The Intuitives(5)

Most eleven-year-old boys would have hated sharing a room with an infant, but Roman didn’t mind it so much. At least he never saw anything strange around his baby brother. He figured he would eventually—he saw things around everyone else. But for now, Xavious just ate and cried and burped and slept, and in between he practiced walking without falling down and saying “NO” and “MINE” and “BOBO,” which is what he called Roman, accompanied by Marquon’s endless snickering. Roman hated changing diapers as much as anyone else, but it was nice to feel normal once in a while.

And when he wasn’t feeling normal at all, when all the evil he had seen during the day decided to get up and start lurching around inside his head, screeching and clawing its way through his brain with no way out, he could grab his sketchbook and spill all that darkness onto its pristine white pages. And Xavious would never tell a soul. The kid would just hobble over to where Roman lay on the floor, sketching furiously, and he would gurgle and laugh as the images flowed into life before his eyes, as though there wasn’t anything the least bit disturbing about any of it.

That was what Roman should do now, while he could—while Marquon was busy with his video games and nobody else was home—but he kept thinking about the stupid test. They had just announced it that afternoon. Morning classes would be canceled for every grade from the third through the twelfth for some new test. It made him nervous. Before the whole Lockhart nightmare, he wouldn’t have cared. He would have just aced it, whatever it was. But now he lived by certain rules. No good grades. Don’t stand out. Keep your head down. See trouble coming.

So even though Marquon was ignoring him and Roman could have escaped into his bedroom in peace for a couple of hours, he just couldn’t stop himself from trying to find out more about it.

“So… did they say what it’s for?”

“OMG, you still here, man?”

Roman waited to see if his brother would say anything else, but the silence dragged on between them while the TV blasted screaming guitars and staccato gunfire.

“I thought maybe they told you guys something at the high school,” Roman tried again. “About the test? They wouldn’t tell us anything.”

“Yeah, well, they didn’t tell us either. Just sit your asses down tomorrow and take the stupid Is-A-Bitch.”

Roman perked up. “Is-A-Bitch?”

“Man, you’re stupid.” Marquon rolled his eyes. “Intuition Assessment Battery. IAB. Is-A-Bitch. I can’t believe I literally have to spell that shit out for you.” Just then, Marquon got shot and the game ended, his death playing over and over on the final kill-cam. Cursing, he threw the controller to the ground and stood up, his head whipping around to stare at Roman.

Roman backed away as the entire beehive streamed in vicious red streaks out of his brother’s eyes and ears and nose.

“Sorry,” Roman said, in a voice that sounded pathetically small and frightened, even to him. “Marquon, I’m sorry.”

“Gonna make you sorry, Mister Is-A-Bitch!”

He was so close to the front door. Roman wanted to yank at the doorknob and run into the street, but he knew he couldn’t. Marquon was already too far gone to stop himself. If Roman ran outside, Marquon would just chase after him, and if the neighbors saw his fifteen-year-old brother beating him half to death, someone would call the cops, and that would be that.

So Roman did what he always did—what he did for his mother and for Shaquiya and for innocent little Xavious so the cops wouldn’t come and take them away or run Tony off and ruin everything they finally had. He curled up in a ball and took the beating without making a sound. Marquon kicked him a few times and then fell on top of him, pummeling him without mercy, while a thousand bees of blood-red light swarmed around them.





3


Sam



Had anyone bothered to ask Samantha Prescott what she was doing with her sixteen-year-old life, she would have replied, matter-of-factly and with more than just a touch of bitterness, “Waiting.”

But waiting for what, she had no idea.

Ever since she was a child, she had understood—with a conviction that had sailed far beyond the realm of mere belief and landed finally upon the unassailable shores of hard, scientific fact—that every last scrap of popularity and power her classmates squabbled over, when measured on any meaningful scale whatsoever, added up to a sum total value of diddly-squat.

Every day she watched in both fascination and horror as the other sophomores scrabbled and spat their way through the merciless arena of high school drama, acting as though it were a matter of life and death which members of the slave-like masses came out on top for the day, as though the entire spectacle weren’t just going to repeat itself again tomorrow.

Really, why did they care? The boys were too childish to fight over. What dared to call itself fashion was hopelessly generic—no one had the guts to wear anything original in this boring, suburban quagmire. And what passed for ‘intelligent debate’ was just the parroted drivel of the previous generation, passed down from father to son and mother to daughter without any genuine reflection or even a token attempt at independent thought.

How had Sam arrived at this rather pessimistic view of the world? It had all started when she was only five years old. Her father had taken her to a ballet class, not because he had any desire to see his daughter grow into a debutante, but because she had very few friends her own age, and in the absurdly wealthy neighborhood they called home, a ballet class seemed the most logical place to find five-year-old girls.