The Acolytes of Crane

6 THEODORE: WEIRD SCIENCE





“Open request! Prisoner eight-six-seven-five. Guns are hot, requesting permission to deliver the warden’s message—over,” the guard says.

The guard has the speaker on his communicator up loud enough for me to hear the response: “Permission granted—over.”

“Prisoner! Assume the static position!”

I hear my vault opening. It sounds hydraulic and in need of maintenance.

“Prisoner, the warden wishes for me to relay this message—”

The veteran guard from a day ago shouts, “Get on with it rookie. I am tired of holding my gun on this prisoner!”

“The message from the warden is as follows: prisoner, your efforts have been highly commended. If you continue to provide us with the information we need, at some point we might be able to discuss a transfer. Message end.”

The rookie’s feet tap the ground quickly, as he hurries out of the cell.

The veteran guard requests for the closure of my vault, and it closes.

Finally, I thought they would never leave. Transfer, yeah right! They are gone, and I cannot wait to hold a session with my tablet. I enjoy talking about Lincoln, so I start: “Later in the morning, after I met the paperboy, I woke up to the smell of oatmeal and honey. The aroma was intoxicating, and beams of sun cut shadows across my room; the sunrise invigorated me.”

I needed the cheering up because I had started developing an achy back, and my overall fatigue was worsening over time. I told my grandparents about the problem a couple of days previously, and they were looking into it.

My grandma whispered to herself, ‘I think I hear a little monkey stirring.’ She always thought of me as that little boy; one who used to pop over to visit with his parents. That little boy who would play happily for hours in their sandbox, out by the azalea garden, with that awesome toy bulldozer that was a prized hand-me-down from grandpa’s childhood.

I could hear grandma’s soft whisper thanks to my years of self-training to become a ninja, practicing the art of stealth. That skill enabled me to avoid my dad around the Red Brick apartment. The less noticeable I was, the more I dodged beatings.

My eyes widened as grandma walked in from the kitchen, winked at me, and handed me a plate with a forbidden item on it: a giant long-john donut. It was definitely a good start to the day.

There was a rapping upon the door. I approached the door with my long-john in hand and alien slippers on my feet. I saw, on the other side of the narrow vertical window panel adjoining the door, the palm of a teenager’s hand shaded with a familiar tone of ink.

It must be Lincoln.

I opened the door. He had his skateboard, and he was ready to shred. I had a plastic banana board that was, ironically, yellow. My board had these giant three-inch wheels that could take on graveled paths, and eat the stones for breakfast too. However, in reality, the only action these funky wheels had seen so far was upon tepid pavement.

‘Is it okay if you come over to my house?’ Lincoln asked.

Before I could answer, Marvin and Laverne stepped up behind me, curious. They then fired away questions at Lincoln out of surprise and curiosity: Who are your parents? Where do you live? Where are you going? My grandparents were extremely protective and old fashioned.

Lincoln wrote down his address, and my grandma reminded me of the appointment they made for me to see a doctor. She said she would pick me up at Lincoln’s house at around three. We diligently answered the rest of their questions, and when we were finished, we opened the door and sprinted down the street.

My grandparents yelled, but with the door closing behind us, the train had left the station.

Lincoln was shorter than I was, only by a few inches, but he was well beyond his years in knowledge and maturity.

He had dark brown hair and his eyes were equally deep in color; there was only a slight difference of hue between pupil and iris. He wore clothes that were stylish and trendy. My guess was that he came from some money.

He lived within an area of Ferndale that was developed post-pyromaniac-Jason, with some fine three-story single households. His hair was always moussed or pomaded into position, and his glasses were sleek and practical. I was envious.

Someday I would learn that Lincoln’s best quality was his ability to reason meticulously. I could always tell when he was deep into thought, because his lips moved with the speed that his thoughts were. It was simply an indication of his process. No matter what his thoughts—metaphysical, statistical, or theoretical—he was brilliant.

With Lincoln by my side, we were unstoppable.

On our way to Lincoln’s house, we were interrupted by Nick White. Nick was a weird one. I stayed over at his house a couple of years earlier. He drank an entire glass of water with a cup of sugar dissolved in it that night.

Anyway, he wanted us to go inside the store with him. Lincoln’s house was near Big-Mart, so there was no worry of deviating from the itinerary laid out by my grandparents.

When we arrived in the store, after a mile of walking in the scorching sun, Nick wanted to check out the baseball card section. He then said something that branded him as conniving and dishonest. He said that I could take as many cards as I wanted, if I stuffed them in my pants.

Drained by the betraying sun that had relentlessly stalked me during the last one mile, my judgment went out of the window. Glancing left and right quickly, I grabbed some cards. I had foolishly believed Nick. In my corrupted state, I felt invincible. I inched my way toward the bathroom with several of the newest trend in baseball cards stashed into my crotch, between my underwear and my pants. We shot paranoid looks everywhere in the store.


I even suspected a doll for having a hidden camera behind its ominous-looking eyes. Lincoln grabbed my shirt at the collar and scared me immensely.

‘Ted, there is a man from electronics looking at you. The sign there says, Thieves will be prosecuted, a p-word that sounds horrible, and it isn’t like you to steal, right?’ Lincoln asked.

I realized what I was going to do was wrong, but part of me wanted to savor the danger, so I proceeded under the sign.

My amulet was warming up, glowing brighter and brighter. Intensely looking at it as I walked, I realized that some incredible physical force was holding me back. It was weird! When I took a step, my upper foot slowed in mid stride. My composure started to crumble; my consciousness screamed at me to feel like ‘normal’ again. Whatever normal meant. It was as if I was moving in water and then mud. My body came to a complete stop. I was halted and frozen like a statue. It was like I was under control from an outside presence. Under the strain, which to me felt more mental than physical, I started to sweat; I felt like I would experience a panic attack.

Once my mind resolved to back off from the misdeed, my body suddenly became fluid again, almost causing me to lose my balance. I swiveled and turned away from the restroom, and my hand opened, dropping the baseball cards to the ground. The man in electronics shook his head at me and asked me if I was okay.

I regained full control over my body. Lincoln’s jaw practically hit the floor. He had witnessed the whole thing.

‘What was that, Ted?’ Lincoln asked.

‘I don’t know! Let’s get out of here! That Nick is nothing but trouble. I will tell you about it later,’ I said, as I boogied out of the mart with Lincoln at my side. We ditched Nick, but he deserved it.

Once out of the store we rendezvoused at the garbage cans behind the strip mall. Out of breath and frightened, I told Lincoln exactly what happened. It was difficult to explain the details of this incredibly weird sensation. To myself, it was as if I were made of quick-drying plaster of paris. That was what I wanted to tell him. But I couldn’t. Shaken, I merely said, ‘I felt a strong energy.’

‘Okay dude, you have been watching far too much TV,’ Lincoln said.

‘I don’t think I was in the presence of an alien or something like that. I think it was the Almighty,’ I said assertively.

There was a long silence and then we both burst into uncontrollable laughter. We put our hats on backward and boarded to Lincoln’s house. After hanging out with Lincoln, my grandparents picked me up for my appointment.

I knew that day as I drove away from Lincoln’s house that I had bonded with an incredible new pal, and I was excited about getting to know him more. Those heady feelings were mixed in with the bewilderment and confusion—which Lincoln had obviously shared with me—over what had happened in the store.

The next few weeks afterwards were scientific in nature, at Lincoln’s instigation. Lincoln was a gifted person, and his instinct was to trust in my testimony about the event. He believed that what happened was a phenomenal intervention.

He wanted ever so badly to uncover the phenomenon with experimentation. After bandying about and getting tired of calling the unknown energy as simply the power, Lincoln proposed a brilliant official term: The Intervention. I liked it.

We put a week of research and creative visualization into the foundation of our trials.

The initial trial was also to determine how far we could go before the unknown power intervened. It was his theory that The Intervention was caused by knowingly breaking the law, and not so much the actual act itself. Lincoln wanted me to, just for a moment, be evil in thought, to see whether the intervening power was aware of what I was currently thinking.

We were ready for trial one. After we had entered the mall, we strolled into a popular skateboarding shop. Lincoln said that he wanted me to stuff something big and blatantly noticeable under my jacket. It was decided by both of us that if the item from the rack was indeed too small, then Lincoln could fail to observe my deft move from rack to jacket.

I have to admit that all I could think about beforehand was the prospect of failure.

Lincoln and I proceeded with the skit despite the consequences.

‘Dude, you said that you would buy it for me,’ I yelped in an irritated tone, but it wasn’t loud enough to override the music in the background of the store. Lincoln motioned for me to take it up a notch with his thumb.

I yelled out once more, louder this time, so that everyone could hear me over an epic guitar solo that was playing through the speaker system. I felt the weight of all the eyes and ears in the room fixed on us.

My mouth was dry. My stomach was full of butterflies, and it was showtime. I initiated the shove, and Lincoln stumbled across the room, knocking over a skateboard rack. When everyone seemed to be looking at Lincoln, I stuck an entire pair of shoes under my jacket, and no one had a clue that I did it. I did it! The Intervention had passively stood by, despite the evil within my mind. The real test would come later—by stepping outside the boundary of the store, possessing stolen goods without paying—the true definition of shoplifting.

It happened so quickly that I became sick with nerves in reaction to what I did.

We wanted to rule out all unexplained variables. We agreed, that should I actually complete the abduction of the item while he looked on, he would have to remove the existence of ulterior motive in my mind by grabbing me and pushing me out of the store. Thus, the switch—Lincoln would take on the role of bad guy, and test himself too.

We didn’t want to fail. We were determined to discover what was causing The Intervention, so we needed draw it out. Lincoln was to take his time grabbing me and shoving me several yards away from the store perimeter, so that his ulterior motive in shoving me could draw in The Intervention long before I reached the exit.

‘Dude, I cannot believe you shoved me, dork . . . boy,’ Lincoln shouted as he clutched my shirt and escorted me out in an act of false rage. Again, nothing supernatural happened. The Intervention had ignored the evil in my mind, then it ignored Lincoln’s too. Our eyes locked in fascination as we simultaneously realized the truth, but we had a trial to finish. We were now going to finally show the risky part to the omnipresent force—the exit from the store with stolen goods.

I backpedaled achingly close to the exit from the store, the stolen goods still on me. Out of improvisation and quick thinking, Lincoln gave one final big shove, propelling himself forward in my direction. Losing my balance due to Lincoln’s onslaught, I set one foot right on the speckled marble floor of the foyer of the mall—the forbidden “no man’s land.” My other foot tenuously remained on the tiled floor of the skateboard store.

Then it happened.

Wham!

It was as if an invisible wall was placed before us. We plastered ourselves into it at full sprint. We both experienced the full feeling of The Intervention—a frontal body slam.

It felt just like the time my body smacked the plywood at the bottom end of a skateboard mini-ramp after executing a risky aerial ‘drop-in.’ Back then, I was executing my first ‘drop-in’ on a skateboard.

Luckily, Lincoln and I were not injured. Two concussed dorks, with stolen goods, would have been difficult to explain to any conservative parents. After the collision, everyone was looking at us. Lincoln turned toward the spectators and screeched.

He said, “We are working-on-our-drama-for-a-school-play.” He sounded like a chipmunk on a tape player if one held down play and fast-forward at the same time.


Everyone’s eyes flitted away from our backs. A couple of tattooed punks from behind the counter laughed and joked about us. Meanwhile, we returned the shoes to their rightful home. Lincoln and I left separately, and we met in the food court to hatch out any issues with the first test.

‘It is official. You are a freak,’ Lincoln said.

‘Okay. Dork . . . man. What in the world were you thinking with that, or was it dork-boy?’ I asked.

‘Dork-boy was the best I could do. Never mind that, we need to be careful. If we don’t respect The Intervention, we could,’ he paused to lower his voice, ‘we could get injured or worse…’ he paused yet again to scan the room and ensure no one was listening, ‘…killed.’

Right there, at the corner of a taco joint and a roast beef stand, it was our grand discovery that what we were dealing with was extremely powerful and real. The first trial was complete. The Intervention could not read minds. The Intervention could only stop us from doing something bad.

I recalled the baseball card incident of a week ago. Back then, I had attempted to exit the store with an intent to steal. This time, with the shoes, I was pushed out of the store by Lincoln, with no intent to steal. The outcome was exactly the same. The Intervention had intervened both times at the boundary between law and crime—the store exit.

Lincoln then issued what was to be known as Linc’s Commandments:

‘One, we can never, ever-ever-ever speak of this to anyone. You and I have been trusted by the power, and we have accepted it. Others will be terrified of this power, and harm us because they are afraid. Two, we can never make a joke of the power. We have to respect it. We felt the pain it dished out today, by being goofballs. We don’t want to put anyone in that pain unless we have a good reason. Three, we must never use the power for bad. We should only use it for good.’

He paused, with a solemn expression on his face. ‘We have to make a pact. If either one of us speaks of this to anyone, we risk great danger.’

‘And if you say anything, Lincoln, I will tell everyone about your crush on Samantha Xiong,’ I said after a few giggles.

‘Fine, I will tell them about your life-long crush on Mariah Espinosa,’ Lincoln sang out in a taunting voice.

We simultaneously agreed with a secret handshake, invented right there in the mall. We glanced over our shoulder: the rent-a-cops of the mall were staying behind a certain distance away, intently watching us.

Word had gotten around. Our disturbance back at the skateboard store made us a concern for mall staff. To shake them off, we shopped around like the rest of the mall zombies, and we bought some orange drinks. While we sat sipping on our drinks, Lincoln told me that if the security guards gave us a hard time, he would use Aikido on them.

Lincoln had an orange belt in Aikido. He told me that in Aikido, one was taught to return their enemy’s force against them. Ultimately, a person could manipulate the force of their enemy to advance his own position, or defeat them entirely.

“After we ditched the teen-monster-building mall guards, we darted to our next target. It was a sporting goods store.”

“Do you need something, prisoner?” the guard asks.

I wasn’t sure why he was asking me. Days would usually go by without interactions. Then I realize, I said, mall guards, when speaking to the tablet. He must have overheard what he thought to be “guard.”

“No, nothing sir,” I responded. After he grunted and walked off, I continued the account: “The second test was to find out whether or not The Intervention could control an object with accuracy. This would be so cool, as perhaps we could use The Intervention as a means of exercising great power at our command. The object needed to be set into motion by me, and I had to want to hurt someone with it...”

To ensure success, we practiced in my backyard with a football the day before. I would throw the football straight at Lincoln’s face. With his excellent reflexes, he would catch it just before it hit him. We weren’t ready to engage The Intervention just yet, thus Lincoln always held his hands up near his face, to signal to any omnipresent force that nothing would happen. The aim was to wear down my reluctance to throw that object straight at his face.

We spent a whole day practicing. My grandparents must have thought we were bonkers while watching me practically attempting to maim Lincoln with a football, and seeing Lincoln repeatedly dodge disaster with a wide grin on his face.

There were to be two parts for the new trial, in which Lincoln would not defend himself at all. For the first part, I was to be provoked into throwing the ball straight against Lincoln. If The Intervention allowed my toss to hit Lincoln squarely in the face, it would have meant that my actions were warranted. In part two, I would chuck at Lincoln for no reason at all, and see if The Intervention would halt the ball. If nothing happened both times, Lincoln would be badly wounded, and we would be at square one. That would really stink. What a brave guy.

We talked about The Intervention as if it was a beast. We found that the physical energy that we were toying with was not only intelligent, but was also much more powerful than any beast.

We entered the sports apparel store. It was lightly occupied with customers, which allowed us to have witnesses around. My stomach churned in this public environment. I felt this might be a bad idea, because I did not want to harm my best friend. As I was about to turn to Lincoln to suggest canceling our trial, he let loose the trigger statement:

‘You are a loser, just like your dad!’

Memories of my kid-beating dad flooded me, triggering vitriol throughout my veins. I grabbed a baseball and spun around with fury.

I was like a wild behemoth on the mound of a baseball diamond, ready to beam the batter for angering me at the plate. I blasted off the ball straight at the forehead of the mocking Lincoln, who kept his hands at his waist this time. I then recoiled at what I had done, covering my mouth. Shock finally registering within Lincoln, he grew bug-eyed and attempted to duck, but was too late to avoid the ball’s blazing path.

Then, the ball froze in mid-air.

Our eyes bulged and our jaws dropped.

The rapidly spinning ball was like a yo-yo that went to sleep and never came back. It sat rotating in front of Linc’s face for about a second-and-a-half, then fell to the checkered floor.

We both gaped at each other in awe.

Shaken and excited at the same time, I suddenly recalled I had to complete the second part of the trial. Quickly, I picked up another baseball, and fired it straight at Lincoln. This time, he merely stood, jaw wide open, transfixed by the spectacle of impending doom.

The second ball did something I would never forget. Just as it was about to rearrange Lincoln’s nose, it hovered. There was a localized burst of light enveloping the ball, and then it vanished.

An elderly lady, attired in a floral-themed blouse and beige pants, clucked at us, and shakily walked ahead, muttering to herself as she did so.

“That ball just went gone!” a child’s voice rang out behind us. We turned.

A little girl, about six years old, tugged at the pants of her father, a middle-aged spectacled man who appeared to be a bit of a jock, with a tight-fitting T-shirt. They both stared at us, with jaws open.

The man blinked in shock. He rubbed his eyes. “No, no… it didn’t,” he told his daughter. He, too, was shaking his head in amazement.

“But I saw it!”

“Shush, shush,” the man said as he took the hand of his daughter, and gently turned her around. He darted one more quick glance at us just before he left, not certain what he thought he saw.


I made the call: we were finished. I could not take the testing any further. We were bound to invite tragedy. Obviously, there was a strange and powerful energy that we knew little about. It was intriguing, but equally frightening.

The conclusion was that I could not do wrong, and if I dared to try any further to do wrong beyond my first mistake, the results could be unpredictable and dangerous. Where that ball disappeared to, we had no clue.

We excitedly chatted about our agreements concerning the just-concluded second trial: it didn’t matter whether a harmful act was justified or not. The Intervention controlled objects. The Intervention stopped your weapon if you intended to harm someone with it. I breathlessly said to Lincoln, ‘It’s as if it adapts. The first time, when you called me names, it made the ball stop. The second time, when you did nothing to deserve it, it just made the ball disappear!’

Lincoln just nodded, too overwhelmed by the experience to be in a talking mood.

We rode the city bus home from the Staplewood Mall. I will always remember that ride. The green vinyl-covered seat in front of us was ripped, and the yellow stuffing within was torn out. I read all the stickers and graffiti on the seats and on the inside wall of the bus, and while I pondered, Lincoln watched the passing traffic through the window. I spotted writing on the seat that read: Your mom was here.

It was funny. I laughed from the simplicity of the joke. “Your mom…” jokes were popular, along with wearing your clothes backwards and deploying the ultimate cool joke: the whoopie cushion.

‘So you busy tomorrow?’ Lincoln said.

‘I don’t have anything going on, really. I have to clean my room. It’s crazy in there, and my grandma is on my case. Did you see these stickers on the seat? I have one for ya that I heard in school: your mom is so fat she pays taxes in three countries.’

‘Okay, that’s really lame.’

I pointed toward the back of the seat in front of us despite his lack of interest. ‘There. It says: your mom was here.’

Lincoln’s shoulders jumped; his eyes flashed anger. ‘Ted, I said it was lame, don’t be so immature.’

‘Dude, relax, I didn’t realize you were going to get all upset. I was only—’

‘Only trying to be funny. I know, but it wasn’t,’ Lincoln said. He turned away from me and lowered his chin onto his fist as he bent forward.

‘Cheese, it is only a joke. I don’t see why you are getting all mad.’

‘Listen, my mom died when I was five, okay? She died of breast cancer, and you keep saying, cheese. I believe what you are trying to say is geez,’ he said.

For a moment, we sat in silence.

‘I am sorry,’ I said, as I rested my hand on his shoulder, ‘I didn’t know. I guess there is a lot I don’t know about you. What did your mom look like?’

‘I looked a lot like her. She was beautiful. Her hair was black as night. When she smiled, there were these little dimples on the sides of her cheeks. Almost every day before school, she would make some pancakes that were so good. They were amazing, and they didn’t taste funny like at school. She would always arrange my bacon and butter scoops into the shape of a face on top of the pancake. I miss her so much.’

Spellbound, I gazed at him. I felt like crying as I recalled the memories of my troubled parents.

Lincoln saw my expression and recognized the hurt within me. He turned away and continued softly, still staring ahead in open space. ‘I would say the thing I miss the most about her, was her hugs. She squeezed me so hard that I would start to feel like I couldn’t breathe. I heard about your friend Jason. That must have been horrible. You must miss him too.’

‘Yeah, a lot. I really miss him. He always knew what to do. He could really help us out right now, because he always had great ideas, and he was good with the ladies.’

I now felt horrible about what I had said to Lincoln about his mother.

Lost in our thoughts, we said nothing during the rest of our bus ride.

There were some weird characters on the bus that night. We had a man who was sitting next to us drinking from a brown bag. He was probably washing away the pains of the day with a bottle of whiskey. He kept blurting out at people in the bus; ‘This is my world, my world.’ He repeated it at least twenty times during the ride. I tried my best not to make eye contact. When the bus stopped in our neighborhood, we exited quickly to avoid interaction with any of the bus regulars.

We stepped down at our stop and said goodbye. When I arrived at home, I lay on my bed, shuffling through all my baseball cards. No, not any I had stolen recently, as I had not. It was the personal collection I had amassed over the years.

Upon further reflection, I wished that I didn’t drag Lincoln into The Intervention business, and I wished that I knew why everything was happening to me.

There was no way of telling what could happen. For my birthday that year, I received a ‘greatest hits’ CD. I plunked it into my player and began to rock to some clever vocals that were accompanied by a piano. Just as I was drifting away, my grandma entered the room and sat next to me in my bed.

‘Honey, we are not going to Taylors Falls tomorrow. I know that you have wanted to go up there, and we have delayed it a lot, but we cannot this year. We cannot afford the trip,’ my grandma said.

‘Well, that is too bad. I get sad after I go anyway. Things are good right now,’ I told her, but I suspected something was going on. She sighed, as if troubled. I decided not to ask.

‘Goodnight, granny,’ I said.

She flipped the light switch and said, ‘Goodnight, Theodore.’

That night, the sky reminded us of its power with a thunderstorm that ripped through our neighborhood. Gusty winds pounded the walls and rattled the windows. My grandparents, who had survived times of war and economic depression, slept through the fierce storm. In contrast, I watched through my window briefly as the storm rocked the trees at mid-trunk.

The bolts of lightning streaked across on the tumultuous sky canvas, instantly dabbing the edges of the otherwise lead-granite colored clouds with brilliant flashes of cream, illuminating the ground below.

My astonishment turned to fear, after a bolt of lightning split the picturesque window scene in front of me. The jagged sword of lightning splintered the elder tree in our front yard, leaving it a smoldering wreck.

The proximity of the blast forced me back; the boom had taken my breath away. I retreated to my covers, because I was shaking from the bolt's impact on that tree.

That tree spent nearly sixty years reaching for the sun, only to be destroyed in a millisecond.

I tried to sleep for the remainder of the morning, but I was left tossing and turning. It seemed the days were becoming chronically weird.

My grandma read the paper bright and early before my grandpa at around four in the morning. She preferred to read the paper before Marv, because he usually left it in a state of disorder after pulling out his favorite sections.

Typically, I was the final person to read whatever was left of the paper, because during the summer, I was the last to wake up.

That morning after that huge storm, my grandparents were out instructing the workers where to put all of the excess wood from the tree. The sounds of the worker's chainsaws and chatter pulled me out of bed.

My grandmother left some food out for me on the stove. I grabbed a few bites and walked toward the living room. The taste of scrambled eggs still fresh in my mouth, I grabbed the paper. Typically, I could bypass all local news if it didn’t interest me, and I would cut straight to the comics.


I sat in my granny’s chair and kicked up my feet on the tiny ottoman that sat next to it. Usually, when I sat on that chair, I felt like I became my grandma, as if I was looking through her perspective: a cold drop of tea in the bottom of a cup, a pen laying atop the day’s crosswords, and a pair of soft and stinky slippers. I slipped them on and gazed at the folded stack of papers.

My heart stopped.

There was a clean, rectangular hole on the first sheet of the newspaper section on top of the pile. Where the crossword puzzle usually was. But my shock was not from the fact that my grandpa must have cut out the crossword puzzle for himself.

Peering through the cut-out hole, as if a ghost, the face of my sworn enemy leapt out at me.

In bold print, underneath the photo, the caption read, Travis Jackson, 2001-2016.

I blinked. This must be a mistake.

I snatched the page where the photo was and threw aside the cut-out crossword page. It was the obituary section.

But this was no mistake. The blurry black-and-white photo of Travis, sullen, looked out at me again. He looked a bit older than the last time I saw him. But that forlorn expression still dominated. He didn’t look happy.

I read on, my heart pounding. It was Travis’ obituary.

Apparently, Travis was camping at Taylors Falls with his dad, and he disappeared. His father reported him missing, and there was an ongoing investigation. Now, he was presumed dead.

The paper’s columnist questioned Travis’ affiliation with Jason’s death, and presumed that Travis may have thrown himself from the cliff into the river.

In shock, I breathed deeply, unsure what to think.

Was this a clue left behind by The Intervention? I had to do some detective work to further my understanding of the unknown force, starting with the cliff that potentially stole the life of two kids. Did Taylors Falls hold the meaning to my amulet? After all, it had glowed there too.

I didn’t mention anything about what I read from the paper to my guardians, and I had good reason. I had a plan.

I sat on the three-season porch taking in the smell of the moist cherry wood. I sat in a white wicker chair that left imprints on my arms where they rested on the surface. I noticed these creases on my skin as I pulled away from the chair to grab some cookies.

My grandma sat on a chair by the wooden kitchen table, sipping some Earl Grey. She would always ask me if I wanted tea, and I would say yes. After all, tea and cookies was quite the combo. ‘What is eating you, Theodore?’ she said while looking at me with an inquisitive squint, ‘I know there is something bothering you, Ted.’

I started crying. I cried so hard and dreadfully long; I was hysterical. My body shook with sobs. My grandmother held me and ran her fingers through my hair. My sadness was always transformed into anger and motivation to do more—to enjoy life better. I wanted to make good of what I could do and the time that I had with her.

‘Theodore, you are special. I am not saying that because I have to, I am saying it because you have proven how strong you really are. You don’t have to be tough and hold in all of your sorrow. It helps to belt it out and shed some tears from time to time,’ Grandma Laverne said, ‘There is something else. Well, I think I will wait for your grandfather to come home to tell you.’

She always had a way with words. After all, she is a grandma; comforting was her job. I found out soon enough what she was waiting to tell me, but not from her own lips.

She was right on one thing. I was different.

I furiously thought of an escape from my dour mood. I had it! For the last several years, my rich uncle always sent me fifty dollars for each of my birthdays. I had that money stashed away inside a T-ball trophy that I had on the top of my dresser. It was the perfect time to spend some of that money.

I skateboarded up to the Big-Mart and used the pay phone to call a cab. The cab arrived, and the driver asked, ‘Where to, sir?’

‘Taylors Falls,’ I said.

‘Whoa,’ he said. ‘Why so far?’

I served him some lie about visiting my grandparents who retired there and wanted me to stay with them at their campsite near town.

As I read the driver’s expression, my only worry was that The Intervention, that unknown power, could intervene. I dismissed the thought. Its jurisdiction was obviously limited to my surroundings, and not my mind.

Hey. Maybe I was doing what it wanted me to do. That was precisely it, I figured. Perhaps, now, destiny was calling me. Travis’s obituary was the tipping point.

Fortunately, the cab driver bought it. ‘We got a long ride. Geez, you are going to have to pay half now. Twenty dollars up front, and pay the rest later. That is the deal,’ the driver requested, with his hand extended through the slot in the Plexiglas.

“After the driver spoke, I knew Lincoln was right about the slang word geez. I paid the man his money, and we left for Taylors Falls.”