“The Statement of X--- Y--- Z---" Part 4

by Seuzz

I wish you'd stop trying to discover "deep" reasons for why I was doing what I was doing. If you've got a theory--

Okay, that's an interesting idea. But you can make up any reason, if you've a mind to. Look, the fact is that I was twelve, thirteen years old when I got tangled up with Tommy DiMarco. I didn't have any "plans" or ideas, not at that age. When you're twelve you're starting to figure out who you are. In my case, maybe you can say "figuring out who I was" had a double meaning. Was I going to be myself or was I going to be Tommy DiMarco?

Yeah, I thought about staying in Tommy permanently, and there was a moment when I put the question to myself. And maybe if I had decided to stay as Tommy, everything would have turned out differently for me. Maybe we wouldn't be having this conversation. But I didn't, and that was my decision.

Well, to explain that, I have to explain everything that led up to it.

I told you last time that I had used him to get close to two girls, one I was interested in and one he was interested in. I don't know how long I waited before I returned to him, but I know I got impatient. We only had a few classes together, and I couldn't really watch him from outside. I had to get back inside him to get any news. My chance, when it came, happened the same way as the other times. He was late for gym, and I caught him at his locker. I think I remember wondering about that, but maybe I'm coloring my recollections. Anyway, there he was, half dressed, standing patiently at his locker with his back to me. And so I crawled him again.

I found out that he'd stayed close to Kathy Eason, that he was riding his bike home with her most days. But he hadn't given any more indications that he was interested in her. Once I was in him, I kept it up, of course, but kept playing things cool. Sara Durbin was another matter. Tommy had dropped her, because he was still scared of her. He'd tried a couple of times to continue that bickering I'd started between them, but he'd run off almost as soon as she returned fire. So I threw myself into with a vengeance. This time I was inside him for a few days, and had lots of time to chase her down and tease her. I pushed him hard at her, and at Kathy, and then I exited him, again at the gas station. Partly this was to see what he'd do, and also because I needed to get back home again.

To deal with my mom, I just told her that I had friends I was hanging out with and sometimes spending the night. I promised I would call her if it happened again, but she didn't seem to much care. For the school I forged a letter as insurance. It was a note saying I had chicken pox and that Tommy would be collecting my homework assignments for me. I was already planning on making an extended stay inside him.

But I was still nervous enough about taking such a step that I stayed away from him for days at a time, and when I did crawl him I'd stay inside him for only a day and a night. We fell into a pattern. I noticed that his tardiness to gym was becoming a regular thing, and that he'd be very slow about leaving the changing room. When I found him, he'd be standing at his locker with his back turned, looking for all the world like he was waiting for me.

I found out he wasn't doing much of anything when I wasn't inside him. He'd go into a holding pattern around Kathy and Sara. I had to push him. I was happy to. He wouldn't do anything without me, and the two girls, like the others, ignored me when I was being myself. But together, Tommy and I had a lot of fun with them.

And Tommy, I finally realized, felt the same way. A month or two after I'd started crawling him, I hurried into the locker room after him, and tripped. Made a big racket as I went down. I looked up in a panic. But he didn't turn around, except that his head jerked a little. Of course he'd heard me, and he's started to turn, but he'd caught himself. He just stood there, looking very tense, with his head slightly cocked. I looked up at him from the floor, breathing heavily. And then he turned back and bent his head to peer inside his locker, and didn't move. My heart was hammering, and I swallowed, and I crept up to him. I hesitated as I reached around him. I put one hand over his mouth without touching it, and the other around his torso. I paused, half expecting him to yell or turn around and punch me, but he didn't. And when I closed my arms around him, I felt him trembling. Then I was back inside him.

You'd think I could tell exactly what he knew and exactly what he was thinking, wouldn't you? But it doesn't work that way. If I'm inside you, thinking with your brain, am I thinking my thoughts or yours? And how would I tell the difference?

But it's the same with memory. As soon as I'm inside someone, their memories become mine. They feel just like mine. It's very hard for me to tell the difference between my memories and theirs. Oh, there are some ways of telling. If Tommy and I saw the same thing while I was outside him, I'll remember both perspectives, and know which one was which. If it's a memory of something I know I didn't experience, I'll know it's my memory and not his. But when you try to remember what you're thinking-- That's not something that connects to something external, so it's very hard to be sure if it's a memory of something he was thinking or a memory of something I was thinking. It's like with intentions. If I'm inside you and I decide to go to the movies, whose decision is it: yours or mine? Well, it's mine, because I'm in control, but is it a decision that comes from inside me, or is it just me acting like you would act? Memories and intentions, from the inside, are like mirror images of each other. An intention is an anticipatory memory of what you want to happen; a memory is the pretence that what happened is what you wanted to happen. So a lot of times I can't tell which thoughts genuinely belong to the person I'm crawling, and which ones are just the ones I need or want to maintain the pretence.

Anyhow, to answer your question: I knew what was happening to him, and so he knew in a general sense what was happening to him. As for how he felt about it-- Was he pleased? He felt happy when I was inside him, but that could just have been me being happy to be inside him. I only had the evidence of his behavior--the way he waited for me--to tell me that he was ... not unhappy.

Okay, to return to the story. That afternoon was the start of my longest sojourn inside him. The next morning I dropped that letter off at the front office, and then I spent three weeks inside him. And there was drama.

The first thing was that his friends had started noticing the way he acted around Kathy, and they started teasing him. I shrugged it off, got in sham fights, bragged that the girls liked me more than they liked them. I bullied a friend who claimed to have some porn into sharing it. It wasn't even real porn. We all started in earnest to swap theories about sex and the proper way to go about getting it. I was shameless and could afford to be brave, and quickly figured out I was getting a reputation as a guy who knew what was what.

I also improved my standing--our standing--by getting mixed up with Kim-- Oh, what was her name? Kim Thompson. She was one of Kathy's friends. I was over at Kathy's house and Kim was there. Kathy left to get something, and Kim started goading me, asking if I was serious about her friend. I shrugged. She asked if I had kissed Kathy. I said I hadn't. She asked if I was scared to. So I kissed Kim. She got very smug with Kathy after that, and I found out the next day that she'd told Kathy what I'd done. Kathy got upset with me and was cold for a few days. Kim tried getting between us. I went off with her alone and got her to show me her breasts. I touched them, played with them. I bragged about it afterward with the guys, and then it was Kim's turn to be upset with me. Sara even got dragged in. She seemed in a bad mood while I was joshing with her, and she called me a creep, said she'd heard what I'd done with Kim. I said I liked her because she was too smart to act like Kim. She got pissed, but I could tell I'd impressed her with that reply. She started looking at me differently after that. And Kim and Kathy stopped being friends.

Like I said, drama. I had a grand time, pushing, teasing, hinting, coaxing, leading them on and dropping them, picking them up again, keeping them off balance. It was a high wire act, but I didn't care if I fell because, after all, it wasn't me who'd hit the pavement.

That happened over the course of three weeks, and then I went home when I couldn't drag it out any longer. I expected to catch hell, but things had really gone to shit while I was away. My mom barely acknowledged my return, and if the school had been in contact with her, she didn't say anything about it.

After that, though, I mostly restricted my crawling to weekends. I'd take Tommy on Friday afternoons and relinquish him on Monday mornings. Tommy was getting the hang of things, or he was skating on my successes, because I was picking up more girls to juggle. One Friday I found out I was expected to sneak into a slumber party, which I did. I kept them all off balance by keeping my hands off them. Their hands were all over me, though. They gave me a makeover, put me in makeup and a dress and a nightgown. They pulled me this way and that. They gave me different hair styles. The following Monday most of the girls who'd been there weren't talking to each other. The guys started getting jealous, too. They heard about my little experiment in transvestism, and I got teased mercilessly. I put them in their place by giving lots of details about who was touching me and where that night. I got in a fistfight with one guy, but Tommy was athletic and had started working out, and I won real quick.

So I was having fun, up until two months before the end of the school year. That's when my dad showed up again. Maybe the school had gotten in touch with him, but I came home one Monday to find him waiting for me. My mom wasn't around--probably they'd had a hard fight and he'd driven her off temporarily. Anyway, he yelled at me, demanded to know what I'd been up to on all those weekends when I was away, why I was missing so much school, who I was hanging around with. I had more self-confidence by this point, and just hurled his own absences back at him. He hit me, sent me to my room. I went out the window, went looking for Tommy, but couldn't find him, went back home before I was missed.

The next day my dad said he was pulling me from school, that we were all moving to another town. I'd be out of school until the start of the next year. I took some final exams at the school and did well enough that they gave me whatever credit would let me pick up at the new school, wherever that was going to be.

The last time I saw Tommy, in the gym locker, I came real close to crawling into him and staying there. That was the first time I was waiting for him. He came in, and he stopped cold when he saw me. I couldn't look him in the eye, just glanced over at him, and went back to slowly changing. I think he also flinched, and also crossed slowly to his locker. He got undressed real fast, but then just stood at his locker, as usual. He was waiting for me, I could tell.

And I chickened out. I had a good life when I was inside him. I liked his family. His dad had a temper, but at least he was around. Tommy had good friends, he was popular, and had gotten really popular since we'd started ... hanging out together, so to speak. I tried thinking what the future would be like if I stayed with him. There'd be the rest of the year, after that high school. I didn't know what that would be like. It was just a big blank, stretching in front of me. It seemed very scary.

See, I could deal with the rest of my life being a blank. But to take responsibility for someone else's life, to fill in that canvas for them ... I guess it was probably at that moment that I knew that crawling people would be something I could only do temporarily. I wouldn't have the guts to take over a life permanently.

But I couldn't just leave Tommy hanging. So I went up behind him, like so many times before. I put my arms around him, one hand over his mouth. I let him relax into my arms and started to go into him. But as soon as he was passed out, I let him go. I laid him on the floor, in the same position that I always woke up in when I went inside him. Then I snuck out. I left the school grounds. I never saw him again, and I'm pretty sure he never saw me. I didn't want him to. I wanted him to think I was inside him. I figured that way he might-- Well, he might fool himself into acting the way he wanted to act, that he couldn't really act except when I was inside him.

He'd been good to me, and I like to think I'd been good for him, and that was the only gift I could think to leave him with.

I knew it was going to be hard after I left. But I didn't know how hard it was going to be. Otherwise I'd definitely have stayed inside him.