Chapter Four

I spent the rest of the afternoon in my own room. Charles had tried to convince me to stay, but I couldn't bring myself to it; I was too distracted and disheartened. So, abandoning the promise of an awesome new video game, I made my way home. My steps were slow and indeliberate; it felt more like I was wandering in some vague direction than following a familiar route. And in a way, I believed that was accurate. I was wandering through a world that now held places I couldn't reach. How could I really know where I was going when I didn't know where everywhere was? With every ninth or tenth step, I would make another attempt at stepping into the other dimension, but it didn't happen. I arrived home, went to the same room I'd lived in my whole life, and felt more lost than I ever had.



Walking to school the next day, Charles and I didn't say much. He tried to ask if I thought anyone else had been able to do it, but I just mumbled that I didn't know and kicked halfheartedly at any rocks in our path. He got the hint, and he was a nice enough guy to not point out that I was pouting. Realizing this, I tried to change the subject, asked how his new video game was playing out.

"Oh. It's cool," he said distractedly. "I, um, I actually didn't play it very much last night."

I had a feeling this meant he had spent most of last night traveling between dimensions, but I didn't ask.

When we got to school, we soon learned I wasn't the only one who hadn't yet picked up the skill. As it turned out, Charles was the only other person who had learned how to do it. "See?" he proclaimed, "I told you it wouldn't just be you." It did make me feel a little better.

"Okay," I said to him, "so go show them." I took a step towards a large crowd which had gathered around Lannie Sanders, but Charles grabbed my arm.

"No. Not yet."

I looked back at him, dismayed. "Why not?"

Staring past me at the crowd of our classmates, he responded with half a shrug. "I just don't want to do it yet. Let's just go to class." He started walking down the hall in the opposite direction. I looked back at the crowd and at Lannie, who had just disappeared again, then started jogging towards Charles.

We reached our lockers which, this year, were both on the top row of the same wall. Just two locker spaces separated ours, and we were constantly amazed that we'd gotten spots so close together and simultaneously annoyed that no one had wanted to trade so that we could be right next to each other. When we started asking, the girl to my left, whose name I could never remember, had already unpacked all her belongings and claimed that she had gotten the space organized just the way she liked it before turning back and rearranging everything for another five minutes. Meghan Flanner cast me a nervous look and told me she didn't think we were allowed to trade, which effectively convinced most of the surrounding residents to say the same. And Dirk Jimson was pretty much an ass and refused to trade just to keep everyone at a suitable level of misery.

That morning, only Daniel Smith was there, retrieving his books from one of the bottom-row lockers between us. He was a chubby, little lump of a kid with fluffy brown hair and big eyes. Crouching there, he looked almost like someone had managed to grow a hamster to human-size and gave it a backpack.

Reaching into my locker for that day's books, I looked over at Charles. "What's wrong with you, man? This is our chance."

"I told you. I just don't feel like it right now."

"You think you won't be able to do it?"

"No," he shot back, more sharply than I'd anticipated, "that's not a problem. I know I can do it. You saw me do it."

"I just thought that maybe with more people watching, you'd get ... I don't know, nervous."

"I just don't want to do it, okay? Can we just drop it?"

"Fine," I said, disappointed. I looked down to see Daniel staring up at me, his mouth open. "What?" I demanded.

"Nothing," he mumbled, zipping up his backpack and scurrying off.

Charles sighed. "Come on, don't be a jerk," he said. He shut his locker and started walking to his classroom. Snatching up the only pencil I saw, eraser-less and broken in half, I slammed my locker door and chased after him.

"What are you talking about?" I asked.

"Daniel didn't do anything to you," Charles said wearily.

"Fine. You're right. I'll apologize later," I agreed, pausing only slightly before continuing, "I just don't see why you wouldn't want to show everyone."

"I thought we agreed we were dropping this." He walked through the door of his homeroom class, leaving me standing alone in the hallway.

But I didn't drop it; couldn't. Every bell that rang signaled the start of another round of one-man peer pressure, demanding, questioning, pleading. By the end of the day, I had even started to annoy myself.



There are times in your life you can look back on and realize you'd been pointing a gun at your foot the whole time and trying your hardest to pull the trigger. I wonder a lot about how things might have gone if I hadn't pushed so hard to make Charles perform his trick, wonder what I thought was in it for me. But I tried and tried to pull that trigger, and finally, Charles let me.