happen, and staring at the clouds all day wondering what if wasn’t going to cut it for anybody. We were already making plans on what to do once we got out of college, how to use what the professors had been teaching us to convey our ideas to a large number of people.
Looking back now, I realize it’s what we were being trained to do.
And our ideas weren’t just our own either.
I mentioned earlier that there were a few large-scale classes at CARP, and the biggest was Ethical Philosophy, a required two-semester class for every alpha. It was divided up into five groups, but each group was being taught the exact same thing. This was where we got deep into thought experiments, and did a lot of discussion about morality, influence, change and the ethics involved. The question that was posed to each of us on day one of that class was this—if you knew for a fact that you could change the world for the better, that you would bring one person in a hundred thousand great suffering but the rest of those hundred thousand the sort of prosperity the likes of which they’d never seen, could you still condemn that one person to the suffering? Would you?
Now, I can’t break down an entire year’s worth of discussion for you in just a few minutes, but let me tell you that we covered most of the major theories of government and influence over the course and it turned out we were all somewhat ruthless people, because by the end of the year, we weren’t just convinced that we would condemn that single person, we were eager to do it.
I’m convinced, in retrospect, the object of that class was to make us deemphasize the individual and emphasize the collective. Not socialism or communism, at least not as most people think of them, but truly we came to understand that sacrifices must be made for progress, that there were always going to be obstacles to overcome, and that nothing worth remembering had been built without a little blood involved somewhere along the way.
The spring semester also included my first visit from Special Agent Costello, near the end of it. I’d waited until a weekend where Julia hadn’t felt like going up into the city with me, and then called the agent to confirm a meeting. I’d called her just before I’d gone home for Christmas, but she said our first meeting could wait until the spring, when I’d learned more.
On a blustery Saturday in April, I met with Agent Costello at a San Francisco institution called The Cliff House for our first debrief. She had told me that if we were simply two people having dinner together in a public place, nobody would look at us and we wouldn’t attract attention. I figured since she did this for a living, I should just believe her.
“Relax, kid,” she said to me as I sat down at the booth with her. “You look like you’re sweating. There’s nothing to be nervous about. You’re not doing anything wrong.”
“I’m technically violating an NDA just by talking to you about the school,” I said to her, picking up a menu.
“And I’ve told you, the NDA doesn’t apply to me or the FBI.”
“What do you want to know?” I asked.
“Start with the big picture. What’s your day-to-day like?”
“Day-to-day? I go to class, I get lunch, I go to another class, I come back to the dorms, I hang out with my roommate, I go to bed. Rinse, repeat.”
“Tell me about your roommate.” I sort of paused for a second and thankfully a waiter came to take our order, interrupting the flow of the moment, but as soon as the waiter was gone, Costello was back on track. “Your roomie, Turner. Tell me about him.”
I inhaled a deep breath and then sighed it out. “Her.”
That took Costello off-guard. “Excuse me?”
“My roommate is a her not a him.”
She looked at me with a scowl. “You gay? That why they gave you a chick as a roommate?”
“No, Agent Costello, I’m not gay, although if it would bother you if I was, I can pretend to be.”
“Don’t get wise with me, kid,” she grumbled. “Why do you have a girl as a roommate?”
Over the next couple of minutes, I detailed out the alpha and beta program to Agent Costello, telling her about Julia, how we were expected to be hooking up and how it was supposed to help keep us on track.
“So it’s a whole school of 50 dudes paired with 50 hot babes?” Costello sneered. “You fucking prick. I ought to arrest you right now.”
“For what, Agent Costello?” I shot back, losing my temper a bit. “Is it unconventional? Fuck yes, it is. But nobody’s making Julia do anything. Nobody’s making me do anything. If I didn’t want to fuck Julia, I’m sure I don’t have to. But when a giant blonde bombshell is eager to fool around with you, you don’t exactly have much incentive to say no, now do you? Besides, your numbers are all wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“The alpha program isn’t all dudes. It’s 20 straight guys, 20 straight women, 5 gay or bi dudes and 5 gay or bi women, or it was when we started anyway.”
Costello frowned intensely, as if my information was in direct contradiction with what she’d expected to hear. “Are all the alphas white?”
“Not even close,” I told her. “I mean, it’s, what, slightly more than half, I think? But we have black kids, Spanish kids, Asian kids, Indian kids... and we’re not all American, although mostly we are. I think there’s about ten alphas who aren’t from the US, although that number’s down a little since we had three alphas quit between semesters.”
“Did it cause a ruckus?”
“Not really,” I said to her. “They all just went back to their hometowns, and their betas were reassigned.”
I spent a couple of minutes telling her about Paige, and how she’d essentially auditioned to find an existing alpha/beta couple to get paired with, something that seemed to make Costello almost apoplectic in shock, as the waiter delivered our food, a club sandwich for me and chicken penne for her.
“You could’ve had two girls to fuck on the reg, and you said no?” Costello shook her head. “I don’t believe you, Turner. I don’t believe you sent her away. What aren’t you telling me?”
“If Dr. Igarashi’s to believed, I’m going to have two girls to fuck anyway starting next year,” I said. “They like springing surprises on us over at CARP, but I’m pretty certain they’re looking to introduce a new member to my room some point soon.”
“Can’t imagine Julia will like that much.”
“Honestly, she’ll probably be fucking ecstatic,” I admitted. “Julia and Paige didn’t get along enough to make it work because they’re both a bit controlling, and they would’ve been fighting for my time, because neither one of them thought of the other as above or below themselves in terms of status. Whatever they’re planning on doing, they’re already taking that into consideration.”
“So you’re gonna have two bitches looking after you while you’re here? Rough life.”
I clicked my tongue, wondering how much I wanted to tell Agent Costello, but in the end, I decided, fuck it, I needed to talk to somebody on the outside about all of this, and since Costello had assured me I could legally do it with her, I was going to be an open book.
“More.”
“More what?”
“More than two women.”
Costello put her fork down, hunched her shoulders a bit and tried to lean in towards me like she wanted to intimidate me, something I remember finding ridiculous because I’d been volunteering the information for her.
“So, Dr. Igarashi’s core philosophy for CARP is available to any student who wants to read it, so I spent a bit of time reading her dissertation on how CARP was going to be put together, and I think by the end of it, I’m going to have four women as partners.”
“Jesus, greedy much?” Costello said.
I offered the biggest apathetic shrug I could. “This isn’t my plan, Agent Costello. This is what the Doctor has in her plan book. Her plan advocates that every alpha have a beta to tend to one of their four core needs—physical, mental, emotional and social. It’s possible she thinks a beta could tend to multiple needs, but her dissertation’s pretty clear on the fact that she thinks it’s in everyone’s best interests if there’s a dedicated partner for each individual need, and that the needs are the only thing that can impede a student’s growth. But there’s also a section where she talks about how it’s important to build the unit around the alpha, and to take into consideration all the other betas when you add a new one onto the group. So, I think she’s going to add a new person to the unit either in the summer or during the beginning of the fall semester every year until I’m out of here.”
“Wait, does that mean the women alphas are getting four men?”
“I mean, what did you think would happen, Costello? They were only gonna take care of the men? It’s a breakdown of men and women in there, and everybody’s getting something.”
“Fucking Christ,” she grumbled at me. “Do you alphas have anything in common? Do the betas?”
“Now that you mention it,” I replied. “There are a few commonalities that might be worth noting. Don’t know if they mean anything, but you asked so...”
“Tell me.”
“So all the alphas are from relatively small towns while all the betas are from larger metropolitan areas. I’ve gotten to know all the alphas at least a little bit, and I think nobody’s from a city bigger than a couple hundred thousand people, if that. All of the alphas are only children—none of us have brothers or sisters. None of us are particularly close to our families. We all did relatively well in school but were often somewhat ostracized because of our lack of social or interpersonal skills. We didn’t have a ton of friends and so when we moved out here, we weren’t leaving much behind.”
“The good doctor gathered up herself 50 or so little Unabomber juniors and put them all under her wing, huh?”
I ignored her implied jab. “Now, by contrast, the betas are all well-integrated into their home lives, and their parents all seem completely aware of what’s going on at CARP. The NDAs that the alphas and betas signed were different, so Julia’s family know she’s rooming with me, and that we’re lovers, whereas my folks just know I have a roommate that I don’t really talk about. The betas all seem to come from extremely low-income families, but have incredible athletic potential, although a handful of them aren’t athletes but performers. Regardless, I don’t think we have a beta on campus who anyone would say is less than an eight out of ten, and even then I’m hard pressed to say who, simply because I can’t gauge the dudes.”
“So, all of this is good info to have, Turner, but where’s she getting the money for all of this? You said none of you are paying for your education, right?”
I nodded in between finishing off the last section of my club sandwich. “In fact, they’re paying us to go to school here. We all get weekly stipends, both alphas and betas, and all the alphas were given a used car each.”
“Are the alphas and betas getting the same amount of money?”
I chuckled softly, pointing at her with a french fry. “And now you’re glad you waited until the spring to talk to me, because I couldn’t answer that question until a couple of weeks ago, but yes, everyone’s getting the exact same amount of money.”
“So, where’s the money coming from?”
I shrugged. “Way beyond my access level. My guess is that it’s private money of some kind, but whose private money? Your guess is as good as mine. But it’s somebody who’s got a lot to burn.”
“What do you know about your next beta?”
“Not a whole lot,” I admitted. “Both Julia and I have been interviewed a number of times, both together and separate, about what kind of person we would want tending to our emotional needs, what kind of things we find attractive and unattractive about people, and it felt a little bit like we’re being sized up for a new partner, and they’re trying to find someone who will mesh with both of us.”
“Is there going to be room for that?”
“Well, we’re going to get shuffled around during the summer, and apparently the new room’s going to come with a larger bed for the alpha. I was also exploring the campus, and there’s a final dorm being built but all the rooms look like mini apartments more than anything. Like, it’s 40 or 50 units, but each unit has three bedrooms, one master bedroom and two smaller bedrooms.”
“What the fuck is this woman doing, Turner?”
“How the fuck should I know, Costello? I’m just a college student in this little program of hers.”
“Okay, well, you keep your eyes open and we’re gonna talk again in the fall. Anything more you can learn about what she’s up to, you do it.”
“Fuck you, Costello,” I replied. “I’ll incidentally spy for you, but I’m not gonna go out of my way to get myself off this gravy train.”
“Enjoying the benefits too much?” she chortled.
“As weird as it all is, I haven’t seen anything illegal going on.” I stood up, shaking my head. “And right now, it just feels like you’re chasing another thing you don’t understand because you’re afraid of it.”
I was about to walk away from her when she reached up and grabbed my wrist. “Eyes open, Turner. You maybe ain’t seen shit so far, but you will.”
“So you say.”
“You will.”
She let me go and I stormed out of the restaurant leaving Costello to pay the check as I headed to my car and drove back down to CARP, thinking to myself that she had to be wrong.
She wasn’t, and it wasn’t long before I found out just how wrong she wasn’t.