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Image Credit: Modified from Quizilla.Teennick.com - Eden. ~Landing

Author's Note: There is no connection between the novel by Harlan Ellison and my story except perhaps that we both just chose something simple that describes the story. :)

This is a fan fiction, the Whateleyverse and all canon characters are the property of their respective writers. If you find your life being depicted in this story you it is purely accidental and you have a hell of a lot more to worry about than suing me. No canon characters have been hurt in the writing of this story...yet.

Many thanks to GinnCaster5 for the editing help, without Ginn this story would probably be unreadable. And to Pmanpman and Rozarius for their read through.

This is a Whateley Academy fan fiction story, you can find the Whateley stories at http://www.crystalhall.org/ I highly recommend them. ~Landing

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Chapter 2
 

“Mr. Glen, this can’t be my test; I answered the questions,” I said, sure there was some kind of mistake.

“Is this not your name on the paper? It sure looks like your signature,” Mr. Glen said, smiling lazily.

It was my signature. It was unmistakable. The ‘M’ was just the way I always made it, with a big loop cutting back across the body of the name. I stared blankly at it for a moment, then it occurred to me. Someone must have altered my paper as some kind of sick prank, and I said as much to Mr. Glen.

“I can assure you that the paper was in my custody from the moment you turned it in on Friday till now, so there is no way anyone could have altered it. Why don’t we drop your feeble excuses? It is clear to me that you decided to make a joke out of my test. It is just the kind of thing you would do. Well, I am not amused. This class is a serious matter and you will find, young man, that your goofing off will have serious repercussions. That is all I have to say to you. Hurry, before you are late to your next class.”

I knew there was no point in arguing with him. So I stuffed the test in my back pack and dazedly tried to get to my next class in time. Of course, the tardy bell rang before I was even half way there, but I was too stunned to really care all that much. We had four major exams in the history class over the course of the semester. I had already finished one with a ninety but averaging in a zero was going to blow my final grade all to hell. I ran some rough calculations and found I would need to get 100’s on both the final tests if I wanted to squeak by with a C-. Holy Plastic Pants Batman, I was up shit creek and the paddle was definitely gone, AND there was a hole in the bottom of the boat!

I got into next class and must have made some kind of excuse that the teacher bought, but I don’t remember what it was. I slumped into my desk and just stared at the wall for a minute before pulling myself back together. Right, I had a problem; that meant I had to find a solution. Can’t find one of those by sitting around moping. I pulled out my test from my backpack and gave it a good hard look. The first thing I checked for was any lines where my answers might have been erased or whited out. Mr. Glen made us use a pen when taking the tests, so anything that was used to get rid of that would probably show.

I couldn’t find anything. As far as I could tell, the little picture patterns were the only thing that was ever written on the paper. This just didn’t make sense. I tried to remember taking the test and what I had written down. I remembered reading the questions and then the multiple choice answers, and I must have written A or B or whatever in the right place right? I strained to remember, I had been so in the zone when I was taking the test that it was hard to remember actually writing the answer down. I had been flying through the test. It had all started to come to me easily when I was doing it.

What about the essay question? Surely I should remember writing that down. I flipped to the essay questions on the third page and just stared again. The same damn little pictures! Little squiggles and shapes all lined up where my essay should have been. What the hell was going on?! Then a sick feeling hit me. What if I had some kind of mental illness that made me write whatever those things were instead of letters? There were things like there weren’t there? Illnesses that messed with your brain, synapses crossing, and wires misfiring. What if I had some kind of tumor? I felt the top if my head, half expecting to feel some kind of bulge where my brain was about to burst my head open.

Okay, calm down. There is an easy way to test this; get a piece of paper out, and write something down. If it’s a bunch of weird junk, then your head is going to explode. Wait, don’t think that, just calm down. Paper, pencil, now write. What do I write?! Stupid brain not knowing what to write when it’s needed.

I wrote down “My brain is going to explode out my ears.” That will teach you, brain, for not knowing what to write. It was completely legible. I have always had a pretty nice hand, and the cursive words seemed to be formed perfectly. I tried writing again, this time printing it. “Brook is really hot.” Well, you try figuring out what to write when you are in state like I was; it’s a lot harder than it sounds, and that was the first thing that popped into my head. Stupid hormones. It turned out that my printed sentence was just as readable as the cursive one had been.
So it looked like my head was normal, or at least as normal as it ever got. That was a relief. But it still didn’t explain what had happened to my test. It just didn’t make sense. The worst part was the dawning realization that when I got home, my parents were expecting to see the grade I got on this test. They would want an explanation for what happened, an explanation I just didn’t have. And that was on top of me getting in a fight.

I made it through the rest of the classes that day until physics with a feeling of dread heavy in my stomach. Time was doing that funny thing it does when you not looking forward to something where it seems to speed up and slow down at different rates so that I could be sitting in class and be sure that it’s been thirty minutes but when I looked up at the clock it would have only been five. Or I would be thinking about what I was going to tell my parents for a few minutes and it would suddenly be the end of class ten minutes before it should have been.

In physics class, the last class of the day, all three of my friends were in there with me, and Nick had already informed them that something was up before I got to class. So when I got there, I was met with the inquisitive looks of three people. Brook was the first to speak after looking at my face.

“Uh oh, something is wrong. He never has that kind of expression on his face unless he thinks the shit is about to meet the rotating blades. What happened?”

I would have scowled, but I was trying to control my expressions. I have no idea how Brook always seems to know what’s up with me just from looking.

“It’s my history test,” I muttered.

Nick winced. “You really do that bad on it? Old prune face did seem pretty happy with himself so I figured it had to be something bad.”

“Hush y’all, just let him tell us what happened,” said Amy.

I didn’t tell them, I just showed them by taking out my test and laying it down on the lab table in front of them, the big red zero showing them plainly what was wrong.

“What?”

“Oh no!”

“Oh shit!”

Their eloquence at my situation was really heartwarming. Sometimes when you’re that deep in the soft and brown, it’s rather gratifying to have people appreciate how bad it is.

“What happened?” asked Brook.

“Haven’t got a clue in the world,” I said.

“You weren’t trying to pull another prank on Mr. Glen were you? That last one where you put that live mouse in his desk really was going a bit far,” said Amy.

“How was he to know that old prune face was deathly afraid of rodents? Calling the ambulance was an overreaction to a bit of hysteria; he was fine!” said Nick backing me up.

I tried not to wince (I was still trying to control my expression). That prank had gotten way more of a reaction than I had expected. Who would think a man like Mr. Glen would be afraid of a little white mouse I found in the locker room? I mean, he just looked like he was the type of old crotchety bastard that would just yell at the mouse (or maybe bite its head off), not shriek like a little girl and try to hide in the cabinet. And I had managed to get the mouse without too much chasing it around the classroom. The principal's action of calling an ambulance for Mr. Glen was pure cover-your-ass overreaction. I was just lucky no one could trace the mouse back to me. Of course from the looks I had gotten from Mr. Glen he was certain I did it anyway.

“No, I wasn’t pulling some kind of prank; I don’t know what happened to my test!” I explained.

“Maybe old prune face is getting his own back at you?” suggested Nick.

“I don’t see that happening, he just isn’t the kind of person to falsify a student’s test. Grade as harshly as he could, yes, but not something like this,” said Brook.

“Hey I know! Adam has some kind of tumor or something in his brain making him write funny shit!” said Nick.

“Only an idiot like you would come up with an idea like that. Adam has been writing just fine since he took the test last Friday, and besides, I don’t see any kind of tumor resulting in these pictures he has in place of all his writing. They almost seem to be some other kind of alphabet,” said Amy

“Yeah, but I’m an idiot in love with you, so everything is all right isn’t it?” said Nick, giving Amy what I called the ‘let’s say gooey, romantic things’ expression.

“Of course it is!” said Amy leaning into him.

“Guys come on, focus!” said Brook.

“No time for that now; here comes Ms. Peck.” I said pointing out the mousy thirty-something physics teacher as she entered the class room. I put away my unexplainable test and took out my physics book.

“Uh, Adam can I share your book with you?” asked Brook.

“What happened to yours?” I said, as I slid the book over so we could both see the chapter under discussion.

“Got confiscated as a weapon,” she said rather embarrassedly. I had to suppress a snort of amusement that threatened to escape. Instead, I nodded solemnly.

“Yes they can be very dangerous in the hands of the unrighteous.”

“Hey, more wars have been started thanks to some book than because of any number of weapons,” Brook said with a twinkle in her eye.

“Oh planning to start a war are you?” I asked.

“Maybe not a war but…”

“Mr. Oakson, Miss Aldridge, do I need to separate you again? Or can we continue on with the lecture?” asked Ms. Peck.

“No Ms. Peck,” we both replied in unison, and were quiet for the rest of the lecture.

At the end of the class, Ms. Peck had us break into groups of two to three to get our assignments for our new project. The topic Brook and I ended up getting was friction. We had to write a paper and come up with a short lab that explained some principles of friction in physics.

“I want to know why we can’t have cool topics, like the physics of magic, or how some of those martial arts masters do all that running on walls and stuff,” I said to Brook as we put up our things and prepared for the end of the school day.

“Really, you think they would let us do cool stuff like that? This is high school after all. If they let us do stuff like that, Walker High School would get a reputation for being interesting, and then all the other high school would make fun of it,” said Brook.

“Yeah, you’re probably right.”

Brook seemed to become hesitant about something as she looked at me nervously. “Adam, we need to talk about something I…” Just then, the bell rang interrupting her.

“What were you saying?” I asked.

“It’s just…can I come over tomorrow so we can talk about something?”

“Can’t we just talk about it on the bus? Not that I have a problem with you coming over or anything,” I added.

“No, my parents said they would pick me up today so I could start detention,” she said with a grimace.

“Alright then, I’ll ask my parents if you can come over tomorrow. I’ll say we are working on our project. Even with all the trouble I’m in, that should make it okay,” I said.

“See you tomorrow,” said Brook, as she waved bye and went off to her detention.

I headed in the other direction, towards where the school bus was waiting to take students home. Since my parents couldn’t arrange to pick me up after detention, they were letting me go home on the bus today. My detention would start tomorrow. And due to the rules I wasn’t allowed to participate in extracurricular activities, so that meant no practice today either. Tell the truth, I kind of wish I could have had it today, at least then I could hold off the reckoning with my parents a little while longer.

I had to hurry to the side of the school where the buses picked up people. You never knew what order the buses would show up in, so your bus could end up being the first one there and by extension, the first one to leave. If you didn’t haul ass, you could end up being left behind.

I got to the bus in time, though barely. The bus was actually pulling away from the curb when I got there, and I had to chase it and bang on the door to get the bus driver to stop for me. This, of course, was doing nothing for my reputation around the school, as all the other students laughed at me. As if parading around all day with a black eye wasn’t bad enough.

My sister studiously avoided looking at me as I got on. The bus normally picked up the junior high kids before pulling into our school, so she was always on it before I got on. The bus driver glared at me that she didn’t want to see any more trouble out of me, or I could walk home for the rest of the year. I nodded my head and settled in to my seat, the absence of my usual seatmate conspicuous in my mind, and the bus gave a lurch as it jolted back into motion.

I had just leaned back into my seat and was looking out the window, when there was a pounding on the back of my seat. Oh great, it looked like there was going to be a repeat performance from this morning. Hopefully I can avoid getting my other eye blackened.

“Hey, faggot, Ken said to tell you that he is going to kick your ass for getting him in trouble. He is going to pound the shit out of your ass till you cry! You better watch your back, faggot; he knows where you live!”

“Thanks for the warning; I’m sure the homoerotic vision it conjures in your mind will give you and your sock something to do tonight,” was my tired reply, which earned me a particularly hard hit to the back of my seat.

I leaned forward, resting my head on the seat in front of me for the rest of the ride home, thus robbing whichever of Ken’s friends it was behind me of the joy of rhythmically pounding on something. Finally, the bus pulled up in front of our home, and Kelly and I got off the bus.

I heard a steady thumping as I unlocked the side door and was almost bowled over when I opened it by a brown streak of lighting. I smiled and bent down to ruffle his ears.

“How was your day, buddy?” I asked my energetic dog.

He barked and generally indicated that his day had been fine, but that he really needed to use the grass. I let him go with a thump to his side, and he trotted out to do his business. I went in, leaving the door open behind me. My sister was already in the kitchen making herself a snack of some cold baby carrots, health freak that she was. She got her head out of the fridge and gave me an interested look.

“Is it true you got in a fight with Ken after I got off the bus this morning?” she asked.

I groaned, how had she heard about that? As if reading my mind, she said, “Marry Tulaney, who sits on the bus a couple of rows behind me told me that you did.”

Urgh, the power of gossip.

“Well, did you?” Kelly asked impatiently.

“Yes, I did, alright!” I said throwing up my hands. “I got my ass whooped by Ken, there are you happy?”

“Oh my god, you are going to be in so much trouble! Mom and Dad are going to ground you for like a year! What happened in the fight; I only heard that it happened, not all the details.”

So I told her what little there was to tell. She winced at hearing how I got the black eye and immediately went and got me a bag of frozen peas to put on my face. Of course the swelling had already gone down a lot during the day, so I didn’t really need the peas, but she was being nice so I put them on anyway. She really liked how Brook had started clobbering Ken with her physics book and pronounced it ‘Cool’. She groaned at hearing about my four days of detention and all in all was a very sympathetic listener. I could only wish that my parents would be as good.

“What I still don’t get is why you punched him? You kind of glossed over that point,” she said.

I thought about it for a minute. She would probably hear the reason when I told my parents, even if she wasn’t supposed to be listening in. So. I decided to tell her, but only after I extracted a promise not to spread it around her school.

“So you hit him for messing with your friend?” she asked.

“Well yeah, but I guess I would have hit him even if she wasn’t my friend. You just don’t go around grabbing people like that.”

Kelly gave me a long look then said. “You’re a good man, Charley Brown.”

The reference was way before her time, or my time for that matter. It was something our mother would say to our father whenever he did something really decent and upstanding, which, since we were talking about my father, happened quite a bit. He was just one of those people that always ‘did right,’ as he put it.

I got a little embarrassed. Come on, little sisters aren’t supposed to say anything nice about you. They are supposed to be there for tormenting till they cry and you get in trouble.

I heard the padding of claw tipped feet coming from the direction of the side door and called out, “Don’t forget to close the door!”

The padding stopped, and then there was the thump of the side door being shut. Moments later, my big brown dog stuck his head around the corner and doggie grinned at me.

“Oh, shut up you.”

My sister just shook her head. “That dog of yours is so weird. It’s even weirder how you always seem to know what he is saying.”

“I just watched too much Lassie growing up.” I turned to my dog. “What is it boy? Is Timmy stuck down the well again?”

He gave me a look that said as plain as day, ‘don’t be a smart ass’ before he came over to lean against me.

“You need to tell Mom and Dad right away why you punched him; that should help a lot.” Kelly said.

“I know how to handle Mom and Dad better than you do, don’t worry,” I lied. Kelly always seemed to get her way in things. I blamed that on the fact that she was the baby of the family, but it probably had to do with the fact that she was just so damn cute, it was hard to be mad at her.

“To bad you’re a guy and can’t do the big eyed innocent girl thing. That always gets me out of trouble.”

I grumbled a bit before moving off to sit at the kitchen table and dumping my backpack on it. I always did my homework there, since there were too many distractions in my room. I would be too tempted to do my homework while at the same time messing around on the internet or playing a game.

That kept me busy for an hour or two, and right around then, the thing I had been dreading happened, one of my parents got home.

It turned out to be my Dad, which was a small reprieve ,since he would want to wait till my Mom got home to ‘discuss,’ i.e. yell, about what happened. I heard his car pull into the garage and the engine cut off. It took a couple of minutes before he came into the house; I wondered if he was calming himself down before he came in. My Dad had a real even temper, but when it blew, boy did it blow!

I risked looking him in the face, hopefully without drawing down doom with the glance. He looked calm enough, but that could always be deceptive. I quickly looked back down at my completed homework and mumbled a “Hi Dad,” as greeting.

“We are going to wait for your mother to come home before we talk about the call I got this morning. But you should know I am not very pleased,” he said, dumping his keys and wallet on the counter and heading into his room to change out of his work clothes.

I didn’t have long to wait, since my mother came home just a few minutes after that. She was deceptively calm as well, just giving me a long look and telling me to go wait in the living room while she and Dad talked.

They had me wait for a good five minutes; probably, they had already done all the talking to each other they needed to, but they wanted to make me sweat it out for a bit. It was working! Finally, they both marched into the living room and sat down, one on the other end of the sofa from me and one in the overstuffed lazy boy, so that I wasn’t able to see them both at the same time, leaving one of them able to watch me, while the other had my full attention.

Oh great, it was the dreaded whip lash routine, where I had to whip my head back and forth as I talked to each of them. They were going to tag team me!

“Start talking; we want to know what happened this morning on the bus,” said my Dad, his tone even.

I quickly sketched out the events of that morning, going over the confrontation between me and Ken and the fight that escalated from it. I took my sisters advice and told them right away what had made me go for him. It really did seem to help. It went from an interrogation to something more like a discussion of what happened.

They asked some questions like, knowing how the fight ended up, would I do it over again, to which I answered with a definite 'hell yes.' Okay, I didn’t actually answer with 'hell yes' except in my head. My parents don’t like me cursing. They also asked me what I intended to do the next time I saw Ken; what if he was holding a grudge and wanted to fight again?

Ha, I think we can put the possibility of Ken holding a grudge in the certainly column after his friend's little homoerotic warning.

I could have answered how I thought they would want me to, that I would try not to fight him and go tell a teacher or something. But I decided I was going to be honest and see were that got me. I must have been channeling Abraham Lincoln. Come to think of it, I don’t remember if he got off the hook for cutting down those cherry trees or not. So I told them that if Ken started to harass me or give me trouble, I would risk getting a stomping again. And I would do the same thing if I saw him messing with Brook, or anyone else for that matter. People like Ken need to be stood up to; at least that’s how I felt.

My parents actually almost seemed pleased with that answer. My Dad asked me about getting in trouble with the school again, and I just shrugged and told him what happened happened, and I would deal with the consequences as they came.

My Mom sighed. “Well, Adam, it seemed you have come to some convictions about this, and I can’t say that I am all that unhappy about them. Sticking up for what you know to be right and learning to take the consequences for your actions is something valuable to learn. I think I can speak for both of us when we say we are proud of how you handled the situation.”

“You mean I’m not going to get in trouble?” I asked hopefully.

“Oh no, you are still in trouble, consequences remember?” She gave me an evil smile that spoke of unending tortures that were going to be heaped on me.

“To start with,” said my Dad. “I want the front and back yard mowed. You should just have enough time before it gets dark.”

I groaned, we had a fairly good sized yard and it would probably take an hour and a half to get that done with the old push lawn mower we had in the shed out back.

“When you get done with that, we will see what else we have for you to do,” said my Mother.

I got up from the couch and was making my way out the back door to get on with the mowing, when my mom asked me a question I had been hoping she wouldn’t.

“Before you start, what did you get on your history test?”

Gulp! This was something I did not want to think about right now. I knew I should tell them about the test and the strange things I or someone else had written on it, but somehow I just couldn’t bring myself to say anything. They seemed to be taking the fight and detention well enough, but I didn’t know how they would react to the test. I wasn’t sure how I should react to the test! So I did a stupid thing. I told them a little fib.

“Didn’t get the test back today, Mr. Glen didn’t get a chance to grade them over the weekend. He said he might have them ready by tomorrow.”

Okay, it was a big fat lie, but I just didn’t know what to do. I was afraid of being in serious trouble for getting a zero. And I was scared about what the little symbols could mean. Had I done them myself? Had someone else made my test that way? I just didn’t know, and I didn’t want to think about it, so I stopped channeling honest Abe and started channeling Sinon and his Trojan horse.

Luckily for me, my Mom let it go at that, and I went out on to the 5th circle of hell otherwise known as the Oakson's yard.

The door hadn’t even shut behind me when there was a ‘Wham!’ and the door flew back open with my dog bounding through it. He took off running in the yard, making a big loop and ending up next to the shed with a stick in his mouth. His tail waved in the air like a propeller. I was surprised he didn’t take off into the sky it was wagging so hard.

I walked over to the shed, which was older than I was, its beige paint job starting to flake off from when it was last repainted. Before I opened the plywood door and manhandled the push lawnmower out, I took the stick out of Harvard's mouth and threw it as hard as I could. He ran after it almost in the spot it landed before it got there. By the time he trotted back to me, stick held proudly between his teeth, I had gotten the lawnmower out of the mildew-smelling shed and had the engine started. I threw the stick again and started making the circuit around the yard. I kept up this routine of mowing and throwing for the next rather miserable hour and a half.

Let me just tell you that mowing the lawn is not fun, especially with the cranky old mower we have. My dad usually paid a yard work company to take care of the basics in our yard, but I had the feeling they were going to be less busy around here in the near future.

I was tired and dirty by the time I was done, and my dog was nicely worn out, or at least as worn out as he ever got, which just meant he was running about as fast as a locomotive rather than the space shuttle. I staggered indoors and flopped onto the floor in the living room. My dog flopped on top of me and gave me a doggie kiss.

Eww, dog slobber. I pushed his head away and rolled out from under him. Then just lay there letting my sore arm and leg muscles relax.

“Looks like you had fun out there,” said my grinning sister from the couch, where she had been watching a show on the biography channel.

I gave her my best big brother stare of disapproval for sassing me, but she seemed impervious to it. I really was going to have to work on that.

“Are you going to lie there all day? Dinner is going to be ready in a little while, and you smell.”

I got up and with exaggerated motions said, “Thank you so much for reminding me, Sis! Let me give you a big hug as thanks!”

I let her dodge me as I made my way past her and towards our shared bathroom. Eight and a half minutes and some scrubbing later I was dressed in my sleeping shorts and an old shirt that was too ratty for anything except home wear. Dinner still had a ways to go before it was ready, so I settled in next to my little Sis and watched the show with her.

The guy they were biographing (yes I made that word up, what are you going to do about it?) was a super villain from the 70’s and 80’s with the code name Deathknell and the real name of Herbert Quercus Kent. What made him noteworthy was the fact that he was also a wildly popular rock star in the band Lamppost, which was also made up of super villains. They didn’t seem to take the whole super villain thing too seriously. Mostly innumerable instances of public noisiness, drunk and disorderly conduct, and causing riots, but also some worse stuff like robbing banks and kidnapping. Though the kidnapping was kind of fuzzy, since some of the people they kidnapped said they had a great time. It was pretty much what you would expect if you gave a rock band mutant powers and no compunction about following the law.

I had heard about him before of course, who hadn’t? He and his band were as well-known as any of the top artists in the 80’s. But I didn’t really know that much about him. My mother didn’t really like music all that much, and my dad was into jazz, not rock and roll. Some of the things the show told that he did were just awesome! Like robbing a bank and dumping hundreds of thousands of dollars off the Empire State Building while rocking out to their soon to be hit song ‘Like a Leaf in the Wind’.

Or the time they gate crashed the Academy Awards, and he used his power to make all the golden statues of Oscar, of which there were many replicas all over the place, come to life and chase some of Hollywood’s finest up and down the red carpet. This had an unfortunate back lash. Before the fracas, there had been some rumblings in Hollywood about their stance on mutants. Hollywood people being notoriously liberal had been getting some flak from their friends about discrimination and had been slowly softening on the subject. But after being chased around on national television by giant gold men shouting ‘you like me, you really like me!’ they had become as hardened on the mutant issue as any religious fundamentalist. Hollywood can forgive people they think are the downtrodden almost anything, but the one thing they will never forgive is being made a laughing stock.

One of the coolest was the Chicago Music Riot, where he used the power of his voice, augmented by some devise of another band member, to influence close to seven hundred people to do a choreographed song and dance in the streets to the band’s music. The dancing wasn’t half bad either.

As we watched a clip of the Riot, I remarked to my sister, “That is way better than that stuff I hear from your room.” My sister always had her favorite band playing when she was in her room. Some little band she found on the internet that was out in L. A. called Brass Monkeys. If you haven’t had to listen to Brass Monkeys all night through the wall you don’t know what torture is.

My sister just gave me that ‘whatever, you just have no taste’ look that almost promised she would be pointing her speakers towards my walls tonight. I shut up before she snuck into my room and put the speakers right next to my ears…again.

The show was talking about one of his most famous songs, ‘Living Life Love Lost’, when the TV suddenly turned off. I looked up to see Mom holding the remote, an angry expression on her face.

“No TV, you’re still in trouble young man,” she said glaring at me. “And dinner is ready.”

“Sorry.” I said guiltily before hurrying to the table to eat. We had oven baked chicken with corn, green beans and rolls with fresh butter on the side. I dug in with gusto, the time working outside giving me an appetite. I even had seconds.

The talk at the table was normal enough. Kelly chattered away about her day at school and what her and her friends were up to. Mom put in a few comments about her students and Dad talked some about how his court case was going. He was a defense attorney.

I mostly kept quiet, since my day wasn’t really anything I want to talk about. I let the talk flow around me and concentrated on eating. A nudge on my left leg reminded me that a certain someone was waiting under the table for those bits I didn’t want to eat. I snuck a green bean to him, and he took it with an audible chomp. Everyone else at the table ignored it, long used to the ‘secret’ disposition of my vegetables and other food.

I was still pretty tired after dinner, so I said goodnight to everyone and went to the bathroom to brush my teeth and all the other night time ablutions. I settled into my bed and pulled the comforter up under my chin. My half-open door was nudged open, and Harvard came in and jumped onto the foot of my bed, where he circled once before laying down over my feet. I closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep.

It was the middle of the night the next time I opened my eyes. The room around me looked strange; there was a golden red tint to everything, like someone had put a small copper colored light somewhere just out of sight. The light was dim, but there was enough to discern the different objects in my room. I looked around, trying to find the source of the light but I couldn’t seem to find it. Eventually, I got out of bed and hunted around. The light seemed to be shining everywhere I looked.

I was getting annoyed until I figured it out; Kelly must have taped some kind of light to me somehow. It was just the kind of prank she would pull. I felt around on my head expecting to find a light strapped somewhere, but, as much as I searched, I could never find anything.

I gave up in disgust and went into the bathroom to find where whatever it was had been taped. I looked into the mirror, then raised my hands to feel at my eyes. I started to scream. Okay, I’ll admit that wasn’t the most macho of things to do, but sometimes it just kind of comes out of you.

I heard shouts and the sound of people tumbling out of bed as I finally got my scream, no wait yell, yell sounds much more manly than scream, my yell under control. Kelly was the first one to get to me, bursting through the door adjoining her room to the shared bathroom.

I turned to her. “What did you do to my eyes?! What kind of prank is this?!” My mind was still stuck on this being something she had done, but the stunned look she was giving me indicated that she was out of the loop on this.

I looked back into the mirror, staring at the two copper colored glowing eyes that stared back at me. I closed my eyes and was greeted with a field of copper colored nothingness as the light reflected off the back of my eyelids.

“What’s going on?” my Mom shouted, as she slid into the bathroom from my room, her foot tangled in a pair of my old jeans that she must have picked up on the way through. I opened my eyes and turned to her.

“Oh God,” she said.

My Dad was right behind her, and his eyes went wide when he saw me.

“What’s going on?!” I asked, echoing my mother as I looked to them for some kind of explanation.

My dad flicked on the lights and everyone stopped looking like someone had cast my family as bronze statues. My mother stepped to me and held me in a tight embrace.

“It’s okay Adam, nothing’s wrong, calm down.”

“What do you mean, nothing is wrong?!” I said, turning back to the mirror to see that my eyes still shone like polished copper coins even with the lights on, though at least they didn’t seem to be illuminating the place anymore.

“Come on, let’s go sit down and we can talk about this,” said my Mom in a calming voice.

I let myself be calmed, and we went into my room and sat on my bed. My dog seemed to wake up as the bed springs settled, and he moved over to put his head in my lap. To tell you the truth, that probably calmed me down as much as anything. My dog can take anything in stride, as long as he got petted and fed on a regular basis.

My Mom sat beside me, and my dad took up a position in the desk chair facing up. My sister leaned against the door jamb to the bathroom, watching with big eyes.

My Mom got my attention back by touching my arm. “Adam, do you feel any different? Do you hurt anywhere?”

“No,” I said after a moment of taking mental inventory. “It just seems that my eyes are lighting everything up like flashlights before you turned the lights on.

“You can see in the dark?” asked my sister.

“I wouldn’t call it dark with the way these things are shining. Couldn’t you see everything thanks to the glow?”

“We only saw your eyes glowing. The rest of the house was as pitch dark as you would expect at night. We all ran to your room pretty much blind when you started screaming. I didn’t take the time to think of turning on the lights until I got here.”

“Yelling.”

“What?” asked my Mom.

“I was yelling, I wasn’t screaming.” I explained.

My Mom gave me a strange look before continuing her questions. “Do you know of anything that happened today that might have affected your eyes?”

“No.”

“Alright,” said Dad. “Then this is what we are going to do. I’m going to call Doctor Evens and see if he can come out here and see you. He owes me a favor after defending his son. In the mean time, I want you to try to lie back down and get some sleep. I know you are probably worried, but staying up all night won’t help anything.”

“Shouldn’t we go to the hospital or something?” I asked.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” said my Mother, clearly discomforted by something. “Why don’t we just wait for Dr. Evens? He is as good as any hospital doctor and much less paper work.”

I didn’t really get it. I mean, if there is something wrong with you, you go to the hospital right? But I was going to trust my folks to know what they were doing.

“Kelly, go on back to bed, Adam is okay and you have to go to school tomorrow,” said my mother.

Kelly seemed putout with the idea, and I think she wanted to protest, but the look in my Moms eyes made it clear she didn’t want any arguments. My sister gave me a kind of wave and a smile before going back into her room, closing the door to the bathroom behind her. Of course, if I knew her, she was already crouched behind the door with her ear to it so she could hear anything else that was said.

My dad said he was going to go make the call and left as well, leaving me, my mother, and my dog as the only ones left in the room.

“I really don’t think I am going to be able to get back to sleep,” I told my mother as I got back under the covers.

“Just try,” was my Mom's reply.

I laid still in my bed, worrying about what was going on. It wasn’t every day that your eyes start glowing like some kind of bad special effect from a Hollywood movie, and you could say I was a little concerned. Mom and Dad seemed to be taking it pretty well though. I guess some people just take shocks better than others.

“Close your eyes Adam,” said my mother from where she was now sitting at my desk.

How did she know..? Oh right, the whole glowing eyes thing. I shut my eyes and, even though I had expected to stay up all night, I felt myself starting to drift off.

Out of the darkness, I heard my mother whisper, “I love you Adam. You’ll get through this.”

~o~O~o~

Veronica put her head in her hands after she watched Adam fall asleep. She had dreaded the day this would happen. She had hoped that it would never come. After all it wasn’t a certainty, it was just probable. But it was happening, and now the secret was going to have to come out.

She got up and headed for the door; she had a phone call to make. As she passed the bed, Harvard thumped his tail a couple times. She smiled and patted him absently. She and Carl had talked about this happening many times in the past, especially in the last few years, but even with all the talking, they had still come to same conclusion every time. They had to do what was best for Adam, and it wasn’t like they could keep the truth from him forever. He had the right to know.

Carl was just finishing up his call to Dr. Evens as she entered the living room.

“So I’ll see you at 9:00 am then? Right. Thanks again, Jeremy, I really appreciate you helping us out on such short notice, and sorry again about calling in the middle of the night. Yes. Goodnight.”

He hung up the phone and turned to his wife.

“He will be here at 9:00 am.”

“I heard,” she hesitated for a bit.

“You know I have to call him; he is the best one to help Adam out with this problem,” she continued.

“I know honey, and I understand,” he said and hugged his wife tight. “Nothing will change my love for Adam.”

“Yes, but will Adam still love us, after what we have kept from him?” she whispered into his shoulder.

“Adam is a smart, level-headed boy; he will understand. We just have to trust him.”

Veronica broke away with a sigh. “You’re right, we have to trust him.”

“Do you want me to stay or…”

“No I’ll do this alone why don’t you get to bed,” she said.

He gave her one last kiss and a tight hug before he left her alone with the phone. She picked it up and dialed a number. She knew the number by heart, even though she had never called it before. There were a couple of rings before it was answered by a sleepy masculine voice.

“Hello?”

“Kent? It’s Veronica.” She took a deep breath. “Your son needs your help.”

---

 
 
To Be Continued...