83 These Eyes are Prying

Terry and I were sitting on her bed after classes on Monday, watching reruns of Heroes on her computer, while I tried vainly to ignore the fact that the most comfortable position for sitting on a bed was with my legs tucked under me, a clearly feminine posture. The problem was, my legs were too short to reach the floor and just letting them hang was tiring. Terry, of course, had no such problem; her feet were resting comfortably on the floor where they belonged.

Lee Ann poked her head in about fifteen minutes into the second episode. “Hey, I picked up the mail. This looks pretty official.” And she tossed a small envelope onto my lap.

I looked down and my heart froze.

“What is it?” Terry asked, pausing the show.

“It’s from the Dean’s office,” I replied, tearing it open, although I was pretty sure I already knew what it said.

“What’d you do?” Lee Ann asked.

I shook my head as I unfolded the note inside:

Marsha,
I was delighted to speak with your father, who is an old friend of mine, 
about you. I am eager to meet with you to set your mind at ease regarding
the pranks played by some of your friends. I hope you can make time for me
this week.
R. Peterson, Assoc. Dean of Students

There wasn’t anything revealing in it, so I handed it over to my roommates to goggle over.

Of course, I wasn’t fooled; this wasn’t a friendly note. The question was, what was I going to do about it? What if he was going to try pumping me for information on the Strangers? I really should tell Vicky about it, but she had told me not to contact her just now. I hoped that after she spoke with Ian and Luke, she would find a way for us to talk, but in the mean time…

“He’s a family friend?” Lee Ann asked.

“I think Dad went to school with him, that’s all, and now he’s decided to keep on eye on me, or something.”

“What’s this about pranks?”

“He means that time travel story; you know, the one that Jay keeps yelling at me about?”

“Why does a Dean care about that?” Terry wondered.

“I told my parents about it, and that I knew some of the people mentioned in the article, and Dad called this guy to find out the real story. So now he’s got to ‘reassure’ me.” I sighed. “This really isn’t great timing. We’re in Tech Week, and I’m already starting to get stressed out. This is the biggest role I’ve ever done, plus my EuroLit and Bio profs both announced that we’re behind schedule and we need to step up the amount of material we’re covering to get it all in before finals, and now this.”

“That really sucks,” Lee Ann said sympathetically, sitting next to me on the bed.

“Well, I know my lines, but there’s a lot of them, and that means a lot of things that can go wrong; a lot of chances for me to embarrass myself.”

“I don’t know how you do it; I’d die if I had to stand up in front of a whole bunch of strangers like that.” She started rubbing my back. “You are tense.”

Terry, sitting on my other side, nodded, “I know, I get that feeling all the time during games. There’s all those people watching, and half the time they’re hoping that I’ll mess us. You just have to keep focused.”

“Right,” I laughed. “At least people who come see me aren’t rooting against me. Thanks for the perspective, Terry.” My tension was definitely easing.

“So why do you need to have your mind set at ease?” Lee Ann asked. “Hey, you have to relax if this going to do you any good,” she added as I tensed up again at the question. I hadn’t thought of an explanation that I could give my roommates, and suddenly I had to think quickly of something that would be true but not revealing.

Fortunately, Ian and Luke’s behavior when I met them was enough. “Well, I met them and they seemed pretty worried that the college was going to come down hard on them.”

Terry scoffed. “For a hoax? Why?”

“I don’t know; maybe because the guy who wrote the story said that the administration was pestering him for their names.”

“That’s stupid. It was inept and nobody believed it even for a second.”

“I know, but still…”

“Look, Marsh, he used your first name,” Lee Ann pointed out. “That means that he’s being casual and just speaking as a friend of the family, right? If it were something official, he’d have called you Ms. Steen or something.”

“Yeah, I suppose…”

I tried to relax and just continue with the conversation, and Terry un-paused the show so we could watch the rest of the episode, but I was really worried. Peterson had to be intending to pump me for information. How was I going to handle that?

After we went back to our own bedrooms to study, I decided that Chad would be my best bet, but he wouldn’t be home from work until almost dinnertime. The problem was, I was really starting to worry about this; I couldn’t think of what an associate dean could realistically do to me, but my concentration just wasn’t there. I kept checking the time every few minutes, until I realized that studying just wasn’t going to happen.

To de-stress, I looked over my sewing jobs, looking for something I could get into. I was almost done with Terry’s gown, but I really wanted to have Nikki check what I had done so far before doing more. I found a couple of simple repair jobs, a broken zipper and a torn seam, and threw myself into them.

By the time I was finished, it was a quarter to six, so I picked up my phone and called Chad’s home.

“Jennifer!” his mother answered. “How are you?”

I bit my lip to keep from laughing. I really didn’t want to spend time talking with her just now. “I’m fine, Mrs. Barnes. Is Chad home?”

“Yes, he just came in. How is your play going?”

“Well, we’re in tech week,” I explained, “and it’s really intense. They’re keeping us very busy.”

“Busy is good,” she continued, completely ignoring my hint. “Are you excited?”

“Very much so. It’s a great opportunity for me.”

“I hope you have a great time. Break a leg!”

“Thanks!”

“Let me go get Chad,” she finally said.

He picked up after a moment. “Hi, Marsh. Hey, where were you this weekend? I figured you’d be home for Thanksgiving.”

“We went to my Grandmother’s for Thanksgiving,” I explained. “The reason I –“

He cut me off. “I had a thought about your situation, Marsh.”

“Oh?”

“Well, you remember that I said you were being too passive?”

“Yeah…”

“Well, it occurred to me that you were assuming that there’s a conspiracy going on. You know, to hide the experiment.”

“Uh huh…”

“But a conspiracy requires a whole lot of people to agree to keep a secret. In this case, you’re talking about everybody who knew about this experiment or this professor or his students. That just seems like an awful lot of people not to talk about something really strange happening, doesn’t it?”

“Wait,” I said, my heart sinking. “You’re saying that… that if anybody really knew about the guys who did the experiment, that it couldn’t be kept a secret? So that means that they’re definitely not around any more?”

“Well, maybe. But on the other hand, if they are still around, it should be possible to get somebody to talk.”

I considered that. “But you don’t really think that they are.”

“I didn’t say that. In fact, I think they almost have to be.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” I protested. “Which way are you arguing? I thought you just said that they couldn’t be, since if they were, it would be impossible to keep it a secret.”

“No, I’m saying that, assuming that they are around, which I think is almost certain, it should be possible to find them.”

“And why do they almost certainly still have to be around?”

“Because when you found yourself turned into Marsha, there was already a newspaper article that explained what had happened,” he said, as if that explained everything.

When I didn’t say anything, he prompted me, “Come on, Marsh. Think about it.”

“OK,” I said, “Let me see. The article was there, which means that other people had changed before I had.”

“Right. And…?”

“So the changes didn’t happen all at once. But if I’m right about how they did it, I wouldn’t have expected that anyway. Um… your idea was that maybe one of the changes affected whether they got funding to do the experiment, right?”

“Or something else.”

“So all of the previous changes couldn’t have had that effect, because if they had, I wouldn’t have been changed.”

“Exactly!”

“Oh!” Now I finally got it. “So unless my change was what made them disappear, or else they did even more changes later, they must still be around.”

“Bingo. And there’s no reason that your being a girl instead of a boy should have changed whether the experiment happened. So they must still be there, unless it was a later change that did it.”

“Hmm. Maybe.”

“What do you mean, ‘maybe?’” he asked, astounded that I wasn’t buying his proof. “What’s wrong with it? I mean, your family thinks you’re special, and you’re my friend, but that doesn’t make you important to a bunch of strangers.”

I sighed. I really wanted to believe his argument. “The problem, Chad, is the whole situation doesn’t seem to work logically at all! Why should me being a girl have caused my cousin not to be born? Why wasn’t Tina affected at all, as far as I can tell? That would have made a lot more sense.” I told him about what I had learned over Thanksgiving break, about Tyler being gone.

“Huh” was all he said at the revelation, although he said it more than once as I explained how I had reacted to the news, and how my parents had reacted to me reacting. Then I told him about the note from Dean Peterson.

“So, if Tyler’s disappearance doesn’t make sense, that means that the experiment still could have vanished, and it seems the simplest explanation now of why we haven’t found out anything,” I concluded.

“Yeah…” he said reluctantly, “although I still think they’re probably there.”

“Well, I think you just hate to give up a nice theory.”

“I don’t get you, Marsh,” he said. “Don’t you want to be able to change back? Don’t you need them still to be there?”

“Of course I do!” I exclaimed. “I’m just… I don’t know… I’m trying to be realistic. It was hard enough to try to accept this, without suddenly believing that I have a chance and then finding out that I really don’t.”

“So you’re giving up.”

“No… I mean… Dad’s friend wants to see me. Maybe… maybe I’ll find out something from him, assuming that there is something to think about. And if so, he’ll be trying to find out something from me.” I blinked to clear my head. This was getting really complex.

“And if he thinks it’s a hoax, he still might be trying to find out who did it.”

“Oh, nuts.” Chad was right. He could be pressing me for information whether he believed in the experiment or not, and he might not actually believe in it even if there had been a coverup.

“Come on, Dude, you can’t give up now,” Chad chided me. “You want your manhood back, you’re gonna have to work for it. Right? Right?”

I had to chuckle at his attempt at a pep talk. “Yeah, you’re right,” I acknowledged. “Thanks.”

“No problem. So what you need to do is find somebody that you can talk to; somebody who knew this professor and maybe isn’t all that crazy about them making him vanish. I mean, there’s got to be somebody who knows it’s genuine and thinks that all of you got a raw deal.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. That’s something you need to figure out.”

I nodded, and then said, “Yeah, you’re right. I know somebody I could ask for ideas, if he hasn’t already just given up on the whole plan.” And I needed to get in touch with Eric anyway.

“So what are you going to do about this Dean guy?”

“I guess I’ll just drop in on him, you know, and pretend that I think it really is all a hoax, and that I don’t really know the group all that well.”

“He’s probably going to want names. Tell him that you can’t give him any, because you don’t want your friends to get into trouble. That’s pretty normal, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess so. Thanks again, Chad. I’ll let you know how it goes.”

“Cool. Talk to you later, Marsh. And good luck.”

25 Comments

  1. Hoopla says:

    Argh! This chapter felt tooooooooooooo short!! Not sure that it moved forward much, but those kind of chapters happen 🙁

    This is one of those conversations I would have been fine with a flash back, rather than some of the other conversations that have been dealt with as a flash back.

  2. Trax says:

    Yeah, I wasn’t feeling this one much either. It isn’t BAD, but something doesn’t seem right with it either.
    —-
    …my apparent rudeness in trying __ cut our conversation shorter… missing a ‘to’ here.

  3. von says:

    This chapter moved the plot forward well, one hopes, but it lacked the feeling of several other chapters. Not sure I could tell you why.

    I do know that the first couple of paragraphs seemed distant; telling not showing.

  4. von says:

    >>“Of course I do!” I exclaimed.

    I exclaimed… but how did I feel? We are accustomed to morbid introspection (when, perhaps, it isn’t needed). Here, I would argue, it is needed. How is Marsh feelilng vis a vis Chad’s accusation? Angry with him, angry with himself, depressed…?

  5. von says:

    (above comments can be edited to add together with this one)

    I am hoping the Dean is going to react to the irrationality of the ‘hoax’ idea, adding greatly to the tension of that scene. I find Chad’s reasoning rather bizarre here, but at least he is thinking, sort of.

  6. von says:

    edited to add
    >>I sighed. I really wanted to believe his argument. “The problem, Chad, is the whole situation doesn’t seem to work logically at all! Why should me being a girl have caused my cousin not to be born?”

    Von sighs. The second sentence is gramattically incomplete, needing a ‘but’ and a subordinate clause. And Marsh,again, shows his IQ to be in the single digits. The question, properly posed, is exactly the opposite. Why would Marsh’s change not have affected hundreds of things… instead of just this one? Why this one among hundreds??

    And the way he skated through this faux pas brings up the missing bits in the beginning of the book where he has a way to easy pass… how come his roomates and parents didn’t catch him out, for example.

  7. von says:

    >>I mean, there’s got to be somebody who know it’s genuine and thinks that all of you got a raw deal.”

    … know[s] it’s genuine…

  8. von says:

    edited to add
    >>Despite my mood,

    Which would be….?

  9. von says:

    >>>“Well, it occurred to me that you were assuming that there’s a conspiracy going on. You know, to hide the experiment.”

    “Uh huh…”

    “But a conspiracy requires a whole lot of people to agree to keep a secret.

    To agree to keep a secret. Thus, if there is no one around that knows that something actually happened, and feels responsible for it, there is no one to keep the secret!! I mean, how many of us are running around desperately trying to keep the secret that Russ is actually an AI from Ganymede? We aren’t trying to ‘keep’ that secret, because we don’t think it is a secret! Because we don’t think it is true! And we don’t care, or wouldn’t care, if people started writing about it and proposing it!

    There are, logically, two possibilities:
    1) Someone knows what happened and feels responsible. In this case, there is hope that there is some way to change; and finding these people should be a high priority.
    2) There is no one around who knows what happened and feels responsible. In that case, there is no reason to hide from these non-existent people.

    Ergo, in neither case is there a good reason for excessive hiding. Marsh needs to find out if these people exist, and who they are.

  10. Russ says:

    I have done a substantial rewrite of this chapter, especially the beginning, as a result of the feedback I got, mostly from Von. Thanks, guys!

  11. von says:

    I guess Scott is dead, eh?

  12. Trax says:

    No, Steve’s dead, dude.

    (Does anyone get that reference? :p)

  13. scotts13 says:

    >> I guess Scott is dead, eh?

    Not dead, just… pining for the fjords, or something. Frankly, there was a fair helping of grammatical and logical, uh, “non-optimal choices” in this bit, and I didn’t feel like getting into it for essentially a placeholder chapter.

    I still feel like little happens; more acclimatization, more ducking verbal faux pas, more circular logic from Chad. However, the revised chapter READS much, much better. Kudos.

  14. von says:

    Poor Russ. With friends like these…

    All that you say is true Scott, but there are some interesting bits. Did you notice what happened with the roomates, for example? And, between all the circular logic, there were some interesting points floating around Chad’s statements.

    True, not exactly fast paced, but it still seems like we are getting somewhere…eventually.

  15. Hoopla says:

    ** Heros ** should be ** Heroes **

    ** Terry, sitting on my other side, nodded, “I know, I get that feeling all the time during games. There’s all those people watching, and half the time they’re hoping that I’ll mess * * us * *. You just have to keep focused.”** Should be * * up * *?

    I like this version a lot better than the original – thanks Russ. I really did like the beginning, it is about time we saw Marsh interact with his room mates outside of a socially stressed situation (the constant peer pressure for getting Marsh to date).

  16. von says:

    OK, a vote. Who is your favorite character so far?

    My vote is for Jared. I had great hopes after that one line of Marsh’s father, but he disappointed me. So I am stuck with Jared. Horribly immoral, but I like his Chutzpah and directness.

    I would like to like Chad more, but his illogic and lack of face time depresses me. Tina is OK. Oh, and I like Grandma… except she is too easily put off.

  17. von says:

    >>>There wasn’t anything revealing in it, so I handed it over to my roommates to goggle over.

    Yeah, right!

  18. Hoopla says:

    I think my favourite is Nikki, such a grounded character for Marsh to have as a good friend.

  19. von says:

    I like Nikki as a character, but I think she damages the book, particuarly in the beginning, so she doesn’t get my vote.

  20. Hoopla says:

    FOUL!

    I didn’t comment on your choice!

  21. von says:

    So, comment already! I could have commented on every single character, telling you why they ‘weren’t’ my choice, but I didnt’ have time 🙂

    Anway, comment already. I expect you hate Jared.

  22. Hoopla says:

    No, I don’t hate Jared – he has grown quite a bit from the awkward lump he started out as. But, he is far from my favourite character in the story.

  23. Harri says:

    “Heros” should be “Heroes”, as Hoopla said. Unless you made up a new series about a guy called Heros.

    >>>“What is it, Marsh?” Terry asked, pausing the show.
    >>>“What’d you do, Marsh?” Lee Ann asked.

    Has anyone seen “Charlie the Unicorn”? this reminds me of that. We know they are talking to Marsh. MARSH knows they are talking to Marsh. I don’t think you need the “Marsh” at the end of these sentences. It seems a bit ‘fake’, like a stageplay, if you will…

    >>>>“That really sucks,” Lee Ann said sympathetically, sitting next to me on the bed. “Do you want to talk about it?”

    She IS talking about it. Don’t ask if she wants to… just try to carry the conversation on, and if she doesn’t want to get into it, she’ll say so.

    >>>”Here, let me rub your back.”

    Again, don’t ask, just do it. This could be mentioned in the narrative “Lee Ann started rubbing my back sympathetically” or “massagically”, and if she has any qualms about it they could be mentioned in her internal monologue.

    >>>“Right,” I laughed. “At least people who come see me aren’t rooting against me.”

    Is this colloquial or should it say “come and see me” or “come to see me”?

    >>>I should have known it wouldn’t last.

    Aww, man, you set us up to expect something we didn’t want to expect.

    >>>”gasped involuntarily.”

    I probably would have “silently groaned” or sighed to myself. A gasp is more associated with sudden visual shock or sudden realisation… “*gasp* a massive spider!” or “*gasp* I’d left my diary open in the study!” not so much for slow realisation like “oh no, I need an excuse now”.

    >>>I was almost done with Terry’s, gown

    extra ,

    >>>I found a couple of simple repair jobs, a broken zipper and a torn seam__ and threw myself into them.

    missing ,

    >>>“No, I’m saying that, assuming that they are around, which I think is almost certain, _that_ it should be possible to find them.”

    Superfluous “that”

    >>>And why do they almost certainly still have to be around?”

    Missing ”

    >>>“I’m just… I don’t know… I just don’t want to get my hopes up again. ”

    This seems off, that she’s “trying not to get her hopes up”. Realistically, when there is faesible hope, who doesn’t “get their hopes up” involuntarily? CSI (Las Vegas, thank you very much) taught me that “Hope dies last”.

    >>>Chad was right. He could be pressing me for me information

    “me information” is colloquial, haha, but I’m not sure it fits Marsh’s dialect. It would fit a Brit Chav, though…

    >>>I mean, there’s got to be somebody who know it’s genuine

    As Von said: “knowS it’s genuine.”

  24. Richard says:

    I think Marsh already knows who knows and she’s eaten lunch with him nearly everyday. Of course I’m talking about Jay.

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