I stepped out of sight of the bathroom mirror and the now familiar stain inside the sink that reminded me of Louisiana. Pulling out my pen, I sketched the luck symbol on the inside of both palms.

Last loop, I had gotten ahold of the tall man. And when he came to offer me a deal again, I was going to get him one more time. I would rip away every ounce of luck he held. All I had to do was wait.

I positioned myself just outside of the door's swing, ready to capitalize on the moment of surprise when the tall man walked in, before he had fully realized what was going on.

Grinning, I crouched, waiting for the door to open. I knew it wouldn't be long. Last loop, the tall man had come sniffing around soon after the dark heart-napper had gotten his luck stolen, so he would be coming around soon. I knew I could get my hands on it.

As I waited, I examined the luck that I had spinning in my core. Before, when I had been trying to reproduce pyrokinesis, and I had spun it up and thrown it. It had produced an interesting effect. Cold fire. It seemed to hurt the tall man. I remembered the angry red blotches he had on his face when he had later shown up in his helicopter, which was weird. He had a helicopter. He had interacted with the police.

My mind spun to the Men in Black, wondering if he had a group of supernaturally gifted detectives on his payroll, and they were the only ones allowed to interact with him when he called. The whole idea made me begin to chuckle. It sounded like a ridiculous movie idea. There's some high-powered tycoon locked away in his ivory tower who will only see certain people, and of course, he'll only see certain people because only those certain people can see him. It's some sort of Catch-22, where he's not actually there, except he's got a close ring of people that treat him as if he is, and so because he has a ring of people treating him as if he is, he is actually there, even though he isn't.

The whole idea made me start giggling. I didn't mean to, but the tension was ridiculous. How long did I have to wait? I looked at my hands, making sure I had inked the symbol correctly. I no longer needed to look at it to get it right, but it was worth checking on. Time crept by. I needed to figure out a way to start a loop with a watch. I wondered how much trouble it would be to take a watch from someone. For that matter, I wondered if I could get my hands on a watch old enough I could read it.

The only watches I had seen at school were smartwatches, which wouldn't help me at all, since I wasn't able to see screens. I needed a good old-fashioned analog watch, not one of those new digital models, which sent me on another tangent.

Why couldn't I see screens?

Reflections were partially explained, if not clearly understood. However, screens were a completely different story. That was just beyond not fair. What sort of supernatural mumbo-jumbo was this that I...

Right at that moment, the door opened, and a thrill shivered through me as I crouched, preparing myself, ready to leap. A tall figure stepped through the doorway, and I jumped forward.

"Aha!" I yelled, laying my hands on...

"Hey! What are you doing?" Billy shouted, as I got both hands on him.

Of course, my luck latched on.

Billy tried to stumble backward, but we were both tied to a permanent point in space, right in the doorway. He stumbled and half-fell. My hands, one on his belly and one on his side, kept him from falling all the way. He twisted and got a hand on the ground, beginning to grow red in the face. Billy then mumbled one of the most magnificent strings of profanity I have ever heard.

"Let go of me, you little freak!" Billy screamed.

I tried to shush him.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"Quiet! You want to bring Mr. Pheizer down on our heads? He's going to give us both detention!"

Billy looked up at me, light in his eyes. "Yeah? You think so?" he said, and it was at that point I remembered who I was talking to. Billy, of course, wanted detention because that meant he didn't have to go home.

I had to draw some amount of luck; otherwise, as far as I knew, the permanent point in space would not release. I was hesitant to draw from another person; however, we were stuck, so I had to do something. I focused on trying to take a single thread of luck. It was tricky and required my concentration…

That was when he kicked me.

We were standing close, so it wasn't a huge wind-up football punt type of kick. But he was bigger than I was and had committed to the kick. And it landed—a solid blow right to my balls.

Now, in my short life, I had been through much worse. Had experienced spectacular degrees of pain. Even very recently, with my self-inflicted car wreck. Short, but it had redefined what I thought of as pain.

But I had never been kicked in the balls before.

Something inside my chest locked up. If not for it being locked, I would have begun to throw up right there. Instead, I had the worst unbreathing, dry heaving, weak-kneed, sick-to-my-stomach, lightheaded reaction all at the same time. My legs gave out. If I could have breathed, I might have screamed, or moaned in agony. All that came out was a small, air-sucking squeak.

Billy now had both hands on the ground, trying to twist himself out of my grip, which, of course, he wasn't in. It wasn’t working. He was in the impossible, immovable space that the luck transfer existed in. I hung off the two luck points attached to Billy’s waste like a wet rag. I was glad for a moment that I couldn’t breathe. My face was inches from Billy’s camo cargo pants, and I was pretty sure they had absorbed enough skin oils they were now waterproof. My balls felt like they were trying to retreat up into my chest.

I didn’t want to be close to Billy any more, but the pain was keeping me from remembering how to draw some luck and break the bond. I still couldn’t breathe. I was ready to risk the stink.

Billy stopped trying to twist away after his back cracked loudly.

“Ow!” he said.

He must have realized he couldn't twist away. His eyes watering, he gave me the weirdest upside-down, puzzled, angry look I've ever seen, and then proceeded to try and kick me again.

I found the energy to push my hips up and back so that my poor balls were out of kicking range. Bent in half, arms above my head, dancing back and forth, hands glued to Billy’s waist; who in turn, was bent awkwardly over, hands on the floor, legs dangling from my hands and kicking. I couldn’t imagine how ridiculous we looked.

It was at this point that Miss Billings walked in on our little scuffle.

"What is going on?" she demanded. “Break this up at once!”

I regained my ability to breathe at about the same time that Billy said,

“He started it!”

I twisted around from my awkward sideways vantage and looked at her, recognizing the blue paisley dress that she wore. She was the one who had confronted Mr. Pheizer the loop I had fainted in front of the locker, I smiled up at her. "Oh, you know," I said, "just an aggressive practice session for Twister."

Billy looked over at me. "Huh? Twister? That lame food from Taco Bell?"

Miss Billings frowned. Then began to look upset.

I remembered. Jokes didn't work on her. She proceeded to come over and attempt to forcibly separate us by putting one hand on Billy's chest and one on my forehead. Then she tried to push us apart. Of course, this didn't work. What happened was my head went back at an extreme angle, and Billy began to kick again.

"Let go right this instant," she said in a stern voice, which I pictured she thought sounded motherly, but to my ear, it sounded rather peevish.

It was at this point that someone I had never seen before stepped in from the side. With Miss Billings's hand on my forehead, pushing my head back, I only got the barest image of the person. Their voice, however, put the hairs on the back of my neck up.

"Nobody make a sound," the voice said. It was low, full of menace, almost a gleeful promise.

Miss Billings looked up and began to protest. "Now just what do you think you...." She cut herself off mid-sentence and uttered the most girlishly appropriate gasp I think I had ever heard. I would have attributed this sort of gasp to only being able to come from someone like Nurse Streep. However, it was like she took in a great big gasp of air and then forgot how to let it out.

I wished she'd take her hand off my forehead because I still couldn't see very clearly, and my neck was beginning to hurt. All I could see were the stranger's shoes, which appeared to be black leather riding boots. They had buckles and zippers on the side to keep from getting tangled. I would have laughed it off like something out of a Mad Max film, except there was something lived-in about these. There was mud on the toe and a stain on the side that drew my gaze. It was brown, ranging to reddish. Something about it caught my attention. I couldn’t tell from far away, but it looked like blood.

"We're all going to step back into this room here, nice and easy," the stranger said. Shockingly, Miss Billings complied, letting go of my head and stepping into the bathroom.

It was then that I got a good look at who it was that was confronting us. A man I had never seen before, holding a pistol. Not held out theatrically like you see in many movies, straight-arming it, but held low near his stomach. He was wearing leathers clearly made for riding a motorcycle. His hair was long and tied back in a ponytail with a beard that was braided in front with a couple of simple silver clasps. He had dark eyes, a brown that was nearly black, and his skin was weathered and mottled, looking like it had been pocked and pitted by both time and hard use. He had a flat, no-nonsense stare, and underneath his white and brown streaked beard, he had a frown, as if this whole thing was not worth his time.

I managed to remember at this point how to draw luck. I took the smallest amount I could from Billy, thinking to myself that he was going to need all he could get. After it finished transferring, we both fell to the floor in a heap.

Billy recovered first, getting up and moving back quietly into the room, his hands held at chest level, his face looking surprisingly calm. My legs were still made of rubber, and as I attempted to get to my feet and move back into the room, the stranger moved forward and picked me up by my shirt back and bodily tossed me into the room, stepping in and shutting the door behind him.

“Please,” Billy said, “don’t kill them, dad.”

***