XGeneration 1: You Don't Know Me

Description

Part
X-Files
, part
Freaks and Geeks
, and totally ’80s!

In the fall of 1984, Cold War tensions between Washington and Moscow are close to breaking.

But in sleepy Gainesville, Florida, fourteen-year-old Janis Graystone is mainly worried about starting high school, earning a spot on the varsity soccer team, and keeping her older sister from running her life. And then there are her nighttime experiences. Experiences where she awakens in her backyard — out of her body — with the disturbing sense that someone is watching her.

For Scott Spruel, the start of high school means the chance to start over. And he’s willing to ditch everything — computer hacking, Dungeons & Dragons marathons, even his comic book collection (well, except for his
X-Men
) — if it means getting closer to Janis, the secret love of his life. But will Scott’s past be so easy to shed? And what about the eerie delay on his telephone, a delay he senses through powers he is only beginning to understand?

Rated 16+ for language

XGeneration 1

You Don’t Know Me

Brad Magnarella

Smashwords Edition

© 2013

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Smashwords Edition License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

Cover by Damonza.com

For the Brywood Gang

1

Gainesville, Florida

Sunday, August 26, 1984

8:05 a.m.

Scott Spruel leaned nearer the window and parted his bedroom blinds a little more, not wanting to lose her. She had already set a canvas bag in her sister Margaret’s car and disappeared down her driveway, to the garage side of her house—the side he couldn’t see.

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” he whispered.

He stole a look back to the car, where Margaret was sorting through the trunk. A red cooler came out then went back in along with a tasseled blanket and a second canvas bag, this one with sandals poking out.

Scott resumed his vigil over the distant driveway, the blinds trembling above his ink-stained fingers. He hoped to see her again—
had
to see her again—if only for a moment. Of course he told himself that every time, didn’t he?
If only for a moment
. But what did he ever do with those moments? He could never make his legs move toward her, could not even premeditate the words he would say or how he would say them. He’d once spent half a day in front of his mirror trying to practice his greeting: “Hi, Janis,” followed by an easygoing smile. He gave up when all he could manage was a Jokeresque parody of a grin.

A hopeless sigh steamed the glass. It had been a long summer.

But now something flickered beyond the blur, like a flame. Heart pounding, Scott wiped the window clean, wiped her into view.

Janis Graystone.

Her fiery-red ponytail swished over the straps of her white tank top as she jogged into view on lean, athletic legs. She bounced a soccer ball along the asphalt driveway, an act as natural for her as chewing gum. The sound reached Scott’s ears a split second after each impact. It was the distance, that impossible distance between his house and hers—one hundred fifty yards, give or take.

He began to sigh again but clamped his breath off.

Janis stopped where the driveway met the cul-de-sac and, before Margaret could prevent it, punted the ball. The ball arced and disappeared into the car’s trunk. Margaret said something Scott couldn’t hear though it was apparent from the stern thrust of her body she was peeved. Janis ignored her, raising her arms at her feat.

Silent laughter parted Scott’s lips from his braces. For a moment, it felt as though he and Janis were connected again, time and space snapping away. But then she was climbing into the passenger’s seat and closing the door. Margaret slammed the trunk closed and joined her on the driver’s side. To Scott’s ears, the faint start and rev of the engine signaled another opportunity slipping away.

The Honda Prelude rounded the cul-de-sac and came straight toward Scott, whose house faced the short street on which the Graystones lived. He drew back into the darkness before stopping himself.

“Who are you kidding?” he mumbled. “She’s not going to notice you.”

After all, she hadn’t noticed him since the end of fifth grade, more than three years earlier. Why would she start now? He pushed his glasses to the bridge of his nose and parted the plastic blinds once more.

When the dark blue car arrived at the top of the street, morning light illuminated Janis’s face. A clean glow shone over the pull of her hair, her perfect brow, cheeks Scott could only imagine himself caressing, her full lower lip. The light caught the depth and pensiveness of her chestnut eyes as well, even as they squinted. It was the most clearly he had seen her in years.

Then the car turned, and the square of sunlight slid from Janis, and only the street remained.

Scott sighed and let the blinds snap closed. It took several seconds for the green glow of his computer to reclaim his bedroom, to redefine the heaps of clutter around him. He swiveled back to the blinking cursor on his TRS-80. With burning, sleep-deprived eyes, he scanned the lines of commands and responses that had delivered him to his present point, the same lines he had been staring at since late the night before. The modem clicked and hummed.

“If you want true power,” Scott whispered to himself, “you have to finish this. You have to go back inside.”

He hesitated before closing his eyes. Behind his sealed lids, he was startled to find an afterimage of Janis’s face, no less stunning for being a negative. But by then, his consciousness was already squeezing through the computer modem, being shot along the network. And though Scott struggled to hold on to her image, it was soon lost to a cold and bewildering storm of data and electrical current.

2

Crescent Beach, Florida

Later that day

“Do you ever think we’re being watched?” Janis asked.

She lifted her head from her soccer ball and squinted past her toes, still slick with sunblock, to where the beach crowd thinned near the crash and rumble of the ocean. For the first time, she and Margaret had the beach blanket to themselves, and she knew it wouldn’t last. Beyond her feet and off to the right, her sister’s three friends squealed and pranced from the water’s edge, breasts bobbing inside new bikinis. The bright pastel colors made them hard to miss. They would probably be running back this way any minute.

“Well, we
are
at the beach,” Margaret said.

Janis turned onto her elbow. In contrast to her airhead friends, her older sister lay in quiet repose, brunette hair tucked into a neat bun that cushioned her head and opened her lithe neck to the sun. Black Wayfarers hid her eyes. When the breeze stirred, the strings of her apple-red bikini fluttered against her hip.

“Not here, I mean,” Janis said. “In the neighborhood. At home. I keep having this feeling that we’re—”

“Being watched? Like the song?”

Janis groaned. She had walked right into that one. “Somebody’s Watching Me” had played on the boom box a half hour before, the deejay at I-100 FM using a creepy ghoul’s voice when he recapped the song and artist. And it
was
a creepy song. The video was even creepier. But no, that’s not what Janis was talking about.

“Not funny,” she said.

“Sorry, couldn’t resist. Go on.”

“All right, but no more jokes. This is serious.”

The corner of Margaret’s glossy lips tipped into a half-smile. She sat up and checked her stomach before dripping tanning oil into her hand and spreading it around her golden belly.

Janis became aware of her own stomach starting to burn and reached for the sunblock. She had tried to wear Umbro shorts and a T-shirt, but Margaret insisted she wear something more grown-up. “You’re starting
high school
tomorrow,” she’d said with the chiding authority of an older sister and senior, and then she dug out one of her old bikinis for Janis to wear.

“There are just these… dreams I keep having,” Janis continued, rubbing sunblock above then below the lime-green bottoms. With her fingertips, she tested the fading bruise on the side of her thigh—softball casualty. “But they’re not dreams. Not exactly. They’re more like out-of-body experiences.”

“Out-of-what?”

“I think that’s what they’re called.”

“If you say so.”

Janis capped the sunblock and searched her sister’s face. She was wading into the paranormal, which wasn’t exactly her thing and was much less her sister’s. Margaret had given
Twilight Zone: The Movie
a thumbs-down last year, not because some parts were wet-your-pants scary but because it was “too implausible.” Ditto with
Poltergeist
the year before. But with the experiences happening almost nightly now, Janis needed to confide in someone, even if that someone was Margaret.

“Anyways, in these dreams, these experiences, I’m suddenly awake, and I’m standing in the backyard. And there’s this strange energy all around me:
whoosh-whoosh-whoosh
. Like the wind’s blowing but deeper and… rougher, I guess.”

Janis waved her hands around her head in demonstration, but Margaret was on her back again, the sun shining along her slender legs and glinting off toenails painted red to match her bikini.

“How can you be awake if you’re asleep?”

“That’s just it.” Janis frowned and brought a loose strand of hair around to her nose. “When it happens, I’m as awake as I am now. But my body’s still in bed. I mean, I can’t feel my body, but I know I’m not actually standing out in the backyard.”

“Maybe you’re sleepwalking. Mom says I used to sleepwalk.”

“Wouldn’t I wake up in the morning with crud on my feet if—?”

“People do strange things when they sleepwalk. I read about this guy from California who mowed his entire lawn, front and back. And he didn’t remember a thing when he woke up.”

“What does that have to do with—?”

“Only found out because his neighbors called the police. You know, the noise of the mower.”

Janis dropped her hair. “Margaret!”

“Oh,” she cut in again, “and he was buck naked.”

Janis snort-laughed. Margaret joined her, her own laughter illuminating the backward tilt of her face, her smooth, arcing neck. Disney couldn’t have animated a more perfect laugh. The only things missing were the little woodland creatures. But Janis only half begrudged Margaret her laugh, especially since her sister didn’t seem to let it out often enough.

“All right.” Margaret cleared her throat and retucked her bun beneath her head. “I’ll give you that you’re somehow awake in the backyard while asleep in bed. But what does that have to do with being watched?”

“I…” Janis began, then pressed her lips together. That’s where things got tricky.

She didn’t always remember the out-of-body experiences—not in detail, anyway. A dream would often intrude then another and another, such that by morning, she could only dimly remember the experience. All that remained were whatever impressions still lingered in her memory, faint and ghostly. And that’s what Janis felt at that moment, what she had been feeling all day: a spine-needling impression that someone had been watching.

And hadn’t there been a smell? Cigarette smoke?

Or maybe she was confusing last night’s experience with the present. The approaching surfer took a final pull on his cigarette stub, then flicked it away, not looking where it landed. A blue tattoo stained his upper arm, a dagger piercing a heart. The surfer behind him was sharp faced and darkly freckled, his nose coated in silver zinc. Janis peeked toward Margaret and began drawing her legs in.

The surfers swaggered toward the blanket as though meaning to trample over it but stopped at the last moment, propping their boards on end. Tattoo glanced along Janis’s legs then turned his gaze back on Margaret. He tossed his slick, sandy hair to the side, his stubbly cheeks swelling around a pair of hard dimples. Locals, Janis guessed.

Margaret raised her Wayfarers a half inch, then lowered them.

“Move along, boys,” she said.

The surfers’ smiles faltered. It was the way she had said it: no nonsense, her tone sounding older than her seventeen years. Freckles whispered something near Tattoo’s ear, drawing a stupid leer.

Janis suddenly felt naked in her two-piece and turned onto her side, pulling her knees in even more. The xylophonic beats of Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” popped from the boom box, but there was no fun in them. Janis peered toward the ocean, wishing Margaret’s friends were crowding the blanket again, giggles and all.
Figures. Now that they’re needed, they’re nowhere to be found.