Gates of Eden: Starter Library Read online

  “What were you thinking?” the zookeeper interrupted. “How did you get down there?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him honestly. “One minute I was standing there, watching the bear. The next thing I knew, I was right there in front of him.”

  It was clear from his expression that he didn’t believe me. “A bear is not a cuddly pet. He could have killed you. You’re lucky we got there in time.”

  Before I could respond, two arms enveloped me from behind and freed me from the zookeeper’s grip. I met my adopted mother’s tear-filled gaze. “Thank the Lord you’re okay! Don’t you ever do that to me again, young man. Never again…”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but we need to question the boy further. It shouldn’t take long,” the zookeeper said as he assumed a less imposing posture.

  “You will do no such thing,” she said. “He has been through enough…”

  “Lois, it’s okay,” I said. To their chagrin, I’d always called my adopted parents by their first names.

  “My apologies, ma’am, but we need to make sure that the boy understands the gravity of the situation. We can’t have children wandering into exhibits like this…”

  “Do you mean to suggest,” Lois interrupted, “that he did this on purpose? I know my boy, he must have slipped and fell. He did not just wander in there.”

  The man looked at me for confirmation.

  “Yes, sir. I’m very sorry. I must have been leaning too far over the rail and fell in and bumped my head. Honestly, I blacked out. I don’t remember what happened.” While it was a half-truth, it was no lie. I couldn’t explain what had happened, not completely.

  The zookeeper reluctantly accepted the explanation, but insisted on escorting us out of the zoo.

  Lois took a knee on the sidewalk and gripped me by each shoulder as the zookeeper left our company. “Please tell me, Elijah, that this was just an accident. I know you’ve been through a lot, but suicide…”

  “Lois,” I insisted, “it’s the truth. I didn’t go in there on purpose.”

  “Well,” she continued, wiping the last of her tears from her eyes, “I’m glad I volunteered as a chaperone. I’ll need to have words with your teachers. We never should have left you unattended by the exhibit.”

  I wanted to protest. This was not her fault. It wasn’t the teacher’s fault, either. It wasn’t even my fault. Still, I couldn’t help but feel pangs of guilt twist away at my stomach. The Harleys were good to me, and I knew that this sort of behavior was driving them both—Lois, especially—absolutely nutty.

  No one had seen how I ended up in the cage, and I couldn’t tell Lois, either. What had happened, she wouldn’t believe. Telling her about the strange figure, the swirling lights… she wouldn’t believe any of it. It would only become a pretense for mandatory psychotherapy—and I’d had enough of that already. So, I stuck by my story: I must have slipped and fallen in. I probably hit my head; that’s why I blacked out and couldn’t remember the fall.

  The incident made national news. For weeks, I was something of a celebrity at school. My classmates either revered me for the incident, honoring my daredevil bravery, or mocked me as an attention-starved moron. Some of my friends started calling me “bear boy,” which eventually got shortened to “Bear.” I wasn’t sure if they meant to honor me or make fun of me. Probably some of both. I didn’t care.

  I returned to the zoo a dozen times after that, but never saw the bear. Apparently he was relocated to another facility. I hoped I’d find the strange girl who had touched my arm. Something did awaken in me that day. After that, animals of all kinds were drawn to me. I could sense their thoughts, and they seemed to sense mine. Aside from a couple close friends, only my sister’s cat, Indie—who had miraculously survived the fire—really understood my pain. A part of me began to believe that the whole episode at the zoo had been an accident. I tried to convince myself that the figure who had touched my arm must have been a figment of my imagination. For years, it worked. I made my way through high school, doing my best to fit in. I was a better-than-average student, and that seemed to assuage most of my adoptive parents’ worries. Still, I couldn’t completely get the image of that darkened figure, and the sound of her oddly familiar voice, out of my mind.

  2. Senioritis

  FAST FORWARD FOUR years. I was halfway through my senior year and everyone was hassling me about picking a college. Lois was constantly on my back. Keep those grades up, she’d tell me, so I could get into the best schools. Blah. I suppose she was right, but I just couldn’t work up the focus to study anymore. Thus, I found myself totally ill-prepared for my midterms.

  The first page of my exam stared back at me with nothing but my name scribbled sloppily in the upper right-hand corner.

  Elijah Wadsworth.

  Only the “E” and the “W” in my signature were decipherable by the untrained eye. Thankfully, my teacher, Ms. McDowell, was proficient at deciphering my scrawls.

  Not only was this the third time I had taken one of her classes in as many years, but she had also been my “personal tutor.” Placing her title in quotations made it seem somehow official. After four years, I suppose, it might as well have been.

  My adoptive parents hired her because, apparently, I was acting too “reckless”—like in the incident at the zoo—and wasting a lot of “untapped potential.”

  What is “untapped potential,” anyway? I mean, everything has potential. Newton said that, I think. The cafeteria food I had for lunch today had the “untapped potential” to end up a pile of barf on the classroom floor. Saying I had “untapped potential” was just a nice way of saying I was a disappointment.

  I hated hearing that. Of course I had “potential.” It isn’t too hard to figure out why a boy who’s lost both of his parents and twin sister in a house fire might lack inspiration. And they had the nerve to talk about my “untapped potential?” Yeah, the propane tank in our garage had “untapped potential,” too. That’s how the fire marshal explained it, anyway.

  When it happened, I was at the Harleys’ house playing video games with my friend. We were racing to the new level-cap for the latest World of Warcraft expansion. Now my friend (and guildmate), Tyler Harley, was my adoptive brother.

  I stared again at my illegible signature.

  I hated exams.

  Tyler was sitting beside me. He held his number-two pencil in a death grip as he furiously answered question after question.

  Don’t ever tell him I said this, but Tyler was way smarter than me. And everyone else in our senior class. It wasn’t that I was dumb—I was actually an A or B student most of the time. But Tyler was in a league of his own.

  And I should have studied.

  I feigned an itch over my right shoulder, attempting to get a glance at his answers. Hey, I’m a good person (usually), but I’m no saint. Tyler had his left hand on edge, cupped perfectly to deflect my view.

  I rolled my eyes.

  Then I almost burst out laughing.

  He was in the zone. I wasn’t sure what to call Tyler’s zone. He did the same thing playing Call of Duty or any other shoot-em-up game. He looked focused, but demon-possessed at the same time. His brow was furrowed, his eyes squinted. He randomly and repeatedly licked his lips for no meaningful reason at all.

  He was answering the questions faster than I could read them. His shaggy red mop nearly covered his eyes as he accumulated trace amounts of sweat around his ears. His freckled cheeks were drawn in as he squinted to focus. His pointy nose quickly darted from left to right and back again, as if his elongated snotlocker were directing his eyes where to go.

  Tyler was a good six feet tall—three inches taller than me. Sitting down, though, we were nearly the same height due to his abnormally stilted and my dwarfish legs. Tyler also had a cheetah’s metabolism. The guy could down pizza and Twinkies like it’s nobody’s business… sometimes at the same time. But he couldn’t seem to accumulate an ounce of fat—or muscle, for that matter—on his bones.
I loved the guy, but he was damned quirky.

  And a prat. Wouldn’t even let his dearly adopted brother steal a few answers. Test-taking integrity is not dead, folks. Not so long as Tyler Harley remains in school.

  The faint scratchy sound of more than two dozen pencils on paper assaulted my ears. Dammit, I should have studied.

  I didn’t have much of an excuse; I was suffering from a serious case of senioritis. Plus, I had to join my guild on a raid the night before. Yes, I know… I’d been playing that dumb game for more than six years. The addictive properties of World of Warcraft rival heroin. No joke. Guild raids were serious business. Miss one, and I’d be likely to get a barrage of arcane missiles up my orcish ass the next time I logged in.

  I guess addictively playing WoW secured my place in the immortal realm of cyber geekdom. At the same time, it had the debilitating side effect of leaving me ill-prepared for things that supposedly mattered. Like this exam!

  AP Anatomy.

  I’d never really been a science person. I did well enough. Well enough to get into the AP class, anyway. Science was Tyler’s forte. I was more of a history buff. History and philosophy. English and literature. These things intrigued me. Math and science, though? I could hold my own, but I just wasn’t wired for it. It didn’t turn me on.

  Focus, Elijah. Focus!

  I forced my attention upon the first question.

  1. Gluteus maximus is responsible for which of the following movements?

  A. Hip flexion

  B. Hip abduction

  C. Knee flexion

  D. Knee extension

  My father used to say that some wonders of deity are better adored than investigated. I didn’t know about God, per se, but that was precisely my attitude regarding gluteus maximus.

  More specifically, the female version of Gluteus Maximus. Emilie Royce’s gluteus maximus…

  To be adored…

  I couldn’t help but break my attention and stare as Emilie got up, two seats in front of me, to sharpen her pencil. Emilie wasn’t the prom queen, cheerleader type. She wasn’t the sort the quarterback would choose as arm candy. Not every guy noticed her.

  But I did.

  Her auburn hair fell just below her shoulders. She casually crossed one leg behind the other as she began cranking the pencil sharpener. The pose accentuated her… gluteus maximus nicely. Hey, I was an almost-18-year-old, hormone-infested dude. Cut me some slack.

  You know you’ve got it bad for someone when you’re admiring her pencil-sharpening skills.

  She removed the pencil, pivoting to the side to blow the excess shavings away. What a tease. She pivoted a second time to return to her seat.

  Emilie’s hazel eyes and button nose suited her round face well. She lost her braces about a year ago. Her new smile, framed by dimples on either cheek, perfectly completed her adorable face.

  Whenever she flashed that smile my way, it had a calming effect. That smile meant, to me, that no matter how awful the world might seem, everything—at least, here and now—would be okay.

  I’d been crushing on Emilie going on three years now. In some ways, I felt like she reciprocated my feelings. So why not go for it?

  Well, I’d known Emilie as long as I could remember. Our mothers used to get together so we could have “play dates” back while we were still in diapers. We were best friends. I think we both wanted it to be more, and a few times we’d come close. We even went to prom together two years in a row. But we were both too afraid of ruining what we had. We never had that conversation, exactly, but it was understood. Besides, with graduation only a few weeks away, the future was too uncertain to start anything. Our time had passed. Alas… that didn’t mean I’d given up hope, though.

  Emilie scrunched her nose and shot me a grin before sitting down, as if to express our shared angst over the exam we were in the middle of taking. She settled back into her chair and resumed the exam. She also was involved in the previous night’s “raid.” Her blood elf priest played an essential role in our victory. That said, unlike me, she had studied before the raid. If sharpening her pencil served as evidence at all, she had clearly moved beyond the first question by now.

  Focus, Elijah. Focus!

  Gluteus Maximus! The muscle, not Emilie’s!

  What was Ms. McDowell thinking when she wrote this question?

  No sooner did I have that thought than a voice startled my attention back to reality. I could swear it was Ms. McDowell’s voice. It took me off guard. What did she say? I couldn’t make any sense of the first few faint words I thought I’d heard. I faked a stretch and looked her way. Her eyes were fixed on a stack of papers in front of her. Some poor student’s exam was suffering the vigorous assault of her red pen of death. She hadn’t said anything. Still, I could swear it was her voice…

  After years of tutoring and several of her classes, there was no mistaking her voice. The voice I’d heard was familiarly hers, but it sounded different. It was distant yet close at the same time, like when you can hear someone else talking in the background over the telephone…

  Eenie, meenie, miney moe… Oh, whatever. Make it B—hip abduction…

  A tingle settled upon my brow as Ms. McDowell’s voice resonated again, somewhere deep in my mind. As I heard the words, my eyes were drawn back to my exam by a bright-orange glow that invaded my periphery. The words hip abduction were literally glowing; moments later, they faded back to black.

  What the…?

  I looked up at Ms. McDowell, this time without the feigned attempt to hide my wandering eyes with a false stretch. She remained intently focused, probably doing another Pontius Pilate job on a poor, unsuspecting student’s test. Her gray, tightly curled permed hair was all that met my glance. Her reading glasses rested low, toward the tip of her nose. Ms. McDowell has looked the same as long as I’d known her. She had that sort of old-lady look that, once it set in, was bound to remain.

  She was busy. She didn’t acknowledge my attention for several moments. Then she tilted her head upward, eyes peering beyond the tops of her bifocals and fixed directly my way. “Is there a problem, Mr. Wadsworth?”

  “No ma’am,” I said. “I thought I heard you say something.”

  “Hmm—” She flashed me a look of skepticism and returned to her stack of tests.

  What in the world was happening? I knew I’d heard her voice—Ms. McDowell’s voice. It was as if I was overhearing her own, personal inner dialogue as she was writing the test! I knew what I saw. The letter of the answer, assuming B was the correct one, glowed!

  Was I hallucinating? It was certainly possible. My study was not all that was sacrificed on the altar of last night’s raid. I’d barely slept.

  Perhaps it was my own subconscious drawing upon information from a previous lecture, or maybe the textbook. I’d heard that the human brain stores, somewhere, everything one has ever seen or heard. It’s just that most of us, under normal circumstances, can’t access it.

  I marked B on the answer sheet and progressed to the next question.

  2. What part of the brain is responsible for the processing of visual information?

  A…

  You have got to be kidding me! Ironic much? I scanned the options, narrowing it down to either A (the temporal lobe) or B (the occipital lobe). I knew it wasn’t C (the brain stem), and D was “none of the above.” Ms. McDowell never made “none of the above” the correct answer.

  Hmm, I thought, what was she thinking?

  They’ll never expect the same choice twice in a row, her familiar-but-faded voice quickly retorted. Again, an orange glow settled upon the answer B.

  What the hell!

  I marked B, recognizing somehow that my occipital lobe was involved in the hallucination… if that’s what it was. What else could it be? I was either going crazy… or… I was going freaking crazy!

  Question three. Same thing happened.

  I laughed out loud. The whole class turned and looked. Ms. McDowell shot daggers from her
eyes with such force they would have shattered her bifocals had she not lowered them sufficiently.

  “Sorry…” I mumbled sheepishly.

  Emilie looked back, muffling a giggle behind her purple-painted nails.

  Tyler just shook his head.

  I finished the whole flippin’ test that way. Every question was answered by an orange glow. Every question was accompanied by Ms. McDowell’s test-writing narration. I was more than a little weirded out, but figured those answers were at least as good as any guesses I could make.

  I took my test up front, setting it on top of Tyler’s. Of course, he’d finished first. I casually strolled back toward my seat.

  As I made my way to my seat, my mind was racing…

  A hallucination?

  No, several hallucinations…

  But how…

  Maybe a brain tumor.

  Hell, I hope not… Dammit. What if it is?

  I don’t want to die!

  I have a brain tumor, or I’m bat-shit crazy…

  I don’t want to die!

  THUD!

  Emilie stumbled after I collided into her, thwarting her attempt to turn in her own exam. I caught her and steadied her on her feet. Our eyes met, only inches apart.

  “Oh my God!”

  “Oh… I’m sorry. Excuse me, Ems.”

  “No, it’s not that. Elijah… Bear… Your eyes…”

  I shrugged.

  “Elijah, they’re orange!”

  A tingle settled across my brow.

  And I collapsed…

  …I’D ALWAYS HOPED that if I were ever in need of CPR, a hot lifeguard would be somewhere nearby. I opened my eyes and saw two old ladies.

  Damn my luck.

  Fortunately, I hadn’t needed CPR.