Exchange
((This story packs a punch you'll never see coming, literally. The big kicker appears near the end of the extra chapter blurb that I never finished. A great story with a surprise that would blow you away...if I ever got around to it, it has been sadly shelved due to my laziness about getting around to the filler as I see it of the first third of the story. While probably important to the story it is not part of my vision and is therefore sadly not important enough to me. Ayden and Lira still gripe at me from time to time to get back to their story and at some point I hope to. Ayden especially needs to share his rather exciting secret with the world (shhh don't tell his family though...oh wait, you can't since you don't know it). Here's hoping.))
To start off, my mother is a fluff brain. I don’t want to be rude to my parent or to make others take offense but the truth is that she really is just one of those people who things come in and they just don’t come back out. She’s like a black hole that eats all the left socks and makes the documents you turn in to your teacher three days before, disappear. That was the reason that I did not know about the momentous occasion that was about to change my life forever until about three hours before it happened.
Let me back track. It all started out innocently enough like so many of the whacked out things in my life do with me getting up for school in my notoriously bad mood and going through the day. It wasn’t the most amazing of days. I went through my normal classes and was generally bored then got my backpack, signed out, and went to my college classes at the local community college. I take general psychology there. In fact the only thing that made that day stand out from the long drab weeks that I assumed would make up my senior year was that this was the first Friday of the first week of school for this year. There was nothing else markedly different about that day until I got home.
Getting home wasn’t all that amazing either. I got in my car, drove home, and then went to veg. out on the couch in front of the TV to watch my favorite anime. Of course I should have known it was coming. I never make it from the door to the living room without hassle so I should have been on my guard. As it was, I wasn’t and my mom came in to drop her bomb shell on me with her epic sense of timing that always seems to appear just as I’m finally relaxing from the last one.
‘Oh Lina, why aren’t you getting around? You know what a hurry we’re in today. Have you gotten something to read for the trip yet? You know how sick you get on trips like this. Remember, it will be at least two and a half hours if not more each way.’
‘To clarify, my name is not ‘Lina’ it’s Lorrienne pronounced like Lorrinne but my parents must have been hippies when they named me because they just randomly added other letters to ‘spruce it up’ as they later explained it. Also, as a side note, I had no clue what trip it was but yes, I do get sick in cars if I don’t read. I think it comes from the tree……..tree….tree…tree..tree.tree.treetreetreetreetreetreetree effect that seems to take over as soon as I’m in a moving vehicle.
And of course I had the normal teenage wisdom that led me to want to know… ‘Does it involve me getting up?’
‘Of course if does silly. How else will we get to Minneapolis to pick up the exchange student?’
‘…What exchange student?’ I gritted out threw my teeth. ‘There was no mention of exchange students to me.’
‘I didn’t tell you? I was sure I had told you. Oh… I remember, when the time came to sign up for this wonderful experience I filled out your interest survey for you.’
‘You did what?!’ You have to understand, in my mother’s world, I probably still take ballet and make paste gem collages instead of playing electric guitar and drawing manga. I mean this is the woman who cheerfully told my English teach that I ate paste. Now to clarify, I never ate paste. That was my brother and the last noted case was the first time he tried it, found it disgusting, and threw up all over my shoes. Of course my ninth grade teach did not realize this and she kept bringing it up during class for everyone to get a good laugh. And they wonder why I’m anti-social.
We made good time making it to the airport and even thought there was a bit of a wait getting through the electronic security system, made longer by my getting stopped and taken into a small room to be strip searched because the scanner went off because of a button on the back of my jeans. I explained this to them at the beginning but because of prior occurrences they were of course not going to take my word for it. So I spent forty five minutes in aback room in nothing but hospital scrubs provided by the security guard who walked off with my clothing. My clothing was then sent through a processor that was supposed to be able to identify any hidden components or pockets in my clothing that might hide something but the metal buttons interfered again, making the system crash and leaving them to do the entire system manually. This of course took longer and they sent someone new to interrogate me. By now you’re probably thinking. I’m making this up but it’s all true. I mean, I wouldn’t have believed it myself. It’s the kind of thing that happens to heroines and villains in old movies but not to people today. They even asked me if I was an agent for the communists. Communists? I thought we had gotten over that scare in the eighties. I mean a communist? USSR crumbled how many years ago and yet this guy in a black suit with the bored look on is face is sitting there in an equally stiff looking plastic chair, one of those made to leave you feeling uncomfortable and irritated, asking me if I was an agent for the communists? When did we enter into loonyville? Finally, they admitted defeat, gave me back my clothing and asked me to not wear it into an airport again. As they were about to walk off with the scrubs I asked them what they were going to do with them. I was told the clothing would be thrown out as they could not use soil clothing for someone else and it would cost too much to have them properly laundered. That is how I added a pair of navy blue scrubs to my collection of work scrubs for the hotel and probably made it onto the airport’s list of most crazy individuals.
Of course, my mother had read the times wrong and the plane wasn’t due for another hour so we went to the gate and waited. I read a book and Mom wandered around until she found the food court and brought back two extra large size soft drinks from Burger King. I myself drink very little but some how I think my mother multiplies it by thirty because she seems to always think that no matter how big the cup is, I’m going to want more. Oh well, what can you do?
Finally, as the hour approached in which the dreaded ‘Ayden’ would be coming in my mother realized, no doubt because of the huge bucket of pop she’d drunk that she needed to find a rest room and so that was how I found myself abandoned to meet a guy I had never met in a foreign airport with a huge gallon sized cup of Mountain Dew and a poorly written science fiction book.
The plane landed safely, unfortunately, I thought gloomily and the first passengers were about to unboard. Great, I thought to myself, the end of the world as we know it is about to happen. Good-by world, hello doom. This of course took me off on a tangent and I sat there brooding until I realized that most of the people had already gotten off the plane and were walking around. I stood up, frantically looking around before I realized that I had no clue what he looked like. Then, suddenly, two young men walked down the run way. The one standing to the back loomed over the other much smaller one but for the most part I ignored him because my attention was on the smaller thin gangly one who was looking around as if he was lost. He had brown hair that was cut in a hideous bowl cut. His look was that of the typical pocket protector geek. I myself am a crossed geek/goth and I know the groups well from years of painful experience at the hands of public middle school. I learned that image might not be everything but it was definitely all that those in power looked for.
‘Um, hey Ayden…’ I said touching his shoulder and trying to look less likely I had gotten news of a terminal illness then I was feeling.
‘Ew! Get away from me you goth freak!’ He shouted turning on me and whipping his arm from my grasp. On closer inspection he was even worse than I had first thought. His teeth looked as though they had not been brushed in weeks and he was wearing ‘birth control’ glasses.
‘Jamie? Jamie? Where are you? Oh! There you are!’ A middle-aged woman wearing similar glasses and a giant floral muumuu advanced on us and hugged the boy to her.
‘I suppose I should be offended,’ came a voice from my left. ‘But since you just had a horrible run in and you don’t know me, I’ll let it go this time. I’m Ayden by the way.’
I whirled around only to find myself staring at the chest of what must have been one of the tallest guys I’ve ever met. Yes, on the one hand I’m relatively short in stature. No, wait, ex that. I’m not short. I’m vertically challenged. Yes, that’s it. Still, the point of the matter was that I had to look almost all the way up to even be able to look him in the eye. Said eyes were a mysterious, almost compelling blue-silver, which were… was that humor I saw in their depths? Yes, I realized, the mouth was forming into a smirk with one side pulled up further than the other. The entire face was framed if remotely, since it was pulled back by brown hair that, I found out later, in some lights had reddish tints. It was just shorter than mine, which hangs down my back to almost my butt. His, which was pulled back in a leather thong was only about three inches shorter on further inspection.
‘Um…sorry about the mistake…um…’
‘You must be Ayden! Oh, I’ve heard so much about you!’ Tropical Storm Mom had landed. When this storm came in it usually left wreckage of life behind it that might never be salvaged. Those within a thirty-mile radius should run for cover finding anything that can get them as far from her as possible. As for us, it was too late. ‘Are you hungry? No wait, don’t answer that. Of course you’re hungry. You’ve been on a plane for how many hours? Oh well, never mind that. Service on planes is always so shoddy. Don’t you worry, we’ll get some decent food into you yet. By the by, my name is Janie Caseroff and you have of course met my daughter. Let me guess, she hasn’t introduced herself has she? Well, this is Lorrienne but everyone calls her Lina.’
‘Not for lack of trying to get them to stop,’ I muttered to myself and then realized that I had said it out loud. I looked around guiltily. Ayden gave me a knowing look before turning his attention back to my mother but thankfully kept silent.
Mom took off with Ayden in tow leaving me to carry the bags. Luckily they were small for the most part. What is it with guys and packing lightly? I mean, most girls I know would pack half their wardrobe for a sleep over. Yet, boys for all their lack of thought patterns realize that the lighter they pack the easier it is to carry the bag around. She led us around in a winding circle before finally ending up almost exactly where we had started since the food court was only one concourse over from the gate he had landed at.
‘Where do you want to eat at dear?’ Mom asked in her momotypical way. I sometimes wonder if she calls her boss dear…
‘Well. Do they have a Taco Bell here? I’m sorry, what ever you want will of course be wonderful. He said with that easy charm he had shown earlier. Mom of course fell for it and we went to Taco Bell, which I was sure he had seen as soon as we got into the food court. I mean it had a huge neon sign pronouncing its location. It’s not that I don’t like Taco Bell in fact nine times out of ten I would choose that over any other fast food joint that I know of. It was more the point of the thing. He was manipulating my mother with perfect ease after less then an hour when I myself who had known her since before I was born can’t get her to do that. Usually, when she does think to ask my where I want to go and I tell her, she sighs and acts put out until I change my answer and choose the place that she wants.
After eating we got into the strangely empty van for the long ride home. Mom, of course had Ayden sit in the front as if was ‘much more comfortable and less dirty than the back seats.’ While these excuses might have been true, they had nothing to do with the reason why she was having him sit in the front. Her ulterior motive was to get him close enough that she continue to interrogate him about himself. I moved as far back as I could, pulled on my head phones and pulled out a new science fiction book, having given up on the one I had been reading while waiting for Ayden. I have to be sin a specific mood to read some types of scicnce fiction and I guess I just wasn’t. Slowly, but surely, I forgot about my psucho mother and the unwanted guest in the front seat, losing myself to the steady sound of Kurt Cobain singing and the image of the stalking specter from my book.
‘Lina!’ I nearly jumped out of my skin as my mohter’s shrill voice puncture my perfectly constructed bubble of serenity. Slowl, glaring blearily at the front seats all though I could see nothing in the darkness of the van outside of the tiny pool of light from my clip on book lamp. I had been focusing so intently on reading that I apparently had not heard her call and now found it next to impossible to focus on the two shadowy forms in the front seat.
‘Huh?’ I asked or at least I think that’s what I ended up saying. I was still dealing with my loss of balance from being pulled out of my quiet place.
‘Take off you ear phones!’ she shouted again. The thing about this that makes this scene almost comical was that my music was not turned up all that loud. I had been tuning them out and now she was still shouting anyways and it wasn’t necessary. She just acts that way sometimes. Still, I put the headphones down so that I could pretend that I was interested in what she had to say. ‘Yeah? What did I miss?’ I asked in a nearly interested tone of voice.
‘We were just making plans for what was going to go on one he got settle in and it turns out that as part of his cultural immersion he is supposed to get a part time job. Didn’t you tell me the other day that your hotel is hiring?’ Now, the thing is, I didn’t tell her that, in fact I was in my room with the door shut talking to a friend on the phone about it because my friend was looking for a job but she ended up working at MacDonald’s. So how does she know this? The world will never know. And oh yay, I really wanted this life ruiner working at my place of occupation. ‘Why don’t you put in a word for him? In fact why don’t you have him come with you to work tomorrow and then he can have the car for the day. Hey! And then after work you can give him a site seeing trip! Wouldn’t that be lovely?’
Yeah, that was right up there on my to do list along with bungee jumping without a bungee and sky diving without a parachute. Heck, it might even come right up there with becoming a cannibal and storming Area 51 with a sharp stick. Wow, that was one of those ideas that just topped all other ideas for things I wanted to spend my free time on a Saturday doing. I mean, where did she come up with this stuff? What made her think that I wanted to take him to work with me let alone give him a site seeing tour afterwards? I mean its bad enough that I had to get up at…wait! That was it; the one way to get rid of him for the day. ‘Oh, you know I would love to do that tomorrow but you know how early I have to get up. That wouldn’t be fair to him, especially after the long trip he just took.’ There, it was done and Mom is just the type of person who wouldn’t want to make a guest do something like get up early and especially after a long, arduous journey.
‘That is okay. I am used to rising with the sun so it will be no trouble at all for me to be ready to accompany you to your place of occupation.’ He said all of this with a smile on his face. Was he trying to torment me or was he really just that dense that he wasn’t getting the signals? And what was with that formal way of speaking anways?
‘Then its settled,’ Mom said in that voice that meant the world must now work out exactly in this precise way or there would be dire consequences. ‘Ayden will go with you Lina and you can help him by putting a good word for him.’ Yeah, like I was going to put my neck out for this person I didn’t even know all that well by telling them that he would make a great housekeeper? I think not. I mean, he looked like he had never done a moment’s manual labor in his life. His build looked as though it probably came from weight lifting and my guess was that in the country he came from, his family was rich and working out meant going to a personal gym. Not that I could speak. I mean, when I workout, I go and use the elliptical that my Mom bought at a garage sale and has a broken dial leaving it eternally on seventh gear. Still, it’s better to act like you actually think you know what life is really like when you haven’t even stuck your feet in it yet. I have worked for two hotels and I have to tell you that hotel work is the worst type of job you can have. It’s worse then fast food and I can say this because I have friends in that field and we play a game called ‘who had the worst day’ and I usually win hands down every time.
For example: in what other job do you have to clean vomit, hair, hair dye, wet discolored towels, wet sheets, spilled unnamable liquid substances, and half a pizza tossed upside down on the floor as just a basic part of the job? Not the fast food people I can honestly say. They may see bad food practices and what’s really in the food but I get to see the food that they served regurgitated all over the floor of the bathroom I’m about to clean. And what is up with the hair in these hotel rooms? There is no way people can naturally shed that much. I realize there ware women with long hair but how do you manage to clog a bathtub drain after one use? And then there are the men who end up shaving and leaving the stubble all over the bottom of the tub when it would take less than thirty seconds to spray it down the drain.
But I digress. The plan was formed and there was nothing I could do about it. I gave up and went back to listening to my music but finally gave up on reading as the headache had already worked it’s way behind my eyes. The rest of the time was spent listening to my mother give him reasons why he and I were so similar and would be the best of friends…yeah right.
When we got home things only got worse. To start with my mother had not thought of where he was going to sleep. Or rather she had thought of it but hadn’t rationalized it. He was going to be staying in my room…for a year! I realized then that this was the reason she had made me actually clean it up. I am embarrassed to admit that I am a very messy persona although I feel the need to put things in order when it comes to collections. Case in point, when I was ten years old, I sat down and sorted a bag of one thousand assorted color beads and my mother came in and wanted to know why each color had three or four subsets. I told her, truthfully, that it was because they had a different shade of color to them. She of course did not see a difference.
Later Chapter
I didn’t know what to do. It was too much emotion for one day. I’m just not the type of person who splurges on emotion. I realized then that I had two choices. On the one hand , and this sounded much better at the time, I could get a can of cheese dip and a romance novel and go hide out in the back yard in the pine tree I found that had a board nailed across two study branches. This way I could drown the guilt in high fat food. Instead I took a walk. It wasn’t a planned route, not even in a specific direction, just away. Away from all the drama that had come into my once drama-free life. I went over the month in my head and realized that I didn’t much like myself for what I had done. What had I been thinking? It didn’t matter, I kept telling myself. He was giving me the chance and I would prove myself a better friend than I had been thus far.
Time passed as my thoughts wandered. It was not until I realized that the accelerating sound I had been hearing was not just a part of the random background music that always seems to be playing in my head that I turned to find the source. A white mud spattered SUV was barreling toward me only a few meters away now. I stood paralyzed for a few precious moments before something, some part of me that still held some sense of self-preservation in my brain, kicked in and I found myself running, no sprinting, for the curb with some hysterical thought that if I could just get to that strand of scraggly trees up ahead I would be safe. I almost made it too. I was just about to pass the first tree when my foot snagged on something. I heard a sickening crack followed by a moist squishy noise and then there was only pain and finally, blackness. I’m not sure to this day how long I was out but of what I do recall,
I remember waking up in pain with something green in my face tickling my nose. I remember wondering idly what it was and then realizing it was grass and trying to figure out how it got in my room. I think this was all some sort of ploy made by my brain to stop me from looking down at the source of the pain. When I did I nearly blacked out again. My foot was a mangled mess. The actual foot was at an odd angle still caught under the root it had caught on. At the heal a tear had formed and through it I could see several bones in various states of disconnection. I must not have been out long because the blood was just beginning to pool around my leg. It took some doing and a lot of curses I had never used openly before to get my foot loose and in the end I had to basically break the root. With that done I didn’t know what to do next. I mean, while I had been getting my foot loose I had had something to distract me from the pain but now I couldn’t think what was next and the pain was starting to make dark spots dance before my eyes.
Finally I noticed a conveniently placed branch that must have broken off of one of the trees although whether I pulled it down during my fall or if it was there all along I’ll never know. It wasn’t forked like those you see heroines in the movies use but it would take my weight off of my bad leg at least a little and hopefully I could make it a little closer to home. At that thought I realized I wasn’t exactly sure what route I had taken and began to panic but some tiny part of me, the rational part that had gotten me through this ordeal so far made me look around and I noticed some houses that I recognized.
