The Turn

"So.. you could buy a house, you know," she'd say.
"A big house. And a car," I'd reply.
"Or a small house and a medium house. Right next to each other," she'd add, after some thought.
"Or the House of Representatives. And a car," I'd say finally.

This went on and on.

I'd told Amy pretty much everything; she'd been more interested than shocked or anxious for a loan. Through the weeks we'd gone over all the details, formulating theories about mysterious deaths and mysterious sums of money. Ideas floated around such as that my dad was not a medical researcher but a secret agent who'd been killed in action, or perhaps he was a robot assassin from the future, or he was a hologram and never really existed. All three seemed equally likely.

It was nice to be able to talk to someone, though. After a few weeks the dead-dad-kid stigma started to wear off at school, but the break from contact seemed to make people question why they ever talked to me in the first place. I suppose I'm just not that interesting and the few recent things that seemed to make me interesting -- I'd elected not to tell anybody. Except Amy.

Nothing notably weird happened for about a month. One Thursday at school I was lost in thought while walking through the halls during lunch. I find when I don't have something particular to think about I end up thinking about everything; hallways, lockers, and people just blurred through the periphery. I'm usually able to stay above the surface enough to avoid running into people or falling down a flight of stairs, but apparently not so much today. It was lunch time, so most people were either in the cafeteria or outside in the cold trying to hide the fact that they're smoking. For this, it was surprising to find four poser Mexican gang drifters standing around one otherwise-empty hallway.

In Fredericksburg there wasn't much or any gang activity, but as in any suburb there's plenty of poser activity. The town's close enough to Washington D.C., however, that some of the posers have friends who have friends who actually are gang members, and so after taking classes at their blue ribbon schools and dropping their books off at their five bedroom houses, they play make-believe that they're gang members. Nothing new.

I should say, I didn't so much "find" them as I did "walk right into one like an idiot."

I wasn't looking, I walked right into one of them as he was making some elaborate gesture in the middle of some I'm-sure-hilarious joke. I was walking pretty fast, and the one I hit was jarred back a foot or so and dropped the clear plastic drink container he was holding.

"Ay, watch where you're going, son!" the one I hit said, the others turned toward me and fell into their stereotypical straight-from-the-tv behavior -- slowly surrounding me and watching the first one, the one I hit, apparently their ringleader, for instructions. I opened my mouth to apologize and hopefully slide my way out of there when I noticed what was spilling out of the container the first guy dropped. It looked like orange juice, it smelled like rubbing alcohol. Oh, the sweet rebellion. I couldn't help but laugh, which probably looked like I was laughing at them. One guy standing to my right pushed me suddenly, and chimed in, "Something funny, son?"

They all say "son" too often.

I swallowed my laugh, but couldn't help but say, "I'd be less obvious if you poured the vodka right in a bottle of orange juice. Putting it all in a clear bottle.. it's trying too hard." Man, I should have shut up.

The first guy didn't seem to like that. "Maybe you should mind your own business, bro," he said, looking me up and down. I guess I wasn't his son anymore. I probably shouldn't have said that out loud either. I gotta say, I'd never been slammed against a locker before. It's not very awesome, the handle goes right into the small of your back.

Two of them were holding me against the locker wall by the shoulders, a third stood off to the side, and the first guy was standing front of me, swinging a tightened fist toward my face in slow motion. Wait a minute…

Something weird happened alright. While that fist was coming at me, the first violent action ever to be taken against me, something snapped in my head. The world slowed down, got mushy, and stopped. Walls in my mind suddenly crumbled, and everything I thought I knew about anything changed in an instant. A thousand images and sounds suddenly splashed against my brain like buckets of paint being dumped on a canvas. That, and my body was numb.

Something else snapped too, the guy's wrist. Like I'd been possessed, and with a perverse clarity I grabbed the clenched fist in mid air with my left hand and turned it counter-clockwise. Before I knew it, I'd forced his face into the same locker with my right elbow. He was soon on the ground, and with a foreign quickness I'd shed the hands now groping at my arms and neck and put the side of my palm into the throat of one of them, my knee into the back of another, and the gasping weight of the second onto the fourth. They were all on the ground now. My head hurt.

My head hurt, and apparently I was a ninja.

Voices echoed behind me, distant and distorted. My head was pounding harder, like ten glass bottles had been broken over my head. I stumbled against the opposite wall, groping it for support. Through a fog I felt a hand grab my shoulder and another grab my opposite arm. Without pause I'd pivoted on my heel, freed the grip from my arm, and was preparing to push an arm out of socket when I realizing that just below the tuft of shirt I was now grabbing was a shiny yellow badge. I was holding the left arm and right shoulder of our school's very frightened police liaison.

Right then is when I passed out.