I felt ready to face Doctor Warmal the next day. No, I didn't do my homework, but that's not really the point. After my meltdown in class, I don't think anyone will hold that against me. The second dose of medication warped my senses. My power was still fresh and strong. Perhaps it would even grow in time, the cumulative effects of my doses giving me new capacity.
"Did you make more plans to see Lei?" my father asked.
I sat in the passenger seat while my father drove. Not like last time, where his thoughts were a blurred jumble of unease. This time I knew everything going on in his head.
"Maybe after school. She wanted me to meet her grandfather."
Good for him. A girl will get his mind off his trouble, my father thought.
But he was wrong. A girl didn’t remove troubles, only made them more bearable. I focused on my father’s thoughts, looking for the undercurrent to ride deeper.
I spoke to draw out the secrets he concealed.
“So you never told Doctor Warmal about this new medication?”
“Of course not. He must think you made a miraculous recovery.”
Doctor Warmal… My father’s thoughts were colored with real hatred. My father deeply mistrusted the man. He’d never said so the entire time he was my physician.
I closed my eyes and willed him to remember why. Revealed to me lost memories of my father’s lab. I recognized it immediately from my many visits: rows of glassware on the counters in all shapes and sizes. Shelves filled with petri dishes, microscopes on the counters, and his cherished PCR machine for reading genetic sequences.
I was surprised to see Doctor Warmal standing in my father’s memory. In my father’s lab. What was he doing there?
“I’m sorry, sir. It won’t happen again,” my father’s voice came from me.
Doctor Warmal nodded. He straightened his lab coat. “I will personally handle the boy’s treatment from here.”
The perspective shifted. I was — or my father was — we bowed low in respect. Nearly groveling before the insufferable elderly man.
“You are very kind, Doctor Warmal,” my father said. “Thank you for not telling anyone.”
The brakes of the car screeched. I lurched against the pressure of my seatbelt. My eyes flew open, back in the present.
“Stay out of the road, idiot!” my father shouted out the window.
“Chill, bro!” A skateboarder in a basketball jersey. We’d arrived at the school.
The skateboarder scratched his shaggy brown head, hoisting the board under his arm. He stopped again, still standing in the street. I saw why: Two of the blackbirds made of smoke were sitting in the road in front of him. He didn’t see them, not really, but he must feel something was there. He maneuvered around them, prodding his foot blindly as though afraid of hitting an invisible wall. The blackbirds watched the skateboarder curiously, but showed no intention to move. Not even when his foot passed straight through them.
“Unbelievable,” my father muttered. “Is he on drugs? You know better than to take anything at school right? For you especially, since we never know how they might interact with —”
“This is a prep school, dad. He isn’t on drugs. I’m going to class, thanks for the ride.”
I was still a bit in shock as I got out of the car. So my father worked for Doctor Warmal? It seemed like he knew my father was making something he wasn’t supposed to. But he didn’t know that my father ever gave me the injection. That must be why he’s at the school now: trying to figure out what I took.
I hurried to catch up with the skateboarder, now almost inside the school.
“Hey did you see them too?”
“Huh what?” He looked at me much like a steamed vegetable might. He smelled like Scooby Doo, the van, and the marijuana, and the dog combined.
“You saw something in the road, didn’t you? Something unnatural.”
His jaw dropped open a bit, his scruffy goatee dangling. He nodded.
“I’m Martin.” I stuck out my hand. He stuck the edge of his skateboard into it, and we shook.
“Arnold,” he said. We walked together toward our chemistry class. I recognized him now as one of the boys sitting in front of me yesterday.
“I’m investigating those things,” I told him. “Not everyone can sense them.”
“I saw nothing.”
“You’re not crazy or anything. I saw it too.”
“I didn’t see anything,” Arnold barked. Too loud. Several heads turned our way, and someone giggled. Arnold hung his head, apparently ashamed of his ferocity. His shaggy hair hung low over his eyes. “The color was off, that’s all.”
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“What do you mean?”
I could have looked into his mind directly, but it was so loud with all the other students jostling their way to class. I tried not to hear them and to focus on his words.
“The color turned off,” Arnold said. “Like, part of the road wasn’t in color, man. It felt empty and cold and … I don’t know. Like I was looking at a picture of the road, where the road used to be.”
“This isn’t the first time you saw an empty patch like that, was it Arnold?”
He shook his head. It was probably my imagination that lice and dandruff abandoned ship and flew off in every direction. Then he took a good look at me, seeming to see me for the first time.
“You’re the kid who screamed yesterday.” Arnold looked relieved at the realization. “Shit man, and I was worried I was the crazy one.”
We arrived at class now. Standing outside, my mind searched for the hunger waiting for me. I tried to feel Doctor Warmal’s thoughts through the door. No good, it was too loud out here. I took a deep breath and opened the door.
Most of the twenty student class had already arrived. Lei waved at me from the back where we sat yesterday. Doctor Warmal wasn’t here yet. I took a sigh of relief, and headed for the back. Maybe he already learned what he came for, and wasn’t coming back…
“Good morning, Martin.” The voice behind me. And with it the thoughts, a heavy malevolence which poisoned the air and left me frozen. I dared not even turn around. “I hope you will be staying with us for the entire class today.”
“I’m sorry sir. It won’t happen again,” I said, mimicking my father’s words. I felt that catch him off guard — I already knew more than he suspected. I found courage to face him, pressing my advantage.
“Why are you really here?” I asked suddenly.
His tired gray eyes didn’t seem so fierce anymore. I couldn’t feel the hunger at all. I only felt a quiet dread, a welcoming of the end that has been fought too long, and can be denied no more. I’d been afraid for so long, that I don’t remember what it feels like to not. But no, those were not my thoughts at all, they were from Doctor Warmal. More terrible than his hunger or his anger was his quiet hopeless fear.
“I would like to have a word with your father when he picks you up today,” Doctor Warmal said. His lips pressed into an manual smile.
I searched for the reason, but there wasn’t time. He walked away from me to go to the front of the class. He broke our connection, and the wave of thoughts from the other students assaulted my awareness. I felt content that his challenge had been met and overcome. I went to the back to sit next to Lei. Arnold was sitting in front of her. He cast an uneasy glance my way, then turned back to his friend, also wearing the red basketball jersey.
I didn’t get another chance with Doctor Warmal after that. There were always too many other people around. I couldn’t get close enough for long enough to pierce his mind. Doctor Warmal was soon droning about different lab techniques and safety precautions that we would need throughout the semester. I already knew about that stuff from my father, and anyway, I could always read someone’s mind if I had to get through a test.
I felt the warmth of Lei’s greeting without her words. She already knew Arnold and his friend Ramsey, and they already knew each other since forever.
“You okay, man?” Ramsey asked me after Lei introduced him.
“I’m better than okay,” I said. There was no going back, no hiding that I was different. And so on I plunged: “Do you see the empty patches too?”
“Bro, leave it. I shouldn’t have told you that,” Arnold says.
“There’s nothing to be ashamed about,” Lei says. “Martin and I see things too. Although I have no idea how you could without any training or anything.”
“Hey, what are you talking about?” Ramsey asked. “I don’t see anything. Am I the only one?”
“Quiet in the back!” Doctor Warmal huffed. “Now if you will all open to chapter one of your lab workbook, and look at the materials section…”
I can’t report anything else supernatural through the day. Chemistry was uneventful, although it seemed like Doctor Warmal’s eyes were always lingering on me. That could have been my own fault for talking though. After chemistry was calculus, and history, and then lunch. Arnold and Ramsey joined Lei and I in the cafeteria. There were picnic tables outside, but it was windy and rainy out there. It’s too bad, because in here it was too crowded and loud to really look for anything with my mind.
“I asked my grandfather, and he’s looking forward to you coming today Martin,” Lei said me, setting down her tray next to mine. “I can drive you.”
“Can Arnold come too?” I asked. “If he already senses things without training, then he might have an aptitude your grandfather can bring out.”
Arnold hung his head over his food and shrugged.
“Dude you never told me about any of this stuff,” Ramsey exclaimed. “I’m coming too. That’s okay, right? I can still learn.”
“Yeah sure. I mean, you don’t have to. But if you want, I guess grandfather wouldn’t mind.”
There was no mistaking the pang of disappointment in Lei’s mind. She was sitting next to me on the bench, close enough. I searched underneath her words to hear:
Noo… why’d you have to invite him? Now when are Martin and I going to have a chance to be alone?
I didn’t know what to think about that, besides embarrassed. Was she really that interested in me? How could she possibly see anything in someone so sickly and weak as myself? Or was she planning a trick on me, a pawn in some greater game to use and throw away?
I let my father know he didn’t have to pick me up. That would spare him another day from talking with Doctor Warmal too. Good. I needed the extra time, and whatever I could find out from Lei’s grandfather.
In the afternoon I had English, and French, and an elective wood carving class. There will be opportunities to talk about these later. I couldn’t think of anything else besides what to ask Lei’s grandfather about the Old Ones. That, and wonder what she meant by wanting to get me alone. And if I’m being honest, a little dreaming about what that could entail.
After school, Lei collected us by the door and led us to her car. She drove a 2004 Honda, with a top that opens, only not today because of the rain. Arnold and Ramsey had a lot to say about that. Ramsey kept asking Lei about the engine, but she didn’t know, and was mostly quiet. In fact, Ramsey was the only one who never ran out of things to say.
“It’s aliens,” Ramsey declared, quite confident, despite being the only one not to feel them. “They’re sending signals to the Earth, and you guys are detecting them. And of course none of the adults feel it, because they’re like, on a different frequency, you know?”
“But grandfather Mori feels them,” Lei protested.
“Maybe he’s an alien too. Oh wait, do you guys have a satellite dish or something at your house?”
“It’s not aliens!” Lei and I said, almost in unison.
Ramsey was quiet for about ten seconds in the backseat.
“You don’t know that,” he said. “Hey, what about ghosts?”
“My momma said there are little gates hidden everywhere in the world,” Arnold said gruffly. “Little gates to heaven. Little gates to hell. Opening and closing all the time, that people never notice. I think that’s what I saw. Only I know it wasn’t to heaven, because heaven wouldn’t leave such a cold empty place behind.”
“The Old Ones don’t live in heaven or hell,” Lei said quietly. The car rolled to a stop on a quiet shady suburban street. A street I must have passed a dozen times, and would have never thought would hide such secrets about the world. “The Old Ones live among us. And we must be ready, for when they are ready for us. Grandfather Mori will teach you what they never will in school.”