Titan

Eric Steele

Many thousands of years after God granted Adam and Eve life and free will, man developed societies, engineering, weapons, and eventually high schools. Unfortunately, that is where this story really begins. It's not the best starting point and it's certainly cliché. But as with God's story, this one begins with a lonely soul. He is driving to school.

The high school years coincide with the height of adolescence coalescing in the loneliest, most awkward, and isolating point in a young person's life. The discovery of one's individuality competes with the drive to be accepted by the masses. But the secret is that everyone is going through the same thing and they just won't admit it. For sure, though, no one leaves high school as the same person who entered.

Everyone wears a mask in high school. Few are comfortable enough with themselves to expose their real selves in public. Some get to choose their identity: athlete, jock, cool, clown, smart, etc. But more often than not, your "identity" is thrust upon you: geek, fag, wimp, ugly, stupid, and so on. Only your friends and family come close to knowing the real you, but there is always a part they will never know.

Eric Steele wanted only to be past all of it. Every day at 7 a.m. he was on the road driving to school. Every day he packed some books in his locker and some in his bag. Every day his first period class was World War I and II. And every day he dreamed about driving past the school and continuing up the road to... anywhere else.

He had never told anyone about that dream least of all his parents. Somewhere along the line, adults forget what adolescence was like. Tim and Nancy Steele had. They had already survived the adolescent struggle, found their identity, and forgot there was ever a time when they didn't know. They chalked up the uncomfortable experiences of youth as exactly that—youth. Kids being kids. They didn't remember the change—the act of becoming something different from what they once were. No one who figures it out wants to remember they were ever unsure.

Eric would. For the rest of his life, Eric would remember his eighteenth birthday in March and everything that followed. He would remember how he changed.

The dreams came first. For months, Eric had been having the kind of dreams that you wake from in a sweat but cannot remember anything about the moment after waking. He didn't attribute the dreams to anything unusual. Strange dreams and restless sleep came and went. This had lasted longer than any stretch before, though.

Maybe he wasn't getting enough sleep. That was certainly possible. He stayed up later and later for no real reason other than to be awake. He watched TV, surfed the web, and read books. Finally, when his eyelids were too heavy to bear, he crawled into bed with Calvin, his cat, exhausted but not tired. He didn't sleep straight through the night, either. His was a fitful sleep, complete with tossing and turning and long hours spent staring at the ceiling freshly visible as his eyes adjusted to the dark.

While he did not remember what the dreams were about or any events that occurred in them, he knew that they didn't frighten him. They were not nightmares. Even so, they were not happy dreams. He sensed (not a memory exactly) that he was hurt or in pain in these dreams, but that seemed unlikely. You don't feel pain in dreams. Or do you? Eric had a dream when he was younger that The Shape from the Halloween movies was after him and when The Shape caught up, he stabbed Eric. Eric clearly remembered the knife going into his arm and being surprised that it hurt. Later, he reflected that it felt kind of like a pin prick—nothing like actually being stabbed probably felt like, but there was pain. He woke up clutching his arm, but the pain had been lost between the dream and consciousness.

Well, there was. When he awoke from the dreams, he felt hot and feverish, and his skin pulsed like it usually did after a fresh burn. But this burn was all over—his skin pulsed with heat from his head to his toes. It always faded quickly enough, but the fact that it was there at all made him wonder. Of course, he hadn't mentioned this to his parents or friends. It was just a phase, right?