Emerson was being shaken. He opened his eyes, very slowly. Someone was standing over him. It was a man in a blue worksuit wearing large orange-tinted glasses. He had receding silvery hair and a white mustache. “Hey, hey kid, are you alright?”
Emerson blinked. “Who are you?”
The man pointed to his name-patch:
Stan
“I’m the janitor. What happened here, are you guys okay?”
“I think so.” Emerson sat up, rubbing his head. What had happened? He was lying on the ground in the science museum. The others were awakening around him.
“Did we fall asleep,”Cat asked.
JJ muttered “Something about big… purple.” He looked around, and saw that his friends were gone. He was stuck here with the crusty geezer and the do-good squad.
Donovan stood up. “There was a flash, and I remember falling. Hey… what time is it?”
Stan looked at his watch. “Uhh… looks to be 2:55.”
Gustav said “The bus leaves at 3 pm sharp, if I recall.”
JJ pushed through the doors. “Crap. Let’s go.”
As they left, Donovan was last. He looked back to see the Transatomic Superconductor standing there. It was slightly misshapen, and some of the pieces seemed fused… it was melted together now, just a useless piece of slag. He put his headphones on and followed the others.
Stan watched them go, then turned and stared at all the broken glass littering the place. He sighed then got to work.
The kids joined their classmates on the bus, which was idling and waiting for them. “Where were you,” Mr. Gola asked. “Emerson, you missed the exhibit on thermoreactive polymers!”
“Yeah, sorry,” Emerson said, genuinely sorry to have missed that. He moved to the back and sat in his seat.
“You would be sorry,” JJ said as he flumped down into the seat.
Steven Piercey asked “Really, where did you go? You were away from the group for a long time.”
Cat, who wasn’t in the mood, said “We were all smoking a joint in the bathroom, got a problem with that?” Steven’s mouth hung open in response and he stared in shock.
Herbie sat down. “She’s kidding.”
JJ punched Jeremy’s arm. “Where’d you go, dickweeds? Left me all alone with the dice-rollers.”
Jeremy didn’t look at him. “Had to come back to the bus. Didn’t feel good.”
“Aww, need to change your pad?”
Jeremy glared at him. It was a look that said
I’m not in the mood. Back off. JJ shrugged and put his feet up on the back of Herbie’s seat.
Herbie flinched back from the shoes that were six inches from his head, and as always, said nothing. He looked down at his hands, tucked safely away between his knees. Why was he such a scrawny nothing? He’d been pushed around and had to be saved by a group of other people that weren’t even his friends. In the end, he hadn’t even tried to begin to stick up for himself. Herbie thought about the failings of his life on the whole long ride back to Buscema High.
Back at the high school, the bus released the kids, who went about their respective means of getting home. Jeremy had called his dad and the red sports car pulled up to take him home.
“Dude,” JJ called. “Aren’t you going to practice?”
Jeremy shook his head without looking back at him. He got in the car and sped away. JJ looked around and saw that his other friends had taken off, too. Wusses. He tossed his football to himself and headed off to the locker rooms.
Cat stopped by Herbie. “Hey, are you alright?”
Herbie seemed to freeze, then forced himself to speak. “Yeah. Uh. Everything’s good. Everything’s… cool. How are you?”
There was a honking noise, and they both looked and saw Herbie’s dad was waving to him from the burgundy, wood-paneled family station wagon. Herbie seemed to deflate, and he put his head down and walked away from Cat, who turned and began walking in the other direction.
Claire Tibbits liked to keep a few things about herself more or less out of the public eye. Not that she was keeping secrets, but she felt her punk girl image might be threatened if anyone knew just how nice she really was. Today was Wednesday, and it was her day to volunteer down at the Silverage Animal Shelter. She walked, feeling the afternoon sun on her face and feeling fine. It looked like the storm had cleared away while she was unconscious. She hummed to herself as she walked, taking her time.
“Hi Cat,” Joanna the shelter manager said as Cat strode through the doors of the shelter.
“Hi, how’s everyone?”
“They miss you… go feed them. Start with the dogs.”
Claire went to the dog cages with a bag of food. She opened the cage and said “Hi, Whipple!” Whipple the malamute puppy stood there and stared at her with his head cocked slightly to the side. “Aren’t you well-behaved today.” She poured him some food, patted his head, and closed the door.
Joanna stared at her as she passed. Cat stopped. “What?”
Joanna pulled out a box of tissues from her drawer and offered her a sheet. Cat stared at the box, confused. Joanna said “Um. You’ve got… you could use a tissue.”
Cat took one, and Joanna went about her business. Cat looked at the tissue then touched her nose. Her fingers came away slimy. Feeling mostly embarrassed, Cat wiped her nose with the tissue, threw it away, and got to work on changing the litterboxes.
She got the bag of litter and began to change the litter in the trays under the kitten cages. Two Siamese kittens, about nine months old, looked at her from within.
Cat finished with the litter and brought the bag back to the supply room. She walked in, put the bag down, then looked around. Something was wrong. Something about the room was different. She looked around, trying to figure out what it was. She felt her vision dimming. She held her hand up in front of her face and watched in horror as everything grew dark. She felt her way along the cabinets to the door and touched the light switch. She’d never turned it on.
Joanna opened the door to find Cat clinging to the wall in the dark. “Are you… alright, Cat?”
“Yeah,” Cat replied anxiously. “I’m fine.”
Joanna nodded slowly, clearly not believing. “We got a new shipment of scratchy-things for the birds. Maybe bring give them a few… and take it easy for a while, okay?”
Cat got a box of the scratching logs for the birds, feeling stupid. What was going on? She didn’t feel sick. She went to the bird enclosure and looked at the dozens of pairs of black, beady eyes staring back at her from the cages. There was no chirping, no squawking, no noise. She began placing the little scratching sticks inside the ancient cages that hung all over the room.
She saved the hardest part for last- the highest cage was too far up for her to reach. Luckily, she kept a few boxes and items handy in the room, and she had devised a simple system of building a set of stairs up to that last cockatoo cage. She placed the boxes and climbed up to see the cockatoo looking at her. She gave it a scratching stick and looked down so that she might begin climbing back to the floor.
At the top of her makeshift stair was a scale that the shelter used for measuring the weights of dogs and heavy shipping crates. She blinked. The red needle in the scale was pointing squarely at sixty-five pounds.
Claire Tibbits was a very slender girl, but by no means was she sixty-five pounds. She hadn’t been sixty-five pounds since she was eleven, maybe twelve years old. As she looked, she watched the needle slowly ease on down to sixty-four, sixty-three… sixty-two…
“Cat, you’re trembling,” Joanna said from the door.
Cat nearly fell down, she was so startled. She realized that yes, her arms and legs were trembling. She climbed down slowly and said “I’m sorry, I guess I don’t feel very well after all.”
“Go home, get some rest,” Joanna said. “Besides being sick, you’re freaking the animals out.”
This surprised Cat almost as much as the scale. “I am? They’ve been nothing but quiet for me.”
“Yeah, when you’re in the room. As soon as you leave they start barking and meowing and making a ruckus.”
“Sorry. I’ll head home.”
Cat walked home, clutching her bookbag to her chest and keeping her eyes on the sidewalk as she went. She had absolutely no idea what was going on.
Next: Different (continued)