The Otherworldly Minds Saga

The Otherworldly Minds Saga Chapter 1

Chapter 1: Shattered Minds

The mind is a fragile thing. It’s like glass. Glass looks really solid from time to time. undisturbed glass can stand the test of time. When it’s clear everything is so visible on the other side. But the moment you throw something at it...it breaks. It shatters. Just that easily you are reminded just how fragile glass was in the beginning. You wonder how it was that you could have held its composure this long in the first place. Do you want to know what happens to a shattered mind? The same thing that happens with shattered glass. The pieces are impossible to fit back together. They are swept up and discarded. Something that was once so firm and so beautiful is nothing more than trash.

Looking back I wonder what would have happened if I hadn't made the decisions I made that fateful day. The world was so different then. Then I had my own mind and it was some weapon I wielded to protect myself. That was until the invaders came and shattered me.

“I have to hurry. I have to study…”

“Study this dick,” he moans.

He enters me and he’s balls deep in my tight wet hole. My hole constricts onto his dick like a vice grip and it causes him to clutch onto his bedpost. His moan is deep and if I can describe it in any other word it would be chocolate. Sweet and smooth like chocolate.  First off I wanted to introduce myself. My name is Nairobi Hassan. My story starts with me riding Logan Flock in the locker room. It’s the end of the school day and I straddle his waist on a skinny bench between lockers. The gym is empty for the most part. No one is there. I’d just found out he was in the closet. He was sexy in his own way if you’re into muscular guys with low IQs. 6’1” with broad muscles the side of cannons. He was dark like A Hershey’s chocolate bar with an 8 pack. Some even went as far as to say that he looked like a young Denzel. He was the kind of guy who thought that having a body was everything. He spent all day picking and pruning in some mirror but only when no one was looking because he’d never run the risk of everyone in school knowing he enjoyed exploring another boy's backside from time to time. I didn’t think he was gay. Honestly didn’t even think he was strictly bisexual. It was more complicated than that but in a lot of ways simpler. The simple truth: He had gotten so much pussy in high school that he got bored and wanted something new.

Enter me, the openly gay boy in Trenchtown high school with a bubble butt that got comments from even the straightest-seeming guys in my high school when no one was looking.

“You about to cum?” I ask.

His dick is average, but it’s good. He grips my love handles, slapping the fat on my ass so hard he leaves an imprint. He’s hitting the spot enough for me to be getting some sort of benefit out of this. He’s putting his all into it, perspiring to the point that my fingers make squishy sounds as I press on his pecs. It must be a mix of him trying to impress me and the steroids that he’s on. I can’t stand his grunting though. I don’t know what that’s about. It makes me think that he’s trying a little too hard to impress me.

And that’s not a good thing. I wasn’t here for pleasure.

He sees that first hand when I turn to him, “Go ahead daddy. Give it all to me.”

“Damn when you talk like that it makes me want to...it makes me want to….erh...ergh...ERGHHHH!”

He’s cumming. The face he makes looks like some distorted little alien. Not that I believed in Aliens or anything like that. I could imagine at that moment though if aliens did exist, he looked like one of them. His brows frown up, his mouth goes all agasp and his fingers twitch up at my sides.

Just at that moment, his moment of complete orgasmic ecstasy is stolen by a flash.

He jerks his head up as a girl emerges from one of the lockers. It was one of the tighter lockers but she’s flexible enough to fit.

“Got it,” she says.

“What the----”

He jumps up. He’s butt naked and still sweating profusely. His alien face relaxes to one of utter shock and dismay when he realizes that the girl who hopped out of the locker also took a picture of us.

“Sorry----” I mutter.

The girl who hopped out of the locker was none other than my best friend Kameisha. Really Kameisha wasn’t my best friend. Hell, she wasn’t even my friend. I didn’t have any of those. She was just the only one who didn’t annoy me half the time. She was a basic girl, the kind of girl you wouldn’t remember ten years from now while you’re looking in your yearbook and you try your hardest to understand what quirky message she put in there. That was because she only came around when I needed something done and she wasn’t really into a bunch of small talk. I had to pay her 10 dollars to have her help me with this. No one in the school really likes me...especially Logan at this point who was looking at me like I had three heads.

He is about to charge for her phone when I hold out a hand and stop him, “It’s already on the cloud. And as you know...you can’t really destroy the cloud.”

He looks at me at that moment, “I swear I heard you were a piece of shit, Nairobi. I should have listened to everyone who warned me about you.”

“Listen, we just took a picture of you in a moment of weakness with the school gay boy,” I reason to him like a champ, “You know what that means?”

“You’re a fucking bitch!” he snarls trying to grab the phone.

Kam throws the phone to me. We fling it from one person to the other until it tires him out. Not sure he knew what the cloud was but then again he was just a jock. He wasn’t a good one at that because he couldn’t even intercept a phone let alone a football.

I am very aware when I try reasoning yet again, “This is how this is going to work. My brother is running for school president...as you know. Voting takes place tomorrow. I’m going to need you to round up all your little friends and make sure he wins.”

“My best friend Cordae is running against him,” Logan says.

“That’s a shame,” I shrug, “because if my brother doesn’t win, your best friend Cordae...and the entire school will be watching you make the orgasm face from hell.”

“Cordae will kill me.”

“Yeah...yeah, he will. But if this gets out around now when colleges are looking to draft you...” I shrug, “I’d hate to see what happens to you.”

“Jesus...I heard you Hassans would do anything to win this election but I didn’t know it was THIS bad…”

“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” I explain, before turning away with a shrug.

I turn back to Logan and whisper a soft, “Sorry”. I wasn’t sorry though. Not to say I didn’t have feelings but let’s just say feelings weren’t my top priority. If I had another way to get my brother to win the school election I would have done it. It doesn’t matter though. The truth was though I never wanted to have sex with him. I didn’t have a choice in the matter.

I keep thinking about my father.

I’m thinking so much that I run right into someone who is standing there. It was a quiet boy. I really didn’t know his name. He was a handsome boy with these square glasses.

“Who the hell are you?” I ask.

“He’s new here,” Kameisha tells me, “Think he just came from up north or some shit like that…”

The boy looks nervous. He’s a white boy and in this part of town, it was rare to see white boys coming to the school. Trenchtown was the home of government assistant buildings, low-income households and an epidemic of prostitution. This boy didn’t fit into those categories. He looks like he was out of place as though someone had lifted him from Beverly Hills and dropped him into the hood. I can tell he's intimidated by me. Good. I could use that.

“Did you just see any of that?” I ask.

His face said it all. The boy was so shy that he trips over his syllables, “I----I er-----”

“Good,” I interrupt him, “It’s good that you saw. If you saw that then you know what the Hassan family is capable of. And I suggest you keep your mouth shut.”

~

I get in our small apartment later that day stressed out and somewhat relieved. It’s spotless. My brother Zaire almost rushes me down when he sees me walking into the room.

“Did you get it? Did you get it?”

“Get what. If you mean, did I save your ass from getting beat in the school election tomorrow?” I ask, “Yeah, yeah I did…”

Zaire had a way of being dependent on me. He was my big little brother after all. He was a football player, one of the smartest in the school and he was vying to be the valedictorian of the school. Of course, he didn’t do it in an honest way. He’d cheated his way through high school....or better yet relied on me to cheat through high school. It wasn’t that Zaire wasn’t smart. He was. He was talented, but he knew and I knew that he hadn’t done it himself. If he was the Wizard of Oz...I was the man behind the curtain and we both knew that.

“Thank God,” the Wizard of Oz sighs, showing off a flash of white teeth.

He tries to hug me, I think. I pull away. Why did people try to hug me all the time? I wasn’t much of a hugger.

That’s another thing. He wasn’t only spoiled but he was “I kind of played a part too…”

He rolls his eyes, “You didn’t do it for me.”

He had a point. There was someone else we did it for. There was a reason our three-bedroom apartment in this small low-income housing project was squeaky clean. My father was coming home. We’re already sitting at the dinner table when he gets there. Usually, I was the one who did the cooking but clearly, I had to stay at school late.

He walks in.

I can smell the cigarettes from my father’s fingertips. He was a big and burly man. Zaire inherited his size. The truth was Zaire inherited a lot from him. I was always the one who inherited from my mother.

“Hey Dad,” Zaire states, his voice shaking a little bit.

I don’t bother speaking. My father offers Zaire a nod. That nod is the best he’s going to get from my dad. It’s one nod more than my father would really ever give me as a greeting. I guess the kid in me wants to scream out, “Why don’t you love me?” But that kid was hushed up years ago when I came out to my father as gay and he decided...even back then...that Zaire was the only child that would ever be worth a damn. I can see the kid in Zaire was still there though. It was there and crying out for attention. Zaire tried as hard as he could to please my father. The truth was Zaire was already my father’s favorite child. Favorite is used loosely. He treats us both like shit, but I guess he treats Zaire a little less like shit. Poor needy Zaire doesn’t know the difference though.

Zaire had to be perfect. He was the one who was always hand-picked by my father to make it out of this shit hole, especially after what happened with my mother.

Imagine having this amazing government job and your wife shows up butt naked saying aliens had abducted her at a company event. My father lost his job and he was blacklisted in a way. My mother was sent to a looney bin and my father became the asshole that he is today.

“How did the last day of campaigning go?” my father asks.

He didn’t say hi. He didn’t ask us how our day was. He wasn’t concerned about those things. He doesn’t even look at Zaire. He looks at me when he asks how the campaign was. As if I was the one who told Zaire to run against the most popular boy in school. A part of me wanted to scream, “I rode a dick today for some dumb high school election”, but I knew he’d probably pummel me into oblivion if I admitted that. I wondered though, deep down, if he knew that he’d turn me into this kind of person. I wondered if deep down he knows his strict way of parenting had created a monster. I think it was probably because of the military training my father had. Everything was straight to the point.

“I’m going to win,” Zaire states.

My father looks over at me, “That true?”

Funny thing is even though Zaire is his favorite, he never seems to trust Zaire with the most common things. If Zaire didn’t bring home straight A’s...both of us would be punished. I’d have to stay up just as long as Zaire to help finish his stuff. It got to the point that I would neglect my own homework to do Zaire’s.

We were the Hassan family. We did things together. That’s what my father would say. Really what he meant was we did things for Zaire.

“He’ll win,” I state, “I made sure of it.”

“You better have made sure of it, Nairobi,” he states, “Because I swear to God if that light-skinned piece of shit Cordae Harris beats my son again…”

I don’t know what his skin tone had to do with it. I think it was just another thing that my father held against the Harris family. One more thing to add to the list. We were all dark-skinned men. My father was born in Africa. He never lets us forget that he came here when he was just a young man to provide us with a better life.

“He won’t win,” I assure him.

Cordae Harris wasn’t only our neighbor. My father hated him because of some rivalry he had with Cordae’s father. Growing up Zaire was convinced it had something to do with their time in the military (both Cordae’s father and my father served together)...but neither of us really knew for sure what that history was about. It wasn’t like my father was some big storyteller or something.

“If he doesn’t...don’t bother showing up in this house tomorrow,” my father tells me.

He gets up off the table not touching a bite of the food that I’m sure Zaire slaved over the stove to make.

Zaire looks over at me, “Sorry he...said that to you.”

I don’t respond to him. I get up from the table. Zaire was too soft sometimes. I’d have to take that out of him one way or the other and get him used to how the world really was. The world was tough and we had to be tougher. Otherwise, we wouldn’t survive. That’s just how our universe worked.

~

I’m standing at the bus stop the next day headed to school. I’m at this bus stop. Zaire never had to ride the bus. One of his football friends picked him up. He’d offered to drop me off a few times but that wasn’t my thing. Besides I couldn’t stand his friends. They were all the worst of the worst. Typical dumb jocks who felt like high school was the beginning and the end of the world. They felt as though there was nothing happening. They felt like they were in some endless cycle of school beef with the Cordae Harris side of the school.

I’m standing there and I notice I’m not alone. This really quiet boy is standing there with me. He must live on my block or something. It was a rough neighborhood and I can tell he looks kind of creeped out because every ten minutes or so a car would speed by bumping loud music and some hoodlum would poke their head out the window and start cursing or something. If I were nice I’d probably say something to ease his little nervous mind, but I wasn’t nice so I just put my earphones in and ignore him.

Or at least I try to put my earphones in and ignore him until I am interrupted by a loud squealing sound.

“Hey, Nairobi!”

Great. There’s this girl standing there. I don’t know what her name was. I knew it started with a J. I wasn’t much of a talker. I really should have because it’s the same girl every time. She tries to have a conversation with me every morning with the same upbeat tone that drives me out of my fucking mind.

“Is there something you needed? Or…” I ask.

“Just wanted to say hi. I’m raising money for kids in Africa and was wondering if you----”

“Don’t got no money…”

“Actually I was hoping you could help with a bake sale we were----”

“Don't’ got no money. Don’t got no time. Don’t got no cookies,” I state, “Is there anything else I can help you out with?”

She swallows a little bit. She was a sweet girl. Maybe in another lifetime, I would have cared about her cookie sale. The truth was I never had the time to make friends. I never had the time to live my life. The truth was all that mattered was making sure Zaire was taken care of. All that was expected of me was making sure that he made it out of here.

“Saw your brother on the football field yesterday....”

I drop my earphones and start listening in.

She continues with a smile, “---- I’m such a big fan. He’s going to make it big one day. It’s wild because we have two stars. We have been undefeated all season. Cordae is----”

“Let me cut you off right there,” I interrupt her, “We have one star. Zaire Hassan. Cordae Harris will never be that big, Janet.”

“My name is Jean.”

Jean was a heavyset black girl with a rather short haircut. She walked with a waddle and she talked with a bit of a lisp. She was the kind of girl who got mad at you if you used straws or knocked on your door if you didn’t pick up your dog’s shit. She was the kind of girl who annoyed the living hell out of me.

“Ok, Julie. Have yourself a nice day.”

“I knew your mother.”

I stop and look at her, “What?”

All of a sudden I realized why it was this girl who was speaking to me all the time. She knew my mother. And she looks at me with this knowing look. It’s a look that tells me she might actually feel sorry for me. Her eyes keep pacing down on me and I feel this heaviness. I can’t believe this is happening.

“What’d you just say?”

“She was a good lady,” the girl says, “She used to volunteer with me. I was just hoping after she got sick…”

“My mother isn’t sick. She is a nut job.”

I put my earphones back in. I turn and see that the other boy at the bus stop lets out a quick glance. We exchange looks. It looked like he was sizing me up. Great...he felt bad for me too. There was something unique about him and it wasn’t because he was some nerdy looking kid. The girl just steps away from me and moves.

Nothing pissed me off more than a conversation about him. Cordae Harris. It was all people talked about.

~

The day goes pretty much as planned. I walk through the hall and see a bunch of my brother and his friends doing something. They were messing with someone, locking someone in a locker. As I get closer I realize who it is. It’s Justin...the new boy.

“You realize how racist it looks bullying the white kid?” I ask.

They look annoyed that I was getting in their shit. I knew, even then, that if Zaire wasn’t a part of this group that I could get my ass beat. Even with Zaire being a part of this group it is still very possible. They look me up and down and I think it’s only a matter of time before one of them shows their true colors and calls me a fag.

I see one boy named Trevor even open his mouth to start the word, “Fa----”

But that’s when Zaire interrupts, “We need to get to practice…”

As soon as he says the words the others look at the time. I probably saved myself from getting the biggest ass-whooping imaginable.

As soon as it happens Justin walks out of the locker. I don’t know why I helped him. I usually never get involved in things like this.

“Thanks…” he states, “Nairobi right?”

I turn away from him and start walking away. I wasn’t really for the small talk. I guess that was my one good action for the year. It wasn’t a chance in hell that I’d keep saving the kid especially when it came to my brother and his friends. I knew how fucked up someone like Zaire could be. I’d grown up seeing it first hand. Truth is I didn’t blame him either. He coped, just like I did.

“You’re not really a people person, I get it, but you can at least let me thank you,” Justin states.

I stop him in his tracks, “This world is fucked up and if you don’t get tougher, it’ll only get worse. Guys like my brother they will eat you alive. And there’s going to be nothing left but bones, chewed up raw bones that are swept away.”

“That was...poetic,” he muses before stopping and screaming out down the hall, “You’re not as bad as you want to make everyone think you are.”

I keep walking. He was wrong about me. I was worse than everyone thought I was...

The announcements for who would be body president were coming up and I knew that everything had to go off without a hitch. If it didn’t I wouldn’t have a place to live. I didn’t think my father was bullshitting with his threat. I believed him when he said that I would be shit out of luck if I hadn’t made sure he won. I remember when Cordae Harris had been named team Captain. I remember how pissed my father was. I remember no food was in the house for weeks as punishment to me and my brother. My father still hadn’t let it go and the truth was neither had I.

I get to the 7th period and I notice the new boy in my school.

“You following me or something?” I ask.

He looks at me and just shakes his head.

“I’m Nairobi,” I state.

“Justin,” he offers back.

I survey Justin up and down. He had blonde hair and blue eyes. His lips were pink and I had to admit there kissable. I had to also admit he was kind of cute in a shy boy sort of way. Usually, I wouldn’t dare take some time to get to know someone but I figure with Zaire on the path to this great victory he was going to get I could at least treat myself a little bit.

“You’re handsome,” I flirt with him.

“And I’m also straight…” he replies softly, “Very straight.”

“That can change,” I tease him.

Surprisingly he laughs back, “You’re funny. You’re also kind of...willful. Saw how you treated that girl at the bus stop. Was any of that necessary?”

“I’m not a people’s person.”

“That’s no excuse to be a dickhead.”

Dickhead. I’d been called worse before by my own father. I want to explain those things to him but the truth was I didn’t think he would care. I just lean back a little bit, feeling the burn that he just gave me sink into my soul. I didn’t even know this kid but he was obviously judging me. He’d been there when I had sex with Logan. He was there was I shut down the girl with the J letter in her name.

And strangely for the first time in my life, I felt as though someone completely removed from my life was able to come into my life and see me for who I really was.

Was I really that bad?

Just then the bell rings and as I walk out I see Kam standing there. Kam wasn’t the most attractive girl. She didn’t stand out like some of the other girls.

“What’s happening?”

“Your brother...I think he’s going to lose the election.”

My heart starts racing.

“How did this happen?” I ask, “I swear to God if Logan didn’t do what I said…”

“Logan DID do what you said,” she explains, “But your brother...he just isn’t as popular as Cordae. I have an inside source. You know Shay Thompson?”

“My brother’s girlfriend? The dumb one?”

“Yeah, she got in trouble for freaking out earlier. She told Troy and Danny that the vote tallies were already done. Cordae beat Zaire...unless something crazy happens.”

Shit. My heart starts to beat faster. All I could do was think about my father. I was going to be a disappointment to him again. I had no choice.

“What class does Cordae have?”

I don’t know what gets over me, but desperate minds will do the damnest things. A desperate mind is a dangerous mind. For a moment I wonder if my father’s worse nightmare came true. I wondered if another member of the Hassan family had totally lost their fucking minds. Maybe I’d start hearing voices as my mother did. Maybe I’d finally lost my shit.

I walk into Cordae’s classroom.

Cordae was just as annoyingly perfect as you could imagine. He looked like some Tyler Perry love interest. He has this light pretty skin with curly “good” hair and a picture-perfect smile. He smiled constantly too showing it off to everyone who gave a damn to look. As I walk in he’s talking to a few of his friends. The class is crowded with kids. Our school was so goddamn big but a few people recognized I wasn’t a member of his class.

That’s when I walk up to him and I look him dead in his eyes. The teacher is standing at the front of the room.

And I say the only thing I can to piss him off, “You’re a bitch.”

Cordae looks back at me. At first, he thinks it’s some sort of joke. He grabs his phone and ignores me but I snatch his phone out of his hands and slam it on the desk.

“BITCH!”

~

Desperate times calls for desperate measure. We end up in detention. I end up with a black eye. The pain is scurrying through my body. It hadn’t been first black eye that I had gotten and if I hadn’t done something I probably would have done a lot worse.

“What the fuck is your problem?” Cordae asks me, “I never had an issue with you…”

Cordae and I were never friends. We never knew each other. I must have said one or two words to him in school. The thing was that my father hated him. And if my father hated him then I had to do everything in my power to make sure that I stayed away from him. That’s just how things were. So when he says he never had an issue with me it doesn’t matter. My family had an issue with him. That’s just how things were. That’s just how the cookie crumbled in the Hassan household.

“You hear me? I know you know who I am, Nairobi. We had 5 classes together last semester and you spent the entire time ignoring me only to walk into my class----call me a bitch and get us both in trouble for fighting.”

It was more like a slaughter than a fight. He’d jumped over the desk and wailed on me with an open fist after I snatched the phone out of his hand.

“It’s pointless,” a voice states, “He’s treats everyone like that.”

I turn and notice the girl whose name ends with a J is in detention as well. I had to admit it didn’t make sense that she was in detention. I’d been in here enough times to realize that she wasn’t someone who frequented the place.

“What the hell you doing here Jackie?” I ask her, “You put coke in those cookies you were selling?”

“The name is Jean. But you knew that. And it's none of your business why I’m here…”

It was strange honestly strange seeing Jean here. Just as strange as it probably was for the entire school to see someone like Cordae here. I can see his eyes burning into me the back of my neck the entire time. It’s clear that he has a bone to pick.

“You cost me an election,” Cordae states, “I got disqualified because of you.”

I can see he’s getting pissed off all over because of it. Just at that moment though the door opens and the teacher walks in. He doesn’t walk in alone. He has Justin with him.

“Sit there…” the teacher says.

He points Justin to a seat in front of Cordae but behind me. I’m kind of happy. Cordae looked like he was ready to get up and kill me at any point and it was probably best to avoid a visual so he can calm down a little bit. Maybe this time I’d gone too far but I had to do what I had to do.

“I’m Mr. Solaris,” he states, “You guys all are here for detention. I don’t want to hear anything from you guys. Not even a word. The rules for detention are written on the board. Your assignment is up there as well. I’ll be back in another hour to pick up said assignments.”

Mr. Solaris gets up and walks out of the room. Knowing this ghetto ass school he was probably going to talk to his second baby’s mother who he’s cheating on the first one with. He definitely shouldn’t have been leaving us alone in class.

As soon as he leaves I slam my book.

It’s a strange group of people really. The four of us. I was the smart ass rude boy who had a bone to pick with the popular boy in school. There was the quiet new boy who was so out of place he might as well be from a different planet. And then there was the girl who wanted to save the world. I didn’t know these people but for some reason, even then I get this knot in my stomach. It’s this knot that tells me maybe all this wasn’t random.

It almost felt like. Almost felt like.

“You guys feel like something is about to happen?” Cordae says out of nowhere.

We all turn to him. It’s strange because it’s almost like he’s in my head at that moment. It’s almost like he knows exactly how I feel. There was this strange feeling. I don’t know what it was exactly but it sort of felt like...destiny.

It felt uncomfortable as hell.

“Fuck this shit…”

“You can’t just leave,” Jean says as soon as I get up.

“That teacher doesn’t give a shit…” I state, “And even if he DID, I don’t….”

I should have just walked out of the room just then. I could have gone home. I could have celebrated with Zaire. Hell, today we probably even could have gotten my father to crack a smile for once. Who knows?

But instead, I’m interrupted by Cordae who says, “What the hell is that?”

Curiosity gets my attention and I turn around to see this bright green floating globe in the middle of the room. It’s sitting there in the middle of detention and for some reason, we are all looking at it wondering how the hell it got there.

My heart is racing because I’d never seen anything like it but also because things like this made me uncomfortable. Things that I couldn’t explain made me uncomfortable. Ever since my mother lost her mind I always felt like it could partially be hereditary. Maybe it was possible that I was losing my mind as well. Maybe it was possible that what happened to her all those years ago was also going to happen to me.

The quiet boy Justin gets up. He takes a few steps to over and for the first time he speaks, “Do you hear that?”

I didn’t hear anything. Not at first, but when I take a few steps closer to him I begin to hear the sound of a voice. It speaks really low almost in a whisper but as I get closer and closer I begin to make out the words that were coming out of it’s the green floating globe.

<Help. Us.>

I swear at that moment it’s like I hear the voice in my head. It doesn’t come from a source. It was as though someone was implanting the audio straight into my brain.

“Did you guys hear that?”

Help us. I turn over to the other three. They look at me like I’m about to lose my mind. I do the only thing I can think of. I touch the globe.

All of a sudden there is darkness. There is complete and utter darkness. I look around watching the darkness and then slowly I begin to make things out. I’m not in the school anymore. I’m in some junkyard...and I’m not alone.

The others are with me.

“What the hell did you do?” Cordae asks me.

“I didn’t do shit,” I argue back.

It’s becoming very clear that this Cordae didn’t like me. I would expect Cordae to be the one acting like shit towards me but that’s not even the case.

“It’s not his fault,” Justin surprisingly takes my side, “Whatever it was...it was going to bring us here whether we like it or not.”

Jean looks over at the rest of us, “I know this place. It’s the junkyard out of town. It’s about 10 miles away from school.”

We all look around wondering how the hell we got here. They are all looking around but it’s Cordae who gives me an elbow to my shoulder. As soon as he gets my attention he points over a mound. There we see something. It’s some sort of structure. The structure is lodged in between several old bikes and car parts. The structure has a round circular shape. It’s a shape that looks so unfamiliar to me.

“Please tell me that isn’t what I think it is,” Jean says.

“Depends…” Justin responds, “What do you think it is?”

“It looks like a…” I start off.

“Spaceship…” Justin finishes the words.

The oval UFO looking thing lodged between the cars was big enough to get attention. Smoke was rising out of it. Had it crashed here somehow?

The smoke buffers out of the UFO. I’m standing there looking at the smoke and I’m amazed at what I’m looking at. Things like this didn’t happen to me. I wasn’t special. I was just your average jerk. I didn’t deserve anything spectacular or amazing to happen. Zaire should have been here. He’s the kind of person you would have assumed something spectacular to happen to, not me. So I’m standing there doubting it all.

We are standing there next to each other and our eyes connect. In a weird way, I had a feeling that we were all supposed to be here at this moment. It felt right.

That’s when these globes of light float up to us. There are five lights, but there are four of us. The globe that comes up to me is this vibrant bright pink light.

The voice in my head is a female’s voice. Her voice is gentle. She has a strange accent, one that I have never heard before. She slurs her s almost as though a snake would. I hear the voice deep in my soul. It takes over every part of my body.

Justin for some reason is paying attention to me. He takes a step closer to me. His voice is deep masculine and almost trusting.

He offers me his hand, “You’re hands are shaking,” Justin says, “It’s OK. I’m nervous too. I don’t think they mean us any harm though, Nairobi. Look how warm the light is. Maybe we should help it.”

“You do what you want,” I say, “I’m leaving…”

“Wait,” Justin offers, “Don’t go. They need help.”

“Well help them…”

Justin shakes his head, “I can’t. Not alone. I think they needed all four of us. That’s why they brought us here. But I think you know that too…”

This Justin guy was annoying. He was annoying because he was right. Whoever these things were it was clear they weren’t from here and it was clear that they brought us here because they weren’t in really good condition.

For some reason, I knew exactly how to help her.

I stop in my tracks. I turn to the pink globe. It’s come out to me.

“The lights are flickering out,” Jean states, “We don’t have much time.”

I look at the pink light. I can see what Jean was seeing. The energy in this thing was going out slowly. She was calling to me desperately. She wanted to be a part of me. She wanted to take me in somehow. This alien force wanted to enter inside of me and was somehow asking for permission. The globe was so warm...so faint.

I’m not sure who does it first but we all end up doing it. We all end up taking one of the alien globes inside of us and then as soon as it was done…

And everything changes...forever.

To read the next chapter in advance go to www.crushedcrown.com