This choice: Screw with David's old gang. • Go Back...Chapter #13Screw with David's old gang. by: Seuzz   There's a strange car in front of Dana's, and while you're looking at it, Dana comes out with Mary Johnson—David Johnson's older sister. You yourself remember Mary for being two years ahead of you in school: a smart and sensible girl, and quite pretty. The part of you that is David Johnson remembers her more clearly for being a bit of a terror at home, though she was fundamentally decent and affectionate.
You shout a greeting, and the girls stop to talk to you. They're on their way to the mall, and you manage to finagle an invite for yourself, leaving your bike at Dana's as you hop into the back seat of Mary's car.
You remember from Dana's own mind and from David's memories that Dana and Mary don't actually hang out together much, but they've apparently made a connection since David's disappearance. You off-handedly ask Mary what is going on with David, and get an earful about the military: She blames them for his disappearance and thinks there's some kind of cover up in progress, and she's urging that the family sue. The military, in turn, is being hard-nosed and insinuating that whatever happened to David is likely his own fault. It's a reminder that you've been thinking about infiltrating the base where David had his accident.
Actually, the afternoon is full of reminders. Mary is quite attractive, and you find yourself trying to flirt with and impress her, despite your own sense of the futility of the enterprise. And so it turns out: Mary is amused by you, but she is definitely not impressed, and she manages to make you feel very young, very immature, and very stupid. It's a sharp reminder that your horizons don't extend much further than high school, and that only there do you have much influence or pull. Mary, on the other hand, represents a much wider world, of both expectations and experiences, and she manages to make you feel like a little boy. Before long you are entirely out of sorts with her.
Your temper is not improved by a "flash" from your mother's mind carrying the surprising news that your father, whom you haven't seen in years, has suddenly shown up. She wants to get rid of him—both for her sake and to protect him from you—and only after you hit her hard multiple times with the thought to let him stay does she stop trying to chase him out the door. But you don't have a quick way to get back home.
That, though, might be a blessing, for it gives you the chance to think. You hate your father, but you have the idea he might be helpful in a variety of ways. You could, for instance, put him to work—two meager incomes are better than one. But then your thoughts turn to your half-brothers.
Oh, you have half-brothers—at least three that you know of—in other states, though you've never met them. You don't even know if you'd like them. But at least one of them is older than you, and you can't help but feel a slight family interest in them. It might also be your ardor with the wolf pack up in the hills reasserting itself: the thought of gathering a "wolf pack" of relatives has an appeal.
You're not deliberately sulky, but you can tell that the girls aren't sad to see you excuse yourself and catch a bus home, where you find a dusty and battered Buick in front of your trailer. You go inside to find your father looking much worse for wear: hair fading into gray and a face deeply etched with wrinkles. He tries to be affectionate with you, but after a pretended double-take you brush him off brusquely: the day's delays have made you impatient to get into his head. So you pour glasses of water, spiking one with a bit of goo, and pass them around to your parents and yourself without any ado or explanation. "Family ties," you say in a toast, and down your glass.
Your father clearly wishes the water were alcoholic—as does your mother, naturally!—but follows suit, and then you've got him. You put him under quickly and rifle through his head while he chats with your mother. It's a deeply unpleasant job, since you get to see all the crappy aspects of your life from his perspective without even the sheen of childish innocence to take some of the grubbiness off them. You're not surprised to see that you actually have six siblings—three boys and three girls—and that you're in the middle.
The oldest, Yvonne, lives in Massachusetts and is already thirty-two and married with kids of her own: no pack animal there. Greg, in Indiana, is twenty-five and is a truck driver. He's unmarried and is already beginning to take after his father as a womanizer, apparently; at least, that's what he had shared with his dad the last time he saw him. Carla, in Ontario, is twenty-three and is probably about to graduate from college—your dad hasn't seen her in awhile.
In fact, your father has just gotten out of jail on a burglary charge and hasn't spoken to anybody in a couple of years, which makes news about the three other brothers even sketchier. Cody, in Montana, would be seventeen; Michelle, in Oregon, would be sixteen; and Ben, in Colorado, would be eleven. But your dad's not even sure that these kids are where he last left them, let alone sure how they might be turning out. You can sense that your own appearance was a bit of a shock to him: He hasn't quite grasped that you're not the fourteen-year-old kid he last saw.
Still, it might be worth sending him out to find Greg, and then with Greg track down Carla and the younger kids. Perhaps you mean to flatter only yourself, but you are actually flattering your old man: you can't but imagine that your siblings have turned out to be other than as charming and talented as yourself, and you'd like to pull them to yourself into a human version of the wolf family you've already acquired.
Both of the day's encounters have left you with a sense of how small a stage you are performing on. Why content yourself with the high school, when through your father you could put together a human wolf pack composed of your own family, or of some of the college students that Mary Johnson knows?   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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