Chapter 2

“And then I slipped and fell into my own cake!” Elizabeth said. “Luckily my mom baked two or there wouldn’t be enough to go around!”

“What a klutz you were as a kid,” Aaron said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Can’t want to be a dancer if you trip all over yourself!”

“I thought you wanted to be an artist?” he asked.

“Can’t a girl be both?!” she asked with faux anger. “You don’t think I have the talent to be my true self don’t you?!”

Elizabeth grabbed his arm and began to squeeze it with mock anger.

“So mean,” she said. “So where do you want to go next?”

He sighed, looking at the park around him. There were more people in the vicinity considering the spring weather was a huge draw to the residents of Elm City. The trees overhead were blossoming with newly opened pink flowers. The lime green leaves they held tenderly stretched out like a baby’s newborn finger. The warm sunshine warmed him as they strolled down the path.

“I don’t know,” Aaron said. “I just thought about coming here rather than staying home. Too nice a day to stay inside in a cramped dark room.”

“That actually reminds me I have some math homework to do,” Elizabeth said. “If I don’t get it done by next week it’ll mess with my straight A average. Can’t have that if I want my parents to pay for the college I want to go to.”

She looked up at him.

“Are you sure you don’t want to try for a less degree than in medicine?” she asked. “If you’re too busy with schoolwork we won’t be able to see each other very much.”

“I know…” he said. “But I’ve got to for Gale’s sake.”

Elizabeth sighed at him for saying that.

“You know,” she said. “It wasn’t your fault that happened.”

“Yeah it was,” Aaron replied. “When he pushed me out of the way of that car it was my fault for playing running across the road without thinking.”

“You were a kid,” she said. “It’s one thing to do that when you’re eight and playing in front of your house.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But you know what Gale said when I was in the hospital? When I walked up to him and I called him a hero he said-”

“That heroes don’t let good people die,” Elizabeth interrupted. “I know. You’ve told me this I don’t know how many times. You forgot to mention how angry Gale’s parents were at that.”

“But isn’t that inspiring?” Aaron said. “That an eight year old told me that. When the doctor came in to see him, it gave me a rush that I’ve never felt before. It was at that moment I knew I had to pay my debt and do my best to save everybody. Isn’t that cool?”

“Not really,” Elizabeth said. “I’m not into heroic speeches. Back to what I was saying, are your parents going to let you go to the med school in Blackbrier. If they don’t, we won’t be able to see each other.”

He glanced to the right, unsure of what to say. They stood in front of the fountain of the park. Aaron watched as a mother and her son tossed some pennies into the water like his own mother did when he was a kid in the same fountain.

“You know how my parents are,” he said. “Kind of clingy. Don’t want me to be too far away. Whenever I talk about them, they keep talking about how they’d prefer the med school that’s only one town over. I don’t think they’d force me to go there instead of the one in Blackbrier but...I’m not sure.”

“Fine!” Elizabeth said.

She let go of his arm and stood in front of him. It was one of these moments that Aaron could get a very close view of just how beautiful she was. The blond ringlets of hair that fell behind her was like a yellow gold waterfall, complemented by flawless skin and a figure that could only be described as slender and elegant.

Aaron knew that it was usually just in cheesy poems that guys compared a woman’s eyes to jewelry but her eyes were in fact like blue sapphire as they had a certain shiny quality to them. In the bright spring sunlight she looked as gorgeous as any woman Aaron had ever seen. The only thing that he found even slightly unattractive was her slightly irritated look.

“I guess we’ll just have to tell your parents about our plans to get married,” she said. “Then they’ll understand why you want to go to school at Blackbrier.”

He gave her a nervous expression.

“But…” he said. “I don’t know how my parents will react! I know your parents took it well but I don’t know how mine will. Knowing them...they’d probably say that I’m too young to decide something so important at such a young age.”

“Well they’ll find out eventually, won’t they?” Elizabeth asked.

“Yeah,” Aaron sighed.

“So let’s get it over with, okay?” she asked. “Don’t worry, we could tell them that if they object we’re both legal adults by next year so there’s nothing they could really do. So what do you say?”

“Alright,” he sighed.

“Yeah!” Elizabeth said.

She jumped up and down before rushing over intertwining her fingers in his. She gave him a mischievous smile as Elizabeth knew that them holding hands in public was something he found uncomfortable. However, she adored the gesture. Aaron inhaled before turning around and walking toward his house as she laid her head on his shoulder.

“Boy, I almost forgot how much stuff you have,” she said.

Elizabeth stared at the red, glassy pebble in between her fingers. While she bent down to examine his rock collection on a shelf beside his bed, Aaron laid on his bed, looking up at the shelf above him. The shelf above him was where he kept the miscellaneous stuff he’d picked up. After she had gone through everyone of the rocks she then turned to look at his collection of sticks in the corner opposite of his shelf.

“Wow,” Elizabeth gasped as she picked up a branch with rough bark. “I haven’t seen this kind of wood in a long time.”

“Yeah,” Aaron said as he sat up. “I got it in the woods outside the city when we used to play there as kids. I think one of those I used to sword fight Gale with.”

“We were some rough kids back then,” she said. “I see you never really got out of your habit of collecting things.”

“Yeah,” Aaron said. “I kind of hate to leave this stuff behind when I go to med school.”

“You’re such a pack rat,” Elizabeth said with a chuckle. “A cute pack rat, but a pack rat nonetheless.”

After placing the branch back down she sat down onto the edge of his bed. After walking past Aaron’s collection metal pieces, Elizabeth looked around at his other treasures. She leaned against the wall before looking up at the same shelf Aaron was looking at. She pushed up at the bottom of the shelf, causing some of the items to bounce.

“What do you keep on this one?” Elizabeth asked.

“Just stuff that has no real category,” he said. “Or stuff I can’t identify.”

“Hmm,” she said.

Elizabeth kept pushing her hand up against the flat bottom of the shelf. A few of the items rolled off and fell onto the bed below. He groaned at the sight.

“Stop that,” he said.

“Sorry,” she said. “Just bored. When do your parents get home again?”

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“They usually arrive at the same time,” Aaron said. “And should be here any minute.”

He looked at the three items that had fallen. They were a round object Aaron had never been able to decipher as wood or stone, a petrified insect and a green cylinder with silver spear-like ends. While Aaron placed the first two things back onto the shelf above, he held the green object in his hand for a moment.

He felt how smoothly the object was and how it looked almost plant-like to him. The surface of the object reminded him of the smooth inner bark of a tree after you stripped away the outermost layer in both touch and sight. It was almost like a scroll in design. It was rather weird that way.

“Never seen anything like that before,” Elizabeth said. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I picked it up at the park one day and wanted to ask my parents what it was. I guess I forgot and just...left it here.”

“Are those buttons?” she asked.

She pointed to one of the many round red buttons on it. Aaron’s finger circled around the round protrusion. Testing the object, he put a little pressure onto it.

“I think so-,” he said.

After pressing a little bit too hard onto the button, the green object unwrapped itself like a scroll. It revealed itself to be a leaf-like object with lime green veins was just one long rectangle. It began wrapping itself around Aaron before mummifying him. At first the young man couldn’t breath as the unrolled botanical thing had covered his mouth and nose. His eyesight become nothing but a hideous green.

“Aaron!” Elizabeth yelled.

He thought he was going to die from suffocation. He struggled against the green fetters before the weirdest sensation began to occur in his body. The leafy material began to seep into his body. The restraints turned liquid before sinking through directly into him. It felt like every pour of his skin had been stretched open with the resulting ooze flooding in.

After feeling as though he was drinking a thick liquid through the surface of his body Aaron could feel the core of his innermost body begin to change. Aaron could feel his bones, vessels and inner skin begin to turn to mush before once again hardening. His own brain was jostled before being restructured, an event he was only semi-conscious for. After he began to grow more aware of his surroundings, Aaron could now feel something beginning to pierce his skin from the inside.

“Aaron!” she yelled. “What’s happening?! What’s happening?!”

As he could feel himself drift in and out of consciousness he began to panic. He stood up from his bed and began running forward, running into a wall headfirst before being rebuffed by the solid plaster. After stumbling backward Aaron could feel the process of whatever that thing was doing wearing off before a tingling pain began rippling throughout his body.

He winced in agony before looking around to find the bathroom across from his room. He ran toward it as he didn’t want Elizabeth to see him in any more pain. However, just as he ran into it and grabbed the door handle, she ran through the doorway just before he could shut it. Now that she was beside him, Elizabeth put her hand on his back as he lurched over the counter where the sinks were held. Aaron looked up at the mirror in front of him to find that sweat had broken out all over his face.

“Aaron!” she yelled. “What’s wrong?! Please...please don’t leave me...”

“I don’t know!” Aaron said. “Get out of here before something bad happens to you-! Aaaahhh!”

Scales protruded out of his entire body, first starting with his arms before eventually his chest, back and down his legs. It was immensely painful to feel the protrusions escape his cheeks, forehead and back of his head. They tore through his clothes as they did. Aaron reared his head back as he screamed at the top of his lungs. His body began shaking while he desperately tried to inhale.

When he leaned forward he found a scene straight out of a nightmare in the mirror. Elizabeth was clasping her hands over her mouth in shock as the woody, green scales had finished growing from all over his body. When Aaron got a good look at them he found they looked like pinecone scales. They even had small points at the end of each individual scale like a conifer cone.

While he looked like a circus freak, he thought the nightmare was over once they had finished growing. Aaron stopped screaming as relief washed over. Then they started flattening. The woody scales that had sprung up began bending down over his body so their flat undersides were worn over him like armor. Almost his entire body became encased in the pinecone scales, his eyes one of the few exceptions. One of the scales had even covered his mouth. Slight pain he sensed from his feet and hands began causing him to grunt in pain. He looked down to see his hands and feet had white bark growing over them.

“What is this?!” Elizabeth said. “What is this?! What is this?!”

Aaron looked back at the mirror to see that his jet black hair was gaining a green hue. While it was still dark, if one looked closely enough they could see it was no longer black but a very dark shade of green. Not only that but his hair had grown longer. If that was not strange enough, a lime green palm leaf had grown from around his neck to wrap around his collar like a scarf. The scarf-like leaf must have been ten feet in length and billowed in the air without any wind blowing.

While still dazzled at the sight, thoughts, images and emotions that were alien to him started flooding into his mind. Death of people he’d never seen, the birth of children that weren’t his, and other events flashed through him. The prominent thing he could see was a pale faced woman looking up at him as though Aaron were staring at her from below, her face stoic and unmoving. The amount of information that flashed through his mind in such little time actually gave him an intense headache. It felt as though a spear had pierced through his skull before the sensation disappeared.

“You are now in danger,” the pale faced woman said. “Flee.”

Once her voice was gone he was now aware of his surroundings again. While Elizabeth was done screaming she was now looking on aghast with horror in silence.

“What on earth?” she finally gasped.

Aaron looked down, thoroughly perplexed but glad he was no longer in pain. He continued to look at himself in the mirror, his eyes running over his newly transformed self. As miraculous as this was, all he wished at that moment was for whatever happened to him to no longer be on him. Aaron balled his hands into fists, wishing it were gone.

And it suddenly was. The cone scales raised themselves up from against this skin and slid themselves back into his body. The white wood around his feet and arms receded back into his skin as well. His dark green tinted hair turned pure black once more and returned to its normal length. The large frond around his neck also vanished. Aaron looked down to see that his clothes miraculously were stitched back together as though they had not been torn.

He turned back to Elizabeth who shook her head in fear. While she was by no means a stoic person, Aaron had never seen Elizabeth so afraid. She backed away from as though he were a wild animal about to attack. Now Aaron was the one who was afraid.

What do I do? He thought. She thinks of me as a monster right now, I just know it!

“Did…?” she said. “Did that...just happen? Did...did you really-?”

“No,” Aaron said. “It was just your imagination. And mine too. There’s a phenomena called group hallucinations. We both just had one.”

“But...but I-,” she said.

“Hallucinations,” he said. “We both just had one. I...imagined my body covered in…”

“In what?” Elizabeth asked. “Pinecone…?”

“Beetles,” he said. “Beetles. I imagined my body covered in beetles.”

“But if we both hallucinated-” Elizabeth said.

“Just because we both hallucinated doesn’t mean we saw the exact same thing,” he said. “Must have been a gas leakage. I’ll have to get my parents to call an electrician or a plumber...maybe they can figure out what caused us to see such things.”

“But…” Elizabeth said. “I know that I wasn’t...you can’t mean that...it was real-”

“No. It. Wasn’t!” Aaron said. “It wasn’t real!”

He stepped toward her with his body tensing up and anger rising to his face. Elizabeth shook her head as she stepped back, clearly afraid of him. He reached out his hands toward her, a gesture Elizabeth would normally enjoy as she would jump directly into his arms at the sight. However, when Aaron did it at that moment she screamed before turning around and running away.

He chased her down the stairs, not having any idea what to say. The only thing Aaron could hope to offer was that they would never speak of this again and he’d never put that horrible suit on again. They could just keep living as though it had never happened.

Nothing will shatter what we have. Aaron thought. And certainly not whatever happened.

The pale faced woman appeared at the forefront of his vision again. Her face emerged from the recesses of his mind like emerging from dark water. Her red lips and ivory hair contrasted with her milk white face, as though the pale moon would on any otherwise pitch black night.

“The young and inexperienced are often surprised how easily things can be shattered,” she said. “Personal bonds are as easy to shatter as glass.”

Get out of my mind! Aaron yelled.

After arriving at the bottom of the stairs he found Elizabeth had raced to the kitchen. She was headed towards the door that led outside. However, as she kept racing she ran into the side of a chair beside the table. Her leg was caught by the chair’s leg and Elizabeth tumbled with the chair.

A clanging sound could be heard when the wooden furniture bounced against the linoleum while Elizabeth fell on her side. Aaron raced over to pick her up, taking her by the right hand and under her left arm. She was sobbing as he did, shaking her head as her tears pooled onto the floor.

“Let go of me!” she yelled. “Let go of me!”

“Shh,” he said. “Stop! I’m still the same person...I’m still the Aaron you’ve known all your life.”

“No you’re not!” Elizabeth said. “And even if you are, how can I trust you?!”

“Listen!” he yelled. “Forget it! We just-!”

Aaron heard the click of what he recognized as the key entering into the doorknob. The two of them quickly turned to see both of his parent’s enter the kitchen. Elizabeth hurriedly picked herself up just in time for both his mother and father to enter. When his mother arrived right behind his father both turned to stare at the two of them with blank expressions. Then those expressions turned to shock.

“What-what?” Aaron’s father asked.

“What?” Aaron asked. “Is it the fact that Elizabeth’s here? We have something to tell you-”

“You really do,” his mother said. “What are you doing in our house?”

Aaron felt as though he’d been punched in the gut. He stumbled back.

“What?” he asked.

“Who are you?” his dad said. “Tell us right now!”

“Um…” he said. “Aaron?”

“You don’t remember me, Miss Vulier?” Elizabeth asked.

“No,” the older couple said together.

“But…” Aaron said. “I’m your son!”

“We don’t have a son,” his father said.