Chapter Six
Anger kept Kyle going all the way back to his house. Anger kept him from going back, because there was no going back. He saw no fathomable reason for him to go back. He had every right to be angry in his mind. How could they have done this to him? So what if the twins were still standing where he left them confused and hurt; they would get over it. Or they wouldn’t; Kyle could honestly care less at this point.
He made the trip from the mall back to his house in record time. His whole body was sore, which made him angry, both from the episode at the mall and the nonstop ride back to his house. When he got there, the first thing he did was basically throw his bike and helmet over the fence. He threw the front door open and slammed it behind him with deliberate force that startled Sarah on the couch.
“What’s up with you,” she said snobbishly. Kyle ignored her, she wasn’t worth the time, and stalked upstairs to his room. Again, he threw the door open, letting it crash into the wall, and slammed it hard behind him. He shut the window and closed the blinds. He kicked his shoes off with enough force that they bounced off the wall, tore his socks off and tossed them with the shoes. Then he tore his shirt off and threw it at the wall with everything else.
He started pacing the room, broiling with anger. How could they do this to him? His own supposed “friends”. They couldn’t understand.
Finally, his legs hurt so much he had to sit down. He plopped down onto his bed and fell lying down with his feet still touching the floor. The bed was comfortable. He always loved his bed. It was the first thing he went to everyday after school. He had been on vacations where he just couldn’t sleep because it wasn’t his bed that he was sleeping in. There were lots of comfortable beds in the world, but this one was his, and that just made it special. This was where he could sleep perfectly and clear his mind.
And just like magic, he began to think clearly again. Why was he angry? He looked down toward his arms. The glow of the vessels was as soft as ever. Why? What are they, and why him?
All of the questions were agitating him again. He closed his eyes and counted slowly to ten. This trick always worked for Kyle when he needed to calm down. By the time he reached ten, his mind was clear; no thoughts, no emotions, just breathing.
And something else. Something new. Something coming from the vessels. Puzzled, Kyle sat up, propping himself on the wall behind him, and examined his arms. The vessels didn’t look any different, but he could feel something. Maybe they always felt like this, and he just never noticed. They didn’t feel like an add-on to his body. Quite the contrary, they felt a part of it, like a limb that had always been there.
For the first time, Kyle truly focused on them. As he did so, he noticed that they flared; a slow wave starting from his upper arm all the way down to his hands. Experimentally, he tried again, with the same result. For the first time since he had them, they were doing something other than make his life miserable. They were finally a curiosity. He could engage them like any other muscle in his body.
The next thing he tried was a constant engagement; to see if he could hold them. When he tried, though, they only stayed active for a few seconds. When he tried again, he managed to last longer. Over and over again he engaged the vessels, and each time he was able to keep them glowing brighter for longer.
By now he was standing, and feeling very excited by this new discovery. Soon he was able to keep them glowing for two minutes straight. Feeling ambitious, he wondered how bright he could get them. He cleared his mind, took a deep breath, and turned the vessels on. He then began pushing them to be brighter. The dull blue glow they usually had quickly became a bright electric blue. Brighter and brighter they grew; Kyle was starting to give off more light than a floodlight. It excited him to know he could more or less exercise like this.
But Kyle soon realized he was starting to give off more than just light. He noticed that things on his dresser and around his room started to shake. This only intrigued Kyle to continue pushing his limit. It was getting harder, and he had to fight for every iota of energy. His arms were feeling as if they were stuffed with some, but not something solid or liquid.
Then it started to hurt, but Kyle couldn’t stop. Then, a realization hit Kyle straight in the face. He wasn’t expelling energy. He was gathering it, and soon couldn’t hold it.
And with that realization came the fact that he couldn’t stop the flow; the energy kept building and building, and he knew he was about to burst. His mind and heart started racing, and he couldn’t figure out which was faster. His arms were glowing like someone had stuffed a star underneath his skin, and were shaking violently. Then one thought shot through his brain like a freight train, drowning out all of the others: he had to get outside.
It took him three tried to grab his own door knob, his hands were so shaky. He didn’t bother closing it behind him, only worried about getting out of the house as fast as he could. He nearly tripped on his way down the stairs.
“What is that?!” he heard Sarah yell. Kyle didn’t stop to answer, only ran for the back door.
He slammed through the back door and into the back yard. Except for his glowing blue arms, he was really pale. Sarah followed him outside, complaining until she saw him. Kyle took several deep breaths, trying to release the energy building up.
It was a struggle to unclench his entire body, but it worked somewhat. A blue substance began falling out of his arms like snowflakes. At first, Kyle thought that the vessels were flaking off, but the vessels weren’t shrinking in any way. They were dulling, though. It appeared that whatever energy he had put in them was falling out. When the “flakes” hit the ground, they just kind of dissipated, and some didn’t even get to touch the ground before they just disappeared.
After a while, the slow leaking stopped, but Kyle’s arms were still significantly brighter than (relatively) natural. He realized then that he was still clenched up tight. After a few more deep breaths, he dropped his arms loosely to his sides.
Before he knew it, he felt energy rushing out of his arms. It was a bitter-sweet relief; nice, but for some reason he had a feeling something else strange was about to happen. Sure enough, as he looked down, he saw that the energy wasn’t just falling to the ground like it did before. It poured out, but then it traveled up his arms and formed a rough bubble around his entire body. It took less than half a minute to completely cover him head to toe. But for some reason, he wasn’t panicking. The release stopped when he was completely covered.
From inside his little bubble, the world looked much different. For one thing, it looked as if he was wearing really dark sunglasses. Everything was distorted, as if he was looking at the bottom of a shallow lake. He looked up toward Sarah, who had something like an aurora outlining her, while the house behind her was dark. Kyle looked up toward the sky, where it was mostly dark, except for the sun, which appeared to have lost its rays and was just a single disk of light. Kyle figured that this must be some kind of heat vision. He also didn’t feel any heat, in spite of it being close to triple digit weather at the time.
He moved around, and the bubble moved with him. He felt lighter, and it felt easier to move. He started laughing for some reason; this felt purely amazing. He felt free of everything holding him down.
“Are you okay?” Sarah asked.
Kyle had almost forgotten that she was there. He looked over to see that she was slowly inching toward him.
“Yeah,” he said. “I feel great; better than I have felt in a while.”
“What’s happening?” she asked.
Her caution was warranted, seeing that Kyle had no idea what was going on, but it felt good. He shrugged, saying, “I have no idea.”
He took an experimental step. Again, he had the amazing sensation that his body was lighter than it originally was. He put his foot down and felt it could just bounce back up like a ball. He took a few more steps, finding it incredible how easy it was to move like this. It was like gravity didn’t have as much of an effect on hi
m anymore.
He jumped two feet off of the ground just bouncing on his heels. “Whoa,” he said when he landed. Usually a jump that small would’ve just gotten him an inch in the air. He jumped again, just a little harder. He easily got six feet off the ground. When he landed, he then crouched low to the ground, and with all of the strength he had, he jumped again.
He left the ground far below him. He flew above his house and kept going. He saw his street, then his neighborhood, and the college in the distance. Soon, all of Odessa was laid out before him, then the airport and Midland. Amazingly, he could still hear and breathe normally; he felt the force of the wind, but it wasn’t blowing him around; he remained upright throughout. His eyes weren’t being affected either, and he felt no change in temperature as he kept going; it was like his little bubble of energy was protecting him from the elements. He was probably a thousand feet in the air when he first started to slow down. He began whooping and laughing, realizing gravity must not work on him anymore.
But he thought too soon. Before he was able to touch a cloud he was heading toward, he stopped ascending. He stopped moving at all, neither going up or down, for several seconds before gravity did take over. Head down, he headed back toward earth. It was then that he realized that he was heading back to earth. Solid, unyielding earth laid beneath him that would destroy him upon impact. He had no parachute, no padding, not even a shirt on. He didn’t know if this bubble could protect him from falling to his very certain death, but something told him it probably wouldn’t.
For one whole minute he fell, his mind racing and the whole “his life flashed before his eyes” thing. Finally, his mind just went blank and he just fell. Of all ways, this was the least he ever expected to die. How could this be it? He almost found this scene ironic since he had never flown before.
Kyle found it almost funny some of the stuff that went through his mind as he fell. His mind went to the fact that he did all of that homework and would never have the chance to turn it in. He thought about that last story he wrote to the school newspaper about the wolf puppy and bear cub that become friends despite differences. He thought about that time he and the twins had ice-cream and while Jules was in the bathroom, Kyle and Justin put salt and sugar in hers. Kyle and Justin nearly blew it as she came back, but she licked her cone, immediately made a face and dropped it in the back yard. Kyle and Justin were laughing so hard they couldn’t hear her yell at them. That was the weekend before finals week; the last time they truly hung out before all of this happened.
It was a happy memory, much better than earlier that day. That couldn’t be it. How could he let the last thing he said to his best friends was to leave him alone forever? He couldn’t have meant that. He should’ve apologized. No. He will apologize. In person.
His mind was made, and his arms began to itch with more power. More energy was being manipulated, and this time it acted differently. His little bubble began flaring around him. He watched and beheld that he was slowing down. He began spinning end over end. When he stopped, he was upside down and falling again, this time faster, and he continued to accelerate. Puzzled, he looked up toward his feet, and saw that the energy was forming a tail stretching about six feet behind him, like the tail of a comet. He realized he was being propelled down. He was flying. Down.
Without thinking, he angled his body up to fly level. He watched as his angle of descent change until he was flying parallel to the ground, heading in an easterly direction. He was moving fast, requiring him to think fast if he wasn’t going to get lost.
He was twitchy and jerky at first, but he soon found that it was easy to control; he could change direction with the slightest movement or thought. He soared over Odessa like a jet. He thought he would feel something like wind resistance, but once again the elements outside of his bubble didn’t affect him. His bubble had taken on a new shape; it was much more streamlined, more like a spearhead, coming to a fine point in front of him.
He didn’t notice as he was getting a little too close to a huge air plane coming from the north. He twisted to his right, ducking just underneath the plane. He could’ve reached up and touched the belly of the huge machine, which went on like nothing had happened. Laughing, he twisted again to the left. He could move around with little more than a thought; it was like he had been flying his whole life, and was now rediscovering this skill. He used his arms a lot to navigate and change direction, too, so it was almost like swimming as much as it was flying. And changing speed was simply adding or taking away power.
Then he angled up. Soon he was pointed straight up and getting higher and higher above the Earth. Again, Kyle was amazed at how easy it was. He was well aware that planes worked with air resistance, lift and drag, but he didn’t feel anything against him. He flew through a cloud and didn’t even get wet. His bubble must somehow block natural forces around him. When he could no longer see clouds above him, he got scared. He looked down to see an entire continent. He could see from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. He couldn’t even see any cities from his point of view. The realization that he could leave the planet on his own scared him, so he turned around and headed back down.
After a while, Kyle was getting tired, he looked toward the west to see that the sun was getting close to touching the horizon, so it must be getting late. He angled himself toward the ground. After another minute of flying around, he found the Music City Mall, and from there he was able to find his way back to his home on Twin Oaks. There was a truck Kyle recognized as his father’s halfway up the road. Kyle soared over it and over the house and tried to stop. Stopping took four more flyovers to figure out. On the fifth try, he managed to finally stop by throwing his arms out in front of him before he wanted to land. This action now left him hovering about thirty feet over his back yard. Slowly, he decreased the amount of energy he was using, causing him to slowly fall to the ground.
When he was about six feet in the air, Sarah and his parents were in the backyard watching him with the same looks Sarah had when Kyle first took off. With a deep breath, he released what was left of his energy, causing his bubble to disappear and he to fall what was left to the ground. He landed a little harder than what he anticipated; he nearly stumbled forward as his feet hit the ground. He was a little disoriented; his body felt heavy, like he was wearing a suit made with metal. He felt hands, strong but gentle, lead him into the house and in a chair. He sat there looking at the dark wood of the table.
When he was sitting down, he heard his mother’s voice ask, “Are you alright?”
He looked up to her face, full of concern as it was, and smiled. “Better than I’ve felt all summer.