As Jennifer ran towards him after his successful dunk, Nick’s mind was a blur, and most of the myriad thoughts racing through his head were some variation on the idea that he had never, ever, in his entire life, kissed a girl. The nervous sickness that he had banished before the attempt had returned in full force.
Jennifer’s lips were moving like she was saying something, but the roar of the school’s full student body drowned out her words. However, her intentions were made clear when she threw his arms around him. “She’s initiating the kiss sequence,” he illogically thought.
Suddenly, Nick’s body give a violent, involuntary jolt, strong enough that he was thrown onto his back. His mild nausea had given way to a horrible pain which coursed through his entire body. He wanted to get up and apologize to Jennifer, but his control over his own limbs had been usurped by rapid muscle spasms. What was happening to him?
He caught a glimpse of his bottle of BoingStuff, abandoned next to the far wall of the gymnasium, and, as if the sight of it was the last piece of some cosmic puzzle, he began to piece together an explanation that was terrifying, yet oddly pleasing at the same time.
—
All Jennifer had wanted to do was to tell Nick that he was kind and smart and cute and that he didn’t need to dunk a basketball to impress her. And then he would just let the kiss happen because his smitten stares in math class had made clear his attraction.
Instead, she could only watch with helpless concern as Nick writhed on the floor several feet away. It was like something about doing the dunk had given him a seizure. The strange thing was that he wasn’t grimacing; instead, his face bore an expression of wide-eyed realization. Then, he caught her worried gaze, and actually smiled at her.
—
“Well, it looks like Nick’s foolish display of machismo has backfired on him, and he managed to injure his unprepared body,” Jake commented from the bleachers. “If there’s no objections, I’m gonna start videoing now.”
“Dude, do you have to be an asshole about every last thing?” Dan replied angrily. “He’s obviously in a lot of pain, and right before he was going to make out with a girl who’s so out of all of our leagues that I would be reluctant to even let her enter my masturbation fantasies as a side character.”
“Too late, he’s getting up,” Jake said, lowering his phone from its filming position. “Wait, is he…getting bigger?”
“No, that’s just what your dick does when you think about men’s hairy buttholes,” Dan retorted, before looking back at Nick. “Whoa, what?” Dan’s sentiments were echoed in the startled murmurs of the assembled students; some were standing up to get a better look at the unbelievable sight.
Nick’s actual person was growing taller.
—
Feeling his bones lengthening and his muscles expanding, Nick thought a single ironic thought: “At least the BoingStuff worked as advertised.” It was now perfectly apparent to him what was happening: he was morphing. Not just his body, either; his very mind was rearranging its own architecture to accommodate the incredible amount of knowledge that would soon fill it. Knowledge of a grand, cosmic, nature. Knowledge that would be supplemented by the addition of fresh neurons sourced from the young humans which surrounded him.
He looked down at his hands and saw that they were more like tentacles now. His overtaxed shorts and shirt popped off, but it didn’t matter; his genitals had been replaced by a smooth expanse of bluish-green skin. His head reached the height of the nearby basketball hoop, then continued past that point. In a test of his new strength, he lashed out a tentacle and grabbed Mrs. Clark around the waist – her struggles were futile as she was easily tossed across the entire length of the gymnasium.
Spurred by the sickeningly loud cracking of bones, students were now running for the exits, but even as they crushed themselves against each other in a frenzy, the object of his former affection just stared blankly up at him. Now, when Nick looked back at her, he felt nothing but contempt and disgust for her weak human form. He again reached out with one of his tentacles, cleanly gripped Jennifer’s head, and crushed her skull with delightfully little resistance. The exposed brain matter, he scooped into his mouth and consumed eagerly, and with each slurp of the vital sludge, his mastery over the physical realm only grew.
For fun, he decided to light the decorations of the gymnasium on fire, using only his superior mental abilities. The ease with which he could command individual atoms pleased him immensely.
He knew now that the BoingStuff powder had been planted by a race of extraterrestrials to seed a new, stronger civilization on Earth, a race for whom Nick would be the sole progenitor. Earth would be purged of all humans. Jennifer had been the first to be sacrificed in the name of this alien imperative, but she would not be the last. The righteous carnage had only just begun.