The Inevitable Obscurity: Rings

Chapter One

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.
~ Carl Sagan

Heather walked through the school hall keeping an eye out for Julian. She finally found him leaning against a wall. "Hey. Will we see each other after school?", she asked. He stared at a point somewhere in space. After he didn't reply Heather poked him. "Hello?" Julian looked at her without focusing. "Heather something bad is going to happen." Heather looked away  "Yeah okay. So will we see each other after school or not?" Julian's eyes widened and his pupils were dialated to an inhuman size "Something will happen! Something bad!" Heather rolled her eyes at him "Right see you later". She went to her first class without looking back.

Julian had been Heather's boyfriend for over a year. She knew that he had brain damage from a car accident, but sometimes he really went overboard with his weird predictions of the world being incased by flames and stuff like that. Every couple weeks he told her something bad was going to happen. Sometimes he had predictions about her, sometimes about the world and sometimes about things he didn't define. If he hadn't been really nice to her and made her love him so much she might have left him, because he freaked her out. Whenever he said things like that he wasn't really there. It was like he was seeing something else and it was creepy. Plus nothing life-changing or "bad" had ever happened when he went on such a rant.

One time she tried to calm him down and he turned even crazier, wanting to lock her into the bathroom so that "nothing bad would happen" to her. Heather always walked away now in such situations. The fact that he didn't remember any of those rants or Heather walking away made it a lot easier to just leave. So, yes Julian was a little crazy, but Heather loved him anyway. She knew he would be normal in a minute and go to his first period like he always did.

When Heather arrived in English class almost everyone was already there. She sat next to her best friend. "Julian was creepy again", she sighed. "Maybe he should go to a psychiatrist.", Sophie suggested. In that moment the teacher arrived and they started analyzing "Romeo and Juliette" for the hundredth time. Heather was anxious the whole period. Was Julian really psycho? It is just damage from the crash right? Or is there something else he isn't telling me?

For once, Julian was right. Something terrible did happen.