Excellent. I’d succeeded in making her more upset. Now what?
Behind me, I heard the quiet scuff of keys as someone entered the apartment. That had to be Anna’s roommate, Taylor. The last thing I wanted was another bizarre social interaction, so.
I hustled to the balcony, climbed down, and took off.
CHAPTER 8
Like I said, moving helps to clear my head. Running’s always been something I’ve been pretty good at. It made RASP easier for me than for a lot of other guys. By easier I mean less excruciating. Sometimes around the five-mile mark, I hit the runner’s high. For me the feeling is actually mellow—real quiet and steady—but as I picked up a trail heading away from the dorms into the hills around campus, I doubted I’d find that steadiness. I had too much to figure out. The fast healing. The mystery metal on my wrist. My newfound ability to, what? Make people angry?
I already had that. I didn’t need to get any better at it.
Nothing made sense and I had nothing, no theories. I didn’t hit any mental dead ends because I didn’t even have roads. I ended up thinking about the months just before my dad died because that was a trick my brain liked to do, pulling memories from behind my ear and presenting them to me like a bad magician.
This one was a baseball memory, right after my last game junior year. My Jeep had broken down and everyone else had already gone home, so Dad and I were stranded at the field. We called Anna, who was bringing jumper cables in my dad’s work truck, then went back to the baseball diamond to wait.
We sat in the home team dugout together, watching the sun sink behind the scoreboard. The infield was freshly groomed, the chalk lines dragged clean, the bases put away. I thought about how something had clicked for me that season. I’d upped my game on every level and already been approached by a couple recruiters—small colleges that wanted me—but I knew I’d do better. I had the grades I needed and enough talent. Effort was the last piece, and that was where I really kicked ass. Come spring, I’d have a scholarship offer from a big school.
It’d been a dream for a long time. That night it felt attainable. Everything seemed possible to me in that moment. Everything did. And as we waited for Anna to show up, I told my dad what I wanted. What I was going to do.
When I finished, I remember he looked at me for a long moment. I felt like he was seeing a man sitting there with him, not just his son. Then he’d smiled and said, “I could go for another four years in the stands.”
He believed I could do it. My fate seemed sealed. In a way, it almost felt achieved already. My dream was going to happen. Except he died six weeks later and I never set foot on a baseball diamond again.
Anyway.
You can probably guess that thinking about my dad didn’t improve my mood. He wasn’t around and never would be again, but he was one person I’d always been able to talk to about anything. I could’ve used that right then. Without that option, I ran until my shirt was soaked with sweat and I’d put five miles behind me.
I stopped as I reached the top of a hill. The setting sun turned the sky red, and campus spread out below me. Up until then I’d barely noticed the cuff on my wrist. Wearing it felt as comfortable as wearing nothing and it shouldn’t have been that way, considering I didn’t like things on me, and how hefty and snug it was. But now, as I cooled down and focused on it, I felt the slightest buzzing sensation, a beehive kind of drone humming up my arm.
That was enough for me. I had a feeling this piece of metal was responsible for everything. Time for it to go. I grabbed the first big rock I saw, braced my arm on the dirt, and slammed the rock down.
A scream detonated in my ears—high-pitched, terrible. Like someone getting murdered. At the same time, the air rushed out of my lungs and my vision went red, bright fire red, and I face-planted into the dirt. The last thing I remember was the sound of my blood pounding in my ears.
It sounded like the thunder of hoofbeats.
*
I think I was out for a few minutes. When I came around, the sun had just set and the sky was doing a slow bleed from red to purple. As I headed back to Anna’s, I had a nice long talk with myself about staying composed.
Anna’s roommate, Taylor, answered the door. In the living-room area, a few people were sprawled across the two small couches, and a pyramid of empty beer cans sat on the coffee table.
I’d already made sure my personal rage atmosphere was mild, low chance of anger. Now I followed up by sending a kind of mental message into the room before anything bad could happen.