This choice: Spread your influence and bide your time • Go Back...Chapter #12The Many Faces of You 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.
At some point that will mean returning to Fort Suffolk for a snoop around. But you'd like to master all your powers—and discover what all they are—before doing that. Westside High, which isn't even your own high school, seems a good training ground for that, and through the Garners you've got access to lots of people.
* * * * *
"Jessica!" Eva-you shouts as she rummages through dresser drawers. "Where did you move my hair bands?"
"What?" Marc-you shouts through the foaming toothpaste that fills his mouth.
"I wasn't talking to—! Jessica!"
"She's downstairs!"
"Rrrrrgh!" Eva-you stomps to the head of the stairs. "Jessica!"
"What?" Jessica-you shrieks from kitchen, then ducks her father's glower. "Can you come down and—?"
But you're already yelling over her with Eva-you's mouth. "My hairbands! Where did you move them to?"
"I didn't move your—! Wait! Look up in the closet, on the shelf where the sheets are!"
"Are you serious? Don't tell me you—!"
"Just look, alright? And tell Marc I want to talk to him!"
Your father says, "You could go upstairs to talk to him."
So you charge up the stairs. But Marc isn't in his bedroom (as you well know), and only after yelling his name does the bathroom door open and Marc-you looks out at her from under twitching eyebrows as he runs the electric toothbrush through his mouth. "Did you drink all the milk?" Jessica-you demands of him.
The space between your two bodies is a ball-like node you could encompass by clasping hands with yourself and wrapping your arms around it. Through this space you trade the conversational ball back and forth. "No," Marc-you says. "You had some yesterday and Eva had some yesterday and I think mom and dad—"
"That's not what I meant and you know it! God—!" Jessica-you flinches and glances down the stares. "God damn you, Marc, you drank the rest of it this morning?"
You throw up your free hand. "It was almost gone! There was two thimblefuls—"
"There was a whole cup! I was saving half of it for my shredded wheat!"
"I thought you already got what you needed!" You spit out the toothpaste. "Don't yell at me, Jess!"
Eva-you pulls the hairbands from the shelf and with them stomps from the bedroom into the hallway to join her siblings. "I'm not a horse," Jessica-you is yelling at Marc-you. "I need—" "Can you tie my hair back?" you interrupt yourself, thrusting the hair bands at Jessica-you.
"What?" Jessica-you asks. "Why can't you—?"
Marc-you comes out of the bathroom. "I'll do it, Eve. Jessica's too busy having a conniption." You squint at the bands, trying to find the catch as Eva-you lifts her hair.
"I'll do it," Jessica-you snarls, and grabs at the bands. Marc-you pulls them away; there's a tussle, and Marc-you lets them fly free. "Christ," he snarls as he shoves his way into his bedroom. "You want all of it or just part of it back?" Jessica-you asks Eva-you.
"Oh, make it all of it," Eva-you says, and you drop her hands and dart sideways as Marc-you, backpack swinging onto a brawny shoulder, charges past. "Are you almost ready? We're going to be late?"
"When did I have time to get ready, Eva?"
"What's going on up there?" you dad asks as you drop Marc's backpack next to Jessica's.
"I was brushing my teeth and Jessica is helping Eva with her hair," Marc-you replies. You then heft up both backpacks. "I'll put these in the car."
"There, go check it out," Jessica-you tells Eva-you as Marc-you swings two forty-pound packs into the back seat of the minivan. "I have to finish putting my books into my bag."
So everyone is in a thoroughly foul mood as soon as they've reached school, except for you, who are pink with pride at how convincing you feel you were as three independent siblings who were totally cross with each other.
* * * * *
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.
Take first period. (Please! in the case of cheerleading practice.) It doesn't take much candlepower to keep Marc acting like his normal self in a class like German for Reading Knowledge, which is packed with sophomores, juniors, and seniors all looking for an easy Foreign Languages credit. Marc-you slouches in a desk with his feet perched on the back of the desk in front, fiddling with a pencil while grinning and whispering over at Rebecca Sykes as some poor asshole stumbles through a German translation of "Red Riding Hood" while trying to turn it into English. "Why Gramma," you whisper at her, "what a big, furry dick you've got!" She snerks and covers her face with her hands while Mrs. Lepine looks around with a scowl to locate the source of the disturbance.
Meanwhile, even as you suck on the pen and undress one of the sophomore girls with your eyes, in the gym your other two bodies are tumbling and practicing with eight more members of the cheerleading squad. Chelsea Cooper, the squad captain, is turning from pink to red to purple to some shade that only astronomers can detect with special instruments as the squad stumbles about missing the beat that pulsing out of the stereo system.
"You have to hit it on the beats, Cindy," she yells at Cindy Vredenburg, the cheerleader who competed with her for the position of squad captain at the start of the semester. Even though Cindy lost seven-to-three, Chelsea has held it against her.
"I know that, Chelsea," Cindy snarls back, "and I am hitting it."
"Girl, you're not even close," Kendra archly informs her.
"Watch this," Chelsea fumes, and quick-marches to the other end of the gym and shakes out her limbs while Kendra backtracks the music. Lin and Yumi exchange a smirk, anticipating failure.
But when Chelsea comes flying toward the group in a series of quick-fire backflips, her hands and feet nail the pounding beat into the hardwood floor. She flies up in a half-twist at the end and sticks the landing. "Wow, great job," Jessica-you has to blurt out. Eva-you gives you a look as Cindy, Yumi and Lin scowl and Kendra and Gloria beam. Maria Vasquez—ambassador to Earth from Planet Airhead—frowns vacantly at the bleachers across the way, and Michelle Estrich—the "unpopular" cheerleader—keeps a carefully neutral expression on her face.
Chelsea turns a sneering eye on Jessica-you. "Yeah, you might learn something, Jessica, if you paid attention." In the German classroom, Marc-you tugs an ear with a faint smile as with three brains you fantasize about introducing a fat blue slug into Chelsea's cunny, and listening as her shrieks of horror turn into orgasmic screams of pleasure.
* * * * *
It's things like that which have you wondering if you're picking up some of the Garners' personalities even as you're dominating and running your own. Are you drunk on the high that comes from running their bodies, or are you drunk on the high that they are getting from being drunk on the high of being part of your collective?
Take second period, for instance. (In the case of AP Calculus: Please!) While Eva-you intently watches the equations unfold across the whiteboard, and Jessica-you polishes off some of last night's homework in Study Hall, Marc-you shouts himself hoarse on the athletic fields as he directs a practice scrimmage by the boys' soccer team, of which he is captain. They are all dressed out, and though Marc-you only has eyes for the play, a light flush of pleasure can't keep from creeping infectiously through the loins and limbs of the girls as such hard-bodied studs as Austin Dougherty, Chris Love, Jeremiah James, and Marcos Rivera thunder up and down the field. And those are the good guys. Westside's team, like its other squads, has its share of thugs and budding gangbangers: Brophy Maddox, Oscar Cantu, Lester Pozniak, and Gary Chen. There's no way the Garner girls would touch any of the latter, and Marc would take an aluminum bat to their knees if they so much as looked at his sisters. But if captured ... tamed ... harnessed ... along with the rest of the squad ... Well, soon even Marc's body is flushing a little.
* * * * *
But it's seventh period, as Eva-you glances furtively around her French for Reading Knowledge class while your other bodies settle into the boredom of the English IV class they share, that another idea recurs to you. Eva-you doesn't know most of the students in there, and neither do your other two brains. But Mr. Rodriguez knows them all.
It reminds you of something you told yourself last night: To take over a city, you should take over the schools. To take over the schools, you should start by taking over the teachers. If you're going to spread out, practice your powers, and hide where you can't be easily found but occupy an advantageous position, it would be hard to beat the teaching staff.
Or you could just grab the cheerleading or soccer squads, which you've already got access to.
Or you could think about it all some more.   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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