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Book One: The Boy In the Black Coat
Chapter 1: The Titan and the Newcomer| Chapter 2: The Problem with Kasira | Chapter 3: Coincidental Encounter?| Chapter 4: Shadows in the Trees | Chapter 5: John on the Spot | Chapter 6: Conspiracy Theories | Chapter 7: "The Arcade Incident" |
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Zac Dryden strode the halls of Edgewater High School like a Titan. |
There was nothing arrogant about this. The way he moved, the way he held his head, the way he made eye contact with everyone he passed in the hallway, were automatic acts without forethought or pretense. They were not the product of vanity, but of confidence from the rarest type of teenager: the popular and well-liked alpha male who adored school as much as the school adored him. Nearly everyone, from incoming freshmen to graduating seniors, seemed to recognize Zac as a peerless creature, the boy you wanted for your best friend, your first kiss, your first time... There wasn’t another student like him anywhere in Edgewater and probably wouldn’t be for years to come.
“Zachary!” someone called from behind him. His best friend, Ben Sher, was the only person in the world who called him this.
Zac stopped in the middle of the hall and the other students immediately parted around him like water flowing past a smooth stone. Once Ben reached him he placed his right hand on Zac’s left shoulder. In the six years they’d known each other, Zac had grown comfortable with this gesture, even if he didn’t fully understand its purpose. His father had once joked that the “shoulder lock” was Ben’s way of claiming Zac, something akin to a dog lifting his leg on a tree trunk. Zac hadn’t cared for that analogy and didn’t know if it was accurate in any case. He felt it more likely that Ben was just overly demonstrative and, coming from a household filled with steprelatives he didn’t particularly like, starved for attention.
Ben was a head taller than Zac with large, black- rimmed glasses and an impressive plume of strawberry blond hair. He was perhaps more eye-catching than attractive, dressed like an anime character in multiple layers of mismatched clothing, an oversized woolly scarf, fingerless gloves and bright orange high-tops cited together with velcro straps. But his ensemble could easily change depending on the occasion, especially if he was observing one of the school’s many costumed “spirit days.” Students still spoke in awe of last year’s “Come in Your Pajamas Day!” when Ben showed up in a baby blue onesie — something Zac doubted anyone else at Edgewater could’ve pulled off. He had some role, usually a major one, in every production of the school theater. He played both the piano and the drums and dabbled in choir when the mood struck him. He had a closet full of elaborate costumes from all the cosplaying he’d done at regional comic book conventions. He was a one-man stage show giving a performance that never ended.
“Where you headed?” Ben called over the din in the hallway.
“Pembroke’s class, marine biology,” Zac bellowed back.
“I’m going to chem so I’ll walk with you.”
“’kay. You should come over after school. My dad’s got a late class so I’ll be lonely.”
“You can always come over to my place if want company,” Ben suggested, but he didn’t mean it. No one, including Ben, wanted to be at his house. Several years earlier, his mother had remarried a man with four children from previous relationships, so now their home was nothing but a disagreeable amalgam of unrelated people forced to live together. Zac thought of it as the twisted, potentially homicidal version of The Brady Bunch.
“Pass,” he told Ben with a grunt. “You got the car?”
“No. I pulled the short straw this morning. My step- blister has it.”
“Shit, I don’t wanna walk home.” “We can take the bus?”
“That’s worse, dude.”
The first period bell rang just as Zac arrived at the door of Ms. Pembroke’s science classroom. “We’ll figure it out at lunch,” he said. Ben nodded, squeezed the shoulder he was still holding and hurried down the corridor.
“Hey, Ms. Pembroke,” Zac said upon entering.
“Late on your first day?” the teacher said without looking up.
“Zachary!” someone called from behind him. His best friend, Ben Sher, was the only person in the world who called him this.
Zac stopped in the middle of the hall and the other students immediately parted around him like water flowing past a smooth stone. Once Ben reached him he placed his right hand on Zac’s left shoulder. In the six years they’d known each other, Zac had grown comfortable with this gesture, even if he didn’t fully understand its purpose. His father had once joked that the “shoulder lock” was Ben’s way of claiming Zac, something akin to a dog lifting his leg on a tree trunk. Zac hadn’t cared for that analogy and didn’t know if it was accurate in any case. He felt it more likely that Ben was just overly demonstrative and, coming from a household filled with steprelatives he didn’t particularly like, starved for attention.
Ben was a head taller than Zac with large, black- rimmed glasses and an impressive plume of strawberry blond hair. He was perhaps more eye-catching than attractive, dressed like an anime character in multiple layers of mismatched clothing, an oversized woolly scarf, fingerless gloves and bright orange high-tops cited together with velcro straps. But his ensemble could easily change depending on the occasion, especially if he was observing one of the school’s many costumed “spirit days.” Students still spoke in awe of last year’s “Come in Your Pajamas Day!” when Ben showed up in a baby blue onesie — something Zac doubted anyone else at Edgewater could’ve pulled off. He had some role, usually a major one, in every production of the school theater. He played both the piano and the drums and dabbled in choir when the mood struck him. He had a closet full of elaborate costumes from all the cosplaying he’d done at regional comic book conventions. He was a one-man stage show giving a performance that never ended.
“Where you headed?” Ben called over the din in the hallway.
“Pembroke’s class, marine biology,” Zac bellowed back.
“I’m going to chem so I’ll walk with you.”
“’kay. You should come over after school. My dad’s got a late class so I’ll be lonely.”
“You can always come over to my place if want company,” Ben suggested, but he didn’t mean it. No one, including Ben, wanted to be at his house. Several years earlier, his mother had remarried a man with four children from previous relationships, so now their home was nothing but a disagreeable amalgam of unrelated people forced to live together. Zac thought of it as the twisted, potentially homicidal version of The Brady Bunch.
“Pass,” he told Ben with a grunt. “You got the car?”
“No. I pulled the short straw this morning. My step- blister has it.”
“Shit, I don’t wanna walk home.” “We can take the bus?”
“That’s worse, dude.”
The first period bell rang just as Zac arrived at the door of Ms. Pembroke’s science classroom. “We’ll figure it out at lunch,” he said. Ben nodded, squeezed the shoulder he was still holding and hurried down the corridor.
“Hey, Ms. Pembroke,” Zac said upon entering.
“Late on your first day?” the teacher said without looking up.
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He knew she wasn’t angry. Ms. Pembroke never expressed anger with students — just disappointment, which was infinitely worse. She and Zac had met during freshman biology class and had come to know each other very well due to her persistent disappointment in his shoddy school work. They’d spent a lot of time together getting him up to a passing grade, and in doing so had discovered a shared affinity for weird facts of nature and nacho cheese Doritos. In the two years since, Zac had remained a consistently sloppy student, but at least he’d maintained an acceptable GPA and Ms. Pembroke had accepted him as her student aide the previous year. He was excited to work with her again, even though he had no particular interest in fish, cephalopods or ocean dynamics. |
“Doesn’t being a teacher’s aide give me special rights?” he quipped.
“Oh bless,” she replied, “those are called ‘responsibilities,’ not ‘rights.’”
“I knew it was a word starting with R.”
“Well, I have a responsibility for you.”
“Lay it on me,” Zac said, dropping his backpack on the floor and nudging it below Ms. Pembroke’s desk with the toe of his shoe.
“We have someone new to the school,” she continued with a lowered voice, “John Gervais. He’s sitting in the back corner, dark hair, big black coat, looking shell-shocked. See him?”
Zac glanced over her shoulder and immediately spotted the individual in question. He was a black hole, a quantum singularity bundled up in a heavy wool and trying desperately to collapse in on himself.
“Yikes,” Zac mouthed.
“He needs a friend,” Ms. Pembroke smile sympathetically. “Wanna earn some good karma?”
Technically, Edgewater High School had an ambassadors program which paired incoming students with upperclassmen who played chaperone for at least their first week at school. But as it was the first day of the new school year, the program hadn’t been organized yet so teachers often called on favorite students to perform these duties in the interval. This would constitute Zac’s fourth karmic act in this respect, and from the look of him, John Gervais promised to be at least as challenging as the German exchange student who had stolen Ben’s cell phone the previous year.
He sauntered to the back of the room and rapped his knuckles on the top of John’s desk. “Hey, I’m Zac. You’re new here, right?”
At once the boy looked both startled and suspicious. “What?” he stammered.
“You. New. Here. New student, right?” Zac smiled. He had an amazing smile but the other boy didn’t seem impressed by either it or the intrusion on his deep and silent suffering.
“Yes,” mumbled John.
Zac slid into the open desk to his right and leaned in across the narrow aisle between them. “Well, Ms. Pembroke asked me to be your buddy for the day.”
John glanced toward the front of the room where he briefly caught the teacher’s gaze. She smiled at him. He grimaced in response. “Why do I need a buddy?” he asked. His tone was polite but the look on his face was sour, as though a particularly offensive odor had just overwhelmed him.
Zac was not dissuaded by this. Part of being the school’s only popular and well-liked alpha male meant he occasionally but accidentally produced anxiety in others. Usually a few moments of conversation cleared this up. “Everyone needs a buddy, dude,” he chuckled. “Where’d you come from?”
“From New Hampshire.”
“New Hampshire? Damn, you’re far from home.”
“I am.”
“Do you like it here?”
“Not really.”
“Been here long?”
“Three weeks.”
Zac wrinkled his nose. “Do you always answer questions with just two words?” “Uh huh.”
Zac snorted. “Funny,” he said, although it wasn’t clear if John had intended his response to be humorous.
“So you were forced to do this?” John asked drily.
“Forced to do what?”
“Speak to me? Interact with a total stranger on the first day of school?”
“I was asked,” Zac corrected him. “I’m Ms. Pembroke’s aide for this class and there’s not much to do on the first day. I’d be happy to show you around if you want. It’s a big place and you can get lost pretty easy.”
The sour look on John’s face didn’t go away. “Well, thanks,” he answered, “but I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
Zac had little experience with rejection, especially when offering to help someone, so he immediately began to reassess the situation. Did he come on too strong? Was John Gervais shy or embarrassed? He regrouped, squared his shoulders and said softly, “Are you sure? It’s really no problem.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“Okay, fair enough. If you change your mind, just come find me. I’m Zac.”
“Right. Zac. You told me. I remember.”
Zac smiled politely though it now seemed certain he was being taunted. As he moved to sit behind Ms. Pembroke’s desk at the front of the room, he caught her eye and shrugged. She frowned but seemed to understand the situation. Other than providing John with a very brief introduction to the rest of the class, she left him alone.
The next fifty-three minutes consisted of the distribution of syllabuses, the compulsory lecture on classroom etiquette and an explanation of the first week’s assignments. For Zac, it was the equivalent of having to sit through the safety review at the beginning of an airplane flight and he ignored most of it, a skill he had perfected in middle school. The trick to successfully ignoring a teacher was to never slouch, to periodically make eye contact, and to consistently write things down even if you were actually drawing your name in block letters or making doodles of cats performing karate moves. Instead, Zac watched John Gervais, who also wasn’t paying attention to Ms. Pembroke and didn’t seem to care one bit if she noticed. Half way through class, the boy put his head down on the desktop and pulled the coat’s hood over the top of him. For the rest of the period, the only part of him that moved was his left knee which bounced erratically either from boredom or possibly, Zac mused, some nervous condition.
When the bell finally rang, John sprang from his seat and was the first one through the classroom door. By the time Zac had collected his backpack and reached the hallway, the boy had vanished altogether.
“Oh bless,” she replied, “those are called ‘responsibilities,’ not ‘rights.’”
“I knew it was a word starting with R.”
“Well, I have a responsibility for you.”
“Lay it on me,” Zac said, dropping his backpack on the floor and nudging it below Ms. Pembroke’s desk with the toe of his shoe.
“We have someone new to the school,” she continued with a lowered voice, “John Gervais. He’s sitting in the back corner, dark hair, big black coat, looking shell-shocked. See him?”
Zac glanced over her shoulder and immediately spotted the individual in question. He was a black hole, a quantum singularity bundled up in a heavy wool and trying desperately to collapse in on himself.
“Yikes,” Zac mouthed.
“He needs a friend,” Ms. Pembroke smile sympathetically. “Wanna earn some good karma?”
Technically, Edgewater High School had an ambassadors program which paired incoming students with upperclassmen who played chaperone for at least their first week at school. But as it was the first day of the new school year, the program hadn’t been organized yet so teachers often called on favorite students to perform these duties in the interval. This would constitute Zac’s fourth karmic act in this respect, and from the look of him, John Gervais promised to be at least as challenging as the German exchange student who had stolen Ben’s cell phone the previous year.
He sauntered to the back of the room and rapped his knuckles on the top of John’s desk. “Hey, I’m Zac. You’re new here, right?”
At once the boy looked both startled and suspicious. “What?” he stammered.
“You. New. Here. New student, right?” Zac smiled. He had an amazing smile but the other boy didn’t seem impressed by either it or the intrusion on his deep and silent suffering.
“Yes,” mumbled John.
Zac slid into the open desk to his right and leaned in across the narrow aisle between them. “Well, Ms. Pembroke asked me to be your buddy for the day.”
John glanced toward the front of the room where he briefly caught the teacher’s gaze. She smiled at him. He grimaced in response. “Why do I need a buddy?” he asked. His tone was polite but the look on his face was sour, as though a particularly offensive odor had just overwhelmed him.
Zac was not dissuaded by this. Part of being the school’s only popular and well-liked alpha male meant he occasionally but accidentally produced anxiety in others. Usually a few moments of conversation cleared this up. “Everyone needs a buddy, dude,” he chuckled. “Where’d you come from?”
“From New Hampshire.”
“New Hampshire? Damn, you’re far from home.”
“I am.”
“Do you like it here?”
“Not really.”
“Been here long?”
“Three weeks.”
Zac wrinkled his nose. “Do you always answer questions with just two words?” “Uh huh.”
Zac snorted. “Funny,” he said, although it wasn’t clear if John had intended his response to be humorous.
“So you were forced to do this?” John asked drily.
“Forced to do what?”
“Speak to me? Interact with a total stranger on the first day of school?”
“I was asked,” Zac corrected him. “I’m Ms. Pembroke’s aide for this class and there’s not much to do on the first day. I’d be happy to show you around if you want. It’s a big place and you can get lost pretty easy.”
The sour look on John’s face didn’t go away. “Well, thanks,” he answered, “but I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
Zac had little experience with rejection, especially when offering to help someone, so he immediately began to reassess the situation. Did he come on too strong? Was John Gervais shy or embarrassed? He regrouped, squared his shoulders and said softly, “Are you sure? It’s really no problem.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“Okay, fair enough. If you change your mind, just come find me. I’m Zac.”
“Right. Zac. You told me. I remember.”
Zac smiled politely though it now seemed certain he was being taunted. As he moved to sit behind Ms. Pembroke’s desk at the front of the room, he caught her eye and shrugged. She frowned but seemed to understand the situation. Other than providing John with a very brief introduction to the rest of the class, she left him alone.
The next fifty-three minutes consisted of the distribution of syllabuses, the compulsory lecture on classroom etiquette and an explanation of the first week’s assignments. For Zac, it was the equivalent of having to sit through the safety review at the beginning of an airplane flight and he ignored most of it, a skill he had perfected in middle school. The trick to successfully ignoring a teacher was to never slouch, to periodically make eye contact, and to consistently write things down even if you were actually drawing your name in block letters or making doodles of cats performing karate moves. Instead, Zac watched John Gervais, who also wasn’t paying attention to Ms. Pembroke and didn’t seem to care one bit if she noticed. Half way through class, the boy put his head down on the desktop and pulled the coat’s hood over the top of him. For the rest of the period, the only part of him that moved was his left knee which bounced erratically either from boredom or possibly, Zac mused, some nervous condition.
When the bell finally rang, John sprang from his seat and was the first one through the classroom door. By the time Zac had collected his backpack and reached the hallway, the boy had vanished altogether.
