Chapter 26 – Friends in low Places

“Pick up your scissors,” the shadows order me.

“I won’t.”

“Pick up your scissors.”

“I shan’t,” I say stubbornly. The knock on the door makes me curl up again. “I shan’t,” I whisper. The door opens and Professor Milly steps in.

“I’m here to check on your wounds, dear.” I sit up cautiously and look at her. “Pick up the scissors dear,” she tells me.

“What?”

“How are you feeling dear?” she repeats.

“I’m…” I start. “I’m fine,” I assure her with a lump in my throat.

“Professor Holt tells me you haven’t been to any of your classes.”

“They aren’t obligatory.”

“No, but you are required to attend school,” she reminds me gently.

“I’m still here, aren’t I?”

“Do you have a way out?” she asks. I don’t, she knows that well enough. “Well, physically at least, there’s nothing wrong with you, not even a commemorative scar,” she pauses and puts a comforting hand on my shoulder before continuing. “If I were you I wouldn’t wait too long to go back to classes, some people might not look too kindly on that.” I don’t answer, and she gets up and leaves me to myself again.

“Pick up your scissors,” the shadows order. “Pick up your scissors. Pick up your scissors.” The echo bounces off the walls and back at me until there are a hundred voices all whispering the same thing at me. I curl up, but I can’t keep them out. I set my hands against the bed and thrust myself up to a sitting position. My head is pounding, and I’m having trouble keeping the room steady, finding my balance. I stand up cautiously, and to my great surprise, my feet are steady on the floor, even if everything else is an ocean of voices swallowing me. I make my way to the door, and my feet seem to know what they’re doing, how to keep me upright.

I make my way up the eight flights of stairs to the 17^th floor. Room 1760, that was where he lived if I remember correctly. I take the door to the west hallway and find the right number. I pound on the door, but no one answers. I knock harder, and I don’t stop. I can hear someone moving in there, someone talking.

“Open up or I’ll smash the door in,” I shout. My voice is hoarse from disuse.

“Lizzy,” a surprised voice says from within and the door opens.

“I wasn’t expecting…” he starts with his hand on the door frame.

“Why would you do this to me?” I demand. I have no interest in what he was or wasn’t expecting, he has answers to give, and he’s going to give them. “What did I do to you that was so bad you thought I deserved this?”

“I’m sorry Lizzy, I didn’t mean to.”

“You didn’t mean to? Oh, well that makes it all better. Never mind then.”

“Lizzy, please don’t,” he begs.

“Don’t make him angry,” the roommate begs me.

“You refuse to answer me?” I demand. He doesn’t reply, but for the first time ever he looks small. He’s always been thin, gangly, but now he actually looks small. “Then at make it stop,” I beg, unable to keep up the energy it takes to be angry. “Just make it stop.”

“It’s still…” he starts out. “But it’s been days… You can still feel it?”

“Make it stop.” A bit of the force still remains in my voice, and I use it in the hope that that will have an effect that begging evidently didn’t.

“I… I don’t know… I can’t control it,” his voice begs me to understand.

“You can’t…” The anger returns in all its glory. I feel my back straighten up, my hands leave the support of the doorframe and my legs lifting me up to full height. I’m shorter than him, by a lot, but I feel taller right now.

“Leave,” he says over his shoulder.

“But this is my room too,” the roommate complains.

“Leave,” he says again, and the boy pushes past us both, unable to do anything but listen. “Come in,” he tells me. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the roommate turn his head and look back at me stepping over the threshold, but there’s nothing he can do about it now, the invitation has been given. “Sit down.” He holds his hand out towards the bed farthest from the door. I assume that one’s his.

“What makes you think I came here to listen to you?”

“Nothing. Please sit down,” his voice is pleading and small, there’s even a hint of an unspoken apology in it. I take on of the chairs from the desks and take my seat there. He kneels awkwardly down in front of me with no balance.

“I don’t know if this will work,” he warns me. He closes his eyes and just sits there, shoulders week and hunched over, hand pressed against the floor to keep himself from tipping over, head bowed in his own little thought world. Second by second ticks by, and he still doesn’t move. Nothing at all happens. I keep watching him. Either it works, or… Or something I haven’t yet thought of. His shoulders move back a little and his posture straightens. When he finally looks up and opens his eyes, they are red again. I move back in the chair. His hands reach up and take a hold of my face, forcing me to face him. I move back further, I push the chair back, I try to get up. He holds me steady, I can’t move my head as much as an inch. He doesn’t look away, he just holds me there. His lips twist into almost a snarl, then his eyebrows raise up in question. His jaw clenches. His eyes narrow. A rouge lock of hair falls in front of his face, but he doesn’t seem to notice. There’s a flash of something in his eyes and his jaw unlocks.

“You will no longer listen to me. You will not do what I tell you to, you will not obey my commands.” The voice stops, and with it so does the echo. As suddenly as a door banged shut it all disappears. He closes his eyes and sinks down on the floor. I look around. I’m free. The echoes are gone as if they were never really here. I feel like I could sing with the mountains. I breathe in deeply, feeling the air making its way deep into my lungs, feel the energy return, feel the horror fade away. I look down at the pile of Boy at my feet.

He really isn’t in control of it. I can see his spine through the clothes, I can see him fighting, withering like a tortured snake.

“No…” he mumbles to someone unseen. “No,” he pleads. “Have to,” he answers himself. “Have to. There is no choice.” I kneel down next to his curled up body. “No, please, no,” he begs with tear-strained voice. “Take it like a man,” he orders himself. “No, no, I don’t want to. I don’t want to be him.”I try putting a hand on his shoulder, but I feel him tense up at my touch and attempt to get away without the strength to leave the floor or even slide across it.

“It’s okay,” I whisper. I put my arm around him and hug him. His hand reaches up and grabs hold of my upper arm. It’s like he’s three different people; the normal, somewhat angry Brody who just wants to prove himself, the red-eyed monster who thinks everyone is beneath him, and this whimpering, crying shell of a man.

“He is you, and you are him. You can’t change that boy.” Slowly, steadily, his back straightens up. Slowly, he regains some of his posture, however bad it might be. “Me,” he whispers in the end, and he sits up fully. He looks around as if unsure what happened. His eyes fall on me, and surprise floods his face.

“You’re still here?”

“Are you okay?” I ask worriedly. That did not seem normal – or in any way pleasant.

“You stayed,” he whispers. “Why?” He notices his own hand wrapped around my arm and let’s go as if burned.

“You seemed like you needed it.”

“After what I did to you?”

“I wouldn’t be a halfway decent person if I had left you like that.” He moves back from me as if I was a dragon or something.

“I could have killed you.”

“Professor Holt got there in time.”

“I could have killed you now,” he corrects.

“Sorry to burst your bubble, but you weren’t in any condition to hurt anyone.” But he just looks at me, and for the first time I feel like someone isn’t looking at me in amazement because I’m a Langdale, he’s looking at me like that because he doesn’t know what human decency is. No one has ever shown him. His posture, his eyes, everything about him from the ribs visible even beneath the oversized shirt to the expectation that everyone will treat him like garbage bears witness to that.

“What happened to you?” I ask, not even meaning to speak the words out loud.

“You pity me,” he says and his eyes turn strong and angry once again.

“You don’t need pity,” I say and reach out a hand and stroke his hair away from his eyes. “You need a friend.”

“You don’t want to be my friend,” he assures me.

“Maybe not.” I agree. “But some people you meet, and the respect just comes naturally. You might not particularly like them, not at first, but once you get to know them you have to respect them, respect the way they act, respect the experiences that made them who they are. Once the respect is there, friendship will follow soon enough, it has no choice.” He just looks at me for what feels like an eternity, and then he does the most unexpected thing. He reaches down and pulls off his shirt.

“You trusted me, it’s only fair I do the same.” He turns around so his back is towards me. The sight is horrific, there are no other words for it. Giant scars run across both his shoulder blades in long lines. The markings cross over each other, scar upon scar, and unevenly, uncaringly, done. A small gasp of horror escapes me, and I lift up my hand to cover my mouth. His head turns to look back at me, but I can’t manage to keep the look of horror off my face. He looks back down again.

“I was born a Transporter,” he says quietly. “Or a Nature. It’s hard to tell until you learn how the power works.” He pauses like he’s not sure if he wants to continue or not.

“You had wings, didn’t you?” I hear my voice say, unaware that I still had it.

“My dad cut them off when I was born.” His dad. A wave of nausea hits me. “When they grew back he cut them off again. He kept doing that until I was three and the scar tissue was too thick for them to grow back. I was never allowed the ability I was born with.”

“So you taught yourself different ones.” You have to admire that, not just the strength to learn something your body was never designed to do, but also the strength to turn something like that into a stepping stone rather than baggage keeping you down.

“Not at first. At first, I just lived with it. Officials came by a few times, they have people who can sense an active gene, so they came to bring me to school. They were the only people apart from my parents who could see the wounds. But since I no longer had my wings, there was nothing for me at school.

“My father was ashamed of his monstrosity of a son, even though no normal person could see that there was anything wrong with me. He began beating me whenever I mentioned my wings or complained about the pain. I learned to keep quiet, to not cry or let him know it hurt. It didn’t matter, he was an angry man, he just found other reasons to beat me. One day I had had enough, I could feel the anger, the hurt build up in me. I looked him in the eye and told him to go beat up someone his own size. He turned around and beat my mother to death.

“Professor Holt was new at the school,” he hurries on without dwelling on the memory. “So when the officials got word an ability had been used on my address again he went along. He brought me to the school with him, he convinced the other teachers the outburst had been self-defense, that I hadn’t meant to hurt anyone. He convinced them to let me study. He thought that since the gene could not express itself the way it was designed to, I might be able to find another outlet. He told me not to use the Minding, but to focus on something else. I taught myself to control the four elements, and was allowed to stay up here in the school as long as I, once a week, would go down to the basement for treatments designed to control the Minding and hopefully heal the Transporting ability.”

“Wednesday afternoon.” He hid from the treatments.

“I’ve been here for 20 years; the treatments have never done anything but hurt.”

“And now? Does it still hurt now?”

“I’ve learned to live with it.”

“Brody is this… Is this why you wanted me to master the micro movements? So I could heal you?” He looks around at me in surprise.

“Never crossed my mind,” he says earnestly. “You let me hide, I thought I owed something in return for that, so I wanted to help you grow stronger. I guess I’m not the best teacher.” He turns back and looks down again.

“Did it ever occur to you that you didn’t have to pay me for sheltering you?” He looks back at me as if I’m a simpleton. I stroke his hair back again and wipe the tear from his cheek. “You need a haircut,” I tell him with what I hope is an encouraging smile.