This choice: Tel Caleb about the new spell • Go Back...Chapter #16Tel Caleb about the new spell by: Seuzz   You're sufficiently reluctant to share your discovery with Caleb that you don't call him up instantly. But he's not at school the next day, in either his own scraggly form or as the more voluptuous Eva. Fears about what he might be up to start to prey on you. He'll surely be at the clubhouse after school, but you're worried enough that you text him when class lets out. You are so engrossed that you don't watch where you're going as you round the corner of one of the wings--
"Oof." You bounce backwards, and look up to apologize to whoever you bumped into. And you pale. David Kirkham turns slowly to regard you with that reptilian gaze of his. "Hey, man, sorry about that," you murmur. You grin weakly.
"You will apologize, douchebag," he says slowly.
"Yeah, I said I'm sorry. Head in the clouds. Brain, like, totally elsewhere."
"I said, apologize." He rolls the toothpick from one cheek into the other.
You lick your lips. It's never easy with Kirkham. You briefly calculate the odds that you can out sprint him, but he's in shorts and you're in jeans. "Uh ..."
"Uh ..." He mocks back. "You know how to apologize, cocksucker?"
"You can't believe how sorry I am." You swallow.
"You just can't help making it worse for yourself, can you?" His tone smolders. "Let me explain how it works. To apologize properly to me, you say, 'Fuck you.'"
"What?"
"Deaf and retarded," he marvels. "I said, you say 'Fuck you. Eat my shit and die.'" Again, he rolls the toothpick, and he also rolls a shoulder. "If I have to tell you a third time ..."
"Um ..." You gulp. "F-- Fuck you? Eat my shit and ... die?" The last word dies on your lips.
He starts. "What did you say, faggot?" His voice is lot rougher.
"I said ... Fuck you?"
His hand strikes like a snake, seize you by the short hairs on the top of your head. No mean feat, that, as he is almost half a head shorter than you. You gasp and your knees bend. "Where the fuck do you get off talking to me like that, asshole? I'm gonna punch your face in so hard you'll hafta fuck yourself up the ass with your own toothbrush just to clean your teeth." He pulls his fist back.
You're saved by the last person you'd expect: Lester the Molester. Out of the corner of your eye he materializes to catch Kirkham's arm and swing him around. Kirkham bounces off the wall.
"You don't fuck with my friends," Lester snarls. "Prescott's my little buddy. Ain't ya, Prescott?" He leers at you.
Kirkham glowers. But though he's meaner and scrappier than Pozniak, he judges it more expedient to stand down. "Fucker touched me," he mutters.
Pozniak wheels on you. "You been puttin' out for others, my little bitch?" He grabs you by the neck and locks you tightly in the crook of his arm. "I thought we had something special."
"Urfk-- Ghkk--"
"I mean a lot to him," you hear Lester say. "Watch this, Kirkham." His hot, rancid breath envelops your scalp. "Kiss my man titty." He pulls up his t-shirt to expose his torso. "Suck on it. Make it hard." You snort and blow. "I told you to suck on it. Suck on it and I'll give you two fingers up your pussy, make you happy." He squeezes tighter. The world starts to go black.
"Is there a problem here, gentleman?" Oh, great. It's Mr. Gelding. With your luck, the science teacher will demand a blow job.
Pozniak releases you. "No sir," he says sullenly.
"Good." Gelding regards you with hard eyes. "Don't you have somewhere to be, Prescott?" You duck your head and scamper off. If he has anything to say to the bullies, he saves it until you are well away.
* * * * *
Caleb is waiting inside the clubhouse when you arrive. "Jesus, where were you today?" you growl. And then you do a double-take, because on closer inspection you see it's not Eva who has turned to smile impishly at you. It's her sister, Jessica. Your heart briefly stops.
"Turns out it's the little differences that make the big differences," she smirks. She puts her foot up on a sawhorse and rubs a hand along a toned leg. "Turns out Jessica, but not Eva, has a little spot, right about here--" She pinches a place about halfway up the inside of her thigh, and gasps. "Oh God." She sucks her upper lip. "Can't play with it too much, or it kind of goes numb, but it makes everything up inside tingle and quiver like electrified jello."
"Where the fuck did you get—"
"Okay, I confess, I've been cheating." She stands aside and gestures at the blank golem. "I've been sneaking in here and getting some extra work out of the golems. I had our Jeremy clone polish up a new mask and used it to get a copy of Jessica, then took over Eva's life during the night hours and put him and that golem we made of Eva to work on even more masks."
"You did what?"
"I said--" She explains it again and it is still impossible to follow, and you stop her when she starts looking for an old chalkboard so she can give you a diagram.
"Whatever," you wave her off brusquely. "You broke our bargain and took Eva out before I said you could."
"In a good cause," Jessica insists. "You said I had to wait because you wanted me to concentrate on making that new mask. Well, now we've got it. And thanks to my foresight, we've got three new ones besides." She conjures three masks out of her backpack.
"Christ Almighty!" you exclaim.
"Well, I wouldn't aspire to that degree of dignity," she says smugly, "but I appreciate the compliment."
A sudden thought hits you. "Were you playing Pozniak this afternoon?" You grab up one of the masks and examine the inside, but it is blank.
"Was I what?"
"The Molester. Did you grab his image, pretend to be him after school?"
"No. Why?" The other masks are similarly blank. You tell him about your misadventure. She clucks sympathetically. "We could do something about him, you know." She nods her head at her masks.
"You know, you're not the only one with news," you retort, feeling irked at the way your friend is hogging the glory. "I checked out that new spell last night." She looks up, and you tell her about your experiment. Her eyes grow wide with excitement.
"This is awesome," she exclaims, grabbing fistfuls of hair and dancing in delight. "Oh my God!"
"Well, it's definitely interesting."
"Interesting?" she cries. "You say that Robert had no idea who he was while he had my mask on?" You nod. "He was your slave? Like a golem."
"Hang on. What are you thinking?"
"I haven't decided yet." Her eyes shine as she looks around the room. You can actually see thoughts form on her face. "You know, I had to skip school today while I was pretending to Jessica," she says slowly.
"Much to everyone's relief."
"But if I'd put that mask of me on Jessica, she could have gone as me, and I could have gone as her, and no one would have known the difference." You blink. "That's always been the problem, right?" She grabs your arm. "We couldn't let Jeremy out in case the real Jeremy spotted him. We always worried that our folks would miss us. But now!" She actually does a somersault. "Now we can actually replace people! We can take over their lives and let them step in for us!"
"Whoa, hold on there! You know, I came this close to not telling you about the new spell because I knew you'd want to do something horrible--"
"What's so horrible about it? You said Robert snapped back to normal when you took the mask off."
"Yeah, but he didn't remember anything."
"Which makes it perfect. It's like the new spell lets us make temporary golems without, you know, actually hurting anyone."
"I think stealing their lives counts as 'hurting'."
She makes a face. "But we're not killing them or turning them into golems permanently. And don't pretend you think you've got the best life in town. I know I don't."
"Yeah, but still--"
"In fact, it's not even like we're changing anything. We'd just be, well, shifting the people who are inside the lives. And it's not like they would know. What they don't know can't hurt them."
That seems an arguable proposition at best. And yet, given how much you've already done to screw with people, it seems hard to finger where Caleb has gone too far.
He apparently takes your silence as conditional assent. "We could move out of Westside, if you're feeling squeamish. Move over to Eastman. Or up the university. It might be fun not having to go to school anymore."
"Or we could go to Hollywood," you sarcastically say. "Take over the world."
"Don't be stupid," she retorts.
"It's all the same thing."
"No it isn't," she says. "One is just moving someplace new. The other is--" Her gaze turns hooded. "You know what really sucks about being on the bottom tier at school? It isn't even the A-list bullies who pick on us. It's C-listers like the Molester."
"You want to be kicked around by a better class of bully?"
"Maybe I want to be a better class of bully," she says quietly. "You know who keeps the Molester in his place, don't you?" She arranges the three masks on a table top in a short pyramid. "We don't have to take over the world, Will. I'd be happy just taking over our little corner of it."   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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