This choice: Continue reading the "Proceedings ..." • Go Back...Chapter #29The Object of Desire by: Seuzz   Bobby sat in front of the mirror: the big mirror that sat on the far edge of the vanity table; the vanity table that took up fully half of the walk-in closet, crowding the shirts and slacks that hung on thin wire hangers; the walk-in closet that no one else had ever stepped into. It would be very hard to explain to anyone why in his closet he had a vanity table of the sort used by actors in their dressing rooms, with the big, bright bulbs ringing the mirror. Bobby was not in the high school drama club, and a walk-in closet would most definitely not be the place to keep an actor's makeup table even if he were.
He studied his own face: a tanned, flat face with a wide but thin-lipped mouth under a large nose, topped with long flat brown hair that lay plastered against his forehead. Between the hair and the nose: two eyes that reflected back--
He sighed raggedly to recognize the emotion. That reflected back terror.
He raised his eyes to the large photograph taped to the corner of the mirror: the photograph taken with a cell phone, sharpened digitally, blown up, and printed out. The photograph that showed Ryan, his best friend at school, gazing coolly into the lens with his skeptical, appraising glance. It was the expression Ryan often wore, usually with teachers who challenged him over incomplete homework, or letterman-jacketed idiots who thought him an easy mark to fuck with. They didn't do that much anymore: they had learned that Ryan could hit back swiftly and savagely, and could dish out far too much punishment before bending under the return blows.
And in the same picture, over Ryan's shoulder: Bobby himself. Ryan was too cool to clown in front of a camera. Bobby couldn't help himself. So there he was, mouth and eyes agape in a mock scream.
Yes, terror was in his eyes this evening, as he knew they'd been in his eyes for weeks now when he relaxed--a very misleading verb--at home. Not the pretended shock and fear in the photograph with Ryan, but the real thing.
So this is love, he thought bitterly.
His mother had told him about love. "It will come on you when you least expect it," she'd said briskly. "Probably with the person you least expect. Probably with someone you have known for some time." Why will it come? he had asked. "Because it must," she'd said. "We couldn't go on without it." How will I know it's ... love? The word had been unfamiliar. "You will know it when you feel it." This didn't make much sense. What will it feel like? She hadn't answered that question. The next day she had left him, never to acknowledge him again, even if she saw him.
He had been four years old when she told him about love. Now he was five. (The seventeen-year-old face, like so much about Bobby, was extremely misleading.) For a year he had hunched expectantly against an ambush from this mysterious emotion; for six months he had prowled the halls of Sarasota High School, and noted what the boys and girls did when they said they had "fallen in love." It had seemed very soft and silly.
No one had told him it felt so much like fear.
No one had told him it would feel like a malevolent vine sprouting inside him, planting claw-like roots in his stomach and twisting it into a knot of pain; wrapping tendrils around his heart and choking it like a wounded and throbbing animal; grasping his throat like a hand. He had felt this kind of fear once before, briefly, when a policeman had followed him into the warehouse and caught him in a flashlight beam. But he was big enough by then, and had snarled and leaped, and after taking the man's clothes he had exited the warehouse as the policeman. He had wondered briefly if he would "love" the man's wife, but he had felt nothing with her he hadn't felt before, and when one day he walked out the door he had almost forgotten her before deciding never to return.
But now he was in love with Ryan.
"Maybe it will be a man and maybe it will be a woman," his mother had said. "You will have to adapt." Bobby knew enough from school to know what that meant.
His hair was already very much like Jessie's, and so was his skin. He only had to press his cheeks in. He pushed until his cheekbones stood out. He shaped his jaw, lengthening the chin to a point. He pulled his eyes down at the corners, and as he blinked they shifted from brown to hazel to grey. He tugged at his hair and twisted it into a bun before letting it fall loosely over the top of his ears. Breasts appeared, but they were very small, and he wasn't concentrating on them, so they also came out the wrong shape.
He rested his chin in his hands and contemplated Jessie's face. The terror was gone from his eyes; now he just felt disappointment. It wouldn't work. Ryan and Jessie were friends, and that was all; he would leave her behind one day as he would leave Bobby behind. No, if he was going to insert himself deeply into Ryan's life, it would have to be as the girl he was most likely to keep close to.
Bobby plucked up the stuffed bear he'd stolen from Alison's. He held it tight in his hands and closed his eyes. He murmured to himself as he rocked on the stool.
"Amanda can be such a bitch," he murmured to himself. (Close contact with personal items left psychic marks, which he could draw on for impersonations.) His voice acquired a sharp whine. "I saw you at Cassandra's locker. What were you talking about? What do you want to do for Valentine's Day? We're going to do something, aren't we? Oh, for fuck's sake, Kyle could stand to grow up a little. Let's take my car. Yours is too dirty." He felt his hair drop down around his ears; he felt his face twitch as the remembered emotions flicked over it like pinpricks, molding it for him. "What do you think of this blush?"
He opened his eyes to peer at himself from under long eyelashes with a sharp and mocking smile. "You're being crazy again," he rebuked himself in Alison's voice, using the words she so often used to rebuke Ryan. He stretched out a long arm with manicured nails at the end and beckoned to the Ryan in the photograph. "Why don't you come here and let me show you the right way to be crazy. Bobby?" His voice now cut like a knife. "Can you make yourself scarce?"
He could make Alison scarce, the way he had made the policeman scarce.
And then he felt fury. Bobby knew about Ryan's computer porn; so did Alison; and now he knew all she knew and felt about it. It was an unfair competition. Well, if Ryan wanted something hot--
He yanked off the soft flannel short and flashed hard teeth as his breasts popped up with nipples rigid. He ran his hands down his abdomen, and gasped as it sharply contracted into a slim, concave pedestal. He twisted out of his jeans and squeezed his cock and balls--how had they managed to remain during the other transformations? until they deflated and withdrew. He stood and planted a foot on the vanity table and massaged one leg until it was long and dark and hairless. He tossed his hair back and blinked again until they were a green so hot they smoked. He sucked coquettishly on a finger.
But even before he finished changing, he knew it was useless, and began to change again. The breasts slowly deflated and drooped, and his jawline sagged. He opened the drawer and fumbled at the brassiere he had lifted from Ryan's house.
"Oh, my sweet baby, what's happening to you?" he whispered sadly as he slowly drew it on. "You're growing up. It's all gone by so fast." His belly swelled up and drooped; his ass sagged into soft, dimpled cushions. He blinked back tears that washed the green from his eyes, turning them brown again. His hair was still long, but became limp and bedraggled, and spots and veins rose and spread over the back of his hands and he carefully pulled it up and pinned it into place.
Self-pity and fear of loss returned to his eyes. This felt like the deepest love; but it was most useless. Ryan would eventually leave his mother, as his own mother had left Bobby. And behind--or before--that act of betrayal would be another, the one that made this choking emotional scene so unbearable, and so gratuitous. "You will fall in love," his mother had told him. "And you will give her a child, or he will give you one. And then you'll take the child, as I took you, and disappear." So that's where I came from, Bobby had thought, and it had seemed an idle curiosity at the time.
If that final act of selfishness is where it ends, Ryan's mother would be the worst disguise of all: something sterile, and curdling into a pain that wouldn't lessen even as the years spread it thinner and thinner.
Slowly, his features recomposed themselves into Bobby's. He had suffered this way for a month; he could suffer for longer before making a final decision.
* * * * *
To continue investigating the room: "Disposing of Lucy"   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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