Harken

3 Birthmark

I expected to feel my spine colliding with the rocks, to be flipped over as I slammed into the stones…even the man’s dagger-like fingers pricking my skin, if only for a moment. But the only thing I felt was my own pillow, pulled from under my head and slammed against my nose a second later.

“Zombie attack!” came the yell of my sister Alli, battering me with the pillow as I rolled over and shouted at her. She beat me again but I managed to grab the pillow, throwing it across the room where it crashed with a line of tripods and sent them flying.

“Are you insane?” I exploded, freeing myself from under the sheets and raising my hands in defense. She held my other pillow as a shield.

“That’s what you get when you don’t turn on your alarm,” she said between laughs. Alli was eleven, a mirror of my mom with messy blonde hair and brown eyes. She was very awake, even though my mind was still hopping back and forth from my nightmare to the oh-so-thankfully-opposite world I was in now.

“Why didn’t you at least knock?” I protested.

“I did knock,” she replied. I glared at her.

“Knocked very softly,” she corrected. I threw a pillow at her but she was a good dodger. My heart was still beating rapidly beneath skin drenched in sweat—I could still hear the horrible breathing of Mr. Sharpe as he chased me. I rolled over miserably, wishing the entire night could have all been one long nightmare. The white bandage still wrapped around my arm told me I wasn’t so lucky.

“You’re up, finally,” my mom said, appearing in the doorway with a cordless phone in hand, her palm over the receiver.

“Phone call, for you,” she told me. Her voice didn’t sound too sharp—at least not as bad as was to be expected the night after I’d crashed my car, though she did regard me with a gaze of slight dissatisfaction. Why was she even letting me take clients today? It seemed odd, until I realized that she was so entirely convinced that Mr. Sharpe had been my imagination that she wasn’t worried about more murderous clients. I put a hand out to take the phone but she kept it out of reach.

“We’re not gonna talk about what happened last night,” she said, looking at the gash on my arm. “But don’t think just because you paid for that car that I’m driving you to clients or to school.”

I would have argued but she obviously wasn’t in the mood for me to defend myself.

“So we’re skipping The Rules at least?” I said, hopeful.

“You are absolutely incorrect,” she said.

“After all I’ve been through?” I protested. We both knew I’d need money to replace the car; luckily I had plenty of other, cheaper cameras. But there was really no use in trying to get around it. I knew The Rules. Alli knew The Rules too, especially the third one about my pay going to her college fund. She giggled lightly and rubbed her fingers together like she was shuffling through a stack of cash. My mom shot her a glare and the little troll darted out.

“So yeah,” my mom said. “Tammy is waiting. Your sister might afford Harvard after all.”

“It’s not Tammy, it’s Mrs. Milo.” I spat. “She’s the only one with our house number.”

“Either way, take care of it.” She shrugged. “Eye Guy.”

She tossed the phone to me and started to leave, but turned back to glance around the room again. Perhaps a quick eyeball of my stuff for weapons of mass destruction was enough to make her feel like she was doing a better job of parenting. There were stacks of lights with cubical diffusers, tripods freshly knocked over, two or three cameras and a shelf holding lenses lined up like a cabinet of drinking glasses. This was where most of my birthday and client money went: that shelf of glass and tubes I used to take pictures.

These, however, were hardly noticeable when placed against the most obviously unnatural part of the room. Almost every inch of every wall was covered with photographs, going along the edges of the furniture and even onto the ceiling around the wobbling fan. They were pasted up carefully with double-sided tape; their edges lined up as perfectly as a ruler—my best photos from my countless albums and computer folders. The crinkled edges of the papers made it look like the old house was peeling, and the splattering of color and black-and-white rectangles sometimes took the form of a mural.

Every picture was of a person: men and women and children, old and young, of every ethnicity I’d come across in LA, captured through the lens of my camera. They were all portraits but none had names, because the names didn’t matter to me, most of them cropped from the neck up. I didn’t really care about their faces so much either; what was important were their eyes. Most people might have easily thought it was just an art project, something I did to convince myself that I was unique and creative. But it was far more than that. This was my life of study: my Great Work.

Or maybe they were more proof to the world that I really was a fine, budding psychopath. The phone beeped to remind us someone was on hold. My mom lingered but I refused to answer the phone while she was still there. She huffed.

“On my way out.” She disappeared and I swung the phone up to my ear.

“It’s Michael.” I got to my feet and nearly tripped over my blanket that had fallen to the floor in my sister’s mini-skirmish. The aged house creaked under my feet.

“Michael!” came the voice of Mrs. Milo. I sighed—of course it was her. She’d been my teacher in fifth grade, but now she worked in the office at my high school. Like the game Duck Duck Goose, there were many things I wished I could have left back then.

“Have you done something to Tammy?” I asked.

“Listen, there’s no Tammy,” she whispered, words racing in her native Alabama drawl. “I didn’t want your mother to get suspicious or anything, so I faked an accent.”

“She knows who you are,” I said. “You call here a lot. It’s getting creepy.”

I glanced at the caller ID. “You’re calling from a Tammy’s number. Please tell me—”

“It’s my cousin’s phone,” she said. “I figured when you didn’t return my calls you might have accidentally blocked my number.”

“That feature is commonly activated by accident.” I wrestled with my jammed dresser drawers. “Now I’ve got to get ready for school, and I’m sore from a car crash, so—”

“I need you to do one more check of my husband,” she whispered frantically. “He didn’t come home until three AM last night. Lately he isn’t home at all. Like he’s avoiding me.”

“No idea why anyone’d do that,” I thought aloud.

“I have a bad feeling,” she burst. “I think he’s running off with some other woman.”

“I already told you he isn’t,” I replied. “We did this last month, right? Remember?”

“But it’s worse now,” she insisted. “He’s going out for golf Thursday evening. I want you to come with me. I’m gonna go surprise him. You can snap a picture of him from the car when he sees me. I’ve got it all planned out.”

“I’m busy Thursday.”

“With what?” she asked wildly.

“I’m recording snail sounds,” I said, exasperated. “Come on, you’ve already gotten me to look at eight photographs and I’ve met him three times. I’m sick of seeing the man.”

“I’ll pay more,” she said. “I’ll double your rate.”

“No.” Doubling the rate wouldn’t help me when it ended up as my sister’s money.

“I’ll…I’ll get you a new camera,” she begged. This offer stood for 0.03 seconds and I hadn’t declined it. She leapt onto it as her chance.

“The one with the most megapixels!” she blurted. “I know you love megapixels!”

Her bribes weren’t swaying me, though they were tempting. It wasn’t money, so that was a loophole in the The Rules, right? She sounded so distraught I knew she’d soon be selling her house to pay private investigators if I didn’t put her mind to rest.

“Fine,” I relented, slamming the drawer shut. “Don’t bother me after then.”

“Not once,” she said. “And if he’s cheating, I swear I’ll do it quick, with a tire iron or—”

I hung up before she could incriminate me any further. Adults—that was still a strange type of work. It wasn’t like I advertised. Word of mouth had just gotten around with the people at school, and then that had spread to me needing a website so people didn’t show up at my house. My reputation of being right was too solid for them to resist knowing the truth. Not long ago, I’d only been approached by classmates at my school. But adults? Their secrets wrecked more than just social lives.

This was how sturdy my confidence in my skill was. There were no mistakes, ever. I’d lived with it long enough that it didn’t feel odd—it was just a part of me, the same way that some people could pull a train with their teeth or other could gauge distances miles away down to the inch. I knew eyes. I didn’t know the parts—the lenses from the pupils from the zonular fibers. I knew eyes. Girls would bring me photographs of their boyfriends and I could see if he loved the person who took it, or secretly hated her, or had secretly cheated on her and didn’t regret it and was planning to break up with her that afternoon. Business owners would have me lurk at an opposite table in a coffee shop while they met with potential investors so I could detect any hints of treachery.

And that was the true nature of my Great Work. Because the photos on my walls weren’t just pictures of people’s faces lined up in no particular order. If everyone could read eyes as I did, they’d see just how plainly sorted they were. In those eyes—every single one of them—I could see exactly what the person had been thinking and feeling at that moment, printing their Glimpse on paper. With the careful attention of a scientist, I had divided emotions onto my walls. Joy, next to my bed. Sadness, going around the door so people couldn’t see them when they first walked in. On the wall with my desk were pictures of eyes showing Anger, and across from that were photos of Fear—those faces had a way of disguising themselves, but I could see straight through that. My ceiling, patchiest from missing the most pieces, had photos of faces showing Love. Eyes of love are the hardest to find. Love is the emotion most-often faked.

One day, when my walls were finally covered, I planned to take all of them down and turn them into a book. I’d have every human emotion ever expressed in it, and show the world just how many shades there were between them. Like primary colors mixing, joy and surprise might be relief, or sadness and love could be bittersweet. Maybe then my obsession wouldn’t seem so crazy.

But that was years away. For now, my skills were just a gift; when it came to people like Mrs. Milo or Mr. Sharpe, sometimes I wished I’d unwrapped this one in secret.

I tossed the phone onto my bed and scooped up my clothes. A shower sounded perfect.

“Girlfriend?” my sister asked in the hall.

“Mistress,” I replied, swinging into the bathroom.

“It’s not a mistress if you don’t already have a girlfriend!” she hollered at me through the door. I pulled the shower knob to wash her voice away.

The water stung the gash on my arm but the pain was becoming easier to ignore. I hadn’t noticed the rolls of sweat pouring down my back until the cloud of steam hit me from the shower. I choked at the door, struggling for air that didn’t reek of old and damp metal. Even under the shower, I sweat faster than the water washed me off.

“This heat is killing me!” I shouted through the wall. Arleta is in the San Fernando Valley, which by some measurements is the hottest place in all of California. But my mom was on an electrical bill craze. Her patients never showed until 11 AM, so the air stayed off until 30 minutes to the hour—long after I’d left.

Mrs. Milo had effectively distracted me from my nightmare, but for some reason it hadn’t departed entirely. I tried to scrub it out of my mind with fervent scratches of shampoo onto my scalp, realizing that I hadn’t showered the night before and there were still bits of leaves attached to me. I happily washed it all down the drain.

I dried my hair, a mess of brown that was just a shade lighter than my eyes, but the room’s humidity made it fall flat again.

“This is all very attractive,” I grumbled, trying to brush it in the mirror. My hand stopped.

The mirror reflected my single birthmark: a circle of black going around the third finger from my thumb on my right hand, almost like a ring tattoo. In fact, as I thought back to the dream, it was far too much like a ring for my comfort. The doctor had said years ago that the pigment in that part of my finger was different for some reason, but not to worry. I never thought much about it before. It was strange how my dream had changed it into something else entirely.

I decided not to think about it. I’d been hung up on the previous night for far too long already.

In my haste, the shirt I had grabbed was a stomach-turning cacophony of orange and red. But it masked my tall and skinny frame, so I pulled it on and hurried down the stairs.

“Humans have invented devices that reduce the sun’s effects upon temperature,” I told my mom irritably, falling to sit across from Alli at the table—it was cheap and old, like almost everything else in the house, and the whole town. Downstairs stank of my mom’s herbal concoctions, some liquefied in plastic bottles on shelves, some dangling as plants from string in the window. Each threw off its own prickly smell, and these mixed together into an odor more sickening than whatever they supposedly cured.

“You’ll be out of here in five minutes,” my mom said, dropping one of her organic toaster pastries in front of me. “I’ll turn it on later. Nobody’s in here all morning. It’s a money sucker.”

“Funny how the patients get the mercy of air and your own family doesn’t,” I grumbled. My mom was officially known as a homeopath, which despite phonetic similarities is not a gay serial killer. It meant she worked with some type of natural medicine and herbs—I didn’t understand it, but whatever it was, people with far too much money drove in to see her.

I bit down on my food. It scalded my tongue so I spit it out. My mom smirked in a you-deserved-it way. Revenge for crashing the car… I actually hoped it was that. If she got it out now there was less chance of her blowing up again later, and all of the night before might gently fade away.

“I’m going to Meg’s birthday on Saturday,” my sister proclaimed. She stuffed her mouth with toast.

“Is that the costume party?” my mom asked. “I don’t have anything for you.”

“I’ve still got stuff from Halloween.” Alli shrugged.

“Zombie again? Aren’t you sick of zombies?” I said.

“You’ll be the only zombie in a house of mermaids and princesses,” my mom agreed.

“Then I’ll be a zombie, and eat the princesses for snacks,” Alli ended it.

There was no arguing with that. I dropped my dishes into the sink as I left for school.

Every house on Hogan Lane was built of wood and brick in shanty designs entrenched in the 1980s, unmowed square yards protected by iron fences. Towering mountains partially encircled the city like a wall hidden behind treetops. Our house had a white metal gate around it with brick supports and decorative spikes at the top, which was a very polite and middle-class-American way of telling burglars they were unwelcome. I had to click the lock to get through, and then stopped in my tracks when I reached the curb.

No car, I remembered. The car that had been parked outside my house for almost half a year was probably being pulped into a baby-food consistency at that very moment. I was like a king dethroned. So I walked.

Hunter High was a behemoth of beige and tan brick with rectangular blue windows and red and black flags hanging from the corners. It bore a sweeping glass entrance that made it look a little more like a space museum than a school. From the outside, it was one of those pleasant little places that old donors adored, with its own football team, a basketball team, a volleyball team, a wrestling team, and even a chess club.

But like peeling away at an onion, there were only a few layers between the outside and a more depressing core. Bars were behind the glass windows and metal detectors sat stoically inside the doorway, a groggy officer standing watch as I walked in. The only decoration on the white walls was a solid red stripe in the center, going all the way down, around the corner, and continuing on throughout the entire institution. If suddenly there were a shortage of students and funding, my school would make a fine prison.

I got to my first class and sat in my usual spot three chairs back and three from the wall. I could see everyone as they came in. I was accustomed to them avoiding my gaze—they didn’t know what I’d do if I got a good look. Could I read their secrets? Would I suck out their souls? The rumors about me had grown far from my actual intuition. In a way, I was both revered, and feared.

The reminders of how different I was came so constantly that I almost didn’t notice them anymore. A girl walked in to the classroom and, by accident, looked straight at me, and upon our eyes meeting she got enough shock to reveal a Glimpse. It was ironic how that worked. I read fear, disgust, and a little intrigue… but not in a good way, in the way that someone looked through the glass in a zoo at an anaconda.

Strangely enough, that didn’t bother me, nor did it bother me that the seats surrounding my chair were the last to be filled. This was all usual. Why should I care, really? They’d all end up coming to me one day or another, meeting in an abandoned hall or beside the school, eyes watching in case their friends saw them near me. Hands full of money. Desperation in their eyes. And I’d just smile and do my job for them anyway.

Mr. Candas wheeled in an ancient television, its black and brown case sporting dials so old that the dust wedged between them had probably been there since before I was born. He was a short man of Indian descent, from Chicago, always wearing a sporty blazer over his jeans, never a tie. He loathed the principal with all his heart, but that was between his Glimpse and me.

“Who followed the earthquake in Japan yesterday?” he asked loudly, positive hope lurking in his voice. A few people raised wearied hands, though half of them were probably lying to get on his good side. My hand stayed down; I’d been busy, as usual.

“Well that’s what we’re studying today,” he declared, searching for the end of the power cord. “I taped some of the news coverage and we’re going to watch.”

Watching a video...the day was getting slightly better already. Everyone’s collective sigh of relief could be heard across the walls. Mr. Candas lifted a hand.

“But you’ll take notes,” he added. Grumbling sounded throughout the room. I reluctantly retrieved the notebook I’d started to stow, plopping it open onto my desk.

“I’m not sure if what happened yesterday counts as history yet…” I said under my breath. Mr. Candas, ever vigilant, sent a glare my direction.

“It’s part of your worldviews. Some important people died in that,” he said. “I say it counts.”

That really didn’t make much difference to me but I wasn’t in the mood for fighting back. So Mr. Candas plugged the screen in amidst the shuffles of our papers and pens.

The tape began but there was no sound. A cable was unhooked somewhere, so Mr. Candas jumped behind the TV as the video continued to play. It was a newscast from the day before, showing a helicopter view of a wrecked city. Buildings were toppled like blocks, all the fancy windows and decorations now like the ruins of old Grecian temples. Earthquake rubble. Cars were knocked aside like a giant had played golf with them.

The report didn’t stick on that for long though, switching almost immediately to an older bit of footage showing a tall man in a navy blue suit, being pulled by the arm through a crowd of reporters. Under his face was the chyron: HAROLD WOLF, CEO of DREYCORP. The graininess of the footage betrayed how old the video was, likely sometime in the 1980s if I could gauge the hairstyles right. It switched to a photograph overlay on the screen.

Finally, something I found interesting. I could see his Glimpse as clear as the day outside our windows, lurking behind his youthful, overconfident smile and the still-outdated, slicked-back hair. Assurance. Absolute, total control over everything around him. Pride. These were signatures of people who had money, but even stronger in the super-wealthy: those who’d taken the leap from millionaire to billionaire. No matter what they did, no one could hurt or stop them. They could circumvent any law, cover up any crime, and have any misdeed go unseen. They were almost like gods that walked among us, unfettered by our lowly restrictions.

I enjoyed reading eyes of people like that: people who I didn’t see in the ordinary places. Their Glimpses were like exotic pets that I could mentally collect, rarities I could never find in a park with a bunch of ordinary people. Luckily, I didn’t need to get close to Harold Wolf to read his eyes because a photograph did the trick.

I’d never tried to figure out the full mechanics of my ability, even though I wondered sometimes. How was it that a camera could uncover the Glimpse for me, when I would never see Harold Wolf in my life? Was it the momentary click of the shutter that forced it from a subject’s eyes? Something else? Either way, a photograph brought down the mental walls, exposing the insides to me.

Mr. Candas found the cable. The volume exploded through the twin speakers, everyone jumping to cover their ears.

“… seen here in 1979, when he was named head of Dreycorp and began what could be the largest about-face in corporate history for a company on the brink of bankruptcy...” The TV anchor’s calm voice came out as a scream. Mr. Candas stumbled to turn it down, instead slamming the pause button with the photograph frozen on screen.

“This is Harold Wolf,” Mr. Candas said far too loudly, probably because he’d been deafened.

“Do you know who that is?” he said, pointing both hands at the screen.

“Harold…Wolf…?” the class stated the obvious in slow, disjointed unison. Mr. Candas looked ready to jump off a roof.

“Thank you, Captains Obvious,” he murmured. He turned his back to us while shaking his head, the marker squeaking against the white board.

“You’re right, but who is he,” Mr. Candas said with a sigh. “Why was Mr. Wolf so important in the world?”

No one raised a hand. The marker continued to scribble—Mr. Candas didn’t even check if anyone had tried to answer. He was familiar with our inherent laziness by now.

“Mr. Wolf,” he said, “was CEO of the company Dreycorp.”

He looked over his shoulder. Our faces were like a collection of mannequins.

“Do you buy sandwiches?” he asked. There was a bunch of nodding.

“Then you should know what Dreycorp is, because you’ve paid them lots of money,” he said. “Every piece of your sandwich was likely Dreycorp made or contains some Dreycorp ingredient. That makes him a billionaire.”

He scratched the back of his head. “I don’t have time to go into it. You’ll learn this in college. But basically…”

He scribbled a word onto the board: DREYCORP INDUSTRIES.

“Everything in the world boils down to which companies make the things we need to live and work,” he said, cupping his hands in insistence. “Energy, oil, technology. Food most of all.”

He shrugged. “And when a corporation controls a good part of one of those industries, they almost become a world power in themselves. It’s not like we can simply tell them we don’t want food.”

“We could grow it ourselves,” a girl in the front of class said.

“What if they own all the seeds?” Mr. Candas countered. “It’s all about who controls the supply. Food is essential to life. It’s how Harold Wolf became so wealthy. Because we all need what his company provides.”

Mr. Candas punched the play button, and immediately the tape began again. The reporter picked up where she’d been cut off, describing the business of Dreycorp, the camera panning across rows of crops swaying in the wind, farm animals and giant barns with the heads of cows sticking through while they were milked by machines underneath their fat stomachs. It switched to the snow-covered door of a giant vault buried in the ground—a vault of seeds, she said, to protect copies of every plant in the world. A seed bank.

Then it changed to another picture of Harold Wolf. He was much older than he’d appeared in the previous, hair beginning to lighten and lines now creasing around his eyes, which had begun to look sallower with age. He was pale, with eyes of green and a beard covering his chin.

The Glimpse had changed. Harold Wolf was working hard to hide his emotions, but not even that could get past me. Behind the oh-so-well disguised smile, I saw that fear had entered into his gaze. At first I thought it was fear of death, which I would have expected for a man of his age. But when I studied it deeper, I saw that Harold Wolf was actually terrified of something different, something that loomed in his future. I detected a fear of a secret being found out, like a debt that he owed or a misstep he’d made and couldn’t remedy.

Crime money? I wondered. I was already almost sure of it. Somehow he’d gotten in debt to someone even bigger, and he knew that they were coming after him. A man who feared nothing had learned the meaning of terror.

“Everyone watch and take notes. Concentrate on how this affects industries!” Mr. Candas commanded. Inside, I wanted to shake my head. Harold Wolf had probably felt relieved in that crumbling building, knowing that the earthquake was quicker than the death he’d have faced at the hands of whomever he was afraid of. How many years before some so-called investigation would uncover what he’d been hiding?

I suppose I could have made a good living in government work. But that was only if they could match my current hourly rate.

My classes continued, slithering by in minutes that felt like weeks. As the lessons became tedious, disturbing reminders of the night before distracted me. Someone’s chair slid against the wall and the metallic cry brought me back to the screeching of my car against trees. The edge of someone’s shirt got caught on the metal end of the desk and ripped, a sound far too much like the tear of Mr. Sharpe’s jacket. It became a struggle just to keep the memories away.

I escaped into the cafeteria for lunch, simultaneously catching up on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and eating the abysmal food that only appeared worse under the fluorescent lights. In this babbling crowd of people, habit demanded I get my camera out and take pictures. High schools were wrought with drama and students’ faces were always showing emotions I loved to pick apart. But the principal and I had been through this before: no photos of students on school property. Being prohibited from my usual occupation left me in a restless state.

“Don’t dress in that bright color,” a familiar voice interrupted my thoughts. “Drunk people will think you’re a piñata and hit you with sticks.”

“Hello to you too, Spud,” I said without looking up.

“I mean it,” he insisted. “Big sticks and bats. It’s happened to me twice. They think ‘cause I’m fat I’m full of candy.”

“Or did they do it because you hacked their passwords?” I mused. He grunted—guiltily enough for me to know I was right—and heaved his backpack onto the table. Spud looked much like his vegetable namesake: not overly obese but with bits of pudge sticking out in his cheeks and in odd places up and down his short, lightly brown stature. His damp mess of curly spaghetti hair was as deep black as his Polo shirt, face already showing the beginnings of a moustache like a smudge of charcoal above his lip, even though he’d likely shaved that morning.

“So you crashed your car?” he said. He had his laptop open already, typing in a password as he unrolled the aluminum foil that held his lunch: cold scrambled eggs, three sausage patties, and a dried piece of toast.

“Word got around fast.” I grunted.

“People talk,” he said. “Actually—” he took a bite, “my aunt’s an officer, and—”

He didn’t even try finishing, his mouth so full his tongue couldn’t move up or down anymore. I hoped his aunt wasn’t the policewoman I’d forced to chase me down. That’d be awkward if we both showed up at Spud’s family Christmas party that year.

“I don’t understand how you can eat that,” I tried to change the subject.

“You want me to be a normal Mexican and eat a taco and some guacamole?” he accused, diving into an exaggerated Spanish accent. “Don’t try to get me off topic, man. I want to hear about your big fiery crash everyone’s talking about.”

“Are they really talking about it?” I asked, surprised. My eyes swept over the room, unexpectedly elated at the idea I’d turned into a topic of conversation. Spud shook his head.

“Actually, no,” he corrected. “Not even a car crash can make us popular, man. I mean for a little bit this morning it was buzzing around, but that was when the rumor went that you were dead.”

“I feel so loved,” I said, clearing my throat.

“I’d have called you if I thought it was bad,” he said. “But I figured it wasn’t. I saw you walking in earlier, so at worst your car was gone.”

“And a $2,500 camera,” I said with a sniff.

“Yeah, that,” he said, disinterested. “My aunt was pretty mad about it because she told my mom this morning when she found out you went to my school. Then she really popped when she found out I knew you. So here.”

He lifted a hand and lightly thwacked my cheek. “That’s from her. She said to do that if I saw you, for that murder story.”

I sighed. This was Arleta—if there was any confidentiality in my police report, it was long gone once the officers went home. One of the most popular pastimes in Arleta was gossiping. Spud took another bite.

“So did you make that up or did you hit your head or what?” Spud pressed. “You know, that part about the guy trying to kill you.”

“I actually don’t remember,” I said. He narrowed his eyes. You salty liar, they accused.

“Don’t start,” I told him. “I’m not even sure what happened anyway. Maybe I did just hit my head really hard.”

Part of me hoped it’d eventually become something Spud and I would laugh about. Now that it was midday and the cloak of night had disappeared, even considering what I had seen felt silly.

“Well, that’s nice,” Spud said with a shrug. “It’s good you’re in one piece, because I need your help with something, and that’d be really difficult if you were in a hospital bed.”

“I can’t help you crack any more codes or unsolvable puzzles,” I said. “You’ll have to hack it yourself.”

“What?” he stammered. “No, I figured that out. I need you to tell me if this girl likes me.”

“I said no unsolvable puzzles,” I reminded him.

“Listen,” he leaned closer. “I need this. I need to know. You’re the only person in the world who can help me. Literally, you are.”

He nodded his head to the side. “It’s Tiffany Dawson. She’s in a green shirt. It says ‘West Is Best.’ Beside the table. You see?”

“Yeah, I do,” I said with a halfhearted sigh. Tiffany was one of those girls who fell three rings outside of our socially mandated circle, with naturally blonde hair and glittery blue eyes. She also had an inclination toward any male whose arm muscle circumference neared the size of my head.

She picked up her tray and began to leave the cafeteria line, weaving in and out of the jostling students, hair brushing around her face like a magical gust of wind had entered the room to dance around her. Was her glow real or from her bleach-white teeth? She remained unaware of our reconnaissance: an easy thing to do when she was unaware of our existence entirely.

“Just curious about which alternate universe you met her in,” I said, tearing my gaze away sourly. “I’d like to visit it one day.”

“She totally looked at me in English earlier,” he protested. “And her eyes lingered. They lingered, Michael. Against mine.”

“In horror?” I said.

“In wild, uncontainable love,” he replied. “I’m gonna go up to her, and you watch her, alright?”

“Please,” I said, “stick to romancing computers. You won’t like this, I promise.”

“Michael,” he insisted.

“She’s far away.”

“Don’t give me that,” he said. “You’re the boy genius, Eye Guy.”

He was gone. I wasn’t in the mood for this but I tried to keep my gaze on her so I wouldn’t miss it. Staring at Tiffany Dawson…such a chore, Michael. I guess my job had some perks.

There were actually two ways that I could read someone’s emotions. Looking at a photograph was one, the other was a bit more complicated. In person, there was one specific moment I could read in someone’s eyes, a certain look of surprise when their guard was let down. It was hard to pin what it was exactly: it was usually that split second when someone made eye contact for the first time or when they were surprised abruptly. That was why I called it the Glimpse.

Spud was just a step away from her already but then clumsily tripped beside her and into a table, causing her to spin around at the sound. I winced as I saw his cheeks go red. Their eyes met for a fleeting moment, he spluttered out in apology, then he was gone again. He dove back into the chair across from me.

“Please tell me you saw it, I can’t do that again,” he said, out of breath.

“I’m sorry Spud,” I shrugged. “It’s just no.”

“No?” he echoed, his face falling. “But…didn’t you see? She smiled, for a second.”

“Tiffany is always smiling,” I replied, taking a bite of food.

“You gotta be wrong.”

I didn’t need to reply. He was very quiet for a while, then he huffed.

“But every psycho-prodigy messes up once in a while.”

“No.”

“Really, there’s a chance.”

“No.”

He sighed. It was an unfortunate fact that neither of us got dates. I was frightening enough, and Spud, my only friend, was exclusively intimate with computer programming languages.

“Do I owe you anything?” he murmured.

“Nah,” I replied. “But you could show me some fun secret government files if you want.”

He grabbed his laptop far too eagerly for my comfort.

“I wasn’t serious,” I stopped him. He leaned back dejectedly, nibbling on his toast.

The day did not get any more interesting, but only got worse when the yawning math teacher Mr. Chex twirled his moustache and assigned us a massive test, during which time he took a nap. I was all too happy when school was over, only to walk out to my usual parking spot and be greeted by someone else’s car in place of mine. I cursed the crash again and started the long trip home on foot.

A mild breeze brushed the grass on the roadside. Every step away from the school and my lifeless day lifted tiny weights off my shoulder. Alli’s school wasn’t far from mine, and when I started to pass it on the sidewalk, I saw her hovering around a group. I strolled up, pushing my fingers through the chain links.

“Get in my van, I have candy,” I growled at her in my best creepy voice, and she turned from her friends, who all looked at me with expressions of horror.

“Get in my van instead,” she replied, “I’ve got a jar of punch-you-in-the-face.”

Her expression betrayed her words though, because she had lit up when I’d appeared. I usually drove myself home so I never showed up to see her. Her friends’ started breathing again, but I’d probably upset Alli’s chances of getting them to come to our house for a while.

“Where’s Spud?” Alli asked. I nodded my head back in the direction of school.

“In the library,” I said. “I’m here walking home all alone and lonely.”

“Mom said I could go with Kate and Sammy,” Alli said apologetically. Her friends continued to eye me suspiciously.

“I get it,” I said, shrugging. “I’ll just walk home, and probably get run over by a car, or mauled by a bear coming out of the trees—”

“Fine.” Alli sighed in defeat. Both of her friends looked at her wildly, but she paid them no heed. Sometimes I wondered if she could read my emotions too. She had changed from their side to mine and I hadn’t even gotten to my good begging yet.

She ran around the gate and joined me, waving to her friends as she disappeared.

“They’re not gonna be mad at you, right?” I asked.

“They’ll get over it,” she replied. “Hungry?”

She held out a remaining half of a sandwich. I shook my head. We walked in silence for a while, the March sun throwing pinks and yellows across the horizon that bordered the high canyon sides of the Valley. Multilayered clouds hovered above us like the fluffy shreds of a torn pillow littered across the sky. Cars drove slowly by us in the school zone, kids babbling as they traveled in packs down a crosswalk.

“Did you do anything today?” Alli asked, since I wasn’t talking.

“Not much,” I replied. “Lame stuff mostly. Math. I hate math.”

“I hate math too,” she agreed.

“You’ll die when you get to mine.” I elbowed her. “They use letters as numbers.”

“I’m already doing that,” she huffed. “X plus one equals four. What is X?”

“X needs to die in a fire,” I replied, and my sister chuckled. She always did that, at every crazy joke I made. That was probably why I’d gone to get her that evening. Which reminded me…

Without warning, I whipped my pocket camera out, and Alli dodged to get out of the lens. I was faster though, and rattled off a few snapshots as she struggled to hide her face.

“Stop it!” she demanded. This was our game. Alli hated me taking photographs of her. She wouldn’t take her hands from her face until I put the camera away.

“I got at least ten this time,” I gloated.

“And you’ll have none when I break that camera with a tennis racket,” she said.

Neighborhoods went by on both sides separated by the road we were following, the smell of damp grass coming from the vigilantly watered lawns. Some people were home from work and in their yards, babbling from terraces, blue fluorescent fly zappers hanging from the porches and armed for the attack of flying beasts. It was all a blur to me, because I’d seen this route every day for years now, even if it was from a car window. My steps became an autopilot.

“You’re not listening, are you?” Alli said, slapping my arm.

“What?” I looked at her quickly. “Of course I’m listening.”

“What did I just say?” she demanded.

“Something about death? Destruction?” I tried. She hit me again.

“I don’t know why you wanted me to walk home with you if you’re not listening.”

“I’m sorry,” I apologized. “Look, I was in a car crash last night—I’m not in the best condition.”

I waved at my gauze-covered arm. “You can’t blame me. Then on top of that I had a really weird dream last night.”

“Were you chained to a chair and fed maggots?” she asked. My eyes widened in horror.

“What? No?” I coughed. “Where did you read that?” Holy hell, she’s only eleven.

“It was on TV,” she said. “I watched a show on a serial killer.”

“How do you even know what a serial killer is?” I said with dismay. “You’re supposed to still think that’s somebody who murders Cap’n Crunch.”

“I don’t even eat Cap’n Crunch.”

I gave in. “It was a dream about…running, from somebody.” I didn’t know if I should mention he’d been my client.

“Was he really ugly?” Alli said. “I dreamed of an old ugly man last week. But when he tried to get me into the gas chamber, I sprayed him with acid.”

I stared at her blankly. My sister stared back.

“I don’t really know how to respond to that,” I said, blinking. “But I think you might want to schedule something with mom when we get home.”

“I don’t need a therapist,” Alli said adamantly. “I’m eleven.”

I was about to retort but we were crossing another busy street and the cars covered my voice. We got onto the sidewalk again, passing into our neighborhood.

“Mom said I wasn’t supposed to ask you about nearly getting murdered,” Alli stated. I tried not to look at her suspiciously. She had a clever way of getting her intentions across.

“You know I do enjoy a good almost-murder story,” she said.

“Didn’t mom rule that out?” I replied. “I was just delirious, right?” Part of me wanted to know what my mom was saying about it.

“But still,” she insisted, “you remember something.”

I debated whether continuing with this conversation was a good idea. My sister’s head was disturbed enough. In the end, I decided I probably wouldn’t make things any worse up there.

So I told her everything that I could remember, from sneaking out of the house and quietly driving to meet Mr. Sharpe. My story followed what’d happened step-by-step, but I left out the silver claws and the flying. Even she would find that unbelievable, I thought. When I came to the end, we were nearly home, and Alli was quiet for a long time.

“Mom really swore at you?” Alli finally asked, and I burst out laughing. That would be the one part of the story that Alli got hung up on. We’d reached Hogan Lane—thanks to Alli, I’d returned to this street in much higher spirits than I’d left it. I knew it’d be a good idea to get her.

“So what do you think?” she said. “You sure it’s in your head, or maybe it happened and it was a good cover-up.”

“There wasn’t a body,” I replied. “I can see where mom and the police are coming from.”

“Yeah,” Alli agreed, and I could hear that even she was slowly becoming convinced. “And honestly, if Mr. Sharpe was real, wouldn’t his car still be parked on the side of the road right now?”

It took all of my mental power to keep myself from gasping out loud, though I couldn’t disguise the sudden shuffle of my steps.

His car! I realized. Mr. Sharpe had driven up to meet me…and…if he’d been killed on the rocks, his car would still be out there!

All of a sudden, a way of definitely proving my story—true or otherwise—had appeared. In my shaken state the night before, I had completely forgotten that detail, and now that it had showed up, every cell in my consciousness focused on it at once.

Luckily, we had just reached our driveway and Alli was distracted. She went into the house without paying me any more regard, clueless that she had caused me to have a breakthrough.

I remained in this nearly frozen state through dinner, my body like a discarded exoskeleton. There were few questions over dinner: how was the day, what did you learn Alli, did you remember to ask if your sister could help at the bake sale, is Michael listening to us speaking…hello, Michael, are you there? Alli’s hand waved in front of my face and broke me from my thoughts, and I robotically rolled out answers to them. Luckily they ignored my mental absence, probably thinking that regret over my car crash was sinking in.

After my mom disappeared into her office and my sister took over the living room television, I headed for my room and switched on my computer screen. That was my habit. I’d sit at the screen and edit photos all night, or study the gazes of politicians who’d been on the news, or the eyes of celebrities just so that I could mentally predict the tabloid headlines that’d be out months later.

That night, though, I couldn’t even touch the mouse. I sat in the center of my face-covered walls, Alli’s revelation rolling through my head. The car…that silver Maserati with the blue headlights.

I know it’s there…

Now that everything had blown over for the most part, did I even want to know the truth?

I was unable to banish it. Finding truth was too much a part of me to simply disregard. If I found it, then I could tell the police and my story would be proved true, and they’d go hunting for this man who’d somehow escaped. My mom wouldn’t be angry with me anymore and my name would be cleared.

And if there was no car in the first place? It was an option I didn’t want to think of, because that meant I’d truly been having hallucinations. But it would put my mind to rest. Because if there was no car, then there had been no man. And if there was no man, there had been no murderous gaze or silver claws, and all of this was a mere overreaction.

I glanced at the clock. It was almost time for bed.

Or time for work? my treacherous mind countered.

My cell phone was in my grasp a second later, dialing Spud.

“What’s up?” he answered. “Crash another car?”

“Not yet,” I replied.