Flipped

1.4

The next day at 10am, I found myself once again in Mr. Shenan's class.

"After Lincoln won the election of 1860, many Southern leaders..."

He wasn't done with the civil war yet.

I glanced at Taylor across the room. She was looking down at her phone, not focusing either. It had been less than 3 days since we met that old man. How did it feel like weeks already?

The lecture went on and on.  Finally, after so much detail on war rationing that I swear I could have  I caught up with Taylor in the hallway.

"I need to tell you something," I said.

"Did you experience anything?" She asked. Her eyes were fearful, but otherwise she seemed normal. She was always a good actress.

"No. But Mike did. He had a vision or something about a girl ditching her boyfriend for him."

That should have made Taylor chuckle but she was stone-faced.

"Yeah, well...something happened to me, too."

She took a deep breath.

"I was walking down Waterfront last night. There was a couple sitting on the patio of The Waterfall having dinner and arguing and then suddenly - they just disappeared before my eyes. Like, there was nobody there."

Taylor's eyes were flashing with emotion.  She was dead serious.

The buzzer rang. We had 5 minutes to get to physics.

"Something's going on, Chris. We can't continue with the plan to just move on - I think we need to figure out what it is."

The pit of fear in my stomach threatened to well up again. I pushed it down hard. "I know. We will."

Taylor and I parted ways and I rushed to get what I needed from my locker.

Now, of course, you can't just push down fear. We've had fear develop through millions of years of evolution. Humans with no or little fear all got wiped out in the past - by hunger, by wild beasts, by each other. It's an important warning system, and you're not supposed to be able to simply switch it off. Sometimes you need to ride it out, sometimes for a while. I had a very strong feeling that I'd be getting very little choice in the matter.

Half-way through physics it happened. My phone was sitting on the desk lit up, "The Westwood Mall. 11pm", it read.

At lunch, I talked to the others about the text that I had received. Ava had gotten it too. We decided we had to go, there really wasn't anything else to do.

That night I was lucky. My mom decided to head off to bed early. I was able to sneak out around 10:30 but even with my bike, I barely got there in time. When I arrived, Taylor was especially grumpy.

After some tense silence, she whispered, "I don't know about all of you, but I'm pretty sure my mom knows I left the house. I'm going to be grounded for sure."

We crouched behind a small clump of trees. In front of us was a huge parking lot, almost completely empty, and beyond that, the main entrance to the mall.

Taylor, still fuming, was beside me and looking pissed. Beside her was Ava. I'd barely talked to her today - she had been keeping pretty quiet. Mike was there, still out of breath - he had run here, forgetting his bike.

For the second time we silently waited in the night.

It must have been about 20 minutes before we saw a younger woman walking past the mall, close to the entrance. She was hard to make out from our vantage point, but she was moving quickly, and seemed a little nervous. Fair - it was the middle of the night and she was alone.

Suddenly Ava shifted and drew a sharp breath. We all shot her a glance and saw her shocked expression.  "You okay?"

"I don't know - this isn't going to end well," she said. "We need to do something to help."

"Help?" I was puzzled. But Ava wasn't interested in answering. She got up and started to run towards the woman. We looked at each other and groaned, but followed her.

The rest of us we were walking on a trajectory to meet her. She saw us and did a double-take. I guess it was strange to see a group of 16 year olds in the middle of a parking lot around midnight.

But as we got closer I could just see coming around the corner of the edge of a box store a group of really rough-looking guys walking towards us. There were three of them and I got the sense that they were out for trouble. But when they saw us, they kept walking right past, toward the street where we had been before.

The woman kept walking, and was soon out of sight, leaving us standing there alone in the middle of the parking lot.

Mike turned to Ava and said, not unkindly, "What gives?"

"I clearly saw in my mind, that there were a bunch of guys there and I knew that they were going to rob this woman. I figured if there were more of us, they wouldn't do it."

Taylor groaned. "Nothing's going to surprise me now."

"Well," I said, "it's already midnight. Why don't we wait for the werewolves to come out? It's not like they'll make the evening any weirder."

I got a shaky laugh from the others out of that.

"This is ridiculous, though," said Ava. "Why did I see what was going to happen before it did? Do we all just have magic powers now?"

"And I don't know if you checked, Chris, but the texts are gone again." Taylor said.

I didn't even check. What was the point?

We stood there for a moment.

Then the woman we saw before suddenly appeared in front of us.

And the funny thing? None of us even flinched. I guess our nerves were so fried that you probably could have shown us an alien the size of a truck and gotten no response.

"A few things," the woman said. "First, you need to keep things under wraps. Not everyone needs to know about what's happening here. So you," she said, pointing at Mike, "you need to be subtle when you get premonitions about a girl you're on the phone with. You - all of you - need to be more careful."

Taylor stepped up. "What is going on? Why do we have to be careful?"

She smiled strangely. "Well, just to start, what do you think the government or scientists would do if they found out what you can do?"

"So do we have special powers?" Taylor asked.

She nodded. "Yes. I'm not sure who did it, but someone opened you up." She chuckled. "I guess it was good that I didn't have to use mine just now. Them walking away was so much cleaner."

"So you were never in any danger?" Mike asked.

"Not at all. You're starting to catch on."

"Okay - this is all very helpful, thank you. But is it really just the government we need to be careful of?" asked Ava.

But she was speaking into empty space.

The woman had simply disappeared.  

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I hope you folks are enjoying the story!  As promised I'll post another one this week to make up for being late.  Please feel free to comment and provide feedback!!