by Rob Vlock
He smiled when he said it. But his words sent a cold bolt of lightning shooting down my spine.
As I watched him slide open a drawer on the front of the exam table, I wondered what he meant by “I had hoped it would not come to this.” In the movies, bad guys would say something like that just before they—
Dr. Shallix pulled something out of the drawer. It was a . . . a huge, curved, deadly-looking knife!
CHAPTER 6.0:
< value= [Meat Loaf, Brussels Sprouts, and Misery] >
SORRY. IT TURNS OUT I might have been overreacting a little. What I thought was a knife was a pair of scissors. Dr. Shallix wrapped my shoulder tightly in a clean, white bandage and used the scissors to snip off the excess gauze. Then he put them away.
A wave of relief washed over me.
Until Dr. Shallix put his hand on my good shoulder and squeezed. Hard.
His voice had a threatening quality, despite his too-wide smile. “I want you to do something for me, Sven, yes? First, keep this bandage on your arm for at least a week. Until you are fully healed. A week. Do you understand?”
I swallowed hard and nodded. I was afraid to do anything else.
“Second,” he continued, “I want you to promise you will not speak about any of this nonsense with anybody. Not your parents. Not your friends. It is not good for you to indulge this fantasy of yours. It could lead to lasting psychological problems, yes? The kind of problems a boy could be . . . institutionalized for. You understand what that means, yes?”
I nodded again. “It means the nuthouse, right?”
Dr. Shallix’s smile grew until it seemed almost wider than his head. “But we will make sure it does not come to that, yes, Sven? I know your parents would be so sad to have you taken from them. For your own good, of course. All of this is for your own good, Sven. So let us agree that we will never mention your fantastic story again, yes?”
“Yeah, okay. I guess it’s a pretty crazy story,” I said, because that seemed like the safest thing to say. I forced out a laugh. It sounded hollow.
When we got to the waiting room, I immediately slumped into a chair. My legs felt like they were made of that stuff that passes for pudding in the school cafeteria. My stomach clenched into a tight knot. I was freaking out. I didn’t know whether to run out of there or hide in the coat closet.
Instead, I licked the side of the fish tank next to me.
“Hey there, champ.” Dad smiled in a way-too-chipper way when he saw me. “How’s the arm? You doing okay?”
Before I could answer, Dr. Shallix responded.
“He is fine, Mr. Carter. Just a little scrape on the shoulder, yes? You probably will not even know it was there in a week or so. But he has been worried that the injury is far worse than it really is. So please call me if he continues to talk about this delusion of his. And I will . . .”
He shot me a glance.
“. . . and I will be sure to take care of the problem.”
“Sure, Doc,” my dad said in a distracted sort of way. “Yeah, yeah. Anything unusual. Got it. Sven, you ready to go?”
Dad rocked back and forth on his heels impatiently. I took a step toward him, but Dr. Shallix stopped me, placing his hand on the back of my neck. He squeezed hard enough to let me know he wasn’t above hurting a kid, then smiled down at me.
“Take care of that shoulder and remember what we discussed, yes?”
My Creep-O-MeterTM went totally off the charts. I mean, this dude was always sort of creepy. But now? He was like creepy times a million.
I nodded, because what else was I going to do?
His smile broadened just a bit and he let me go.
• • •
As soon as I stepped into the house, Mom started covering my face with wet kisses.
Yuck!
She smelled like bananas and soy sauce. Obviously, she had been baking something. And I thought I knew what. A shudder shot through me.
“Oh, my brave little man!” she cried. “Are you okay? What did the doctor say?”
“I’m fine, Mom,” I said, wiping her saliva off my face.
“Your father told me you thought your arm fell off.”
I scratched the back of my neck. “Uh, well, you see—”
Dad cut me off. “Dr. Shallix told me that it was . . . what did he call it? A delusion. You know . . .” He traced circles in the air next to his temple and whistled.
“Dad!” I objected. “I’m not crazy!”
“Of course not, son. No one’s saying you’re crazy. Just . . . delusional.”
“Well,” Mom chirped. “I’m just glad you’re home. I made your favorites for dinner. Banana soy meat loaf with maple-glazed Brussels sprouts.”
“Oh. Thanks, Mom.”
Needless to say, banana soy meat loaf and maple-glazed Brussels sprouts weren’t my favorites. I hated them. But somehow my mom had gotten it into her head that I loved them, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her how disgusting they were. But on the bright side, at least she hadn’t made me a cake.
All through dinner, Dad kept shooting me these looks, like he thought I was about to do something insane. The only thing I did, though, was poke halfheartedly at the “food” on my plate, choking down a few bites for my mom’s sake. But I had no appetite. And not just because the meal was revolting—I felt sick with anxiety and fear.
I plucked a dead fly from the windowsill behind me and scarfed it down.
My father sighed loudly. “He’s happy to eat dead bugs, but will he eat perfectly good food? No!”
“Dr. Shallix said we’re not supposed to make a big deal about it, Al,” Mom said in a half whisper.
“What does he know?” Dad countered. “He also said he’d grow out of it. Does it look like he’s grown out of it?”
“Um, I think I’ll turn in early tonight,” I said. I wasn’t really tired, but I couldn’t stand sitting there listening to the usual argument about how weird I was.
My parents were too busy debating my strangeness to even notice I had left the table.
When I got into bed, I knew there was no chance I was going to be able to sleep. I stared at the ceiling for what must have been hours, thinking about all the weird stuff that had happened. Finally, I got out of bed and flipped on the light.
Dr. Shallix had told me to leave the gauze on my shoulder for at least a week. But I didn’t care. Everyone telling me I was crazy was, well, driving me crazy! I couldn’t stand it anymore! I had to know whether there was something under the bandage that would explain what had happened.
Standing in front of the mirror on the back of my bedroom door, I started to unwrap the bandage. I slowly uncoiled one layer of gauze after another until . . .
What I saw practically knocked the breath right out of me.
There was nothing there. I mean, there was a shoulder, of course. But nothing else. No injury. No scar. Nothing. No evidence whatsoever that I had hurt myself at all.
I touched my shoulder. The skin felt perfectly smooth. And it didn’t hurt anymore. I dug around in my desk until I found the Li’l Explorers magnifying glass I had gotten for my eighth birthday. Even looking through that, I couldn’t see anything. Not a scratch.
It was like it never happened.
CHAPTER 7.0:
< value= [The Science of Bullying] >
CHESTER A. ARTHUR MIDDLE SCHOOL was pretty much like any other middle school—filled with a whole bunch of eleven-, twelve-, and thirteen-year-old students who had the lethal aim of a heat-seeking missile when it came to searching out and humiliating kids who were different. In other words, for someone like me, it was pure misery. And that was on a good day.
This was not a good day.
For one thing, I couldn’t get my shoulder off my mind. I had been so sure I’d find something to prove my story when I unwrapped that bandage. Maybe I was going crazy.
But no! I knew I wasn’t crazy. I knew it!
Something weird was going on here. And it wasn’t a
ll in my head.
Just a couple of months earlier, I fell off my bike and scraped my knee. I had a big scab that took weeks to heal. And that was nowhere near as bad as an arm getting ripped off. So where was the scab? Where was the scar? Even Dad had seen something there.
I sat through homeroom, staring blankly at the whiteboard, going through every detail of what had happened the day before. The cake. The jump. My arm crawling around by itself. Will’s phone bouncing off my head.
Wait! Will’s phone! If I could somehow get it working, I could watch the video and prove I wasn’t crazy!
But there was no way Dr. Shallix would give it back to me. He’d just say I was imagining things. Then he’d send me to the nuthouse.
It was hopeless.
The thought was so consuming, I barely had enough brain space left over to worry about Brandon Marks.
Brandon Marks, by the way, was the second thing that made that day particularly sucky.
Then again, Brandon Marks made pretty much every day particularly sucky, so I guess it was kind of par for the course.
It all started during first period. Science class. I kind of liked science. It was interesting. And our science teacher, Mr. Collins, was actually pretty cool. The only problem was we sat at these big black lab tables, and guess who always sat right behind me? Brandon Marks. Which meant every time we did some kind of experiment, I’d end up being on the receiving end of one of Brandon’s pranks.
Over the last month alone, Brandon had drenched me with a vinegar-and-baking-soda volcano, dropped a live tadpole down the back of my pants, sprinkled hamster droppings in my hair, and unleashed the inhabitants of an entire ant farm into my backpack.
And that didn’t even count all the prior years of psychological warfare he waged against me. Ever since our first class together in third grade, Brandon had done everything in his power to make me an outcast in everybody’s eyes—and make me feel like the world’s biggest misfit, the universe’s ultimate outsider. Trashmouth? That was just the tip of the cruelty iceberg. A drop in the bullying bucket.
The worst thing about Brandon, though? I couldn’t do anything about him. You see, his dad was my dad’s boss at Spray-Yum Aerosolized Foods. If you’ve ever eaten food that you spray out of a can, there’s a good chance my dad had something to do with it.
Anyway, having your worst enemy’s father be your father’s boss really sucks. Once I went to the vice principal to tell on Brandon. He got in trouble. The problem was, so did my dad. The next day, he got demoted from senior director of canification to flavor assurance engineer. That was a fancy way of saying he had to taste every batch of Spray-Yum’s products before they got canned. Including their new Liver-’n’-Onion Krack’r Spread. Let’s just say I’ve never seen Dad so unhappy. All because of me telling on Brandon.
In the end, what all this meant was I couldn’t do a thing about Brandon, no matter what he did to me.
“Okay, kids,” Mr. Collins said, looking out at the class through wire-rimmed glasses with lenses so thick they made his eyes look like tiny brown pebbles at the bottom of a pond. “Today I’m going to introduce you to the wonderful world of electromagnetism!”
Mr. Collins was always saying things in an exaggerated voice like that. Like he thought everything about science was megacool. Which, I guess, did make it kind of cool.
He yanked a big brown sheet off some kind of contraption sitting on his desk. It was made out of a whole bunch of wires and stuff that were plugged into the wall. “This, my friends, is an electromagnet that I built. It uses an iron core and about two hundred windings of copper wire to convert electrical energy into a magnetic field. So what can you do with it?”
He grabbed the handle of a round metal plate wrapped with wire, held it over a big bowl of paper clips, and flipped a switch. Instantly, hundreds of paper clips leapt out of the bowl and attached themselves to the plate. Then he turned the magnet off and the paper clips fell back into the bowl.
“Okay, kids,” Mr. Collins called out to the class. “Pick a lab partner and come up with a way you can tell me how many paper clips I was able to lift using this magnet, and how much they weigh.”
I looked at the empty seat next to me. It was Will’s. He was out that day. Probably taking what he liked to call a “mental health day.” It was usually because of OCD-related things—like if he accidentally got up at 7:05 instead of 7:04—or if he was just feeling particularly anxious. Given what he had seen at the skate park yesterday, I wasn’t surprised to see Will’s seat completely devoid of Will. Which left me without a lab partner. Because no one other than Will would ever team up with me.
I looked around the room for a potential partner. But every set of eyes I made contact with quickly darted away from the weirdo boy. I mean, God forbid anybody get anywhere near the kid who might drink the juice out of a dissected frog or chomp down on a handful of owl pellets.
So before long, everyone else in the class had split off into pairs and was busily counting and weighing paper clips.
All except for me.
And Alicia Toth, of course.
She never had a lab partner.
Alicia had transferred to our school at the beginning of the year from somewhere in the Midwest or something. She never liked to talk about it, though. So she just said she was from nowhere. And nobody really cared enough to question it. She was the new girl, after all.
So while everyone else chose to work with a friend, she was, as usual, the odd person out.
Then again, it wasn’t like she was trying to win over any friends. I had never seen her talk to anybody. It was almost as if she had set up some invisible barrier between herself and everybody else. A wall that kept her all alone in her own private universe. And as far as I could tell, that was the way she wanted it.
She must have been awfully lonely, though. I mean, Will may have been my one and only friend, but she had no one. I couldn’t help but feel kind of bad for her.
I guess that’s why I did what I did.
“Hey, uh, do you, um, you know, want to, uh, partner up for lab today?”
With her black, shoulder-length braids, skin so pale it was almost translucent, and vivid green eyes, she was really pretty. I thought so, anyway. Which made me seriously nervous. I was barely able to fight off the impulse to lick the black stone top of the lab table.
She peered at me with distrust for a moment, then slowly nodded. “Yeah, okay. I guess. Thanks.”
I had never really met her properly before. Probably because she was always so unfriendly. At first, I thought she just seemed like the supercool type and kept to herself because she thought she was too awesome for everyone else, staring at people with those big, bright green eyes of hers and never saying a word.
But eventually, I came to see her as just another outsider like me. Maybe not as weird, but probably just as lonely. And some part of me always wished I could do something about that. There were never any cracks in her cold façade that I could use to get a foothold on conversation, though, so we never ended up talking. Not a single word.
Until today.
CHAPTER 8.0:
< value= [I Have a Magnetic Personality] >
“THIS IS DUMB,” ALICIA MUTTERED, not exactly to me, but in my general direction.
“I know, right?” I quickly responded, trying to sound cool and not nervous, even though the opposite was true. “I mean, who cares? And it’s not like you could figure it out anyway. You’d have to be some kind of superbrainiac.”
Alicia flashed me a look that told me my effort to be cool just fell flat. “What are you talking about?”
“Uh, um, uh . . . ,” I stammered, totally unprepared to actually have a conversation with a pretty girl. I could feel the blood rushing to my face. “Well, uh, everyone knows Mr. Collins always gives these impossible questions,” I managed to say. “Um . . . so his students understand that, like, not having answers is part of science and that it’s okay to fail and stuff.”
&nbs
p; “Seriously?” she yawned. “I could have done this in third grade.”
I laughed because obviously she was joking.
She didn’t laugh because apparently she wasn’t joking. “He practically gave us the answer when he told us how many windings he used. To figure out the strength of a magnetic field you just have to multiply the number of turns of wire by the amperage of the power source. He told us it had two hundred windings, so assuming he’s plugged into a twenty-amp wall outlet, that gives you four thousand gauss. That kind of magnetic density can lift about . . . half a pound of ferrous metal. Since standard paper clips weigh approximately one gram each, and there are four hundred fifty-three grams per pound, I’m going to say he lifted two hundred seventy-five clips.”
I stared at her with my mouth hanging open.
“Okay, everybody,” Mr. Collins said a few minutes later. “Since I’m sure no one got the right answer—which is fine, because in science you can always learn from your failures—I’ll tell you how many paper clips I lifted. I counted them while you were working, and the answer is two hundred seventy-four.”
My mouth hung even lower. “Why didn’t you say something?”
She didn’t answer and started bending a paper clip into a circle.
Mr. Collins spent the rest of the period showing us how, by winding more wire around the core, he could make the magnet stronger and stronger until he was able to lift up a twenty-pound dumbbell with it.
The whole time this was going on, I was waiting for Brandon to make his move. But he didn’t. When the bell rang at the end of class, I breathed a sigh of relief—I had made it through a whole science class without Brandon doing a single nasty thing to me.
Only I spoke too soon. As we all filed out of class, Brandon dashed up to Mr. Collins’s desk, picked up the electromagnet, flipped the switch, and stuck it in my face.
“Hey, eat this, Trashmouth,” he guffawed. “Looks like it’s made out of a bunch of trash, so you’ll love it! How’s it taste?”
I couldn’t answer him. Because at that moment, it felt like my face was being ripped right off my skull. The pain was excruciating. It was like a thousand fishhooks stuck themselves into every part of my face and then a thousand Olympic weight lifters started yanking on those fishhooks as hard as they could. Every cell in my head pulled in a different direction. I tried to open my mouth to scream, but it was like my lips were fused to the magnet.