The Experiment (Book 2): Making Friends

by Micah B. Edwards

  Oblivious to my discomfort, the doctor continues, “As for what I assume — you wouldn’t have gotten your blood tested if there weren’t visible effects. So if it’s not the facial bruising, what are they doing?”

  I hesitate, and Brian says, “C’mon, man, she can’t help you if you don’t tell her what’s up.”

  After a long moment, I say reluctantly, “I think they’re giving me superpowers.”

  It’s now Doc Simmons’s turn to give me a skeptical look, so I hurry on. “Look, give me a paperclip or something, something small and magnetic. Magnetisable. Whatever it’s called, something that would stick to a magnet.”

  She slides one off of a stack of papers and passes it to me, and I place it in my palm and demonstrate how it sticks no matter which way I turn my hand. The doctor grabs my hand and pulls it close to her face, demanding, “Do that again! Show me, slowly. This isn’t a trick?”

  “No trick. Not my trick, anyway.”

  “Can you repel it?” she asks, and I obediently levitate the clip an inch off of my cupped palm. She slides her finger underneath as if checking for wires, and breathes, “This is amazing.”

  Releasing my hand, she asks, “How far does your control reach?”

  “That’s about it now.”

  “Now? How far was it before? What happened?” She doesn’t have a notepad in her hands, but manages to give the impression of having a pen poised and ready to take notes all the same.

  “I don’t know; a couple of dozen feet, maybe? It sort of wore off.”

  Simmons gives me a disgusted look for my imprecision and asks, “What else can you — or could you — manipulate? Could you alter the flow of electricity?”

  Brian chimes in, “Remember during the big storm, the guy you couldn’t hit with the defib?”

  The doctor’s eyes widen, even as I narrow mine to glare at Brian. “That was you!” she exclaims in recognition.

  Brian shrugs apologetically behind her. “Trust her, man. Or trust me if you don’t. Besides, she was going to figure it out eventually anyway, and this’ll save you from an hour of questions and a bunch of homework.”

  Simmons shoots him a look over her shoulder, and he shrugs again. “Don’t blame me, Doc. You interrogate people.”

  Turning back to me, Doc Simmons asks, “Have they done anything since then?”

  “Um, well, sort of. I mean, yes. Do you have…I don’t know, some trash, and like a nonflammable surface?”

  Moments later, I’m raising my hand at a balled-up piece of paper in a glass beaker on the desk, and we all watch as it bursts into flames.

  “Man, that’s cool,” says Brian wistfully.

  Doc Simmons, meanwhile, is already hurrying around her office. “We need to test this.”

  - - -

  Two hours of experimenting later, Brian’s long gone and I’m explaining to the doc that really, I have a job I need to get to, and science is going to have to wait. She is deeply dissatisfied with this claim.

  “You can be late,” she tells me.

  “I can’t! It’s a new job.”

  “This is important!”

  “Being employed is important, too! Look, I appreciate everything you’re doing for me here, but I have to go.”

  “Fine,” she says with badly-concealed temper. “Give me your phone number.”

  “Whoa, hey, was this a date?” I joke, but the words die in my mouth at the look she gives me. Doc Simmons could fry ants with her glare. Chastened, I mumble out my digits, and she nods.

  “Okay, go. I’ll send you further questions and we’ll come work them out.”

  It occurs to me to ask what happens if I don’t want to be her lab rat, but one look at her tells me the answer to that: too bad, Dan, you’re not in the driver’s seat here. I mentally shrug, make my way downstairs and cab it out to work. I have to go home to get my uniform, so I end up being about ten minutes late to work.

  I figure this is still basically okay, and that I can explain away my tardiness with my obvious physical injuries if necessary. And in fact, when I arrive, the first thing Matt says to me is, “Dan, wow! What happened?”

  Part of being a good liar is figuring out your story ahead of time. I, unfortunately, am not a good liar, and have not thought to do this. Ideas spin through my head: I was mugged. I had this terrible nightmare. My friend invited me to a fight club.

  None of them sound any better than the truth, so I just go with that. “I was in a car accident last night.”

  “Were you driving?”

  “No, walking. It was on the way home from here, after the cops let us go.” I decide to take a small step away from the truth. “The guy hit me and drove off. I don’t know if he never saw me, or what, but I never got a look at him; it was just wham, in the air, on the ground.”

  “Do the police have any idea who it was?”

  “The police?” Oh, yeah, obviously I would have called them. “Yeah, um, no, they said there wasn’t really anything to find.” Except a burnt-out car and a dead guy. I feel momentarily sick again, remembering.

  Matt looks concerned. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m a little beat up, but yeah, basically. I’m good to be here, if that’s what you’re asking. I just got back from the hospital,” I add, which is technically true but actually unrelated.

  “All right, good,” says Matt. He pauses, then says, “This may sound harsh right now, Dan, and I understand that there are extenuating circumstances, but I really do need you to call in if you’re going to be late. I get that this situation is different from usual, and I’m not going to hold it against you. But it’s just a phone call, and it would make my life a lot easier.”

  So, ten minutes late is not basically okay, and “I was hit by a car” is not a good enough excuse. It’s rough being on the bottom rung of the ladder.

  - - -

  The workday goes fairly well, aside from the fact that I have to answer the question “What happened to your face?” approximately fourteen times an hour. I try giving a fake answer at one point, but when I tell a middle-aged couple that I was in a fight club, they both just glare at me disapprovingly. The woman says, “You should wear protective gear,” and the man with her nods. I sigh and take their order.

  The man behind them approaches the counter, looks both ways, then leans forward and whispers, “You’re not supposed to talk about that!” So at least the joke wasn’t a total loss.

  On the whole, though, it turns out to be much easier to just incorporate it into my routine. “Welcome to Børger, what can I get for you? A car hit me last night. Yes, it hurts, no, I don’t know who did it, yes, it’s terrible that people behave like that to each other.” I’m pretty tired of having the same conversation over and over, but everyone who asks means well, so I keep a smile on my face and the sarcasm out of my voice.

  About seven hours into my shift, a man diverges from the script. Instead of asking, “Did it hurt?”, he says, “Really! A buddy of mine got into a car accident last night, too. Bad night for it.”

  “That’s terrible,” I say.

  “Yeah,” he says. “It was my car he was driving, too, so it’s a double whammy. The thing’s totaled now.”

  “How’s your friend?”

  “Totaled, too. Can I get a Big Børger, no pickles?”

  I don’t know exactly what he means by this. Is his friend totaled like smashed-up-but-going-to-be-okay? Or totaled like dead? Either way, I have no idea how to respond to this cavalier announcement, so I just ring up the order.

  “It’ll be a couple of minutes,” I say.

  “Thanks, pal,” says the man, and gives me a searching look before walking off to wait by the pickup line. I feel like the look was supposed to mean something, but I have no idea what. Do I know this guy? I don’t think I’ve seen him before. He’s a pretty average clean-cut white guy, nothing particularly memorable about him.

  The next customer is up, though, so I shrug it off and tell them that I was in a car acciden
t, and yes, it hurt, but no, I don’t know who did it. Yes, it is terrible that people behave like this to each other. I check the clock; with three more hours in my shift, I’m probably going to be saying that at least another forty times. I wish Matt would let me just put up a sign.

  - Chapter Ten -

  Over the next couple of weeks, I discover that Brian has not told me a vital piece of information: Doc Simmons knowing my secret means I have a second, non-optional part-time job. She is absolutely relentless, and it’s not so much that she won’t take no for an answer, as it is that she just doesn’t hear “no” in the first place. No matter what I say, she brushes it aside and assumes that my objections are situational and temporary. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that I might not be as interested in getting to the root of this as she is.

  In fairness, I do want to know what’s happening to me. But if I let the doc have her way, I’d be doing twelve hours of testing every day, with no time off for good behavior.

  The worst part is, I can’t even complain. It’s not like she’s asking me to do things that she could do herself. I’m the only one who can give her the data and samples she needs. And while I’m fitting the testing in around my thirty-five hours a week at a burger joint, she’s doing the same thing around her who-knows-how-long at the hospital. So it’s hard to be like, “Can we do this later? I had a long day putting meat on a bun,” when I know that she was up before me literally saving people’s lives.

  On the plus side, under Doc Simmons’s guidance, I’m expanding my power much more rapidly than before. And while she’s thrilled to see that I’ve moved from 500 degree Celsius fires to 3000 degree ones, I’m just excited to see that I can ignite metal now.

  Side note: never tell a scientist that you can’t convert Celsius to Fahrenheit in your head. Doc Simmons almost threw me out of her lab that day, nanomachines or no. All I said was, “So Fahrenheit is basically double Celsius, right?”

  She gave me a look that could practically melt steel itself, and spouted off some formula that, I’ll be honest, sounded made up. So I said, “Well, what’s 500 degrees Celsius in Fahrenheit, then?”

  “932,” she said without hesitating.

  “Great, so basically double,” I said.

  When I tell you that I’ve never seen a look of such disdainful fury, please remember that this includes the time someone hated me so much she literally summoned lightning from the sky to kill me. The doc stalked out of the lab, and I genuinely didn’t know if I should be there when she got back. It seemed pretty possible that she was going off to find something sharp to stab me with. Fortunately, when she came back, she was calmer, although she still didn’t talk to me much for the rest of that day.

  In my defense, I wasn’t baiting her. With rounding, that’s basically double. Doc’s not a “basically” kind of person, though. She likes precision.

  Meanwhile, work goes along surprisingly well. I’m trained up, which is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I know how to do basically everything around the restaurant now, so I don’t feel like an idiot when a customer asks for a Freëzie and I have to stare dumbly at the register to figure out where the button is. On the other hand, it means that I’m not paired with Matt for all of my shifts now, and the assistant manager B-Rock is kind of a jerk.

  Don’t get me wrong; he’s nowhere near as bad as Edgar, my boss at the museum. B-Rock and I just rub each other the wrong way. He’s just this big, slightly disheveled, slightly slovenly guy who’s always ready to call out someone else’s imperfections. Everything he says is just a little bit sarcastic and a little bit cutting. Spending a day working with him is draining. I’m just constantly on edge, aware that any mistake I make may be called out.

  And on the days that I don’t make mistakes, even his compliments are laced with sharp edges. “You did good work, Dan,” he says, dropping his tone on my name like it’s some kind of slur. “Just learn to relax and you’ll do great around here.”

  He’s got a half-smile when he says it, too, like he understands perfectly well why I can’t relax. I can’t decide if this is some sort of hazing period or whether he actually dislikes me, but either way, it’s an obnoxious way to spend the day.

  After one ten-hour shift with B-Rock, I’m walking home and slowly calming down, just letting the breeze wash over me and enjoying the pleasant afternoon air. A mile’s walk is just about enough time to let go of the stress of the day, so I’m approaching peacefulness as I head up the sidewalk to my house. There’s an unfamiliar car parked out front, but I don’t think anything of it until the door opens and Officer Peterson gets out.

  “Afternoon, Dan,” he greets me, and all of my tension slams back in like it was attached to me by rubber bands.

  “Officer Peterson! Hi. Do I call you officer when you’re not in uniform?”

  “That’s fine. No jacket in this weather?” He raises his eyebrows at me.

  “I, uh, forgot it at work. Didn’t feel like going back in for it. I just walked briskly.”

  He dismisses this with a half-shrug. “Mind if I come in and talk to you for a minute?”

  “What? Um, sure. I mean, no, I don’t mind.”

  We walk into my house, where the absolute first thing I see is my jacket hanging on a hook by the door. I resolve to tell as few lies as possible in this conversation, since I am clearly terrible at it.

  Peterson doesn’t seem to notice; he walks on past, into the kitchen, and takes a seat at the table. He motions for me to join him.

  “Can I get you anything?” I ask, but he shakes his head. I pour myself a glass of water and take the seat across from him.

  “Mr. Everton,” he begins, “I want to talk to you informally — and I stress that part — about a car accident that occurred near here recently.”

  I laugh nervously, and hope it sounds like genuine humor. “I don’t even have a car!”

  “This was a one-car accident,” Peterson says. “There were several curious things about it. For example, the car appeared to have hit something which was no longer on the scene, something perhaps the size of a person.” His eyes never leave my face.

  I swallow some water, suddenly acutely aware that my bruises have not totally faded yet. “Oh?”

  “Yes. And also, the car caught fire afterward.”

  “That happens in accidents, right?”

  “Less so than the movies would have you believe. And rarely does it start from the engine block, as this one did.”

  I swallow another drink of water and ask, “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I thought you might have seen or heard something, Mr. Everton. This happened on the night of the robbery at Børger, only a few hours afterward. And it occurred to me today that the place it happened is on the way home for you. Perhaps you heard something and disregarded its importance.”

  “I wish I could help you.” I sincerely, fervently do. I hate lying to Peterson, mainly because I’m so bad at it, but the alternative is worse. I killed a man — accidentally and in self-defense, but still. It’s not going to help my argument that I can be trusted.

  “The vehicle belonged to one of the robbers,” he says casually. “Fingerprint evidence suggests that he was the one driving at the time. A man named Vince Amano. So maybe it’s lucky for you that you didn’t see anything. With that timing and location, it seems like a pretty good bet that he was looking for you. Can’t speak to what his intentions were, of course, but I can’t imagine that they’d’ve been good. You might have had quite a fight on your hands if he’d found you.”

  Peterson knows. He clearly knows. He knows I was there, he knows I was hit, he knows I burned the car. And he’s still saying that it wasn’t my fault. I’ve got to tell the guy what’s going on. Unless it’s a trap! He could be setting me up, luring me in. He’s smart, he’s good at reading people, he knows what I want to hear. I want to trust him. I need to trust him. I can’t trust him.

  I try to take another drink of water, and find that my glass is em
pty. “Wow, lucky for me that he didn’t find me,” I say weakly.

  Peterson looks disappointed. “Yes, lucky. Well, I was just playing a hunch.”

  He pushes his chair back, stands up from the table, and heads for the door. “Ah, I see you have another jacket at home for when you forget one at work. Lucky indeed. Enjoy your evening, Mr. Everton.”

  He closes the door behind him, and I slump down in the chair. Banging the side of my glass gently into my head, I say quietly, “Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

  After a few more minutes of self-recrimination, I heave a sigh, order a pizza, and shuffle downstairs for an evening of Netflix. Clearly, today is determined to suck, and the best I can do is turtle up and let it wash over me. Earlier, I’d thought about maybe going out later tonight, but if I did that, I’m sure that one of the other robbers would find me, or I’d run into Edgar, or a plane would fall on me or something. Better to just turn on the movies and turn off my brain.

  Three cheesy movies and more of a pizza than I meant to eat later, though, and I’m still not settled. I’ve still got thick black bruises across the backs of my thighs from the car impact, and although they’ve faded a fair bit, no matter how I sit tonight, the couch seems to press directly into them. Also, it’s too hot in the house, which is a problem I can’t really fix because the thermostat says it’s 49 in here.

  I add some ice to my soda and try watching a movie about some Arctic explorers finding monsters in the glaciers, but if anything, all that snow just makes me warm up more. So I switch to The Mummy to try the opposite. It still doesn’t help much, but at least the movie’s better.

  Somewhere in the middle of the movie, I fall asleep to weird dreams of robbers running me down with their cars and attempting to eat my organs. I try to tell them that they’ll burn their tongues, but they open their mouths and I can see they’re already charred inside.

  “How hot is it in Celsius, Part-Time?” one snarls at me as he swipes a clawed hand across my stomach, and I jerk awake to find that the credits are rolling.