This choice: Recruit on both sides, and enact a war. • Go Back...Chapter #17Of Dominance and Dominique by: Seuzz   You use Eva’s phone to text Dominique; not until you look up do you realize you used Jessica’s body to send it. Don’t lose track of whose hands you’re using, you remind yourself.
It’s twenty minutes before Dominique replies: Sure where?
Where r u?
Home. U?
It’s the start of a slightly aggravating game of texts chasing texts, until you settle on meeting her at The Flying Saucer, one of the kooky downtown coffee bars near the university.
Out at Suffolk Wilderness, Marc-you and Hannah-you snuggle close while walking back to the car. “Why are your sisters doing this? I told you I didn’t need your help,” Hannah-you complains.
“You’re not,” Marc-you retorts. “God help you after they get hold of Dominique and her friends. You better start thinking about who you want to recruit to your side.”
Each of your bodies grabs the other by the shoulders, and open their mouths to each other. Marc-you pumps a thick, viscous gob of blue goo into his girlfriend, arming her for the coming struggle.
* * * * *
Dominique is late in showing up. “She always runs late,” Eva-you reminds her sister, who is jogging an impatient leg under the table while killing time on her cell phone.
“She’d be late to her own funeral,” Jessica-you retorts. Eva-you raises an eyebrow. “That’s not what I meant,” her sister says.
With Eva’s eyes you glance around the place, while with Jessica’s you soaks in the latest news headlines. The Flying Saucer, as befits its name, is a saucer-shaped building with a semi-circular dining room; the other half is closed off for the kitchen, register, and display cases for the pastries. Heavy beams brace the cone-shaped roof. The interior walls are hung with vintage posters of such classic movies as The Day the Earth Stood Still and Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers, as well as some framed photographs of purported UFOs. But the outer walls are pierced by wide bay windows that look out onto the street and parking lot, so you’ve a good view for when Dominique finally arrives.
Which is late even by her standards. Jessica-you is going through her bookmarks a third time by the time Eva-you spots Dominique’s car pulling into the lot.
“So, hey,” Dominique says when she joins you. She drops a small handbag on the table and looks between your two bodies with a truculent stare.
Jessica-you says, “Nice to see you too” while Eva-you struggles out of her side of the booth. “You can have this side,” you tell Dominique. “I have to get a refill anyway. What are you having?”
“Nothing. I’m only here ‘cos you wanted to talk.”
“Well, you can have something, at least.”
Dominique makes a face and scoots into the just-vacated booth. She stares at Eva-you from under lifted eyebrows, but says nothing.
On the other side of the city, Noah-you closes his math book and shoves it into his canvas book bag, which he slings over a shoulder. “Going to the library, gotta look something up,” you tell Noah’s mom as you pass her in the living room.
“Can’t you look it up online?” his sister asks from the sofa, where she’s lazing away with her cell phone.
“Can’t you mind your own business?” Noah-you retorts.
“What do you think they made Wikipedia for?” Jody calls after you.
“They made it for sophomore girls who don’t know how to do real research!” Her reply is lost as Noah-you passes through the laundry room into the garage.
“So how are things going on the soccer team?” Jessica-you asks Dominique as Eva-you gets her refill at the counter. Dominique shrugs. “Are Eva and me forgiven yet?”
Dominique’s expression remains impassive, though maybe it turns the tiniest bit more impassive. You could probably punch her in the face and she wouldn’t even flinch. “You think someone’s mad at you?” she asks.
Jessica-you sighs. At the counter, Eva-you pays for a second coffee.
There’s history between the Garner girls and the soccer team. They were two of the star players their sophomore and junior years, until they were bullied by another friend into trying out for the cheerleader squad. When, against their own wishes and expectations, they made it onto the squad, they had to quit the soccer team. For a couple of weeks none of their old teammates would even speak to them, and lots of vicious posts and memes got put up on the social media.
“Look, the last thing we want to do is get dragged into anything,” Jessica-you tells Dominique.
“What’s there to get dragged into?”
“Drama.”
“What drama?”
“Isn’t there always drama where Anita’s concerned?” Jessica-you leans across the table, both to emphasize the point and also to distract Dominique as Eva-you opens her mouth to drop a fat, blue worm into one of the coffees. All over the city, your bodies twitch as though scalded. “Remember when you and Austin tried dating? How she tried breaking you up?”
Dominique’s face goes so rigid you could probably bounce pennies off her cheeks.
“So we’re going to get sucked into it one way or another if—”
“Here, what are you two talking about?” Eva-you asks, and slides in next to her sister Dominique sniffs at the coffee that gets pushed in front of her. “I got this for you anyway,” Eva-you tells her, “even though you said you didn’t want any.”
“We’re talking about Hannah,” Jessica-you asks.
“Do we have to?” Eva-you asks. To Dominique: “Jessica’s got a bug up her ass or something. I’m sorry.”
Jessica-you gives Eva-you a slit-eyed side-glare.
“I didn’t know we were talking about Hannah,” Dominque says. “What about her?”
* * * * *
The conversation that follows is like those fake conversations you had between Marc-you and Eva-you, and Eva-you and Hannah-you. Only in this case it’s Dominique who pretends not to know that there’s any trouble between Hannah Westrick and the rest of the Westside girls’ soccer team. She even claims not to know anything about any trouble between Anita and her friends on the one side, and Tara Weston and her friends on the other, even though the rivalry between Anita and Tara almost tore the soccer squad apart during their junior year, back when Eva and Jessica were on the team and found themselves pulled like taffy between the two camps.
And yet now she has the stone to pretend it never happened. “First I’ve heard that Amita has a problem with Tara,” she tells your girls with a wooden insolence. “Anita thinks Tara is awesome.”
But the really exasperating thing, the thing that almost drives you crazy, is that Dominque completely ignores the coffee that you set in front of her. She doesn’t even look at it, or even toy with it.
So Eva-you and Jessica-you are feeling very hot and very pissed off when Noah-you saunters in with a book satchel over his shoulder. It gives you quite a start when he does.
Not that his arrival is a surprise. It’s just that this is the first time you’ve seen this new body from your girls’ perspective since you acquired it. And damn if he isn’t sexy.
Noah Lepley radiates presence. That’s the only way to describe it. He might be a little taller than most guys in the senior class, but even in his baggy sweatshirt and his worn-out jeans he is more filled out than most. He has wide-set eyes under a broad brow, and a strong jawline that tapers to a small chin. Twists of sandy-colored hair stick out in little spits from under the brown knit cap he usually sports. He has the bow-legged swagger of a relaxed athlete.
“Hey,” Noah-you says after swerving over to the girls’ table. “I don’t suppose this is a study group or something, is it?”
“No,” says Jessica-you, pointedly ignoring the new arrival. But Dominique says, “You can turn it into one,” and scoots out of the booth. She fishes inside her purse and drops a crumpled five onto the table. “Thanks for the coffee.”
“You got here in the nick of time,” Eva-you tells Noah-you as Dominique stalks away.
“Traffic was bad,” Noah-you replies, and picks up the coffee. It’s the work of two seconds to slurp the worm out.
“Hey, Dominique!” Noah-you calls to her in the parking lot when he catches up. She’s just getting into her car. “Hang on a minute.” You hope the smile you put onto his face doesn’t look too insincere as he looms over her. “I got something for you.”
She gasps, squeals, and flinches as Noah-you dives to grab her and cover her mouth with his. She shuts her lips tightly, so you glom onto her nose. The worm shoots out over Noah’s tongue and slithers up her nostril. “Let’s drive out somewhere we can be alone, get to know each other,” Noah-you murmurs as Dominique falls into a vacant stupor behind the wheel of her car.
* * * * *
The next morning, before class: Dominque-you joins her friends in the P.E. classroom inside the gym. Stephanie Wyatt glances up from her cell phone as you hop onto a desk beside her. It’s part of their morning ritual: Anita’s crew—which encompasses more girls than are just on the soccer team—gathers in that room before classes to mutter cryptically at each other while cruising social media.
So: “Hannah’s been bitching about us to Eva and Jessica,” Dominique-you says while studying her own cell phone.
Stephanie looks up, stares, then snorts. “Fuck.”
“What’s this about Eva and Jessica?” Kristy Suffolk asks. Like Stephanie, she’s on the basketball team. And like Stephanie, she is part of Anita’s school-wide conspiracy to bully Hannah.   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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