XGeneration, Books 1-3: You Don't Know Me, The Watchers, and Silent Generation Read online

  Janis loved flying dreams, but she wasn’t dreaming. She knew this because of the plastic egg. She had discovered it in the nest of ferns one night, near the clothesline. A purple egg, faded and spotted with dirt, half buried — one she and Margaret must have missed during a childhood Easter egg hunt.

  A week had gone by before Janis remembered the experience with the plastic egg, sparked by a trip to a McDonald’s during one of her softball camps. A couple of her teammates had gone into the play area and waded into the pit of colored balls. Colored plastic balls. That’s all it had taken. For the rest of the camp, whenever Janis could remember, she repeated to herself, “Plastic egg, clothesline, ferns.” Her friends must have thought she was sun stroking, but it worked.

  Back home, Janis didn’t even change out of her cleats. She ran through the house and out the back patio door, straight to where the ferns sprang into their wildest clumps near the clothesline. The egg was not in the exact spot, no. And it was yellow instead of purple. But what did that matter? It was there: half-buried, spotted with dirt — like in the experience. She twisted it open and found two quarters (her dad’s substitute for jelly beans). Now and again, she would retrieve the egg from the top drawer of her dresser and give it a little shake, the rattle of coins erasing her daytime doubts.

  But she wasn’t doubting now.

  Janis neared the tall bushes that formed the boundary between their yard and the neighbor’s and floated to a stop. In all of her experiences, the bushes were as far as she had gone — as far as she could go, it seemed, as though a force field blocked her way. She extended an arm into the dark leaves and felt it being repulsed: a charge rebuffing another like charge. The harder Janis pushed, the harder the field shoved back on her.

  All right, she conceded. I’m not going to win this one.

  She drifted backward and lifted her face to where oak branches dipped and Spanish moss hung like beards. An urge came over her to perch on one of the branches and watch the night hum and crackle around her. The experiences never lasted very long, and on this final night of her summer break she wanted to savor it, even though the out-of-body state still frightened her a little.

  Janis rotated as she rose, streams of energy seeming to trail out beneath her. When her gaze reached above the rear line of bushes, she froze.

  The back of the Leonards’ house appeared like a dark, dreadful creature emerging from the earth. But it was not the house that chilled her. It was the shadow of a human figure on the high deck and the point of light that smoldered red. The same light she had seen the night before and in the same place — at the height of the figure’s head.

  The light dimmed and fell. She pictured the threads of smoke snaking over the dark sloping yard, fording the cement culvert between their properties, filtering through the leaves. She did not know if she possessed smell in this state, but she imagined the low scent of the cigarette anyway.

  When the point of light rose and smoldered again, it glinted against a pair of glasses.

  The previous night, the same sight had driven Janis back to her body, back to her bed. But now she remained hovering. He couldn’t see her after all. She was insubstantial, incorporeal. She drew courage from that vocabulary word — incorporeal. Drifting nearer the shrubbery, she peered past the leafy tops. The red spot of light rose and burned again. The lenses they illuminated were perfectly round.

  Forward-facing.

  And she could feel it too, somehow, the concentration coming from his shadow, the intent. This was not a person on a casual smoke break. Mr. Leonard was watching just as he had likely been watching at the beach that day, the throngs of beach-goers his shield, as the darkness was now.

  But why was he watching?

  Janis sifted through what little she knew of him. He had lived in the house as long as she had been aware of him. He had a wife, a pale woman with dust-colored hair, who mostly stayed inside. No kids that Janis knew of. Sometimes he substitute taught. She’d seen him in the halls of her middle school as recently as last year, his dress shirt crumpled, his thinning wreath of hair in mild disarray, as if he were always filling in on short notice. He’d even subbed her history class once, his lecture voice thin and quavering. He never quite looked anyone in the eye, either, always down and to one side. So why was he watching now?

  Margaret.

  Her sister’s name sprang into Janis’s mind. Had he noticed her at school just as the surfers had noticed her on the beach that day? Had he become interested in her? Infatuated? Mr. Leonard had to be at least twenty years older than Margaret, but Janis’s father had warned them about “sickos” during one of his serious talks. Was Mr. Leonard a sicko?

  The tip of the cigarette inflamed the lenses again.

  Janis started to withdraw, then stopped. Incorporeal, she repeated. I am incorporeal. As if to underline the affirmation, the energies that coursed throughout her intensified. Janis dove down and felt her way along the bushes, palpating with ethereal hands, probing for an opening. It felt crucial that she discover what he was up to, before something happened.

  The barrier rebuffed her again and again and—

  Her arm plunged through a place in the leaves that appeared just as thick as any other spot but did not feel like-charged. She withdrew her arm and felt the soft pull of a force that seemed reluctant to release her. An opposite charge. Even as Janis leaned away, she found herself reaching forward again, anticipating the fascinating tug on her fingertips.

  And if I go through, what then? Will I be able to return?

  Or would she become trapped on the outside, barred from her yard, her home, the bedroom where she slept… her own body? Beyond the leaves, the tip of the cigarette smoldered red again. Janis hesitated then let herself be pulled through in a cold and silent whoosh.

  5

  Spruel household

  Monday, August 27, 1984

  6:36 a.m.

  “What in the world were you doing in the garage last night?”

  Scott jolted awake. He found himself at the kitchen table, one hand pushing his jaw askew, his other hand barely clinging to the end of a spoon. The spoon teetered over the rim of a bowl of soggy Golden Grahams. Dribbles of honey-colored milk spotted the plastic place mat.

  He blinked up at his mom. “Huh?”

  “You heard me, mister.”

  She clopped across their all-white kitchen to the freezer, pulled out an oat bran muffin, set it on a plate, clopped to the microwave, and jabbed the panel with her thumb. The microwave roared like a vacuum cleaner.

  She leaned against the counter, facing Scott in her orange skirt suit. Arms crossed, she raised her freshly stenciled eyebrows. It was her Don’t Mess with Me look. Scott cleared his throat and tried to sit straighter. His vision swam with sleep or, rather, the severe lack of it — four hours, maybe.

  “My computer,” he mumbled.

  “What about your computer? And enunciate when you speak.”

  “It’s not working.” His cereal dissolved to mush when he stirred it. “Something with the motherboard, I think.”

  “Well, no wonder. With you on that thing all the time, it probably overheated.”

  “I brought it to the storeroom to fix.”

  “What storeroom?”

  Yeah, what storeroom, genius? Wasn’t that the whole point of bringing it back there? To hide it?

  “In the garage,” he replied, too spent to lie.

  His mother gave a sharp laugh. She clopped to the chair at the kitchen table where her white leather briefcase hung and began flicking through the files of houses she’d be showing that day. She yanked a folder halfway out and then slid it, knife-like, back into place.

  “I’m surprised you could even get back there. Your father with his… junk piled floor to ceiling. I’ve given him a deadline. Thanksgiving. Everything has to be out of that garage by Thanksgiving, or so help me God, I’ll have it hauled to the fill.” She knifed another folder home. “And don’t think I won’t.”

  S
cott’s impulse was to defend his father, but he remained silent — as usual. Anyway, what she said was true. For all intents and purposes, his father was a hopeless, and pointless, junk collector. Lampshades, lawn chairs, lawn darts, rolls of linoleum, it didn’t matter. If it was a deal, his father bought it. And then promptly stored it in the garage.

  “I can’t even remember the last time I parked in there.” She found the folder she was hunting and flicked through its papers, repeatedly wetting the edge of her thumb. “Imagine that. The luxury of parking a car in the one place for which it was actually intended.”

  Scott grunted and slurped his cereal.

  He was awake now, but it was a temple-boring wakefulness. After mining a tunnel through the garage last night and carrying his incriminating computer equipment, printouts, floppy disks, and Bell manuals to the rear storeroom, it was after two o’clock in the morning. He wasn’t even able to manage one last check of his bedroom to see if he had missed anything. Fully dressed, he collapsed into sleep, only to dream his door was being kicked in. The FBI always raided in the wee hours, went the rumor. So you couldn’t warn your hacker friends.

  The microwave beep-beep-beeped at the same moment his mother patted the files down and snapped her briefcase closed. “All right,” she said, slinging the briefcase over her shoulder. “I put three dollars on the mantelpiece for your lunch. If there’s any change, I want it. Mr. Shine might come this afternoon to weed. Tell him I’ll have his check this weekend.”

  She wrapped the steaming muffin in aluminum foil, took a bite from the end, and patted her short, dark hair.

  “And wake your father before you leave.”

  For the first time that morning, Scott became aware of the choked snores from the living room. After pizza last night, his father had fallen asleep on the couch, trying to watch his three rentals from Video World, action-comedies from the sounds of them. His volcanic laughter had erupted on and off until about a quarter to one, then ended abruptly.

  “Yeah, all right,” Scott said to his mother.

  But she’d already seized her thermos of Ultra Slim-Fast and was halfway to the front door.

  * * *

  The early morning, though dim, felt raw against Scott’s eyes. The front yard was empty, the street still. No swarm of black Crown Victorias parked helter-skelter over his lawn, which Scott had dreamed as well. He staggered down the street, wearing an oversized backpack into which he’d dropped some mechanical pencils, a scientific calculator, two sheaves of paper, a green Trapper Keeper, and his unread copy of 1984. The backpack, one of his father’s finds, had sagged to the backs of Scott’s knees the year before; now it barely touched the hemlines of his shorts. His summer growth spurt had been more vigorous than he realized.

  He approached Oakwood’s main intersection — no cars coming — and scuttled across. But he didn’t stand beside the stop sign as the letter sent by the school had instructed. Instead, he studied the Pattersons’ driveway, where a pair of tall bushes flanked the garage door. The nearer bush looked fuller. A moment later, he was crouched behind it, peering through the leaves at the intersection.

  He shrugged off his backpack and held up his calculator-wristwatch. 7:02 a.m. He was probably safe unless the FBI decided to come for him at school or bide their time until the weekend, when they would have a better chance of catching him asleep.

  That’s how the FBI had nailed hackers all summer long. The thing of it was, the hackers Scott knew from the boards were harmless, not out to bring the system to its knees or start thermonuclear warfare (as if they could). To them, hacking was a challenge. It was learning how systems worked and then becoming master of those systems. It was sports for nerds. Scott had never scored a goal or a touchdown or swatted a home run — and probably never would. But he couldn’t imagine any of those matching the rush of a successful hack.

  Or the terror.

  Scott watched cars pause at the stop signs, then cruise down the hill toward Sixteenth Avenue, their taillights as red and bleary as his eyes felt. Most of the cars he recognized, many of them just by the hum of their engines, the cut of their tires: Volkswagen Rabbit, Chevy Chevette, turd-brown Toyota Tercel. Most recognizable were those cars that came from the Meadows, the subdivision where Scott lived. Less familiar were the ones puttering up from the Downs or coasting down from the Grove, where the biggest houses were. The Grove also featured a field with a community playground, where Scott used to venture — until Jesse Hoag snapped his arm.

  Scott’s hand went to the place above his wrist where the bone had healed into a lump. It still swelled when he slept on it wrong, and it ached a little this morning. But his mind was preoccupied with his phone call to Wayne from the night before, those extra milliseconds between the final pulse and the ring.

  How long had the FBI been monitoring him? Who had tipped them off? How much did the feds know? How much did they need to know to put him away?

  That Scott was too young for prison offered little consolation. He could still end up in juvie, and juvie would mean the worst abuses he had suffered during his ten years of public schooling added together and squared. He thought about all of the playground fights, the humiliating wedgies, the two times he’d had his head crammed in a bathroom toilet and flushed on.

  His ears burned. No, he wouldn’t do well in juvie.

  And what about Wayne? With his Napoleonic size and temperament, his D&D-themed insults, where he’d throw his face forward, lips pursed (“You’re not a Night Hag,” he’d once informed Scott during a spat. “You’re a Night Fag.”), Wayne wouldn’t last a day. And if the feds had a tap on the Spruels’ line, they were likely to have one on Wayne’s as well. Scott needed to warn him. The problem was, Wayne would want to know how he knew about the tap, and then they’d be right back to what caused their fall out in the first place.

  Ass-wad, he heard Wayne saying.

  Scott unzipped the small pocket on his backpack, took out his Thirteenth Street High class schedule, unfolded it, and ran his finger down the first column. Advanced computer programming. Third period.

  He would have to figure out some way to warn him then without—

  Scott whipped his head around. The thundering belch, still echoing from the Downs, fell into a guttural chop-chop-chop-chop. Scott crammed his schedule into his backpack and crouched low to the bush, checking to see that every part of him was concealed.

  A minute later, the black car trundled into view. Not a Crown Victoria but a 1970 Chevy Chevelle — a car whose engine signature Scott had learned well and learned to avoid. The Chevelle idled at the stop sign, the chop of its engine like crude laughter. Scott didn’t need to see through the homemade tint job to know who was behind the wheel. The collapse of the car’s frame toward the driver’s side told him everything: Jesse Hoag, all three hundred pounds of him — the same three hundred pounds that had snapped his arm the summer before.

  The Chevelle continued chop-chop-chopping, its wheels compressed to the pavement, not moving. When a minute passed, Scott became certain that he was spotted. He darted his gaze to the left. Could he get over the Pattersons’ wooden fence in time, knock on the sliding glass door hard enough to awaken one or both of them, convince them to let him in?

  Jesse was too big to give chase, but Creed Bast would be in the car with him. So would Creed’s younger brother, Tyler. Both of them had tormented Scott at one time or another — and why not? Unlike Wayne, Scott knew the game; he knew the score. He was among the weakest and geekiest. He wore thick glasses and carried an inhaler until just last year. And worst of all, he owned a pair of legs that did everything but what he wanted them to do, especially in times of stress. The qualities had singled him out of the healthy herd long ago. Made him fair prey.

  Beyond the bush, the Chevelle ripped another belch and idled. Scott inhaled a lungful of exhaust. Were they toying with him, daring him to step out? Scott tried to swallow the hard lump in his throat, afraid he might start blubbering, like the last time they�
��d cornered him.

  When the passenger-side door swung open, heavy-metal music blasted out into the morning. From a swirling fog of smoke, blue-tinted John Lennon glasses appeared. The rest of Creed’s narrow face followed. He’d grown his hair longer, Scott saw. The dirty blond hair fell from a black bowler hat that sat high on his head. Creed looked around, then said something over his shoulder.

  One of his slender black boots landed on the pavement.

  Crap.

  Scott slid his gaze to the Pattersons’ fence and ran his dried-out tongue over his braces. It was now or never. Once Creed’s second boot hit the pavement, Scott wasn’t going to be able to outrun him, much less get himself up and over the fence. Scott rose to his haunches.

  Creed draped his hair behind his ears. Then he snorted and hawked something into the street. His boot and glasses disappeared back into the fog, and the door slammed closed, muffling the music.

  Scott sobbed once as he let out his air.

  Huge brakes cawed, and a chrome yellow nose drew up behind the Chevelle. Two minutes late, but it was here, thank God. Scott stood from his crouch, ready to make for the school bus whenever the folding door flopped open. But the door wasn’t opening. The bus tooted twice at the obstructing car, waited, then blew one long, exasperated honk.

  A meaty hand appeared above the Chevelle on the driver’s side, its middle finger extended.

  Scott’s thighs began to burn in his stance. Should he go for it, run down and pat on the glass doors? Could he do it without Jesse and the others seeing him? If they did, they would know his hiding place. They’d know where to look for him. And for a moment, Scott wondered who he feared more: the FBI or Jesse Hoag.

  Probably a toss-up.

  The kids on the bus began to stand. Some lowered their rectangular windows and craned their heads out. A couple of them cheered the obstructing car. Scott squinted to see inside the car’s windows. If Jesse and the others were looking away from him, he would go for it, slip down, sidle up to the bus, get the driver’s attention…