Evolution

by Hayden Thorne

  Ms. Whitaker stood in front of her shop, having a smoke, or at least she appeared to be. Dressed in another turtleneck sweater, tight jeans, and boots, she stood on the sidewalk with one arm crossed over her stomach, the other resting against it with its wrist relaxed and limp, cigarette lightly held between the fingers in a very intellectually blasé kind of pose. Thin tendril thingies of smoke rose, but Ms. Whitaker wasn’t contemplating her surroundings at all. She stood motionless like that for some time, her head bent, her eyes fixed on the pavement directly in front of her.

  There was a pretty healthy pile of shit on the sidewalk, directly in front of her shop’s door. Someone must have been walking his or her dog, and it had a bit of an oopsie, which was never cleaned up. I swear, some people shouldn’t have pets or children. If the price of antiques didn’t drive Ms. Whitaker to close her business, shit on the sidewalk marking her shop’s entrance probably would.

  I approached her, and she glanced up. She didn’t appear startled or peeved, just blandly curious.

  “Someone should clean that,” I noted.

  She gave a faint shrug, took another drag of her cigarette, and turned her attention back to contemplating shit. “It’s the city’s job to do this, I think.”

  “Maybe we should call them—watch our tax money at work.”

  Silence fell on us for a bit. I wondered what passersby thought when they walked around us because we were blocking pedestrian traffic over dog droppings. Ms. Whitaker finally shook her head.

  “Wow,” she breathed. “This is so David Lynch.”

  “I’m sorry, who?”

  She looked at me again, smiled wryly, and jerked her head in the direction of her shop. “Come on in, sweetie. You can bring your bike inside if you want. Just make sure it doesn’t knock anything down, okay?”

  I nodded and maneuvered my bike toward the door, which she’d propped open with a brick—probably pulled out of someone’s wall. From light, I plunged myself into gloom and the creepy smell of age and lives long gone. I eventually found a spot for my bike—next to a narrow desk with a matching hutch, which I ogled for a while, imagining how the whole setup would look in my bare old attic space. I tried not to look at the price tag, of course.

  Ms. Whitaker called me over to the counter. “Do you like tea? I don’t drink coffee, so I can’t admit to being hip like you kids nowadays. I’ve got a bunch of different teas, though, and a plate of ginger cookies.”

  “Yeah, I like tea. Thanks.”

  She grinned at me as I shuffled over to the counter, eyeing her offerings more out of hunger—that day’s miserable lunch had finally caught up with me—than suspicion. She could have drugged me, for all I cared. She’d set an old bar stool in front of the counter. I perched myself on it, staring at her offerings and suddenly feeling embarrassed by the whole thing.

  On looking back, I now know it was a weird feeling to have when one had just been lured to a surprise meeting. I should’ve been on the alert, defensive or angry, even, ready to play all kinds of mind games if I had to. But no. I was kind of embarrassed, maybe even a little shy, and I squirmed a lot. My gaze flitted from one thing to another, unable to rest on anything for more than a second.

  Ms. Whitaker sure noticed.

  “I was right,” she said after a moment’s uncomfortable silence. She met my eyes with a curious, deeply probing look, but I didn’t sense any malice or danger in her. “You’re not like them.”

  “I don’t understand,” I stammered. No, I wasn’t doing too well at all.

  She raised a hand and lightly grazed my face with her fingers, as though tracing something only she could see. Wherever her fingers went, her eyes followed, all fixed and intent. It was all I could do to hold still and not sneeze when she tickled my nose—unintentionally. My thoughts momentarily flew back to those nice moments when Peter would trace my face with a finger before moving close for a long, deep kiss.

  “Oh, damn it,” I whispered, my hands balling into tight fists on my lap as I willed my fledgling boner to go down.

  Ms. Whitaker pulled her hand away with a light chuckle. “Sorry,” she said, turning to pour hot water out for me. “It was pretty forward of me to do that, I know. Don’t worry, I wasn’t trying to do anything illegal. I just needed to make sure of things, even though I knew I got them right the first time around. Want anything in your tea?”

  “No thanks,” I replied, tearing open a bag of chamomile tea. “I don’t understand why I’m here.” Now was the time to be on supervillain mode, I guess. I made a show of narrowing my eyes at her in a threatening way, which she appeared to ignore.

  “You’ve changed a little since I last saw you,” she said, drawing a chair up and sitting herself down. She plunked a couple of sugar cubes in her tea and stirred.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You look somewhat harder around the edges, a little older.” Her eyes rested on me as she sipped her drink, the steam from her cup looking like a thin veil of white. “I’m guessing you now look the way you’ll look about—oh—three years down the road.” She paused. “Also a bit sadder.”

  I bit into a cookie—note to self: ask Ms. Whitaker for the store where she got those ginger cookies. “Isn’t there like a disease that makes people age way, way faster than they should?”

  “It’s not a disease.” She laughed, rolling her eyes. “Quit the innocent act, honey. You have powers, and you didn’t get them naturally. You’re an—”

  “My name’s Eric, not Olympia,” I growled before blowing gently on my tea. “Last time I checked, Olympia’s a girl’s name.”

  “Olympia’s just a name I give to artificially-enhanced types. Like you.”

  Okeedokee. Play along.

  Hoping I looked totally confused, I blinked and munched thoughtfully. “I still don’t get it. By the way, are these cookies on sale? I want to tell my mom about them.”

  “Honey, I’d know, believe me. I was a little older than you when my dad experimented on me the same way you were worked on. In your case, though, it looks like the method’s been perfected.” She smiled. “More tea?”

  Chapter 17

  I stared at her, drop-jawed. “Shut up!”

  “Shut up about what? I was around seventeen when Dad messed with my head. Through suggestions, you know. Lots of them, embedded in tutorials he gave me on foreign language arts.” Ms. Whitaker poured me more hot water. I was simply stunned at how cool and indifferent she was when she talked about her past. “I was home-schooled, by the way. Pretty convenient setup; Dad didn’t trust the school system. I think it’s safe to say he hated it. Ironic, really, seeing as how he married a teacher.”

  “Didn’t trust the school system? As opposed to what?” I blurted out. “Screwing up your own kid’s head with your so-called lessons?”

  She set her cup down and leaned forward to fix me with a steady gaze. The shadows in her shop did nothing to soften the spooky lightness of her pupils. “Listen,” she countered, “what Dad did to me was nothing compared to what’s been done to you. His experiments had everything to do with knowledge absorption, not a distortion of someone’s mind and behavior. If I understood the mechanics behind it, I’d be able to explain it all to you right now, but I don’t. I was never aware of it until I started experiencing all kinds of weird things.”

  “Like what?” I was growing more aware that the gloomy silence around us felt grave-like. I caught myself glancing over my shoulder twice, shuddering. All around, the antiques stood half-covered in shadows like graveyard relics.

  She took a dainty bite of a cookie. “I could see through people.”

  “You could see dead people?”

  “Don’t be funny.”

  “Sorry, sorry. I’m just feeling a little creeped out by all this.” I waved a hand in the direction of the shadow-cloaked antiques behind me. “Your antiques aren’t helping me any, either.”

  Ms. Whitaker sighed and rubbed her temples. “Some kind of…ability that I was born with was s
omehow enhanced. Developed. Matured. Know what I’m saying?”

  “And that ability you were born with was, like, ESP or something?”

  “I guess so. ESP, sixth sense. Sounds pretty gothic, doesn’t it?” she said with a wry smile.

  I frowned at my tea. “Sounds crazy, not gothic.”

  “I don’t think it’s any less crazy than your ability to destroy objects with energy waves created by your mind.”

  “Are you saying that I was born with these bizarre energy waves or something?”

  “No. They’re unnatural. They’re obviously a manipulation of your mind. Maybe it’s an ability that’s been planted.” She paused and considered, frowning. “No, scratch that. It’s not a ‘maybe.’ It’s definite.”

  I glanced at her sharply, and she just stared at me without blinking. “Eric, I tried to forget about everything and brush it all off as some freak accident that was unique to my experiences. After moving to Vintage City, though, and seeing what’s been going on here, I’m now convinced it isn’t true. Meeting you, especially, and reading about what recently happened downtown forced me to rethink my own conclusions.”

  “Can you start over, please? I’m having a hard time wrapping my brain around all this.”

  Chamomile tea wasn’t helping me cope with its promised relaxing effects. I decided to up the ante and tear into two new bags of the stuff and to let them steep for twice the length of time as my first couple of cups.

  Ms. Whitaker grinned and nodded. “Okay. I’m sorry for hitting you with this from out of the blue.” She excused herself for a moment and vanished to her shop’s back room, returning with a new box of ginger cookies. “These things are on sale at Bettina’s Market. Your mom shouldn’t have problems finding it. Eat up. You need the calories.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  She settled herself on her chair and tore the box open, dumping the cookies in a pile on the plate. I didn’t need another invitation to dig in and swiped a cookie, sighing inwardly at the sharpness of the real bits of ginger that were blended in. Memories of Christmas from way back when coursed through my mind. Memories of happier, simpler times.

  “Mom was a teacher, and Dad was a psychiatrist. They—”

  “Wait,” I broke in. “You mean…I thought your dad was a geneticist.”

  She stared at me for a moment, and my brain froze. Oops. I said too much, didn’t I? “You know about the labs then?” she prodded, her words slow and cautious.

  “Yeah, I do.” I swallowed. Oh, great, did I just compromise my friends? “Only rumors, though.” That was a quick and awkward save, and I could tell from the way Ms. Whitaker looked at me—looked right through me—that she didn’t buy it.

  She broke the clumsy moment by glancing past my shoulder and in the direction of the front door, which I was sure she could easily keep an eye on from where she sat despite the expensive junk that crammed the shop. Then she turned her attention back to me.

  “I know about the labs, too, but no one told me about them. No one needed to, thanks to Dad. It’s something I’m sure he didn’t even consider when he experimented on me, that I’d be able to read his mind and know what he was doing, and for whom he was testing things out.” She flashed me a humorless little smile as I stared at her, wide-eyed. “Strange how things work, no? Dad knew people from the labs, was friends with a couple of geneticists. From what I’d seen, he was consulted over manipulations involving human subjects. I’m talking about genetic manipulations, but I’m no scientist, so I can’t really understand the nuances of the process and, God, anything scientific, I can’t grasp!”

  I nodded, sipping my tea. “I’m like that with Chemistry.”

  “Anyway, from what I could piece together, Dad began to look into mental manipulation because—again, I’m pretty much grasping at straws here—he thought the geneticists were onto something in altering the human makeup to enhance certain features and abilities. I don’t know if he continued to work with them on the side, but I suspect he did as an advisor of some kind, and he did his own experiments to test things out.”

  “I can’t believe he’d use his own kid for that!” I ground out. “Hell, I can’t believe that he’d even consider screwing around with someone just to see if he can improve on her! He’s no better than those crazy geneticists!”

  She watched me, listened to me, with a little smile. Weirdly enough, I felt much more comfortable talking to her about this, compared to my discussion with Mrs. Barlow. I could only guess it was because Ms. Whitaker and I were on par when it came to our “powers,” compared to Peter and Trent. She was no less superficially manufactured than I was. The difference was that she was the “prototype,” and I was the “new model.” Our experiences, though, stayed the same.

  Just as Wade’s experiences were the same as Peter’s. I stared at the half-eaten cookie in my hand, my spirits sinking at the thought. Another parallel, this time in terms of inferiority of powers and their source.

  “Sweetie, Dad wasn’t any different from most parents out there. He wanted me to be the best in what I could do. Unlike most other parents out there, though, he stumbled across a chance to cheat Nature, and he took it. He knew I loved history and foreign languages, and he used it.”

  “What about your mom?”

  “She didn’t know anything. She taught me at home, sure, but she didn’t realize the extra study materials my father gave me on the side were heavily coded to work on my mind on a subconscious level.” She sighed and glanced down, running a finger along her teacup’s rim as she lost herself in thought. “I really don’t know if it mattered had she known. Mom died in a plane crash when I was eighteen. She was on her way to visit an uncle.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, the long and short of it, Eric, is that Dad tried to make me ‘better.’ And I knew—I saw in his mind, little glimpses of his thoughts, that is—that he only wanted me to succeed in what I loved the most. You know, turn out into a summa cum laude in history or language arts someday. Maybe write several scholarly journals for Ivy League universities and so on. Win a Nobel Prize in something I was passionate about. His heart was in the right place, but his methods…I forgave him a long time ago. I guess I’m glad his experiments didn’t really succeed beyond a certain point. He couldn’t work his way past their limitations, it seemed.”

  I mulled things over, pulling out past conversations and weaving them into the present one, picking up a few threads and dropping others as I went. “That’s how it all starts, isn’t it?” I asked, my voice dropping. “Good intentions. Someone wishing a better future for his or her loved one. I guess in your case you’re lucky it didn’t go too far.”

  “I’m grateful for that, yeah.”

  “Did he stop? I mean, when did he think that he’d done enough?”

  “When I began to read his mind,” she said with a sly grin and a mischievous sparkle in her eyes. “At the same time, I didn’t show much improvement in my absorption of facts. It was like he turned something on that he didn’t expect while shooting way off the mark when it came to his actual purpose. Pretty bizarre.”

  I frowned. “Sounds kind of like Pandora’s Box,” I offered, and she burst out laughing, easing the seriousness of the moment. I couldn’t help but chuckle.

  “Yeah, you’re right. It was, wasn’t it? At any rate, when I began to finish his sentences for him and pull out odd bits of information that only he knew, he realized he’d gone too far, or at least done something completely unintentional. He stopped but never confessed to it. Then again, it wasn’t as though he needed to, anyway. I already knew too much even if what I managed to get out of him were fragments that I had to piece together, myself.” She paused and shrugged. “Things weren’t the same between us from then on. I think I frightened him enough for him to keep his distance, and I was fine with that. When I turned eighteen and had enough money saved, I moved out the first chance I had.”

  She leveled me with another steady, intense gaze. “Know w
hat’s even more ironic? I majored in business when I went to college. And all this?” She waved a hand. “All this is what’s left of my passion for history.”

  I’d already filled myself up with ginger cookies and tea, and I regarded her morosely. “I’m really sorry.”

  “Sorry? Don’t be! I’d rather be doing this than be some mentally manipulated big name scholar who technically cheated her way to fame even though she didn’t know it.”

  “So, uh, do you still have your—you know—powers?”

  She nodded. “A little bit. Most of them are gone, but I retained some ability to read people. That’s how I found out about you.”

  “How’s your dad?”

  “Gone. He died a couple of years ago, actually, but we were estranged till the last moment. I only heard about his death through a cousin.” Ms. Whitaker raised a hand while sighing deeply. “I think that’s all I’d like to share about my personal life. I’m a lot more concerned about you, Eric.”

  I shrugged, my earlier depression returning. “My situation’s more complicated,” I stammered. “You said earlier the process was perfected in my case. I guess I won’t argue against that, but what can I do?”

  “How did it happen?”

  “Um—music. I was knocked out, and music was played while I was unconscious. I guess like you, it was coded or something like that, and it worked better than your dad’s method, apparently. I mean…” I looked back at her, feeling hopeless. “I’m hurting people and destroying things, and I’m torn. I want to be better than I am, and in a way I got what I wished for, but look at what’s happening.”

  Ms. Whitaker leaned forward and took one of my hands in hers. “Listen, I’m not saying that I know everything because I don’t. What I do know, I figured out on my own, and even then, I’m still not sure about the veracity of my—my conclusions. Eric, you probably know way more than I do about those genetics labs, but what I understand, what I can see, is that your case isn’t hopeless. You’re not manipulated the way Magnifiman, Calais, and the others are manipulated. You’re like me—Olympia.”