This choice: Try to make Adam work as a boyfriend for Dana. • Go Back...Chapter #8Try to make Adam work as a boyfriend for Dana. by: Seuzz   Adam's life is harder than you could have ever feared, but you're not ready to give up on it and on him yet. By morning you're are intimately acquainted with his thoughts and feelings, and yet there still seems to be aspects of it you haven't mastered. You decide to let Dana be herself for the day; you will concentrate on Adam's subconscious and tighten your grip on him.
It's a crash of pots and pans from the kitchen that wakes him, even as you sit inside and watch. He lays in bed for a few minutes, until one particularly loud bang tells him his mother is trying to get him up. He pads out of his bedroom in his pajama bottoms and mildly offers to fix breakfast for her; apparently she responds with a stream of curses, because a bunch of felt—but not uttered—profanities form in Adam's own mind. Yesterday he was angry when he talked to her, but this morning he just feels cold hatred. Seemingly, she won't be placated, so he shrugs and puts on some clothes and leaves for school, to blow off steam in the weight loft—that explains why he is in such good physical shape—and a shower before class.
When he's finished with the weights he showers and changes into shorts and sneakers and a T-shirt. He then shoots free throws until the basketball players come in. He playfully does a little one on one with Scott Bridges, and the other players grin and shout encouragements at him until the coach comes in and they start pre-school practice. Afterwards he goes back into the locker room and changes into a short-sleeve shirt and pair of baggy pants held up with suspenders.
Out front, he spots Jordan Treat and Reggie Dortmund, who are just two of the regular "guys" at school, and chats amiably with them for a few minutes: they say they're going to be tossing a Frisbee around at lunch, and Adam says he might join them. Then he goes off to lean insouciantly against the wall of the library until a gaggle of admiring girls (and a few guys, hanging around like pilot fish on a shark and looking to snag any loose female flesh it leaves behind) have him in a circle. He lets most of them do the talking, just laughing along and twinkling at a few of the more homely girls: he knows it gives them a rush when he pays attention to them. His only real contribution to the conversation is a dead-on parody of Mr. Federmann, the new calculus teacher, that he's honed and perfected over the year, and delivers to great mirth.
Then it's off to class, where he relaxes in the back and listens to his English and Biology and Social Studies teachers with vague but sustained interest. Ms. Henderson, in Biology, particularly likes his attention: she is just out of college, and Adam isn't shy about letting her catch him with his eyes resting on her bosom. Each time she does so, he only looks back with fresh but innocent candor, as if to say "I think you're sexy, and why should we pretend we don't like looking at each other?"
For lunch he lifts half a sandwich off Tucker Aldrich and some fruit from the twins, Brenda and Flora Ioescomb, then excuses himself from their company by remembering he was going to hang out with Jordan and Reggie. They're waiting for him in the front, and he happily tosses the disc around until the end of lunch. He then skips fourth period by hiding out with Kyle Lakewood and some of the soccer players in the library, and concludes the period by going behind the shop building to smoke a cigarette by himself.
All this has left you a little breathless—not just Adam's schedule but his very mind is restless, constantly searching for relief and distraction. You doubt you can get him to hold his attention on Dana, but still, you're curious to see how he would act around her. So you reach out to her mind—this is the tail end of her lunch period—and plant in it a sudden desire to go looking out behind the shop building.
As you wait for her to appear, you insinuate yourself as deeply as you can into Adam's mind, coiling around his thoughts, the better to manipulate them yourself. So when Dana appears, Adam's thoughts feel like your own, even though you are not actually "thinking" them for him.
"Oh hey," she says when she sees him. "I thought I'd find you here."
He's unstirred by her appearance, but he smiles brightly, pretending he is. "You looking for me?"
She shrugs. "All the cool kids hang out here, so I just wanted to see who I could find."
"I don't see you back here, though. Not often enough for my taste, anyway."
She looks at the ground and rubs her arm. "Do you keep an eye out for me?" His manner has provoked in her a memory of his casual flirtation in the library on Monday night. Was it really so casual, she is wondering.
He eyes her speculatively, and the tiger-like desire to play with fresh prey stirs in his mind. "Yeah, sure. Almost all of us do."
"Who is s 'us'?"
"Well, guys, of course."
She glances up at him. "You're a fucking tease, Adam."
It's a shot across his bow: now he's hungry, and the smile vanishes from his face. "I know I am, but what are you," he says mockingly.
"What?"
"Never bullshit a bullshitter, Dana. What were you wearing on Monday?"
She thinks. "I don't remember."
"I do." He strikes a pose, a mocking parody of the sexy girl you pretended to be on your first day of controlling her at school. "That afternoon, every guy here went home and masturbated furiously while thinking of you," he says. "Even the gay ones."
An angry shadow crosses her face. "You're so fucking crude."
He takes a quit hit off his cigarette and gives her a piercing glance. "If you see right through me, Dana, why should I pretend I'm someone I'm not? Go out with me. You know what you'll get. That's what scares you away from every other guy, isn't it? Not knowing what'll happen?"
She stares at him. "Do you ... Do you actually think you know me?"
"No. So why do you think you know me?"
Her face is pinched, even ugly. "I guess I don't."
Through her mind you can sense his smile: the warmth, the pleasure, the sunny and open vista. He smiles, and you feel like anything is possible, you once heard a girl moan ecstatically about Adam. It's that smile now. "That's all I wanted you to say, Dana" he says softly. "Of course you don't know me. So go out with me. Explore me." He lets his eyes flick over her features while his head tilts slowly to the side. "Go out with me," he says again, but his voice is so soft, and his attention is so seemingly lost in her, that he barely makes a sound.
Dana's mind is a sudden whirl: Adam was being so crude, so direct, so abrupt; but now he seems so open and fresh and innocent. He has always just seemed "cool," but he's really complex. Isn't he? How can one guy be so horrible one moment and then so angelic the next? She said horrible things to him. He was just throwing them back at her? To teach her a lesson? He's dated a lot, but always been a gentleman, they say. Maybe he does know me, she thinks. Maybe I've not been fair to him ...
Adam, meanwhile, is gloating at having caught her. The smile never fails, especially when it follows the slap ...
Okay, this has gone quite far enough, you think, completely forgetting your earlier desire to pair Dana and Adam. There's no way in hell you're going to let this asshole screw with the girl you love.
You jam on the brakes in both their heads. Dana you just spin around so that all her thoughts—already jumbled—stay jumbled. In Adam you try desperately to insert the thought that this little lamb is not worth the trouble of slaughtering, that he should just be nice and let her go. You're only pretending to be nice to her, but be nice to her for real. You try grabbing his memories and rearranging them so that he forgets what he was planning to do ...
Suddenly, Adam's mind goes dark. No, it's not dark, but you can't read it any more. You can't see out his eyes, either. Instead, it feels like all his thoughts have turned into little mirrors: You can't see inside them, but you can see yourself reflected off them. You are puzzled by this, and then you get the awful feeling that he has become aware of you, that you see yourself in his thoughts because he has felt you, and is looking back at you. And then, horribly, the great galaxy that is Adam Karter's mind turns into— Well, there's no other way to describe it: It turns into a great eye staring back at you.
You'd gasp if you had the physical body to, but the eye has seized you and holds you in its gaze. You are still entwined with Adam's consciousness, you still have your own mental tendrils plunged into his, and you feel him pulling inexorably at you.
Who are you?
It's not a voice, it's a demand that reverberates through your own mind. You try to twist away, to reestablish your own dominance, but you feel your own thoughts being pulled down into his. It's like being caught in the gears of a great machine: you stuck your mind into his, and now you can't get it out. And, with growing horror, you see that he isn't just pulling you. He is eating you, digesting your own thoughts and turning them into his.
What are you? How did you get here?
You try to fight, but you feel answering words being torn from you, as your own mind is twisted into a pattern that conforms to Adam's demands.
"I'm ... I'm David Johnson."
The eye seems to look through you. What are you? Your mind twists again, throwing up the vision of the night on the military base. How did you get inside me? In an agony, you visualize your possessing Dana and then possessing June and possessing Paul.
The eye looks at you speculatively, and you feel yourself being drawn deeper in. It's like a cauldron of fire now, consuming you. The warmth is searing at first, but then it becomes warm and soothing. You lose your focus on the eye, on Adam's mind. It feels like you're sinking into an embrace. Arms seem to reach to you—and then they're inside you.
David, says a voice soothingly. "David," it repeats, and you realize it is your own. "David ... You are mine."  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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