Mine (7 page)

“Don’t!” Justin yelled.

“We need to take a look. See if you’re okay.”

“I’m
not
okay!”

Several other customers started gathering around.

“What happened?”

“Was it a fight?”

“Did he sit on the table or something?”

Justin eyed them, then whispered to Joel, “Okay. Take it off. But careful.”

Justin squeezed his eyes shut as Joel worked the shoe and sock off.

“Oh, geez,” someone behind Joel said.

“Eww,” at least two of the onlookers threw in.

Another added, “That doesn’t look good.”

Joel stared at Justin’s left foot, more specifically at his friend’s little toe. He knew without a doubt it was broken, and that in the coming days the bruise that was already starting to form would encompass the whole toe and part of the foot. He also knew exactly what his friend’s pain felt like, for he had experienced it himself that very morning.

It can’t be. That was a dream. This is…this is…a coincidence.

“He should go to the hospital,” someone said.

Joel held out his hand to his friend. “Let’s get you up.”

When Justin was standing on his good foot, Joel put an arm around his back to support him. “Does anybody have a car?”

Most of the other kids looked about his age, so Joel turned his attention to the arcade employee who looked old enough to have a driver’s license.

“I’m working, man,” the guy said. “I can’t just leave.”

Information suddenly flashed in Joel’s mind.

Police station.

A block and a half away.

“Come on,” he said to Justin, and started walking him toward the front door.

“Hey,” the employee called. “I need your names. My boss is going to want to know who’s going to take care of this.”

Without looking back, Joel said, “Tell your boss he should be more worried about being sued for faulty maintenance than who’s going to fix his stupid ping-pong table.”

“Wait. Sued?”

The police were more than happy to transport Justin to the hospital, where it was confirmed he had broken a toe. The officers were also interested in how the accident had occurred, and sent someone down to the arcade to take pictures of the “unsafe” table and ask questions.

Joel didn’t make it to the library that day. After Justin’s mom arrived at the hospital, he returned to the arcade for his bike and headed home.

Once he was alone in his bedroom, he removed his left shoe. The bruise he’d seen that morning had not returned. He touched the spot and felt the bone under the skin.

Everything was fine.

A dream, that’s all.

There was no way his experience had anything to do with Justin’s accident.

No way.

Except for the fact the injuries were identical, down to the smallest detail.

Yeah, except for that.

He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, hoping for answers. It wasn’t long before his eyelids grew heavy and he started to fall asleep.

In the gray world before he slipped all the way under, a low voice whispered in his head.

Mine.

T
WENTY

Leah

A
FTER RETURING HOME
from Camp Red Hawk, Leah’s parents restricted her to the house for the rest of the summer, allowing her to go out only if one of them was with her. Since her mother was a teacher, she also had summers off and was always around.

Though Leah was allowed to spend as much time as she wanted with her friends, they had to come to her place. And if it was a friend Leah’s mom and dad hadn’t met, they would insist on talking to the person’s parents first.

“It’s like you’re in prison,” Tracy Eastman said one day as they sat in Leah’s bedroom. “I mean, it’s not like you killed anyone, right?”

Leah smiled and shrugged and changed the subject.

The story of the missing children from Camp Red Hawk was a big deal that summer—in the paper, on the Internet, and even on the local TV news. The only details missing from the story were the names of the Three Who Returned. Out of fear that whoever had taken her would find out where she lived and come for her again, Leah’s parents had forbidden her from telling anyone she was one of the three.

On another day a different friend, Melinda Waters, brought up the Red Hawk disappearances and asked, “Wasn’t that the camp you went to?”

Leah shook her head. “Camp Bicknell.” It was the one her brother had attended.

“Really? I thought you said Red Hawk.”

“My parents were thinking about it but decided on Bicknell.”

“Whoa, then you were lucky, huh?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“I wonder what happened to those kids?”

Another shrug and another change of subject.

The truth was, Leah wondered about that, too. She wondered about all of her time at Camp Red Hawk. Her memories of those days were becoming harder to recall and she didn’t understand why. She could remember Joel and that other kid—the rule follower…what was his name? Mark? Something like that. The others, though? She couldn’t even picture what they looked like, let alone remember their names.

She tried to talk to her parents about it once, but they shut her down immediately. They had even at first refused the sheriff’s request for an additional interview with Leah before reluctantly giving in, with the caveat that the discussion would be terminated if Leah seemed at all disturbed.

Her parents’ fears were unfounded, however. Leah wasn’t disturbed at all, because she had nothing to add to what the officers already knew. She couldn’t even remember some of the things they said she’d told them before, though she’d kept that to herself. She believed the deputies had left thinking the interview had been a waste of time.

The rest of her summer was spent with more visits from friends and a surprising amount of time reading books from her parents’ collection. Their taste was pedestrian at best, however, and on more than one occasion, she had begged her mother to take her to the library, where she checked out books that were considerably more challenging.

To say she was excited on the first day of eighth grade would have been a colossal understatement, especially since it was touch and go for a while as to whether or not her parents would homeschool her. She’d nearly turned blue protesting the possibility, and had even locked herself in her room, refusing to come out for a full day.

Fortunately, when it became clear what the realities of homeschooling meant financially, her parents had accepted the fact that Leah needed to go back out into the world.

Being away from home without her parents was possibly the most liberating thing she’d ever experienced. She felt so good that even her schoolwork seemed fun and easy. At the end of the first semester—and for the first time in her life—she achieved straight As. She did it again in the spring. She was surprised, though, that her academic improvement came with an unexpected cost. Several girls who had been close friends began avoiding her, intimidated and confused by the change in what they’d come to expect from her.

Determined that the same thing wouldn’t happen as she started her freshman year at Verde High School, she worked diligently to maintain a low A average, even letting one of her classes—History—dip to a C+. To say this was easy would have been a lie. She knew all the answers and understood all the concepts, most of the time even better than her teachers. Acting dumb was painful.

While struggling with her growing intelligence, she also began changing in physical ways. Though no one would call her a giant, she had already grown taller than her mother—a respectable five foot six—and was closing in on her dad, who stood at five foot ten.

With size came strength, but in Leah’s case, her increase in strength wasn’t commensurate with her increase in height. It was far greater. Thankfully, the first person to notice this was Leah herself. Though she couldn’t hide her height, especially from the basketball coach who kept hounding her to try out, she was able to downplay her strength by never doing anything to put it on display.

Though her growing intelligence may have confused her, her new physical abilities scared the hell out of her. Leah had no doubt that she, a mere freshman, could outrun anyone at Verde High, girl or boy, and likely outperform most of the school’s best athletes at their chosen sports, too.

How any of this was possible, she didn’t know. Her family was not particularly athletic, and the only real physical activity she partook in was the mandated hour of PE each school day. At least her arms and legs weren’t bulging with muscle. There would have been no way to hide that during gym class.

Another change, perhaps the strangest of all, made its first appearance the tenth week of high school.

Lunch period—the time of the natural sorting of the student body.

The cliques of the cool and the outcasts and those caught in between spread across the quad in territories each had laid claim to at some point. There were the athletes and the cheerleaders, the band, the choir, the brains, the theater geeks, the losers, the druggies, and so on. Those who didn’t fit into any of these tried to stay out of the way of everyone else.

The Venn diagram of Leah included several groups: the brains, of course, though their pedantic conversations bored the life out of her; the band because she played oboe, much better this year than she ever had; the theater geeks because she knew several of them from her grade-school days; and the norms because that’s where she wanted to fit in most, though if they knew the real her, they would not have thought she belonged.

It was toward this last group, which claimed the corner bench near entrance F, that she headed that day with her friends Amanda and Molly. Their path took them past the annex storage building and across a grassy strip behind the cafeteria. At one end of the grass was the drama tree, bare now in anticipation of winter. Apparently it had been serving as the meeting point for the theater geeks for years.

“Leah,” Paul Markle called out as she walked by. “Come feast with us.”

Leah could hear Molly groan as Amanda whispered, “Weirdos.”

“Can’t today,” Leah said. “Already have plans.”

“Tomorrow, then, perhaps. We’d be honored with your presence.”

“Sure, maybe tomorrow,” was what she was about to say, but she was stopped by a
whooshing
sound, faint but growing louder. Looking over her shoulder, she saw a cup flying through the air, white with a yellow arched
M
on the side. It had already passed its apex and was in a downward arc that would land it directly in the middle of the theater geeks.

Leah didn’t need to see inside the cup to know it contained a milkshake. These bombardments had been happening since the first week of school. Everyone knew who was behind it, a couple of a-holes who’d been kicked off the football team for behavioral issues. Though administration had brought them in to question them about the attacks, little could be done without an eyewitness stepping forward.

At the moment, however, the identity of the thrower wasn’t important. The cup was coming down, and when it hit, it was going to splatter everyone.

She swiveled around, shoving her bottle of iced tea under her arm and squeezing it to her ribcage. Behind her she could hear the first sound of someone noticing the incoming cup and the start of a yelled out warning. It was way too late, though. Few, if any, would be able to get out of the way in time.

Leah made a quick adjustment to her position, and then, as the cup was about to sail past her, she plucked it from the air and spun around to decelerate the momentum and keep the contents from spilling out.

The voices behind her silenced, and when she looked up from the cup, everyone within sight was staring at her.

“Whoa,” Jayson Chu said. “That was
awesome
!”

“Leah,” Molly said. “What the hell?”

Leah had to fight the urge to send the shake back to where it came from. She could do it, too. Instead she walked over to the nearby trash can, tossed the cup inside, and said to her friends, “Come on. I’m hungry.”

News of her act spread, and for a few days she became a minor celebrity, with people she’d never even talked to coming up and asking her questions. Thankfully the attention didn’t last long.

After the incident, Leah began noticing other things that added to her suspicion that something beyond her improved strength and intellect was going on. Little things like snatching a pencil that rolled off a desk before it dropped an inch, rising from her chair a split second before any of her classmates reacted to the bell, stealing the ball in a PE game of soccer from the best player on the girls’ team. Not once. Not twice. But over and over.

The only way she could explain it was that she felt as if she were
ahead
of everyone else. Not by much, but enough to be noticed—by her anyway.

This, too, she knew she had to keep secret. Perhaps more than anything else.

T
WENTY-ONE

Joel

B
EFORE JOEL REACHED
the halfway point of ninth grade, it became apparent to all those concerned that James Madison High could not provide the level of education he required, and remaining at the school would be a colossal waste of his time.

What was left unsaid was that the school’s administration and faculty were scared of him, both of his mind and his growing strength. When he’d left middle school, he’d been approaching six feet and one hundred and eighty pounds, but by the time he started his freshman year two months later, he was six-three and nearly two-twenty.

Though there had been no repeats of the fights that had occurred in eighth grade, everyone was sure it was only a matter of time. Just like at the end of middle school, the students who might have drawn Joel’s attention were even more scared of him than the staff was.