Tah-dah! (cheers) A chapter, finally, after what seems like eons...but there is a bright side (other than the chapter, of course. ) I took one look at my varius stories, and set a goal: at least two of them will be done in time for November's next NaNo, so updates will be a bit more common than they have been recently.

Besides that...as always, read, review, and enjoy! Mucho thanks to Athos, as well.

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What’s a poor nerd to do?- Chapter 6

I woke up the next morning to the smell of waffles and the distinctly nauseous feeling that comes from not eating for a much longer period of time than recommended. Almost immediately I groaned, throwing a blanket over my head to block out everything for as long as I possibly could. I had been having a good dream, with Tyler and me and…well, I’m sure you can guess, but the point is that for once in my life I actually had a wonderful reason to stay sleeping.

But, because I am responsible, sensible Damien, I actually had to get up and greet the day. It was blasted annoying, especially since I knew that I had another long day of traveling to do, and probably another night of sleep on a lumpy mattress in a cheap motel, which left me with an interesting crick in my back if nothing else. It was not a pleasant thought, and, more than anything, I wanted to be back in my own body and my own bed, not driving 1600 miles to hunt down Jasson and somehow figure out how to become me again. Heaven knows what I would have been doing if I had not met Misae...the thought prompted another, and a brief moment of pure panic.

Misae! I sprang out of bed when I realized that I was alone, before falling in an undignified heap when the blankets tangled around my legs in my rush to find the only person who was still keeping me sane. While I was trying to get untangled, I heard the distinct sound of a shower, and chuckled in relief at my assumptions. Misae hadn’t run away screaming just yet, and I was in too much of a hurry that I didn’t bother to pay attention to the fact that there was someone in the shower who was not me, and there was only one person it could have been.

A real genius; yep, that’s me all the way.

Calmer now, I managed to pull myself off the floor, idly massaging the hip bone I had landed on, all the while glaring at the offending blankets and floor like it was somehow their fault. I was going to get a bruise from that fall, and it wasn’t even my body I was damaging. Even though I was still quite angry at Jasson and probably always would be, I always felt bad when I broke other people’s things, whether they deserved it or not. Also, it was interesting; even though the body was not mine, I must be connected to it somehow to be able to feel pain. Like my soul or spirit or whatever you call it was Velcro or something. Soul Velcro. Yes, I liked that thought; it implied that it could simply be disconnected and reconnected to any body, and it made me hopeful that I could actually get back to mine. Provided Jasson hadn’t already died while in my body, or damaged it beyond repair.

It was the worst thought I could have possibly had, and the low-grade panic I had been having since the beginning of this nightmare intensified tenfold. I didn’t start screaming, thank heaven, because I’d already done that once and it had resulted in a rather unpleasant trip to the hospital, but shaking wasn’t entirely out of the question. So when Misae emerged from the bathroom a few minutes later, I was sitting on that lumpy bed, shaking like a leaf in a Wyoming breeze.

“Damien? What happened?” Misae asked, sitting down next to me while I tried to work on the breathing exercises that I used to relive stress before a test, a Buddhist technique. It normally worked wonderfully, and I aced every test with perfect marks; this time, however, it wasn’t working. But then, my life was hardly a test, and what life was left I was seeing crumble right before my eyes.

I buried my face in my hands, and my answer came out sounding muffled as well as miserable.

“Misae, what if he killed himself while in my body? What will happen to me?”

Through some miracle (or very good hearing) Misae actually understood my slightly hysterical concerns, and answered in a calm, quick way that was absolutely believable.

“Jasson would never do that. He might be a little self-absorbed-” I snorted at the understatement. The clothes, the apartment, the suicide…all spoke of a distinct lack of caring for anyone but himself. “-okay, very self-absorbed, but he has a deep appreciation for the joy others have in life. Suicide isn’t beyond him, but he would never kill someone else, and I’m sure that’s what he would see it as. I have faith in Jasson.”

God, that’s comforting I thought with a wobbly smile. Misae had faith in Jasson. Misae had faith in Jasson. I kept repeating it in my head like a mantra, hoping that the pure ludicrousness of the statement would make it more believable. Misae, the moderately successful businessman, had faith in the suicidal redheaded teen with a questionable taste in company and employment. It spoke of friendship like no other, and, surprisingly enough, I envied that friendship. I had never had real friends, mostly because I believed that people my age weren’t worth befriending, but Jasson had at least one good friend, and he had thrown the feeling of support and love away like it was nothing. Like so many things about him, it made me angry, and I just wanted to pummel him within an inch of his (my) life, hoping that, in doing so, he would at least stop making Misae so miserable. The idea that he would stop making me miserable was too much to ask for, really, as everything he had ever done was now my history, and I’m sure the surprises would never end when it came to Jasson’s past life.

I felt the mattress dip as Misae sat down next to me, and smelled that same vanilla smell, thinking that I’d have to get some of whatever lotion it was. It was a very comforting scent, much better than just ordinary vanilla. I don’t know what it was about it, really, but I decided the manufacturer was a genius. I would have to ask Misae about it later, but at that moment I was still somewhat depressed, and more than a little hungry. Without another word, I dug into the cold breakfast that was sitting innocently on the end table, too distracted by my problems to acknowledge that the food actually had a taste. I continued eating until there was nothing left, and stood quickly afterwards, saying I needed to take a shower and disappearing before Misae could really say anything. I couldn’t help it; I really did need a shower, and my bladder seemed to work just fine now that I was awake. At least this is what I told myself.

Honestly, I was just looking for a way to avoid talking about Jasson.

II

I stood in the bathroom for ten minutes before I finally worked up the courage to actually take a shower, blushing the entire time. I mean, I’m only seventeen, and I’d always been somewhat immature-socially and romantically, anyway. I had never been kissed in my life, much less seen anyone naked, and I was quite mortified to have to be washing a body that was not the one I was used to. It made me shudder, really, and it only got worse because Jasson, who must have seen many bodies, probably did not have the same problem. Provided, of course, that he bothered to maintain his new body at all…

After I had taken the briefest shower possible and slipped back into my clothes in record time, we were off again, me with my map and Misae driving just as we had done the day before. There were very few words spoken, mainly because I was a bit…preoccupied. Every thought that could pop out of the shadows of my mind and remind me of my situation did (not like I had forgotten), and I was more than a little worried about what awaited me back in Cheyenne. Some of the things we did talk about, however, included the lotion Misae used (Almond Vanilla Goat Milk Lotion, of all things, which he ordered off the internet), what high school he had gone to (Edina High School in Minnesota, which explained his lack of a truly southern accent) and why exactly he’d dropped out. After I’d asked this question, he went silent for several minutes, reflecting, and nothing I’d say could bring him out of it until he was finished.

“I was never good at bookwork, and I didn’t get along with anybody, really. Edina was all about being all that you could be, but I just couldn’t be what they wanted me to be. I was good at culinary arts, at business, but I wasn’t really good at anything else. And Jasson was…” Misae paused, smiling slightly in a reflective, happy kind of way.

“Jasson was the son of my math teacher, who told me without hesitation that I was hopeless and needed to find a career that focused on something I actually excelled at. He was the one who encouraged me to start my own business, and when I left for New Orleans, he went with me. I’m not really sure why.”

I knew why, of course, or at least suspected: Jasson had probably had a crush on Misae at one time, although whether or not he did now was uncertain. The fact he was suicidal spoke of a deep depression and lack of caring for life, and if he had still been fond of Misae, wouldn’t it have occurred to him that him dying would hurt? But then, I was hardly an expert on the workings of Jasson’s mind, and for all I knew he had drugged it away, and could have been thinking about flying purple rabbits when he took those pills. It was a mystery that could not be solved without at least some speaking to Jasson.

That was another one of my fears: speaking to Jasson. When I thought of his mistakes, I couldn’t help but be angry and want to bash him upside the head -repeatedly- but the more I thought about it as we drove, the more I wondered: could I really blame Jasson for the entire situation? Sure, I believed it was beyond stupid for him to kill himself and inexcusable to harm Misae like that, but then again, I hadn’t been an exactly innocent victim. I had jumped in front of a truck for someone else, and would have been dead had I not done this body-switch thing; it’s not like I was yanked out of my life when I was sleeping or anything. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure what to think about the entire situation anymore. I wasn’t sure of anything other than the fact that, even if this wasn’t Jasson’s fault completely, I was hardly going to like him. It was a fate I’d resigned myself to beforehand.

The next place we stopped at was a gas station, some little nothing on the edge of the road called the Loaf N’ Jug. The second I saw it, I became so excited that I could hardly stop moving, because Cheyenne had one just like it smack dab in the middle of the city. I hadn’t seen any at all for the majority of the trip, and the fact that I saw one now meant that we must be getting closer to Wyoming than I could have hoped for a mere three days after the incident. I had long since given up on the map to tell me where I was, because every time I glanced at it, the lines swam before my eyes and became one great yellow and red blob; Misae had cheerfully taken over that job as well, and now I was left with only a small idea where I was without annoying him by constantly asking. But I recognized the land, I recognized the buildings, and I knew.

I was nearly home.

III

When we pulled into the parking lot of another dime-a-dozen motel, we were only a hundred miles or so from Cheyenne, a distance both minor and impossible when someone had driven for as long as Misae had. He must have been tired, surely he was, but before he even thought of sleep, he calmly took out his candy making supplies and began working, explaining that he would make the candy and send it back to his shop in order not to lose business. After watching him follow some unspoken ritual for a few minutes, he laughed and beckoned me over closer to watch as he made the most perfect caramels I had ever seen.

The key to caramels was not to break the boil, he told me, and to not scrape for the extra few caramels at the bottom of the melting pot and risk having crystals form as a top layer to the batch. It was better to lose a few than ruin them all, he said, and it was a bit of information that registered in the back of my mind, to be imprinted there for a very long time, perhaps until my next death, even. It wasn’t the caramels that I knew I’d remember so much as what it said about Misae, and that was that he was not greedy. He chose quality over profit, and for someone who had lived around money-hungry Thomas all their life, it was a virtually unknown concept. But that was just Misae.

We finally settled down for the night after making two batches of tiny, perfect caramels, dipped in dark chocolate and sprinkled with bitter cocoa, before neatly being settled in insulated boxes ready for shipment. I had never considered myself a candy lover of any kind, and I had never had time for the simple pleasures in life, and I had really never liked caramels (which I had had quite often as a perk of coming from a rich family full of people who never bothered to learn what you did and didn’t like.) Misae’s caramels, however, were something else, a bit of bliss in a time where most of my life was stress. And as we settled down to sleep, I couldn’t help but think that, under the circumstances, this was the best spent night of my life.

The night passed slowly, as everything did before an really big, really exciting event. While Misae slept like a man on the brink of death the entire night, I couldn’t bring myself to close my eyes for as much as a minute. I was so excited to finally be solving something, to have nearly taken the first step in becoming myself again, and I was so very eager to be back where I belonged. This entire incident had convinced me that nothing in life was a certainty, and it gave me a new vein of courage; as soon as I was myself again, I would speak my mind. I would confess my love for Tyler, laugh at my sister’s arrogant assumptions, talk to Thomas like an equal rather than live in his shadow. I would change things, I would be stronger, and I would no longer be hidden away like a disgrace to the supposed perfection of my family line. I swore all of this to myself before I ever got a wink of sleep.

But as the light crept through the dingy mini-blinds and landed on my face, and as I woke with a large dose of reality, such plans faded, back into the depth of fear and uncertainty. I couldn’t be that way; I couldn’t be different, rebel, change the world. I wasn’t strong enough, and heaven knew I could never be.

It was a depressing thought, of course, but I didn’t let it change the excitement I felt. I was Damien Christopher, and come hell or high water, I was getting back to my body.

Misae understood the determination I was feeling without a word spoken between us. I think he saw it in the serious set of my face (an expression I had perfected at age five) and in the tense silence that followed me from the motel and all the way back into the car. Misae didn’t ask for answers, like so many people would have, because he understood that I didn’t want to talk. Although Misae was no genius (his words, but after having known him for just a few days, I wasn’t so sure) he didn’t pry, and therefore didn’t make me more upset than I was.

Instead, he told jokes. Simple jokes, puny jokes, jokes that you can’t help but laugh at even though your mind knows they are so stupid that they don’t deserve laughter. He seemed to have a depthless arsenal of them, and then out of nowhere he switched to riddles, riddles that, more often than not, I couldn’t get. It was fun, and I laughed so hard that halfway through the last leg of the trip, my sides hurt and there were tears at the corner of my eyes. It was then, and only then, that he stopped, content to descend into a better sort of silence. We stayed that way right up until I saw the road sign declaring Cheyenne only fifteen miles away, and then I couldn’t stop talking in the excited, squirrel-like chatter of any little kid happy to be going home. It wasn’t long before we found ourselves in the city, and then my babble began to include directions to my house on Central. We passed the library, the circular park I knew and loved, and slide into the driveway of my old home, built new hundreds of years ago and changed only when it became clear that a family of sorts would be moving in. I jumped out of the car before it had completely parked, and I stood there, just stood there, staring at my house with its beautiful windows and cold iron fence.

I was home again.