Chapter #10Gossip Girl by: Seuzz   You don't want to try shifting your point of view until you've got your host and target bodies properly relaxed, so you wait until after you've dressed and have settled Eva in her AP Calculus class before you start contemplating a shift over into Jessica. But before you can do so, you are nudged from behind. You turn around.
Another guy named Caleb, you think idiotically as stare into his face. But your best friend at Eastman is named Caleb Ryerson. This is Caleb Johansson, and he's someone that Eva knows and is reasonably friendly with, even if he is a classic "geek": tall, skinny, high-strung, and clumsily inarticulate around girls.
Still, you have to stop yourself from shrinking back as he leans forward across the desk. "Hey, can you do me a favor?" he asks in a low voice.
"Probably," you answer.
"Can you tell people you talked to me about Will and Lisa?"
"What about Will and Lisa?" you reply. "Lisa Yarborough?"
"Yeah. You know they broke up."
Inwardly you groan. "They weren't really dating, Caleb."
He turns very cheerful at that, which is the opposite reaction you were expecting, for Will Prescott is his best friend. "Cool," he chirps. "Now we've talked about them, and you've told me what's up with them." He settles back in his desk.
You stare at him. "Did you make a bet with someone?" you ask. "Is this a dare or what?"
"No, it's just Will asked me to talk to you or Jessica about him and Lisa. About how come they broke up."
Again you groan inwardly, and wish you had fled Eva's consciousness for Jessica's (or even Marc's) before Caleb could corner you this way. For that matter, you sense that Eva would have flown her own body to get away.
Not that there's any real horror story to avoid, except the standard embarrassing high school one. Will Prescott, a gangly, unkempt scarecrow of a kid, had spent the summer hanging around with Lisa Yarborough, a soft-spoken, raven-tressed girl who is more at home with the country club set. Somehow Will had gotten it into his head that he wasn't just "hanging out" with Lisa, that he and she were actually "going together." Eva herself was too embarrassed (and too kind-hearted) to straighten Will out, and so apparently was everyone else who saw him lighting on her every opportunity, like a stork descending on a very patient poodle. But when school started up a few weeks ago, Lisa had finally summoned up the courage to tell him the facts. Since then, Will has been wandering around school with the look of a puppy dog that's been kicked.
"I'm not gonna talk about it with you, Caleb," you tell him.
"We already did," he smirks. "I got what I wanted."
"Did Will put you up to this?"
"Naturally. You think I give a shit? Now I can tell him and—"
"You're not going to tell him what I said!" (That's Eva talking, not you, but you don't care enough to stop her instincts from dragging you along.) "Jesus, Caleb, how heartless—?"
"He asked me to ask you, okay? Now I done my duty. And you done me a solid too, Eva. Will's gonna put in a word for me with his dad at work."
"I don't get you."
"No one gets me, babe."
You close your eyes and feel for Jessica's mind. But she's out jogging around the athletic fields, you sense. So with a sigh you sink into your desk, prepared to suffer through AP Calculus.
* * * * *
"He's trying to get a job out where Prescott's dad works," Carson Ioeger explains to you at lunch. He's explaining it to you through Jessica, though, for she has fifth period lunch and can take it out on the quad with some of her friends, whereas Eva is stuck fifth period in AP Biology. You made the swap at the start of third period, after settling Eva in the library and Jessica in her history class. It went more smoothly than you'd feared, and you figure you can stand to be a lot less careful in the future when you want to switch viewpoints. "So what did you give him in return?"
"I didn't give him anything," you retort. "It was Eva he asked, she was just bitching to me about it."
"I thought you and Eva were interchangeable," Carson says.
"Ignore him," James Lamont advises as you gasp at Carson. "He gets you and Eva and Marc all mixed up in his wet dreams." Carson casually stretches a leg and kicks his friend.
You're sitting on the grass in front of the school with six other people. Carson, his friend James, and Paul Davis represent the male of the species; Jessica, Jenny Ashton, Lin Pol, and Yumi Saito the female. Yumi and Lin are cheerleaders, like the Garners; Jenny is a tomboy; Carson and James and Paul are scruffy science nerds like Johansson but with a better sense of style. Deep down, in fact, Jessica has kind of a crush on Carson, who is vulgar, sardonic, and super-smart in a devil-may-care kind of way; and he wears a bandana that he has no business rocking as hard as he actually does.
"So what did Eva tell Caleb about Lisa and Will?" Yumi asks as she stirs her non-fat yogurt with a carrot stick. "So we're all on the same page."
"That they were never going out, so she couldn't break up with him."
"I thought that's what Lisa told Will," Paul objects.
"That's for fucking sure," James says. "It's all he's been whining about for the last week."
"But what's this got to do with Caleb?" Jenny asks Carson.
He rolls his eyes. "Pay attention, Ashton. Will asked Caleb to nose around about how come Lisa broke up with him, and in return Will promised to talk to his dad about getting Johansson a job out at Salopek."
The name Salopek piques your interest. "Is that, like, an aerospace company?"
"It's exactly an aerospace company. Johansson thinks he'll go into Salopek as an intern, and come out two weeks later as an engineer at Lockheed," Carson snorts.
"And Will's dad works there?"
"Why are you interested?"
"No reason." You pop a raw broccoli sprout into your mouth and crunch it thoughtfully. The conversation shifts to other topics, to which you don't contribute.
* * * * *
Marc grumbles after school when you tell him you want to drive out to the Suffolk wilderness, but a sharp thought from you whips him back into line. You leave the driving to him as you put Eva and Jessica in the back seat. There you breach Eva's consciousness without relinquishing your hold on Jessica. Your mind swallows the space between your bodies, and your eyes are wide as you turn two heads to gaze at each other. Then you turn to look out the windows, and into the front seat. It takes you only a few minutes to get used to the feeling. The world seems to shrink, for with two separated bodies you have in a sense gotten larger.
After parking at the entrance and goading Marc into following your two female bodies up a trail you add his consciousness to yours, and the world shrinks again. It shrinks further as you string your tripartite body out along the trail. You find yourself walking in a rhythm, like a caterpillar, and you have to practice to break stride without falling back into a robotic pattern. At the crest of a small hill you pause Eva in the lead and let Jessica catch up. You gently lay Jessica's hands on Eva's shoulders, and you thrill to feel a sweater under your palms, and hands upon your shoulders.
"This is nice," you whisper in Eva's ear, and you turn your head to smile back into Jessica's face. "Yes it is, you agree."
"Alright, you dykes can stop the sis-cestuous flirting," you jeer as you shamble up to them. "You're making me horny."
"You just can't wait to see someone make the beast with two backs," you retort. You catch yourself sharply: Who said that? You look at yourself, and three frowns appear on three face, then harden into three grimaces. You're going to have to practice if you're going to be convincing as three independent people.
You resume walking without talking, concentrating on feeling your bodies as separate appendages and not as a single thing walking on six legs. When you're confident of that, you jog Marc's body ahead at a trot and send him down a separate trail. Without his mouth to worry about, you try talking to yourself with Eva and Jessica.
"Even if this doesn't work out," you say, "this three-body thing, it's convenient."
"Like having spares?"
"Not exactly. Though I guess if one of us gets caught it wouldn't be the end of the world."
"Don't even talk about getting caught."
"But we should spread out some more. We can take at least a dozen more bodies."
"It's hard enough with three."
"We'll practice. But even if we have to keep ourselves to one body at a time, the right bodies could be useful."
"I think I know what you're thinking."
"Of course you do." You link arms and draw close. "Yumi is cousins with Dana, you know. We get into Yumi, then go through Yumi to either get into Dana or so we can get to Caleb. Our Caleb, I mean. Or we just talk through Yumi to both Dana and Caleb. Do you think Dana would be freaked out?"
"Everyone would be freaked out. But what about the army base?" Far off, Marc is looking down at the base from the same vantage from which you attacked it on Friday.
"Through Salopek. They're contractors, they could get onto the base. We could use Will to get to his dad." You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
| Members who added to this interactive story also contributed to these: |
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
More by this author