by bret Wellman
I let Brianna lead the way through the throng of people into the heart of the party, our game room in the basement.
The entire open end of the room had been turned into a giant dance floor/mosh pit. The lights had changed from their normal color to a darker mix of flashing blues, greens, yellows, and reds. Black lights had been strung up around the border of the entire room, it looked as though everybody standing by the wall had glowing clothing.
I looked over at the hot tub on the far side of the room, away from the dance floor. A group of people had undressed to their underwear and gathered in the hot water. A lot of them seemed to disappear into the steam. Water was splashing down onto the floor, even though it was a huge hot tub, I don’t think it was meant to hold that many people. I made a mental note to drain and refill it in the morning.
Brianna grabbed my hand and yanked me through the lounge chairs over to the dance floor.
I had to shake my head as she started to jump up and down screaming to the music. She stopped when she saw I wasn’t doing it with her.
“Come on” She said “dance.”
“You looked like you were doing enough for the both of us.” I said.
Nikki and Neal came dancing out of the crowd tangled up together.
“Hey guys!” Neal called. He didn’t look very confident, I noticed, but at least he wasn’t nervous anymore.
Brianna jumped to my side to make room for the spontaneous couple. She laced her hand in mine as they walked up.
“When does the football game start?” Nikki asked.
“You missed it.” Brianna said.
“What?!” she said clearly disappointed. “Well who won?”
“We did of course!”
Neal slapped me on the shoulder “So you don’t have to move? Cool.”
I shrugged “I guess not.”
It wasn’t long before the music changed to a slow song. Half the people groaned and scattered. The other half paired up.
“Oh I love this song!” Nikki exclaimed and she and Neal turned back to the dance floor.
I turned to Brianna who was watching me with a smile faintly touching her lips.
“May I have this dance?” I asked, holding out my elbow for her to take.
She blushed and wrapped her arm around mine. “I thought you would never ask.”
I lead her through the throngs of people until we were in the center of the crowd, I placed one hand on her hip and twirled her with the other.
There were very few times in the government buildings when we would be left alone, most of the time was at night. Adrian, Lillie and I liked to use this time to do things we knew the government would not approve of. Lillie had gone through a phase a while back where she became obsessed with becoming a professional dancer. With the help of our advanced minds, within an hour we could have been. That didn’t stop Lillie from making me practice every night. We studied many techniques and developed quite a few routines. I bet we could have put on quite a show in the end. Even after the phase had passed, every once and a while Lillie would insist that we spend some of our free time dancing.
I doubted Brianna had ever had the chance to learn how to dance, that’s probably why she looked so surprised when I spun and dipped her. Even so, she did a good job following my lead.
I threw myself into the music. Every trick, every move, I was doing my best to incorporate all I had learned of the slow dance. The music moved us, we were two parts of one greater, living piece. Shadows swept across her face as the lights continued to flash, the rest of the world was just a blur.
As the song started to fade I leaned in for a kiss. When our lips met I felt a burst of frigid air flow into my mouth. It sent a tingle coursing through my body.
“Wow…” I said, you could see my breath. It practically spelled the word out in the air.
It was dark enough that everyone else was no more than swaying shadows cascading all around us. Even surrounded by so many people, in the dark it felt almost as if we were the only two there.
Brianna clung to me tight. She pulled back and gave me a questioning gaze. We were still holding each other like we had been when we were dancing. My hand on her hip, hers on my shoulder, our free hands slipped into one another.
“Ok, where the heck did you learn to do that?” She asked, it was close enough to a whisper so that only I would hear.
“It’s kind of a mental user thing.” I said.
Suddenly Neal and Nikki were there, morphing out of the crowd. I hadn’t even known they were near.
“Where did you guys learn to dance like that?” Nikki asked.
“Yea it was like nothing I have ever seen before.” Neal added.
If that was what they thought of a slow dance, I wonder what they would have said had the song been faster. “It was nothing.”
“No for real dude, you guys made it look like a movie or something. All everybody else did was sway back and forth. How long did it take to learn that?”
“Can you two teach us?” Nikki asked.
“A long time and no.” I wasn’t so sure I could teach it, I was lucky to still be able to do it in the first place.
She crossed her arms “Well I don’t see why not.”
“Yea dude, it could be like a double date thing.” Neal said.
“Ok we will try.” Brianna said “But William is the one who knows how, not me.”
The music abruptly changed to the Kingdom's screamo rock, mid song. Everybody parted as Spencer and Josh took off running through the crowed. We backed away from the dance floor, watching to see what their kamikaze move was going to turn into.
Spencer ran up to Josh and with a little boost launched into a back flip. He landed on his feet and threw his hands into the air, screaming the words to the song. Moments later the circle around the dance floor collapsed inward and the party was back on. Brianna and I were happy to watch from the lounge area.
“What’s the first thing you plan on doing Monday?” She asked me.
“What do you mean?”
“Now that Blake is going to be gone.”
“I think you should take his spot on the football team.” Nikki said.
“No.” I said. “I don’t think the football players will want me on their team after tonight. Besides, do you really think Blake is going to leave town?”
“I have been thinking about that.” Neal said. “What’s he going to do, tell his dad that he lost a bet so now they have to move away?”
“He shouldn’t be making bets if he can’t hold his end of the bargain. People have been killed over this kind of stuff.” Brianna said.
Nikki looked at her wide eyed. “Whoa, don’t you think that is a little dark Brianna?”
“I’m just saying, if this was a professional bet like the ones made in the city, Blake’s options would be pay up or else.”
She had a point. The whole school knew about the bet and he probably wasn’t going to live it down. Hypothetically speaking, he would be like a cornered animal. If there was one thing I was taught about the wild it was that even the nicest animals can turn vicious when cornered, Blake wasn’t really all that nice to begin with.
“What if we let him off the hook?” I asked, thinking about the cornered animal. If you backed off enough, in theory the animal would flee.
Brianna looked astonished. “What?”
“Think about it.” I said. “We have something over him now, maybe we can use it to draw a truce. All we really wanted in the first place was just to get him off of our back. This could still work to our advantage.”
“How do you know that he won’t go back to the way he was?” Neal asked.
“I don’t.”
“Hey!” I heard Rachel yell from somewhere towards the stairs. I turned in time to see her spiky blond hair bouncing through the crowd. “This is my first real party.” She said, sitting against the back side of the couch. She was crystal clean and smelled like coconut. She must have taken a shower after the game.
> “I think this is the first real party for all of us.” I said.
“What are you talking about?” Nikki asked.
I hadn’t been thinking about her, she probably went to party’s all the time. In fact I bet Brianna went to her fair share of parties, Neal has probably even been to a few. Rachel wouldn’t have had the chance to go to any, she was older and would have stayed on the lookout with Josh in the trailer park.
“The first time for us too,” I corrected. “We don’t get out much.”
“Have you seen Adrian and Lillie?” Rachel asked. “I swear they are trying to interview every single person here. Some one needs to tell them to lighten up and have a good time.”
“I doubt they will listen.” Brianna said.
“You’re probably right.” Rachel said, shaking her head and standing up. “Well I’m off, I just filled up a bunch of water balloons. Spencer, Josh and I are going to throw them at the people on the dance floor.” She smiled thoughtfully before leaving us to head back up the stairs.
We hung out on the couch for another hour or so before Brianna and I got up to challenge Neal and Nikki to a game of pool. Sometime around my second shot, one of Rachel’s water balloons came cascading into the side of my head. The water submerged my face, washing off more of the leftover mud from the football game. When I looked over to see who had thrown it, Rachel, Josh, and Spencer were making exaggerated whistling faces and pretending to innocently look around the room. I just laughed it off and went back to playing pool.
The hour hand on the clock began to fly but the party raged on. I’m not sure who was the first to leave but somewhere around four in the morning the people began to thin. At around five Neal was sound asleep on the couch, his face covered in marker, everyone else was gone.
I got up and killed the music along with lights. Brianna waited for me by the stairs, we had to be the only two still up.
“I’ll see you in the morning.” I said and turned for bed.
She caught my hand. “I had a great time tonight.” She said, turning me around.
Both of my hands were now in hers. “Goodnight Brianna.” I said, leaning forward to give her a small kiss on the lips.
When we parted I could only stare into her blue eyes. Her cheeks dimpled as she smiled.
“Night.” She said and went into her room.
As her door clicked shut I glanced back into the game room, It looked like a hurricane had gone through it, the entire place was trashed. I had to watch my step as I went up the stairs, lest I trip on all the garbage scattered all over it. My room, being behind a locked door, was the only place in the house still not trashed it seemed. My eyes grew heavy as I slipped into bed, it was late and I was exhausted.
At first all I wanted to do was sleep, but then I started to think about the football game, those thoughts soon shifted to Brianna, standing in the driveway watching me, the rain pouring down. It was still raining outside, every now and again you could hear thunder booming in the distance. Raindrops pounded soothingly against the roof. I fought sleep for as long as I could, playing today over and over in my head. It’s hard to say when exhaustion finally took over and I succumbed to sleep, but eventually it did.
The house was still a mess in the morning. Lillie was in a rampage. Even with her frantically cleaning, the house looked like it had been toilet papered from the inside out. You would have thought there had been a bull fight rather than a party. She had me scrubbing floors before I could even finish my breakfast.
When things were semi-clean Brianna and I started a movie marathon. It felt good having her curled up against me under a blanket all day. We only got up for food and bathroom breaks. Even then we were running to get back to the couch. In the afternoon Lillie talked us all into playing the board game monopoly, she had found it in the attic of the mansion earlier in the day. Everyone agreed to play but Adrian, even he watched for a good ten minutes before heading out the back door. As we played we could hear him shooting off guns. It wasn’t all that long before Lillie had us all broke. Josh and Rachel complained about her being a mental user, saying she would be disqualified the next time we played. Spencer just laughed it off, Brianna and I slipped a few fake dollars back and forth under the table, Lillie noticed but didn’t rat us out.
When the game was over we met Adrian out back and had a big barbecue on the new patio. There were no chairs yet so Adrian and Lillie sat on the wall whilst the rest of us ate our food sitting Indian style on the ground. Spencer turned on the back speakers so the radio was playing as we ate. We laughed and poked fun at each other, most of our conversations circulated either the party or the football game. At the end of dinner Adrian pulled out a slip of paper that contained a list of people to avoid at school, it was a compilation of all his spying the night before.
Sunday came packing with a temperature drop. It looked like the strange bout of warm weather had finally given way to fall. Light snow floated down from the sky, it wasn’t quite enough to stick and soon turned into rain. I had once read a quote saying that Michigan was a place where you could get both sun burned and frost bitten in the same day. I was beginning to understand this a little more personally, the weather seemed to change drastically in such short periods of time around here.
Josh, Rachel, Spencer, Brianna and I spent a lot of the afternoon relaxing in the hot tub.
“What did you do with all that garbage Lillie gave you?” Spencer asked, turning to Josh. “I saw you carrying it out back.”
“Torched it.” Josh said “Felt good to stretch and use my powers. Still, all that ability and I’m stuck burning trash.”
“Awe you poor baby.” Rachel said, patting him on the cheek.
“I’m serious, I can’t stand sitting idle anymore.”
I wrapped my arms around Brianna’s waste as she floated onto my lap, her hair smelled like coconut.
“I think I know how to fix that.” Spencer said “We could start sabotaging the armory here in town.”
“No!” Brianna and I said at the same time.
“Did you forget what we are doing here?” I went on. “We are in hiding. To capture unnecessary attention would be the worst thing we could do.”
“I don’t ever want to be sent back.” Brianna added.
“I know, I know.” Spencer said “It’s just fun to think about you know?”
“I wouldn’t mind torching a few of the Kingdom's soldiers.” Josh said.
Rachel snapped her fingers and an ice spear began to grow over her hand. “I want to freeze an agent.”
“An agent?” Brianna said. “I didn’t know they could be frozen.”
“Anything can be frozen.” Spencer said.
“Yea, but not without raising suspicion.” I hated being a downer, but the way they were talking was dangerous.
I watched as Brianna froze a hand full of water. She touched the ice to her face, I could feel her shiver against my skin. “It would be nice to use our power for what it was created.” She said.
“Our powers were created to scare innocent people into submission…” I said.
She shook her head “No, they were created for waging war.”
Josh slapped the water “Yea! If only we had all the users. We could march right through President Mead’s front door and no one could do a thing about it.”
“Could you imagine?” Rachel said “I would spank him on live television.”
“Spank him?” Spencer asked.
“Yea, let the whole world see that he is nothing more than a spoiled child.”
I jumped as Brianna pressed her ice chunk to my chest. She laughed as I struggled to wrestle her hands away. Had she not been a good fighter it would have been easier.
“On that note I think I have had enough hot tubbing for one night.” Josh said and started to climb out. Rachel and Spencer followed.
“On that note you’re staying.” Brianna said, grabbing my bathing suit before I could hop out.
“Oh I am, am I, and who is goin
g to stop me?” I asked.
“Me.” She said and kicked out the back of my legs.
I tumbled backwards into the hot water, for a moment, as I went under, all I could hear was the rumble of the jets. She had been so swift with her attack, I hadn’t stood a chance of keeping my balance. When I was back up she gave me a kiss on the cheek and floated back onto my lap.
“I guess you can go if you really want.” She said, wrapping her arms around my shoulders.
“I think I might stay for a bit.” I said.
She turned so that she was facing me. “What are we going to do about Blake?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“If he doesn’t leave he is going to want revenge.”
“There isn’t much I can do about that.”
She kissed me softly on the lips “If he tries to push you around I swear I’m going to beat him up.” She made it seem like she was joking, though I sensed some truth behind her words.
“That might be fun to watch.”
She was so close, her bright blue eyes were staring deep and curiously into mine. I slid my hands down her hips and pulled her tighter toward my waist.
“I find it hard to be mad at him.” I said.
She looked taken back. “Hard to be mad at him?”
“Yea, I’m the one that got you.”
“That is a load of crap. That doesn’t even make sense.”
“In a way, for me it does.” I said.
She thought about it for a moment. “I’m still going to kill him if he comes near us.” she teased.
I shrugged “Can’t argue with that.”
By the time we climbed out of the hot tub our hands were all pruny and the heat from the water had gotten uncomfortable. It was pretty late so I kissed Brianna goodnight and we headed our separate ways to bed.
That night I laid wide awake staring at the ceiling, deep in thought.
How had I come so far from my days in the government buildings? It was like I had won the lottery or something. Nothing could go wrong… if only I had known how wrong things would get.
Chapter 16
Outside the world was covered in snow. I could hardly believe it, the temperature had plummeted so much. I dreaded stepping out of the warm house. Sure the snow wasn’t all that thick, but that didn’t stop it from painting everything white.