When a parent looks upon their child in the delivery room they don’t think about anything bad that could happen.  In that moment of peace when their newborn baby has stopped crying, and their eyes have closed over their soon to change irises, a parent has their first thoughts of just how beautiful their little creation really is.  They trace their plump little cheeks and relish the soft skin and tiny button-like features.  A soft little baby girl, their one and only, was out and ready to take on this bright new world.  A broad spectrum of life choices would soon take her away to a wonderful life of her own, but for now she was theirs.  A beautiful baby girl in a beautiful growing world.  Nothing could go wrong.  They would never dream their precious little angel would be on anti-psychotics.

    But flash forward 17 years and you will come to find me in the place of their little bundle of joy; a girl, doped up out of her ever-loving mind and still seeing and hearing things that were not really there.  What a fantastic way to finish out your senior year, right?  

My parents ended up naming me Iris-after the muscle in my eye not the flower.  When I opened my eyes, my irises appeared to be like the color of the sun as it shines through gold stained glass.  The doctors were concerned of course:  color takes melanin produced after being exposed to the sun, and I had just popped out of one of the darkest places on earth.  My parents thought it was a blessing, or something, and said I had been kissed by a star.  But when told that story at the age of nine, I pointed out that if I had been anywhere near a star I would’ve burned up.  Obviously I was a cheery sort of kid.

I was born in Gresham, Oregon to a pair of loving parents, Joyce and Robert Colton.  I was an only child who, at about the age of 11, began having strange hallucinations.  It started out with voices, like people having a conversation near me.  My parents were concerned at first, but when I said it didn’t happen all of the time, they decided that it was just my imagination.  Then I started seeing things:  dark, crawling shapes just at the edge of my peripheral vision that slowly danced into the center.  The images that I began painting to release the creatures from my head were becoming progressively darker and more disturbing.  By the time I was 15, my walls were decorated in canvases in an array of sizes with a varied, but dark, color palette.  The visions that never wavered, even when I shut my eyes, became etched on my canvases and almost always greatly resembled the location of a body or a kidnapped victim on the news.  My parents had had enough.

I was put on a regimen of anti-psychotics, anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, and sleep medication to try to get me through the day.  My life became a fuzzy haze of breakfast, school, gym, home, dinner, sleep.  I was never fully awake; I don’t know how I maintained a 3.9 GPA.  My whole body and mind were numb, and my paintings became bleak and less specific.  Any friends I may have had fled, and I was alone in my incoherent daze.  The images were still there of course; they were insistent like they were always trying to tell me something.  The voices that came and went were muffled like everything else around me.  My life was enveloped in a thick layer of cotton that absorbed all sound and fuzzed the edges of my vision.  They didn’t affect my nightmares, though.  At least twice a week, I’d wake up after the realest moments of unconsciousness I’d experienced.  Vivid scenes playing out before me of violence and accidents that continually wound up on every channel the next morning.  I was a walking corpse with nowhere to hide.

But it was May, and in three days I would be a graduated senior of a high school I had never really experienced.  All I needed to do was continue on as I had for nearly three years, and I could get out and maybe even convince my parents that I no longer needed to be on my medication.

I was watching the animated gestures of my english teacher as she continued on about the ridiculousness of gender roles when the bell rang and we were all released for the day.  Hadn’t I just gotten to school?  I blinked slowly and rose from my desk, following the cascade of people out the door and into the overcast “daylight” of the parking lot.  Driving probably wasn’t the best idea when I was drugged to high heaven, but my parents didn’t seem to have a problem, and I had never been in an accident.  When I got home, I found both of my parents’ cars in the driveway, which was strange for two thirty in the afternoon, along with a sleek new car I couldn’t think of the name to if I tried.

Cautiously, I walked through the front door and found my parents sitting with a woman I had never seen before in my life.  At first, I thought it was just another one of my hallucinations and continued past them and into the kitchen to get a glass of juice.  Even when my mother cleared her throat and stood up, I just continued past them and dropped my backpack off by the door.

“Iris?”

I froze.  None of my people hallucinations ever spoke.  Especially not to me.  Narrowing my eyes, I slowly turned back to face the small group that had congregated at the long, oak table that my father had built so many years ago.  My anxiety levels were rising, and an image flashed before my eyes of somewhere else.  I needed to paint; I needed to get this image out of my head and onto paper or canvas or something.

“Iris, can you come have a seat for a moment, honey?”  My mother raised her eyebrows at me, gesturing to the seat across from this strange woman.

Very hesitantly, I walked back over to the table and sat facing the woman now in front of me.  My fingers traced over a small indent in the corner of the table where I had knocked out my front baby teeth when I was eight.  More anxiety crept up my spine as another image danced just behind my eyelids.

“Hello, Iris,” the young woman greeted warmly.  Her voice was like a gentle breeze; it was very welcoming and pleasant as if she knew just how fragile I was.  Her hair was very straight and hung a few inches below her collarbone with a sort of natural strawberry tint to the blonde.  She seemed to be about my height (five seven, five eight), and her straight white teeth formed a very easy smile that reached her chocolate brown eyes.

“This is Adelaide Kamens, from the Institute of,” my father cleared his throat skeptically, “Psychic Research.  She thinks she can help.”

My eyes never wavered from Adelaide.  I wasn’t totally convinced by her affiliation either.  I wasn’t a psychic; I was painfully logical with a sprinkle of psychosis.  Palming a stack of sticky notes from my pocket, I slowly took a pencil that was lying next to me on the table.

“Yes I am.”  Adelaide smiled up at my father and looked back at me as I began anxiously sketching at the sticky note.  “I have heard a lot about you, Iris.  Your testing results showed us a lot.”

“Testing results?” I inquired, allowing my fingers to do what they did best.

“Yes!  Testing results!  Remember when you took the SAT a couple of months ago?”  The blonde seemed eager for me to respond, but I just continued to administer my blank stare.  Remember a few months ago?  I hardly remember how long classes are in my perpetual fog.

“Well…” she continued, seeming to realize she would get nowhere with leading me, “when you took the SAT, there was a following survey on the projector that had you write down the letter you saw.  Do you maybe remember that?”

“Vaguely,” I supplied, avoiding looking down at the sticky note in my hand.

“Well when you took that survey, the letters got smaller and smaller until there was no letter at all, but you kept writing.”  Adelaide had a giant grin on her face; excitement was clearly getting the better of her.

“Well, yeah.”  I furrowed my brow in confusion.  “There were letters, so I wrote them down like we were supposed to.”

Adelaide shook her head so her sheet of hair rippled and shone like glossy water.  “Nope.  We had a volunteer sitting in the room next door who was doing the same thing but with actual letters.”

I narrowed my eyes in suspicion.  If this was a stupid game, I didn’t like it.  “No.  I saw letters.”

“Yes, you did.  You saw the letters that Joshua was projecting with his mind, and that was what you wrote down.  We would like to offer you some help...in return for your help.”

The fog in my head was pressing down and giving me a headache.  I don’t need this.  I squeezed my eyes shut and tossed the pencil back onto the table which smacked the wood with a cotton enveloped whack.  The room was silent as the sound faintly echoed around the high ceilinged walls.  Adelaide leaned forward and took the sticky notes out of my hand.  She gazed down at the precise sketch of a long building with a glass-plated sun room and a very sleek style of architecture that tapered into a brick structure.  I looked at the upside down (from my angle) rows of pine trees that surrounded the building that seemed to be situated at the base of a gravel driveway.  An excited grin pulled at the  corners of her eyes.

“Do you know what this is?” she asked, holding up the yellow note for my family and me to see properly.

Both my parents and I shook our heads, watching her as she pulled out a wood-cased smartphone and flicked at the screen for a moment.  When she held it up, it was the exact image that I had drawn just moments ago but in color with a few people standing in front of it.  The three people seemed to be Adelaide, an older gentleman, and a handsome man probably in his early to mid-twenties.  My parents were silent.

“What kind of help are you offering?” I asked, anxiety twisting the pit of my stomach and shoving it back up my esophagus.

Adelaide beamed.  “We think that with the right testing of your abilities in a stable and controlled environment, we can accumulate enough data over time to figure out a way to control your abilities.”

This had to be a new kind of hallucination; I couldn’t afford to harbour this kind of hope in my fuzzy world.  “Could I come off of my meds?”

The room was very quiet, and there was a moment where I knew my parents’ faces were not what this young woman had anticipated, but she didn’t look at them.  Her eyes were focused on me, and I knew she could see how hard it was for me to have this kind of hope with such a foggy head on my shoulders.  She smiled that easy smile and gently laid a hand on my knee.

“Absolutely.”

All it took was one word, and I was aboard that crazy psychic train to wherever it took me.  I jumped up; there was more energy in my still fuzzy mind than there had been in nearly three years.  I didn’t care about anything but getting out and getting better if I could.  Adelaide was grinning and stood too, ready to answer any questions that I had for her.

“Give me the details.”

 

2: Chapter 2

I stepped out of the car and onto the long and winding gravel road that went right up and curled around the building I would be calling home for six to 18 months.  It was bigger than my drawing or the picture had made it seem with a long wing towards the back.  Outside of the gravel ring was a grassy knoll that rolled up around the sides and back with the evergreens popping out of the ground and into the sky.  It was probably two or three stories tall with high ceilings from what I could see of the glass-walled, sun room area that was encircled by dozens upon dozens of pale-purple wild flowers.

I had hugged my parents goodbye at one o’clock on May 31st before Adelaide and I had taken off on some highway for about four hours to Kalaloch, Washington.  Deep green pines towered around the glass-panes of what seemed to be the living room of the house and reflected the minimal sunlight back at the overcast sky.  It was just like home (weather wise).

After an hour or two of convincing toward my parents, Adelaide and I had negotiated my departure and stay.  I had left the day after my graduation on the 30th (2 days after I had met with Ms. Kamens), and I was slowly coming out of my drug-induced haze.  My body was cramped and I was going through uncomfortable waves of withdrawal from all of my medications, but it was well worth it.  The cottony feeling of my world was lifting and the fuzz around the edges of my vision had receded almost completely.  Besides the nausea, I felt so much better.

“You can go on in, Iris.  You’re the last one to get here, and don’t worry about your stuff,” Adelaide assured me.

I hesitated; had we talked about other people being here?  Turning to ask, I saw another car had pulled up the crunchy gravel road and two familiar looking people got out.  They seemed to be the group from the picture I had seen on my host’s phone.  With a deep breath, I looked up at one of the windows near the the top in the brick part of the building .  Four faceless silhouettes of various heights looked through the glass down at me.  My heart rate increased slightly and tears stung in the corners of eyes; were they real?

With words lodged in my throat, I started forward and up the squat stairs to the open door that rested beneath a porch-like overhang.  Looking around I saw that I had been correct; the ceilings were very tall and there was a straight, open-backed staircase up to the second floor.  I looked around cautiously, not seeing where the back wing began that I had seen from the front and only a short hall to a kitchen. Sharp whispering came from the top of the stairs like a few people were quietly debating on whether to go down or not.  I gritted my teeth; I couldn’t tell if they were real or not.

“Oh shut up and go down,” an annoyed male voice declared followed by the sound of shoes on the hardwood.

After a few steps, legs followed by a torso and head were seen trotting down to meet me.  A handsome head, far over me, when he reached the ground, at least six two.

“I’m not sure if you’re taller or shorter than I expected.”  He examined me for a moment, and the sound of a few more people coming down the stairs and muttering filled my ears.  “You miss Oregon?”

I looked him up and down as he had with me.  I hadn’t really noticed guys or girls in my druggy haze; attractive faces were new to me.  And he was the kind of guy you would expect to drive a truck; his shoulders were rather broad, and his whole physique said “quarterback” with his gray t-shirt snuggly fitting across his chest and showing off his tanned arms.  His jaw was strong with a stubbly chin that complimented the whole ruggedly handsome look he didn’t seem to be going for.  His hair was a nicely-tousled light-brown that looked like he ran his fingers through a lot, and his eyes were a charming mossy-green.  He offered a large and strangely un-calloused hand towards me in a more formal greeting.

I took it.  “Yeah, I’m Iris Colton.”  

His hand curled around mine, and his other, equally large, came up to cradle the backs of my fingers.  I looked at him strangely, my brow furrowed slightly at the focused look in his eyes.  A thoughtful sort of “huh” came from his throat as he directed his concentration back towards me.

“Iris.”  He tasted my name and nodded coolly.  “I’m Charlie Montgomery.  You’ve got some messed up shit in there, don’t you?”  He tapped the center of my forehead with the forefinger of his left hand.

I suppressed a sort of grin; his matter-of-factness was sort of refreshing.  “Yeah, uh, I suppose I do.”

“That was actually the complete opposite of what Adelaide wanted you to do, you meathead.”  A hand smacked the back of Charlie’s head and an amused grin revealed a set of straight, white teeth.

The owner of the hand walked around to face me, his lean arms folded across his chest.  Around him on the second stair was a girl around five foot two with very soft looking, light-blonde hair.  She had a very old look in her misty blue eyes like she had been around much longer than her young face may have suggested.  Her soft, rosy lips were in a very gentle and easy smile, and she seemed to be thinking about something else entirely.

“Sorry about him.”  The lean man pulled my attention away from the other girl to focus on him.  I blinked and sort of raised my eyebrows while pressing my lips together in a kind of facial shrug as my shoulders lifted as well.  “There’s just air in that big head of his.  I’m Christopher Haines.”

He reached out a hand towards me, and a voice began whispering just behind my left ear.  I hesitated for a moment, feeling as if my thoughts would again be put on display as something black curled at the corner of my eye.  One of his eyebrows raised as if to say, “I’m not like him, come on.”  Slowly I took his hand, squeezing it simply before letting go.  The last thing that I needed was everyone here that I was just meeting knowing what lurked in the corners of my mind.  Although Charlie seemed to have seen some of it briefly.  But there wasn’t anything nice up there.

“So, Christopher Haines, where are you from?” I asked casually, wondering where the fourth person from the window was.  I never asked that sort of thing anymore, usually it was just my mind playing tricks on me.

Christopher was almost as tall as Charlie, it seemed, with darker brown hair that swept up in the front.  His skin was pale, about the same creamy shade as my own, which made the few and far-between freckles on his face stand out a little.  He seemed like he was the kind of guy to be perpetually annoyed by the people around him with his chocolate eyes fixed and glaring at the man beside him.  Annoyed because he knew he was more intelligent and everyone else was an idiot; I understood that.  His maroon, long sleeved t-shirt was pushed up to his elbows and revealed two lean arms with hair as dark as the stuff on his head.  A strain seemed to be put on his square jaw as he avoided engaging Charlie’s literal prodding.

“Lansing, Michigan,” Christopher offered, pulling me back out of my examination.  “Dumbass is from Flagstaff in Arizona.”  He smacked away Charlie’s teasing hand.  “And that’s Elise Lovely.”  He gestured over his shoulder at the pale girl who seemed to be humming to herself softly.  “Whitehorse, Canada.”

“So, basically all over the place,” I deadpanned, not flinching as an enormous crash and thud sounded from upstairs.  Was that the diminished drugs in my system that suppressed my alarm or had I really become so used to weird noises?

“God dammit!”

Loud, frustrated footsteps tracked down the staircase accompanied by a string of muffled curses.  “Can I get some help up here with the stupid couch please?” a clipped, low voice asked.  It was the kind of voice that might raise the warning hackles on a dog’s neck.

Number four, I thought, watching the third man rest his right forearm against the wall that hung above the fifth or sixth step and peer down at his companions.  His hair was a honey blonde, and he looked as if he had just woken up (on the wrong side of the bed).  His eyes reminded me of a chronically wary animal, pacing and strangely blue.  He was assessing me, that much was clear, circling his prey from a standstill distance-hesitantly.

“Christ, Thomas.  Are you just throwing shit around up there?  We’re supposed to be gentle and quiet,” Christopher lowered his voice for the last part, but I heard it loud and clear, “when she gets here.  She’s fuckin’ here, man.”

Thomas glanced from Christopher to me as I pinched the bridge of my nose.  Was I really going to have to live with this lot for possibly over a year?  Emotions were not something that I had had much experience with in the last three years, and that much repression definitely rose to the surface quickly.  I inhaled through my nose slowly, opening my eyes and looking up at the boy on the stairs.  Er, man.

“Let’s just get this out of the way right now:  I don’t need to be coddled.  I don’t need all of you tiptoeing around me like I’m going to shatter into a million tiny fucking pieces.  I need to be treated like a normal person just like any of you.  So please, don’t be gentle and quiet because nothing else ever fucking is.”

Thomas continued to stare at me, and Christopher seemed very taken off guard.  Elise seemed to come out of her daze slightly and looked at me as well.  Everything was silent for a moment, the kind of silent where your ears fill it in with ringing.  The voices behind my ear had stopped.  All of a sudden Charlie let out a whooping, whole-hearted laugh, and as he bent over at the waist, he smacked his knee.  He walked over to me, still cracking up, and wrapped a brawny arm around my shoulders.

“Oh, you’re fuckin’ great!  Tellin’ off Cali and Haines, and look at their dumb faces!”  He gave another whoop and patted my shoulder with the hand that rested on it, wiping at his eyes with the other.  “Jesus, it’s beautiful.”

“Cali?” I prompted, confusion puckering my brow.  Charlie seemed more and more like my favorite suddenly.

He gestured at Thomas still faintly giggling.  “Yeah, McKinney.  He’s from Pismo, Cali.  Weirdly entitled surfer with some serious anger issues-”

“Let’s not stir up any hot coals, shall we?” a voice from behind the big guy suggested as a hand clapped down on his large shoulder.

“Wouldn’t be dreamin’ of it, Maxy!” Charlie agreed, grinning at the man that stepped around to face the group.

Thomas seemed to be silently fuming on his stair.  This probably wasn’t what he had expected when coming for help.  An unfamiliar and hoarse voice began whispering profusely in my ear, and I flinched slightly, covering it with my hand.  I ground my teeth together slowly, hoping the voice would dissipate and leave me alone for once.  It didn’t.  The guy from the photo  Charlie had called Max was looking at me as if he knew exactly what was going on, but there was no sympathy in his gray eyes.  He addressed everyone else, his eyes suddenly on something there...but not.

“Alrighty, boys and girls.  Let’s head to the lab while I get Iris settled real quick.”  He ushered the four towards the kitchen hallway with much grumbling, and once the sound of a door closing was heard, he turned back to me.  “You’re a painter, right?” he asked without any sort of concern or compassion.  It was strange and distant.

“Yeah,” I murmured, wary of the closeness of him.  His eyes weren’t just a pale gray, I noticed; there was a tiny explosion of rust just around the pupil.

A pain began to build in the center of my forehead and in my temples.  It was a hot pain and stabbing like dozens of tiny icicles without any of the cool relief.  My teeth clenched slowly tighter in an attempt to avoid showing how the pain felt.  It circled around my head in a thin tongue of fire, forcing an image before my eyes.  My hand shot out to find something to hold onto; Max was my default.  It felt like I was falling backwards, and the earth was rushing up beneath me, but I knew that my feet were still glued to the floor.  Max was firmly holding onto my forearms, but it felt so far away and irrelevant.  He seemed to be quietly calling for someone in an attempt to not alarm me.  It didn’t matter though, I wasn’t with Max anymore.

I was near the house still...I think.  I stood on the edge of the ever-so-slightly tilted roof and dropped backwards.  I fell fast, but the ground never came.  I just stopped.  A voice was whispering very quickly in my ear.  The words rasped together with the attempt at quietness, but a few things rang clear.  It’s alright…everything feels softer...cream cheese.  If I could’ve wrinkled my brow in confusion, I would’ve, but I couldn’t really move my face.  I turned my head to the left and saw the reflection of a still figure beside me on the hard-pressed gravel in the glass of what seemed to be the sun room.  Looking past the glare and reflection, I saw through the room and all the way to the entryway where I lay on my back with four people surrounding me.  My vision zoned out and back to the reflection.  I felt as if the air in my lungs was being sucked out by a giant vacuum in the sky.  The ground beneath me I suddenly felt with a sharp clarity, little rocks poking the exposed skin of the backs of my arms and where my shirt had ridden up to my waist.  The whirring of the air as I passed through it when I had fallen filled my ears, and in an instant I flew in reverse back to the edge of the building’s roof.

“Iris?”

My eyes flew open, and I immediately rolled forward into a sitting position to take in a huge lungful of air.  Why was I on the floor?  I needed to paint.  Four people stood around me with avid concern on two of their faces.  Max just seemed distantly apathetic with his black brows furrowed in observation.  To the left of me was an older gentleman with a thick head of silvery-white hair and a placid expression.  If I wasn’t coughing dryly into the crook of my elbow, I would’ve recognized him as Jonathan Kamens, Adelaide’s father from the photo.  Adelaide herself and Christopher were leaning down in front of me with their apprehension-filled eyes on my face.

“I don’t...is-is she okay?  I just forgot my...my notebook…” Christopher trailed off.  He seemed very worried for me and, it seemed, for himself.

“I’m fine,” I managed softly, holding my face in my hands and raking my fingers back through my long hair.  I could still feel the gravel pressing into my skin, and I brushed at the backs of my arms to no avail.

“Let’s get her to the lab.”  That was Max’s voice, I registered as my fingers began to shake slightly.  “Could you help me, Chris?”

I let my arm get pulled around Max’s shoulders where he grabbed my wrist to keep me up.  My legs felt like jello, but I weakly stood with my crutch’s help.  Being carried into a room by a muscular guy was not how I wanted to be seen on my first day anywhere.  I heard Christopher ahead asking lots of questions as he held open a couple sets of doors for us; if they were directed at me, I didn’t really notice.  Max was offering short replies along the lines of “don’t worry about it” and leading me to a chair that was placed in front of an easel in what I was assuming was the lab.  

I sat down and looked up to find everyone staring at me.  Wrinkling my nose at the drawn attention, I pulled the easel closer and stared at the blank canvas.  The image flashed back through my mind, and without making eye contact with anyone, I picked up the paint-dotted palette that was already laid out for me.  Adelaide made a sort of flustered sound near the front of the room as she came in with her father.

Picking up a brush from the row on the side table, I zoned in on the image in my head and zoned out of the lab.  My brush picked up a gray paint, and I watched as my hand administered the gray with a delicate precision.  I picked up black and dashed or dotted in a few places where the gray had gone and watched as it mixed and formed organic dimensions.  The vision began to play over in my head again without the sensation of falling.  Was this really what it was going to be like now that I was off of my meds?  Scenes like that had never played out for me when I was awake.  Not that I remembered at least.  -The vivid dottings of the violet lupin just outside of the glass panes made an appearance.-  Was this going to be a regular occurrence now?  Was I going to learn to control this?  -White trailing like gossamer on the gray pebbling.-  I didn’t want to feel this way anymore.  I didn’t want to feel like I was living through someone else’s horrific experiences.  I wanted my own peace.  -Dark crimson trickling across my painted gravel.-  I needed my own peace.  I never wanted to wake up in the middle of the night gasping for air as I felt around in my bed to make sure I was safe and...alive!  -Deep green spitting across the canvas and up sharply into angular shapes with oddly soft edges.-

Something black slid past me in my peripheral vision and forced me to shut my eyes against any fear that rose up in my throat like bile.  I was angry and fed up with what my life was becoming.  Yes, I had left home, finished high school, and gotten off of my pills but look at me now.  I didn’t even really know who I was.  I was a stranger to myself, feeling the future strife of others.  I had freaked out a bunch of people that I had just met and had had some sort of episode.  

Max grabbed my wrist as my brush moved to smear black across the scene that had unfolded from my brush.  Adelaide came around to see what I had done, her hand hesitating over her mouth.  I knew what it was, and I didn’t want to look at it anymore.  It would be the view from the sun room; light spilled out onto the tightly-packed gravel path like pale milk against a dark table.  Brilliant, but soft, violet puffs made up the pale lupin that was grouped and sprouted from the earth by the glass.  Across the dark driveway was a figure sprawled out.  The figure was facing away from the viewing point with their head bowed forward and slightly consumed by the darkness.  Green pines shot up from the dark grass giving an eerie contrast to the red shimmer on the gravel stones.

I slid off of my chair and walked over to one of the couches where no one was anywhere near and observed the lab for the first time.  It wasn’t your everyday science lab with white tile floors and white-washed walls.  The floor, for starters, was a soft-looking dark-chocolate color.  It was the kind of carpet to lay on in front of a large fire place and draw in a sketchbook or write a novel.  The walls were actually white, but the top half was a multi-paned window facing the forest.  There were comfortable looking chairs and couches dotting the room that didn’t seem lived in yet.  The rest of the wing must have been filled with other testing rooms or something because we were only in the one at the very end.

A purposeful throat clearing sounded next to me, and I raised my eyebrow and tilted my head to see who it was.  Was it really that hard to leave me alone?

“I saw what you painted,”  Thomas muttered, not looking at me but staring towards the front of the room.

“Great,” I deadpanned, leaning back into the couch with my arms folded over my chest.  “And what did you think?”

“Nothing,” he began, turning his fiercely-blue eyes on me with sudden purpose, “I saw it when I met her too.”

 

3: Chapter 3

That was definitely not what I had been anticipating.  I narrowed my eyes at Thomas; he had been such a prick not too long ago.  He blinked solemnly back at me, his hands shoved in his pockets.  I didn’t even know what Thomas did-if I had decided that I did believe in this psychic crap.  Charlie read minds or something, that much I knew, but everyone else here I had no idea about.  Was Max or Adelaide or her father anything special, or was it just us?

“What do you mean, you saw it too?” I asked softly, looking up at him with less suspicion.  I didn’t want to be alone in this anymore.

Thomas didn’t say anything for a moment; he seemed to be weighing his words.  “I, uh,” pause, “I see how people...die.  I think.”

His face was calculating in the most vulnerable way.  He didn’t seem to be completely sure of what he had said, and he looked as if he didn’t want it to be wrong because if it was wrong it felt too much like a lie.  I watched his face sort of solidify into a more sure mask.  Opening his mouth slightly as if he were going to speak, he hesitated a moment before nodding and staring back ahead of himself.

“Montgomery could probably explain it better.  He gets in there and really…” he chuckled humorlessly to himself and folded his arms over his chest, “man’s got a way with words, I guess.”

I nodded and watched as Adelaide removed the canvas from the easel and take it into a back office off to the side with her father.  The other three of our group walked over to where Thomas and I were at the couch.  Charlie, the only one of the three to not look phased, hopped onto the cushion beside me and popped his feet up onto the squat little coffee table before us.

“So,” he drew out the word, looking up as he did to try to pinpoint where to begin, “I think some deeper introductions are due.”

He looked at each of us pointedly like children who denied stealing from the cookie jar.  Something about Charlie was very warm and welcoming.  Whether it was the easy smile and automatic charm or something to do with how he was wired, I had no idea, but I liked his presence.  

“Deeper?” Elise asked curiously.  Her voice was like the fragile wing of a moth, and I had a feeling I would not be hearing it very often.

“That’s right, sweetheart.”  Charlie nodded and folded his muscular arms over his chest.  “Here, I’ll go first.  I’m Charlie Montgomery; I’m from Flagstaff, Arizona; I’m 18 years old; and I can read your mind through physical contact.”

His grin was sort of infectious, and as I looked around I could see everyone suppressing the urge to return it.  Christopher seemed to like the idea too, pushing aside his attitude of annoyance and nodding along with the larger man.

“Yeah, alright,” he began, pushing his hands into his pockets.  “My name’s Christopher Haines; I’m from Lansing, Michigan; I’m seventeen years old; and I can move stuff with my mind.”

Charlie grinned at him, glancing around to see who would step up next.  Elise was looking rather bold (for a fluttery sort of butterfly person), and she smiled pleasantly around at all of us.

“My name is Elise Lovely,” she said in a smooth and soft voice, “I’m from Whitehorse, Canada; I’m eighteen years old; and I can communicate with people who have passed over to the other side.”

Charlie nodded with an impressed look on his face, and he looked between Thomas and me to see who would go next.  Thomas sighed and rubbed his face before blinking and looking at a speck on the couch.

“Well, my name is Thomas McKinney; I’m from Pismo, California; I’m eighteen; I don’t want to be here; and, uh, I see how everybody is going to die,” he mumbled the last part, making sure to avoid eye contact with everyone except me.  He knew that I saw pretty similar (and horrific) stuff, and he knew that I understood.

Again, Charlie nodded coolly and rolled his head on a limp neck to look at me.  I sighed and tried to figure out what I actually did.  Charlie’s grin was prompting me to divulge myself, and I sucked in a deep breath before deciding on what to say.

“Alrighty.”  I nodded and bit my lower lip.  “I’m Iris Colton; I’m from Gresham, Oregon; I’m seventeen; and I...sort of...see the future?  and other stuff…”  I left out the part that only Charlie had seen.  The part that had scared me half to death my whole life and had nearly driven my parents to a breaking point.

Charlie gave a gentle knowing smile and nodded as he clapped his large hands together.  We all sort of jumped at the break in the silence.  I glanced sideways at him and realized that I was okay with living with this odd bunch for over a year.  Thomas and Max might take some getting used to, but Elise and Charlie would be easy.  Christopher and I seemed to weirdly understand each other on an annoyance and intellectually based level.  This would be good, and I would learn to control my...thing.

“Well, boys and girls,” Charlie sighed, imitating Max from earlier, “I don’t think we’re doing any testing today, and I think it’s safe to say we can go up and figure out our new comer’s sleeping arrangements.”

“How many rooms are there?” I asked, accepting the helping hand he offered after standing up from his cushion.  I really hoped that I didn’t have to share a room because of all the nightmares, and, well, occasional screaming.

“There are seven, little lady,” he announced, herding the group out of the lab and into the glass-walled hallway back to the main part of the institute.

“Are there more coming?” I inquired, looking between everyone in the group and ignoring the whispering that had started just next to me.

Christopher shook his head and looked forward.  “Nah.  There were two others that originally fit the bill, but, uh, one turned out to just be a really good guesser.  The other girl died.”

Suppressing the urge to snort at his bluntness, I nodded and followed them slowly upstairs.  “And I thought I was cheery.”

Christopher smirked and Charlie did nothing to suppress his snort of amusement.  Elise was smiling calmly, but she was clearly not listening to the conversation at all.  Thomas seemed very focused on something in his head, not in front of us, and walked through the first door on the left in the open area at the top of the stairs.  It shut behind him.

I folded my arms over my chest and looked around at the ring of seven doors, all open except the one Thomas had gone into.  Three of them looked a little lived in with half unpacked luggage and made-up queen-sized beds.  It suddenly occurred to me that I had no idea how long these other people had been here.

“Don’t worry about McKinney,” Charlie chuckled, nudging me with his muscular arm, “he’s just a stick in the mud.”

I shrugged, walking forward and sticking my head into the one of the three unoccupied rooms nearest Thomas’s.  It was spacious with similar, but white, carpet as the lab downstairs.  The walls were a soft lavender-blue, and a white duvet-covered queen-sized bed was pushed up into the corner.  Next to it was a simple, white nightstand with a single drawer and a small, round knob.  Heavy, white curtains encased in a sheer lilac outer curtain were collected at the ends of the floor to ceiling, wall-length window which over-looked the expanse of evergreen forest that surrounded the building.  Against another wall was a white oak dresser crowned by a wide, oval mirror.  Just adjacent was a slatted closet door.  My luggage was set at the foot of the bed.

“Look at that; she even found her room,” Charlie announced behind me as he elbowed an annoyed-looking Christopher in the ribs.

“One of us.  One of us…” Christopher whisper-chanted which made the Arizona native grin in amusement.

I turned around to face them with raised eyebrows.  Elise was whispering happily to the empty air beside her.  It sent a chill down my spine.

“They assigned us rooms?” I asked skeptically; I was almost an adult.

“More like designed us rooms,” Christopher offered, glancing back at Elise.  “They keep saying, ‘comfort is key.’”  He shrugged and stared at the two unoccupied rooms’ doors until they slowly swung shut.

I narrowed my eyes at the doors as my brows knitted together.  Maybe this psychic crap wasn’t a joke.  I wasn’t sure I liked that idea.

“Do you think they have strawberries down in the kitchen?” Elise inquired suddenly, looking at an empty spot on the wall.

“Yeah, probably.”  Charlie nodded, watching as she beamed and turned to go back down the stairs.

“Ooh, and cream cheese…” she trailed off down the steps, the top of her white-blonde head quickly vanishing out of sight.

A wave of nausea crept behind my sinuses and slid up my throat.  That word rang in my head like a foggy echo from no more than an hour ago.  Cream cheese.  It forced a pressure headache into the center of my forehead and pressed annoyingly.  I wrinkled my nose and rolled my shoulders back to hear the popping between my vertebrae.

“What?  You don’t like cream cheese?” Christopher prodded, obviously seeing my unintended reaction towards the word.

I shrugged in an attempt to cover up my slip.  “I could take it or leave it.”  I knew Charlie was staring at me with a slightly concerned expression on his face, but he didn’t know.  He hadn’t seen what I had seen.

Christopher nodded and shrugged as well.  “I’m just gonna hang out until dinner.”  He gestured over his shoulder into his room as he backed into it.  “Probably like an hour, yeah?” he asked Charlie.

Charlie nodded.  “It’s like 5:30 now.  Half an hour...hour, hard to say.”

I left them to their conversation; it was much more pressing that I got my sketchbook at that moment.  Everybody seemed pretty great, but I also had a shit storm building back up in my head, and it needed to come out.  Digging around in the backpack of art supplies I had brought with me, I extracted my spiral-bound sketch pad from the back.  I found a tin of charcoal pencils wedged into the side pocket and extracted the one with the lowest density.  Sitting back with my knees curled up to my chest at the foot of the bed, I opened the notebook to a clean page.  My hand went to work.  I didn’t even want to look at what was coming out of the end of the pencil; I knew what it was.  It was disgusting and tried to control my mind day in and day out.  It was made of smooth, almost sinewy, black tendrils that curled and writhed across the page and my vision.   At the point below what looked to be blank, lifeless eyes was a sticky-looking opening where globs of black oozed and clung to both ends like a disgusting mouth.  I looked down at the life-like horror beneath my hand.  I thought I was going to be sick.

I leaned my head back against the foot of the bed and moved the sketchbook to the floor.  Dragging my hands down my cheeks in frustration, I closed my eyes and removed myself.  I slowly let myself shut down; I hadn’t had to deal with all of this fear and stomach churning on my medication.  I don’t think I was actually really on this plane of existence.  My own little world had been constructed around me as a safeguard, and I had let it crumble without the cotton in my ears and mind to cushion the fall.  It fell hard, and it fell fast, and it left me exposed like an electrical wire.  I wanted my little world back.  I wanted to reconstruct what I had made for myself.  But I didn’t understand how.  My lack of emotional know-how had stripped me naked and left me out in the cold.  My throat was tight, and the corners of my eyes stung with unshed tears.  How was I expected to survive this?

To my left the door clicked shut.  My eyes sprung open, blinking away the excess liquid.  A slightly blurry Charlie stood with his hands stuffed in his pockets and his eyes on the discarded sketch pad.  I rubbed my eyes and gently closed the notebook now feeling even more exposed.  His mossy eyes focused on me, pinning me in the gentlest way to my seat.  He slowly sat facing me with his legs criss-crossed like a little kid.  In a careful and premeditated movement, he rested his elbows on his knees with his hands outstretched to me.  I met his eyes.  

“Can I see?” he murmured with his steady hands waiting palm-up for mine.

“You…” I began, folding my arms over my chest and looking down, “you don’t want to see up there.”

He exhaled slowly through his nose and simply waited for me to give him my hands.  Eventually I uncoiled my arms from myself and held them out to him.  As soon as he curled his fingers around my pale hands, his eyes zoned out.  His pupils shrank a little, and he stared right past me at a blank spot on the wall.  Was this a psychic thing?  They all seemed to stare at nothing while obviously focusing on something else completely.  Had I done that earlier?  I really hoped not.

Then my chest felt a little lighter, like the constant pressure of whatever my mind had produced no longer stomped on my lungs.  I looked up at Charlie and hoped what was in my head didn’t change him.  He just seemed to want to have a good time and make people happy with his easy humor and positivity.  He was such a genuine person, and I didn’t want my ugly brain to corrupt or denature that.  

His eyes moved to mine and seemed to focus in.  He was staring at me, and he didn’t look like he was in my head anymore.

I frowned and watched him.  “Do you know how to shut that off?” I asked, jealousy and awe creeping into my voice.

He gave me a proud smile and shrugged nonchalantly.  “Sort of.  I had to figure it out because if I ever got tackled in a game or practice or whatever, I’d see into the guy’s head, and I’d be like paralyzed until he got off me.”

My lips twitched up in an amused grin.  Charlie was definitely smarter than he appeared, and he was still holding my hands.  But I liked it; it was warm and comforting.  “So what’d you think?”

With a goofy look on his face, he stared at the center of my forehead and skewed his mouth to the side.  “Well, that’s not your typical sunshine and ponies as one might expect.”

“Nope.”  I shook my head as a sudden thought occurred to me.  “What do you see?  How much?”

“That depends,” he started, releasing my hands to rest his chin on his knuckles.  “If I’ve seen everything you’ve experienced, like just now, I only see the newest stuff that gets churned out from then on out.”

I nodded and thought about that.  Charlie had just seen everything.  He’d seen all of the ugliness, heard all of the strangeness, experienced the fog of my existence, and here he sat, just chatting about it like it was nothing.  It was weird...and cool.  I wrapped my arms around my shins and rested my chin on my knees.  I had a lot of questions:  how do you turn this shit off? was definitely the first one that came to mind.  But it wasn’t the first one that I asked.

“Have you ever seen anything like….” I tapped the center of my forehead with my forefinger and raised my eyebrows.  I didn’t know what to call it.

Charlie seemed thoughtful for a moment, clearly chewing the inside of his lip.  “None of the constant slurpee shadows or whispering dudes, but you see some pretty similar stuff to McKinney.”  He nodded in confirmation with himself then smiled at me.

That made me a little nervous.  Why was I seeing and hearing all of this extra stuff if it wasn’t part of the psychic crap I was starting to accept?  And why was I still the odd one out in an institute full of mental weirdos?  That didn’t seem to make any sense, but maybe I just wanted to not be the craziest anymore.  I didn’t want to be normal; normal was boring, but I could get used to less strange.

I scrunched up my mouth in thought, taking a deep breath through my nose.  Charlie smiled and folded his big hands in his lap.  He was kind of just a big, friendly kid with a genuine interest in everyone.  A big, friendly, intelligent, kid.  The guy had definitely grown on me in the short time since I had arrived.  I remembered again thinking how long everyone else had been at the institute and looked up at him.

“When did you guys get here?” I asked, leaning back against the foot of the bed.

“Uh…” he looked up as if trying to remember something.  “Haines got here about the same time as me on the 23rd. I think blondey got here like...last Monday?  So that was…”  He began counting on his fingers, and I suppressed a smile.

“Is ‘blondey’ Elise?”  I raised my eyebrows curiously.

“Yes, ma’am.  The 26th,” he continued, “McKinney got here last Thursday on the 29th.  And now you’re here on Monday the 2nd.’  He grinned at me as he finished.

I smiled and nodded:  Charlie was so happy it was infectious.  “And do you have a ‘nickname’ for everyone?”

Charlie laughed and shrugged still smiling.  “I guess I sort of do.  Why call somebody the same boring old thing as everybody else?”

I grinned at him and let my legs fall into the same criss-cross position as Charlie’s.  I forgot what it was like to be around people who were friendly towards me.  Every friend I had had had ended up not being a friend.  This new ease of companionship was comforting and helped me battle the monsters inside my head.  I could get used to this.

 

4: Chapter 4

 

At six thirty, everyone went downstairs for dinner.  Everyone except Adelaide’s father and Max.  Mr. Kamens did not stay at the institute with the rest of us, and Max was busy with something in the lab that apparently constituted missing a meal.

It seemed to be a pretty easy-going schedule that had been planned for us (planned being used lightly).  We were pretty much given free-range of the building.  Since we were all graduated, we didn’t have to get up for school in the mornings, and Adelaide didn’t care when or if we went to bed.  We were allowed to come and go as we pleased as long as we were ready for testing around 3pm everyday.  If we couldn’t make it back by then, we were supposed to give Adelaide or Max a call.  The fridge was going to remain fully stocked, mostly because there were three teenage boys in the house, so we could eat whenever we were hungry.

This was definitely something that I could live with.  The only foreseeable drawback seemed to be that there wasn’t a bathroom upstairs, so walking around the institute in a towel would probably be a regular thing.  I hoped that the boys liked my fashionable towel turban.

All three of the boys had driven there (despite the absurd distance), and their cars were parked out in the gravel driveway ready for exploring.  There was Charlie’s reddish-brown 1987 Chevy pickup with mud caked up the sides and an Arizona License plate smacked on the front.  Next to it was Christopher’s white Jeep Wrangler with the boast-worthy off-road tires every mud-loving man would dream of.  And sandwiching in Charlie’s Chevy on the right was Thomas’s sleek black Mustang with nary a bug splat on the windshield.  There was no doubt in my mind that at least two of the three would be finding some muddy backroads to regularly bounce through in their down time.  Maybe if they asked I’d even join them.

Around ten o’clock I decided I had had enough excitement for one day.  I had unpacked most of my things and changed into a big t-shirt for pajamas.  Thankfully my body agreed that it was definitely in need of some shut eye, and I drifted off while pushing away the moving blackness that teased me behind my eyelids.

 

I stood in the kitchen of the institute still dressed in only my unders and shirt.  Something felt off, and I looked around at the stretched corners of the walls.  The usually brightly-lit, tiled kitchen was dim and uninviting as I cleared the room and found myself in the hall.  To my left was the door that would take me to the glass hallway that led to the lab.  To my right were the warm hardwood floors of the rest of the level and the large front door.  Something pulled me, almost as if by the hand, to the hallway.  I quietly pushed open the door, every sound feeling much louder than it probably was.  It shut with a booming echo behind me that burst into a chorus of dark whispers.  

I bit the insides of my cheeks, a pounding beginning at the base of my skull.  What was I going to find at the end?  The darkness on the other side of the glass was pulsating as if the night itself were alive.  Slithering amongst the darkness were my monsters, ready to consume me in their dark, slimy embrace.  I walked quickly to the other end of the hall.  Staring at the door to the lab, I felt as if I was not going to be able to move it.  It was like staring at the side of a mountain and knowing that no matter how hard you push or pull on it, it will never move from the spot it’s always been.  Only I didn’t have to touch it for it to swing open.  Slowly, followed by a haunting whisper of voices, it ghosted open to reveal its interior.

Everything seemed to be in its place just like we had left it earlier that day.  But it was too quiet.  Every breath seemed like a strangled scream in the ear-ringing silence.  I was especially alarmed by the silence when I realized Max was standing in front of what looked like my painting on an easel.  His back was to me, and I don’t think that he realized my presence which was weird considering all of the echoing whispers that were beginning to enclose on me from the high ceilings.  

I took a step closer to him, and my foot was greeted by the carpet with a soft jumble of nonsense.  Recoiling slightly, I stared down at the ground.  The carpet came to life and peeled back in places to form blankly staring eyeballs.  My stomach lurched to my throat, and I jumped back nearly stepping on one.  The whispers grew louder along with the increasing weight of the air in the room as it pressed down heavily around me.  I stepped around the eyeballs, watching them blink and follow me as I hurried towards Max and the easel.

“This is your fault, you know,” he suddenly said, his voice eclipsing the whispers and making all of the eyeballs look towards him.

I froze in my place nearly five feet from him; what was my fault?

As if reading my thoughts, he turned to face me.  “You fucked her over.”

I watched as he lifted a hand and pointed to the painting of the figure draped in a gossamer nightgown.  The crimson pooled around the head seemed stark against the pavement, and the voices all began to whisper in agreement.  The eyeballs all turned on me, and I realized for the first time that they were all grotesquely the same with irises so palely blue they almost blended into the whites.  My whole body began to shake, and I averted my eyes from the painting to Max.  He looked at me with such an absence of emotion it frightened me.

The whispers grew louder and woave themselves into one.  I couldn’t distinguish the muffled words that surrounded me.  I wanted to scream.  The whole room stretched out and warped enormously around the edges, and my vision zoned out into a tunnel of the hall as if I had never entered the lab with Max as the center.

The whispers went silent as I woke up.

 

I gasped, my lungs burning as if an enormous weight had just been lifted from my chest.  I wanted to scream and cry and find someone, anyone, to convince me that I wasn’t still dreaming.  Everything looked and felt exactly the same, and my heart thudded loudly against my ribcage as if I had just sprinted a mile.  There were no voices or eyeballs or dark creatures, but my head hurt like the center of my forehead had been pierced by a hot poker, and the lack of distinction between dream and reality was driving me insane.

I glanced around the room frantically for the glowing green numbers of my digital alarm clock when I remembered I wasn’t at home.  My hand slapped the top of my nightstand in search of the cell phone I had set to charge.  9:38am.  There was no way it was morning; it was too damn dark!  The sound of my heart thumping in my throat and blood rushing in my ears drowned out any and all outside sound, and I was locked in my head like I had never experienced.  I pressed my knuckles to my temples and with a deep breath jerked back the heavy curtains to reveal bright streams of morning light.

Blinking in disbelief, I felt my heart begin to quiet.  I was awake; I was okay.  I stepped out of bed and ran a hand through my dark, wavy mess of hair.  My brain flicked through the exercises my psychiatrist had recommended when I had first complained about not being able to reestablish my own reality from that of my nightmares.

I counted out my ten fingers and inhaled slowly through my nose.  “My name is Iris Colton; it is 9:38 in the morning on June 3rd; and I am in Kalaloch, Washington.”

Without putting much thought into what I was doing, I dressed myself in jean shorts and a light t-shirt and padded out to the ring of rooms in my scrunched down wool socks.  All the doors were open with no one inside, so I headed downstairs in search of a bowl of cereal because that’s what almost adults do, right?

In the kitchen, my four housemates were sitting around the center island chatting quietly about plans for the day.  All except Charlie looked a little shaken, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time when Adelaide came in munching on a bagel with half a grapefruit in her other hand.  She had on purple sweatpants that were rolled up to the knees and a comfortably fit zip-up sweatshirt.

She held up a hand as if she were going to speak as she attempted to swallow a large bite of bagel.  There was a pause in the conversation, and I flinched slightly as two loud whispers argued violently by my right ear then disappeared.  One of the chairs at the island scooted back all of a sudden with a disturbed grinding screech.  I jumped and turned at the sudden noise and met the large and frightened eyes of everyone at the counter.

“Did you hear that?”  Thomas’s blue eyes were caught between anger and frantic verification as he looked around at everyone else.

Christopher was the one who had jumped back in his chair and was actually standing and looking around him for the source of the sudden onslaught.  His eyes were wide, and he rubbed his cheeks with the palms of his hands, bringing them to rest over his mouth as he looked to me.  His bright brown eyes looked watery and a little too tired for a full-night’s sleep.

Charlie and Elise looked rather alarmed as well, but they seemed a little more knowing of the disturbance.  Elise probably heard things all of the time from the people she talked to on the “other side” and was only unused to the sudden and intense volume.  A look of realization crossed Charlie’s face as if he knew exactly what the disturbance had been and where he had heard it before.

Adelaide frowned as if she was not in on a joke that was being told.  She scrunched up her mouth and looked around at the five of us.  “Hear what?” she asked, her eyes both narrow with suspicion and intrigue.

“You all heard it too,” Thomas insisted, looking around accusingly at the rest of us.

When his eyes met mine something seemed to click in his head.  Everyone could see it; it was like a dawning “oh” sort of moment that changed his face into a pointedly blank mask.

“It’s you,” he said flatly, not turning as Charlie rose from his chair.

“Excuse me?” Adelaide and I asked at the same time as I folded my arms over my chest.

“McKinney, hold on,” Charlie began in my defence and raised his eyebrows in surprise as Thomas shot him a glare.

“What are you talking about?” Adelaide interjected, stepping closer to Thomas and setting her grapefruit on the counter behind him.  “Hear what?”

“Th-that whispering,” Christopher said softly, flinching as I began to hear it creeping up behind me again.

“Did you even bother to check her alpha waves before bringing her here?” Thomas inquired, coiling his arms over his chest defensively as he turned his glare on Adelaide who looked alarmed.  “Didn’t you say she was on some meds or something?”

Adelaide seemed to blush like she had just remembered something rather embarrassing.  She opened her mouth slightly to speak then paused and shut it again.  I myself was embarrassed; why would she tell them that I was on medication?  The whispers were growing louder behind me, and their voices began to grow louder than the conversation that was going on before me.  Christopher was staring worriedly at a line in the hardwood, and Elise was slowly covering her ears with her small, pale hands.  Charlie continued to try to peel Thomas away from the brewing argument as their voices began to rise.

I tried to shut out the whispers and focus on what was happening in front of me, but it wasn’t working.  My medication had kept them more muffled and manageable even if they were still there.  The pills had made it so I didn’t care or really even take notice of them, but now I felt like I was being rubbed raw by the abrasive edges of their hoarse speech.  I wanted it to stop; I needed it to stop, but it kept getting louder and louder.

“Shut up, shut up…” I barely whispered to them, raking my fingers back through my hair.  

The voices continued, almost completely drowning out Thomas as he began to shout in frustration and use his hands for violent emphasis.  Adelaide was trying to calm Thomas down and ease the situation to a negotiable level to no avail.  The volume was making my ears ache and the piercing feeling in the center of my forehead was back with a new vengeance.  I thought I was going to explode and have that be the end of it.

“Shut up!” I yelled, pressing my knuckles to my temples and squeezing my eyes shut as I bent slightly at the waist.

Everything went silent.  Everything.  I slowly opened my eyes and bit my lip as I realized I had just actually yelled that.  Christopher looked a little awestruck like what had been troubling him was now gone as well.  Everyone looked that way, I realized, and Adelaide just looked bewildered beyond all belief.  I cleared my throat and shifted my weight onto my left leg.

“What are alpha waves?” I ventured, chewing the inside of my lip and only looking at Adelaide.

She looked a little taken aback and tried to answer.  “Oh, uh, alpha waves are the brain waves that occur with psychic activity.  That’s what we were going to test you for yesterday, but we got a little distracted…” she trailed off and frowned to herself.

“And why would that have been helpful to record before ‘bringing me here’?” I inquired, pressing my lips together in a worried line.

“Well….”  Adelaide looked a little distressed and tried to press forward.  “If your alpha waves, meaning psychic pull, is the strongest with an ability and condition like yours...it could run the risk of pulling other psychics in.”

I narrowed my eyes at her; this seemed like one of those things that you share up front with people before you bring them aboard the crazy psychic train.  “In?  Into my head?”

Nobody should have to live through this with me, especially not four people I had only know for less than a day and only wanted to control the shitty hand that the universe dealt them.  I wanted to apologize, but I wasn’t totally sure what for.  Hey, I’m sorry I pulled you into my crappy reality with my weird psychic mojo.  Want to hang out sometime?  I felt trapped and alone with the weirdest feeling of being surrounded.  I could feel the energy of my housemates in the kitchen and it was strange.  It was like standing and facing one way while someone stands directly behind you, so you just know that they’re right there.  You can feel the heat of their body and their energy, and it’s there.  Except that they weren’t standing right behind me; they were standing a few feet away.

“Yes….”  Adelaide looked like a guilty child that was being scolded by their mother for forgetting to clean their room.

I stared blankly at her, and I prayed for the first time in my unbelieving life that my hallucinations would stay as far away as possible.  I opened my mouth to reply but felt as if the words had been sucked out and thrown away, so I closed my mouth.

Thomas looked angry again but more like a trapped animal than anything else.  Elise was very quietly murmuring to the air beside her as if to fill in someone on the events of a game they had not attended.  Charlie and Christopher both seemed like they were clicking together the final pieces of a puzzle and stepping back for the first time.

Thomas clenched his jaw and turned his gaze on me.  “I knew there was something off about you,” he said slowly; his face was so set in his surety it resembled a carefully crafted marble sculpture.  “I knew when I couldn’t get a read off of you something was wrong.”

Adelaide stepped forward and took me by the hands.  “Let’s do it this way, okay?”  She looked me in the eyes (which no one ever did) and awaited recognition.  “Let’s go measure your waves now, and depending on the results, we’ll figure out a plan.”

I nodded quietly and didn’t make eye contact with anyone as I walked towards the door to the lab.  I didn’t want anyone to be sucked into my head and feel what I felt.  The quivering curtains of my mind should remain firmly shut towards...well everyone.  Every voice or shape or creature I saw scared me and to have people who had never experienced that before be exposed to that….

I sat in a comfy chair that Adelaide had ushered me into and waited patiently as she began examining a bunch of small, round things connected to wires.  On my right middle finger, she clamped on the boxy end of a wire that led to a machine with a small screen that sat on top of a monitor.  She wiped at several places on my forehead with a clear substance before applying the little objects to my forehead and temples.

“The thing on your finger is for measuring your heart rate.  The fancy things on your forehead are just little electrodes; they’re what we use to pick up on your brain activity,” she explained, fiddling around with the machine that the wires connected to.  “This is an EEG machine, and it helps us to record that brain activity and the waves that you produce.”

“Alright.”  I wrung my hands and waited for further instruction.  “What happens if they get stuck in my head?  What’re the things that I see and hear?”

Adelaide was quiet for a moment and adjusted things on the machine before she answered.  “My father and I were wondering the same thing actually-about what you see and hear.  We think, and this is just a theory, that you’re picking up on other people’s thoughts.”  She paused for a moment and nodded to herself.  “Like Charlie, except without the physical contact.  And the things that you see are probably just half-formed visions that are constantly going.  And if our theory is right, it would account for why your alpha waves are off the charts.”

She turned the machine’s screen towards me and indicated a spiky line.  I didn’t understand exactly what the squiggly lines meant, but I did understand that it was apparently irregular compared to others.  I stared at the sharp angles of my alpha line and resented it.  I didn’t want to cause others pain; I wanted to fit in with these new psychic friends of mine.  “Friends” probably wasn’t a word I could use to describe them anymore actually.  I sort of just ruined their lives after all.

Pressing my lips together in an uncertain line, I looked up at Adelaide.  “So...what’s our plan?”

Adelaide consulted the screen and pressed a few buttons on the monitor; the chugging of a printer erupted from the back office where she had taken my painting the day before.  “Well, I’ll talk to Max and my father and get their opinions on the situation.  I’ll let you know by the end of the day.  Sound like a plan, Iris?”

I was so enveloped in my new wave of disappointment and guilt that I just nodded my head.  A dark, oozing figure stood just at the edge of my peripheral vision.  It looked as if it were waiting for something.  Goosebumps crept eerily up my arms and legs despite the comfortable temperature of the lab.  The sound of the hall door opening didn’t even jar me from my self-loathing.  I knew that the rest of them were probably seeing this right along with me as anxiety crept up the back of my neck.

“Iris, it’s going to be alright,” Adelaide tried to reassure me faintly like she was at the other end of a tunnel.  “Think of your brain as a sort of psychic radio.  The tuning knob is just flicking from station to station on its own.”

I nodded again slightly and ignored the sudden wave of nausea that curled up the back of my throat.  Slowly, like the blowing up of a balloon, the center of my forehead began to ache.  I started pulling off the funny little electrodes that were stuck to what seemed like every inch of my head as the black figure began to crawl towards me.  A thin chill ran down the top of my spine making the hairs on my arms stand to attention.  My heart began to thump loudly in my chest, and I heard the beeping of the heart monitor begin to escalate.  

Suddenly I was back in my world of cotton muffled sounds.  Adelaide was asking my something with a worried inflection in her voice.  A lower voice began asking as well, but I didn’t know who had come in.  My guilt and anger and fear were rising quickly with my heart rate, but the beeping of the monitor was more like a crappy slow motion sound effect.  The shape was coming closer; its animalistic steps were fluid but it crawled like an injured ape.  A pulsing aura of animosity surrounded the creature, and the terror that coursed through my veins blocked out the memory of actual people being in the room with me.

A grinding whisper breathed down the back of my neck made me recoil and shutter away.  Someone was grabbing my upper arms and calling my name, but the only thing I could see in front of me was the oozing black creature.  I felt restrained like I couldn’t get away as my breath became caught in my throat.  Hot tears streamed down my cheeks and blurred the vision of the thing in front of me.  I tried to blink them away to keep the beast in focus, but instead I clamped my eyelids shut against whatever it might do when it got to me.

“Iris!”

Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep!  I sucked in a sharp breath and opened my eyes to find a very close pair of bright gray ones staring back at me.  A tight, circular spray of rust plumed around the pupil which was constricted with close proximity focus.  I slowly leaned to the left and looked over the broad shoulder that was between me and where the creature should have been.  Should have.  All that was there was a wide-eyed Adelaide.  What a terrible morning she was having.

The heart rate monitor had slowed down quickly and was offering up a steady beep, beep, beep.  “Oh no,” I whispered, leaning my head into my hands, “is everyone else okay?  Did they see that?”

Max looked up from me to Adelaide for clarification.  She seemed flustered.  “They got sucked in by her pull.  I’ll fill you in in a few!  Take her blood pressure!” she called over shoulder as she trotted towards the hallway that led to the main part of the building.

With a sigh, Max looked back towards me with eyes that asked, are you okay if I let go? as he reached for a blood pressure cuff and stethoscope that sat beneath a manilla folder overflowing with sheets of paper.

I nodded and rubbed away the goosebumps on my arm.  I was so worried about everyone else that my stomach hurt.  Hunger probably assisted that hurt as well, but I was upset nonetheless.  Everyone seeing what I was seeing was definitely my number one fear come to life.

Max wound the cuff around the lower part of my bicep and secured it in place with the strip of velcro.  He pumped it up and was quiet for a moment as he listened with the stethoscope and stared at the pressure dial.  Slowly his brows knitted together, and he unfastened the cuff.

“85 over 60.  I wouldn’t get up if I were you.  What’d you see anyway?”

That low?  If I were home, my parents would’ve driven me straight to the hospital.  “Oh, uh, there was something...crawling towards me.”  Wow, that didn’t sound half as scary as it actually was.

Max looked thoughtful for a moment as he wound up the cuff and stethoscope and set it aside.  “How did it crawl?  Like a child?”

I was surprised he seemed so curious before remembering he worked for a psychic institute.  “Like...like a feral person who never learned to walk properly.”  I shuddered at the thought of it coming back towards me with its eerily liquid-like movements.

Max’s heavy, black brows cinched together, and he folded his muscular arms over his chest.  I could almost see the gears turning in his head as he put together whatever situation seemed to be unfolding before him.  Adelaide walked through the lab door then with a relieved but stressed look on her fair features.  

My stomach gave a perturbed growl of displeasure at the lack of sustenance so long after waking, and I slowly got to my feet.  Max tried to stop me (remembering my blood pressure), but I waved him off.  The two of them obviously had things to talk about, and somewhere in the kitchen was a bowl of cereal calling my name.

“Are they okay?” I asked as I passed Adelaide.

With a deep breath and brief nod, she offered me a smile.  “They’re fine, Iris.  Go get some breakfast.”

I let out a relieved sigh and made for the lab door; I didn’t want to get held back when Max told her my blood pressure.