Unusual Events: A Short Story Collection Read online

  “No, I swear! Chemistry in the garage, cooking in the kitchen!” The words came out of his mouth almost without him needing to think about them. His mom’s rules for their new home had been very specific—for both him and his father.

  “Well, if you’re sure—”

  “I am!” he said quickly. “No cooking or chemistry. I don’t know how it got there.”

  “All right,” she said, her voice softening. “Well, if you do figure out what caused it, don’t do it again, all right?” His desk shook as she thumped her hip against it. “This wasn’t cheap, you know.”

  “I know,” he said, staring down at the small mark on the desk. How had he not noticed it before?

  “Okay, well, see if you can finish up your homework before dinner. I think your dad wanted to take us all out to a movie tonight, and we’re having lasagna. If you feel ill again, let me know.” For a moment the corner of her mouth turned downward, worry in her eyes as she regarded him. “In fact, I might just call and see if Doctor Diallo can meet with you tomorrow, rather than waiting to speak with him on Sunday.”

  “Mom …”

  “No, no,” she said, shaking her head. “If it’s happening more and more often, then better to get you checked now rather than in a few days, right? Get your homework taken care of, and let me know if you start feeling anything again, okay?”

  “All right.”

  “Good,” she said, smiling before leaning forward to give him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Love you.”

  “Love you too, Mom,” he said as she walked out of the room. Then he looked back down at his desk. The dark mark on the wood stared up at him.

  Weird, he thought as he shook his head. Maybe I spilled something? A drink wouldn’t have left a scorch mark in the wood, though. How long has that been there?

  He slid back into his seat, eyes already fixed on his homework, and then he paused. His hand, which he’d braced himself against the desk with as he’d sat down, was right atop the mark his mother had noticed. For a moment he froze, and then he shook his head.

  Well, at least I know why I never noticed it, he thought as he picked up his pen. Maybe it’s from something on my hand?

  A minute later he was lost in his assignments, the burn mark completely forgotten.

  * * *

  “And this hasn’t been tied to anything you’ve been eating? Anything regular that you’ve noticed?” Doctor Diallo asked.

  Mark tried not to wince as the doctor pressed something cool and papery into his ear. “No,” he said. “Nothing.”

  “No foods that you eat regularly?”

  “No,” he said.

  “All right.” The cool feeling in his ear vanished as Doctor Diallo walked around to the other side of the table. “Well, what about your regular life?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well …” The cool feeling pressed itself into his other ear. “I have to be honest, Mark. You seem to be perfectly healthy. I mean, aside from a little extra weight. But unless we get something back from the labs, I’d have to say that in my diagnosis, you seem perfectly fine.”

  “What about the shakes, and the nausea, and the sweating?” he asked.

  “Well, those might be caused by something that the lab will pick up when they run your blood work,” Doctor Diallo said as he pulled away. “But I have to say that if it is something like that, I can’t see it.” There was a loud snap as he pulled one of his gloves off. “But I’m curious, Mark. How’s school?”

  “Same as always,” he said, shrugging. “No different.”

  “I see. Kids still picking on you?”

  He shrugged. “Of course. I still go to church, and I’m still new.”

  “Uh-huh.” Diallo nodded. “And how do you feel about that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well …” The doctor shook his head. “Do you enjoy being the brunt of everyone’s abuse like that?”

  “Are you kidding?” he asked, pulling his head back. “Of course not! It sucks! Everyone hates me just because I’m someone they can hate, because I won’t drink or do drugs with them, or because I go to church and believe in God.”

  “I see,” Diallo said, nodding. “So it’s not fun.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Well, what do you think?”

  Diallo nodded once more, apparently unconcerned with the shift in tone that was in Mark’s voice. Then he stepped towards the table, turning and leaning up against it beside Mark.

  “Look, Mark,” he said, bracing both his hands against the table and looking down at the floor. “We can do the blood work. And we can put you through a lot of tests. But you know what I think?” He looked back up.

  “What?”

  “I think we’re not going to find anything wrong,” he said. He shook his head, his curly salt-and-pepper hair merging into a grey blur. “Not a thing. I don’t think your body is sick. At least,” he added quickly, “not from any disease.”

  “So what then?” Mark asked, lifting one eyebrow. “I’m going crazy?”

  “No, that’s not it at all,” Doctor Diallo said with another shake of his head. “What I think you might find is that your body isn’t sick, your mind is. Of being abused. In other words,” he said, his head bobbing from side to side. “You’re stressed.”

  “Yeah, well, who isn’t?” Mark said as he looked back towards the wall.

  “Well, everyone is,” came Diallo’s reply. “But the thing is, Mark, is that sometimes even though we don’t want to admit it, that stress starts to get to us. And it piles up and up until our body can’t take it anymore.”

  “So I’m going crazy?”

  “No,” Diallo said with yet another shake. “You’re just getting tired of all that stress. All those kids mocking you because you’re different, because you believe in something none of them have any interest in wanting to believe in, or don’t want to do a lot of the same things they want to do? You’re tired of it. Combine that with all the pressures of school and home, the fact that you really don’t have any friends to hang out with except online—” He nodded as Mark lifted an eyebrow. “I do pay attention when I see you in church, you know. Lord knows we’re a small group, and you’re the only kid even close to your age. It’s not exactly hard to tell you’ve got it rough here.”

  “So … what then? I need a break?”

  Diallo nodded and folded his arms. “You probably do. You keep pushing yourself, letting all this stress pile up, and it’ll just build and build until it reaches the point where your body can’t take anymore—a flash-point, so to speak—and then it’ll all boil over.”

  “And then I go crazy?” Mark asked.

  “No,” Diallo said with a chuckle. “You’ll just probably get very sick. Maybe lose a little hair. Which is why you need to catch it now. If you’re anything like your dad, you’ll want to keep as much of that as you can.”

  “Oh.” Mark slid down from the table as Diallo motioned for him to get up. “So I need a break.”

  “That’s my guess, yes,” Doctor Diallo said. “Some time to relax, think about things for yourself. I’ll have to wait until we get the blood work back, but … that’s my diagnosis. The problem is, even if we give you some time off, a lot of those stressors will come rushing back the moment you set foot in that school, won’t they?”

  He nodded. “Yeah.” None of them would stop anytime soon.

  “So then you’ll need to find an outlet. Something to let that steam, so to speak, evaporate before it gets to be too much. A new hobby maybe. Something to help you air your mind.”

  I wouldn’t need that if the school had a soccer team, Mark thought. But there was no point in stating the obvious. “And the bullying?”

  “I can’t do anything about that,” Diallo said, shaking his head. “Unfortunately, that’s the way things are. A lot of people like to find something to hate and dig into it, tear it down. Doesn’t matter what it is, if it’s skin color—” he tapped his own cheek with a chuckle. “—or so
meone’s personal belief in the divine. They just want something to put themselves over. You’re just going to have to learn, earlier than most, to turn the other cheek.”

  “And if I can’t?”

  “Well … then you run the risk of becoming the very thing that’s causing you so much trouble. There’s a time and a place to fight back. Part of life is realizing what is standing for yourself is, when it’s right to do so, and what the difference is between that and letting someone push you around. But that’s a little out of the scope of what I’m seeing here, I think,” he said with a laugh. “For now, just focus on taking a break, all right? I’ll talk to your mom about it, and we’ll see how you feel on Sunday.”

  “Unless the blood work says something.”

  Doctor Diallo nodded. “Exactly. Now come on, let’s go talk with your mom. She may not look like it, but she’s worried, just like every mom always is in here.”

  * * *

  “So …”

  Mark looked over at his mom. “So?” he parroted back.

  “Tomorrow’s Friday,” she said, pulling her eyes away from the road for a moment to give him a quick smile. “Doctor Diallo said you should take some time off. He also said he’d write the note for you. You could just do your classwork at home, take a three-day weekend. More if you need it.”

  He nodded but didn’t say anything, instead turning to look back out the window. Pine trees were sweeping past on either side of the car, tall and thick with green.

  “Maybe your dad could take the day off from work,” his mother suggested. “You two could go do something together, hmm?”

  He stayed silent, watching the trees roll past. They’re so different from back home, he thought, watching as the needle-bound branches shifted with the cars passing. Back where they’d lived before, trees had been far and few between, rather than houses. Why’d we have to move—?

  He caught the thought before it could finish. No point in dwelling on questions he already knew the answers to. Work. His dad’s job. It was either go, go all the way to Montana and do what the company said, or find a new job and lose all the benefits he’d earned over the years.

  He couldn’t blame his dad. It had been a hard choice, and then barely a choice at all once everything had been weighted. And there hadn’t been any way for his dad to know what the town they’d been moving to was going to be like.

  No, he couldn’t blame his dad. He almost had, but it hadn’t felt right. Sometimes life was just rough.

  “Mark?”

  His mother’s voice pulled him back from his thoughts, and he turned to see her staring at him with a concerned look on her face, her eyes flipping every half second to the road ahead.

  “Sorry, Mom,” he said, shaking his head. “I was just thinking.”

  She nodded. “You want to talk about it?”

  “No, not really.” There wasn’t much to say. They’d spoken about it before. “Just thinking about the move.”

  “I guessed as much,” she said, one corner of her mouth turning downward. “I know it’s been hard on you, Mark. More than any of us. Your dad and I, we at least have friends our age at church, and people in town will still talk to us. You, on the other hand—”

  “I know, Mom,” he said.

  “I know you know,” she said, her words coming out fast and hard. Then her tone softened. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just kind of … Well, Doctor Diallo telling me that you might be having stress problems … It wasn’t exactly a surprise.”

  He perked up, head jerking back. “What?”

  “Not what I meant,” she said, letting out a sigh. “I mean … This has been harder on you than on your father and I, so when he said that it might be stress, it made sense, you know?”

  “Oh,” he said, letting out a nervous chuckle. “Okay, that makes sense.”

  She smiled. “Yeah, it does. And for what it’s worth, I’m really proud of the way you’ve held up.”

  “Thanks, Mom.” The sense of unease in his stomach unclenched a little.

  “But if you want to take Friday off—”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “I might as well go.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Like Doctor Diallo said: Just skipping out on things and relaxing won’t solve the problem—if that’s what it even is. How long—?”

  “We’ll know tomorrow.”

  “Right.” He could see their driveway up ahead, flanked on both sides by wooden fencing that had long since been overshadowed by trees. The next driveway after that was at least a quarter of a mile down the road. Maybe further.

  “So yeah, I might as well go, and then try to relax this weekend,” he said as the car began to slow. “Maybe go down to the field and practice dribbling, shoot some goals. Get my mind off of things.”

  “That sounds like a good idea.” Gravel crunched beneath the tires, the sound echoing through the car as they pulled off of the road. “What about Monday?”

  He gave her a shrug. “We can see how I feel Sunday night. You know, depending on what those tests say.”

  “You’re sure?” his mother asked as they pulled to a stop in front of … well, it was home, wasn’t it?

  “Yeah,” he said as he opened the door. “It’s just one day. What can it hurt?”

  * * *

  Ow, he thought as he pushed himself up off of the gym floor. One hand came up, wiping at his nose and checking for blood. That hurt.

  “Kransky!” the coach shouted, his voice echoing through the gym. “Get off your knees and back in the game!”

  “Yeah,” someone shouted, their voice jeering. “Quit your praying and get up, wuss!”

  He gave his head a quick shake. Things still felt a little fuzzy, but his nose wasn’t bleeding. He pushed himself back up, ignoring more shouts from the rest of the students as he put himself back into play with the rest of the team.

  And here I thought volleyball would be safe, he thought as the other server wound up to send the ball towards his team’s side. I guess not.

  That last spike had been brutal. Nasty. Fast. And targeted. If the look on some of his classmate’s faces hadn’t clued him in on exactly how targeted the strike had been, their laughter after the ball had slammed into his face certainly had.

  He stared through the net at the still-grinning student who’d nailed him. His name was Adam, but most people just called him A.D. He’d been the one that had helpfully informed Mark the day they’d met that in Mark’s case, A.D. really meant “after death.” Mark’s death, to be precise.

  “Service!” With a soft slap, the volleyball flew into the air, arcing up and over the net and coming down near the back of the court. One of his own team members hit it back, volleying the ball back over the net, and within moments the other team was back at setting themselves up for another spike.

  Thankfully, one of them flubbed their hit, the ball flying back over the net, his own team taking control. Two of the players lobbied the ball back and forth between them before volleying it back again.

  Too bad we can’t play soccer, Mark thought as the other team batted it back. At least then I’d have a chance of doing halfway decent without the entire other team and half of my own gunning for me. The volleyball sailed back over the net, almost skimming itself against the rope. There was a loud slap as someone in the back of the other team knocked it into the air. High into the air.

  Here it comes, he thought as he saw A.D. give him a quick grin. Another member of A.D.’s team was already moving to set. It’s going to come hard and fast. If it were soccer … well, why not act like it is?

  The ball was in the air now, and as he watched, A.D. leaped, his hand coming around in an open slap that sent the ball rocketing straight down at Mark.

  But he was already moving—back, rather than forward. There was a collective half-shout as the ball shot down towards the gym floor, past where his face would have been, followed by a hefty thunk as his foot came between the ball a
nd the floor, neatly intersecting it just before it hit.

  It was sloppy. Out of practice even, by his standards. But the light kick sent the volleyball back over the net, past the stunned A.D. and the rest of his team. Half of them weren’t even paying attention, already celebrating what they’d thought had been another point—right up until the moment the ball bounced off of their side of the court.

  “Point,” Mark said, grinning at A.D. as both teams erupted in shouting. A.D. glared at him. “Our serve.”

  There was a sharp, sudden whistle that split the gym, both sides quieting.

  “Kransky!” Coach Hunt shouted. “Get off the court. I don’t tolerate cheaters.”

  “What?” The question was out of his lips before he could stop it as he turned towards the coach.

  “Don’t ‘What?’ me,” Hunt said. “You cheated.”

  “I didn’t cheat! Kicking the ball is legal in volleyball!” But it was too late; the cry had been picked up by the rest of the students. Shouts of “Cheat!” were already starting to echo across the gym.

  “And now you’re being a smart-ass,” Coach Hunt said, his face darkening. “Talking back and trying to defend yourself. Don’t they teach you manners at that church of yours?”

  Mark could feel his hands clenched tightly by his side. He wasn’t sure when that had happened. He took a step towards the edge of the court—

  The volleyball slammed into the back of his head, just hard enough to kick his body forward. Laughter broke out among the rest of the class, the faint cries of “Cheat!” still echoing behind it as he turned.

  “Get yourself to the lockers, Kransky,” Coach Hunt shouted. Mark turned just in time to see the coach jerking his thumb in the direction of the doors. “After you do ten laps for your sass. Clear?”

  He tightened his grip as the coach looked at him. Kicking it is a completely … He took a deep breath. “Yeah, fine,” he said, nodding and letting the breath out.

  “Add another five laps for talking back just now!” The shout echoed after Mark as he ran off to the side of the court and began looping around the edge of the gym. He grimaced as he realized what the coach had said, but kept his mouth shut.