by Schow, Ryan
I start to speak, to protest, to curse, but he holds up a hand, silencing me for a moment.
“The differences in your two personalities, the fogginess of her memory, it can all be explained. You died, Abby. You were dead for days. But then you came back. You were a zombie, but you were alive.”
“So no one’s wondering where I am? No one’s missing me?”
He shakes his head.
My heart drops. “You son of a bitch.”
He manages to look sheepish, well as sheepish as one can look for being a genius and one of the most infamous mass murderers in recorded history.
“My father, and Margaret—”
“They have their dead daughter back. It’s a miracle, really, that you survived. Because of that, I’m certain they’re coping with the fraudulent you as you are: a child who survived the unthinkable.”
“So now what?” I say.
“You take her life and go back to what you know, or I make you different and you see what this new life holds for you.”
For a long time, we stand in the lab in silence. My brain feels soggy. I’ve got no energy left. I have a choice, I tell myself. A better one than before. The way Maggie ended her life was with a razor blade in the tub. I can end mine in the canister and start anew, my already tainted soul spared from the consequences of suicide. All the times I wished for different parents, a different life, a do-over…I can have it now. Isn’t that what I wanted anyway? It is, but now I’m not sure.
“Let me sleep on it,” I concede.
“Fine. But we must choose new DNA if you are to change again.”
“I could give a shit less at this point,” I hear myself say. “Just surprise me.”
“Surprise you?” he says.
“Yes,” I say. Then I quickly add, “But I better not have a dick.”
He just shakes his head and says, “From the DNA samplings I now have, I can throw something together tonight.”
“Sure,” I say. “Whatever.”
Right then I realize I need to see someone. If I’m to give up this body, and surrender my life as Abigail Swann—and before that the pudge-bomb formerly known as Savannah Van Duyn—I’ll need to tie up some loose ends.
What I’m thinking, it’s selfish, but what do I care anymore? I’m not me. I might never be me again.
“Hey Josef,” I say, “I need to borrow your car. Where are your the keys?”
“Don’t call me that,” he snaps.
He stomps off to his office, then comes out a minute later and throws them overhand at me, like a baseball pitch thrown with the force of his anger. I see what he sees. And what he sees in his head are those keys smashing me in the face. It wouldn’t kill me, or even matter if they did hit. It’s the hatred he has for me that has me grinning. I speed up my processing time, not realizing I can do that. Everything around me slows. Gives me the chance to control the elements. Holding up my hand, I stop the keys in the space between us. They hover midair. Casually, with a smirk on my face, I reach out and grab them like it’s no biggie.
“Smart ass,” Holland says.
When it comes to me versus him, I’m always going to win, so I gloat. “How’s my dick taste now?”
“Extra sour,” he grumbles.
Gosh damn, I’m thinking, not even God can stop me from killing him when the time is right. What a delectable day that will be.
4
Sitting in Holland’s Porsche with the cruise control set on seventy, I let the tentacles of my mind reach out to find him. It doesn’t take long. I leave his mind the second I have him. Staying inside people’s minds, it’s creepy. It’s like using your best friend’s butt to poop. You’re not borrowing an experience, you’re sharing it. Trust me, you don’t want any part of that.
He is leaving a dive bar in downtown Auburn, the nightlife all but dried up. Within moments, I have an address. A destination. Traffic is semi-light, so it takes a minute for me to find a good place to pull over. When I do, I enter the address into the navigation system and follow the directions. When I arrive an hour and a half later, my heart is slamming so hard against my chest I can hardly breathe.
My emotions are usually muted, dull. Not like before these last changes. I think of the times the two of us have been together, even though it didn’t work out, and this stirs something in me. Like an off switch turning on. The lust starts the currents of need within me.
And now, OMFG, now I feel everything.
Getting out of the SUV, the cool evening air washing over me, I walk up to the front door, knock twice and wait. When he opens up, seeing him sends countless emotions crashing through me in waves of desire and hunger. I am lust. I am love. It’s like taking that first breath after being held under water for months.
“Abby,” he says. “How did you find me?” I’m in his head, feeling what he’s feeling, and it only increases my appetite for him.
He wants me, too.
My hand goes out, touches his chest. I push him gently out of the way and walk inside where it’s warm.
“Shut the door,” I tell him.
He does.
If I didn’t tell you, I look hot. Smoking hot. After leaving Holland—just before closing—I went to Nordstrom’s, found a super sexy outfit, put it on in the dressing room, then disrupted the cameras and the minds of the necessary employees while I walked right out the front door with my stolen gear.
Okay, I felt like Winona Ryder in her klepto days, shoplifting and all, but I will return the clothes in their same condition tomorrow. I swear. And I won’t always do things like this. That is a promise as well. What I can’t do is feel bad, though. It’s pretty darn cool being able to do anything you want.
So he’s like, “Seriously, Abby, what are you doing here?”
“Stop being coy.”
“What?”
“I know what you want, I can feel it.”
My body is caught in the gravitational pull of his lust. I saunter up to him; he backs up because it’s the polite thing to do, me being underage and all.
“Stop,” I say.
“Stop what?”
“Stop resisting me.”
“Are you eighteen yet?” he asks.
Rolling my eyes, I say, “Yes, Jake. I’m eighteen. I’m twenty. I’m twenty-five years old. What does it matter?”
“Because you’re a minor,” he explains, like I haven’t heard that from him a dozen times already. “That matters when you’re a teacher. And I am your teacher.” But he is not my teacher anymore. Not now, maybe never again.
“I know you want me, and I know how weak you are right now. You don’t want to resist me, not looking the way I do, especially these tits”—I say, cupping my girls—“and how they tasted on the flat of your tongue not so long ago.”
His jaw drops because that’s exactly what he’s thinking in his head. My fingers go to my blouse. Buttons are undone. The shirt drops to the floor and it’s only bra, skirt, thigh-high fishnets and heels.
“They’re ripe for the taking,” I say.
“No,” he says, but his voice is faltering. I can feel the yearning coursing through him. It’s some sort of a depleting, energizing force that’s changing his thoughts, and overriding his morals. His will is anemic. Faltering.
“Shut up, Jake.” I walk to him. He puts a hand out to stop me. I undo my bra, let my breasts loose. He staggers backwards, weakened by the sight of them.
I reach him. My fingers, his buttons; the shirt he’s wearing comes off. The smell of his skin is a soapy, erotic fragrance. Slightly damp, earthy smelling from the day, hot to the touch. My mouth on his chest leaves kiss prints everywhere. He’s mine. I’m in his head now. I know exactly what he wants.
“No,” he says. “This isn’t right.”
He tries to nudge me away and I say, “After today, you’ll never see me again. Not this version, anyway.”
Now time stops.
“Why did you phrase it that way?” he asks.
I’m still
in his head, answering all the questions the moment they arise. “No I’m not leaving the country. No I’m not leaving the state. No I’m not suicidal. I’m not on drugs. No boyfriend.”
“How are you—?”
“I’m already inside you, Jake,” I say, all breathy and seductive, because he loves the sound of my voice. It sounds the way a good tumbler of brandy tastes. “Now I want you inside me. For real.”
The way I say it, it’s like I’m in pain because we’re not already one. Skirt goes off, panties come down and it’s just me in my thigh-highs and heels.
He can’t resist it anymore. He’s huge against his jeans, his eyes haunted with something so deep and animalistic. I don’t need to be in his head to know what he wants. What he wants right now is to be inside me, not that I blame him.
“Kiss me,” I say.
“No,” he whispers, feeble, the last of his defenses falling away with my every advance.
“You kiss me, or I take the kiss from you.”
“What’s come over you?” he asks. His eyes are all over my girl parts, feasting on them, trying not to give in but failing.
“Do it, Jake. Take me. I’m all yours tonight.”
His pants come off. Then it’s his shoes, socks and underwear. Moments later he’s all over me with his warm lips and his soft, thorough hands; then slowly, albeit painfully for the first few minutes, he works his way inside of me and I’m mentally inside of him and together we go and go and go until he’s spent and I’m spent.
After that we lay together, holding each other. We are both quiet, still swimming in the ecstasy of it all, still riding the sexual end of an impossible bliss. I breathe in the memories of being taken by him, smell the post-coital air, taste the damp scents of my first lover, and my lost virginity. Inside I’m beaming. I wonder if this is what it feels like—falling in love not with a boy, but with a man. It was everything I ever dreamt it could be. Everything and so much more.
5
If he never said another word, if we could just lay together like we are now—our naked bodies on the downy sheets, forever clinging to each other—I’d die a happy girl.
And I will die.
But not now; not just yet. And not like before.
This time, I’m giving up everything: my identity, my education, my friends and my family, the lifestyle my father has created for us. I’ll miss my father dearly, and Brayden and Netty, too. And, of course, I’ll miss Jake.
The pit in my stomach, it is an abyss so dark and painful, it threatens to overshadow the moment.
I focus on Jake’s steady breathing, climb into his mind, rest there for a while. He thinks he loves me. I think I love him, too. But it’s more than that. He wonders if we’re meant to be together. If we’re destined for each other. But there’s something else, there, as well. A conflict he’s hiding.
“In another life,” I say, pulling out of his mind before it’s too late.
“What?”
“I think we are meant to be together. Just in another life.”
“I was just thinking that,” he says, craning his head to look at me. His arm is under my neck, my nude body curled sideways against his. “Not the part about it being another life, though. I was thinking it could be now. I mean, it isn’t unforeseeable.”
“Now isn’t good, Jake,” I tell him, wondering what he’s hiding. “Never is best.”
He pulls his arm out from underneath me, turns on his side and looks right at me. “What’s going on with you?”
“Like I said, I’m leaving and you’ll never see me again.”
“Where are you going?”
“Just…away.”
“Listen, you don’t owe me an explanation, but you being all cryptic like this, it’s sort of tainting the moment.”
“If I told you, you wouldn’t understand.”
God, I love the way he looks. How just the act of seeing him makes me want to change my mind about leaving. I take a strand of hair that has fallen over his forehead and move it out of his face.
“Try me,” he says.
“I did. Just now. I took you for a test drive and I want every last part of you, but we can’t do this. It can’t happen. It’s not because of you that I’m leaving. It’s what I’ve done with my life, and how I’ve become something…I can no longer live with.”
“You talk like you’re dying.”
“I am.”
Now he’s sitting up.
“Do you have cancer or something?”
“Worse.”
I want to open up, but I can’t do anything but shut this party down. My mind, it’s this push and pull of things and I’m absorbing everything: his sadness, his love, his apprehension and anxiety and, oh God, his uncontrolled longing for me.
My loins are stirring again. I pull the blanket up tight around my boobs just as the rain outside starts. My ears listen to the soothing sounds, focus on it to drown out everything else: all the energy in this room, all the white noise.
Then I look at him and say, “I am everyone and no one.”
“What?”
“I am not Abigail Swann, but I am.”
He laughs, but not like what I’ve said is funny. It’s more like an, oh shit, what are you about to say kind of laugh. I hate the way it sounds coming out of him.
I take a deep breath, resign myself to this, then say, “I started out as Savannah Van Duyn before becoming several versions of her.”
Now his brain is wrecked. It was going fifty miles an hour forward when I threw it into reverse and obliterated the transmission.
“That’s not possible,” he says, low and a bit angry. The word piling into his mind is deception.
“There is another version of me out there right now. Taking my life. Filling in as Abby Swann while I’ve been gone.”
“There are two of you?” he says, perking up, but only to strengthen his case for when the energy inside him finally breaks loose on me.
“Not tomorrow. Tomorrow there will only be her. And that Abby? Well, you don’t know her at all, but she’ll look exactly like me and she’ll probably like you just the way I do.”
“What about you? Where are you going? I don’t understand this! How are you Savannah? You look nothing like her. She was so…so insecure, and you’re not.”
It’s starting—his undoing. I’m completely out of his head now. Gone. I jumped out the second the word deception flittered into my psyche. A hard rain is coming. It’s tap-tap-tapping the roof, but an even bigger storm is about to break in here, inside Jake.
“Because I am something…impossible. A harbinger of worse things to come if I don’t undo all the things that have been done to me.”
“Stop being so goddamned cryptic!” he says. I try to take his hand, but he pulls away from me. His face and chest are turning red.
“The reason I took you was because I knew what was in your head, the same way I know what you’re thinking right now.”
“Bullshit,” he says.
“When you rejected me before, I didn’t understand. Now I do. You couldn’t just be with me in secret and wait. You’d want me relentlessly. It would be too much for you to handle so you’d start the affair, one neither of us would want to quit.”
There’s more, though. I don’t know what it is, but it’s big. It feels huge. If I’m here to tell Jake goodbye, and not try being with him, then whatever he’s hiding, I don’t want to know about it.
“How do you know this?” he’s saying, clearly baffled.
“I told you.”
“But—”
“Then, once you had me—once I had you—we’d be an item, and doomed to secrecy. You didn’t want that to be our start. You would want to show me off or hold my hand in public, but you couldn’t.”
“You’re not yet eighteen,” he says, his voice quiet as a whisper.
“No, I’m not. But there’s more, a secret you’re holding that I’m shying away from because it is too big for me to handle, and too much for you to
share.”
Now his eyes fill with so much pain and remorse it nearly cracks my heart. What I have done to him, the mistakes I’ve made, it couldn’t be more clear than right now. I’ve taken something from him I should not have taken: his honor. He slept with an underage student.
Double whammy.
“Labels are for men and women who don’t know us. Who will never know us,” I say. “The way you feel, in your heart, how it’s exploding with adoration, with desire, with the kind of reckless sobbing of first love, that’s what my heart is feeling, too. Whether you put yourself inside me or not, whether the laws written by archaic haters from forever ago think I’m not fit to handle your penis in the emotional, rational sense, it doesn’t matter. I want to love you. You want to love me. That’s real. And there are no laws to govern love. It’s a truly destined, truly organic affair, Jake. And you know that.”
Inside him again, I feel everything. How he’s melting inside, how his restlessness comes from wanting me all the time but having to wait, how his silence and rejection was him trying to do the right thing. How I’ve now compromised his morality.
And there’s that other thing. I stay away from it. Best to not touch against it for fear of what I’ll discover, for fear of what he can’t put into words, what he won’t say.
“I’m a super-biological entity, made this way through genetic modification, and something else,” I confess. “It’s a force I don’t understand and refuse to observe any longer.”
“A what?” he says. “You’re a super-biological what?!”
“Entity.”
He doesn’t understand, so I show him. I look at his bedroom door, close it with my mind. He startles. Snaps his head around to look at me. Fear pumps into his heart, but I say, “Don’t be afraid.”
“How can I not?”
I open the door back up, slowly, perfectly controlled.
His hands go to his head, palms pressing to his temples and he is not the sex symbol I’ve been holding in my mind since the first day I kissed him. To me he has been flawless, perfect. And he still is. But he’s also scared. Scared of me, terrified this dream he’s been dreaming has been a lie. A trick. The rock he will break himself upon.