“What sort of environmental factors are we talking about here?” the reporter asked, still off screen.
The televised version Dad let out a heavy sigh. “Where do I begin? It all comes down to—"
But in my living room Dad suddenly shut off the TV. As Mom tried to protest, he shook his head. "No, no, absolutely not. There's no need to hear my reply now, because they've made me look like an idiot. I went on and on about how pollution and fracking and genetically modified organisms in our food and groundwater could be inhibiting human's evolutionary capabilities, when all along what they really wanted from me was what I just said. That new abilities in humans could show up in certain genetically predisposed family lines." With a heavy sigh and a grim set to his mouth, Dad dropped the remote onto the table at his elbow. "What a waste of my time. I spent hours showing those people charts and graphs and countless pages of research!"
I bit my lower lip. I could just imagine the tidal wave of data Dad had probably poured onto them. The first time he introduced anyone to his theories, it was always a bit like being swallowed whole by a whale...overwhelming and way too much to comprehend at first. I'd been working with him on delivering his supporting evidence for his ideas in easier-to-swallow bite-sized chunks. But he'd been this way for decades before I came along. I doubted the transformation would happen overnight.
Then I thought of my own mountain of evidence hidden in my closet.
I was halfway across the room before I even realized I'd decided to stand up.
“Tarah?” Mom said. “Is everything okay? This show didn’t...upset you, did it, hon?”
Her voice had slipped into that careful psychiatrist tone calculated to both soothe and get me to spill my innermost thoughts and feelings.
But I’d fallen for that trick once before and learned the consequences of telling her my secrets.
I turned to face her with a smile pasted on my lips. “Nope, I’m good, Mom. Just going to get caught up on some homework, is all. Sorry about your interview, Dad.”
Mom’s gaze searched my face for several long seconds, checking for signs I was lying, before she finally nodded.
Dad caught my eye before I could turn away. He cocked his head an inch to the side in silent question.
But I shook my head. Mom's quick dismissal tonight of Simon's abilities as nothing more than a hoax made it clear she still hadn't changed. Her inflexible mind just couldn’t wrap itself around the idea that there might be more to human capabilities than she could fathom. So it would be pointless to push this issue with her again. If we tried, it would only lead to a lot of yelling and Dad sleeping on the couch and all of us going through yet another long round of family therapy sessions with one of her peers. And I’d already had more than enough therapy to last a lifetime.
I gave Dad a sad smile then made my escape.
In my room with my door safely shut and locked behind me, I walked over to my closet then hesitated, my hands resting on the bifold doors' plastic knobs.
There is no such thing as magic, Tarah, my mother’s often repeated argument echoed through my thoughts. That’s just your father’s crazy love for fantasy books stirring up your imagination.
I slid the doors open then used both my arms to shove back the clothing that hung inside, parting them to reveal my own "research lab" of sorts...two black framed bulletin boards I’d secretly had Jeremy screw into the closet’s back wall for me before he left home. Mom never saw them since I'd been doing my own laundry for years now. Which was a very good thing, because if she'd seen these, she really would have insisted on more family therapy sessions.
The boards were covered with news articles printed off from the internet, each one held in place by clear plastic push pins. Around each push pin, a red string looped and stretched, connecting causes with their events throughout history. Taken at a glance, anyone else might see only a crazy, tangled up mess of a spider web. Unless they took the time to see the dates I'd circled in red ink on each news article.
But what alway drew my focus and made my heart hammer like crazy was the length of time that stretched between each historical cause and effect event.
It was getting progressively shorter.
Tonight wasn't the first time I'd heard about the Clann. East Texas was full of rumors about it. In fact, just a half hour's drive from Tyler was a mid sized town called Jacksonville, which was rumored to be the Clann's headquarters and full of all kinds of strange people and even stranger things going on. A few years ago, Jacksonville had even been nearly destroyed by what locals claimed to be some sort of Clann civil war, though the news had blamed it on gang violence instead.
Until tonight, I'd always thought it was the Clann who should be blamed for the rising disastrous pattern of cause and effect tragedies. I'd never considered the possibility that the Clann might have outcast members who could be behind it all.
Simon's theory made sense, though. In fact, it was the only thing that made sense. I'd never been able to find a good motive for the Clann to cause all those disasters. Why create so much chaos and pain and death and loss and risk bringing attention to themselves in the process?
But untrained outcasts could easily be making things happen worldwide accidentally without even realizing the power they were wielding against their fellow humans. Especially if certain events in the news managed to stir them up collectively and lead them to feeling a kind of group negativity in the same direction at around the same time.
The question was...if the outcasts learned what they could do, would this stop the cause and effect pattern?
Or would it only make things worse?
Monday, November 23rd
Hayden
Kyle slammed his tray down beside me on the table the next day in the cafeteria. Everyone at our table looked up.
“What's up with you today?” I asked around a mouthful of pizza while Kyle flopped into the plastic chair beside me.
He looked at me like I was some kind of alien. “Seriously? You don't watch the news, do you?”
I shrugged. “Sometimes. Why, did I miss something new?”
Kyle's girlfriend Becky, captain of the Raiderettes Varsity Cheer Squad, laughed at me and shook her head. Her short, curly red ponytail with its extra shellacking of hair products never budged beneath its crisp red and black bow. “Uh, yeah. The father of those D.C. terrorists is claiming he's some kind of real life Merlin.”