Chapter 3

The morning after was ... quiet.

Evie wanted to beat herself up over ‘taking advantage’ of a minor and her student. I wanted to celebrate breaking the ice with a beautiful woman and successfully spending hours finding ways to please her. She was equal parts remorseful and jubilant, so to get her back to herself, I built on the jubilant part and skimmed past the remorse, so we could go nail my college tests.

“You realize that teachers do not have sex with students, right?” She was determined to ruin her high, and I was just as determined to maintain it.

“Be honest with yourself, Evie. I seduced you. You did not have any designs on my body. You wouldn’t have ever thought of spending the night with somebody as pathetic and little as me. Nothing you tell yourself can ever make you think otherwise.

“Right now all you want to do is blame yourself for something you have no responsibility for, and you know it. You won’t let go out of some sort of misplaced need to assign blame for indulging your need to pit a label on what was a wonderful night spent enjoying the company of a close friend.” She easily capitulated so we could get dressed, have breakfast, and go amaze the University Regents. The car with our bodyguards was waiting when we exited the elevators and we were in the testing room right on time.

“Well, Terry ... It looks like you will be skipping college as well as grade school, middle school, and high school.” I could tell that she was incredulous at my performance on the breadth and depth of what I was tested on.

The Regents called us in to give us the news in person, and the news – quite frankly – blew me away. “Mr. Wellington ... It is a rare day in academia when a completely unprepared young person walks in and aces a battery of final exams that would have frustrated Albert Einstein.” He was young for the position he held, but his manner and behavior screamed intelligence, education, and qualification.

“The state has no choice but to allow you to test out through high school, The Board of Regents of this State’s university system voted to grant you a Master’s degree to go with your B.A.” He shuffled some paper and produced a series of documents to sign, invoices to pay, and forms to file. Once the paperwork was satisfactorily completed, and counter signed, I was a college graduate with an MBA.

It was pretty good for a single week of work.

Our guards shepherded us back to Mr. Wellington’s plane and we settled in for the ride home. Evie chose to join me in the back to see if we could catch an hour or so of sleep. When she crawled onto the bed, she grabbed my arm and cuddled up to my back. Evie was sound asleep within five minutes, leaving me awake to try and come up with a plan for Terry Wellington’s life.

The body I inherited was little, malnourished, sickly, and rather pathetic. Deirdre and Evie seemed to enjoy the way I performed in bed, but there were very few careers for four-foot, nine inch, stunted, children with bad posture. I needed a reason to live in Terry’s body, and a mission to perform.

Without both I had a long life of boredom to look forward to...

Before we landed the mission came to me.

The intercom sounded beside the queen-sized bed. “Yes,” I said in greeting.

“We have a problem. It seems that there has been some kind of major power failure along the east coast and we being ordered to turn away from our destination, and head for an alternate airport at least three-hundred miles from home. I am sorry, but I have absolutely no further information. As soon as somebody tells more, I will let you know.”

Our current predicament got me thinking ... Deirdre had taken another of Mr. Wellington’s planes and gone to Texas to visit an old college roommate. Mr. Wellington was in Europe, and if things were about to get weird, he certainly wasn’t come back any time soon.

What I needed was information.

The plane was equipped with Wi-Fi, so I logged on and tried to find some news. The main news sites offered little more than the pilot told me.

That was seriously weird.

Some hard digging and all I found were rumors that outweighed any facts available and I knew we should know more when we got on the ground where there should be some hard news to be had. It must have happened within the last few minutes for there to be so little information available. With nothing better to do, Evie and I chatted to keep our minds off of what might have caused the blackouts and how bad they were going to affect out trip home.

“My life has been pretty vanilla,” Evie said in response to my inquiry. “I was raised by my mother, because my father decided he liked eighteen year old tramps more than us.” Her smile turned into a frown when she mentioned her parents’ breakup.

“I was five when he didn’t come home from work one day. My mother tried calling his cell phone but it was turned off. The next day she was served with divorce papers.

“It wasn’t pretty,” she sighed, thinking about her parents and the divorce. I gave her time and waited patiently.

“My father was – is – just a bit of mist, or a fragment of a memory. He never returned, never took me for a weekend or a summer. My father forgot I existed and if my mother didn’t drag him into court on a regular basis, he would have never made a single support or alimony payment.

“He was almost a figment of my imagination. For years I would lie in bed and pretend that he was overseas, fighting spies and saving countries from nuclear destruction, like James Bond. One night the phone rang downstairs as I imagined my father coming home victorious. I got so excited because I just knew it was him and he was coming back for us.

“My mother was crying when she hung up and I ran down to see what was wrong. ‘Your Grandfather passed away this afternoon, Baby,’ was all she said, and we held each other and cried for hours.

“That was the last time I ever indulged myself in the fantasies of my father suddenly wanting to have a family again. He’s been dead to me ever since.

“Not that he knows that, of course. He left us both and never looked back. Once I understood what that meant, I lost interest in him and rarely think about it anymore.”

I could tell that her father was not a subject that we should revisit.

“How did you manage to become my tutor?”

She smiled at the memory. Her smile was sweet and kind, with no hint of deviousness or spite. “I graduated from teachers’ college and hated my first job. The school system was flush with tax money, but only seemed to want to spend it on land, buildings and obscene salaries for themselves. Teachers were horribly underpaid and treated like disposable diapers.

“One day our union rep told me that he had gotten a request for a full time, live-in tutor at an estate and wondered if I was interested in applying. Your grandfather’s lawyer interviewed me and hired me as soon as my background and driver license screenings were complete.” Her face changed and I figured she wanted to change the subject, again.