Mine (6 page)

W
HILE JOEL OCCASIONALLY
accepted invitations from friends to go over to their house and play video games or swim or just hang out, more often than not he found himself drawn to the library.

That was something new. For most of his life, his reading habits had been limited to comic books and the occasional sci-fi novel, but now he devoured books on dozens of different topics—biographies, science texts, histories, how-to manuals, even books on sociology and psychology, two topics he’d known almost nothing about before that summer. It felt like he couldn’t stop devouring knowledge even if he wanted to.

And he
didn’t
want to.

“Joel?”

It was a Wednesday morning in late June, and he was deep in a book about the American legal system, entranced by a section on tort law.

“Joel?” This time there was a touch on his shoulder.

He finished the paragraph he was on before looking up. The instant he saw the girl’s face, his mind spit out:

Jasmine Hammond, aka Jaz

7
^th
Grade Just Completed

Lives Three Blocks from School

Excels at Math

Instant information such as this had gradually been appearing more and more in his head. Assuming everyone had the same ability, he’d come to expect it rather than be surprised by it.

“Hi, Jaz.”

His knowing her name seemed to both please and fluster her. She glanced at the book he was reading. “Is that a textbook? Are you in summer school?”

He shook his head but said nothing.

She glanced at the floor and then back at him. “I just…I…um…I never thanked you.”

She was talking about fight number two. A couple of idiots had cornered her by the lockers outside the science lab. Unfortunately for them, Joel happened to be walking to his locker nearby.

“No reason you need to,” he said.

“Of course there is.”

“It wasn’t a big deal. Don’t worry about it.”

Joel wasn’t ashamed about what he’d done to her tormentors, but he didn’t see the point in discussing it.

“It was a big deal to me.”

He didn’t know what to say, so he gave her a quick smile and returned his attention to the book.

For several seconds, he could feel her there, still staring at him, before she finally whispered, “Thank you,” and hurried away.

N
INETEEN

T
HE DREAM CAME
in the wee hours of the morning.

It featured two of Joel’s friends from camp the previous summer. The guy and girl he’d been found with by the road. Mike and, um…Leah.

Right, Leah. How could I forget?

Though he hadn’t seen either of them since they’d left the hospital after camp, their features were surprisingly fresh in his mind, as if they’d just spent the day together. Which was strange because when he was awake, he could barely remember them at all.

The other four in the dream were out of focus, so it took a few moments before it dawned on him that they must have been the ones who hadn’t come back from the hike. The missing kids.

He attempted to remember their names, too, but the best he could come up with was Dudley and Carrie. Neither was right, he knew. As for the names of the other two, he had nothing at all.

At the beginning of the dream the seven of them were surrounded by trees. Then images began piling on top of one another, rapid fire. A room dank and dreary, with three desks. A staircase spiraling round and round and round, filled with the howl of a storm. A passageway, even darker than the other places, the noise of wind so loud nothing else could be heard.

And flying down the middle, the spinning beam of a flashlight.

Walls and floor and ceiling.

And walls and floor and ceiling.

And walls and floor and—

“Help me.”

The sound but a whisper, and yet he could somehow hear it above the howling wind. The speaker was a girl, her face out of focus, pressed against the ceiling of the tunnel as if gravity had reversed.

“Help me.”

Joel gasped as his eyes shot open, his heart thumping like it wanted to leap from his chest.

The first hint of morning light was seeping around his curtains. He looked at his clock—5:15 a.m.

What the hell was—

All thought flew from his mind as blinding pain shot up from the little toe of his left foot.

He threw his covers back and sat forward to inspect it. A black and green bruise covered his toe, and continued a good half inch onto his foot. When he touched it, the pain returned with a vengeance, causing him to fall back against the bed, gritting his teeth.

“Mom!”

His door flew open seconds later and his mother rushed in.

“Honey, what’s wrong?”

“Are you all right?” his father said, a few steps behind her.

Grimacing, Joel said, “It’s my toe! It…”

He paused. The pain was gone.

His mother scanned his feet. “Which toe?”

Joel pushed back up. Not only was the pain gone, but the bruise had vanished, too.

He touched it, tentatively at first, and then pushed at it, harder and harder.

Nothing. No hint that it had just looked and felt like it had been run over by a truck.

“Joel?” his dad said.

“I, um, I thought I’d hurt it.”

His mom gently raised his foot and touched his little toe. “This one?”

He nodded.

She wiggled it back and forth. “Any pain?”

“No. Feels fine.”

“Must have been just a dream.”

“Or a cramp,” his father suggested. “I used to get those all the time at your age. Hurt like a mother—”

“Hey!” Joel’s mom said.

“They hurt a lot,” Joel’s father said.

Joel’s mom gave Joel’s foot a loving squeeze and set it back on the bed. “Well, I might as well get some coffee going.”

After his parents were gone, Joel examined his toe again. It had
not
been a cramp. No cramp had ever left a bruise. And no bruise had ever disappeared so quickly.

So maybe I
did
dream it.

He shook his head and whispered, “I saw it.”

He repeated the words and was pretty sure he was right.

When he said them for a third time, though, he began to wonder what had really happened.

Sleep took him again, dreamless this time, and when he woke, it was half past nine. He dressed in a blue T-shirt and baggy gray shorts, and headed downstairs to grab some breakfast.

This was the first summer he’d been allowed to stay home alone, so his parents had already gone off to work. To gain this independence, though, he’d had to agree to call his mother every few hours, and if he were to go anywhere, he had to check in with their next-door neighbor, Mrs. Valdez.

He grabbed an untoasted Pop-Tart, shoved it in his mouth, and dropped onto the couch to pull on his Converses. It wasn’t until he was slipping his left foot inside his sneaker that he remembered the toe.

It doesn’t matter how real it felt, it must have been part of that strange dream
, he decided, because it certainly wasn’t bothering him now.

Not long after ten a.m., he wheeled his bike out of the garage, made the prerequisite stop at Mrs. Valdez’s place, and headed off. His friend Justin had called the night before and they’d arranged to meet at the arcade. Joel’s plan was to give Justin maybe an hour of his time and then head to the library.

As he rode, the other parts of the dream came back to him. The room and the stairway and the tunnel all were somehow familiar, and yet he had no recollection of ever seeing any of them before. Could they have had something to do with the four kids who’d disappeared? Or was this more of his mind playing tricks on him?

When he’d returned to school the previous fall, there had been some talk about the Red Hawk Four, as the missing kids had been labeled by the local news. Joel had been very careful to not reveal he had been there, too, and, as one of the Three Who Returned, had been smack in the middle of the drama.

Justin’s bike was chained to the stand outside the arcade when Joel arrived. Joel found his friend inside feeding dollar bills into the token machine, and soon they were standing side by side in front of the classic Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 machine.

Joel had spent much of the previous summer, before he’d headed to Camp Red Hawk, next to Justin in that very spot, improving to the point where he and Justin had been pretty evenly matched. This was the first time he’d played since then. In fact, he was only there because Justin had kept after him until Joel ran out of excuses for not getting together.

His rustiness fell quickly away, though, as he recalled timings and control combinations, and then started employing them in ways he’d never tried in the past. Justin landed a few initial lucky strikes, but that was it. Eight losing games later, Joel’s friend shoved the machine with a frustrated grunt and walked away.

“So I guess we’re done?” Joel said.

“I want to try something else. That game sucks anyway.”

Thirteen-year old Joel would have said, “You’re the one who sucks,” but fourteen-year old Joel didn’t talk that way anymore. He shrugged and followed his friend.

The place was already half full, so a lot of the games were taken. There was even a line for the dance game where you had to jump on arrows in a specific pattern. Most of those waiting at the moment were girls. Joel had always thought the game was stupid, but that had been when he was several inches shorter and girls weren’t important. Now…

“How about that?” he said, nodding toward the line.

Justin looked over and scowled. “Are you kidding me?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s
dancing
.”

“So?”

“So nothing. We’re not dancing. Come on.”

It turned out all the games Justin wanted to try were also occupied.

“If we’re not going to play something, then I’ve got things to do,” Joel said.

“We just got here. Besides, what could you possibly have to do?”

Given Justin’s reaction to
Dance Dance Revolution
, Joel had no intention of mentioning the library. “Things.”

“What things?”

Joel frowned. “Errands…for my parents.”

With a scoff, Justin said, “You can do those anytime.”

He looked around, his gaze stopping on the railed-off area at the back where the “big kid” games were kept: pool tables, air hockey, and—

A cheek-splitting smile appeared on Justin’s face. “The ping-pong table’s open!”

Joel reluctantly followed him to the back.

The ping-pong table, like most of the other games in the place, had seen better days. The net sagged in the middle, and the white lines around the outside of the table were faded and chipped.

“Volley for serve,” Justin said.

“You can just serve.”

“Come on, man, we volley. Those are the rules.”

Joel wasn’t sure if that was true or not, but if it got this over with faster, then fine. “Okay. Volley, then.”

Justin picked up the ball. “It’s got to go back and forth three times before it counts.”

He hit the ball nice and easy. Joel returned it, and then Justin smashed the ball at an angle that would be hard to reach for most players, but Joel got there with enough time to tap the ball so that it barely cleared the net. Justin dove forward, but he knocked his hip against the side of the table and missed the ball.

“Dammit!”

“You all right?” Joel asked.

Justin motioned at Joel with his paddle. “Yeah, yeah. Just serve.”

“Okay. Zero-zero.”

The first game ended 11-2 in Joel’s favor. In the second, Justin managed to double his previous game total.

“Best three out of five,” he said.

“I really gotta go.”

“Three out of five. Come on. It’s summer, for God’s sake. No one needs to go anywhere.”

Joel hesitated before nodding. “Three out of five. But then I’m out of here, okay?”

“Sure, sure. Whatever.”

Joel decided to back off a little to give his friend a chance to save some face. Justin, for his part, put up a much better fight in game three than he had previously, and was able to take the lead at 10-8.

“For the win,” he said, as he prepared to serve the next ball.

Joel had already decided to give him the game, but he didn’t want Justin to suspect that, so he kept the volley going as he waited for the opportunity of a convincing miss.

Justin returned a shot that forced Joel to back away from the table several feet. Joel thought for sure his return would fall short, but it clipped the top of the net and passed over, bouncing off the table an inch from the edge. Justin was in position, though, and with a gleam in his eye, he tapped the ball so that it gently flew back onto Joel’s side.

Joel charged forward, flailing for the ball, and bumped against the table.

With a loud snap, the table leg on Justin’s side collapsed and the table fell, corner first. Justin had no time to get out of the way, and the look of triumph that had started spreading across his face turned into anguish.

He screamed so loudly, even those playing
Dance Dance Revolution
looked over.

Joel ran around to where his friend had dropped to the floor. The corner of the table sat squarely on Justin’s left foot. Joel grabbed an edge and moved it off.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

Justin writhed on the floor, his hands over his shoe.

One of the two teenage arcade employees hurried over. “What the hell happened? What did you do to the table?”

“It broke and fell on him,” Joel said.

“Well, you’re going to have to pay for that.”

Justin moaned.

Ignoring the a-hole—
who was it who used to say that word?
—Joel reached for Justin’s foot.