Mine (11 page)

“You should drop that,” he said, his voice low and even.

The man whirled around and jumped to his feet when he saw Joel. “Get out of here. This isn’t your business!”

The victim began pushing himself away, but the guy with the knife heard the movement and stamped a foot down on the other man’s ankle.

“You stay,” he said to the guy.

“I told you to put that down,” Joel said.

The man swished the knife drunkenly through the air a couple of times, nearly losing his balance in the process. “The hell I will.”

Joel stepped forward and swung, knowing where his fist was going to land even before he threw it. The alcohol in the man’s system delayed his reaction time so much that he didn’t even move to keep Joel’s knuckles from slamming into his cheek. Down he went, unconscious before he hit the ground.

The other guy scrambled to his feet and backed away, wide eyed. “Don’t hurt me!”

“I don’t want to hurt you. I was just—”

“Look what you did to him.” He glanced at the man and back at Joel, a crazed look on his face. “Leave me alone!”

“Are you okay?”

“Leave me
alone
!”

The man ran off.

Joel climbed back up the hill to get his stuff, unsure if he’d done any good. There was one thing, though, he no longer had any doubts about.

He
was the catalyst of the injuries his body foretold.

T
WENTY-SIX

S
TANFORD PROVIDED JOEL
with the
first intellectual stimulation he hadn’t discovered on his own since seventh grade. His classes weren’t particularly challenging—like his aborted first year of high school, he was still earning top grades—but he liked that his courses were more focused, and his professors expected him to dive deeper into subjects.

A consequence of his success came in the form of a nickname that quickly spread across campus—Prodigy.

Joel hated it.

As much as he wanted to learn all he could, he also wanted to fit in. But how could he make friends when everyone had already formed an opinion about him? Even his mother had begun to treat him as if he were different from everyone else, almost like she was afraid of him. At his core, he was still the happy kid he’d once been, a kid who now couldn’t understand what had happened to the life he thought he was going to have.

Knowing there was little he could do about the unwanted attention, he poured his energy into learning. It became like a drug. The more he took in, the more he wanted to know. To feed his unquenchable appetite, he signed up for the maximum amount of credits allowed, but it still wasn’t enough. So he sat in on as many other classes as he could, mainly choosing lecture courses with large numbers of enrollees so his presence would go unnoticed. While knowing he shouldn’t, he couldn’t resist taking the tests and turning them in. Even in these classes he wasn’t officially taking, he earned top grades.

By the third quarter, at the urging of several professors, the administration granted Joel credit for the extra classes and removed his limit of credits per quarter. This new freedom allowed him to design an educational track that would see him complete his undergrad studies at the same time he should have been graduating from high school, and not with just one degree but two, in physics and pre-med.

As for the phantom injuries, they were absent throughout his freshman year. But they weren’t gone forever.

T
WENTY-SEVEN

Leah

S
CHOOL-WISE, LEAH’S
sophomore
year
was no different from her freshman one. Again she knew she could easily be the number one student in each of her classes, and again that was attention she didn’t want. So she continued Project Dumb Down.

This turned out to be harder than it had been in ninth grade, as she’d grown even smarter over the summer. Her mind now struggled with itself every time she purposely screwed up a homework assignment or wrote the wrong answers on a test.

She was well aware it was impossible for someone to get so much smarter in such a short time, and though she didn’t know how her intellectual boost occurred, she knew the catalyst was the day trip back to Camp Red Hawk.

The night after that visit she’d begun having what she’d come to think of as enhanced dreams. They were like a whacked-out obstacle course filled with wild-colored landscapes and impossible shapes, and had no use for the rules of physics. At first, she found herself running down twisting ribbons of gold and purple and turquoise. Sometimes she felt pulled by an invisible rope, while other times it seemed as if giant hands pushed her from behind.

The dreams would come approximately every other week. There was no consistent pattern, but she always knew when one was on the way. At some point in the hours before she slept, her shoulders would tingle. The sensation would spread over her back and around her sides by the time she climbed into bed.

Perhaps this should have given her a sense of dread, but she felt only anticipation. As strange as the dreams were, they comforted her.

When the summer after tenth grade arrived, she didn’t request to return to camp, and her parents certainly didn’t suggest it. Leah busied herself between a job at the public library and spending time with her friends.

Through the first half of her junior year, she continued along the familiar groove of pretending to be an above average but not brilliant student.

Her deception, however, would not make it through the second half.

__________

O
N THE AFTERNOON
of the Valentine’s Day dance, Leah’s shoulders began tingling, letting her know another dream would be coming that night. But as much as she would have liked to go to bed right after dinner, she’d made a deal with her friend Monica that if no one asked either of them to the dance, they’d go together. Surprise, surprise, Monica’s boyfriend broke up with her at the end of January, and Leah was forced to honor their bargain.

They spent the first hour of the event with a few other girls who’d come alone, occasionally dancing as a group but mostly sitting around and gossiping about other students. As Leah’s mom had predicted, only a few boys came dateless. That was fine. Leah was having a good time with the girls, and would have happily stayed until the last song if not for the tug.

At first she thought someone had pulled on her dress. But no one was behind her. She assumed she’d imagined it, but then the pull returned. Not a gentle tug this time, but a yank.

It was like in the dreams, only she wasn’t asleep. This was the first time she’d ever felt it awake.

Wait, no
, she thought.
It isn’t the first time, is it?

A fog lifted in her mind. Two summers ago. The return to Camp Red Hawk.

The blank spot in her memory was not blank anymore. She’d felt the tug that afternoon, too. That’s how she had ended up in the forest.

Like back then, she was overwhelmed by the desire to follow the pull.

“I’ll be right back,” she said.

“Where are you going?” Monica asked.

“Um, restroom.”

“Oh, great. I’ve got to go, too.”

Telling Monica she wanted to go alone would have sounded strange, so Leah smiled and they headed across the multipurpose room together.

The restrooms were outside to the left. As they moved into the central hallway, Leah said, “I should call home. Promised my mom. You know, check in? I’ll catch up with you in a minute.”

“Sure,” Monica said, continuing on to the bathroom.

As soon as her friend was out of sight, Leah made a beeline for the room where everyone had left their coats, found hers, and once more gave in to the invisible rope.

It guided her out the main exit, down the steps, into the parking lot to her car, and then went slack. Getting the message, she hopped in and backed out of her parking spot. As soon as she put the car into drive, the rope reasserted itself.

Her curiosity about where she was being taken soon turned to concern as she realized she was being led home. Was something wrong? Had something happened to her parents?

Squeezing the wheel, she increased her speed. When she turned onto her street, she expected to see emergency vehicles parked in front of her house, lights flashing, but all was quiet. And when she pulled into the driveway, she could see the TV flickering off the living room wall.

She rushed up the steps, unlocked the door, and hurried inside.

Her parents looked over from the couch, startled.

“Hi, honey,” her father said. “Is everything all right?”

“Oh, um, yeah. Fine.” She channeled her relief into a smile.

“I thought you weren’t going to be home until ten.”

“I, um, got bored.”

“Well, it was a Valentine’s Day dance,” her mother said. “I told you, always better to have a date.”

“Thanks, Mom. I’ll remember next time.” Before they could ask another question, Leah said, “I’ve got homework to do, so I’ll, uh, see you in the morning.”

“Good night, sweetie,” her mother said.

“Sleep well,” her dad said. “And sorry about the dance.”

As Leah said, “No biggie,” the rope yanked again, pulling her up the stairs.

Once she was in her bedroom, it led her to her bed. She finally realized what was going on. The dream wanted her, and it wanted her now.

She fought the urge to lie down, and said out loud, “Hold on. I’m not sleeping in this.”

In record time she was out of her nice dress, into her nightgown, and under the covers with the lights off. She stared at the ceiling, certain she was too worked up to fall asleep anytime soon, but she was wrong. Within moments she was out.

The dream was different this time.

There were no ribbons, no bright colors, nothing to indicate she was in one of the imaginary landscapes she’d spent so much time in.

The scene before her was real world, nighttime. A suburban lane with houses and apartment buildings and street lamps and cars. A street in a big town or maybe a city.

Yes, a city. She could hear sounds in the distance—buses and the drone of a nearby freeway…and people. Thousands and thousands of people.

The air was moist, which meant she must be near a body of water, a lake or maybe a river. It was cool, but not cold like it was currently in Colorado. Yet she
knew
this was the same night as when she’d been awake.

She took a breath, and when she felt the coolness enter her lungs, she realized she was actually there, standing on the sidewalk.

As vivid as the other dreams had been, they were nothing compared to this.

She heard voices and laughter behind her. Turning, she spotted a large group of people in front of one of the buildings. A gathering of some kind.

She started to turn away, but the pull stopped her. It wasn’t like the rope this time, not nearly that forceful. This was more like a thread attached to the center of her chest, thin and weak yet unbreakable.

It wanted her to walk toward the people, so she did. As she neared, the din of voices separated into fourteen different conversations. If she focused on any particular one, she could bring it forward and hear what was being said, like tuning in to different stations on a radio.

The thread continued to pull her forward, through the group and toward the building’s entrance. She had to twist and turn to avoid running into anyone, though no one appeared to notice her.

She was there and she wasn’t.

She moved into the building and up a set of stairs. As she passed the second floor, she heard more mumbling conversations. The third floor, however, was quiet. Upon reaching the landing, two gentle tugs guided her to the left and down the hall.

Both sides were lined by closed doors, each with metal numbers mounted to it. But the numbers on apartment 319, unlike the others, pulsed with a blue-white light she knew only she could see. It was no surprise, then, that the tug guided her there.

The moment she put her hand on the knob, the world went black. When she could see again, she was standing in a cramped living room.

A single pull sent her down a hallway and into a dim, unoccupied bedroom. She waited, assuming she’d get tugged again, but the thread remained slack.

An empty room in a strange apartment? What could possibly be—

A flash of light, brighter than any she’d ever seen, forced her to jam her eyes shut.

“You can lie down in here. When you feel better, we’ll get you home.”

Leah eased open her eyelids, and was surprised to find that her vision had been unaffected by the flash.

She was still in the room, only now the overhead light was on and two young guys were helping a girl over to the bed. All three appeared to have been drinking. The girl was the worst off, though. If not for the arms around her, she would have surely fallen.

“Now?” one of guys asked after they laid her down.

The other guy shook his head. “Ten minutes. That should be plenty of time.”

Before Leah could wonder what they meant, the searing light flashed again.

T
WENTY-EIGHT

Joel

E
VEN BY JOEL’S
standards, it had been a grueling day.

Four daytime classes and an evening astronomy lecture on the relationship of Pluto and Charon. It was well after nine o’clock when his mother picked him up and drove them back to their two-bedroom apartment, five blocks from campus.

As always, she prepared a late-night snack and asked if maybe he was taking on too much at once. After that, there were stories from her day about houses she’d seen and the ridiculous expectations some of her clients had. She was not a big fan of California, though she did like her commissions on the overpriced homes. What she longed for, though never said, was to move back to Denver to be with Joel’s dad instead of seeing him only on one of their quick back and forth visits. Joel suspected a small part of her hated him for choosing a college so far from their life in Colorado.