The Watcher

Bill pulled a cloth from his pocket and started cleaning his glasses. With them off, you could see we were related. We had the same nose and high cheekbones, but his eyes were hazel like Dad’s. Mine were green, the same as Mom’s. “You know, you used to see things when you were little,” he said.

“No, I didn’t.”

“You did! Saw a woman flying across the sky when you were four.”

I couldn’t remember any of it. If I was some kind of freak with an overactive imagination, shouldn’t I be the first to know? “No fair. I was a kid.”

“Swore it was an angel watching over us,” Bill said with a chuckle. “Mom took you in for tests, and not eye tests, either.”

I remembered being taken to a brightly-lit office full of furniture that was as small as me. Mom talked with a gray-haired man while I explored a box full of dolls and toy cars, waiting. Eventually, I sat at a table covered in big sheets of colored paper. The man came over and sat on the carpet beside me and told me he was a special kind of doctor. He handed me the biggest box of crayons I’d ever seen and invited me to draw pictures for him. I don’t think I ever went back.

I contemplated telling Bill about the strange shadows, the flashes of light, the image of the loom—everything. Maybe I was seeing things again. But I changed my mind when he said, “Turns out you were fine. Well, fine enough for a freak.”

“I’m not a freak. Take that back!”

Bill laughed. I kicked him, but not nearly as hard as I wanted to.

“How about you?” he asked. “Any guys on the horizon?”

My thoughts jumped to Michael, the way he’d turned up to help me in the woods and then gave me the brush-off later, acting like a total stranger. Bill might have had some great advice to offer, but we didn’t have that kind of relationship and I wasn’t about to start one with him. “If there are, I can’t see them.”

He shrugged, adjusting his glasses. “Several guys have checked you out since we got here. They think you’re with me, though, so they leave you alone. And from the looks of them, that’s a good thing.”

“Eww! You’re my brother.”

“You let me know if you need me to take care of them for you.”

“Take care of them? You’re a comp-sci geek, Bill, not a mercenary.”

“You’d be surprised what a good hacker can do.”

Bill’s weekend visit ended much sooner than I would’ve liked. For a few brief days, we were a family again, and it wasn’t just Mom and me. After di

***

On Wednesday afternoon, we had the team and club fair, so our afternoon classes were cut. Though it wasn’t mandatory, Mr. Bidwell, head of the Language Club, suggested so strongly that we be there that I half-expected him to take attendance, but he didn’t. When the bell rang, I noticed Michael slip out to the parking lot and drive away in a shiny new white Volkswagen GTI. It was a rainy day, so instead of being outside, all the booths lined the cafeteria. Each club—sports teams, multicultural clubs, and cancer awareness groups, to name a few—had its own table. In the middle of it all was the Environment Club, where Heather was working. She had an extra seat beside her so I sat down, propping my almost-healed foot on a box under the table.

“You’re helping?” Heather asked cheerfully.

“I said I would.”

“Right. I forgot with—you know,” she said and gestured at my ankle.

“Hello, Mia.”

I looked up at Heather’s math tutor smiling at me. A year younger than us, he’d skipped a grade and was at the top of our class.

“Hi,” I said, wishing I could remember his name. The caption on his black T-shirt read This is my clone.

Heather tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Hey, Farouk.”

Farouk. That was it. He leaned on the table in front of us and his dark, curly hair fell into his eyes. I remembered him being a lot shorter last year.

Farouk signed one of our petitions for using recyclable containers in the cafeteria, then turned to me. “How’d you hurt your ankle?”

“You didn’t read the gossip column?” Heather asked. I hoped she was joking.

He shook his head.

I didn’t want to relive the drama of it, so I let Heather tell the story. Fortunately, she didn’t play Michael up too much—unlike the article itself.

Farouk picked up a flyer for the city’s recycling program and curled it around his fingers. “Michael Fontaine. I heard he had an accident or something,” he said.

“We heard that too,” Heather chimed in.

“He nearly died,” I said a little too defensively.

“Hmm, a near-death experience?” When I nodded, his face lit up. “I saw that in a movie once. This girl dies and when she comes back, she’s all weird and different.”

“What movie?” I asked.

He put down the mangled flyer. “I don’t remember. It was old. I saw it on TV a few months ago.”

“You don’t believe movies are real, too, do you?” Heather asked, crinkling her nose.

“No,” he said, “but some people who have near-death experiences do change.”

“Change how?” I asked, leaning forward. Catching myself, I pulled back, embarrassed by how much the subject of Michael Fontaine interested me, especially since it was so one-sided.

“Sometimes the person is so different when they come back that other people think they’re possessed.”

“Possessed?” Heather leaned back and crossed her arms. Math genius or not, Farouk’s credibility was at stake if he believed in anything too “out there.” “You mean by a ghost or something?”

Before we could talk further, a crowd of freshmen swarmed our booth and asked us a bunch of questions. Farouk helped us hand out flyers while Heather chatted and I passed around the petition. Who knew we’d be so popular?

I tried to keep my thoughts from wandering, but failed. Was he saying that Michael had been possessed? It was almost too strange to consider. Everyone said he was different now, and there was something about him that was almost otherworldly, something you’d expect from a person who’d cheated death. But possessed? Maybe not.

When the crowd finally thi

As Fiona visited a few tables, I wondered what she was doing here. Didn’t she have a dentist appointment? Wasn’t that why she couldn’t work the booth? Or did she have something set up with Michael instead? Eventually, she came over.

“Hey, guys,” she said.

“I thought you had a dentist appointment,” I blurted.

“I’m heading out now,” she replied. “Believe me, I’d rather be here.”

“I bet,” I said, my voice dripping sarcasm.

“What’s with you?” Heather asked me. “If you don’t want to be here, I can handle it on my own.”

“I saw you talking to Michael,” I said to Fiona, ignoring Heather.

“What? When?” She did a great job of looking puzzled. Obviously she was up to something.

“Don’t pretend to deny it. I saw him talking to you at your locker not two minutes ago.”

Heather was calm. “Mia, I saw her too. She was alone.”

“Seriously, Mia. What’s gotten into you?” asked Fiona. “I haven’t seen him all day.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

There was nothing else to say, other than “Sorry.” I didn’t get the sense she was lying to me, and yet I was sure I saw him. If she was telling the truth, perhaps I was imagining things. It wasn’t the first time I saw things that nobody else did: shadows, flashes of light, images of a strange primitive place. Maybe something was really wrong with me.