Chapter #5A Face Graft by: Seuzz   Previously: "A Washout" 
The door slams behind as you swagger into the house you and your three roommates share. You hurl your workout bag onto the sofa and wipe your bare torso down with your discarded t-shirt as you enter the kitchen. There, you kick open the door into the laundry room and toss the shirt onto the pile even as you yank open the refrigerator to pull out a beer. You crack it open and down half the can before pausing to catch your breath.
You come close to downing the rest, but pour it down the sink. It's a crappy Lite beer anyway.
Well, you shouldn't even have half of it, though it's a scorching July day outside. Last week, as you were buttoning yourself into a pair of Levis preparatory for a date, you found the top button pinching just a little too much for comfort. You cussed lustily under your breath and ran a quick dietary audit of the previous ten days. Nothing stood out as particularly bad, which was itself the bad news. Your genes are starting to catch up to you. All the men in your family incline to paunch, and if you're going to keep it trim, it looks like, you're going to have to cut back even more on the calories and ramp up the exercise.
Did you say "your" family and "your" genes? Well, that depends on the value of the variable "you."
You are still Will Prescott, so far as you're concerned, even though it's been almost three years since you've answered to that name. "Jason Lynch" is the name you answer to, and it's his body, his family, and his genes that have you worried about premature middle-aged spread.
The trouble all started during your senior year at Westside High School, when a classmate found a magic book that accomplished the equivalent of body swaps. (Well, technically, it was you who found the book in a used-book shop, but you quickly sold it to that classmate.) At the time you were a scrawny kid drifting through high school, getting Cs while trying not to attract the attention of bullies. Jason Lynch was the star pitcher and captain of the school baseball team, and one of the worst bullies of the bunch. Your acquaintance, Justin Roth, thought it would be—er—"interesting" if he body-swapped the two of you without warning. After an acrimonious beginnings, then some personal screw ups, and finally a set of semi-comic adventures, you and Jason wound up forming first a wary and then a fast friendship. For various reasons that seemed good to you at the time, you decided to keep inside each other's bodies for the rest of the school year, even though you both knew how to reverse the process.
Too late you discovered that you'd trapped yourselves in these new roles. Jason, while pretending to be you, had engaged in a crash course of body building, and he seriously bulked up before you discovered that, if you switched back, you would be reappearing in your earlier, weaker form. This would have raised all sorts of awkward questions, so you have had to persist in your altered states.
By that time, though, you were quite used to being "Jason Lynch," and he to being "Will Prescott." You kept close to each other, as you had a shared secret, and even though you could have gone to a better college on a better athletic scholarship, you chose to enroll at the local university, Keyserling College, when your friend could get into no better place.
And he too got in on an athletic scholarship. You are both pitchers for the university baseball team.
You hear a door open, and a minute later one of your roommates, Michael St. Sauver, pads into the kitchen. He's in his boxers, and his hair is tousled, even though it's almost two in the afternoon. "Hey, sleepyhead," you say as he leans past you to root around inside the refrigerator.
"I didn't get in till five," he says as he pulls the milk out. He opens it, sniffs it, decides it's still okay. "Kristin and I had a three-hour drive back."
"Shit, man, how'd you and her wind up three hours outside'a town?"
"Well, first we wound up an hour outside town," he says as he gets down a bowl and a box of cereal. "Then we wound up two hours outside of town. And after an hour of driving we wound up three hours outside of town."
"Sure, but where did you—?"
There's a sharp rap at the front door. "That's your friend Christian," Michael says as you go to open it. "Saw him coming up the street.
Sure enough it is. Christian Knouse, as skinny now as he (and you) were back in high school, darts inside. "Put on a shirt," he says as he gives you a quick look up and down. "Oh, God!" he exclaims as the nearly naked Michael, munching on cereal, joins you. "Did I interrupt a gay orgy or something?"
"It's hot."
"Stop jawing about how bad you lust for each other."
"Fuck you," you tell him, and Michael flips a casual bird. "What are you here for?"
"To offer you some hours." He perches on the arm of a sofa and fixes you with a steely stare. "I'm taking off for Virginia next week—"
"Already?"
"Plans got moved up. Naturally, I need someone to cover my hours at the computer center, and you—"
"Why can't Will cover them?" you ask.
"Because I hate the son of a bitch."
Your eyes narrow. Christian shrugs. "On account of he rooked me out of thirty bucks on our last poker night."
A muffled voice from the other side of a door joins the conversation. "I did not!"
"Are you denying," Christian shouts back, "that you left thirty dollars richer and I left thirty dollars poorer?"
"I didn't rook ya! I scared the ever-fucking Jesus out of you and that's how come you folded while holding a full house!"
"Does everyone in this house wait until mid-afternoon before getting up and getting dressed?" Christian asks. "Well? You want more hours?"
You shrug. "I could always use the money. Electricity's expensive," you say as the cooler kicks on.
* * * * *
You would have never imagined, when you enrolled at Keyserling, that you would have wound up working in the computer center, and that you would be working there with people like Christian Knouse, who is exactly the kind of guy Jason, in his earlier incarnation, delighted in tormenting. But you turned out to have an almost spooky knack for computer programming, so there you are.
But then, "Jason Lynch" and "Will Prescott" both have a very different set of friends than either one had had in high school.
It's been a greater change for "Will." When you were him, you had less than a handful of good friends, and they were scrawny, rabbity guys like yourself. After Jason became "Will," he didn't drop Caleb Johansson and Keith Tilley, exactly, but they wound up on the backburner as he started hanging out with some of his old friends, like Noah Baker and Michael Allen. These guys were jocks, but they were respectable, academically successful athletes, and with them for friends Will Prescott saw both his grades and his social standing soar. (Though strangely, and you've never talked to him about it, he never got a girlfriend.) They were your friends as well, after you became Jason Lynch, and you solidified that friendship with them while easing away from and in some cases outright dropping Jason's friendships with the more bullying element: Gordon Black, Steve Patterson, Dalton Douglas, Roy Nelson, Antonio Sanchez, and others. And as you became friends with guys like Laurent Delacroix and Alec Brown and Chris Ratliff, so too did Will.
By the time college started, then, you had exchanged Jason's reputation as a bully for one as something of an anti-bully. It didn't surprise anyone, then, when on becoming so successful as a programmer you also became reasonably friendly with the programming set: guys like Christian. That's why he's so comfortable coming into your house to ask you to take over some of his hours at the place where you both work—and to invite you to his place to play anything from poker to his own highly baroque adaptations of Dungeons and Dragons.
You follow him to the computer center now, to set up the change of work hours, and when you leave you wander over to the Keyserling library to research some mythological monsters in preparation for the next gaming session. You're slouched in one of the chairs in a corner, poring through an old book, when voices sound nearby.
One of them is softly singing: "You must never smile at a crocodile—"
A gruffer one interrupts: "Quiet. I don't want to have to recalibrate this thing."
"If it's so delicate as that," says the first, "it's lucky they're haunting a library, isn't it?" There follows a hissing laugh. "Hickory dickory duck, the mouse came out to f—"
The words die as the two speakers come round a corner and spot you. They seem to be about your age.
The one in the rear, who was chanting, has brilliant blonde hair and shining teeth. He is in long pants and a dress shirt, but his shoulders are very broad, despite the light, quick step with which he walks. The other is—
You blink hard as you recognize him. It's Justin Roth.
Roth is the guy who was responsible for you and Jason switching identities. You haven't seen him since your senior year, when he vanished right in the middle of the "adventure"; immediately afterward, everyone who had been affected by the rash of body-swaps (except you and Jason) had reverted to normal. You never heard what happened to him, so his appearance now, with shorter hair, clearer skin, and a brighter, harder eye, is a surprise.
He's holding what looks like a Geiger counter, and peering around the stacks. He glances at you, but doesn't seem to recognize you.  You have the following choice:  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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