The beginning

Your name is Parker Comstock. You were a fairly ordinary teenage boy until recently. You've always been small and delicate with features which are even a bit feminine. You never had many friends except your best friend Billy who was also something of a social outcast. Billy would try to get you involved with his other friends, but they never seemed to like you much.

Your father was an insurance executive. He didn't approve of most modern technology so you never had a cellphone or been allowed to go on Facebook like all your friends. You think this may have had something to do with your social isolation, but your father was always very kind to you and would comfort you whenever you got bullied at school or something so you still adored him. Your mother worked as a personal assistant to a chemical company executive and your relationship with her was always more distant. Then your father died in a car accident a year ago.

Shortly after, your mother bought an entirely new wardrobe and started dressing very differently for work. Short skirts with stockings, high heels, push-up bras, that sort of thing. Appropriate for work, but really close to the line. At some point she started having an affair with her boss. Or at least so you figured, though she never told you. But all the late nights at the office with her boss driving her home, obviously intoxicated, with her clothes in disarray and reeking with the smell of semen.... Well, you don't need to be hit over the head. You eventually reconciled yourself to the reality that your mother had become a slut. Worse, her boss was married with a couple of kids. You'd always been pretty non-confrontational so you didn't make anything of it, though privately you raged at this betrayal of your dead father.

A few weeks ago, she announced that the two of you would be moving in with her boss, away from Eastbourne where you've lived all your life, and you'd have to switch schools to the suburban school in Rosestead where he lives. You were livid; you had finally gotten yourself a girlfriend - Emily, who you had met while roller-skating with Billy and who went to another school. Sure, you'd only gotten to first base a couple of times and never gotten to second, and you always felt like she was about to break up with you, but it was something. And you'd also have to move away from Billy.

"Besides," you said, "I thought he had a wife and kids?" Your mother then informed you that the two of you would be moving in with him, his wife, and his children.

"That's crazy," you said. "Why would his wife possibly agree to this?" But your mother wouldn't explain it. "Maybe the rich are different," you thought.