The Genevieve Remix free porn video

THE GENEVIEVE REMIX by Crazy Baron NOTIFICATIONS AND DISCLAIMERS This work may be distributed to forums where it can be read free of charge, provided that the author gives his explicit permission and the text is not altered. Please note that this story is intended for mature readers only. The people and incidents depicted herein are completely fictional. THE STORY One of the peculiarities of the human brain is its sensitivity to the combination of sounds that make up the name of the brain's owner. This applies even to retired, middle-aged TV actors who have recently left their house for the first time after a two-day drinking binge and are getting used to fresh air and sunshine again, cautiously and by degrees, with their hangover thankfully showing definite signs of subsiding at last. "Kyle Haney?" The addressee took his eyes off the stack of paperback novels and the plastic storage bin filled with cassette tapes that he had been rifling through and straightened his back, and the source of the nasal voice came into his field of view. It was a young man, not much over 20. Kyle's eyes went over the form of the other person and made more observations. Short, over rather than under ideal weight; cheeks on the chubby side, a dimpled round chin, black-rimmed glasses, fairly thick and dark eyebrows; dark curly hair. No beard or stubble to speak of. Dressed in loose-fitting jeans with a belt and a plaid gray-brown shirt, hem carefully tucked in and all the buttons done, apart from the uppermost one. Conclusion: a nerd with loser tendencies, or maybe the other way around. "Are you Kyle Haney?" the man repeated. "I'm sorry, but you look a lot like him." "Yeah, that's me," Kyle confirmed and turned on his heels so that he was facing the geek properly. "What can I do for you?" The question was purely rhetorical, just as Kyle's visit to the moving sale of his soon-to-be former neighbors was nothing more than an excuse for him to go out and walk off his hammering headache. He was not seriously thinking of buying any of their crap, and he certainly was not about to start socializing with a random passerby, especially in his current condition. "Um," the geek stuttered, patently having summoned his courage, "were you by any chance on Richer or Poorer? The old sitcom?" This was an interesting development, for sure. The time when people had occasionally recognized Kyle on the street was long gone, together with his fleeting taste of fame. Gone too was the heartthrob with good, youthful looks and radiant smile. Twenty years had piled up on him since, and they had brought unemployment, debts, occasional back pains and a losing battle with alcoholism. Although his handsome face was still there to an extent, albeit with added plumpness to the cheeks, plenty of creases around the eyes and a scraggly goatee to cover his chin, he was surprised that anyone could make the connection between his present and 1990s self. "We preferred to say it was a family drama with comedic elements," Kyle remarked with a chuckle, "but I'm fine with the sitcom classification." "So, you are Kyle Haney? The same Kyle Haney?" "Yep. The man himself, in the flesh." "Hi, I'm Marty," the geek introduced himself and extended his hand clumsily for a shake. Kyle took it with a tight-lipped smile, and their acquaintance was formally inaugurated. As he had expected, Marty's grip was weak and his palm was clammy with sweat. "Nice to meet you." "My pleasure," Kyle said less than truthfully. "It's great to see somebody remembers me even though I only had a recurring part, and a pretty small one at that. Jeez, it's been so long! I was something like thirteen or fourteen when they canceled that thing." "You were Kev, the wannabe cool kid," Marty specified and let out a nervous, forced little laugh. "Do you recall that face you did in the Halloween episode of Season Four? There are these tough boys, with you in the middle, and you have your mouth hanging open and your eyes are, like, completely bugging out!" "I know we did that, but the details of filming it are kind of hazy in my head." "The thing is, somebody took a screengrab of that and made it into a meme. It's all the rage on Reddit and everywhere right now." The polite smile promptly left Kyle's lips as the disappointment sunk in. He sincerely wanted to say something witty and acidic to this, something that conveyed his deepest feelings, but his mind, laboring under the aftereffects of the liquor he had consumed, quite simply failed to come up with anything even halfway adequate. This left him with no other option than giving the geek a wordless despising stare. "You know, a meme," Marty broke the increasingly awkward silence. His smile, unlike Kyle's, had not faltered, and he seemed oblivious to the reaction of the other man. "It's when you take an image and put text---" "I know what that is," Kyle interrupted him none too kindly. "So, they've made one of me where I'm staring in front of myself like a drooling idiot?" "Basically, yeah." "Oh, goody," he grunted but then added dryly, "Well, I guess I can't complain. At least I'm finally getting some form of recognition for what I did." There was more to this than pure sarcasm. A tiny part of Kyle was genuinely glad to hear the news: someone, somewhere, had seen him on TV and remembered him, even if that person had reduced him to a cheap joke that would be thrown around for a few weeks and then relegated to the scrap heap of history where the rest of Kyle's career already was. Though Kyle had no intention to let Marty in on any of this, there was no denying his curiosity had been piqued. Instead of telling the geek to go away, like he had been tempted to do only a few seconds prior, he decided to offer the young man an olive branch. "So, anyway--Richer or Poorer," he said, trying to sound jovial. An old, nearly forgotten instinct was telling him to be friendly and not waste this opportunity to win over a new fan. "It was pretty cheesy, especially when you look back on it now, but from what I've heard, it's still got a few aficionados here and there. What's your take on it?" "The show?" Marty responded. "I, uh, I haven't seen it, to be honest." "You haven't?" "No. I only read about it on Wikipedia because I saw the meme and thought it was, like, really funny." "Praise the Lord for Wikipedia!" Kyle declared loudly and added a bitter chortle. "Where would the youth of today be without search engines and websites you can use with your cell phone?" "It's great that we get to have them, in my opinion," Marty defended himself meekly. "I wouldn't have any idea of who you are if I hadn't looked you up." "Okay, you've got a point there," Kyle admitted grudgingly. "Nothing personal." "It's fine." An idea was taking shape in Kyle's brain. It had begun as a mischievous private gag, nothing more, but when he gave it some consideration, it started to seem viable for real. This day was going to be boring and spent alone, nursing away the remains of the hangover and trying to pass the time until night came and he would go to bed; any break in that dull routine was welcome. In the end, he opted to act on his whim. "Marty," he spoke up, "what do you say we go to my place, kick back and get to know each other a bit better? I think I've seen enough of this junk here." The geek's eyes grew large, and he needed a full three seconds to formulate a response. "Your place? As in your home?" "Yeah." "Where do you live?" "Next door. My little bachelor cave's right there." He pointed across the lawn at a white wooden house, half hidden behind the hedgerow that marked the border of his neighbors' property. "Oh," Marty mumbled. "I guess. But I can't stay very long. I've got plans for this evening." "Like a date?" Kyle asked with a teasing, impish smile, raising an eyebrow. He knew the answer to his question perfectly well. "Who's the lucky young lady?" "No, not that," Marty said and shook his head. A faint shade of blush had crept on his cheeks. "Just... a kind of meeting thing with my friends and stuff." "Alright. Let's head on over so you won't miss your thing." The other people present--the thirty-something wife of the family moving away, a handful of her friends, a tall, bald man in overalls, and a few others--paid Kyle and Marty scarcely more than a cursory, mildly disapproving look as the pair departed the scene of the sale and made their way to the next house over, with Kyle leading and his new friend shuffling behind him. Their muted relief at being rid of the uncouth troublemaker who smelled of old booze didn't go unnoticed by him, and he quietly basked in it. Kyle's house tended to stand out of its surroundings somewhat in the same way as its owner did, if not to the same degree. While the neighborhood generally represented a picture-perfect sample of upper middle class suburban America, this one dwelling near its heart seemed to belong to a considerably less wealthy region. At the beginning of its life, it had been a solitary, modest family home, with a tiny porch at one end and an attached garage at the side (currently filled with miscellaneous household items and junk because Kyle didn't own a car), but the intervening years had seen the area developed, and little by little the old house had been hemmed in by more sumptuous buildings and properties. Now, it stood in the middle of an unkempt lawn, and the white paint flaking off its walls made it look more dilapidated than it actually was. It was the house that trick-or-treating children and Jehovah's Witnesses avoided equally carefully since both knew that they wouldn't get anything for their trouble, maybe apart from a drunken cursing, if they walked up the cracked cement driveway and rang the doorbell. Kyle fumbled with the lock until he managed to open the door. They were greeted with a rush of air carrying a bewildering mixture of smells. "Step into my bungalow," he exhorted Marty. He easily navigated around the pile of old newspapers stacked in the doorway and further into the short and narrow, mostly dark hallway that led to the living room, while Marty followed in his wake, watching his every step. The kitchen and the bathroom sat side by side along the hallway, and beyond the living room lay the bedroom. The living room had heavy, navy blue curtains drawn over the windows, but instead of opening them, Kyle flipped a switch, and the ceiling light came to life. The room, like the whole house, was in a merrily disorganized state--old pizza boxes, clothes, magazines, empty beer cans and bottles and anything else imaginable strewn across the floor, the lone armchair, the couch facing the TV and the small four-seater dinner table that also doubled as Kyle's writing desk and had a laptop computer sitting on it. "My apologies for the mess," the owner of the house said with a touch of mock formality. "I wasn't expecting visitors today." "It's okay," Marty hurried to sound his approval. "No problem." "I need a beer," Kyle announced and marched into the kitchen with long, decisive strides. Marty heard him open the refrigerator door, and then his voice carried across the house, "How about you? I've got my Repair Kit ready to rock, and there's plenty to go around for both of us." "No thanks. I'm good." "Are you sure? Straight out of my fridge, it's nice and cold." "Really, I'm okay. I don't... you know, drink." "You don't?" Kyle asked as he returned to the living room with a can in his hand. "You mean you don't drink beer, or---?" "Alcohol. I don't do that." Kyle gave his guest a scrutinizing look. "But you're legal age to drink, aren't you?" "Yeah. I turned 21 in October last year." "Have you ever tried it?" "Just once. I was, like, sixteen when my dad let me have a bottle of beer at home. I hated the taste so much I couldn't swallow half of it, and I haven't touched the stuff since." "Oh wow," Kyle said. He popped the can open and then immediately treated himself to a mouthful of its contents, swallowing it as though he had been about to die of thirst. "I honestly don't know if I should envy or pity you." Marty let his eyes wander around the room, including a quick, timid glance at Kyle. He understood that he had to say something to do away with the silence, and to his relief and joy, a suitable, hopefully inoffensive topic did occur to him just when the pause was becoming awkward. "Uh, this is... a nice house you've got." Kyle laughed. "I'm not 100 per cent convinced you actually mean that, but thanks anyway. It doesn't look its best at the moment, though." "How long have you been living here? Did you, uh, buy this place with the money you got from the TV shows and movies you worked on?" "Something like that," Kyle said and took another swig. "It was a blessing my folks insisted I save my earnings and not blow everything on useless shit. Yeah, and of course, I was underage when I got started, so I didn't have much of a say in what to do with my money back then." "How young were you?" "When I started acting? Young, I can tell you. My mom was convinced from pretty much the day I was born that I was destined to be a great actor, a big star, and she had me start drama lessons when I was in preschool. Whenever there was a commercial being taped or a bit part in a TV show, she took me to audition, and every once in a while, I would get the gig. It was a crazy life for a little kid but I liked it, first because I could see it made my folks happy and then later because it made me happy. I don't want to brag, but I really had what it takes to be a professional--maybe not the top of the A-list kind, but I could've made a good living out of it." Kyle stopped to wet his throat again, only now realizing that he and Marty were still standing in the middle of the floor. "Take a seat," he said, motioning at the couch. "Feel free to push that stuff aside if there's not enough room." "Okay, thanks!" Marty responded gladly and lowered his butt on a relatively clean spot on the aforementioned piece of furniture. For his part, Kyle showed that he practiced what he preached by throwing a handful of old car magazines off of one of the armchairs. He flopped down in it, taking another thirsty gulp of his beer before continuing his recount. "This is how it went, by and large. First there were a bunch of toy commercials and that sort of thing, and then I was an extra in a couple of movies around the late 80s and the early 90s. That led to Richer or Poorer, which was the nearest I got to a regular job. I think I was in something like ten or twelve episodes. Mom and Dad would drive me down to L.A. maybe once every two months, I'd get the shooting script, try to memorize my lines, go to the studio, rehearse my scenes and shoot them. We'd stay at a hotel and hang around for a day or two after the episode was in the can, check out the sights or whatever and then go back home. It sure as hell beat rotting away in a classroom at my middle school." "Oh," Marty said. "It soon got to a point where Mom bought a small apartment in Long Beach, and she moved there with me, you know, to be where my job and acting coaches were. Just a little later, we got a phone call from the assistant producer one evening, and she told us Richer or Poorer had been canceled. I didn't take it that hard. I was pushing fifteen by that time and Mom and my instructors were saying I needed to do something more mature." "How did that turn out?" Kyle grinned at what was obviously a bittersweet memory. "I almost made it," he said. "It was so goddamn close it's not even funny." "What went wrong?" "I want you to picture this. I'm an up-and-coming fresh face, way better looking and younger than I am now. I've got an agent. I'm doing work here and there and the guys behind the cameras are starting to remember me. That was the time when teen dramas were a huge thing on TV. I got small one-time speaking parts on Felicity and Dawson's Creek, and even though most of it didn't make the final cut, I was interviewed by some teenybopper magazine and girls from all over the country start sending me fan mail. Pretty cool, huh?" "What's Dawson's Creek?" Marty inquired. "I've never seen it." "Yeah, right," Kyle snorted and downed another dose of beer. "I keep forgetting you were born fucking yesterday." "Uh... Sorry." "Things were really going my way after that," he went on, not bothering to dwell on Marty's ignorance. In truth, he was delighted and grateful to have at last met someone who was willing to listen. "Imagine you're right on the edge of your breakthrough, waiting for that one call or meeting that makes you a millionaire and a household name in a day. I was there for a brief while, Marty. I was that guy." "It must've been fantastic." "It was insane. I was like on hot coals for the next few months, and then it came. This big producer, whose name I shall not utter, was pitching a teen show for a major network. It was called Love You Till September, and they were holding an audition for it on the West Coast though it was going to be filmed in the East." "I-I don't think I've---" Marty begun, but Kyle merely waved his hand. "Of course not, and I'm forgiving you for that. You see, it never actually got made. They cast me as one of the three male leads--a two- year contract with an option for three more. It would've been steady work and big money. We went to this college town in the summer of '99 for two weeks to shoot the pilot, me, the other guys and four unbelievably hot girls. Christ, what a time to be alive! Whenever we weren't working, we took trips around the countryside or just hung out, and I got to second base with the blond chick. She was a looker, as in supermodel material, and she put out! Anyway, I don't know for sure if the stuff we shot was ever properly edited and put together into a full episode before the network execs pulled the plug on the whole shebang. We didn't make it, and that was that. So much for my big break." "Oh man. Raw deal." "That's how it goes in the business. You fall on your face, you get up and try again. Maybe you make it in the end, maybe you don't. And then there are people who wreck their chances all by themselves, such as Yours Truly." Kyle grimaced and gulped down a large mouthful. "This one night, I'm coming back from New York where I've been to another audition. I'm changing flights in Minneapolis and I've booked a hotel room to sleep the night over. I get there, and I see these three girls in the lobby. They recognize me and ask for my autograph. I give one to each and go to my room, but then, I hear a knock on the door. It's one of the girls, and she wants to come inside. I let her in, and... Well, things roll from there." "You had sex with her?" "Damn right I did!" Kyle declared and let out a laugh. "And what a sweet, tight pussy she had. But guess what? Turns out she was fifteen. I swear she didn't look a day under eighteen to me, but there it was. And in the morning, she runs home to Mommy and Daddy and tells them everything. It kind of sucked to be me after that." He emptied the can in one impatient swig, got up and went into the kitchen. "That's awful," Marty called after him in a compassionate tone. "What did they do to you? Did you, like, go to prison?" Kyle wasted no time. His guest had barely finished the question when the owner of the house was already back in the living room, with a fresh beer in his hand. "My folks hired a good lawyer," he explained and opened the can. With a grunt, he sat down in the armchair. "I got a suspended sentence, but they slapped me a big fine and community service, and I had to undergo that deviancy evaluation shit. I don't think I've ever experienced anything more demeaning in my whole fucking life." "Was it difficult for you to find work after that?" "What do you think?" Kyle laughed again. "No, not difficult; try impossible. I wasn't a big-name celebrity yet and the story didn't make headlines everywhere, but word gets around pretty fast in the entertainment world. I could've just as well died, as far as my agent and casting directors and other people were concerned. They wouldn't touch me with a ten-foot pole." "That's unfair," Marty commented. "You made one honest mistake. I mean, when there are people like---" "I'm not one of them," Kyle interrupted him. "I never was some major player with a billion dollars on my bank account and powerful friends. Those are the folks who get away with crime, not some 20-year-old newcomer actor with a swollen head. I was good, but there were others. I was forgettable, so I was forgotten. End of." Kyle got on his feet and began to pace back and forth, barely able to contain his anger that had interrupted the wistful reminiscing. "I'm telling you, Marty, I could be up there right now. Name any male actor in my generation, and I could be just as big. Kutcher or Wood or even DiCaprio, that could be me. I've got the chops. They're no better than me, only luckier. If I hadn't fucked that one girl, I wouldn't be an unemployed slob in a one-street town in the middle of nowhere! I could be somebody, Marty. I... Fuck this!" For a moment, Kyle squeezed the beer can in his hand, debating with himself if he should slam it against the table or the floor. However, his thirst won out, and instead of crushing the can and spilling its contents, he raised it to his lips. Clenching his jaw, he slowly slunk back to the chair and sat down. "Marty, that's how things are. I'd give anything for a second chance, but I'm not going to get that. You can't undo the past. There's no way out of this." "Maybe there is." Marty closed his mouth quickly, flustered and scared at the realization that he had unintentionally blurted out what he had been thinking. It had not been intended for Kyle to hear, but he couldn't take it back anymore. The host tilted his head and gave Marty a questioning look. "Come again?" he inquired. Another short pause followed, and it ended with Kyle letting out a chuckle. "You can change history? Wow! I'll drink to that." He lifted the beer can up and then brought it to his lips with a sweeping, overstated movement. "No." Marty had looked around himself one more time, as though he was hoping suddenly to find someone there to support him in his decision. "I can't, but I might know a person who can." "Hey, tell me more, man. I'd love to hear this." The sarcasm in Kyle's voice was unmistakable, but Marty could no longer retreat. "There's this lady," he explained, trying to sound convincing while quietly bracing for the near-inevitable laughter and scorn from Kyle, "who can do some totally amazing things. I don't know how any of that actually happens or if it's strictly real, but---" "Strictly real? What do you mean by that?" "It's hard to describe," Marty said. "I've never seen anyone do anything like that. What I'm saying is the stuff is so out there you can't help but doubt your senses when you see it." "Okay," Kyle nodded. "You've got a friend with superpowers. It's cool, I give you that, but how does this tie into what I've been telling you and the general misery that's my life?" "I wouldn't call her a friend. I know her, that's all." "You didn't answer my question, Marty boy." "I just thought she might be able to help you. I can't promise anything, but..." He stopped for a beat and then continued with, "I'm going to attend a very special meeting tonight, and she'll be there. I... I don't know if this is okay by her and the others, but--I guess you can come too. It's on one condition, though." "What's that?" "You've got to have an absolutely open mind. That's not negotiable. You can't make fun of the people there, and you'll have to be nice to them even if you don't believe in the stuff they tell you. They'll kill us both if I bring a troll in there." Kyle raised his eyebrows but a faint smile remained on his lips. "Really? As in we get literally drawn and quartered if I fuck around?" "Maybe not literally, but I sure wouldn't like to get on her bad side. I don't even want to know what she's like when she's pissed at someone." This left the proverbial ball in Kyle's court, and he spent a moment pondering Marty's suggestion. Getting to attend a gathering of harmless nutcases that was going to be presided over by a soi-disant sorceress had the makings of hilarious entertainment. All he had to do was to keep a straight face--which, granted, might be a challenge--and watch. Kyle was not one to overlook an opportunity to enjoy himself at the expense of others, and since he didn't have anything better to do that day, there was nothing to stop him from going. "Yeah, why not," he finally agreed. "Count me in. I'll be on my best behavior." "Promise?" "Scout's honor." "Okay," Marty said and got on his feet. His movements were stiff. "I need to get going. I've got some things to do first but I'll come to pick you up at seven. I can drive us there." "Seven it is," Kyle responded and took a swig of his beer, leaning back in the chair. "Honk your horn when you're here. I'll make myself presentable in the meantime." ***** At precisely 6:58 p.m., Marty's blue, aging Volvo station wagon rolled to a stop in front of Kyle's property. After hesitating for a while, the driver pressed the horn button with his palm, and the device blared. Nearly simultaneously, Kyle stepped out of his house, pushing the front door closed behind him with his foot, and made his way across the porch, down the stairs and along the driveway towards Marty and the car. His energetic but slightly unsteady swagger revealed his intoxicated state, and even Marty noticed that at once. The younger man bit his lip. This had been a lousy idea. He had had no business inviting the chronically drunk and disorderly washout of an actor to a function that was intended only for the select few, the members of a fellowship who had been told to be discreet. There would be hell to pay if Kyle caused trouble and Genevieve held Marty responsible. Kyle grabbed the handle of the passenger side door and dropped his bulk on the seat two seconds later. He brought a strong smell of alcohol with him to the cabin of the car. "Hi!" he greeted Marty briskly. "How thoughtful of you to bring a hearse. Are we going straight to the cemetery?" "No," Marty mumbled, his cheeks reddening with anxiety and embarrassment. "Sorry for the car. I don't have the kind of money to buy me a new one." "Just kidding," Kyle laughed. "Your ride's fine by me, as long as it runs." Marty lowered his foot on the gas pedal and put the car gently in motion. Without allowing the speed to build up past 15 miles an hour and keeping both hands firmly on the steering wheel, he drove along the quiet, currently trafficless street dissecting the residential area. There were homes of decent, well-to-do families, their gardens and lawns and their parked cars and vans, superficially different but actually very much alike; thick bushes that cast deepening shadows on the road when the sun was beginning to set; then a tight curve, an intersection, another one, the tower of the church appearing from behind a grove of trees; next, the railroad tracks, the grocery stores and shops and the gas stations. Kyle took in these boring, familiar sights without any real interest and deliberated with himself whether he should ask Marty where the meeting was going to be held. He decided not to--a surprise would be more fun. He soon thought of another topic to discuss instead. "Where do you live, Marty? Are you from around these parts?" "Yeah. I've been living in this town pretty much all my life, ever since my folks moved in from Sacramento when I was, like, two or three. My mom's got relatives here as well." "Do you have your own place, or...?" "Not at the moment. I'm staying with my parents." "Okay, let me guess. You go to the community college but didn't feel like paying for a dorm room." "No, I don't. Not really." "So, you dropped out and you're working to save money while trying to figure out what to do next." "Um... I guess you're right about that last part." "You don't have a job?" "Yeah. I don't." "But you did graduate from high school?" "Yeah." "Didn't you get accepted anywhere after that?" "I, uh, never applied," came the insecure reply. "High school sucked so much I started to think studying's not for me. My grades were mostly okay but I hated everything about it. For me, it was just sitting in class, getting picked on and being taught loads of things I don't need to know." "What do you do with your time, anyway? What's your typical day like?" "Well, I get up in the morning, maybe around eleven, eat and help my folks around the house. Then I grab a bunch of energy drinks, order pizza or Chinese, go to my room and listen to music, play some games or hang out online until I start getting sleepy and go to bed. The usual, basically." "Oh shit. Do you ever actually go outside and see your friends face to face?" "Sometimes. There's this dude called Brandon I met in school, and we get on really well. We hit the town every now and then to check out the game stores." "In other words," Kyle summed up, "you do nothing whatsoever except piss away your youth and your parents' money and you have zero plans for the future. Is that it?" "No! I have plans! I'm pretty good at Overwatch and not too bad at Call of Duty, and if I started practicing hard, like eight or nine hours a day, I probably could---" "Shut up right there, Marty boy. That's bullshit, and I don't want to hear it. Even if nine out of ten people in your generation are paralyzed from the neck up, that doesn't mean you have to be. God, I need to teach you how to enjoy your life while you're still young! We're going out sometime, you and me, and then you get to learn from the master." A short-lived but sullen silence fell. Marty, offended but unwilling to confront his passenger directly, concentrated on driving. Even at this easy pace, it didn't take him more than five minutes to leave the town center behind, cross the river via a steel bridge and enter another residential area between and on the slopes of the rolling hills to the north. Spring had changed into summer some weeks earlier, and the lush nature around the town attested to that. Marty shifted nervously on the driver's seat, glanced at Kyle and finally spoke up. "Uh, about this meeting we're going to." "Yeah? What about it?" "There's going to be people and things that I know you think are weird and stupid, and---" "Look," Kyle interrupted him. "When I was a kid, my best friend had an uncle who lived in Tacoma and who was big on political activism. Do you know what he used to do?" Marty shook his head. "Whenever he was unhappy with some government decision, local or national, he'd go to the bathroom, take a dump in his boxers, take them off, put them in an envelope and mail that to the person he thought was responsible. And that guy was almost normal compared to some folks I later ran into at movie studios. Believe me, I've seen my share of off- the-wall types in my time." "That's... good." "Anyway, I could do with some background info. What's the name of this great magician we're going to meet?" "Genevieve," Marty said. "A nice old lady." "But she's a real witch?" "Don't ever call her that, Kyle. She hates it more than anything." "What should I call her?" "She says she's a teacher and we're her students, so we usually address her as just that--'Teacher'. Our meetings are lessons because we're there to learn about the world and ourselves." "Her lingo's got a cool cultish ring to it," Kyle commented. "I like that." He chuckled to himself and already regretted not bringing along anything to drink. What he had heard so far had added up to a vivid mental picture of a group of suburban odd ducks chanting and dancing around in an old woman's dining room. A six pack of beer or a small bottle of vodka would have gone perfectly with watching that spectacle from the sidelines. "Remember what you promised," Marty warned him yet again, sounding more desperate than threatening. "She's a sweet person, no matter how you feel about her teachings. Be respectful to her." "Hey, relax, kid! As I said, I've been around wackaloons before and I know how to keep my mouth shut. Take it easy." Their destination was a new or recently renovated family home in the middle of a spacious, open lawn dotted with flower beds and fruit trees. A meticulously groomed, thick, man-high hedge surrounded the property and shielded it from view. Marty pulled up on the gravel turnaround, conscientious to park so that the owners of the other motor vehicles there--two cars and a vintage motorbike--would have no problem leaving. In addition to these, two bicycles were standing on the lawn by the main entrance of the house. "Is this is?" Kyle inquired. "The lair?" "Yeah," Marty replied, pulling the keys out of the ignition. He stepped out of the car, and when Kyle had done likewise, he locked it up and headed for the house. The older man walked by his side. After they had entered through the door, Kyle found himself in a tastefully and expensively decorated hall where almost everything was painted creamy white. The house seemed larger on the inside than on the outside, not least because of the plentiful daylight supplied by the windows above the staircase. There were large mirrors on the walls and heavy, soft carpets on the floor. His observations were interrupted by a person who peeked through a doorway and then began to stroll towards Marty and him. Running his eyes over this new acquaintance-to-be when he or she was entirely visible, Kyle tentatively determined her to be a woman. That, though, was no more than a guess. She was pudgy and greasy, and she had either lost all of her hair or shaven her head absolutely clean. Unless her pallor was the result of overdone, very skillfully applied cosmetics, there was no trace of makeup on her face. To add to this, she was wearing a pair of jogging pants and a black, oversized long-sleeve shirt that had a hole near one of its armpits. Even if she was indeed a woman, Kyle thought, she was no looker--and she had taken extra care to underline that unfortunate fact. "Hi, Marty," she called out in an androgynous voice that fit perfectly with her appearance. "Who's your friend?" "Oh, this is Kyle," the geek hurried to reply. "Kyle, Yon." "My pleasure," Kyle said reflexively and extended his hand to the woman, who merely smiled at him. "Yon, was it?" "Yeah. Y-O-N." "Okay. So, is that---?" "I'm going to save you the trouble," she cut him off, firmly but without overt hostility. "I know you'll ask me about this stuff anyway. I'm biologically female but I identify as non-binary. You can use whichever set of pronouns you like, provided that you're civil and don't call me a woman or a girl, or by any term you think I might find offensive. Got that?" "I think I did," Kyle replied and reined in the temptation to do just what Yon had told him not to. He had not lied to Marty when he had claimed to have met and gotten along with lots of offbeat personalities during his career; regardless, his first impression of Yon, taking shape at present, was not flattering. "Anyway, just to be clear, what... are you? What word should I refer to you by?" "I'm a person," came the answer. "The same as you and everyone else. That's good enough for me." "Alright." "How about you?" Yon returned his question. "I'm asking because I don't want to assume your gender." "I'm a guy," Kyle supplied with a wince, "and it's fair to say there's nothing more to it than that." "Hey, cool! It's great to see some men are starting to wake up and come around. You're interested in Love and Might too?" "Sort of." "That's what the world needs," she said. There was an unmistakable tone of passion and conviction in her voice. "More people seeing magic for what it is, a way to heal and do good. It's not a sin that originated from some imaginary evil being. The patriarchy wants us to believe that, but it's not true. They've always waged war against anyone who opposes them, and this suppression of ideas and thoughts they don't approve of is an important part of it. The battle is won or lost with ideas because the world as we see it is made up of ideas." "Right." "Take modern science, for example. Why do you think the vast majority of famous scientists have been men? What do they and their theories have in common? Things like Newton's solid body mechanics or Darwin's evolution, what do they boil down to?" "No clue. What?" "Rape," she pronounced emphatically. "It's all about rape. Throughout human history, the patriarchy has tried to hold the exclusive right to sexual power and violence and to use it to dominate every other group. What they call science is only another means to an end. It's rape by any other name. They suppress beliefs in magic and witchcraft because it's an alternative to their mechanical, rapist world view and therefore a threat. They can't have that." She snapped her mouth closed, to underscore that she had delivered the whole truth and the last word on the subject. "Well," Kyle commented and drew his lips into a sarcastic smirk, "that's a pretty unique take on the issue, for sure. I haven't heard anything like it before." Yon's moon face beamed. Just as Kyle had intended, she had mistaken his quip for a compliment. The rest of Genevieve's congregation was waiting in the living room adjacent to the hall. There was a seriously overweight black man, not older than 30, with a round, friendly face, a beard and short dreadlocks; a tall and gaunt white man with hollow cheeks and somewhat bulging eyes; a mousy, withered, very small woman of indeterminate age; and finally Marty's friend Brandon, who was a little shorter and skinnier than him and did not wear glasses but looked much the same otherwise and had a nearly identical voice when he spoke. Each of them greeted Kyle in turn, some with a simple hello and a nod, while others shook his hand. He answered them in kind, without sincere interest. Kyle had privately classified every single one of them as a loser well before the introductions were over. He had turned his thoughts to talking Marty into leaving this nest of pathetic loons with him and taking him home when a door opened and in walked a woman. There could be no mistake about her identity: she was none other than the mistress of the house, Genevieve. She had one thing in common with her short and homely female follower, namely that her age was difficult to estimate. Underneath her makeup, the slightly wrinkled skin of her face was that of a tired and frail woman in her late 40s, that of a very well preserved one in her early 70s, or something in between. In a stark contrast to the other woman, however, Genevieve was at least average height, her body form appeared neither too plump nor too thin, and she had a full head of chestnut brown, curly hair and proportionate, fine facial features. Her regal expression and perfect posture did their share to accentuate her looks, as did her clothes. She was wearing a plain but tasteful, long, ice blue dress, with a plaid shawl on her shoulders to add color. Genevieve was imposing in her own eccentric way, even in Kyle's eyes, despite the fact that he was prepared and fully expecting to laugh at her, her antics and her disciples. "I see we have a new child with us today," she spoke, casting a look at Kyle. The words came out in a clear, carefully articulated flow that was fitting for someone used to making important speeches and conducting ceremonies. In passing, Kyle wondered if the woman had studied drama. "What is your name?" "Kyle. I'm Kyle Haney." If Genevieve recognized him, she hid her reaction perfectly. "Pleased to meet you, Kyle. Do you want to learn about the ways of Love and Might?" "Yes, he does," Marty jumped in. "I talked with him about you and your lessons, and he was interested, so I said it was okay for him to come. I hope I haven't done anything you don't approve of, Teacher." Genevieve gave him a stately smile. "Do not worry, Child Marty. I'm sure your intentions are pure. The message is destined to be spread, and both open and closed minds will hear it. Each and every person must decide for themselves whether to listen, and Kyle is no exception. He is welcome to be one of us if he so chooses." "Nice," Kyle remarked and grinned. The effect of the Repair Kit would not last forever, and he was anxious to get to the good part before the inevitable renewed hangover took hold. "So, what happens next? How do we roll?" "Patience," Genevieve chided him in her restrained, polite manner. "All will be clear in good time. This is only your first lesson, Child Kyle." A massive armchair stood alone in the middle of the room. Kyle had immediately guessed that it was Genevieve's throne, and sure enough, she made her way to it in an elegant, slow stroll and took a seat. "Please be seated, children," she exhorted her flock. "To be able to witness the works of Love and Might, we must cleanse our minds first." The others sat down on the carpet in front of Genevieve. Kyle, meanwhile, picked up one of the chairs belonging to an antique dining set at one end of the room and brought it closer to the scene of action so that he was sitting a little to the side and above Genevieve's disciples. This arrangement both gave him a good view of the proceedings and made it clear that although he was willing to watch and humor the hostess up to a certain point, so as not to miss the show, he was not one of her followers and would not grovel before a self-styled high priestess. Genevieve raised her left hand in a salute of some kind, and the others began to hum a wordless tune in unison. The droning didn't last longer than half a minute, but that was plenty for Kyle. Soon everyone went completely quiet again, and Genevieve put her hand down. Only the ticking of the cuckoo clock on the wall, as well as the occasional hiss of a deep breath escaping from one of the attendees, punctuated the silence that stretched out second by second. A constant small smile played on Kyle's lips, but he was following the session with genuine interest. Something about the whole thing had suddenly gripped him and curbed in the ideas for sardonic remarks that had been forming in his mind a few brief moments earlier. As chance would have it, Kyle was looking straight at the clock when the hook from which it was hanging gave way without warning. The clock dropped, fell on the floor and immediately shattered to pieces. The loud crack of breaking wood visibly startled everyone in the room (apart from Genevieve), and Marty gazed at the scattered remains of the timepiece while the faint twang of a metallic spring released from tension was still vibrating in the air. Kyle's surprise had lasted for a beat or two, but he overcame it easily. "Oh man," he commented with an irreverent grin. "Poor little birdie's homeless now." Genevieve gave him a momentary glance, to acknowledge his existence with the least effort possible, and then resumed her previous staring directly forward and into nothingness. Her facial expression remained the same, concentrated and totally unperturbable. Kyle leaned forward on his chair and prepared to fire off another remark, but a gasp from Marty distracted him. The geek continued to gape at the broken clock, and instinctively Kyle followed his eyes. What he saw derailed his thoughts completely. The pieces of the cuckoo clock were moving by themselves. The smallest bits and splinters of wood crawled like insects across the floor to recombine with the larger parts; and then those began to reassemble themselves. They joined back together, as though highly skilled but invisible and unthinkably fast hands had worked on them, and when the clock was whole again, it jumped up and resumed its former place on the wall. Kyle blinked in astonishment, only to see that the cuckoo clock was where it was supposed to be, swinging its pendulum left and right. Genevieve spoke up in a dignified manner. "My dear children, there was a doubter in our midst. This demonstration was intended to relieve him of his misgivings and convince him that through Love and Might, everything is possible. I want to ask him this: does he continue to doubt?" Kyle realized that he had been staring at the sight with his eyes wide. Jolted back into the present, he scrambled to give his answer, and this time, it was thoroughly honest. "No, I don't," he confessed. "I believe it. I believe all the way!" ***** Another noteworthy feature of the human brain that comes into play here is its tendency to filter out or explain away things that don't seem to make sense or fit into a pattern. Kyle was no slouch in this respect either, and even though the cuckoo clock incident had definitely impressed him, he had reconsidered after going home that night and decided not to get on the bandwagon quite yet. Maybe the whole show had been some kind of a stage magician's trick; admittedly, Kyle had no idea how it could have been pulled off, but he was too cynical not to take the possibility into account. Besides, the following two sessions over the next week were far less riveting. For the most part, Genevieve had the group sit on the floor of her living room while she lectured them on philosophy and metaphysics. She would ramble for hours on end, and Kyle had trouble staying awake. He had seriously begun to wonder if he was wasting his time when, after Marty had come to pick him up for his fourth "lesson", he and the boy were together walking up the steps leading to Genevieve's porch. He happened to look at his feet and barely avoided stepping on a small brown turd right in the middle of the welcome mat. "Dog shit, apparently," Kyle surmised. He put his foot down on a corner of the mat and pulled it to the side. "We'd better tell Genevieve to clean the mess up." "That looks like Billy's calling card," Marty commented and smiled. "Good to know he's alive." Kyle raised his eyebrows. "Come again?" "There used to be this guy in our group. His name was William but everybody called him Billy the Furry because he was into that stuff big time and he really wanted to become a fox." "Right," Kyle brightened up. "One of those sick fucks who get an erection watching cartoon animals. Gotcha." "Billy was an okay person," Marty countered. "He wasn't like a pervert or a rapist or anything." "What happened to the dude?" "He took part in Genevieve's lessons until one day around last Christmas she said he was ready for his wish to come true." "And?" "He just disappeared. No one's seen him after that, but there's been a half tame fox living in this neighborhood since then. We think he's Billy, and he stops by every now and then to thank us." "By shitting on Genevieve's porch?" "What else could he do? He's a fox, you know. It's not like he can walk into a store, buy some flowers and bring those over. I'm glad to see he's doing alright." "By the way," Kyle went on, unsure whether he should have put any stock in Marty's tale, "did anyone ever tell him that most animals in the wild don't die of old age? Did your buddy Billy consider this little unpleasant fact when he made his decision?" "I, uh... I don't know exactly," Marty said in a quiet voice and looked away. Apart from the old man, the same people who had been present at Kyle's first session were waiting in Genevieve's living room. However, there were definite signs of unusual excitement and even nervousness. The participants stood together around Brandon and chatted enthusiastically, as though to congratulate him for some achievement. The nerd himself was the most anxious of all. His cheeks were red, and skittish chuckles and snickers came out of his mouth. Genevieve was sitting majestically in her comfy armchair, again steeped in the role of a religious leader. She raised her hand, and the others stopped talking at once, turned to look at their mistress and gave her their undivided attention. "Children," she announced in a solemn tone that was already familiar to Kyle, "today is a great day. Love and Might will work to fulfill Child Brandon's wish before the sun sets." Brandon smiled bashfully at this. The others showed their support: the black man clapped his hands and cheered, as did Marty; Yon, who was standing by Brandon's side, gave his shoulder a friendly squeeze. Kyle, for his part, carefully maintained his outward cool and composure, but Genevieve's words had roused his curiosity. Something interesting was finally in the offing. "Child Brandon," Genevieve addressed her star pupil, "would you please state your desire so that all may hear it?" "Okay," he responded, swallowed, cleared his throat and began, "My dream is to get to be a magical girl, basically like the ones you see in manga and anime. My name is going to be Goddess Pure Soul, and I'll have purple hair, a beautiful face, big eyes with many colors and a super hot body. I can shoot balls of plasma from my hands, and I can call on Love and Might to give me an energy boost and heal any injuries I might get when I battle evil aliens and demons. I'll live in a castle made of pearls on Ceres but I can teleport through space to be anywhere I'm needed." Genevieve nodded approvingly. "So be it," she said and smiled. "May Love and Might help you attain your goal. Come, let us begin." This session differed from the previous ones. Genevieve sat on her throne as before, but Brandon kneeled in front of her and bowed his head while the others gathered in a loose circle around the two. Again, the priestess raised her left hand to signal the start of the ceremony, and Yon, the black man, the woman and Marty performed the hymn. Kyle, who was at pains to hide his amusement and disbelief despite his curiosity, made a halfhearted attempt to hum along until the chant was finished. Genevieve gently placed the palms of her hands on top of Brandon's head. She closed her eyes and her lips moved, but the words they formed were inaudible. A blinding explosion of white light washed out Kyle's field of vision without warning. There was no sound, heat or pressure, just a wall of uniform brilliance that saturated his eyes. For a few frantic moments, he was certain that he had lost his eyesight for good, and he took an instinctive step back in a feeble attempt to protect the rest of his body from the lightning strike, magnesium flare or whatever it was that had disrupted the session. Kyle blinked, and the light was gone. Little by little, he began to discern the blurry shapes of other people and objects in the room-- Marty, Yon, Genevieve's chair, the dinner table--from the sea of red, orange, green and purple circles, waves and squares that wallowed in front of him. As far as he could tell, the others were still there, though the tight circle had broken up when everyone had recoiled from the flash. No, he corrected himself. Something had changed. Genevieve was sitting in the exact same position, as though she was frozen solid, but there was no Brandon. Kyle was about to air this observation and his alarm when Genevieve finally opened her eyes and lowered her hands. She took a deep breath. "It is done," she declared calmly. "Love and Might have taken Child Brandon to be transfigured." If the cuckoo clock episode had been memorable, this had left Kyle speechless. His mouth was hanging open and his brain struggled to comprehend the fact that he couldn't see Brandon anywhere. A living and breathing, flesh-and-blood human being had disappeared. "What the fuck?" he blurted out in a loud voice, not caring if Genevieve and the others took exception. "Seriously! I mean, the guy was just here, and... What happened?" "He got his wish," Marty said in a half-whisper, and his lips curved up. "Brandon's a magical girl now." "You turned him into some Japanese cartoon chick? How?" "Love and Might," Yon answered for her Teacher. She was reflecting the same smile that was on Marty's face. "That's what we've been telling you all along. Love and Might can do anything, and you can do anything with them." "No," Kyle huffed and let out a small laugh out of sheer confusion, disbelief and amazement. "I won't buy it. No way!" "But it is true, Child Kyle," Genevieve corrected him patiently. "I can see that your heart is not yet fully open to this world, but one day you will understand." "Where did he go?" "To the place where he wanted to be." "Ceres? The asteroid? Look, people, I'm no scientist but even I know that thing is an airless lump of rock going round in space! How the hell is anyone going to survive up there?" No answer was forthcoming. Genevieve had gone back into dignified, introspective silence, while Marty, Yon, the woman and the man had cast their eyes down, apart from a few furtive sideways glances at Kyle the Infidel who had raised a disturbing issue. Close to a full minute passed in the quiet, increasing awkwardness until the black man mustered the courage to speak up. "Guys, we've got to believe in Love and Might. It'll be alright in the end. Maybe the Goddess can live in outer space because she's got space magic." "Yeah, that's got to be it," Marty voiced his agreement. "Love and Might won't let Brandon down." "The lesson is concluded," Genevieve said in what was close to her normal conversational tone and stood up. She had a tendency to relax a little and step out of her role as the lofty leader of her sect whenever a gathering was formally over. "We'll be having the next one at three the day after tomorrow. I'm hoping everybody can come." This signaled the end of the meeting, and it broke up prosaically, with everyone saying goodbye to the others, voicing hopes to see them again soon and then heading out of the door, as though nothing particularly unusual had taken place in the house. For Kyle, this was a relief that didn't come a second too soon. He went out ahead of Marty who had again given him a ride, stood on Genevieve's driveway and tried to make his racing thoughts calm down at least a little. He had to get away from this lunacy, he needed something to strengthen his nerves after witnessing a bunch of nutcases evidently send one of their number into space with a magic spell. And he knew just the thing. "Marty," he called out to the young man when the latter was walking down the porch steps. "Come here for a sec, will you?" Marty complied, waddling slowly up to the person who was the closest equivalent of a friend in his life now that his best pal from school had vanished in a flash of light on an ordinary, sunny May afternoon. He wore a neutral expression on his face, but it did little to hide the fact that he was torn between his will to believe and his fear that things had gone wrong for Brandon. "Yeah?" "Remember when I told you I was going to teach you a life lesson?" "I think so." "Well, bud, today's the day. Get the car and let's go." Marty had no objections. A minute later, his Volvo was rolling steadily back towards the town center and Kyle's house. The two men in the cabin were both completely quiet at first, the driver pretending to devote his attention to staying on the road and the passenger leaning back on his seat, outwardly relaxed and indifferent but inwardly troubled by what he had seen only a brief while earlier. Their very first meeting excepted, Kyle had initiated almost every one of the casual conversations between them. This time, it was Marty who broke the silence with a hesitant question, "Um... What do you make of it?" Kyle didn't turn his head. "What?" "This stuff we do. What do you think actually happened back there, and is it okay? Should we be doing things like that?" He had prepared a cutting wisecrack or two to shut Marty's mouth fast in case the boy was hankering to blather about some inane, boring topic, like video games or his lack of a meaningful life, but this took Kyle by surprise. The occasion was momentous: not only had his young friend made an effort to start an entirely sensible discussion, something a normal person might have done, but the true believer had also aired his uncertainty about the teachings and morality of the cult. Perhaps Marty deserved a nicer response. "I don't know," Kyle said in a tone that was somewhat mellower than the one he normally used with Marty. "You tell me. You've been with them much longer than I have." "I sometimes wonder what Love and Might actually is," Marty confessed. "It's supposed to be, like, this fantastic force that can do anything, and I guess it can, but I'd feel better if Genevieve told us where it comes from and how and why it works. I don't really know if it made Brandon into a magical girl. We've only got Genevieve's word for that." "Can you do anything with it when you're alone?" "No." He shook his head vigorously. "I can't. Not that I've tried, but I think the miracles only happen when Genevieve is there. And even if I could do it, I'd be too scared to. Chances are I wouldn't be able to control it." "Do you know what I'm thinking? Maybe Genevieve can't always control it either." Marty went quiet for a couple of seconds, evidently to give Kyle's idea some thought, but he shied away from tackling it directly in the end. "What's more, there's no way for me to know what the consequences might be. If you keep using a superpower to fool around, maybe it comes back to bite you somehow." "I suppose that makes sense." "What worries me is that it could already be happening. I don't go out much but even I've heard there's talk of some pretty weird stuff going around town. My aunt lives down that street over there, and when she dropped by the day before yesterday, she said these two funny-looking men came to her house sometime last week and asked her strange questions." "Such as?" "Like, if she thinks she's been to another planet lately or if she's seen twelve feet tall insect people walking around her neighborhood after dark. There was more but I can't remember everything she said. Anyway, the two guys kept asking her this goofy stuff, but when she told them she hasn't seen anything out of the ordinary, they left her alone. They warned her not to get involved in dangerous things, jumped in their car and drove off." "What did the guys look like?" "They both had dark suits on, and they talked in a kind of unusual way, like they were really tense or something. Their faces were... I don't know; normal. Aunt Kay didn't say much about that. It was the suits that she remembered the best." "A typical teenager prank," Kyle declared confidently. "Two bored high school seniors dress as Men in Black because they can't wait for Halloween and try to scare the townsfolk." "Do you think that's what it was?" "Come on, Marty! Use your brain. What else could it be?" "Well, yeah, but she said it was creepy." "That's the whole point of pulling the stunt in the first place. I really wouldn't lose sleep over it if I was you or your dear old auntie. Tell her to forget about it." "Okay. If you say so." By this time, they were passing through the town center. Marty had delivered his closing line and was about to drive through an intersection when Kyle interrupted him, "Hey! Turn right!" "What? Why?" "Turn right!" With no time to spare, Marty managed to change lanes and then veer in the direction Kyle had ordered. Luckily for everyone involved, there were no other cars in the lane or pedestrians crossing the street. Not counting video games, Marty was badly out of his element whenever he was required to make split-second decisions and react without delay, and more likely than not, he would have been too surprised and jittery to handle the situation without crashing into or plowing over anyone. "Pull over here," Kyle instructed, and again Marty complied, stopping the car at the curb by a block of small stores. The vehicle had not yet come to a complete halt when Kyle opened the door and jumped out. "I won't be long," he called over his shoulder. "Give me ten minutes!" With that, he was gone, leaving Marty to reach out and pull the passenger's door closed. Marty sighed. He had begun to realize that some kind of reckoning, or at least reevaluation, was at hand. He would have to rethink many things, his relationship to Kyle, his commitment to Genevieve and the group, what he would do with his life. He might arrive at troublesome conclusions, which was the main reason why he had been putting the task off for days (or actually months), but he wouldn't be able to postpone it forever. Perhaps he should begin right away. Of course, he didn't have more than a few short minutes to himself before Kyle came back, but even that might bring some clarity to the issues he was facing. Nonetheless, he had barely finished this thought when his cell phone played a little melody to alert him to an incoming message. It was from one of his friends and contained a link to a video with an interesting title. Like so often before, he was soon completely distracted, browsing aimlessly and jumping from one item to the next. He only returned to the present when he saw his passenger and mentor exit one of the stores. Kyle was carrying a large plastic grocery bag that would have seemed innocuous enough, if not for the clinking sound of glass bottles tapping against each other inside it. He got in the car, slammed the door shut and lowered his burden gently on the floor. "Some teaching aids for my lecture," Kyle informed his driver, bent forward, quickly rummaged in the bag and pulled out a quart bottle of tequila. A wide smile came onto his lips, and he twisted the cap of the bottle open. Proceeding to lift its bore to his mouth, he took a healthy swig immediately. He closed his eyes, grimaced and let out a loud but contented grunt. "This is more like it," he said, coughed lightly and blinked to clear the tears caused by the taste of hard liquor. "We can start your life lesson, Marty my boy. Screw black magic and secret rites. We'll do it the right way." "Does that mean you're going to drink yourself senseless while I watch?" the young man asked, the signs of revulsion showing on his face. "No," Kyle chuckled. "We, Kemosabe. We will be having fun, you and me together." "I don't want to---" "But you will. This is a lesson, remember." "Look, Kyle," the boy tried again, "I don't want to, like, offend you or anything, but if your idea of fun is a ton of booze, I'm out." "Again, no. The booze is the necessary condition; that you're in the mood to have a good time and know how to is the sufficient condition. You're getting them mixed up." Marty looked helpless. "I don't follow." "You'll figure it out." Kyle took another taste of the tequila. "Alright, we're done here. Put this hearse in gear and let's go." "Where to?" "No-fucking-where." "What does that mean?" "Just drive forward, Marty. I'll give you directions if you need them." Kyle's eyes wandered lazily over the uninspiring and mundane view of the street as he consumed some more of the content of the tequila bottle, but they suddenly landed on an interesting detail that made him perk up. Walking on the sidewalk on his side of the road was a young woman. Even though he could only see her from behind, there was no question that she was a knockout. The girl had long legs and a curvy, tall body clad in a short black leather jacket and skin-tight pants that showcased the wiggling of her round, bouncy bottom as she strutted along in a pair of high heels. The locks of her blond hair reached almost to the small of her back. He was about to open his mouth to voice his impressions, but Marty beat him to it. "Oh wow," the boy breathed. He was staring at the girl in a reverent awe, as if she were an angel who had stepped down from Heaven. "She just keeps getting hotter." "You know that chick?" "Yeah, sure. That's Aimee McIntyre, the most popular girl in school way back when. She was in my class. Every guy there was crazy about her." "I can see why," Kyle commented and smirked. "What was she like? Did she put out and do every jock on the football team, or was she one of those teases who love to lead guys on and go all pure and no-sex- before-marriage on them if things heat up?" "No idea. She went out with more than one guy, but other than that, I don't really know what her rep was like." "Yeah, I bet. You were too busy staring at your shoes and thinking about comic books to notice her." "I wasn't! I wanted her, the same as everybody else, but I knew I didn't have a chance." "Hey, Marty, when we get closer, slow down a little. I'll show you something." "What?" "Just do it." The car had not been moving much faster than a brisk jogging pace to begin with, so Marty had no trouble humoring his friend. Kyle rolled down the window when they were abreast of Aimee who turned her head to look. She had on a pair of oversized tortoiseshell sunglasses that covered much of her round, still girlish face, but Kyle could tell that its fine features were every bit the match for her delicious body. He could easily believe there had been lots of hard-ons in the classrooms while she had been in high school. "Hi there!" Kyle called out to her. "Where are you going, kitty cat?" She scrunched her brow in resentment and then returned her eyes to front, with her nose pointed high in a haughty pose. "The last I checked, that was none of your business," she replied angrily. "And talking like that to a person you don't even know is sexist and inappropriate." "The thing is," he continued, unabashed, "you look kind of familiar. I was at this pretty exclusive orgy last month, and there was a girl who jerked off three guys at the same time and took their loads on her face. So, if you're her by any chance and you're game for some more of that, I'm your man." Despite her makeup, the fierce red glow that washed over Aimee's cheeks was plainly visible. "You fucking creep!" she screamed. "Fuck you! Fuck you front and back!" "You know," a grinning Kyle quipped back, "I was hoping you'd let me have the honor of doing that to you." Outraged, she stopped in her tracks and stomped her foot. "Fucking asshole! I'll call the cops on you!" "Nice talking to you," he said and then added to the side, addressing Marty, "Okay, we can go now." The driver wouldn't have needed to be prompted, though; while Kyle was still talking, the boy had stepped on the gas, sending the car down the street at a speed that was over the limit for once. "She wants me," Kyle commented with a laugh as he raised the side window all the way up again. "Yes, sir. The little bitch definitely yearns for a ride on this dude's pecker." "Jesus Christ!" Marty huffed. His face was hardly showing any less red than Aimee's. "Why did you have to do that? What if she does call the cops?" "Relax, buddy. She won't. She's flattered by the attention, no matter what she says. That's how chicks are wired. I've picked up and smashed more than one in my time, Marty. I know." Attesting to his fluster and anxiety to get away from the deeply offended Miss McIntyre as quickly as possible, Marty turned almost blindly onto the next crossing street. Fortune still favored him and no accident happened--in fact, no other cars were anywhere to be seen. He drove past the small warehouse and car tire shop on the left and the gas station on the right and stopped at the next intersection. "Where to now?" he asked Kyle. "Keep going. You're doing fine." "No, seriously. Where do you want me to go?" Kyle was on the verge of repeating his earlier flippant answer to this inquiry when a thought came to him. "Alright," he said. "I know this one place. Take a left." "What place?" "You'll see." Kyle's directions led the pair out of the town and eventually to an abandoned service road which cut across the wooded hills. It was in the process of being reclaimed by nature, with high grass and even small shoots of young trees growing in the gravel that made up its wide surface. After the Volvo had trekked slowly and laboriously a good half a mile up this track, a rusty metal swing gate with a stop sign came into view from behind a curve. There was just enough space to turn the car around in front of the gate, and Marty proceeded to do that. "Here it is," Kyle announced. "Lock up and let's go." "Where?" "For fuck's sake, Marty! Could you please not ask 'what' or 'where' or 'why' every goddamn time I so much as open my mouth? It's really getting on my nerves." "But I---" "Shut up and come on." Apart from the tequila bottle, Kyle left his purchases in the car when the two got out. With long strides he walked up to the gate with the bottle in hand and pushed. A padlocked chain fastened the moving part to its post a little below Marty's eye level, but the chain hung so loosely in place that the end of the gate easily moved more than a foot inwards. Kyle bent down and stepped sideways through the opening, more than a bit awkwardly due to his height and weight, and gestured Marty to follow, which the younger man did with reluctance. He saw that the gate was part of an equally rusty chain link fence, and that the fence protected a massive white concrete building standing in the midst of the woods. The tall brick chimney and the large cylindrical metal tanks and pipes surrounding the main building revealed that it was a factory of some kind. Or, actually, a factory was what the complex had been in the past. Even as he was clambering down a steep slope that led to the asphalt-topped yard, Marty could see the building was old and run down. Its walls were pockmarked with small cracks and pits where the concrete had given way to the elements, its doors were barred, and several of its windows were broken. The business had come here around the middle of the last century, thrived for a time and then gone away, leaving the crumbling site behind as a memorial. "Wow," he breathed, spurting to catch up with Kyle when both were on level ground. "How did you know about this place? We're only a few miles from my home and I never even realized it exists." "This is where me and my friends used to hang out when we were nine or ten," Kyle replied. The happy childhood memories and another gulp of tequila had worked together to make him forget his earlier irascible attitude. "My mother's parents lived in this town back then and she and my dad unloaded me on them when school was out for summer. That's also one of the reasons why I bought a house here, in case you were wondering." "I wasn't, but... Cool." "Hey, let's see if we can get inside. That side door over there used to be unlocked." Kyle ran up the five creaking and rotten wooden steps to a narrow door in the side wall of the main building, grabbed the iron handle firmly and pushed. At first, nothing happened, but on his third try the door became unstuck from the frame with a crack and turned on its hinges. He stepped across the threshold, and again Marty's part was to put aside his aversion and hesitation and follow his mentor against his better judgment. A stale-smelling darkness of a dusty storage space was waiting for the two behind the door. That failed to deter Kyle, who confidently marched across the floor with the bottle in his hand and walked through the next door. There was another dark room and one more door, and after that, a very large hall with bare cement walls and floor. Unlike the first two, it was full of light that was coming in through the large windows. It housed the stripped remains of a production line, a long conveyor belt, a gantry, steel struts and beams and a fixed floor crane that had been abandoned in place. Kyle, who had seen these countless times, gave them little attention and made a beeline for a flight of steep metal stairs on the other side of the hall. Marty was almost out of breath when the climbing was over. The stairs ended in a voluminous open space high in the main building, right underneath the roof at one of its ends. As with the hall, the windows provided more than adequate illumination; some fresh air came in through a hole in one of them, but not enough to blow away the innumerable dust particles dancing in the shafts of sunlight. A sturdy, rectangular, six-legged table stood alone in the middle of the room. What purpose it had served was a mystery to Marty. "Welcome to the Secret Headquarters!" Kyle declared in a loud, pompous voice that echoed in the building and reflected back at them from the opposite wall far in the distance. "Or the research lab of the Phoenix Foundation. Or the NORAD Command Bunker. Or the Alamo. This, Marty boy, was where it was at when I was a kid. All we needed was a tiny bit of imagination, and this dirty hole became whatever the fuck we wanted it to be. Did you ever play outside, build treehouses and do that sort of stuff with your friends?" Marty gazed down. "I did, a little. Sometimes." "I doubt it, but who cares. Hell, I'd give anything to get to go back to that time, even if it was only for a day or two! Everything was so clear, so simple. We had it all worked out. Life was perfect before we grew up and everything went sideways." Kyle took a large gulp of his tequila, swallowed and grimaced fiercely. "Marty!" he called out. "What?" "See that crowbar lying there in the corner? Pick it up and smash a window." "Why?" "Do you need a reason? Smash a window!" Marty bent down and took hold of the heavy tool apprehensively. He would much rather not have touched the thing in the first place (it was probably covered in mouse crap and other filth that contained germs), not to mention that he didn't understand what he had to gain by randomly destroying someone else's property. "Attaboy!" Kyle complimented him sneeringly. "Swing it, baby!" "But why?" "Remember what I told you just now?" That this was more of a warning than a genuine question was instantly obvious even to Marty, whose strong skills lay elsewhere than in face- to-face human interaction. Nevertheless, Kyle's order was so senseless and idiotic that he decided he had to take his chances. "No," he said and let the crowbar hang loosely from his hand. "It's dumb. What good would that do?" Kyle wiped his mouth with his sleeve. "Nothing. And that, bud, is the whole point." "I don't get what you're trying to say." "I'm sure you don't, but that's exactly why you need to break that window over there, now." "No." "Break it!" "No!" With a downright furious look on his face, Kyle stepped closer. "Fucking break it!" he roared. To his surprise, Marty stood firm. "No! I won't do it!" "Break the goddamn window!" Kyle yelled at the top of his lungs and clutched the boy's wrist violently, forcing him to swing his arm. The end of the crowbar rose, picked up speed despite Marty's resistance and hit the glass. A spiderweb of little cracks appeared in the pane, but the blow was too weak to punch all the way through. Marty released his hold, and the crowbar dropped to the floor with a clang. The two men stood completely still and silent, facing each other. Unable to look Kyle straight in his crazed, probing, frightening eyes, Marty watched the man's shoulders heave as he breathed. The harsh, overpowering odor of ethanol that wafted from him would have been enough by itself to make Marty want to retreat from Kyle. Vulnerable and stricken with terror, Marty waited, without a clue as to what might happen next. At best, their friendship was hanging by a thread; at worst, Kyle would attack him physically and hurt him. He wouldn't have a prayer in that fight. His stomach felt sickeningly hollow at the thought that he was at Kyle's mercy. "Buddy," Kyle spoke at long last. The anger that had flared up was gone from his voice, and he sounded soothing, almost apologetic. "You honestly don't get it, do you? This is not about smashing a window at an abandoned factory, or getting drunk, or hitting on a hot girl you see on the street. None of those things matter by themselves. What I'm trying to make you realize is that you... You never loosen up. You don't know how to have fun, or how to live. You're not living at all." "It's not like I'm dead," Marty responded quietly and with a faint smile to signal that he was not seriously challenging what his friend had said. Even so, Kyle's possible reaction worried him. "You might as well be. All you do is sit at home, play video games and read comics and hang at bullshit social media sites. These are your best years, the best time you'll have before you get old and sick, and you waste it on meaningless shit." "How come getting drunk isn't meaningless?" "It is, in isolation, but that's not what I'm driving at. It's the big picture that counts. You have to go out and spend time with real people. Get a job, get an education, get whatever. If you sit on your ass and do jack, one day you'll notice every opportunity you ever had is gone and every door's closed forever. Trust me, you don't want that." Kyle's features softened and brightened into a smile, as though he had suddenly thought of a good joke, and he climbed onto the table. "Choose Life," he intoned in his best faux Scottish accent. "Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose a washing machine and... cars, CD players and..." He broke character and laughed. "Shit, I can't remember any more, but you know what I'm talking about. That film's a damn masterpiece, by the way." "What film?" Kyle's smile faded, and he jumped down from the table, landing on his feet. "Christ, you've missed out on everything good, Marty. I can understand you not getting laid in high school, but... Jeez!" He paused for a brief while. Marty, whose whole existence had been picked apart thoroughly over the last three minutes, felt strongly that he had to get a word in edgewise, although he was fully aware Kyle might not take that well. Ignoring the hot prickling on his cheeks and at the back of his neck and trying to brace for whatever was to come-- from a witty but scathing insult to a fist in the face--he said, "I don't want to, uh, be pissing you off or anything, but... Don't you think the stuff you said about having to go out and not rot at home applies to you as well? I mean, you're not that old. You could still start fresh and build a career for yourself, even if it's not in showbiz. It's like you've totally given up." To his relief, Kyle's immediate response was a mere wry, joyless chuckle. "I know you want to make me feel better, Marty, and I appreciate that, but that's not how it works. The sad fact that I fucked that one girl back then is going to be haunting me till the day I die. Once someone hears about it, it's no use denying it or explaining that yeah, I was young and drunk and yeah, she was really mature for her age and it was mutually consensual and yada yada yada. They won't listen. The only part they catch is 'Kyle Haney's a pedophile', and that's it. I had sex with a minor. It makes no difference in people's minds if she was fifteen or five." "Couldn't you move to some really distant place or another country where nobody knows about your past? If you didn't tell them about the girl, then they'd leave you alone." "I can't make my criminal record disappear, and besides, people always find out these things sooner or later, no matter how hard you try to hide them. Even if I moved to fucking Siberia and hunted seals or some shit for a living, I'd forever be Kyle the Kiddie Diddler for everybody around me. It won't go away, Marty. Not ever." Marty took this as his cue to stop pressing the point. "Oh. Maybe, um, maybe you're right. I don't know." "And so, bud, we come right back to you," Kyle continued his sermon. "When I was your age, I already had a career, a damn promising career, and I had already fucked it up; you haven't even tasted life. That's the thing eating at me the most when I look at you and what you're doing, or what you're not doing. Before you realize, you're my age and you've got nothing to show for it. You have no idea how fast time goes." "I guess," Marty muttered. "Take it from someone who's got personal experience. Move out of your parents' house, get an education, get a job and forget about games and comics. Forget about Genevieve, forget about her more than anything else, and also forget about every other crackpot cult that promises everything to you on a silver platter if you sell your soul to them. As hard as this may be for you to believe, I'm on your side here. I like you and I sincerely want what's best for you." Kyle closed his mouth. His last words had simply come out; he couldn't tell for certain if he had actually intended them to be heard, or if he might have said them without the alcohol loosening his tongue. The idea behind them was something that he, up until that point, hadn't confessed even to himself. Although he had looked down on Marty, the pathetic geek had grown on him, not least because neither of the halves of this odd couple really had anyone else they could legitimately call a friend. Marty spoke next. "Kyle? Can I have some of that?" "The tequila?" A pleasantly surprised smile spread on Kyle's lips, and he held up the half-empty bottle for the boy to see. "Are you sure?" "Yeah," Marty confirmed in a quiet voice and nodded. His face was expressionless, silently resolute. "I've never tasted it." "Here you go," Kyle said, handing the drink to Marty. "Just be careful." In a measured movement, Marty lifted the bottle to his lips and tilted its bottom towards the ceiling. "Hey, easy there, buddy!" Kyle exclaimed with a laugh. "It's not soda pop!" The warning was late. Marty had swallowed a fair amount, and the tequila scorched his tongue, mouth and throat on the way down to his stomach. His eyes watered and he began to cough violently, so much so that he came very close to dropping the bottle and throwing up. Only Kyle's timely intervention prevented the former from happening. "Are you okay, man?" Kyle asked him after his coughing fit was beginning to subside. "Ugh... Yeah. I am," Marty replied, not very convincingly, and wiped his eyes dry. "Whoa. I didn't expect it to be... so harsh. I've seen you and other people drink it like it's nothing." "Years of practice." That Kyle had, without question, but genuine spontaneity was something else entirely. Maybe he had lost some of his gift for impulsive action, he thought while he was sustaining his intoxication with frugal, carefully timed and evenly spaced sips from the bottle. Marty was again cruising satisfyingly aimlessly along the streets of the town, and Kyle sat on the passenger's seat, trying to sort out his thoughts. The weather was good, and they had a car, lots of time and plenty of booze. Nevertheless, something was unarguably missing from the equation, and that bothered Kyle. The ethanol concentration in his blood, and his mood along with it, had reached the level flight part that followed the skyrocketing start. This was when the inhibitions were gone and when he was supposed to come up with creative, crazy ideas and have engaging conversations prior to another fast rise that all but inevitably led to socially unacceptable behavior, memory loss and a tremendous headache on the following morning. But he didn't seem to get to the good stuff, no matter how hard he tried. Many times, he came maddeningly close to stumbling on a promising train of thought, only to have it slide away at the last moment when he tried to develop it further. This was obviously not working now. He was being far too introspective and too focused on the mechanics of the process. Marty's frightened shriek interrupted his reverie. "Oh shit! It's the cops!" "What? Where?" "Behind us!" The rearview mirror showed a large black-and-white police cruiser some distance away. At first, there was no sign that the officer at the wheel had taken any particular notice of the Hearse, and Kyle was about to tell Marty to calm down. However, even as he was looking at the car, the bright lights on its roof suddenly flashed and its siren sounded. The cruiser accelerated and began to close the gap. "Oh fuck!" Marty cursed. His eyes, wide with fear, were flitting frantically between Kyle, the road, the dashboard and the mirrors. "Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck! What do we do now? We're screwed! Oh fuck!" "No, we're not," Kyle said. "Just pull over and stay cool. It'll be alright." The first item on the list was easy for the driver to accomplish--the Volvo had been going slowly and there was no shortage of space at the curb--but the second was another story. The boy's hands were visibly shaking as he put the gear in neutral and pulled the handbrake on. "Oh fuck," he repeated. His face was red and he was nearly hyperventilating. "It's got to be about what you said to Aimee. She called 911 and we're both going to be arrested!" "No, she didn't. Maybe one of your taillights has gone out or something and the cop's bored because nothing ever happens in this town." "What if he saw me drive badly? Jesus Christ, I'm drunk! I drank your tequila! He'll arrest me for DUI! The one time I try a hard drink in my life, and this happens!" That was a problem that had slipped from Kyle's thoughts, and it made a crack in his confidence. The cop would smell the liquor in Marty's breath. Marty could not be over the legal limit--he probably wasn't even close--but any tangling with the law enforcement was nevertheless something that Kyle hoped to avoid. "Calm down," he ordered emphatically, pushing his uncertainties aside. The front of the cruiser filled the mirror, and the car was gliding to a halt right behind the Volvo; this was no time to panic. "You're not drunk and your driving was perfectly okay. I'll do the talking when the guy comes over." "Uh... But be respectful to him, will you? I don't want any more trouble! This is bad enough!" "Don't worry, man. I'm an actor, remember? I've talked my way out of more than one speeding ticket in my time." Trying his best to appear calm, Kyle leaned back and waited, ignoring his quickening heartbeat and the sweat on his palms. The officer, most likely a square-jawed, muscular ex-serviceman with a regulation haircut and no sense of humor, would step out of his car any second now, walk to the side window and ask (demand) to see Marty's driver's license and registration. He would look them over, look at Marty, glance at the documents again and then begin the questioning. At that point, Marty would assuredly crumble and regress into a hysterical, bawling child if he was left to his own devices. He, Kyle, had to step in and explain away any problems. Everybody would win: deep down, the officer only wanted to go back to his dull patrolling routine after showing off his authority, and Kyle and Marty wanted to get on with their drinking and merrymaking. Yet nothing happened. The minute figure on the car's clock changed; no sign of the officer. Soon, Kyle couldn't take the suspension anymore and looked in the mirror. He was again seeing something that didn't fit within the normal bounds of reality. The cruiser was no longer standing a few feet behind the Hearse. Instead, there was something green--a pile of small round objects. He looked away and then over his shoulder, directly through the rear window, but the sight remained the same. "Stay here," he told Marty, unbuckled and opened the side door. They were green apples, Kyle comprehended as he stared at the heap that had taken the place of the police car, and they had appeared out of nowhere. It couldn't possibly be some freak optical illusion because he was only a few feet away and there was no glass or mirror between him and them. He could see them clearly; there had to be at least a ton of them. Some had rolled down into the ditch, or onto the middle of the road. He shook his head to snap out of the daze threatening to incapacitate him and decided that the best, and only, course of action was to leave and not look back. He returned to the car and nodded to Marty. The boy understood, for once without redundant words having to be said, put the gear in drive and stepped on the gas. ***** As a rule, Kyle didn't have much tolerance for complete strangers who came to his door and tried to squeeze their way in uninvited. This was especially true for those cases who showed up at the ungodly hour of 9:45 a.m., when the owner of the house had barely finished his breakfast and first beer of the day. Regardless of his lifestyle, he valued and felt entitled to some basic privacy. He was more annoyed and angry than anything else when he heard the knock. None of his relatives (that is, those few with whom he was still on speaking terms) was supposed to come to visit him today. They always made sure to call in advance, and so did Marty. He didn't need a new washing machine, he wasn't interested in participating and he certainly didn't have time to talk about God. There were essentially two alternative ways to handle a situation like this. He could pretend he was not at home, or else he could open the door and tell the person, whoever he or she was, to go to hell. Out of common courtesy, he was at first inclined to choose the former option, but when the impudent knocking continued and even became louder, he lost his patience. He stormed to the door, intent on giving the uninvited guest a piece of his mind, and tore it open. Two white men--young, lean, average height or little over--were standing side by side on his porch. Both had pleasant and wholesome faces without any outstanding or distinguishing features, and they were dressed in black business suits and ties. Kyle was immediately struck by the peculiar detail that for whatever reason, they had completed their otherwise smart outfits with blue baseball caps. "Good morning, Mr. Haney," the one on the right greeted him. "May we come in?" The speech came out in a carefully pronounced rapid fire. "No," Kyle replied bluntly. "I'm not buying anything and I don't want any literature to read, so you can stop wasting your time and leave my property." "You misunderstood," the second man said. He looked and sounded so much like the first that they could almost have passed for identical twins. "We're not door-to-door salesmen or missionaries." "I don't care. If you have something important to tell me, we can talk right here." "As a matter of fact we do," the man on the right said. "Our business is both important and urgent and it involves you." "In that case, spit it out, fellows. I'm listening." "It has come to our attention that you're engaged in certain unusual activities, Mr. Haney. Is this true?" He feigned amusement and let out a dry chuckle. "Like drinking beer before lunch and not registering to vote?" "This is no joke, Mr. Haney," the other upbraided him, perfectly replicating the no-nonsense tone of his partner. "I can assure you we're dealing with extremely sensitive matters. There's plenty of growing concern about this at the highest levels." "The highest levels of what?" "The relevant organizations," the first man said, literally without batting an eyelid. His irritation aside, Kyle had felt a tiny shiver of fear and instinctive revulsion the moment he had laid his eyes on the two men, and that sensation was fast gaining in strength. The longer he looked at and conversed with them, the more convinced he became that something was amiss. He had learned to study the fine details of how other people behaved and talked, their gestures, inflections and mannerisms, but he would have been at pains to express in words the precise quality he found so unnerving about the men. Nevertheless, it was definitely there. Then his mind began to put the little pieces together. Even though the men's eyes looked superficially normal, light green in color, they were also empty and emotionless, like prosthetics made of glass. The facial skin of the visitors was perfect, without any blemishes or greases as though they had been wearing a thick layer of makeup; when they talked, it moved in an odd way, maybe a little too loosely around the corners of the mouth, a little too stiffly near the chin. It was all chilling and disgusting, and no matter how hard Kyle tried, he couldn't stop focusing his attention on these things after he had noticed them. There was no question about it anymore. He had to get rid of the men as quickly as possible, even if it meant having to indulge them and swallow his anger. "The responsible thing to do," the second man explained, "is to stop participating in the sessions and encourage others to do the same. I would go so far as to talk to the chief organizer directly and advise them to cease and desist. We understand you probably see the activity as completely harmless and even humorous, but it's nothing of the kind." "Okay," Kyle responded. He no longer had to pretend that he was taking the men seriously. "I can do that." "Very good," the first man said and rewarded Kyle with an unnatural grin that made him shudder. "That's fantastic to hear. We knew we could count on your cooperation." "Uh, one more thing. When I talk to the organizer, who should I say sent the message to stop?" "I'm sorry, but we're not allowed to reveal that information to you. What's important here is that the sessions come to an end before anything truly damaging happens." "Alright, you sold me. Consider it done." "Excellent," the second man said and flashed the same standard issue grin in his turn. "Thank you, and goodbye, Mr. Haney." "Bye." His heart hammering in his chest, Kyle pushed the door closed and leaned against it for good measure. He was immensely relieved that the meeting was over, and also afraid that it might not be. The next minute passed excruciatingly slowly. He expected to hear another knock or some more sinister sound from the porch, but there was only heavy, ominous silence. When he finally summoned the courage to peek through the small window facing the porch, he could see no one there. Even so, he had a strong feeling that the men were still nearby, or, at a minimum, keeping him and his house under surveillance from a distance. The unspoken threat that they had brought remained behind and was hanging in the air. Taking deep breaths, concentrating and attempting to apply cool reason to the issue didn't help him much. He had breezily laughed off Marty's rumors of encounters with strange people, but now that something similar had happened to him, he was anything but convinced his theory about practical jokes by teenagers held water. The two men hadn't been playing robots or aliens--they were robots or aliens playing humans. He downright refused to believe that a random high school kid from this town could pull off such a refined and layered, unfaltering impression in an unscripted direct conversation, something a good professional actor might struggle with. He needed barely ten seconds to reach a decision on what to do next. The spooks were plainly intent on ending Genevieve's days as the Teacher, and while their methods were anyone's guess, their determination was not in question. They would eventually accomplish their goal, Kyle was sure of that, by whatever means necessary. He had to make his move first. That, though, was easier said than done. He had no idea whether his new friends from Uncanny Valley actually were monitoring him, or indeed if they were lying in wait and ready to pounce on him if he ventured out of the house. Yet that was exactly what he had to do; he had to get to Genevieve before it was too late. In the end, he waited with burning anxiety for another quarter of an hour and then opened the front door ajar. In a way, he was surprised to see an empty front lawn and street. An unmarked black van with an array of antennas on its roof, a drone buzzing in the sky or more of the mystery men dressed in suits would have been much closer to what he had expected. That he saw no signs of them didn't prove they were not there, but he might at least have a chance. He pulled his denim jacket on in a hurry, stuffed the keys and his cell phone in his pockets, closed the door behind him and headed towards Genevieve's home in a slogging run. Kyle was out of breath well before he had gotten to the end of the street that went past his house, and he cursed himself out loud for letting his physical condition deteriorate so badly. All the same, he brushed aside the protests of his muscles and the painful cramping sensation in his chest and kept going. He had rarely been this motivated in his whole adult life. To disappear from sight for a while, he jumped over the ditch near the intersection and continued into the woods. He would take a shortcut through it to the town center, then use the roads until he got to the other side of the river, and finally hike cross country again to Genevieve's place. His going was much slower and more tiring than on the paved street, with the undergrowth, stones, inclines, small puddles of mud and streams of water doing their best to hinder him or trip him over, but he felt much safer here. Every now and then, he had to stop, lean against a tree for a minute or two and rest, but as soon as he thought that he had regained enough of his strength to continue for another couple of hundred yards, he pushed on. He was weaving and swearing his way through a thicket close to the main road and not far from someone's back yard when his cell came alive in his pocket. It began to belt out its ringtone and vibrate, scaring Kyle senseless. He scrambled to get the phone out and answer it, not so much because he wanted to talk to the caller but rather out of a need to silence the thing. His hands were shaking when he put it on his ear. "Kyle." "Hi there, dude," Marty's voice spoke. He sounded unusually cheerful. "Guess what happened?" "This is a kind of bad time for me, Marty," Kyle replied, biting his lip. "Okay, but I won't take long, promise. Do you know what I did?" "No, I don't. What?" "I mailed my application papers to Forest Hill Community College this morning. If they accept me, I'll start there next fall, as Information Technology major. How about that?" At long last, to Kyle's amazement, the boy had taken his first step towards hopefully becoming something other than a lifelong social case. Kyle knew he should have been overjoyed for Marty and congratulated him, but his own consternation ruined the moment, and what he managed to say came out forced and in a tone that unintentionally gave his words a ring of insincerity. "Hey, good for you, man! Imagine that-- you'll be a freshman college student, partying hard and hitting on the girls! You know, I almost wish I was your age and going there with you!" "There's no guarantee I'm going to get in, but you never find out if you don't try." "You've got that right, Marty. Besides, I'm pretty sure they'll take you. You're actually smart and outgoing compared to some college guys I've met, and I'm not shitting you one bit." "Yeah, well, I'm hoping for the best, anyway." "Right, you do that. Look, buddy, I've got to go now, but I'll talk to you later, okay?" "Sure," Marty said. "See you." "You too. Take care." By the time Kyle reached Genevieve's driveway, he was drenched in sweat, the legs of his pants and his shoes were covered in mud and dead leaves, and he sported a throbbing red bruise above his left brow, the last touch courtesy of a tree branch which he had bent carelessly to the side and which had sprung back. Someone had parked a well-kept 1970s Ford Mustang on the turnaround, he noted with the mildest possible interest as he staggered past the vehicle and up the stairs of the porch, panting as he went. He pressed the doorbell button and then, without waiting for anyone to come and open the door for him, simply let himself in. Judging by the car, Genevieve was entertaining a guest, and she might not appreciate his barging in or the soiled and smelly state of his clothes, but he couldn't care less. This was an emergency for him as well as for her. "Hey!" he called out in the foyer. "Anybody home?" Almost instantly, the lady of the house herself appeared from the other room. She tilted her head slightly and looked at Kyle with a curious but neutral expression, neither overtly pleased nor displeased by the unannounced visit of her least committed disciple. However, Kyle's attention was captured right away by a young blond woman who had followed Genevieve into the foyer. "Oh, hello!" Genevieve greeted him. "I wasn't expecting you today, Kyle." "Yeah, I know," he said to this. "Sorry for intruding like this, but I've got some pretty important things to tell you." "Hi," the other woman greeted Kyle and treated him to a beaming smile. She walked up to him and extended her hand. "I don't think we've met. I'm Kelly." "Kyle," he introduced himself, and they shook hands. The woman was a stunner, even by Kyle's demanding standards. She had long, wavy golden blond hair and the classically beautiful face of a movie star or a model: blue eyes, arched eyebrows, delicate cheekbones and chin, a pert but gracefully shaped nose, fair skin and succulent lips. Her figure seemed as if she had been deliberately designed to strike the perfect balance between being slim and being buxom, and her long slender limbs and full curves came together in a combination that was hard to beat. She was without a doubt well into her adulthood but still young and fresh, and he hazarded an off-the-cuff guess that she was most likely around 27 or 28, definitely not over 30. All this loveliness was wrapped in a pair of very tight blue jeans, a black open-necked sweater and high heels. Kyle allowed himself a brief but hot private fantasy of what it would be like to peel those clothes off of her. "You know," Kelly said, "this is such an amazing coincidence! Genevieve and I were talking about you just---" She was interrupted right then. Something--the startled Kyle had no idea what he was seeing--burst into the room; it was roughly the size and shape of a four-year-old child, but one good look at it proved that it belonged to another species. A violent cold shiver of repugnance went down his spine and shook his whole body as he comprehended that he had run into one more non-human creature in the space of two hours. In a word, the being was grotesque. It was three feet tall and had a huge head on top of a diminutive frame, wiry limbs, no hair and no clothes. The skin covering its body was thick, extremely wrinkled (making it look ancient and decrepit) and sickly green in color, with patches of dull brown here and there. Its nose resembled the peck of a large bird in shape, and on either side of its massive bridge there was a small, round, deep-set black eye. Its mouth was half open, and Kyle could see an uneven sparse row of needle-like white teeth, blood red gums and a massive fleshy tongue behind them. Nothing hinted at the being's sex, assuming it had one in the first place. Had he been in a less disturbed and agitated state of mind, Kyle might have been willing to give some thought to the possibility that perhaps the thing was human after all, a child or a dwarf wearing an elaborate special effects costume. In any case, he could far more readily imagine it stepping straight out of the pages of a book on Celtic mythology. As with the agents at his door, his instincts were telling him in no uncertain terms that commonplace, reasonable, ordinary explanations were woefully insufficient here. "Fridge, tummy, pom-pom!" the being cried out to the women in a horrendously shrill voice. "Fridge, tummy, pom-pom!" "Oh, you're hungry again," Genevieve addressed the little abomination. "Give us a second, Yon dearie. We talk for a while, and then I'll give you some food." Kyle finally regained his ability to speak. "Yon?" he blurted out in shock. "What the fuck?" "Yes, Yon," Genevieve confirmed and drew her lips into an understated smile. "We had a short lesson the day before yesterday. You weren't there." "Yeah, I missed it. I was busy." "It was Child Yon's turn to have their wish come true," Genevieve continued, seamlessly exiting the role of a pleasant upper-class lady hosting a couple of guests at her home and slipping into that of the high priestess of an arcane cult. "They wanted to be an intersex person, in bodily form like a pubescent boy who had both male and female set of genitals and who would never age. They thought it would allow them to experience the real meaning of fluid sexual identity, without any constricting bounds." Kyle was still staring at the creature with his mouth agape. "And that's what happened?" "You must understand we cannot simply command Love and Might to do our bidding," Genevieve explained in her signature lofty tone. "We may only ask them to fulfill a wish, but it is their decision whether or not to grant that. Even if they do, they sometimes modify it for the better. In essence, Child Kyle, Love and Might give us what we need, rather than what we want." "That's how it went for me," Kelly chimed in. "You may not believe it, but I used to be a man before I met Genevieve." Kyle's jaw dropped again. "What?" "You heard me right," she confirmed and let out a little giggle. "All guy, with a beard, a big beer gut and the works. I was 73 and I had chronic arthritis. My life sucked, to put it mildly. I would've done anything, and I mean anything, to get rid of the damn condition. That was my only wish. It would've been enough for me, but Love and Might had other ideas and, well, here we are." "Christ," he breathed quietly. "I don't know what to say." "The thing is, Genevieve's absolutely right. This really is what I needed. Sure, I had a hard time at first trying to adjust, but now I wouldn't go back to being a man even if I got to be young and healthy instead of a sad old fart whose body is falling apart on him. I love the new me. It's like Genevieve called on higher forces to put the best of me together with this gorgeous, happy girl." "You are the result of what Love and Might saw fit to do with you," the mistress added. "My part was mostly limited to invoking them." "When you make a wish, you get a kind of remix of the reality you start with. It sometimes happens in unexpected ways, but everything is better in the end." "Dude, stuff, grass," the former Yon commented. "Kyle, very much, looksie! Kyle, looksie!" "Why does she have to talk like that, anyway?" Kyle inquired in an annoyed tone and pointed at the being with his finger. "As far as we've been able to figure out," Genevieve said, "that's actually the language of their race, only with English words in place of the native ones. It has no verbs." "Or pronouns," Kelly added helpfully. "Right," he snorted. The young woman gave Kyle a sweet smile, curiously bashful in his opinion. "This can come from left field for you and it's pretty straightforward, but I've found out that usually works for me, so... Alright, to be totally honest, I think you're cute and I'd really like to get to know you. I was wondering if we could go out sometime. What do you say?" "I... I have to think about it," Kyle stammered. Under anything resembling normal circumstances, he wouldn't have hesitated for one second. Getting the chance to score with an insanely hot chick like her would have been an achievement to remember, even in his short heyday when teen girls were flinging themselves at him. To add to that, Kelly was apparently a full female who had no incongruous parts in her anatomy, regardless of her past. But there was nothing even remotely normal to these circumstances, and the revelations of that day had shocked Kyle to his core. "Okay," she said and let out a little laugh. "I guess I was being a little aggressive there. My offer stands anyway, in case you're interested." "I'll, uh, keep that in mind." Even if the two men hadn't warned him, seeing and hearing all this would have been warning enough for Kyle. It had brought him close to the tipping point, and for the first time since he had been introduced to Genevieve and her powers, he seriously wavered in his decision to go through with his idea. It would have been easy to turn around and walk away, go home and never look back. It would have been the smart thing to do. He was risking his life. Then again, from another point of view, that was not a very steep price to pay. If he went on like he had, he would drink himself slowly to death, without ever doing anything worthwhile again. Was it a better way to go than ending up on an uninhabitable planet in the form of a cartoon character or exploding to bits in some psychedelic higher dimension? At the end of the day, there was nothing for him here, no prospects whatsoever and no one to miss him. He had never been one to chicken out; that was not his nature. For better or worse, he had always seized an opportunity when he saw one, and this time, he knew, was going to be no different. No matter how long he deliberated, he would arrive at the exact same conclusion. What was more, he probably had very little time left. The men might come for Genevieve at any moment, and then his one and only chance would be gone. He would not get another. "You said you had something important to tell us, if I'm not mistaken," Genevieve pointed out, breaking the silence before Kyle could do so and bring up the true reason of his visit. "What is it?" It had been a serious mistake to mention that, Kyle realized, but he could not lie his way out anymore. He had developed a healthy respect for Genevieve and he knew she would see right through him if he tried. "These two weird guys came to my door this morning," he explained with reluctance. "I got the impression they're with some secret agency. They told me I had to get in touch with you and ask you to stop doing magic, or whatever this is. They said it's dangerous somehow." Genevieve and Kelly exchanged looks. An expression of worry was patent on the faces of both, and Kyle bit his lip. "I suppose that was to be expected," the older woman commented in a conversational tone and sighed lightly. The priestess character had faded into the background once more. "Sooner or later those people always find you and give you trouble. Still, it's good to know what's going on." "What should we do about them?" Kelly asked her. The news had made her plainly more anxious than Genevieve. "Can they hurt us?" "They can be a nuisance, but I have a couple of useful tricks up my sleeve. We'll let them have the next move, and the one after that is ours." "Pom-pom, tack, money, grub!" the Yon creature demanded. "In a minute, dear. Please be patient." The time was now, Kyle thought. He had to take the plunge. "Actually," he began, doing his utmost to hide his anxiety with a practiced easygoing exterior, "I wanted to talk to you about something else as well. Given there seems to be trouble coming our way, I was thinking that maybe I could, you know, have a shot at my wish too. What do you think?" Kelly lifted her eyebrows at this, but Genevieve's expression remained inscrutable. "What is it?" "Well--if I could have anything in the world, I'd want to go back to my past and, basically, fix some of the stuff that I screwed up along the way. I'm not sure if you know this, but I worked an actor when I was a kid and a teenager. I could've been somebody but I made a mistake that cost me my career. I'd like to undo that, and a few other ones as well." "Oh, you're Kyle Haney?" Kelly brightened up. "That Kyle Haney? Yeah, no wonder you looked familiar when I first saw you! Where have you been all these years?" "Around here, mostly." "How is your life? What do you do these days?" "The straight answer to that question would be 'Not much', and if we start talking about things that suck, my life's also up there on that list." "I've got a daughter who is a little younger than you, and she totally loved you on Richer or Poorer. She had this super cute crush on you and your character. I'll never forget how she swore she'd go to Hollywood and marry you when she grew up. Wow, can you imagine it was me who got to meet you, and I was even hitting on you! I feel like such a cradle robber!" Kelly laughed and turned to address to her friend. "We've definitely got to help him, Genevieve! He's earned it." "If you say so," the older woman agreed with a nod and smiled, "I don't see why not." Kyle replied with a smile of his own, but it was little more than a polite mask on his face. Although he was getting his wish, he was far too tense and apprehensive to be genuinely happy about it. Celebration would have to wait. Genevieve led everyone present to the living room, and she sat in her armchair in her usual dignified manner. She gestured at Kyle, who kneeled before her with his limbs trembling, and Kelly and Yon gathered around him. He closed his eyes as the young woman and the weird creature began to perform the chant he had heard during the ceremony that had sent Marty's friend Brandon off into the unknown. Even though Kelly's melodious voice was far removed from the creature's unpleasant, ear- piercing peeping and warbling, they were singing the same words; and they combined into a strangely soothing and harmonious music that seemed to fill the space around Kyle. So it had come to this, he thought and suppressed a chuckle despite his nervousness which was steadily growing into an all-out fear for his own safety. He was desperate enough to trust magic to gain a second chance at stardom. Kyle Haney, the forgotten teen dreamboat of yesteryear, had finally gone off the deep end, once and for all. He was still dwelling on the funny side of the situation and listening passively to the chant when he suddenly felt that the floor had given way. With a start, he opened his eyes, but he saw only solid darkness. He was falling down, ever further into some lightless chasm that had opened up beneath him. A suffocating wave of terror rose to incapacitate him, but at the next moment, it was gone as if it had never existed. So was everything else, and there was just silence. ***** Over the last two and a half decades of his life, Kyle had occasionally awoken in some fairly unusual and imaginative places after drinking heavily and passing out--a waste paper dumpster behind a shopping center, the median strip of a highway, an airport terminal, the deck of the private yacht belonging to a pop music producer whom he had never even met. This one, however, outdid the others hands down. The first thought to cross his mind was doubt over whether he had actually regained consciousness at all. As far as he could tell, he was lying on his back and staring up at bright lights that washed out much of his field of vision. He was shivering. If he had any clothes on (he was not sure if he did), they couldn't keep away the piercing cold that flowed into him from the smooth, flat surface underneath him. He turned his head from side to side, to get an idea of his surroundings, and tried to raise his right hand, but his muscles could barely do any of the things he was asking of them. Not that there was much to see; he was definitely in a large empty room, but its ceiling and walls faded into a blur behind the lights. The floor was made of some white material, and it glowed almost as brilliantly as the overhead lights. Alright, Kyle thought to himself. He had ended up in a hospital operating room or a morgue, without the faintest recollection of what had happened after Genevieve, Kelly and the ridiculous Yon creature had put their hands above his head and performed the incantation. It must have been one hell of a ride, and it would have made for a great story to tell afterwards. Regardless, there was no reason to panic. He was cold and stiff but he was alive and hopefully even in a reasonably good condition, seeing as he felt no pain. He only had to kill the time until a doctor or a nurse came by. Then he'd get their attention, find out where he was and why he was there. While he was at it, he might also ask for another dose of medication to put him back to sleep. As if on cue, he became aware that someone else was in the room with him. Virtually everything he could see of him or her was an oblong blob of whitish yellow light off to his right, near the foot of his bed, but he sensed the presence of this other person as definitely as if his eyes had been able to resolve the smallest details of the face, hair, neck and hands of the man or woman who, he knew, was looking him over. "It appears they sent another one to us." The voice was clear, masculine, and the words perfectly pronounced. Kyle's heart skipped a beat, not because he had not expected the other person to talk but because there was something eerie to how his speech sounded. Assuming Kyle could trust his senses, the utterance hadn't come so much from outside of his head as from the inside, as though he had spoken the sentence himself and then heard it. The drugs that the doctors had given him had to have been some pretty strong stuff if they distorted his perception in this way. "Yes, indeed," said another voice, very similar to the first but separate and distinct. A second condensation of light had appeared on Kyle's left. "What should we do with him?" "Can we not send him back?" asked a third voice that could have been a woman's. "I fear we have long since crossed the boundaries of appropriate action, and if we continue to meddle, there might be unfortunate consequences." "No," the first voice disagreed, pleasantly but firmly. "He would not survive the return trip. We can either keep him here or pass him along. Those are the options open to us." They were talking about him; so much was plain to Kyle, and he was suddenly on the verge of powerless, maddening panic. He had to have his say before something irreversible was done to him. "Hey!" he cried out. "Hey, you! Can you hear me?" As opposed to the sonorous voices of the others, his own was just a whisper in his ears, and he wondered if he had made an audible sound in the first place. Not knowing what else to do, he tried again. "Hey, you! I'm awake! Hey!" "You are correct, of course," the third voice said to the first. "I just want to emphasize that we should be mindful of the risks." "I do not believe any of us is ignorant of them," the second voice pointed out. "Unless we change our policy to one of strict non- intervention, we will be faced with weighing the safety of the many against the satisfaction of the few." "But this man never fully appreciated the danger," the first voice argued. "We cannot hold him solely responsible or first accept him and then reverse our position and reject him. We also must not be responsible for an untimely end of his life." "Oh God," Kyle moaned in despair and horror. "People! Can you hear me? I'm awake! I'm awake! Help me, somebody!" If the participants of the conversation had heard or understood him, they showed no reaction. "In that case," remarked the second voice, "our hands are tied. We have no choice but to process him." "I concur," the third chimed in. "Should I start the preparations?" "Hey!" Kyle yelled again. "Listen to me, you assholes! I'm awake!" "Yes," the first agreed. "Please do." There was a contemplative and absorbed quality to it that Kyle could discern, despite his own mounting terror. The subject was clearly a serious matter to the speaker. "Then it is settled," one of the others said. "Come on!" Kyle screamed at the top of his lungs. "I'm here! Hey! Motherfuckers! I'm right here!" The sound died out as though he had been shouting in the vacuum of space, and it was to no avail in any case. The cool, unemotional, detached voices continued talking, but they too began to recede and fade. They turned into low mumble, and it was soon completely impossible to make out any words. Only a little later, there was again nothing but silence. The blobs of light had disappeared from Kyle's bedside, and he knew that he had been left alone. The ceiling lights were dimming, he noticed with a fresh pang of fear. Did that mean his consciousness and life were slipping away, or had the doctors or surgeons (after all, the three talkers had to be some kind of hospital personnel) started their operation? Were they going to cut him up, without his consent, and why? Who had brought him here? He never got the answers to any of his questions; he was about to forget ever having asked them. The room went completely dark in perhaps another minute, and Kyle found himself in a forbidding black hole. It was fortunate for him that his panic-stricken mind couldn't keep up its furious, addled functioning for long before all of his ideas, feelings, conjectures and memories collapsed into dust under their own unbearable weight, and a world of impenetrable quietness swallowed him whole. ***** If his first emergence from unconsciousness that day had been strange and frightening, his second defied comprehension altogether. The darkness gave way to light, and it dawned on him that the curious object he had fixed his eyes on was the wood-paneled wall of a large room. He was sitting upright on a cushioned seat, and he could hear subdued chatter and the footsteps of someone walking on a carpet nearby. That, though, was where any superficial semblance of normality ended. Well before his lightheadedness dissipated completely, Kyle was acutely aware that something drastic had happened--to him, rather than his environment. He had no words for it; his very sense of self, his own body and its dimensions, had been somehow warped out of alignment. His fingers, hands, feet, legs, buttocks, chest, head and hair were still there, yet at the same time, they weren't. They should have been larger and longer, or shorter, or in slightly different places, or weighed less or more. He shifted a little, and right away there was another barrage of indecipherable messages from his nerves to his brain. His body moved in an unfamiliar way, effortlessly and nimbly, as if neither most of his muscles nor any of his excess fat existed. It took him another couple of seconds to realize that they in fact didn't. This was not his body, the body of a grown man called Kyle Haney, at all; it was a child's, small, energetic, soft and flexible. That had to be it, he reasoned, and a tentative smile began to creep onto his lips. His wish had come true! He was a boy again, free from the burden of his early adulthood missteps, his alcoholism and the contempt of other people, ready to try again. That explained everything, and that was what was going on here! It would--- And then he was running as fast as his small feet would carry him, heedlessly forward. His budding pleasure and relief had been replaced with another wave of brutal, crushing terror. He had to get away and hide. The spell had gone horribly wrong. A woman's voice called out, presumably after him, but the words didn't register with him and he ignored them. His temples throbbed, his cheeks burned, and the outside world had become a furious, meaningless blur of colors, shapes and movement. Seeing a row of beige doors on his left, he randomly grabbed the handle on one of them, pushed and opened the door with difficulty. He barged into the space beyond, not sparing a single thought to what it was and where he was going. He had ended up in what was obviously a restroom, with stalls, mirrors, sinks, tiled walls and floor, and fluorescent lamps on the ceiling. For the moment, he had it for himself, which he noted with a small grateful sigh. Once again, the feeling of relief was short-lived. He could see his reflection in the mirror panes, and as soon as he did, he was transfixed by it. It was drawing him irresistibly closer, and he obeyed its call, stumbling slowly towards it with numb feet. A single good look was enough to explain all of his abnormal sensations and confirmed what he had already suspected and feared. The child in the mirror was not a boy. She was a girl. He took in the sight with dumbfounded disbelief. A pretty, narrow-ish face with dimples; moist, brown eyes, wide open as part of the shocked expression she was wearing; a dainty nose; light brown, curly hair, tied in a bunch on top of her head with a pink band. An incredibly delicate neck; below that, a tiny frame clad in a loose-fitting, short, blue denim jacket, red sweater, ruffled knee-length skirt (also denim), stockings and pink-and-white running shoes. Conclusion: an urban preteen girl, fairly hip by the standards of 1990, possibly living somewhere on the West Coast. Likely personality traits: outgoing and positive, would love to hang out at the mall with her friends if her parents let her, does well in school, aspires to be an actress or a singer (or, failing that, a teacher or a journalist), worships New Kids on the Block and thinks Jordan is the cutest. "Oh my God," he intoned quietly. The girl pronounced the words back to him in her voice, a melodic, sweet soprano. "This can't be real... This can't be happening to me!" The mirror girl's terrified gaze was too much for him to bear, and he tore his eyes off it, turned around and ran into one of the stalls, slamming its door closed. He collapsed on the toilet seat, wrapped his arms around his petite torso and closed his eyes, in the forlorn hope that by the time he opened them again, the bizarre situation would somehow have resolved itself and he would be back in the world where he belonged, as a grown man. The women had been right to warn him, and he had been a fool for not listening to them and insisting on going through with his plan. Love and Might, or whatever the hell the force behind this actually was, had played a nasty trick on him. He was now another case like Kelly, the former infirm and aging guy who got far more than he bargained for. She had come to enjoy her new life in the end, true, but she hadn't been forced to get used to spending her days as a tween girl or being stuck three decades in the past. But then again, all that had to be utter baloney. Magic didn't exist, as everybody knew, and neither did time travel. He remembered clearly that he was a man called Kyle Haney who had arrived from 2019--he had been right there only minutes ago!--but that story felt downright laughable to him already. Any sane person would have been hard pressed to take it seriously, and he couldn't help but doubt it himself, despite everything. Might it have been just a figment of his imagination, or maybe an unusually detailed and realistic dream? He heard the restroom door open and close. Heels clacked on the tiled floor, and a woman spoke softly, "Tiffany? Are you there, honey? Tiffany?" He knew that she was looking for him, but he stayed quiet, hoping she would go away and let him be. He was in no condition to talk to anyone. "Tiffany?" she repeated, with a clear note of concern in her voice. Her footsteps came closer, and then the stall door swung open. He understood that he had forgotten to lock it, but there was nothing he could do about it anymore. The woman was standing there and looking at him--an elegant, graceful lady in her late thirties or early forties, dressed in a business outfit. Her carefully made up face was a more mature version of one he had seen in the mirror. The age difference aside, the resemblance was so close that the girl and the woman had to be related. "Oh, sweetie!" she gushed and bent down. "Have you been crying? Please tell me what's wrong." "I'm scared," he whimpered. It was as honest a reply as anything he could possibly give. She responded by drawing him into a hug and holding him. "Shh," she said. "Everything's alright, Tiffany. I'm here." "I---" "It's okay, honey. We all get cold feet sometimes when we have to perform in front of people. I do too." He swallowed hard and sniffed back his tears. The woman went on in a comforting, maternal tone, "You don't have to win every time, baby girl. All I want is for you to do your best out there, and if that's not enough for them, it's their loss. They miss out on a wonderful talent, but you're bound to get another chance to do what you love. There will be other shows, other movies. You've got your whole life ahead of you, Tiffany, and you'll make it in the end." "You really think so, Mom?" he asked in a small voice. It wasn't what he had intended to say, the final word in particular, but in some curious fashion it nonetheless conveyed the gist of his thoughts. "I know it," she replied and gently let go of him. "You're destined to be a star, and you've shown that to me and your dad and everyone over and over again." The anxiety and terror that had threatened to break him altogether were beginning to loosen their grip, and the small, young heart in his chest was settling down to a steady and easy rate of beating. The constricting, suffocating pressure and feverish confusion had all but disappeared. His mother had removed the ache with her hug and her words. Something else was flowing out of him as well, more subtly but equally irrevocably. Kyle's black bitterness, which had accumulated and grown heavier over the years, always lurked in the background and oftentimes poisoned every single scrap of joy and pleasure that came his way, was being diluted. It was like a persistent dirt stain that was finally coming off; his soul was being washed clean. The process was akin to what had happened to his memories of the future, in that the pain and its cause were still there, or he knew they should have been, but they had become devoid of meaning. They were simply ballast to be jettisoned, not something of real value. One last fleeting pang of panic hit him when he finally comprehended what was actually going on. It was not just the dark side of his psyche that was being purified--his whole personality was being taken apart and rebuilt into a completely different shape. As painful as they could be, the negative emotions and memories made him who he was, and the mysterious manipulator responsible for deleting them was attacking his very essence at the same time. It was methodically destroying what it didn't want to keep and reorganizing and reassembling what it deemed serviceable into a new structure, the person who was going to be Tiffany. Kyle Haney had outlived his usefulness. He had to go. In a desperate, frantic attempt to latch onto the old him, he bit his teeth together and concentrated hard on this thought, but as soon as he did, it had already slipped out of his reach and into oblivion. He was left to wonder what he had been mulling over only a second ago and why it was supposed to be so vitally important. "Tiffany," her mother addressed her, bringing her out of her long reverie. "Are you ready to go back there?" "Sure," she said and nodded. She even managed a little smile. "I feel much better." "You don't have to do this if you don't think you're up to it right now." "It's okay, Mom. I'm alright, and I absolutely don't want to miss this chance." She meant what she had said. Her mother could immediately see that the storm clouds had parted and Tiffany was again her bright, charming and determined self through and through. Her little girl had recovered from the passing moment of weakness and would in all likelihood go on to win the role that could be her big break. She knew her daughter better than anyone else in the world, but Tiffany's maturity, drive and ambition were a constant, inexhaustible source of both pride and amazement to her and her husband. Bethany Billingsley, a mother of three and a working woman, wouldn't even have dreamed of going out and achieving what Tiffany had at such an early age. A little bout of stage fright every once in a while was more than understandable and forgivable for any 12-year-old. When she and Bethany left the restroom and walked down the long corridor, Tiffany's mind was on the audition, the need to impress the people doing the casting and to deliver the best performance she could. Nevertheless, she had the time to spare some attention to a couple of strange notions still lingering in her head. Out of curiosity, she tried and discovered that she could recall Kyle Haney, even though the man was more like a character in a book or a movie to her than a real person who had had a life of his own, had his thoughts and tastes and made his own choices. On the other hand, she knew for certain that she had always been Tiffany, that Bethany and Daniel were her parents and that her family lived a few miles outside of downtown San Diego, near the factory where Dad worked. It felt silly to question any of that. In passing, she wondered how to make sense of these two mutually exclusive histories. Were she and Kyle two separate people whose souls had come to share her body, or was she actually Kyle who was imagining another childhood as Tiffany in California? Or had she imagined Kyle, and the man was the one who had never existed? Was there perhaps a second Kyle somewhere out there, a boy about her age also dreaming of a career in movies and TV? Whatever the truth was, none of this had practical importance to her. It was sort of fun to think about but it had nothing to do with the audition or the work she hopefully had ahead of her. She could entertain herself with it later when she was bored, but she had to put it aside for the present, and this she did without problems. Tiffany was far too levelheaded to let herself get distracted when she had a great career opportunity within her reach. The room where Tiffany had been sitting with her mother at first was a lounge of some sort, like that of an upscale hotel (which the place indeed was, she remembered). There were a good dozen other children present, some fidgeting around nervously in their seats and others sitting still. Almost all of them were accompanied by one or both of their parents. Although this was the second round of the audition and the elimination after the first had been rigorous, the show was so popular and roles on it so coveted that lots of talented young actors and actresses remained on the producers' list of candidates. A smartly dressed female secretary was standing next to an open door with a pile of papers tucked under her arm, scanning the crowd. "Tiffany Billingsley?" she called out. "Is Tiffany Billingsley here?" "I'm her," the girl announced in a self-assured manner and walked up to the woman, her mother following right behind her. "I'm sorry if I kept anybody waiting. I had to go to the bathroom and I didn't hear you call my name." "No harm done," the secretary responded with a smile. "We're ready for you." "Okay," Tiffany's mother said and patted her daughter on the shoulder. "Go in there, sweetie, and knock them off their feet!" "I will, Mom," she said to this. "I'm going to get the part this time. I just know it." "I'm sure you're right, honey." There was a table, a lone chair facing it, and a large video camera on a tripod in a corner of the room. Three people were sitting behind the table, two men and a woman. This setting was exactly what Tiffany had expected. She was no stranger to TV and movie auditions and knew what would happen next. "Hi, and welcome," the man in the middle opened the conversation. The oldest of the three, he had a mostly bald, round head, a sizable nose and a pair of thick-rimmed glasses on. "You're Tiffany, right?" "Yeah," the girl answered without missing a beat. "Tiffany Billingsley." "Like the pop singer," the other man pointed out and smiled. "Are you a fan of hers, by any chance?" "Her music's okay," Tiffany said. "The older stuff in particular. I'm not that excited about her latest album, though." She knew better than to give vague answers or tell hastily made up lies to please the person who had asked the question. Most people, TV show producers included, appreciated well-articulated, confident honesty. "We watched the tape you sent to us," the woman chimed in, "and you did well at the first audition. We'd like you to read the test scene and do the song again, to give Mr. Levinson"--she gestured at the older man in the middle--"a chance to see you in person. He's one of the chief executives at our studio, and he was really impressed by what we told him about you." Tiffany nodded in response. "So," the younger man said, "could you start by telling us a few things about yourself, just to refresh our memory and bring Mr. Levinson up to speed?" "Sure!" the girl agreed. "I was born in Arkansas, but my family moved here, oh, five years ago. I've loved music and performing ever since I was little, and I once sang on stage at a small restaurant back when I was five. I started ice skating and taking ballet and tap dancing lessons around that time, and I competed on the state level for a while. I got into acting after we settled in San Diego, and last year, I had a role in an independent film called Temperance." "Oh yes," Mr. Levinson injected. "I think I've seen that one. You were the little boy's best friend, weren't you?" "That's right, sir. Then I've been doing, like, tons of toy commercials, fourteen or fifteen in three years. There was this pretty popular one for Mattel where I had a voiceover part. You could say I know my way around them by now." She punctuated her sentence with a little sparkling laugh, and the executives smiled. All told, it went nicely. Tiffany was happy when she exited the audition room a quarter of an hour later. She had read a scene from a script book and then sung a song on top of a backing tape, along with an ad-libbed choreography, and if the looks on the producers' faces and the kind comments they had for her afterwards were any indication, the part was as good as hers. Of course, nothing was ever guaranteed in this business, but the other girls had to put in a fantastic performance if they seriously wanted to beat her. Her mother was supposed to be waiting for her in the lounge, but Tiffany failed to spot her. Maybe she was in the restroom, the girl reasoned, or had gone to get herself some coffee. Mom would drive her home and treat them both to pizza on the way. That was their cherished little ritual after every audition, no matter how well or badly Tiffany thought she had done. It was a reminder that her family and her normal life would always be there for her, regardless of whether she was famous or not. A boy dressed in fashionable designer clothes happened to be walking down the corridor at the same time. He had swept-back light brown hair, big eyes, a youthful face with a promise of ruggedness and a frame that was on the athletic side for someone his age. She recognized him immediately. He was Sean, one of the male leads of the show and the object of dreams of countless girls around the country, if not the world. Tiffany was no exception. He had noticed her likewise, and when he aimed his eyes at her, she felt faint. And not only that--he went on to flash her an adorable smile and, to her surprise, made a beeline for her. Tiffany could hear her own thumping heartbeat in her ears, but the boy was all that she saw. "Hi!" he spoke. "You're here for the audition?" "Yeah." She was secretly mortified to realize that she was blushing, but she forced herself to keep it together for a little while longer. She had to. "My name's Tiffany, by the way." "Sean." "I know," she said and giggled. "I'm a huge fan of yours and I love the show. You're the best thing about it." "Thank you," he said in the seasoned and polite tones of a celebrity who had learned to receive admiration and adulation despite being merely a year or two into his teens. "Have you been doing a lot of TV before, Tiffany? What's your background like?" "Well, I think of myself as a singer and dancer first," she explained. "Music is my first love, but I want to try acting too, and you get to do lots of both on this show. It seemed like the best way to put the two together." "Yeah, you're right. It can be pretty hard sometimes, what with having to memorize your lines and the lyrics and dance moves and things, but it pays off. You feel good about yourself when it's done." "Not to pry, but how come you're here?" she asked him. "I didn't know you have to audition for every season." She added a soft little giggle, to underscore that her comment was mostly intended as humorous. "Nah, no need to do that," he responded and gave a little laugh as well. "I've got my name on the papers, and it says on them I'm on board for one more year, at least. I just want to see who I'll be working with. The producers are cool with that and they let me sit in on the auditions sometimes, as long as I don't butt in and start making their decisions for them." "Okay," she said. "I see." This clearly called for a clever remark, but she failed to come up with anything that wouldn't have sounded embarrassing. She was enthralled to the point of being almost tongue- tied, and that seldom happened to Tiffany Billingsley. "I've got to say you have it good," Sean commented with yet another charming smile. "You've got looks, obviously, and talent too because otherwise you wouldn't be here in the first place. I guess you must have done something super good in your previous life." This caught her off guard, even though she didn't miss the compliment. "What do you mean?" "You know, karma and that sort of stuff," he said. "Eastern philosophy. My parents were way into it when they were in college, and I've been doing a bit of reading myself in my downtime." "Wow," she gushed out loud. The guy was not only lovely to look at and a great actor but incredibly mature and intelligent to boot. She hadn't expected him to be that perfect. "You have to tell me more about it!" "No problem. If you get the part, and I've got a feeling you will, we'll be hanging together a lot." "Oh, I really hope so!" "Yeah, me too. Anyway, I've got to be going, but... See you, Tiffany." "See you," she responded and blushed a little as he turned to leave. "Bye then, Sean." "Bye!" He walked off in a confident, slightly exaggerated swagger, but slowed down to give her one last grin and wink over his shoulder. She kept waving at him with her fingers until he opened one of the doors and disappeared from sight. He was just too sweet for words, and the prospect of being on the show with him and getting to see him every day was enough to make her melt inside. She had to have that role! Her life was going pretty great--she had to admit the boy had hit the nail on the head there. She was gifted in many ways and she had a caring, supporting family. And if the people running the show had the sense to cast her, everything would be even better. This perky small town girl would go places, work in the movies, kiss cute boys, walk on the red carpet. Maybe Sean had been right about something else as well, she thought, and a fresh happy smile began to form on her lips. Maybe your fortunes really were down to how you treated others, and maybe Love and Might was karma or justice by any other name. Whether or not she had ever actually been Kyle Haney, it was heartwarming to think that she had helped another person somewhere along the way, perhaps, given them what they desperately needed, and her reward was getting to live as a loved daughter and future Hollywood star. Instead of, say, a wild animal who habitually took a dump on someone's porch.