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This book is for sale to ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. It contains substantial sexually explicit scenes and graphic language which may be considered offensive by some readers. Please store your files where they cannot be accessed by minors.
All sexually active characters in this work are 18 years of age or older.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover Design: Selena Kitt
A Stitch in Time © 2008 Marshall Ian Key
eXcessica publishing
All rights reserved
A Stitch in Time
By Marshall Ian Key
Chapter 1
Finding the men's room in the Maple Hills Shopping Mall wasn’t hard. It was getting there, through the holiday shoppers who, like my mother and sister, still hadn't finished their holiday shopping on December 23, 2003, that was the real challenge.
The first time I passed the hallway that contained the men's room, I found myself too far to the inside of the mass of humanity that was circling the mall like a road rally at a roundabout. Instead, I used the next circuit to gradually move to the outside. From there, I was finally able to launch myself into the deceleration lane that led to my goal.
I had apparently discovered the only place in the mall that was wholly devoid of life. I stepped up to the farthest left of the three urinals and was standing there, taking care of the business that had summoned me, when I heard the door bang open.
Etiquette required that I continue staring at the wall in front of me, although etiquette also required that this new visitor use the right-hand urinal rather than the one in the center. Apparently he hadn't heard that. I could sense him stepping up next to me, leaving us separated only by the shoulder-to-knee metal divider.
"Ho-ho-ho," he said with a chuckle. "So what are you wishing for this Christmas, young man?"
I glanced over. This would be the mall Santa, on a break from posing for pictures with tiny tots with their eyes all aglow.
"Santa." I acknowledged him with a grin as I returned my eyes to the front. I had no idea his red suit had a zipper in the front.
"Well?" His booming voice reverberated inside the tiled room. "There must be something you want!"
"Can't think of anything." I was still grinning as I finished up and walked over to the sinks to wash my hands. Here was a guy who loved his work..
"So you've got everything you want in life already?" he asked, still with the loud voice. "Everything's perfect?"
"Well, no," I replied . "All right, you know what I'd like, Santa? Instead of just starting high school, what I'd really like is to be finishing it."
That way, I thought to myself as I looked in the mirror and tried to smooth my hair over to the side a little, I can avoid all the assholes, bullies, jocks, and bitches; all the sniping, teasing, gossiping, and backstabbing — instead of three and half more years of this crap, I'd be just about done.
John Marshall High School was not my idea of a good time. There was a core group made up of jocks (male and female), cheerleaders, and the generally cool. There were orbiting planets for band members, newspaper and yearbook types, comics, theatre freaks, and druggies. Then there were kids like me, whose orbits occasionally brought them uncomfortably close to the solar system but who generally preferred to stay out among the asteroid fields. I was currently on one of my forays to the center, where I seemed to have been appointed the target-of-the-month by the freshman and sophomore football players and their tart-tongued girlfriends. The juniors and seniors, thank God, thought me so far beneath them as to not even be worthy of attention.
It didn't help having an older brother who was one of those seniors. Dave was bound for Auburn University next year on a football scholarship. The gym coach was constantly expecting me to show even a fraction of my brother's athletic ability. The teachers were constantly expecting me to be as much a goof-off as he was. And the girls, even in my own ninth grade, were constantly comparing his six-foot-two, 220-pound frame to mine. At five-foot-seven and 140 pounds, I was constantly disappointing them.
"That's a pretty tall order, young man." Santa laughed as he joined me at the sinks. "So basically you just want to skip all this annoying adolescence and go straight on into adulthood, huh?"
Was Santa Claus mocking me? I looked at him in the mirror, but he still wore the same jolly expression, even on his break.
"I was more mature at six than most of the guys in my high school will be when they're thirty-six."
"Maybe so." He laughed again as I dried my hands and pulled open the door. "Have a Merry Christmas, young man!"
"Yeah, you too," I mumbled as I let the door close behind me.
I made my way back to where I was supposed to meet Mom and Jeanne, noticing along the way that Santa Claus was already back at his station, making yet another kid smile as he bounced her on his knee. No doubt he knew some sort of mall shortcut.
My pissy mood evaporated as soon as I saw them standing there, two women for whom the Christmas season seemed to have been designed. They were comparing what they had bought. Mom had a present for a family at our church with a newborn baby, and Jeanne had a couple of presents for two new girls in her circle of friends in the eighth grade.
"All set, Patrick?" Mom asked. "Sure you don't want to get anything while we're here? You have presents for everybody?"
"I think so," I said, pretending to go over the list again. "Dad,"—that would be a set of offset screwdrivers—"you,"—a bathrobe I'd actually picked out last summer—"Dave,"—a copy of the new Madden Football game—"and Jill"—a pair of earrings for my fashion-conscious seventh-grade sister. "All done."
"Jerk." Jeanne smiled at me.
"Oh, and Jeanne," I said. "I must have gotten a present for Jeanne. Still, too late now, huh?"
"Jerk."
I had spent the most time picking that one out, a sweater that perfectly complemented her green eyes. I would tell her that, two mornings from now, and she would ask how anything could complement eyes hidden behind glasses as thick as hers. I would kid her that her boyfriends would notice, and she would ask which boyfriend, the older college-age one or the younger high school one. Then we would both laugh. Neither Jeanne nor I were ever going to be among the school's beautiful people. Unlike Dave, for instance, the jock of jocks, who seemed to have a different girl every week. And unlike Jill, who was already reveling in the attention she was attracting from high school guys to the point where she wouldn't even consider dating an eighth-grader, let alone a guy from her own grade.
Jeanne and I were different.
Jeanne would start dating when she found a boy smart enough to look beneath the shy exterior. I stole a quick look at her as we followed Mom out to the car. Maybe when she got a different pair of glasses; it wasn't so much that they were thick as that the frame did nothing to hide that fact. And, in truth, she could use a little bit more developing, just like I could. Just like I got compared to Dave, she got compared to Jill, about an inch and a cup size to Jeanne's detriment. She was constantly getting teased about her "little" sister, and the stuff I heard when she wasn't around was even cattier. But I loved my sister, and I knew that, even if she kept the same glasses and the same bust, someday she'd find a guy who thought as highly of her as I did.
I would start dating when I found a girl like Jeanne.
"So what are you doing tonight?" Jeanne turned around from the front seat of Mom's car to question me.
"Why?" I narrowed my eyes.
"Cammie's coming over," she said with a shrug. "I just thought —"
"I'm busy."
"Oh, stop it. Cammie's nice."
I held up my hands. "I never said she wasn't," I protested. "But I don't know, chubby little metal-mouth Cammie Rowe and me? Can you see that?"
"I think you two would be a very cute couple," Mom piped in from her seat.
"Don't you have driving to do?" I pointed ahead for her. "Stop signs, lights, all that?"
"She's not chubby any more," Jeanne pointed out. "And she gets her braces off next summer."
"Yeah, I know," I said. "But she seems so, I dunno, desperate."
"She likes you," Jeanne objected. "God knows why!"
"So what are you doing tonight?" I asked her after a suitable pause.
Jeanne smiled. I couldn't fool her. "We're gonna listen to some tunes and then walk around the neighborhood and look at the Christmas lights. You wanna join us?"
"Wouldn't that make either you or me the third wheel?" I asked.
"Yeah, one of us," she admitted with a smile. "But you know how much I like helping you out."
"Helping me out?" I raised my eyebrows. "You mean helping Cammie out."
"Next fall, Cammie's gonna have to beat the guys off with a stick. She doesn't need my help."
It was true. I left them alone for the music portion of the evening, but allowed myself to be coaxed outside for the walk. Once there, Cammie's gloved hand shyly made its way into mine. We strolled beside Jeanne and listened to her commentary on which of our neighbors had committed serious Christmas decorating errors and which had gotten it right.
We arrived at the house and Cammie discarded the scarf and wool hat she'd been wearing. I was struck by a suddenly clear vision of how pretty she would be next year. If I waited until next fall, I would never even be able to get close enough to get hit with that proverbial stick.
So later that evening, while Jeanne was making hot chocolate for the three of us in the kitchen, I sat with next to her on the couch and made inane small talk. What was I doing for Christmas? Nothing special. What was she doing for Christmas? She was leaving tomorrow with her family for Rhode Island to visit her grandparents.
I heard Jeanne unplug the electric teapot to pour the water into the mugs and I knew she was going to be coming back shortly. It was now or never. I tentatively leaned in for my first kiss.
"Finally," Cammie agreed in a whisper as she pressed her mouth against mine, her soft lips self-consciously pressing out to make sure that I couldn't feel her braces with my own lips.
"Chocolate's done," Jeanne announced from the kitchen, giving us a full five seconds to disengage before she bustled in with the three mugs.
"So?" she asked. "True love yet?"
I blushed, while Jeanne and Cammie burst into giggles.
Later that evening, while Jeanne made a big production of washing out the mugs in the kitchen and carefully drying them, Cammie and I shared two more kisses. We agreed that it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if we ran into each other when she returned in the New Year.
* * * *
"So, did you and Cammie have a nice time last night?" Mom asked innocently at breakfast.
"Yeah," I grunted. "Sure."
"And did you have a nice time with Cammie after she went home?" Jeanne whispered when Mom was out of earshot.
"What are you talking about?" I could feel myself blushing.
"Squeak, squeak, squeak. You need a quieter bed, older brother.”
I felt my cheeks burning as I tried to find something—anything—in my cereal bowl that was worthy of intensive study.
"Don't worry," Jeanne said, "she did it too."
I looked up in astonishment. "How do you know?"
"She called me last night."
I was finally able to close my mouth. "And, um, she didn't tell you that sort of, um, in confidence?"
"And, um, she asked me, um, to tell you," Jeanne concluded with a big grin.
We spent the rest of the day cleaning the house, one of Mom's bugaboos. Dave helped by staying out of the way, while Jeanne and I, and to a lesser extent Jill, dusted the cabinets, vacuumed the floors, and cleaned the kitchen counters. When Santa Claus came to the Sterling house tonight, he was going to find it spotless.
My day got even a little bit better late in the afternoon when we got our report cards. At dinner that evening, our traditional Christmas Eve roast, Mom made a big deal about my across-the-board A-pluses. My father grunted his approval, but he was far more interested in re-running the film of the state championship football game two weekends ago. Marshall had come within a field goal of winning thanks to my brother's 300 yards passing. They would still be watching the tape while the rest of us were decorating the tree, and then attending the ten o’clock service at the church.
"I don't know," Mom teased me by cupping her hand to her ear after Dad and Dave left the dinner table. "I think I hear UVA calling."
"Mom!"
My Uncle Ted, married to Mom's sister Helen, was a tenured professor of history at the University of Virginia. He always described it in such glowing terms that even though it couldn't possibly all be true, I had never lost my dream of going there one day. And Mom was right, these grades wouldn't hurt. The odd part was that I hadn't given a lot of conscious thought to them last semester. Instead, once my teachers had gotten past the “me-as-Dave's-brother” thing, they had turned out to be a pretty good bunch. My English teacher in particular, Mrs. Palmer, was amazing. She had led these discussions of Charles Dickens that even had some of the druggies participating.
"Calling all geeks, calling all geeks." Jill interrupted my reverie and I stuck my tongue out at her. She was capable of being a good student herself, and she had done well last semester: three B's, an A-minus, and an A. Jeanne had just missed straight A's with a single B-plus. Dave? He had gotten an athletic scholarship. Still, he wasn't in any danger of not being able to play when he got there.
I went to bed that evening just before midnight, with the lights of the tree still illuminating the stairs leading up from the living room. I just lay there for a while, my hands behind my head, thinking that maybe I'd been a little hasty the day before in the men's room at the mall. I mean, if Cammie Rowe was going to be around, if the teachers were actually bringing this kind of work out of me, then high school might not be that bad.
I woke up at three, with a desperate need to visit the bathroom. I had no sooner gotten out of bed when I tripped on something lying on the floor. Swearing quietly, I pulled myself up and quietly walked down the hallway to the bathroom I shared with Dave. I sleepily drained my dick and washed my hands in the bathroom sink. Then, with just the barest of glances at my reflection in the mirror over the sink, I flipped off the light.
I flipped it right back on again and stared at the mirror. I had no idea who I was looking at.
Well, that wasn't exactly true. It was me. Those were my blue eyes; that was my sandy hair. But whose ripped pecs were those? Whose muscled arms? And, just as a matter of general information, whose six-foot-three inch body was that?
I stayed there for another five minutes, raising my arm to make sure that the mirror was reflecting properly, and then touching my face, my arms, and my chest to see if they would disappear. I was fully awake now, and I eventually forced myself back into the hallway, still lit with a faint glow from the tree downstairs. I flipped on the light in my room, hoping that somewhere inside was a clue to my startling transformation.
If there was, it certainly wasn't going to be easy to find it. My room was a pigsty. What I had tripped on when I'd gotten up was a pile of clothes that easily topped the mattress on the bed. Other than that, I appeared to have been fortunate not to have tripped on the baseball between the bed and the door, not to mention the pens that littered the floor, lying among a set of notebooks.
I made my way over to my desk, uncluttered with anything that looked like schoolwork, and pulled out the chair. I sat down and looked around. There were clues everywhere now. It's just that I had no idea what they meant. There were all sorts of newspaper clippings pasted to the mirror that hung above my desk. According to the headlines, the Marshall High School baseball team appeared to have had a phenomenal year.
On the shelf directly below the mirror was a picture of a Marshall High baseball team, with the two guys in front, who looked like Jim Perkins and Carl Wascinsky, holding up a large trophy. They were two sophomore jerks who were also on the football team, and who had been among my tormenters this past week. I was in the picture as well, in my new body. I was standing in the back with an arrogant grin on my face, holding up a much smaller trophy.
That trophy, I suddenly realized, was also sitting on the shelf. A baseball player perched atop it, and according to the inscription on the plaque, it had been awarded to "Patrick Sterling, MVP — State AAA Tournament, 2006."
I stared at it in disbelief. It was 2006? What had happened to 2004 and 2005? Had I been asleep? Well, no, apparently I'd been playing baseball. I fired up the computer sitting on the desk; fortunately it was the one thing in the room, along with the bed and the desk itself, that didn't appear to have changed. I opened the internet browser, and discovered that my home page was now a pornography site. All of my bookmarks, in fact, were porno sites. I finally had to type in the URL for Google to get something that looked familiar.
From there, I found out that it was, in fact, 2006. George Bush was still president, we were still at war in Iraq, Osama bin Laden was still the world's bête noire. Nothing new there. I googled myself, finding all of the articles in the local newspaper about the baseball team, among them articles that discussed the terrific recruiting war between Auburn and Alabama for my services, which appeared to include a ninety-five mile per hour fastball and a devastating changeup. And the Yankees and the Red Sox were interested as well, since baseball prospects could get drafted straight out of high school. Wow. No wonder I looked arrogant.
And then I found the brief article that broke my heart, dated June 26, 2005.
Sarah Anne Sterling, Community Activist
Sarah Anne Sterling died this past Tuesday of cancer at Mercy Hospital. She was 40. Mrs. Sterling was a noted community activist. Among her causes was the successful 1999 fight to establish what is now known as Lemmon's Park, built on a site that the city had been touting for development as a chemical processing plant. She was a member of the Vestry of the St. James Episcopal Church, and had served as the Vestry's Senior Warden in 2002-2003.
Survivors include her husband, Bob Sterling, and her children, David, Patrick, Jeanne, and Jill, all of Parker's Falls.
I shut down the computer and cried myself to sleep. What in God's name was going on?
Chapter 2
I opened my eyes very slowly, thinking—hoping—that perhaps I'd just had a very bad dream last night. Even with them half open, though, I knew that it had all been real. The room was just as messy as it had been when I had stumbled over the pile of dirty clothing. The newspaper articles about my baseball prowess were still attached to the mirror above my desk. And, I knew deep inside, my mother was still dead.
I sat on the edge of the bed for a while, telling myself that it's not like I could have done anything to help her. And I'm sure I said goodbye to her; somebody must have been operating this body for the last three years. He couldn't possibly have been that big a jerk not to have said goodbye to Mom before she died. It just wasn't me. I had apparently gone through all of the stages of grieving already, and now I was going to have to do it again.
I looked over at the clock: 9:24. It was, I suddenly remembered, Christmas morning. I needed to at least show up. I found a relatively clean pair of jeans on the floor, and a nice-looking flannel shirt hanging in my closet that appeared to have never been worn. I pocketed the pile of stuff on my bedside table—a wallet, a pocketknife, a couple of quarters, and a set of keys—and with a last look in the mirror (so far, this body was the only good thing about this whole nightmare) I headed downstairs.
I paused at the doorway to the living room, comparing the scene to the one I had left the night before. The furniture was completely unchanged. Same couch, same chairs, same lamps, same rug. The only thing that had changed was one of the pictures on the far wall. Mom had hung a painting of the church we attended, a one hundred and fifty year old building nestled among the oaks and maples that deserved the description it was always given: quaint. The new picture was a photograph; from my vantage in the doorway it appeared to be two people on a beach.
The Christmas tree was in the same place as always, although it didn't seem as "happy" as it usually did. It took me a minute to figure out why. No tinsel. Mom was always a big tinsel person, and I had spent last night gleefully, but tastefully, helping her put it on the tree.
The three—three?—girls sitting around the living room didn't look all that happy either. The closest to me was Jeanne. She was sitting on the couch in a pair of jeans and a sweater as she neatly sliced the tape on the back of a wrapped present with a thumbnail. I smiled as I realized that she was wearing the sweater I had bought for her, the one I had intended to give her this morning. Back when this morning was still in 2003. I choked up a little, thinking that I would never now know whether I had told her how well I thought it was going to go with her eyes.
It was a little tighter than I thought it would be. That meant that I had screwed up the size, or, more likely, that she'd finally undergone that growth spurt she had been wishing for. Well, good for her. She was cutting her hair a little shorter, too, in a way that framed her face much better, and adding a few highlights to her brown hair. She was actually a very attractive young woman now, even if she did still have the same thick lenses in the same unattractive glasses.
Sitting at the other end of the couch was Jill, and my God, what a fox she'd become. If this was 2006, she would still only be fifteen years old. Fifteen going on twenty-five, it looked like. Her lustrous blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail, emphasizing her perfect cheekbones and her lively blue eyes. Those lively blue eyes appeared to be surrounded by way too much mascara to my way of thinking. She was dressed in a bathrobe that had fallen open as she propped her long, tanned legs on the coffee table to paint her toenails with a bottle of polish the color of blood.
I had no idea who the third girl was. She was sitting in one of the wing chairs, her legs stretched open in front of her on an ottoman. She looked to be about twenty-four or twenty-five. I always had a hard time guessing women's ages, though, so she could be anywhere from twenty to thirty. She also looked to be about five months pregnant. Although again, she could be anywhere from four to six months as far as I knew. She wasn't an unattractive woman, with dirty blonde hair that hung down to her almost exposed breasts. She was wearing a short, nearly nonexistent nightie that did little to hide much of anything, particularly with her legs splayed out like that. Dave's wife, maybe? He had never been the smartest guy when it came to protection, but this girl looked a little older than the standard-issue co-ed he would have run into at Auburn.
Jill suddenly realized I was standing there and broke into a grin.
"Hey, bro," she said, "thanks for the gift card. Victoria's Secret. Be nice to buy something there myself."
"For a change," Jeanne muttered as she looked up, too. "Yeah, thanks."
Evidently, I'd bought her the same thing, although with somewhat less success. She picked it up off the coffee table along with a small pile of other gifts that she had finished unwrapping.
"How come I didn't get one?" the pregnant blonde asked with a pout.
"Maybe because you don't have any secrets," Jill sniped at her, casting a disdainful look at her exposed panties.
"Jill," the blonde warned her, "do you want me to tell your father we're not getting along again?"
"No, stepmother dear." Jill's voice dripped with sarcasm. "I'm so sorry."
Stepmother? Whoa. This was my stepmother? I leaned back against the door jamb as I processed this information. Dad had remarried? And since this woman was five months pregnant, and Mom had died 18 months ago, he sure hadn't waited very long, the son of a bitch.
Jeanne had finished gathering her stuff, and moved toward the doorway I was standing in. She stopped suddenly, and eyed me with suspicion.
"I thought you hated that shirt," she said.
"Why would you think that?"
"'Cause I've never seen you wear it before," she answered me. She managed to make me feel as if I had done something wrong by not wearing it before, and was doing something equally wrong now by having put it on now.
"No, it's great," I assured her. "Matches my eyes, don't you think?"
"Of course I think it matches your eyes." Her voice was brittle. "That's why I bought it for you last year."
Without even the hint of a smile, she pushed past me and stomped up the stairs to her room.
"We saved your presents," Jill said, pointing to a pile of gifts sitting on the couch between her and the seat Jeanne had occupied. I sat down in the space Jeanne had vacated.
"Where are Dave and Dad?" I asked as I glanced at the card on the first gift, from Jill.
"Your father, uh, didn't get enough sleep last night," my stepmother giggled as Jill rolled her eyebrows. "He'll be down soon. Dave had to go in to open up the 7-Eleven because his manager called in sick."
Jill's gift proved to be a very nice-looking cellular phone.
"This is awfully expensive, Jill," I said, "but thank you."
"You're welcome." She favored me with a well-practiced, but nonetheless glowing, smile. "And I actually got it free, sort of. It comes with instructions for transferring all your numbers from your old phone on it."
"Sort of free?" I asked.
"Well," she said with a giggle, "he did get to take me to dinner."
I narrowed my eyes.
"Oh, fuck you," she grinned and threw a pillow at me. "Who are you to talk?"
Who was I? That was turning out to be a very good question.
"Anyway, thank you," I said, leaning across the couch to kiss her on the cheek. I sat back with another gift in my hands, this one from "Dad and Mom (Tiffany)." Tiffany. That figured.
It was an empty picture frame, with a gold inset inscribed "Marshall High School — 2006 State Champions."
"It's for that picture you have in your room," Tiffany bubbled. "We can hang it on the wall now. Your father picked it out."
I couldn’t help but wonder whether it was really a present for me or for him.
“Thank you."
"Where's my kiss?" she said with a pout.
I stood up and walked over to her chair. She planted her feet on the ground and pushed herself up a little, and I leaned down to kiss her on the cheek. She threw her arms around my neck, and I was only barely able to brace my arms against the arms of the chair to keep her from dragging me down on top of her.
"Thank you," I murmured.
"I wish this was our baby," she whispered into my ear.
She let go, and I turned and tripped over the ottoman, somersaulting onto the rug. Our baby? How could we have a baby? Oh my God, I was doing my stepmother. Not only had I managed to misplace my virginity in the last three years, but I'd apparently buried my self-respect along with it. Oh my fucking God.
"Are you okay?" Jill asked when I hadn't gotten up after a minute or two on the ground.
"Yeah, sorry," I said, pushing myself onto my elbows. "I just hit my head."
"Didn't hurt the golden arm, did we?" she asked with arched eyebrows, her voice taking on the slightest mocking quality.
"Which one is that?" I asked in all innocence.
She just clucked her tongue in disgust and returned to her nails. I returned to the couch, and opened a hastily-wrapped magazine from Dave, with a card telling me I'd be receiving Sports Illustrated for the next year.
"That's very nice," I said absently as I replaced it on the coffee table.
"It's a big sacrifice for Dave," Tiffany assured me.
I looked over at her. A subscription?
"He doesn't make that much at the 7-Eleven." She seemed eager to press his case. "And it's hard for him to even think about sports after his injury."
"Oh, yeah," I agreed. "I hadn't thought about it that way, uh, Tiffany. Thanks for reminding me."
"Tiff," she said quietly.
Jill was rolling her eyes again.
"Tiff," I acknowledged.
The final gift I unwrapped was from Jeanne, a wool winter hat, mostly blue, with little white baseballs woven into the pattern. It was just so Jeanne. I imagine I was grinning stupidly as I put it on.
"What do you think?" I asked Jill and Tiffany.
"Yeah, the girls are gonna flock to that," Jill said.
"You know, I just can't understand knitting." Tiffany was shaking her head.
"Jeanne knitted this?" I asked. "Herself?"
"You don't think anybody would sell those, do you?" Jill apparently found it hard to make comments that didn't include sarcasm.
"Jill," Tiffany used her stepmother warning voice again before turning back to me. "She did work on it for most of the last two months."
"Well, I like it," I said. "Hey, it comes with a matching scarf."
I put that on, too.
Dad wandered in just then, dressed in a bathrobe and a pair of fuzzy slippers that had obviously been a gift from Tiffany at some point. My father was forty-five years old now, and he wasn't a fuzzy slipper kind of guy.
"You look like a dork," he muttered on his way past me as he leaned over to give Tiffany, the son of a bitch's pregnant wife, a long kiss on the lips.
"I need some coffee," Dad grunted as pushed himself off the chair. "Where's Dave?"
"7-Eleven," Tiffany said. "Manager's sick."
"Assistant manager at a fuckin' 7-Eleven." Dad shook his head as he made his way into the kitchen. "You want some coffee, Trick?"
Jill and Tiffany both looked over at me. I was Trick?
"Uh, yeah, sure Dad, thanks," I yelled back.
He came back with the coffee, and Jill and I watched as he and Tiffany opened their gifts. Mine was apparently a gift card to a steakhouse. Had I gotten everybody a gift card? I must have shopped for a whole fifteen minutes one day. Dad grunted his thanks while Tiffany called me over for another kiss, this one blessedly uneventful.
My mother had loved Christmas, and I found myself unwilling to let go of what little holiday spirit we had going by heading back to my room. So I grabbed the copy of Sports Illustrated that came with the subscription acknowledgement and started to flip through it. Jill had finished painting and was now in the drying stage. Dad and Tiffany were sitting on the floor, murmuring to each other. Dad put his hand and then his ear on Tiffany's stomach while she cooed about feeling the baby kicking.
"So can you take me to Uncle Bill and Aunt Ruth's now?" The voice came from my left. We all looked up to see Jeanne in the doorway, looking eagerly at Dad for an answer to her question.
"Sorry, doll," Dad said with a shake his head. "I gotta spend the afternoon changing the timing belt in my car, and Tiffy's car is still in the shop from hittin' the deer."
"The deer hit me," Tiffany protested with a sulk.
"Yeah," Dad said, "but he hit you smack dab in the middle of the hood, and it's gonna be another week 'til they get in all the parts. Christmas, you know."
"But you said you'd take me," Jeanne protested, clearly struggling to keep a stiff lip.
"Nothin' I can do about the timing belt that quickly," Dad told her, still sitting on his butt on the floor. "You know, if you hadn't failed the driver's test twice, I'd have bought you your own car by now."
He returned his focus to his wife, Jill returned hers to her toes, and I watched Jeanne as her face fell and her shoulders slumped. She turned and started to walk slowly back upstairs. I suddenly remembered the keys in my pocket and pulled them out. One was labeled as a Subaru key, so it might very well be that I owned a car.
"Hey, J," I shouted after her, "I can give you a ride."
I looked up the stairs, to where Jeanne's butt was about to vanish into the ceiling. The butt slowly turned in place, and the girl ascending turned into a girl descending. Still not a happy girl, though.
"Why?" she asked when she reached the third step, the first step at which she was able to finally look at me.
"I dunno." I shrugged my shoulders. "To say thanks for the hat and scarf?"
She blinked at me a few times. Apparently, she hadn't noticed I was wearing them before now. That was probably because she hadn't even given me so much as a glance when she came back downstairs to ask Dad about the ride.
"Um, okay," she agreed. "When can we leave?"
"Whenever. My plans for the day were kind of gonna start and stop with laundry."
"Yeah, I could use some laundry, too," Dad chimed in. "What about it, Tiffy?"
"I still got a couple of clean pairs of panties." Tiffy had adopted a sullen expression. "And it's Christmas. I'll do it tomorrow."
Dad grunted his assent.
"Let's go now," I said, suddenly wanting nothing more than to get out of this house. "Grab my coat, wouldja?"
That last line was a sudden inspiration, and it would solve one of the three immediate problems I had, namely, which coat was mine? Unfortunately, that was the most minor of the three. The other two—how to get to Uncle Bill and Aunt Ruth's, and how to drive a car—were going to be a little more problematic.
As it turned out, though, they were easily solved in much the same way. As we walked out of the house—me wearing a very nice leather bomber jacket, along with the scarf and hat—I followed Jeanne toward a fancy silver Impresza. She began to walk toward the passenger side when I was re-inspired.
"Hey," I said, tossing her the keys. "You drive."
"Me?" Her eyes widened as she caught them. "Drive your car?"
"Can't pass the test if you don't practice. You got a permit, right?
She crossed over to the driver's side and adjusted the seat while I took the other seat.
"I'm nervous," she said. "I hate sticks. That's why I failed the second test. I got so nervous driving Tiffany's car."
Shit! A manual transmission. Another good reason for me not to be driving.
"Well, just talk yourself through it," I suggested. Talk us both through it, in fact.
"All right," she started reciting a litany. "I put in the clutch, I start the car. I let the parking brake off, I put in reverse. Now I slowly let my foot off the clutch, and when I feel it reach the stall point, I put on the gas, and shit!"
We jerked back about a foot and a half and stalled.
I looked over and she was literally shaking.
"Can you please drive?" Her voice quavered as she stared down at her lap.
"No," I said, touching her on the arm. She looked at me with a mixture of embarrassment and anger and suspicion playing across her face.
"You remember when we were at Grandpa and Grandma's that one time?" I asked her. "When I was, like twelve, and you were eleven and we were learning how to fish?"
She blushed and looked back at her lap.
"Do you remember when you got that worm hooked to your finger?" I continued.
"Yes," she said softly.
"Me, too," I chuckled. "And after I got you two lovers apart"—that merited a small giggle from the driver's seat—"I gave it back to you, told you how to do it one more time, and then stepped away. Remember that?"
"Uh-huh," she said, looking forward now instead of down.
"And when I came back, you'd baited that little sucker all by yourself and you ended up catching a big one, too, I think."
"He wasn't that big," she demurred.
"I think you're missing the point First of all, I want to say 'thank you’."
I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. "I love this hat and this scarf and I can't believe you made them for me."
"You do?" she asked, finally looking at me again.
"I do. Second of all, I bet Dad watches you like a hawk when you're driving his car, and Tiffany probably gets worried about you scratching up her paint or burning up her clutch."
She nodded.
"Or being attacked by a deer," I added as an afterthought, producing the first genuine laughter I had heard in the Sterling household all day.
"So I'm just gonna sleep here." I put the seat back, slouched down, and closed my eyes. "Take me for a ride, Jeeves."
We stalled again backing out, and once getting into first gear at the end of the driveway. After that, though, it was a piece of cake. I kept my left eye closed the whole way in case she looked over. The right was open, scanning the scenery. At a minimum, I was going to learn how to get to Uncle Bill and Aunt Ruth's.
As Jeanne smoothly pulled into the driveway, I discovered that they hadn't moved. Whether I could find my way there again, or home for that matter, was another question.
"You should come in." Jeanne turned to me with a look of delighted triumph when she set the brake and turned the car off.
"Why wouldn't I come in?"
"When was the last time you were here?" she countered.
"I honestly can't remember," I replied truthfully.
"Well, you certainly didn't come last Christmas. I was the only one who bothered. I don't think you've been here at all, in fact, since Mom died.”
"Really?" That seemed unlikely. I had always loved visiting Mom's family; they were so, I don't know, exuberant about life.
"Hell, you practically spent all day last Christmas over at Sheila's," she sneered, drawing out the name so that it sounded like I'd spent the day with a slug. "Where was her husband, anyway? I mean, it was Christmas."
"I dunno." I'd also been doing it with a married woman named Sheila? Who the hell am I? "So, inside?"
We walked up to the door, Jeanne growing more and more excited with each step she took. Finally, bouncing up and down, she rang the doorbell.
"Aunt Ruth!" she screamed as the door opened.
"Jeanne!" Aunt Ruth, Mom's older sister, was just as enthusiastic as her niece. She stepped forward and the two embraced. Finally, Jeanne let go and turned to me.
"And is this your boyfriend, dear?" Aunt Ruth asked before Jeanne could speak. "I'm Ruth Parkinson."
She held out her hand. My Aunt Ruth, who had nursed me through mononucleosis in the eighth grade, was offering me a handshake. God, what a pitiful asshole I've become.
Chapter 3
Jeanne was at least as mortified as I was that my aunt apparently had no idea who I was. "Aunt Ruth," she murmured, "it's Trick."
"Trick?"
"Patrick?" Jeanne tried again. "My, uh, brother?"
"Oh my gosh." Aunt Ruth snatched back her hand like she might not even be sure whether I deserved a handshake. "Oh, Patrick, I'm so sorry."
She put her hands on my cheeks and looked into my face. "I'm so embarrassed. Of course it's Patrick. And I saw you just last year. I just didn't realize how much you'd grown."
"I'm sorry I haven't come over more," I mumbled.
"Well, I certainly hope we see you more now," she said. "Now give me a big hug."
I leaned down—Aunt Ruth was only about five-foot-five—and got almost as enthusiastic a hug as my sister had received.
"Well, come on." She released me and turned around, linking one arm in mine and one in Jeanne's. "Everyone's going to be so excited to see you both."
We stepped into a simple foyer, made fancy by the evergreen garlands that hung on the staircase, decorated here and there with elegant red globes. There were voices coming from the right.
"Eeeehhhh!" I recognized the voice of my Uncle Bill imitating a buzzer. "Next, please."
"I thought it was perfect," Aunt Helen protested.
"Perfectly flat," her husband, Uncle Ted, chimed in.
"It's not too late to ruin the gravy," Aunt Helen warned him.
"Perfectly wonderful," Uncle Ted corrected himself. "But now it's my turn. Maestro? Excuse me, maestress? Maestrix?"
The tinkle of Aunt Ruth's piano drowned him out and filled the house, and Uncle Ted's baritone followed close behind.
"O ni-ight dee-viiiiiine. O-o niiiiiight, when Christ was booooorn. O niiiiight, dee-VIIIIINE — "
"No, it's hideous," another woman protested as the piano went silent. "Make it stop! Make it stop!"
"Philistines!" Uncle Ted roared through the laughter.
Aunt Ruth put our coats in the hall closet and escorted us into the living room. Five adults were gathered around the piano, all of them laughing helplessly. The living room was even more splendidly festive than the hallway. There were candles in all the windows, and a block-shaped pine-scented candle burning inside a wreath on the coffee table. The angel atop the Christmas tree was almost touching the nine-foot ceiling, while the tree itself held globes of silver, red, and gold; and ornaments of every shape and description, ranging from an elegant glass crèche to a homemade lime-colored clay wreath inscribed "Love, Jeanne" that had been given a place of prominence right in the middle. And tinsel. This was my mother's family. Strands of tinsel were draped on all the branches, making the whole tree shimmer in the reflected light of hundreds of tiny white bulbs.
I looked over to see a tear running down Jeanne's cheek, which she quickly brushed away before the singers realized we were among them.
"Uh-oh, cops." Uncle Ted grinned as he finally caught sight of us. "Cool it everyone."
"Jeanne!" Aunt Helen raised a glass of punch from the piano in a toast to my sister.
"And Patrick," Aunt Ruth added quickly, eager to save everyone else from making the faux pas of not recognizing their nephew.
"Patrick!" Aunt Helen's eyes twinkled. She pushed herself off the piano—she'd probably consumed a little more than a moderate amount of the punch, her own special Christmas recipe that I'd never been allowed to try—and walked over to me with conscious slowness. "Give us a kiss."
She winked at Jeanne and stuck her cheek out at me. Helen was Mom's younger sister, probably still a year or two shy of forty, and she'd always been the adventurous one. And the flirtatious one. It was usually Ruth who got the cheek kisses; Helen always liked a nice firm smack on the lips, a source of unending embarrassment to the fifteen-year-old me whom she constantly tricked into giving her one.
Like the others, she was dressed in what I thought of as church clothes—skirts and sweaters for the women; pressed slacks, button-down shirts for the men. I felt very out of place in my jeans and flannel shirt. Jeanne, I was only noticing now, had changed out of her jeans into a pair of black slacks and a very pretty plum-colored blouse.
I delivered the commanded kiss at the same instant that she turned her head. Our lips met briefly, and I hastily pulled back.
"He's gotten taller, hasn't he?" Aunt Helen asked Jeanne with a merry giggle.
"A little." Jeanne smiled back at her. "More support for his swelled head."
Everybody had a good laugh at my expense, and Jeanne collected a hug and a kiss from her other aunt as well. Uncles Ted and Bill came over with handshakes for me and kisses for Jeanne, and then Aunt Ruth turned to her other guests, a handsome couple in their late twenties or early thirties.
"Jeff and Sheila Jenkins," she said, "I'd like you to meet my niece and nephew, Jeanne and Patrick Sterling."
Jeff rose to offer his hand, while Sheila stayed seated at the piano bench, from which she offered us a half-hearted wave. She looked a little nauseous, to tell the truth, and Uncle Ted hustled back to her side to ask if she was all right.
"A little too much punch, maybe," she said weakly. "Could I just have a glass of water?"
My aunts raced toward the kitchen for some water as the men gathered solicitously around the stricken woman. She was incredibly attractive; her church clothes included a sweater that seemed to have expelled all of the air that might have fit between it and her skin.
"I thought you said she moved," Jeanne stepped toward me and hissed into my ear.
I suddenly wasn't feeling that good myself, and the next glass of water was for me. After a time, though, both Sheila and I recovered. She seemed intent on ignoring me for the rest of the afternoon, or at least ignoring whatever relationship we had had. For my part, I was as blissfully ignorant as everyone else in the room of the details of that relationship. Only Jeanne apparently knew that there had been one, and she treated Shelia with an initial coolness that I'd never seen in her before.
It didn’t last long. Jeanne could no more ignore the spirit of Christmas than she could stop breathing, and soon she was standing behind Sheila, her hand on Sheila's shoulder, taking her own turn at the show-stopping chorus of "O Holy Night." After I had a turn, standing well in back of Sheila, Jeanne was awarded first prize, and allowed to select any ornament she wanted from the tree.
"How 'bout that wreath?" Uncle Bill joked, pointing at Jeanne's youthful gift.
"You touch that wreath, Bill Parkinson," Aunt Ruth said, her eyes flashing, "and you'll lose something very dear to you."
"Very dear to you," he suggested with a flick of his eyebrows.
"I can get another one," Aunt Ruth quickly retorted.
"I could make a better one," Jeanne said.
The room exploded into laughter.
"A better wreath, I meant." Jeanne turned a brilliant crimson. "It's a little, uh, lumpy."
"You touch that wreath, Jeanne Sterling," Aunt Ruth turned on her, "and you'll get no pie for dessert."
"She gets no pie and I get disfigured?" Bill asked.
"I know which punishments work on which offenders," Aunt Ruth replied with a smirk. "Now which one would you like, dear?"
Jeanne had to examine each and every ornament on the tree, and finally plucked a hand-painted wooden Santa Claus off a branch in the back.
She held it out to Aunt Ruth, her joy evident in her eyes. Aunt Ruth, equally delighted, pulled open a drawer in one of her tables and extracted a box in which the ornament fit perfectly.
"You knew!" Jeanne seemed awed.
"I bought it for you." Aunt Ruth smiled at her. "Still, I'm surprised you won it this early. I was figuring you'd win charades once everybody else got a little tipsy."
As it turned out, I won the charades, even though I had earlier been pronounced old enough to finally sample the punch and was probably a little tipsy myself. In a similar vein, both Jeanne and I were pronounced old enough to be able to dispense with "Aunt" and "Uncle," which Helen argued made her feel old.
Dinner, a turkey that had been butchered at a local farm only two days earlier, and that Bill butchered again with his electric carving knife, was served just after three. I gratefully accepted my portion of turkey shreds, accompanied by stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, green beans and Ruth's exquisite gravy. I allowed myself to be persuaded to have seconds of everything except the vegetables on the grounds that I was a “growing boy.” I had pieces of lemon meringue and blueberry pie for dessert.
Later, when Jeanne was busy washing dishes in the kitchen and Bill had dragged Ted and Jeff out to the garage to see his new toy, I found myself sitting at the table with Sheila.
"So how have you been?" she asked quietly.
"A little sick," I admitted. "Not quite myself lately."
"I've been thinking of you."
While she was thinking, she had apparently kicked off one of her heels. I could feel a stocking-clad foot begin to trace a course up my leg.
"My husband never found out who it was, you know. Only that I was cheating on him."
"Uh-huh," I agreed. Her foot had reached my crotch, and I couldn't believe that I wasn't exploding into my pants.
"Therapy was so boring." She took another sip of the wine we had shared during dinner. She began rubbing the ball of her foot up and down the ridge in my jeans created by my swollen dick. "And I guess I sort of promised not to do it again. But still..." She gave me a look that could almost be described as predatory.
Just then, Helen popped back in from the kitchen, gaily humming "Deck the Halls."
"You drove out the men?" she asked us.
Sheila had yanked her foot out of my lap as if it were on fire, and she lifted her glass for another drink.
"They went to check out Bill's car," I answered, happy for a change of subject.
"His car," Helen said with a knowing nod. "So that's where he keeps the annual Playboy magazine that Ruth gives him each Christmas."
Helen sat back down at the table and picked up her own half-full wine glass. "So," she said with a look toward me, "tell us what's new."
"New?" I asked. As far as I was concerned, everything was new.
"New girlfriend?" Helen teased me with a guileless wink at Sheila. "Any new scholarship offers?"
"No," I shook my head. "Not that I know of. I'd still like to go to UVA," I added. I wondered if I had even submitted an application. Or whether, as an in-demand jock, I simply considered myself above applications.
Now it was Helen shaking her head.
"Well, you can ask Ted," she said, "but apparently they've decided to toughen up academic standards for athletic scholarships, and I think they're starting with the baseball recruits. Here he is. Honey, what was it you told me about baseball scholarships?"
"Pretty ruthless," Ted said. "A two point seven five average and somewhere around a 1400 on the SAT combination."
I nodded to myself. That didn't sound that hard. The last report card I remembered, after the first semester of ninth grade, had straight A-pluses, which was like, what, a four-five? I had no idea what my average was at this point, of course, and no idea whether I'd even taken the SAT.
By now, though, everyone else had gathered around the table again, and judging by the look on Jeanne's face, I wasn't going to be attending UVA any time soon. I felt tears coming to my eyes, and I tried to cover them up by knocking over my water glass.
"I'm sorry," Jeanne said gently as we got settled into the car for the ride home. "You never mentioned UVA anymore, so I thought you'd given up on it."
"It doesn't matter," I said. "That was fun, huh?"
"That was Christmas," Jeanne said with a sigh, nestling herself into the passenger seat like she was ready for a nap.
Oh shit. She was in the passenger seat. I was in the driver's seat.
"So you wanna drive back?" I asked her as casually as I could.
"No," she said sleepily. "I just wanna sit here and remember that feeling."
She stretched like a cat, and I returned my attention to the car.
All right, I thought to myself, trying to replay the instructions Jeanne had recited, I put in the clutch, I start the car. I let the parking brake off, I put it in reverse. Now I slowly let my foot off the clutch, and when I feel it reach the stall point, I put on the gas, and—YES!
I pumped my fist as the car began backing down the driveway. Thank God for muscle memory; apparently I had done this enough that my feet and hands could feel when it was time to shift and when it was time to let the clutch out. I'd done a good job memorizing the directions, too, and had no trouble navigating my way home.
Driving? That was another story altogether. Tryptophan, or whatever it is in turkey that puts you to sleep had a fortunate effect on Jeanne. She would have been terrified of ever getting in any car again, let alone mine, if she had seen the two dogs we almost hit, the stop sign we ran through, the cute little family that had to jump back to the curb with expressions of horror on their cute little faces—yeah, like I'd really been that close to the stroller—and the general disregard I showed for the dotted and solid lines that had been painted down the middle of the road. Muscle memory is apparently of absolutely no use outside of that shifting thing. Once you've got the car going, that whole driving business apparently requires input from the brain. Mine was still fifteen years old, the same age it had been yesterday when I went to sleep.
Finally, thank God for Christmas; on any other day of the year, the roads between our house and Aunt Ruth's would have been filled with traffic, and even more pedestrians than the ones whose lives I had nearly ended. With sweat dripping from my chin, I pulled into our driveway and jerked the car to a halt.
"Are we here already?" Jeanne asked, once again doing the cat stretch. "Thanks, Trick. Thanks for bringing me. You did have fun, didn't you?"
"I did." I nodded, a little taken aback at the surprise with which she'd laced that question. "After a while, I even forgot what a schlub I looked like."
"Nobody noticed," she said with a smile, still lost in nostalgic reverie. "Nobody ever notices anything like that over there. Speaking of which, that was Sheila, wasn't it?"
Reverie over.
"Um," I said, "I really thought she'd moved. I haven't seen her in, like, forever. She seems to be happy with her husband, though."
"Bullshit," Jeanne said. "I saw the way she looked at you when she thought nobody else was looking. You be careful, Trick. The last thing you need is another paternity test."
She looked at our house, the lights of the tree in the living room the only visible sign that we celebrated Christmas.
"Whaddya bet they're in there having meatloaf for Christmas dinner?" she sighed.
She slammed the door and left me in the car to ponder my life. Another paternity test? I hoped to God I had passed the first one. Or failed it. Whichever one ended without a kid.
Chapter 4
In one sense, every day is the first day of the rest of your life. December 26, 2006, though, was a little bit more for me. Christmas was over, and I woke up to find myself in the same room, in the same body, and in the same life in which I'd found myself the day before. All of which were three years older than they were when I'd gone to bed on December 24.
My first thought as I woke up, stretched, and sat up in bed, was that if Mom were still alive, she'd reinstate spanking just to make sure my room never looked like this again. And I would have agreed with her; it was disgusting. So laundry was still high on my list of priorities. Since it was only seven o'clock, however, I figured I'd better wait a bit to start that project. Instead, I tiptoed down to the kitchen, where Dad and my older brother Dave were drinking coffee and reading the paper, Dad the sports section and Dave the business news.
"Morning," I said cheerfully.