Foresight

Chapter 12

It was Recess at school the following day. Mike was walking with Connor to the school library. Mike had spent the morning picking up catch-up homework for all the classes he'd missed yesterday and now he was going to the Library, to try and find something, if anything, to try and find out more about his precognition ability. "So how did the funeral go?" Connor asked, as he and Mike walked through the hallway.

"Well let's see," Mike said as they turned the corner, "I didn't cry, I did yell at my dad and uncle for arguing over what to do with Grandpa's stuff and, I noticed somebody who I have never seen before – a twenty-something year old man – and boy, he was shifty,". Connor looked at him confused.

"What do you mean? Shifty?" he asked. They reached the staircase leading up to English floor and began climbing.

"Seeing him just made me feel -," Mike began, pausing for a moment to think of the right word. "strange,". Connor still looked confused so Mike started explaining himself. "I felt like I know him from somewhere but I just can't remember where – and I feel like I should know – and it's driving me crazy,".

"Are you sure he wasn't, I dunno, one of your Grandpa's friend's kid," Connor suggested. They'd reached the library but they hung around outside to finish talking – the librarian was very particular about talking in the library.

"Well that was my thoughts exactly – but after I stormed off from my family, I saw him watching me, and when I started walking over to talk to him, he began walking away pretty quickly – if that doesn't sound a little suspicious then I don't know what does," Mike replied, he turned to enter the library. They were suddenly shrouded in almost pure silence. Even the tiniest sounds were amplified in the Library. The scraping of chairs, the flipping of book pages, the rustling of someone's bag, somebody furiously typing on a computer. The library was an incredibly large room, to the side of the door, the librarian was sat at a clean desk in front of a PC, reading her own book, in front of them were vertical rows of bookshelves, stacked to the brim with books, on side of the rows of bookshelves there were individual booths with PCs sitting in between them, a few people were sat at them, their eyes glued to the screens, on the other side were several tables with chairs around them for working at and, finally, there were small rectangular windows in the gaps between each bookshelf.

"Remind me again, what we're doing here," Connor asked, as Mike walked into the mythology section.

"Anything to do with precognition –," Mike said as he began scanning the bookshelves, "and the best place to start would be mythology since that's where facts go when people can't be bothered to remember them as they once were,".

"Why?" Connor asked. Mike froze for a minute. That was a good question. With a completely ridiculous, yet true, answer. Why did you bring Connor along? Idiot! Mike thought, scolding himself. He quickly thought up a good lie – seemed like that was another thing he had to do more often.

"Because... I'm doing an extra-curricular project on popular notions in fiction and seeing the future is one of the focus points," Mike said. Another decent cover story.

"And you want my help for research?" Connor looked at him in amusement – both he and Mike knew how extremely bad he was at researching. One time, he had done an essay which was supposed to be on the context of the Renaissance for one of Shakespeare's plays and ended up basing the essay on the video game Assassin's Creed II – Mr Eames was so amused that he ended up giving Connor a D instead of an F just because Connor had apparently made some 'logical arguments'. Mike awkwardly smiled and shrugged.

"Well if you want to get better at English pal, you'd better learn how to do some research," Mike replied, smirking. Connor rolled his eyes, smiling nonetheless, and they got to work.