The Felix Chronicles: Freshmen (38 page)

How could she be so amped? he wondered. He wasn’t amped at all. More than anything, he was floundering in some higher realm of confusion that he hadn’t known existed. And the small part of him that wasn’t confused was just flat-out scared. And if there was any emotional machinery not saturated with confusion and fear, a drowning layer of doubt submerged it. He still wasn’t sure what to believe. Despite the proof—the room was staring him in the face—he doubted. Strongly doubted.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not sure if they got the right kid for this job. How can
I
be the Belus?”

“It’s fate,” she said confidently, like she actually knew what she was talking about. “And I think it’s incredible! Sorry. Okay. I’ll stop. Tell me the rest.”

Felix waded back in right where he’d left off, and when he was finally finished, Allison blurted out: “That’s it? That’s it?”

“Yeah,” he replied, confused.

“Mid-sentence? It ends mid-sentence?”

Felix nodded slowly.

“Why?” She gave him a long curious look. “What happened?”

He shrugged and said vaguely, “Bill didn’t say anything. Or maybe he did and I don’t remember.”

Her troubled expression faded and she smiled at him, her eyes burning with excitement. “You realize this is the most amazing story ever! Do you have any idea what’ll happen if we tell people about this?”

“They’ll think we’re insane,” Felix said flatly. “Then I think Lofton—
the Drestian
—will kill us. That’s part of the adventure you’re forgetting.”

“Oh. Yeah. Well… yeah, I suppose you’re right. But there’s no adventure without a little danger, right?”

“I still can’t believe this is happening,” Felix said. “We’re from some little dive town on the coast. Things like this aren’t supposed to happen to people like us.”

“Says who? And I think it’s cool.” She paused, her eyes fixing on his in a measuring stare. “So how do you plan on saving the world from dictatorship and enslavement?”

Felix stared back at her and blinked, wondering if she was being serious. Her face gave nothing away. Then she broke out in a big smile and started laughing. He joined in. The notion of Felix saving the world was inherently ridiculous, and when you said it out loud, it was even more ridiculous. It was funny, hilarious even. The punch line of a joke, a comedian’s closing flourish, the grand finale. How could you not laugh? The whole thing was a monumental lark; at any second, someone was almost certainly going to pop into the room to tell them this was just an elaborate hoax. Or maybe it was all a mistake. Maybe the cosmic forces—whoever was responsible for that Source thing—had screwed up. Maybe they had the wrong kid.
Sorry Felix, there was a clerical error. We meant to pick a sophomore at Ohio State. Wrong school. Wrong year. Wrong kid. Oops. Sorry.

“I guess I should probably tell Bill about this,” Felix said.

“This guy Bill. He’s a
groundskeeper
? Are you sure that’s all he is?”

“I don’t know anything about him.”

“Alright. Well, we need to figure out what to do about this.” She cocked her thumb at Caitlin’s side of the room. “She’s gonna stroke out when she sees this. And you have a game, you know?”

“Shit!” He’d totally forgotten about it. “What time is it? It’s an early kickoff.”

She checked the clock next to her bed. “Seven thirty.”

“I’m already late for pre-game breakfast! I gotta go.” He started toward the door.

“Hold on!” She snared his arm before he could get past her. “Here’s what you’re going to do first.” Allison had snapped back into let’s-get-shit-done mode. “Go to your room. I’m sure Lucas is still sleeping. Then—oh! You didn’t say anything to him last night, did you?”

“No. He was hooking up with Piper so I came down here.”

“Piper?” She rolled her eyes. “He’s such a slut.”

“I was actually heading down to the common room to crash on a couch, but then I got to your floor, and I guess that I… I just wanted to talk to you.”

She smiled and quickly turned her head to look at something on her desk that had suddenly captured her interest. Her cheeks had gone pink. “Alright, Belus.” She went over to the window. “Go to your room, get your stuff and get outta here. I’ll give you ten minutes then I’m pulling the alarm. They’ll have to evacuate the building. When the firemen get here, they’ll find this disaster.” She pointed off to her right. “I’ll tell them I woke up smelling smoke, jumped out of bed and pulled the alarm. It’s kind of strange it died on its own, but I’m not the expert on fires. Hey, are you gonna tell anybody else about this?”

 “No.” He shook his head emphatically. “I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it.”

“I agree.”

“Yeah, so don’t tell—”

“I won’t say a word,” Allison promised. “You can trust me.”

“I know. Give me a few minutes to get my shit together.”

*   *   *

Lucas, to Felix’s immense relief, was all alone and sleeping soundly. Felix grabbed his things and slipped back out of the room. Lucas didn’t stir. When the fire alarm sounded, Felix had just reached The Yard. Wailing and screeching, rising and falling in waves, it rolled across campus. And then just as he entered Ferguson Hall, he could hear the fire trucks howling to a stop on 1
st
Street.

“Hello, Dad,” Bill said into his phone. He was standing at the table in his office, looking out the window at The Yard below.

“Hello, William. I haven’t heard from you in a while. How have you been?”

“Living the dream as an assistant groundskeeper. The other day, I was mowing the lawn and some smartass kid yelled, ‘you missed a spot’. That’s a good one. These kids are funny. The next kid who does that is going to get circumcised with my hedge clippers.”

“You sound tired. I hope that’s not discouragement I hear in your voice.”

“Me?
Discouraged? I’m an eternal optimist. You know that. I didn’t get much sleep last night. That’s all.” Bill rubbed a hand over his chin, pausing for dramatic effect as the moment seemed to call for it. “I met with Felix last night.”

“And…?”

“He read the journal.”

A short pause. Bill thought he heard his dad let out a single relieved breath.

“And so it begins.”

“Yeah,” Bill replied. “After all this time.”

“How did you convince him to do it?”

Bill glanced at the baseball bat propped up against a stack of books in the corner. “I asked him politely.”

“Sure you did,” his dad said skeptically. “I know you, William. Sometimes you’re the proverbial bull in a china shop. It’s that temper of yours. If you’d learn to control it, you might make things easier on yourself.”

“I’ll try to remember that,” Bill muttered softly.

“So how did he react?”

“Exactly as we had anticipated,” Bill answered.

“Refused to believe a word?”

“Of course not. But he’ll be back. Soon. Once it starts to sink in, he’ll want to know what it all means.”

“I hope he doesn’t wait too long.” There was a note of anxiousness in his dad’s voice.

No one spoke.

His dad was waiting for a response.

It never came. This was about a timetable, and that was a conversation Bill was determined to avoid. The situation was too fluid for that, and besides, he had a plan.

“So tell me,” his dad said after a while, “what’s he look like in person these days? Does he still look like Lofton?”

“The similarity’s hard to miss. Felix is a little bigger, but they could be father and son.”

“And what’s the boy… like?”

“
Like?
He’s an eighteen-year-old kid.” Bill put the phone on speaker and set it on the table, taking a seat. “He seems conflicted about something. But what teenager doesn’t? He’s probably got himself worked up about girls. Not to mention midterms, football, and of course, his parents. He’s a small-town kid. You know that. You know everything about him. I’d describe him as a simple, unsophisticated kid. But he’s not dumb. He’s actually quite smart, smarter than he realizes. And he won’t always be simple.”

A phlegmy cough rattled through the phone as Bill’s dad worked out something in his throat. “It’s the simple-minded that make me nervous. They cannot even grasp that there are things beyond their understanding. And that makes them
dangerous
. That makes them confident controlling the lives of others. Hitler and Stalin were such men. Simple-minded monsters.”

“He’s not Hitler.” Bill stared at the phone and shook his head. “Jesus, Dad. He’s eighteen. And he’s on our side, remember?”

“Hitler was once eighteen,” his dad barked in his gravelly voice. “And the boy has the potential to make Hitler look like Mother Theresa.”

An uncomfortable silence followed.

Bill gazed out the window and sighed, watching two students out for an early morning jog cut across The Yard through a light mist that was beginning to lift. The grass was wet, though it had stopped raining a few hours ago, and the sky was mostly clear.

“Do you think he has any idea of what he’s capable of?” his dad asked, finally breaking the quiet.

“No. None whatsoever.”

“
All that power,”
his dad growled softly, like a contented lion. “The power of the universe flows in that boy’s veins, and he doesn’t even know it. Can you imagine what it must be like to wield that kind of energy?”

“No. But I intend to bring it out of him.”

“And when do you anticipate that happening?”

“I’ll start training him when I think he’s ready,” Bill said adamantly, aware that his tone alone wouldn’t cause his dad to drop the subject. But it was worth a try.

“But we don’t have the luxury of time! If you don’t start training he won’t—”

“He’s not ready! This isn’t something you can force. And
you’re
telling me that
I’m
the bull in a china shop? I’m dealing with an eighteen-year-old kid who’s been through a lot. He’s got enough teenage angst to supply the rest of the school. If I push too hard, or too soon, he’ll break. He’s like an unloaded gun at this point and you’re telling me to fill him with bullets. So don’t you think we should know where he’s aiming before I show him how to pull the trigger? I have a good read on this kid. I’ve been doing my homework since he was in diapers. I know what I’m doing.”

“Of course you do, William,” his dad said in an overly pleasant voice. “Fine. That’s fine. Train the boy when
he’s
ready. By all means, let the boy dictate the schedule. That makes perfect sense.”

“I’ll call you later,” Bill said, ignoring his dad’s sarcasm. “I have a game to attend. If the Sturgeons win, we’ll play for the Rain Cup.”

“The rain what?”

“That’s right. Gotta go.” He ended the call, amused by his dad’s consternation.

Felix caught the ball on the Sturgeons’ eighteen-yard line, dodged a defender, stiff-armed another to the facemask and darted out of bounds at the thirty-five. The whistle blew. The crowd cheered anxiously. He glanced up at the clock—eight seconds left. He flipped the ball to the official and jogged back to the huddle.

He still couldn’t believe he was playing in a football game. The past twenty-four hours hadn’t exactly been a typical day: he finished his midterms; a groundskeeper threatened to break his fingers with a bat; he found out he was adopted; he read a cursed journal; he imagined people chasing him (people who wanted to kill him); he defied gravity and set fire to Caitlin’s bed (in his sleep); and if he understood the journal correctly, he was not only immaculately conceived, he was the only person capable of preventing the Drestian (aka Lofton Ashfield) from enslaving the world.

During pregame warm-ups, he’d been mostly catatonic and went through the motions of getting ready for the game, relying on habit and muscle memory to conceal his state of mind from the coaches. And this wasn’t just any game: The only thing standing between the Sturgeons and a shot at playing for the Rain Cup was the Milford Lava Bears. The game was huge—the most important game anyone in attendance could remember. But Milford presented a gigantic obstacle. And as the game wore on—in front of the largest crowd in school history—it was clear they were simply the better team: bigger, stronger and faster at nearly every position.

Yet the scrappy Sturgeons had gone after them full throttle, putting everything they had into every play. His teammates’ determination and desire was contagious, and by the mid-point of the first quarter, Felix had stopped thinking about the journal and whatever it was that had happened in Allison’s room. It wasn’t as hard as he’d thought it would be. It was all so bizarre, and so surreal, it wasn’t much different than trying to shake the lingering effects of a bad dream.

The only distraction he hadn’t been able to block out was Bill’s voice in his head telling him that he was adopted. He wasn’t sure why, but he thought it was probably because he could actually grasp the concept. Adoption was almost normal—at least compared to finding out that he was the Belus (among other things). So between plays his mind had drifted; he wondered why his parents had never told him, and if they ever planned to. He’d never know. It was their secret—a secret they took with them to their graves.

And now, with just eight seconds left, the Sturgeons were down by four points. They’d outhustled and outworked Milford the entire game. But it looked like talent was going to win out over heart and effort. Brant huddled the offense and took a knee. He looked up at his teammates and said with a smile, “Helluva game guys. Whadya say? We got one play left. Nothin’ to lose. I’m throwin’ it to August. Felix, you catch it and run. Déjà vu, baby.” He broke the huddle.

Felix lined up on the left side of the formation in the slot position. At “two” the center snapped the ball to Brant. Felix pushed aside the defender and Brant delivered the ball to him in full stride. He tucked it tightly under his arm and took off down the middle of the field, leaving Lava Bears in his wake. He jumped over a diving defender at the forty-yard line. Another player slammed a shoulder into Felix’s thigh but bounced off without slowing him down. At the fifty, he cut back sharply to his right, split two defenders, and making it to the sideline, turned on the jets.