This choice: Possess Will, head toward the fort • Go Back...Chapter #12Willing the Means by: Seuzz   Though you're teasing yourself with the thought of fame and fortune, you know that's not for you—at least, not yet. You want to learn all that you can about yourself first, and that involves learning everything you can about the project that transformed you into a body-possessing wad of blue goo. Getting back into Fort Suffolk for a look around is a priority.
But that doesn't mean you have to go charging in, the way you did last Friday. You have a chance to approach the base through a contractor, and that's what you decide to do.
* * * * *
The next morning, in the student parking lot of Westside High. "Hey, there's Will," Marc-you says. You point out the gangly kid with the shock of straw-colored hair that he barely keeps corralled under a sloppy white ball cap. He's trudging along, head down and back bowed, toward the gym, like a condemned man carrying his own axe for the beheading. "Which one of you wants to get out and give him a blow job here and now."
"Shut up, you disgusting—" Jessica-you punches Marc-you in the arm.
"That's the way we're gonna get him, right?" Marc-you chortles. "By being so sympathetic he has to take his pants off before he explodes?"
"Don't fucking rub it in, Marc," Eva-you sighs from the back seat. You put away her cell phone. "Which one of us is it going to be, Jess?" you ask with another sigh.
"I say brother dear does it."
"Me?" The minivan lurches as Marc-you jams on the brake; the asshole in front of you has stopped. "Prescott's not queer, and neither am I, last I heard."
"You could be all kinds of sympathetic," Jessica-you retorts. "Everyone loves you, I don't know why."
"'Cos I'm sexy as hell, sure."
"Is that it? 'Cos I heard even Steve has nice things to say about you."
"Steve who? Patterson? No!"
"I know."
"Who told you?" Marc-you beams with pleasure.
"Gloria. It was at some party or other, and Steve was talking about how you and the soccer team—" Jessica-you breaks off. "Fuck you, brother dear, I'm not telling you. Your head's big enough as it is. It's like an air bag's popped open over there."
Marc-you chuckles, then blasts the horn at the car in front, which appears to be waiting for Christmas vacation to advance.
Yes, it's been a successful morning with the Garner impersonations. Last night's practice drills at the diner helped acclimate you acting out with three different personalities, and overnight you bound their brains more tightly still to your own. When morning came you drove your parents crazy with a lot of yelling and fighting about breakfast, and with lots of running upstairs, downstairs, inside and out as various items were forgotten, retrieved, taken back inside, or hurled at siblings' heads. You might even have laid it on too thick, given the glares that Mr. and Mrs. Garner were giving their children. But you feel reasonably proficient at running three bodies with a convincing semblance of independence while still directing them with a common will. The trick, you've decided, is to give each of them just enough free rein that they can will think and act with their individual brains (dominated by yourself) so that you don't wear yourself out following and directing three different lives (or conversations) at once.
It's a bit like watching three boring TV shows at once. Or—maybe more apt—watching a boring movie while attending some easy listening music and glancing through a comic book all at the same time. You can follow one closely while still paying attention to the others without strain because they use different parts of your brain, and can easily shift from one to another without losing track of any of them. It's like that with the Garners, except that the "different parts of your brain" are actually three different brains that you've consumed.
* * * * *
So you spend the first half of the day doing cheerleading routines and attending math and history classes as Eva and Jessica Garner (and lounging in the library doing your nails and grousing about Chelsea Cooper and her sidecunts with friends), and as Marc goofing off through a German for Reading Knowledge class and more seriously runs soccer practice out on the athletic fields. During fourth period, Eva-you stews at the "alpha" table in the cafeteria under the tyrannical fist of Chelsea and her friends (including the aforementioned Steve Patterson, one of the worst bullies at Westside High, while Marc-you more happily competes with his soccer buddies at stuffing as much of a burrito into his mouth as he can without choking, and with glinting mischief fantasizes about how to get some blue goo into a burrito and thence into some of his friends, should the time for that ever come.
During fifth period, when two of your bodies have AP Biology and Psychology, your third goes looking for Prescott, who has lunch that period. After checking with Jenny and her friends out front, you find Will and two of his friends slumped in back of the school and shoving sandwiches in their mouths.
All three were poured and pried from the same mold: as lanky and sloppy as middle-school boys. Caleb Johansson, who you talked to yesterday about Will and his romantic troubles, is probably the most presentable, as he is dressed in slacks and a short-sleeve dress shirt, and his tightly curled hair is trimmed close to his scalp. All in all, he looks like a Mark Zuckerburg in larval form. His other friend, Keith Tilley, is the least presentable of the trio, with a pasty complexion crusted over in spots with dry zits, and a beetle brow stretching from one temple to the next. Will, despite his scarecrow build, is probably the handsomest of the bunch, having clear, regular features, though his eyes have a shy, rabbity cast to them. He peeps up at you as you approach with a mix of wet-eyed ardor and shrinking timidity. Caleb watches you with studied neutrality, while Keith openly leers.
"Hey Will," Jessica-you greets him. You nod at Caleb and grimace at Keith. "Jenny and them told me you were probably back here."
"Er?" says Will.
"Yeah, I was thinking we could get together this afternoon. Or this evening."
"Yuh?" says Will. His eyebrows go up. Keith's jaw falls open, and Caleb takes a bite from his sandwich as his face loses all expression.
"Yeah, just to talk. You know." You give a Caleb a direct, sidelong look. "Just to talk."
"M'nah," says Will.
Jessica-you takes out her cell phone while in Biology Eva-you sinks down into her chair and in Psychology Marc-you grips his forehead and winces. Then you readjust your other bodies, returning them an appropriately po-faced ignorance as Jessica-you scrolls through her contact list. "Yeah, I got your number here. We could meet— Well, I'll text you later."
"Pfer," says Will.
You nod, smile, and walk away. You doubt there will be any trouble getting him out to a rendezvous. But given his inability to talk in your presence, there might be some trouble getting his mouth open wide enough for you to slide a worm into him.
* * * * *
You spend the rest of the school day shuttling through a succession of classes. When the final bell rings, you swing Marc's body past Will's locker. "Hey," Marc-you shouts over the muttering hallway crowd as you punch him in the back of the shoulder. Will nearly folds in half, and terror gleams in his eye as he turns around; the relief that washes over him when he sees you practically melts the face off the front of his skull. "Guh, hey," he croaks back.
"Yeah. Jess tell me you're going to Panera with us for supper."
"I am?" His eyes widen.
"Aren't you?"
"Oh. Uh. I didn't—" His face crinkles up, and he more than ever looks like a woodland creature peeping out through the tall grass at some animal that's gigantically bigger than it. "I thought Jessica was going to text me."
Marc-you shrugs as Eva-you and Jessica-you chatter with friends while changing out books at their locker. "If you don't wanna go you don't have to. But Jessica wants you along specially." You nudge him in the rib with a knuckle.
"Pleh?"
"Wha'd you say?"
"Sure," he squeaks. "What time?"
"Meet us there at seven. Can you hang on that long?"
"For what?"
"To eat. You don't look like you eat anything but carrot sticks and hay, but maybe it's your metabolism. Right?"
"Blorp."
"Cool. See you then." You grin and nudge him again.
* * * * *
Prescott doesn't seem to be much of a conversationalist, and true to expectations he spends most of the time at Panera hunched over in his seat as though nursing an erection while a bashful grin wanders over the front of his face. You try using Eva's and Jessica's bodies to draw him out without much success while Marc-you tips back in a chair, quaffing a gigantic tumbler of tea and chewing the ice cubes.
After an awkward thirty minutes of this, Marc-you and Eva-you take off, leaving Jessica-you with Will. "Let's go back up to the school," Jessica-you suggests to him as you get into his truck.
"Yeah? You forget something there?" he asks.
"No, it's just more private than the river."
The river. Will freezes. That's where high school kids go to hang out and make out. "You know, you're not getting together with Lisa again," you explain to him.
"Yeah."
"Well, I thought we could figure out what you've got to work with, see who might be a good fit for you." You run one of Jessica-you's fingers up his thigh.
"Gngkh?"
Fuck it. You throw Jessica-you across him, put your mouth to his, and vomit a worm over your tongue. You have the following choice:  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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