I made the frogs jump and whiz toward the windows like moths to a flame and within seconds they were gone. All that was left was a very excited and amped up Biology class. Nancy sat down next to me, wonder in her eyes, but she didn’t say anything.
“Calm down, okay, calm down, get in your seats.” The biology teacher tried to bring some semblance of order back to the room. “We won’t be dividing into lab partners today, obviously… I need to sit for a second.” The teacher had finally grasped what just happened and he couldn’t seem to keep it together. After he sat he said, “You can sit in your regularly assigned seats if you like. Just read chapters four and five, I’ll be right back.” He got up and left the classroom without another word.
The room broke out into chatter and laughter at what just happened. Jill Forester waltzed over to Nancy and said in the most condescending and superior voice she could, “You don’t have to sit next to that anymore, Nancy. Come over and sit with Joan and me.”
I waited for the inevitable rejection from Nancy. I expected it and I honestly wouldn’t have been offended. Social ladders in high school are tricky things. If you get knocked down a few rungs, it’s really difficult to climb back up, and being friends with me would probably knock her off the ladder completely.
But Nancy didn’t even flinch, didn’t even hesitate, she just turned to Jill and said in a cheerful voice, “No thanks.” Then without another word of acknowledgement to Jill she turned to me with a smile, “What are you doing after school?”
Jill was in shock, standing there as if she had just been slapped in the face. After a moment she seemed to recover. “Nancy, this is your last chance. I’m serious.”
Still smiling, acting completely oblivious, Nancy turned to her. “Serious about what?”
Jill didn’t have a response to the directness of the question. As if spelling it out would somehow expose her as the raging bigot she was. In one fell swoop Nancy had beat Jill at her own social game by either making her admit to her prejudice against me, or back out and fight the fight in some other way. People were starting to stare at this strange confrontation, so she decided to back away, but not without an evil glare directed at the two of us. She was always full of those.
Ever since then, Nancy and I have been best friends.
The Hover-Shuttle landed at the station on the outskirts of Geoffrey Turner High. It was right next to the black iron wrought gate that served as metal open arms to the school. I did love this school, despite the people in it that made my life torture. There was something so comforting about its presence that I couldn’t quite explain. Maybe it was because I earned my right to be there. I earned the scholarships, I worked a part-time job, I made the grades, I deserved to be there. I wasn’t born into it; I made it happen and I was actually a little proud of that.
I exited the shuttle without a word to the driver and made my way through the gate to the front courtyard. It was pretty much deserted since above me was the carpool platform with a long line of hover-cars dropping off students. Most of the kids liked being driven, but a handful of students drove themselves and parked in the designated lot behind the school. You had to be seventeen to get your hover license and most of the rich kids waited until they were eighteen since they enjoyed having drivers taxi them around everywhere. Bill was the only person I knew that actually had his hover-license.
The courtyard was green and lush with classic maples and a hedge fence surrounding the entire circumference of the area. Two rows of cherry blossom trees lined the walkway ending at the large arched oak door that led inside the school. My favorite time of year was spring when they’d become a forest of pink. There were benches scattered throughout to encourage students to study and socialize outdoors, but there were only a handful of us that took advantage.
I walked through the oak doors and entered the bottom level of the school. The halls were quickly filling up as students made their way down from the hover platforms above. Mahogany lockers lined the hallways (no small feat considering the use of any kind of wood was limited by the law for environmental purposes) and white marble floors leading the way. I could only imagine the amount of money it took to maintain the beauty and quality of the wood and flooring with the wear and tear of high school students. Not that Vice President Turner had to worry about money. He was filthy rich and always had been, even before Age-pro. His family was old money, ancient money, like since the early fifteen hundreds kind of ancient.
When I reached my locker I opened the combination lock, pulled out my electronic reader and grabbed my fitted cardigan. Temperatures usually reached below freezing in Mr. Alaster’s History class and I wanted something to protect me from the cold.
“Hey, did you read chapter eight?” Nancy suddenly appeared at my side. She had grown a few inches since freshman year, but her hair remained blonde, long and gorgeous. I still get pangs of guilt when I realize how popular Nancy would be if she wasn’t friends with me. She was truly stunning to look at, giant blue eyes: a delicate straight nose and perfectly bowed lips that were always pinkish-red in color as if she wore lipstick, but she was just naturally flawless. Her tight jeans and fitted top showed off her picture-perfect body. I always felt like the ugly duckling little brother when I stood next to her.
“Yeah, last night.” I shut my locker and we started to walk down the hall toward class.
“Fill me in. I completely slacked.” Nancy usually didn’t do her homework and relied on me to keep her up to date. Her philosophy was that since she aced the tests what did it matter if she did the homework or not. She was one of those ridiculously smart people who never had to study for anything; everything came to her naturally. Somehow she’d manage to put all the pieces of the puzzle together just by looking at the question or the equation on the test. I, on the other hand, had to study for hours just to maintain my A status. If I didn’t I’d lose my scholarships.
“We’re just going over religious stuff since Age-pro,” I told her.
Nancy rolled her eyes and made an exasperated groan. “Seriously? Haven’t we covered that in every class ever?”
“I think we’re going over the whole Voodoo thing today, so that’ll be cool.” I completely agreed with Nancy. The fascination of belief or lack of belief in religion since Age-pro was a topic that every teacher liked to discuss at some point in their classroom; from Literature, to Biology, to History, to Social Sciences, even the Math teacher had something to say about it! At least Mr. Alaster delved into the interesting stuff, like the transformation of Vodun or Voodoo from a religion to black magic.
“Watch out for Jill today. She’s on a rampage and you’re her favorite target.” Nancy didn’t seem all that concerned, but confrontations with Jill tended to get ugly and I knew she genuinely wanted to avoid it at all costs.
“What’s she on a rampage about?” I asked. Sometimes knowing what was freaking Jill out helped me figure out how to avoid complete and total humiliation.
“Her mom found out she was taking Age-pro.”
I shrugged. Most of the kids here illegally started to take Age-pro before the eighteen-year-old restriction. The fear of wrinkles and cellulite overrode health and good sense. The reason there was a restriction at all was because the International Health Board ruled it dangerous to stop aging before a person had fully grown. It could cause massive complications later in life. There were extreme cases, like in 2143 the “Alice Rose incident.” Basically, this woman, Alice Rose, had a baby and decided she wanted a baby forever, so she started giving it Age-pro. When she was finally caught, the baby was nineteen-years-old and still an infant. Alice was arrested and sent to prison. That was when everyone started realizing the dangers of Age-pro. They immediately made the eighteen-year-old restriction punishable by life imprisonment, which meant no Age-pro, which meant dying of old age. Who knows when Jill started taking it? She was damn lucky her mom found out about it and not the police. By trying to stay forever young she came dangerously close to living a mere eighty to ni
nety years.
“I’ll steer clear,” I said to reassure Nancy. I really didn’t want to be in Jill’s warpath today.
The bell rang and everyone started shuffling into his or her designated classrooms. Nancy and I arrived at Mr. Alaster’s door and entered.
Jill was sitting at the back of the class with her usual crowd of admirers hovering over her like bees to honey. As soon as I walked in I looked away trying to avoid eye contact.
“Just sit down,” Nancy said under her breath, which indicated to me that Jill was staring me down. It’s amazing when you can actually feel people staring at you. I refused to look in her direction. Meeting gazes with Jill would only give her an opening to use me as her verbal punching bag.
I did as Nancy said and we both sat in our seats near the front of the room just as Mr. Alaster walked in. Mr. Alaster started taking Age-pro around thirty and had a thin, wiry frame with curly brown hair on top, making him look like a human carrot. He wore his usual brown cardigan sweater with the round suede elbow patches, typical khakis and dress shirt, and, of course, his wire frame glasses. Let’s face it, he looked the way you’d imagine a History teacher to look. Sometimes I wondered if he did it on purpose or if he really, truly liked to dress that way.
“Punch up chapter eight.” Mr. Alaster’s enthusiastic, buoyant voice filled the room.
I pulled out my electronic reader and brought up chapter eight like everyone else in the room. The title of the chapter was, “The Fall of Religion and the Beginnings of Elemental Experimentation.” Snore. Though Mr. Alaster didn’t seem to think so, he was, in fact, more eager than I’d ever seen him before.
“What did you think of this chapter? Any thoughts? Questions? Come on, guys, don’t be shy, this subject is fascinating, trust me.” Mr. Alaster’s smile was almost contagious. He might actually be right if we hadn’t already heard it a bagillion times.
“No one? Really?” Mr. Alaster didn’t seem upset, only surprised at our lack of enthusiasm.
That’s when Ryan Vaughn raised his hand. I looked away and tried to ignore his perfect face. It was too torturous liking someone I had absolutely no shot at. He was the resident whiz kid of Geoffrey Turner High, and I had an enormously embarrassing crush on him. Like I said, most of my crush on the reporter Jason Keroff was to keep my mind off of my doomed liking of Ryan. Ryan’s family was on the same pay scale as Nancy’s, which put him in the upper middle class range. He was a popular kid only because he agreed to do other people’s homework for the right price. Ryan’s I.Q. was also fifty points above genius which put him as the smartest kid in school and rumor had it, in the world. Science scouts would come to our school all the time offering him jobs straight out of high school at the top research facilities in the world. Ryan didn’t seem fazed by all the attention and no one knew if he took any of the offers. He tutored me in math junior year and even though I was a social reject, he was still decent to me, which of course, made me like him all the more. I could barely speak when I was around him. He probably thought I was a complete idiot. He was ridiculously cute and ridiculously brilliant. He kept his short, sandy-blonde hair in a kind of “planned messy” way. He was taller than most boys our age (six-three), lean but muscular, big brown eyes, angular features. Okay, he was gorgeous, but way out of my reach. I seriously had a better chance with Jason Keroff than with him.
“Yes, Ryan.” Mr. Alaster was thrilled that someone was participating, let alone the resident brainiac.
“Isn’t all this Elemental Experimentation the same thing as religion? Just a bunch of mumbo jumbo made up to validate our existence.” Ryan was slumped in his chair and said this with a kind of arrogance that suggested he didn’t have much conviction in his statement.
“That’s a valid point, Ryan, but scientific Elemental Experimentation has tangible evidence that it truly produces results where as religion was always based on faith and imagination.” Mr. Alaster was getting into it now. You could almost see the saliva forming around his mouth. “The reason I’m so excited about this, guys, is because just this morning the Scientific Journal released the results of an extended study which began in 2247. It was run by a scientist named Lester Rankin who performed the Voodoo ritual of resurrection. He was actually able to bring a man back to life that had been dead for two days.”
My interest immediately perked up. Nancy looked over at me with protective concern. We never talked about the day I made the frogs come to life, but I could imagine she had wondered about it. And now as Mr. Alaster was telling me that there might be others who could do what I could do, I needed all the info I could get. I needed to download the Scientific Journal pronto.
“For how long?” I asked before I could stop myself. My curiosity overtook my sensibility of speaking up in a classroom where Jill Forester resided.
“For how long what?” Mr. Alaster wasn’t upset by the disruption, he genuinely was curious as to where my mind was going with this.
“For how long has Chelsan been a complete moron?” Jill chimed in from the back.
The class laughed on cue, but I ignored them as usual. I turned my attention to Mr. Alaster. “How long was he able to bring him back to life?”
“Aaah!” Mr. Alaster was thrilled with the racing thoughts I instilled inside of his mind. “For only a few minutes. And the man wasn’t really alive, more like an animated corpse. According to the study, the longest they were able to keep the corpses mobile was a maximum of five minutes.”
Interesting. Somehow this had to have something to do with my gift. Maybe I had performed this spell or ceremony or whatever it was when I was a kid and didn’t even realize it? Maybe my mom or my real dad… maybe something genetic because they had done this hoochimimbober Voodoo thing? I couldn’t stop thinking about all the possibilities. I needed to know more.
Ryan raised his hand again, perplexed. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought Vodun was a religion.”
Mr. Alaster’s eyes lit up with excitement. “You are very correct, Ryan. But Vodun or Voodoo is no longer considered a religion because of its tangible elements. Many people no longer believe in the Vodun creator, Mawu, or, God, in Christian religions anymore. Only the people who consider themselves truly faithful, like the Christian Coalition, who segregate themselves around the world in tiny towns and refuse to take Age-pro still worship their God and practice the ritual ceremonies.”
There were a few gasps from Jill and her lackeys in the back of the room at the thought of not using Age-pro on purpose.
“Paganism and Wicca were also categorized as religions in the past, but are now seen as Elemental Experimentation. In the twentieth century people thought of them as hokum because death was such a driving factor in the way that people lived. They were on this planet for such a finite time that the afterlife was far more important to them than the mere seventy to ninety years they were alive. Once the factor of death was taken out of the equation, people found that there were far more interesting things to explore. Suddenly finding out if these rituals or spells as they used to call them actually worked became a priority. Most of the population found that when you had eternity, your goals and ambitions changed.”
This is where I started to tune out. Mr. Alaster was now getting into familiar territory that all of us had heard too many times to count. I looked over at Ryan and even he had zoned, staring at his reader as if he were following along with Mr. Alaster.
That’s when Ryan’s eyes unexpectedly met mine and he smiled slightly. I could feel my face flush and I quickly turned away. My stomach was doing back flips and I could feel myself break into a slight sweat. What was my problem? A guy who wouldn’t say “hi” to me in the hallway smiles at me and I’m completely falling apart. And to boot, I just realized that when I turned away I didn’t exactly smile back. I probably gave him some kind of look of disgust. Typical. It didn’t matter anyway, it’s not like Ryan would ever like me like me. He was almost certainly smiling at the fact that some moron was staring at him like a
complete dork. I’m such an idiot. What was more annoying than that was the fact that I desperately wanted to look at him again. Was I a masochist or something? Don’t do it!
“What’s wrong with you?” Nancy whispered to me with a look of concern on her face.
“Nothing. Not feeling well, must’ve been breakfast.” I tried to cover up, but I could tell Nancy wasn’t buying it.
“Is it the study?” Nancy’s expression indicated that she really did know more than she was letting on. I could tell we were going to have a discussion about my gift very soon. And a part of me looked forward to it. After four years I could trust her. Besides, she obviously already put most of it together if she was picking up on my interest in the study.
“Yeah. We’ll talk,” I promised.
Nancy’s face changed from concern to excitement. Between her and Mr. Alaster’s enthusiasm I could barely concentrate.
Okay, I could barely concentrate because I desperately wanted to turn around and stare at Ryan. My brain was a mess. I couldn’t wrap my head around why I cared? I tried not to think of Ryan Vaughn all that often. In fact, after our tutoring time, I tried to block him out of my head completely for fear of becoming a stalker. But it was very hard to forget the rare moments when his hand brushed up against mine by accident and it would send tingles all the way to my toes.
The Riser Saga Page 3
