by John Mancini
Chapter 5 -- SPECIAL VISION
William didn’t tell anyone what he had seen at the game, but he knew it was something special. And over the next few weeks, William DID wear the glasses more than usual.
He kept trying to find dramatic times to put them on so that they would do their magic again.
One time they were having a math test and William forgot to study. It was long division, which William hated. William figured that that was why God had invented calculators.
During the test, his mind went blank. All of a sudden, he didn’t think that he could add one plus one, never mind divide 7634 by 34. He looked at the paper, but didn’t have the faintest idea where to start.
Then he thought about the glasses. He reached into his pocket and slowly took them out with a flourish. He cleaned them off on the edge of his shirt and put them on. He looked down at the paper, hoping to see the answers to the problems all clearly outlined and miraculously saw…the same piece of paper, with all problems and no answers.
Another time he was watching a TV show. It was a mystery about a guy who was killed and nobody could figure it out. And they thought that a good guy did it, but you knew that he really hadn’t because they kept showing these memories of the real guy who had done it. But they never showed his face, so you didn’t know who it was. And just as it was getting to the exciting part, Mom said that they had to go in the car to the Giant. Will had a sudden inspiration - the glasses! He dug them out from underneath the cushion of the chair, put them on…and saw the same McDonalds commercial that he had seen a thousand times.
He also thought about using the glasses to find out what he was going to get for Christmas. Will thought that if he turned the Christmas lights on, and sat in the chair by the fireplace, and stared at the tree for long enough with his glasses on, that all of a sudden - "Voila" - he would see what he was getting for Christmas.
But no dice.
Will even tried using the glasses to see if he could predict when he might run into Smalls. Will’s line of thinking went like this. If he imagined Smalls’ ugly face, and then looked around the school, Will thought he might be able to predict where he was going to be and could then steer clear of him. But it didn’t work. He put the glasses on and saw Smalls, but not sometime in the future. Right there. Right then. And Smalls took his lunch money and used it to buy an extra piece of pizza that day.
But the closest William came to getting the glasses to work was on a Friday night at Tyler’s birthday party.
Tyler had invited a big gang of 12 boys over to his house for his birthday. They were going to hang around for a while at Tyler’s house and play Nintendo and drink soda. Then they were going to see the movie, "Waterboy," starring Adam Sandler on the very first day it was in the movie theatre. Then they were going to sleep over.
Well, not really "sleep over," because they planned to do very little sleeping. This was for 3 main reasons.
First, by the time it came to "sleep" at any of these so-called sleepover parties, everyone was so loaded with sugar and caffeine from the soda that nobody could hardly even sit still, never mind lie down and fall asleep.
Secondly, it was a well know fact that whenever two or more eleven year old boys are gathered, the cumulative IQ of the group goes down by 50% each time another boy is added, but the energy present doubles. This meant that by the time you got to 12 boys in one place, the group had the collective intelligence of a moderately sized squirrel, but the collective energy of a small nuclear weapon. Which was not exactly conducive to listening to the carefully articulated arguments about the need to go to sleep no later than 12:30.
But the main reason why it was so hard for anyone to get to sleep was because whenever anyone went to sleep, those who were still awake wrote on their faces with magic markers. Not just a little bit. A lot. It wasn’t unusual for some poor kid who went to bed early to wind up with a face completely colored in. In fact, at Tyler’s party, Jason’s face was so green when he woke up that he looked like a leprechaun.
But that wasn’t when Will thought the glasses were going to work. Will’s "Close Encounter of the Eyeglass Kind" came when they went to see the movie.
They had to take two cars because there were so many kids. When they were leaving, they also had to get a small refrigerator out of Mr. Martin’s car. And so it was kind of crazy what with everyone getting into the cars and all. And then when they got to the movie, there were so many people there trying to see "Waterboy," that it was sold out and they couldn’t see it.
But that wasn’t the half of it. Because when Mrs. Martin counted heads to go back home, she came up one short.
"Who’s missing? Somebody’s missing? Did someone go into the men’s room? Is somebody still in the lobby of the movie theatre?"
Daniel nonchalantly solved the puzzle. "Jason’s not here."
"What do you mean Jason’s not here?" yelled Mrs. Martin. "Whose car was he in on the way out here?"
"Not mine." "Not mine." Nine more "not mines" completed the tally.
"I think," said Daniel, pausing for emphasis, "That he must be…‘Home Alone.’"
"Wow," repeated the group. "Home Alone."
Needless to say, Mr. and Mrs. Martin quickly loaded everyone back into the cars and zoomed back to the Martin’s. When they got there, the front door was open. But Jason was not there.
William was really worried about Jason. Suppose some sort of ax-murderer had broken into the house while they were at the movie and gotten Jason. William had seen that on TV one time. William thought the time had come to really use the glasses. Suppose Jason was hurt. Or suppose some kind of bad guy had him. It suddenly occurred to Will that maybe this was the kind of thing that would make the glasses do their thing again. Maybe the score at the basketball game was just a warm up in case somebody was really in trouble sometime. He said, "Wait just one minute. I think I can find Jason." He grabbed his glasses and put them on, kind of like the reverse of Clark Kent into Superman. "Let me just look around. I think with my magic glasses I can find him."
Will felt a little dizzy. He looked around and everything swirled around him. Just like before, everything came to a stop. The noise of the rest of the gang faded away. But there was no Jason. Instead, he just threw up. It turned out that it wasn’t anything with the glasses. It was just that he had had one too many Surges before the movie.
Now it turned out that what really happened was that Jason had gone into the bathroom right before everyone left. When he came out, he went through the house, but no one was there. He went to Ian’s house, but no one was there. He went to his own house, but no one was there. Finally, he went to the Selestay’s house. No one was there except Brett’s grandmother, so he decided to stay with her until someone came home. Eventually, the Martins and everyone else caught up with him, and the sleep over was on again. William got to stay even though he had thrown up because everyone agreed it was just because he had too many Surges. Everything seemed back to normal.
But it really wasn’t. The word was out. William Mancini thought he had "magic glasses."
