Edgewood Series: Books 1 - 3 (2 page)

I grew kind of fond of all the nighttime people and found myself labeling them. There was Grandma Nelly, and the Woman-Who-Played-the-Piano. Third-Shift-Guy lived on Elm Street. If I got there early enough he was leaving for work as I was arriving. Three doors down from him was Knitting-Lady. Always knitting, all the time. There were others, but the ones I mentioned were the regulars. I wondered how many of them tried to sleep, but just couldn’t. Did they lie in bed like I did, feeling like their heads might explode if they had to stay there one more minute?

I ended my nighttime route by looping past the abandoned train station on the outskirts of town. The building itself was old and boarded up, but still pretty solid. There had been some talk by the local historical committee to have it restored, but that never happened. Beyond the train station were the tracks, no longer in use, and beyond that, what seemed like an endless field. Signs on the building warned about trespassing, so no one ever went there but me, or at least that’s how it felt. I liked ending with a trip to the train station. It was forbidden and dark. A little scary. It made going home seem like a relief.

Each night, I thought this trek outside might be my last. It was ridiculous, I thought, to be roaming around when I was so tired and all I really wanted to do was sleep. I had to figure out a way to sleep without leaving the house. But a solution never came and I just kept going.

You might be wondering—why didn’t I just do this walk thing earlier? Eight, nine, ten o’clock? If I did that, I’d be back in plenty of time for a normal bedtime. Don’t think it hadn’t occurred to me. I tried it, more than once, and it didn’t work. It only worked when I left after my usual bedtime. I knew it was just a head game, but I didn’t know what else to do.

Like I said before, my parents have no trouble falling asleep. “I wish I had your energy,” my mom says, as if energy has anything to do with it. She’s a speech pathologist at a school (not mine, thank God), and pretty worn out most of the time. She and my dad are in their late fifties, a lot older than my friends’ parents. One drawback to having older parents is that I don’t have any living grandparents; the last one died when I was a little kid. I do have an older sister, Carly, but I don’t have much in common with her. I was born when Carly was still in high school. Her son, my nephew Frank, is only five and a half years younger than me. I was what people call an “oops” or “change of life” baby.

My mom told me that when she learned she was pregnant with me they were over the moon with excitement, but Carly said otherwise. Her version is that Mom cried and cried when she first found out.

I know that having me put a damper on my parents’ plans. They were just about done with the whole child-rearing thing when I came along. Knowing this makes me feel bad, but there’s not too much I can do about it. Carly was hell on wheels, even she admits that. She drank and smoked pot and flunked classes and wrecked the car. I heard my dad say they couldn’t go through that again, that they’re glad I’m a good kid. I figure it’s the least I can do. I don’t want them to worry about me and my psychological problems.

So I keep my troubles to myself. When I can’t sleep, which is most of the time, I walk at night. I do my rounds, going from the mall to the industrial park to the houses, and then I go home and crawl into bed.

That night after seeing the light explosion I fell into a deep sleep as soon as my head touched the pillow. I actually remember sinking through all the stages of sleep. Down, down, down I went, into a sinkhole of comfort and warmth. I had dreams, vivid colorful dreams, and I remembered them when the alarm went off, but somewhere between me hitting the snooze button and my mother yelling up the stairs, they completely left my brain.

I did a quick look online to see if there was anything in the news about meteors or shooting stars or weird lights in the sky, but there was nothing at all. Nada.

It was starting to feel like one of those vivid dreams that seem real when you first open your eyes, but fade the longer you’re awake. I didn’t have too much time to think about it, though, since I needed to get my stuff together and head for school. As the day progressed, I somehow managed to put it out of my mind. Until last hour when I had science with Mr. Specter.

Specter was one of the better teachers at my school. He was almost as old as my parents, and he didn’t try to relate to the kids, something I liked. Nothing worse than teachers who act like they know the latest slang or ask about rock bands or popular YA novels, like they’re one of us. Mr. Specter just did what he was supposed to do. He taught us science. He totally loved the subject—that much was clear. I was taking what everyone called dummy science, a class called Science Samplers, which consisted of units in biology, chemistry, and natural science. Basically, Specter covered whatever he was interested in. It seemed to vary from year to year and class to class, but no one ever complained because he was brilliant and funny and interesting. We saw films on technology, and he did magic tricks and explained how they were done, and he encouraged us to bring in things to share like a sort of high school show-and-tell. One kid brought in his uncle’s taxidermied squirrel, which started a whole conversation about how it was done and why. Another student in my class brought in fossils she found on vacation, and then we were all about fossils for the next week. You didn’t know what you might get in Specter’s class, but it was never dull, and that’s saying a lot when you’re a sophomore in high school.

That day, I sat down in my seat, the middle of the row closest to the door. I settled in and dropped my book and notebook on the desk. We hardly ever used the textbook, but I felt compelled to keep bringing it anyway. The rest of the class filtered in bit by bit, but Mr. Specter wasn’t upfront like he usually was. The bell rang and still he wasn’t there. A few kids speculated that we would be on our own. There was talk of leaving, but no one did. Some pulled out their phones and several of the girls started talking, the way girls do sometimes, kind of show-offy, laughing and smiling in the direction of guys they liked, hoping the guys would notice and drift over by them. I wasn’t the kind anyone wanted, so I kept quiet and took it all in.

Finally, half an hour later, out of complete boredom, I opened my notebook and started doodling randomly. Without realizing what I was doing, I started sketching the light show from the night before, first as it appeared in the sky and then how it looked on the ground. In the background, I drew the abandoned train station, quickly and with great detail. I’m usually terrible at drawing, but this turned out good, surprisingly good. My hand had a life of its own. It knew where each line and dot belonged, like someone else was drawing it through me. Without even thinking about it, I sketched a figure standing in the middle of the field, right in the center of the glowing swirl, arms raised upward. It was a picture of me, although I didn’t remember standing quite that way.

When I glanced up, I saw that the girl in front of me, Mallory Nassif, had turned around in her seat and was watching me draw. I didn’t know Mallory that well. She was the sort of girl who blended in with the crowd, until you noticed her, and then she clearly stood out. She had big doe-eyes fringed with long lashes, shiny dark hair always in a ponytail, and this really nice laugh that carried across the lunchroom. Her skin was the color of coffee with cream. I sometimes got that tan by the middle of summer, if I was out a lot, but her coloring came naturally. Besides what I saw in front of me, all I knew about her was that she’d been the new girl the beginning of this school year, and she played on the field hockey team. Our eyes met for a second and then she gestured to my notebook. “Whatcha drawing there, Russ?” she asked.

I stared, surprised she even knew my name. I started to say something about how it was nothing, just a doodle, but before I could get the words out, the door flew open and Mr. Specter strode in. I shut my notebook.

“Okay, people,” he bellowed, heading to the front of the room. “Settle down. Free time is over. Now it’s my turn.” He seemed a little out of breath, and not himself, frankly. He wore a button-down shirt with a sweater vest over it and a pair of creased gray trousers, per usual. His wire-rimmed glasses had slid to the end of his nose and perspiration shone on his forehead.

“You okay, Mr. Specter?” asked one of girls. Emily, a total suck-up. “You’re not sick, are you?’

“I’m fine, Emily,” he said. “Just coming back from a meeting that ran a little late.” He shuffled through some papers on his desk and went to his computer to send attendance to the office. Everyone was quiet now. We all respected Mr. Specter. He was a real teacher. “Now,” he said, walking away from his desk and standing front and center. “I thought we’d talk about astronomy today.”

“I’m a Capricorn!” This from Chris Jennings, a guy I was friends with in grade school, back before I had good taste in people.

“That would be astrology, Mr. Jennings.” Mr. Specter pulled a handkerchief out of his pants pocket and mopped his brow. “Another fascinating subject, but not one that’s included in our curriculum.” Our curriculum—what a joke. As if we had a set schedule. “No, I’m talking about
astronomy
, the study of objects and matter outside the earth’s atmosphere and of their physical and chemical properties.” He looked at us over his glasses. “That’s an exact dictionary definition, a rather narrow view in my opinion. Astronomy is so much more than that.” He glanced around the room. “William Shakespeare said, ‘It is not in the stars to hold our destiny, but in ourselves.’ Does anyone know what that means?”

Mallory raised her hand, and when he nodded, she said, “That’s not quite right, Mr. Specter. The actual line is from the play
Julius Caesar
and it goes like this: ‘Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.’”

I thought Mr. Specter might be irritated at being corrected, but he just nodded. “Well done, Ms. Nassif. And what exactly does that mean?” He glanced around the room. Mallory started to answer, but he brushed her off saying, “Let’s give someone else a turn, shall we?”

He pointed to a kid in the front row, who shrugged his shoulders and said, “Yeah, I got nothing.”

Mr. Specter leaned back against the whiteboard. “Come now, there are twenty-four students in this room. Miss Nassif can’t be the only one with a brain in her head.”

Whoa, kind of harsh. Especially coming from Mr. Specter, who wasn’t usually demanding at all.

“Can you repeat the quote?” someone called out.

Mr. Specter raised his eyebrows at Mallory, who sat up straight and repeated, “Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

“What is this, English class?” another guy grumbled. “I want to do science.”

Mr. Specter ignored him and walked up to me. “Mr. Becker, would you care to tell us what that means?” He leaned over and drummed his fingers against my notebook.

I nervously cleared my throat. “Umm, I think it means we determine our own fate. It’s not what happens to us in life, it’s what we do about it.”

Mr. Specter gave me a penetrating look and then nodded. “Very good.” He walked briskly to the front of the room. “Last night a phenomenal astrological event happened only a few miles away from here. If you were awake last night around one in the morning, you would have seen it. Does anyone know what I’m talking about?”

I knew immediately what he was talking about, but I wasn’t about to fess up to being out that late at night. “Come on now,” he said, when a minute or so had passed. “This was spectacular. Someone had to have seen it.”

“Tell us what it was,” Chris Jennings said. “Maybe I saw it and didn’t know it.”

“You would have known it,” Mr. Specter said, more quietly this time. He looked around the room searching each face, one at a time. “Extra credit for anyone who can tell me about it,” he said in a cajoling tone. I looked down at my desk, not wanting to meet his eyes.

“Come on, Mr. S., give us a clue,” one of the girls said.

“No clues.”

He walked down the first row, the one closest to the door. “Anyone who saw it and can accurately describe it will be excused from having to do the final project and will automatically receive an A for said project.” That made everyone take notice.

“Whoa.”

“Cool!”

“No fair. I can’t help it if I didn’t see it.”

“Ooh, ooh.” Allie Westfahl raised her hand.

“Yes, Miss Westfahl?”

“I remember now. I was looking out my window last night and I saw an eclipse.”

“Nice try, but that’s not it.”

Mr. Specter moved methodically through the room, row by row, desk by desk, pausing by each student and placing a hand on their shoulder. If they didn’t look at him, he’d say their name until they glanced up. No one knew what he was talking about.

Except me. He was five students away and I wasn’t sure how I was going to handle this.

Now four students to go before he got to me. “Brad?” Mr. Specter said, but Brad shook his head.

Three students. My heart sped up a bit. I concentrated on not looking flustered.

In front of me, I heard a strangulated gargling noise that made me look up despite myself. It was Mallory Nassif. Her head trembled and then shook, making her ponytail swing back and forth. She fell out of her desk chair and onto the floor in the aisle, her head hitting the linoleum with a loud thwack.

Once she was on the ground, it was pandemonium. One of the girls screamed and people were shouting different things all at once.

“Someone should call the office.”

“Screw the office, call 911.”

One girl said, “I heard that for seizures you should stick something in their mouth to keep them from swallowing their tongue.”

It didn’t seem like a seizure though, because once she landed on the floor, she stopped shaking and fell limp. Mr. Specter quickly took over, sending one girl down to get help from the office and telling the rest of us to move the desks away from Mallory’s body. Body, like she was dead. The whole thing was pretty surreal. Mallory was completely still, not even flinching when he knelt down next to her and put his fingers on her neck. “I have a pulse and she’s breathing,” he said to no one in particular. By the time Mrs. Schroeder, the woman from the health room, came to the door, Mallory’s eyes had fluttered open and he’d helped her to sit up. “Easy now,” he said, in a kind way. She looked around, seemingly confused.