Trent was like a snowball thrown to the top of Mt. Ranier. He was the beginning, and slow to get started, but steadily growing.
The summer passed uneventfully, unfortunately. Charlotte was gone for a whole month to this music camp for people who had a special passion, and his dad was gone the whole time too. Charlotte told him the camp’s name was Interlochen, and that some of the best future musicians in the country went there. She had to fly. They were going to keep her busy. There was no chance to get in touch with her.
Even so, he did get a few video e-mails from her, playing more music he'd never heard of in his entire life. And even when she came back, he wasn't allowed to see her very much. His mother was out of the house a lot doing community service and reading clubs and jewelry making parties and Tupperware parties (what was the point of these), and he was forbidden to have a girl anywhere near the house without his mother there to watch them.
So he delivered papers and scarfed down as many books as his brain could process, and sometimes stared at walls in utter boredom.
One thing didn't change as the summer came, went, and morphed into seventh grade, and that was the constant attention of mother, grandfather, and Mr. Springfield. He was horrified when Springfield called him up the first time, a month after the thing with Trent, and again a month after that.
“Just to check up,” he said.
Right.
Michael was so caught off guard that he didn't even think to ask him why he was a teacher instead of throwing himself into volcanoes to see what happened. And Springfield called every fourteenth of the month, Michael soon learned.
He figured out, as seventh grade started and he talked to Charlotte about it, that he wasn’t the only one the adults were keeping tabs on. He was in the middle of telling Charlotte about Springfield’s ‘call me at three a.m.’ spiel when she held up a hand and he stopped.
“That’s weird,” she told him. “What's really strange, right, is this school guy keeps calling me too.”
“What, what guy?”
“This counselor from the high school. His name is Terrance Jackson.” She explained that she'd had a similar counselor's meeting a week after the Trent-threw-lightning-all-over-the-place night, and she hadn't thought much of it. They just wanted to make sure everybody was adjusting to the new reality of an Active near them. But then Jackson kept calling and calling, to see how she was doing, what was new, and if she'd had any strange dreams lately.
“Weird,” Michael said.
“Yeah. And get this, he read my mind.”
“What? He's an Active too?”
He told her about Springfield's forcefield.
“Okay,” she said, “I was ready to believe there was just a teacher who could read minds, and he thought 'I don't need to be a super spy or anything, I can just teach better', but here's another one.”
“Mr. Springfield seemed like a nice guy though,” Michael said.
“Well, yeah, okay...maybe Terrance just wanted to be a teacher too.”
“But two Active teachers in one town, in one school, is...it's impossible.”
She shook her head. “Not impossible. Just not likely.”
“And Springfield told me there are more than a hundred Actives in town.”
Charlotte's mouth dropped open.
And there was that thing about his grandfather; he couldn't shake the feeling like Grandpa was involved. He felt guilty and awful for the thought, but he couldn't squash it. Grandpa was coming over more often for dinner now, and had popped in several times for breakfast over the summer. Come to think of it, he'd been asking the same sorts of questions Springfield had.
Stop it, he told himself. Grandpa was clearly just concerned that his only grandson had been through something completely nuts, and he wanted to make sure everything was cool.
Oh yeah, the thought countered, why does he know so much about the student population at LADCEMS? And who was that guy he was talking to on the tablet?
Grandpa had a life. He didn't show Michael every single piece of mail or introduce him to everybody he ever talked to on the phone.
And the little thought worming his way through his mind replied: you're in denial.
Denial or not, he wasn't going to troop over to Grandpa's house and ask him what he was involved in. He was an old man who sat on his porch most days and read the news. He had a shot of whiskey before he went to bed every night. He played cribbage very well. Michael wasn't going to start accusing his own grandfather of anything, especially when he didn't know what was going on. Or if anything was going on at all.
If you couldn't trust your own grandfather, who could you trust?
He and Charlotte decided there had to be something they didn't know. Then they had a laugh over that, and decided there was something very big they didn't know. Something that probably affected the whole town and was an awfully big secret.
Seventh grade was no different from sixth, even the way Michael’s classmates were looking at him. The fear and directed at him had increased. Instead of being politely ignored, people went out of their way to get out of his way. If he was in line for hot lunch, other people got out of line. When he walked by, conversations stopped as if he had thrown a switch. Or worse, as if he’d become the new Trent. The teachers were too busy to notice this sort of thing. They all had hundreds of students to teach, hundreds of tests to grade, and whatever teacherish things they got up to that divided them from paying attention to students' lives.
Michael tried not to let it bother him. He knew that people were afraid of him, or afraid that bad stuff happened wherever he was. They were probably also talking about he and Charlotte. He didn't mind so much that they were talking about him, but it irked him when he thought he heard her name and his together.
The work was much more difficult now. He was expected to know the names and locations of every Asian nation, along with their capitals and some special facts about each one. He was expected to read two chapters of some books per night, which wouldn't be a problem except that these were stupid books about stupid, boring real life and made him want to jump in front of a train. A speeding train. The math was hard just because he didn't do well with numbers, but his mother helped him out. Science had him building musical instruments with his father in the garage, and bird nests with Charlotte a few weeks later.
It was enough to drive someone crazy.
The stress got to other students as well. He was halfway through his second geography test (Europe this time) when he realized nobody was looking at their tests. He glanced up at Mr. Groebels first, who was frowning, then followed his stare over to the corner.
A kid named Jared McClaren was pulling himself out of his chair. He wasn’t standing up, there were actually two of him, identical carrot-topped kids with the same rash of freckles and hand me down clothes. One was trying to pull the other one out of his... their... seat.
“Let me do it,” Jared said, hauling another Jared up by his shirt.
“Get off me!” the other Jared said.
“You are such an idiot!” the first one said. “Go, go back to math and talk to Rosenbaum.”
“She told me I couldn't retake the test!” he told himself.
Just then, two more Jareds burst into the room.
“Are you crazy?” one of them shouted. “People are trying to take a test here.”
Somebody giggled. Others followed, nervously. Michael wondered if any of them had realized just how messed up this was.
Three more Jareds stood up behind the original one and started pulling the other three away, but six more sprouted out of nowhere. Those sitting right next to Jared were thrown out of their seats by one kid having a cleared-benches brawl all by himself.
Most of the class was still laughing by the time there were twenty of Jared McClaren in the classroom, and the punches were being thrown. One Jared got his head smashed into a bulletin board, throwing an enormous map onto the floor. Then he snarled and Michael saw four more of himself split off.
It happened so fast that soon there had to be forty of them.
The classroom was getting crowded, and it hadn't even been a minute.
Mr. Groebels stood up and bellowed at the top of his lungs. “That is enough of that!”
Forty crazed and identical pairs of eyes turned on him.
“Get yourself under control, young man!”
“It was his project,” one of the Jareds muttered.
“And all the memorizing,” another said.
“A hundred countries and capitals.” Now they were finishing each others' sentences.
“Just give us a blank map, you think we don't have anything else to do...”
“...but sit around and stare at your stupid maps all day? Most of these countries...”
“...ain't gonna last ten years anyway.”
“And there's math...”
“...English...”
“...science, what was that, bird nests and building musical instruments.”
“You can't just be one person and get it all done!” one of them shouted. None of them sounded quite right, horrified and laughing, like they'd just been watching The Devil's Cheerleaders and How I Married a Martian at the same time.
Some of the kids who hadn't left the room were going along with the Jareds, egging him on. This wasn't good. Michael got up and headed to the front, where an army was closing in on Mr. Groebels.
The teacher stared, wide-eyed and frightened, as the Jareds surrounded him. He had a phone in his hand, but his mouth wasn't making any noise. It was just opening and closing, like a fish gasping for water, caught on a hook.
“Don’t do this Jared,” Michael said.
“Get out of my way, crazy outcast,” Jared said, and pushed Michael roughly aside. Half a dozen Jareds grabbed him. He was punched in the stomach, tripped, and then stomped on a couple of times before Michael smelled Charlotte’s shampoo and realized she was pulling him out of the fracas.
All of the Jareds turned their mad anger on the teacher, leaping over desks and pushing other students aside to get to him. He went for the door, but his escape was blocked by more copies than Michael could count.
Then a flash of strange golden light appeared, and the Jareds fell back. Something happened in the middle of the circle, where Mr. Groebels had been, but there were too many carrot-topped heads in the way. The classroom was clogged with them.
All of the copies howled in rage and started streaming out the door. It was then Michael noticed the strange smell in the air. He wondered what was going on, because everything was getting blurry. Suddenly his head was a leaden ball, and he couldn't move his feet. He looked around for Charlotte and found her lying on the ground, was she asleep? He couldn't tell. In fact, he couldn't think of anything. He was supposed to be scared, he realized, but then he couldn't be scared, because he just need to lie down, close his eyes, and everything would be okay.
Or at least everything would be a nice, peaceful black.