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| Absolute darkness (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
“It musta' been a fluke,” said Arick.
A week had passed, and Damon still
could not re-create the second darkspace.
He shook his head. “I can feel the darkness growing stronger
somehow.” Or maybe he only wanted to feel a change. Every time he tried
to make the darkspace darker, Arick could easily find his way around the
playground. “You’re just remembering where things are,” he finally said,
exasperated.
“No, I’m not!” Arick retorted.
Andy joined them for awhile, but
then some other boys invited him to play football. Neither scrawny,
four-eyed Arick nor Damon, who wasn’t much of an athlete, were invited. So, they continued to practice their
powers on the lower playground.
Then, one day, it happened
again. Damon felt the darkspace expand just as Arick bumped into the a retaining
wall.
“It’s like creating a second layer
of darkness,” Damon boasted, “like spreading chocolate frosting on a cake.”
Arick’s power was growing,
too. It took him longer and longer to detect his way through the second
layer of darkness, but, eventually, he could. One day in early fall, Arick didn’t meet
Damon for recess. Damon ran to the side
of the building, where kids in his class sometimes hung out, and found Arick
with his eyes closed, talking to some of them.
Damon ran up to him.
“Damon? ‘s that you?”
“How d’ya know?”
Arick opened his eyes. “I can
tell who people are now, just by their 'blip'!”
"Wow!" Damon was impressed by how both of their
powers were growing. “Did you forget? We’re supposed to meet—”
Arick blinked several times and put
on his glasses. “Oh, that’s getting kind of old. I want to play
during recess, not work harder.”
Damon wandered the lower playground
alone, feeling rejected yet again,when he felt someone watching him.
He studied the backside of the
school building and jumped. A long,
narrow face with black eyes bore down upon him from a third-story window.
Damon hadn’t
seen Calvin Goodrich since the second grade.
His power was so dangerous, the teachers kept Calvin away from other
kids. His parents dropped him off before school began and picked him up
after everyone had left, because he had to take special classes. Damon
couldn’t remember what Calvin’s power was, and nobody had talked much about him
in five years. Damon wondered how long
Calvin had watched him and Arick practice.
Even though he remembered Calvin as a nasty, mean kid, Damon felt sorry for
him. He waved to the small face in the third story window. Calvin
didn’t wave back. He just stared at Damon, his black eyes burrowing into
Damon as if he were studying an insect under a microscope.
Damon shrugged off the chill running
down his spine and went back inside the school.
***
Damon thought the Power Club might practice
with him unofficially, but when he
asked Vee Evans on the way home from school, Vee stuck his nose in the
air. “We don’t have time for amateurs,” he told Damon before running off.
Danner, an eighth grader, might have
been willing to help, but he had been chosen as a crossing guard; every
day, he stood across from the school at the corner of 92nd and Ellingham to let
kids cross. Damon had no opportunity to
ask him. Kyle, a ninth grader, attended the district’s high school
several blocks away, so Damon rarely saw him unless they happened to run into
each other in the neighborhood.
“You’re
worrying too much about this stuff,” Damon’s mother said after she got it out
of him why he was acting so blue. “Just
because you’ve got a power doesn’t mean you should forget what it’s like to be
a normal kid.”
“But I’m not normal,” Damon said
with pride. His mother looked as if she
had been slapped. “There’s nothing wrong
with being normal.” She glanced out the
living room window at the huge oak tree that separated the side yard from the
back. The leaves were changing to
brilliant hues of red and yellow. “It’s
going to be cold soon,” she said. “Why
don’t you go outside and ride your new bike.
It wasn’t brand new. Damon’s father
bought it for him for his birthday.
Damon had thought the sleek, two-toned, blue ten-speed was cool when Kyle
rode a similar bike—two years ago.
Compared to the old Mustang Kyle was now rebuilding with his own dad and
the motorcycle Danner planned to get for his next birthday, any bike seemed childish.
Damon didn’t want to hurt his mom’s feelings,
so he went to the garage and got the bike. If he rode it up and down the alley behind
their yard a few times, he thought she would be satisfied.
The
purple-grey mixture of gravel and concrete stretched the length of the
block. The alley was maybe wide enough
for a compact car and a half to fit.
Even better, it’s uneven surface descended at a sharp decline, making for
hazardous travel—perfect terrain for riding a ten-speed bike. Maybe
being normal isn’t so bad, after all.
Damon
hadn’t been to the “low” end of the alley since the year after he’d moved into
the district, when an older kid named Larry Endicott had chased him and Eldon
away. Larry wouldn’t reveal what his
power was, but he claimed to own the part of the alley he called “Larry’s End”.
Damon
hadn’t seen Larry in years. For all he
knew, Larry had moved to another part of the district or been sent to Alaska,
where kids who abused their powers were sent.
Damon
guided his bike down the alley with his feet off the pedals, past rows of
garages and yards much like his own. He approached
Larry’s End before he realized it, passing very close to one of the yards. A huge rosebush protruded claw-like into the
alley, and nearly snagged Damon before he swerved away from it.
I hope you've enjoyed this advance look at my novel in progress, THE POWER CLUB™. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.
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