Chapter 7: Present

GARCÍA RESIDENCE

1:36 PM - Wednesday Week 2 March, 2019

Arjun lingered near the exit at the back of the school building, waiting for the perfect time to leave school without being noticed. He didn’t want his parents to find out that he was bunking school when he was just a few months from graduating. It also didn’t help that he had just spent a week at home, recovering from a concussion, or that both his mother and father were stereotypically overbearing, academics-obsessed Indian parents. If they found out he cut class, their interrogations and lectures would be even worse than his eventual punishment.

This would be the fourth time in Arjun’s high school career that he scrammed. The first two times had been during pep rallies. He hated them, and would always find ways to leave. The other time was with Meera, to go to the park as a date.

The only thing stopping him from leaving now was the fear that the school had fixed this exit’s broken alarm. His palms sweated profusely and his heart thumped in his chest as he paced back and forth, working up the courage to open the door. Arjun took a deep breath, in and out. He held his hands on the crash bar, and took another one. Then he decided to stop stalling.

He pushed the bar. The alarm didn’t ring.

Huh, still broken. Arjun spared a thought for how little the school cared about security. He shrugged to himself, then walked towards a bus stop where nobody would recognize him. The next-nearest from the school was a six minute walk away.

The Garcías only lived about twenty minutes away from the high school by foot, but it was uphill practically the whole way. Arjun didn’t want to run or walk there; by the time he got to the top of the hill, he’d be covered in sweat. He wanted to look and smell somewhat nice when seeing his childhood crush. Even though he had a girlfriend, and Marianna had a husband, Arjun couldn’t stop thinking of her in a sexual way. He also couldn’t stop thinking of how she’d responded to him, inside of his head, when he’d revealed to her that she’d been the object of his pubescent fantasies — and still was.

A bus arrived at the stop only a few minutes after Arjun did. Getting on, he didn’t see anybody he recognized. He breathed a sigh of relief, took a seat, and enjoyed the ride.

********

1:56 PM

The bus dropped Arjun off three minutes from the Garcías’ home. Arjun walked to their two storey ranch house, thinking about how — or, more precisely, how much — he’d tell them about what had happened last night with his mother.

KNOCK

KNOCK

Arjun knocked softly at first, then harder. He held his hand in front of the door, thinking about whether or not he should knock again. They probably didn’t hear it, maybe one more knock wouldn’t hurt. Arjun went to knock one more time, but before his knuckles could make contact with the wooden door, it opened. Marianna held the door open wide, and Arjun’s hand fell atop her knockers instead.

“OH!” Marianna said with a bright smile. “That’s one way to say hello after a long time. Hello, Arjun.”

“H-h-hi...” Arjun said, his mouth wide open at the realisation of where his hand had landed. Red-faced in shame, he jerked it back. “OH! I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to do that, it was an accident!”

“Don’t worry, mijo, it’s no big deal,” Marianna said, unphased by Arjun’s unintentional grope. “Come in. Paco said you had a problem with your power.”

“Uhh-uh–ye–yeah.” Arjun walked into the house, his cheeks hot with embarrassment. He stood in the middle of the Garcia family’s living room, awkwardly inspecting the decor, until Marianna told him to sit and make himself comfortable. He sat, but he wasn’t exactly comfortable. He stammered out his words, unsure of how to begin.

“I–I–my power ... wait, is it possible for me to body swap with people?”

“Body swap?” Marianna echoed. “Hmm, it’s not out of the realm of possibility, but it’s highly dangerous to do so. Why?”

“I, body swapped with my dad...” Arjun tried to sound calm, but failed miserably. He was still embarrassed that he’d touched Mrs. Garcia’s breasts, and nervous about where the conversation was about to head. He looked up, and immediately regretted doing so. Rather than catching Mrs. Garcia’s eyes, he caught sight of her breasts once more. His cheeks got even hotter.

If Marianna weren’t Cisco’s mother, Arjun wouldn’t have found it shameful to find her so attractive. She was a gorgeous woman. Any eighteen year-old, or any man in general, would have loved an opportunity to get to know her body better. As it stood, however, she was off-limits, and Arjun had a girlfriend. He wished that either of those facts would stop him from lusting after her. They didn’t. Arjun cringed at the thought of Cisco, Paco, or Meera discovering his taboo attraction. He felt a brief surge of panic, wondering if Paco had heard — or ‘heard’ — the beginning of their exchange inside of his mind, or if Marianna had told him about it.

He could see it now: Meera getting jealous and upset, and yelling at him that her small breasts — which Arjun truly loved, as he told her all the time — weren’t enough for him. Meera wasn’t insecure about having small breasts. Her wonderful, round, gymnast’s butt made up for any shortcomings up top regardless, but no girlfriend wanted to hear that their boyfriend had gotten a feel of a much bigger pair. Few would readily believe it had been an accident, even if it truly had been.

Marianna looked at Arjun. She noticed he was blushing, and it brought a quick smile to her lips. Then she processed what he’d just said. Her round eyebrows, thinned out towards the edges, spiked up. Her head tilted, and confusion was written all over her face.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Yes!”

“Huh.” Marianna sighed, folding her arms under her big breasts. She didn’t want to dismiss the boy’s claim, but she couldn’t think of any way it could be true.

“Hold on, Arjun; wait here. I’ll go get Paco. I think he’ll be of more service than me.”

Arjun nodded, avoiding looking directly at Marianna.

********

Marianna walked upstairs to a makeshift office adjacent to the couple’s bedroom. She opened the door without knocking. “Paco, Arjun’s here.”

Paco didn’t hear his wife. He was in his own world, rifling through papers. They were a mess upon his desk. His eyes looked strained as he held a yellowish-white paper in his hand, trying to read what was written on it. The words were jumbled. Most of the letters were written backwards, and others upside down. That was no issue for Paco; he’d mastered his powers to such an extent that he could manipulate his own perspective. To him, each letter twisted around until it was right-side up; so long as he focused exclusively on the text, and not on all the distortions those rotations created elsewhere in his field of view, he could avoid getting sick and throwing up. Unfortunately, the letter’s writer — the Patriarch of the Sabha himself — had terrible handwriting. It was an unintentional cipher atop the intentional one, and Paco’s power didn’t help at all with it.

“What are you reading?”

“Huh?” Paco looked up from the paper, and immediately regretted it. He squeezed his eyes shut and forced his perspective back to normal. When he opened them again, his wife could see that they were bloodshot.

“I wrote a letter to the Grand Patriarch about Arjun’s idiosyncrasy,” he said, “but the letter he wrote back is...” Paco handed the letter to Marianna, rubbing his dry eyes.

Marianna’s eyes widened, almost bulging out their sockets. Her brows stretched up, looking back and forth between the letter and Paco’s fatigued face. “He knows no one can read this, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Then why does he keep writing like this? That two-hundred-year-old French bastard is getting on my nerves.”

“Hey, at least you don’t have to try,” Paco said, with a faint smile crossing his face. “Did you need anything?”