XGeneration 1: You Don't Know Me (11 page)

Back to normalcy.

Instead, she began to press herself through the kindling and against the metal lid. She had come this far. But like when she’d tried to pass through the bushes bordering her lawn, her progress was barred. The obstruction felt different, though—not like charge repelling like charge but an electrical barrier, fiery and unyielding. She redoubled her concentration.

The field gave a little.

The wooden door to the shed began to rattle. She hadn’t heard his footsteps patter down the steps of the deck or cut through the grass, but she could hear the scraping sound of a key inside the lock.

She fell against the back wall of the shed, her mental commands colliding into one another:
Pass though the wall, Janis! Pass through the wall! C’mon, Janis! Concentrate, damn it!

But the skin of the shed’s wall held this time. There was no pop…

Other than the bolt’s release.

A red terror blotted over Janis’s senses like a swarm of cockroaches, flapping their oily wings, spilling down her back, cocooning her arms and legs. It was like those first out-of-body experiences when she couldn’t move. Now the same horrible thoughts assailed her:

What if I can’t return? What if I’m trapped on the other side of that barrier, trapped inside this shed?

The door swung open, and Mr. Leonard’s face loomed from the night like an executioner’s. Janis shrieked, the sensation tearing from her throat like a ball of nails.

WHOOOOSH.

She jerked upright in her bed, heart thundering, cotton T-shirt warm and soaked through. But it wasn’t sweat she felt. It was urine. For the first time since she was five years old, Janis had wet herself.

* * *

Janis grimaced as she gazed at the rotating plastic egg. She remembered the fear and shame of stripping her shirt and sheets the night before, tiptoeing the length of the house to the laundry room, starting the Kenmore, taking a quick, furtive shower, spreading a dry cover across her bed, lying there without sleeping, later moving her sheets to the dryer then back to her bedroom, and at last drifting off, where the memory of the experience receded from her conscious mind like a wretched creature down a slippery hole, deep beneath the ground.

It was the vision of Mr. Leonard’s looming face that had returned to her that afternoon in English, ripped through her amnesia, threatened her sanity, sent her fleeing from the classroom…

But that was done. The creature was out of the hole.

Now, as Janis chewed the inside of her cheek, two competing questions chewed at her mind: What was beneath Mr. Leonard’s wood shed? Had the experience even happened to begin with?

Janis glanced at her clock radio and sighed. She should have been in bed an hour ago. When she gathered the egg, the back of her hand ached from supporting her chin. She carried the egg to the dresser and returned it to the top drawer.

Yellow instead of purple.

She closed the drawer tight. The experience hadn’t happened, she decided, not out there, anyway. Just like with the egg, it had been a product of her subconscious mind, manifesting the very things she’d expected to see and find, scaring herself half to death in the process. The next time she found herself in the backyard, she would will herself back to bed. She would never put herself through another experience like that again.

With that, Janis climbed beneath her covers and turned out the lamp at her bedside. But she didn’t fall asleep, not right away. A niggling thought came to her as she massaged her hand. She had spun the plastic egg several times in the half hour she’d spent recounting the experience. But how many times had she actually moved her hands from beneath her chin to do so? Every time? Every
single
time?

Enough, Janis.

She turned over and closed her eyes again, and this time she did find sleep.

10

Thirteenth Street High

Friday, August 31, 1984

Lunchtime

“You can do this,” Scott said into the rust-speckled mirror. Outside the metal door, he could hear the final calls of students headed to lunch. The bathroom stalls and cracked latrines at his back stood vacant. “It’s just an informational meeting. One informational meeting. You go in, you listen, you size it up. If it feels wrong, you’re done. You don’t have to go back.”

But it will be a risk
, a voice whispered.
Being seen will be a risk.

Scott considered that as he looked back at his pallid face. No one had messed with him all week, or even given him a second look. And now he was threatening that invisibility, threatening to stand out. Informational meeting or not, he might as well be wearing a sandwich board that announced:
I want to be like you guys!
And on the back side:
Please accept me!

Scott knew something about healthy herds. They didn’t take well to misfits worming into their ranks.

He ran water onto his hands and finger-combed the sides of his head. His mom was supposed to have given him a haircut the night before—something more in line with “today’s look”—but her Avon meeting had run late. As Scott worked to flatten a few stubborn sprays of hair, he reminded himself of the progress he had made in other areas…

After crashing following that first day of school (and sleeping straight through the night), he had rebounded Tuesday afternoon and cleaned the rest of his room. Gone were the relics of his childhood: the Buck Rogers sheets, the plastic models, a View-Master whose lever had jammed years before, a Merlin Phone (“Play it six different ways!”), his old Atari 2600, joysticks, and trays of game cartridges, eight binders of Scratch ’n’ Sniff Stickers, stacks of
Encyclopedia Brown, Choose Your Own Adventure,
and
Mad Libs,
as well as a medley of dog-eared magazines he’d stopped reading when he was eleven:
3-2-1 Contact!
and
Cracked
among them. He filled four Glad Bags and dragged them to the garage.

Immediately, his room felt twice as spacious. It smelled better, too. He proceeded to vacuum and dust in places that no instrument of cleaning had touched in years, prompting his mother to freeze in the doorway, eyes wide. “I can’t
believe
it!” she kept repeating, the ringed fingers of one hand digging into his kidney when she threw her arms around him. A good pain, Scott decided.

But that had been the easy part.

What about his Star Wars figures, his
D&D
manuals and modules, not to mention his comic books? He made a deal with himself. He would box them all and place them in his closet, out of sight. If by Christmas, he hadn’t gotten them back out, he would sell them to the last. All except for his John Byrne collection—he could still read those.

On Wednesday afternoon, he had tackled his clothing. All of the stained middle school–era shirts and shorts were goners, along with most of the rest of his clothes. He’d been surprised and amused to find a mashed-up pair of Spider Man Underoos behind the bottom drawer of his dresser. He held the diminutive red undies to his waist and then tossed them in the discard pile. That left two pairs of pants that fit, a few Izods, a short-sleeved button-down shirt that looked semi-stylish, and a serviceable pair of Docksiders.

The clothes he laundered and ironed; the shoes he scrubbed with a damp cloth, then buffed. He used an old toothbrush to clean out the dust along the stitching. When he finished, the shoes glowed like polished wood.

The following evening, Thursday, he had stood in front of his closet mirror, stripped to the waist. His room was clean, his clothes sorted out until he could go shopping for more. It was time for Scott Spruel himself. After deciding he needed his hair trimmed on the sides and grown a little longer in back, he touched his forehead. The red eruptions were fewer than last year, he decided. Even so, he pledged to wash his face twice a day and get back on his Retin-A regimen—something that had fallen to the wayside that summer.

And the rest of him? He examined his body with the clinical eye of Professor X: his lanky neck, his sallow, sunken chest, stark ribs, arms that hung long and thin at his sides, promising harm to no living thing. He rubbed his right forearm. A slight angle showed where the bones had healed (yes, Jesse had snapped
both
his ulna and radius), a permanent deformity now. Anger flared from the pit of his stomach, the anger that he had not been able to stop them.

Do it again, and it’s gonna be both arms, you little piss stain,
Jesse had promised.

He needed bulk. He needed mass. Scott Summers of the X-Men was no Incredible Hulk, but he was solid. He kept in shape. Scott Spruel of Oakwood, meanwhile, had never touched a barbell, much less lifted one. Back in his room, he broke his promise and fished a handful of non–John Byrne comic books from the closet, plopped in the chair at his desk, and began flipping through them. After a couple of minutes, he found what he was looking for:

HEY, WIMP! I’M TALKING TO YOU!

REMAKE YOUR BODY IN 15 MINUTES A DAY!

It was the full page ad with Bud Body, “The Finest Specimen of Manhood,” standing in what looked like his underwear, fists on his glistening hips, glowering out of the page like he’d just as soon beat you senseless as bestow on you the glories of his strength and conditioning program.

“Bulk out your back, puff up your pecs, strengthen your arms and legs. My easy-to-follow, SCIENTIFIC method will make you fitter, faster, and MORE DESIRABLE than you ever dreamed possible!”

Scott made sure it was one of his rattier comics before taking an X-acto knife to the stamp-sized order form for the booklet. It was a start, he had figured, and would only cost him five bucks plus shipping…

Standing back from the rust-speckled glass of the C-wing bathroom, Scott examined the tuck of his bright-green Izod inside his belted khakis. He turned one way and the other, made a couple of adjustments, and then stooped to rub away a smudge near the cowhide lacing of one of his Docksiders.

Drawing a long breath, he raised his face back to the mirror and nodded. “You can do this.”

He folded his thick glasses with a decisive clack and hid them away in his pocket. Squinting, he pushed the door open on the bright blur of mid-day and set a course for D-wing.

* * *

The room was a chaos of motion and voices, and for a moment Scott considered feigning surprise with his hands (
Oops! Wrong room!
) and backing out, resuming his stiff walk down the D-wing corridor and over to the food trucks, where he would eat alone as he had done every day that week. And that was the thought that stopped him—eating alone again.

He lowered his head and stepped into the room.

“Hey!” someone called to his left. Scott froze, waiting for the inevitable,
What do you think you’re doing here?

When he turned, the person he beheld was brown haired and blurry, nearly faceless. He was sitting at a table near the door with four other faceless people. Scott went to push up his glasses before remembering he wasn’t wearing them.

“You rushing Gamma?” the voice asked.

“Y-yeah.” Scott cleared his throat. “Yes.”

“You’re gonna need one of these.” Scott felt a piece of paper being pushed into his hands. “It’s a permission slip. Have it signed by a ’rent and back here by the next meeting. Go on and take a seat. Pledges in the back.”

Scott nodded. “Thanks.”

There were other young men’s service/social clubs at Thirteenth Street High, but Gamma was considered the premier. That part didn’t matter so much to Scott. In fact, he would have preferred it if the club were of more middling status, to improve his chances of getting in. No, what mattered most was that Gamma was the brother organization of Alpha, the club to which Janis’s sister belonged (he’d seen her hanging posters on Tuesday to announce their first meeting). And Scott was gambling that if Margaret was a member, Janis would be pledging, too.

Like big sis, like little sis… he hoped.

He supposed he could have asked Janis during seventh period, but just getting up the nerve to speak to her again was proving to be a trial in itself. He wasn’t there yet. And besides, he didn’t want her to think he was stalking her—which, of course, he was. Gamma was going to be another access point into her life.

Scott clutched the strap of his backpack and made his way between two columns of desks, his sternum stiff, his breaths paper thin. Volleys of masculine voices shot past. The air tasted heady with cologne. Several Gamma members were parked on desktops, but without his glasses, Scott couldn’t see how they were looking at him, or whether they were even looking at him to begin with. Being half-blind had its advantages. It made the room and everyone inside it seem spectral, not quite real—like he was there and not there at the same time.

Scott edged to the back and joined the other hopeful pledges, where it was decidedly quieter. He wondered if anyone from his middle school had come. He hoped not. He picked a desk in the last row, stumbling around it before getting himself seated.

“SHUT THE HELL UP!”

Scott jittered and dropped his backpack. The louder conversations at the front of the room wound down. Members climbed from their desktops. Scott peeked to either side to find the other dozen or so pledges sitting ramrod straight.

“SHUT IT, I SAID!”

Scott drew his glasses from his pocket and, keeping them folded, snuck the right lens over his right eye. A stocky guy with a blond buzz cut paced the front of the room, arms bowed. His reddening face was clenched inside a look of muscular rage that shriveled Scott’s insides. Was this the president? Was this the guy he was going to have to answer to?

“All right,” Buzz Cut said, his face decompressing into a sidelong smile. “That’s better.”

Laughter from the front rows.

“Now, stay shutted the hell up.” Buzz Cut leaned his butt against the chalkboard, his thick arms folded.

Someone stood up from the table in front, a taller, more refined-looking member of what Scott surmised to be the club’s officers. He strode to the front of the room in a stylish white Oxford, a silver pen jutting from the brown sweep of hair above his ear. “Thank you, Britt. That was… colorful.” Then he spoke to the room: “The sergeant at arms has called the first meeting to order.”