Damage Control

Waking up from his bed terrified, Terry tries to grasp what he just experienced, telling himself that it was just a dream to try to make scenes of it. "It was not real. In real life you can't magically teleport. But it felt so real. Dreams can be vivid. That's what makes them awesome and terrifying." Terry gets dressed and heads downstairs to get some breakfast, still trying to convince himself of the traumatic and unexplained events was nothing more than his overactive imagination. "It was just a dream. You fell asleep while watching the Q&A. You have a creative mind which is why it felt so real but why the situation could never happen. It was too extreme."

As he goes into the kitchen to grab some cereal he tells his parents "I don't want to go to school today.'' "Why sweety, are you sick?" the mother sincerely asks worried about him. "No it's just I didn't sleep well last night." Terry tells her, adding "This isn't going to be a regular thing is it."

"I hope not." she tells him "Well okay but just this once." "Hope you feel better kiddo." The father tells him as they both leave for work. As the parents left Terry sat at the counter finishing his breakfast, feeling a little bit better that his parents were understanding of his situation even though they don't know the full extent.

To get his mind off the dream he goes to the living room and watches tv. Still, he can't stop thinking about it, feeling unsure that it was just a dream. He goes into his room and checks on his laptop to see the youtube live stream video but finds out that the video is currently taken down. The fact that happens worries, Terry, even further. He then looks up any news outlet to see if anything happened on the live stream that was worthy to report on. Unfortunately, his fears are confirmed when he sees a bunch of links and articles about a mysterious kid appearing in the middle of the stream naked, and to make matters worse for him every article he clicks on has a screenshot of his face posted as the articles cover. Terry checks on his feed to see if anyone recognizes him. Come to his unpleasant surprise feed is blown up with people in town asking if that was him and or congratulating him. Terry feels unreal like he's not even in reality anymore.

Trying to stay sane from all this a thought then occurs to him that if people from his hometown already know that it was him then the news outlet for sure would have written about him which means the girls probably know who he is by now. He spatially checks his email account and sure enough, he has 3 email messages from Jane, Marry, and from The Shake-Up channel. Terry quickly skims through them and they all sound unhappy even worse when he got to The Shake-Up email. The first two was bad that he could barely read the third email but even though his mind couldn't manage to read a single sentence he could make out a few words lie sue, federal law, find hundreds of thousands of dollars, imprisoned which causes his mind goes into a meltdown mode reaching his limits on what his mind can take. His room starts to shake like an earthquake as he walks back against the corner of his room and sits back seeing the chaos of his shattered mind producing.

Not wanting to be overcome by the great power he somehow possessed he closes his eyes and starts breathing in and out nice and slow only focusing on the sound of each breath he makes. "Calm down, calm down. Breath." Terry says to himself

The shaking of his room dives down and Terry starts feeling okay. "Well crap, there's no explaining out of this." he takes a good look at his room, how it looks like it just experiences an earthquake. "It was real?" he asks himself with him replying "It was real."

With everything that just happened in the last couple of minutes, Terry decided to ignore everything for now and just take a long walk around town wearing earbuds to listen to music.

It is a bright sunny day as Terry walks throughout the town. As he walks past the local stores and public area in his town people around that see him start giving him compliments and ask questions about him hanging out with two stars which just stresses him out.

Terry hangs out at the library, a quiet place where he can collect his thoughts. He breathes deeply in and out feeling a little calm until one person (a kid named Ashly Brown) and a bunch of her friends comes up to him.

"You know there's this kid that looks exactly like you." Terry stairs at the girl in silence not sure how to respond to that statement.

Another kid (one of her friends) asked Terry "Did you watch The Shake-Up Q&A live stream last night?" "Heard of the show but no, I fell asleep." Terry answers on the fly.

"See, I told you that wasn't him." "What?" Terry says, pretending not to know what they are talking about as his heart starts to race. "A kid appeared on it that looked alot like you see." Ashly pulls up her phone and shows a screenshot of Terry with the girls.

Looking at the image tries to make an excuse that it's not him by saying "That picture is super blurry." hoping they will buy it. "Well it has your likeness. I'm sure if it was you you would tell us, right?" one of ashly friends says, still speculating it's him.

Getting extremely nervous and a little bit shaky Terry tells the girls "I would but it's not. I wouldn't even know how to get there even if I wanted to."

Terry becoming anxious quickly leaves the library feeling stressed out again. While quickly walking listening to his music Terry is stopped by some people walking down the street asking him the same questions. Terry shouts out "No, It's Not Me!" and runs away from anyone wanting to ask him questions about the live stream.

Not wanting to cause any more attention Terry goes and spends some time in the woods sitting by a lake thinking about how he's going to move forward from this. "How about we just ignore it. We tried that, it didn't work. Do you think this is just a part of life that they just don't tell you about. I don't know, let's just enjoy the silence. Okay." Terry spends his time just staring up into the sky, looking at clouds forgetting about his problem.

As Terry returns home he sees many reporters and news vans surrounding his house. Realizing that he has to deal with this problem now, Terry turns up his music, takes a deep breath, and slowly approaches the reporters mentally getting ready for a long and stressful day. Once reporters see him, they start surrounding him shouting out a bunch of questions shoving their mics in his face. Terry tries to answer but with his meek stuttering voice and the reporters relentlessly throwing different questions at him he doesn't get the chance to. All this starts getting his heart races, his mind unable to think, and his eyes beginning to swell up he can feel his power about to go arise. Terry tries his best to keep it contained. He feels that he's going to explode but before that chance happens Terry shouts out enough the voice carrying out for miles cracking some camera lense of seriously damaging some other and everyone stunned in silence as he says "One. At. A. Time."

At Mary's house, the girls watch the news city where Terry is clearing his name. "Okay first of I'm here people have seen me here this morning and even yesterday at school! How would I manage to get all the way to California where Jane lives and all the way back in about 12 hours! It's not humanly possible! Second, if I did manage to get to an airport and fly all the way over and back in that amount of time that would be so much money and there would be so much evidence of me doing this stunt which I don't think that there is! And third, I have extreme social anxiety! I'm more afraid of just going outside my house and interacting with people let alone video bomb a live stream of two most beautiful celebrities being seen by thousands of people! Since this news came out I was so overwhelmed I didn't went to school today! Even doing this interview is stressing me out if you can't already tell! Now please just leave."

After making a successful argument every reporter and article agrees with him and that the mystery kid is still out there. "Wow I guess it wasn't him after all. I kind of feel bad that he got so much attention from this. I guess we'd better email an apology to him." Mary tells Jane. Jane seeing Terry face on the news she was sure the stranger was him. Jane was the only one who got a good look as she saw him when he ran out of the bathroom running down the hallway towards her as he jumped over her. Jane pulls up the video of the stream and shows it to Mary. "I mean yeah look at it. The video isn't even in good quality, kind of harsh to assume it was him due to a few random people claiming it was him. The media outlet, man they're the worst." "Mary I think it was him, look. that's not a reaction of a fan excited he got in but as someone who was scared and confused where he was." Jane suggested.

After a long day of successfully convincing everyone and spending all day relaxing watching tv, Terry collapsed on his bed ready to take a long relaxing sleep. After a few seconds of sleep Terry realized that he was not sleepy, not even a little tired. "Crap."