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  ISBN 978-1-62007-398-8 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-1-97427-822-0 (paperback)

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  ’ve heard that when people get older, they look back on childhood as the best time of their lives. If that’s true, then either memory plays some really strange tricks, or life is just one big downhill slope. I don’t know a single fifteen-year-old who thinks his (or her) life is great. On the other hand, I can show you a lot of kids who feel like they got off at the wrong bus stop.

  In this sense, I was pretty typical. I’d come home from school after a day of being yelled at for stuff I hadn’t done or words I’d never meant to say but they just kind of escaped from one of the hidden rooms in my head, and all I’d want to do is chill. For me, that usually means gaming online, because the people you hang with online don’t know how much your day sucked and are always happy to see you and share a laugh. And oftentimes a laugh makes the hurt go away.

  That world—the gaming world—is a place where the things that give you trouble are things you can overcome if you’re smart enough. Unlike teachers, or annoying students. Sure, you die sometimes. But it’s a temporary condition, and nobody remembers that you died, the way teachers remember that you mouthed off and hang it around your neck for the whole school year. You always get a second chance in the game world. It’s like you have your own personal God to forgive you and wipe the slate clean every time you mess up. “You are absolved, Jacobus Rose. Go and live to fight another day.”

  If only we were allowed multiple lives in the real world, I used to think.

  Coming home from school offered at least the comfort of that fantasy, but I often had to walk through a war zone to reach it. My parents had one of those “troubled marriages.” These days, there doesn’t seem to be any other kind. For hours after their fights, misery hung in the air like smoke, and as they say, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. But no matter how much I’d yell, “Mom! Dad! The house is on fire,” they didn’t seem to see it.

  There’s a point where you begin to wonder if these people can really be your parents. Not to mention question the whole idea that wisdom comes with age.

  I know I’m not alone, and I don’t mean to whine. There are millions of adolescents who reach this state of disillusionment on a regular basis. Other kids who have found themselves whispering under their breath through clenched teeth, “This can’t be my life. This can’t be my world. There must be a better one—at least a different one—somewhere.”

  Well, there is, or I should say, there are. Before you get excited, I need to let you know there’s a catch: once you leave your life, you can never come back to exactly the same one. I’m writing this story for you, the misplaced teenagers of the world. Think of it as a roadmap to the worlds right next door to yours. As close as your shadow, or closer.

  Before the events described in this book occurred, I’d read a lot of books about kids caught in dystopic or post-apocalyptic futures. Dystopia is big for my generation. All of them were about us, but none were written from inside our heads. This story, I hope, will be different. I want you to know what it felt like to fall out of the world, and keep falling.

  Until all this happened, I would have characterized myself as a pretty ordinary kid. Smarter than average, although that didn’t necessarily show up in my schoolwork. Decent-looking, I guess. Mom always says I got her good looks. But I wasn’t boy band material. Despite my parents’ marital problems, I managed to have some good times along with the bad, and the bad was never horrible. One thing made me unusual. I’d had what they call “heart murmurs” since I was a baby.

  It was something about the valves in my heart not always opening and closing properly. When I was four or five, I’d heard the doctor tell my mom that I most likely had a normal heart, and that the murmurs were “innocent.” That was reassuring. No kid wants to have an abnormal anything, and innocent is always better than guilty. But he’d also said that it was something we’d have to keep an eye on as I aged, and that was less comforting. As far as I knew, I still didn’t have a completely clean bill of health. But for all that, the doc told my folks not to let it affect sports and physical stuff, so my dad took the bright side and encouraged me to run with him. But Mom worried, and that sometimes made me worry, too.

  Hence, my mostly sedentary existence.

  None of this—my parents’ issues, my heart murmur, or my general boredom—made me depressed, or—in the language of my kind—emo. But I did sometimes have a gnawing fear that I was missing something better: something, somewhere that I ought to be a part of.

  I’ve learned, as you will, that there are really no “ordinary” kids, just ordinary lives. Every kid has a hero inside, depending on the circumstances. And we have other things inside us, too. Not all of them so great.

  My journey began in Chicago on April 1st of my fifteenth year on earth. It ended just a few days later, in the same place, but by then, I had lived quite a few lives. None of them were boring.

  artūn was not your average playground bully. For one thing, he wasn’t especially big, or chubby, or red-faced, and as far as I know, he’d never beat the crap out of anyone. For another, he wasn’t always getting detention the way most bullies are. He was too smart for that. He worked it so that you were the one who got detention.

  But the name. Ah, the name was classic. I don’t know where it came from or what nationality he was. Someone said once it was from one of those little countries that used to be part of Russia. You can be sure I never asked him about it—at least not in this version of the world. It was pronounced with a long ‘u,’ like ‘oo,’ so you couldn’t say Hartūn without thinking cartoon, and we all saw him that way. A cartoon with dark eyebrows angling down toward his nose and smoke coming out of his ears. I know I’m describing an angry kid, and that’s just the thing. That’s where his bully power came from. He didn’t have to hit you, or even shove you. If you looked at him the wrong way, he’d just give you that angry Hartūn stare, and you wanted to run for cover. Sometimes under his breath he’d add, “You suck,” or “You’re a loser,” and that would be the final blow.

  Nobody knew why Hartūn was so pissed off. We thought that maybe kids from his part of the world were just that way. One kid had a theory that it was his diet, because in the lunchroom, he sometimes got a special meal. Another kid, my best friend Connor, said it was because his father beat him. Either way, Hartūn could ruin your day. And on the day in question, the day I discovered the switch, he ran true to form.

  If you decide you like a girl when you’re fifteen, your options are limited. You can’t ask her “out on a date,” which is what older guys do to get around having to say, “I like you.” The stuff that your parents suggest, like, “Why don’t you ask her to work on a school project with you,” is just way too stupid. And despite what adults may think, kids my age are totally aware of their place in the whole man-woman, “birds and the bees” thing, so even if what you really want to do is put your arms aro
und her and squeeze her and maybe kiss her, it’s not like you can say, “Hey, _______, you wanna hook up?” Fifteen is an impossible age for romance.

  But pretty much everyone knew I liked Jemma, because I told my friend Connor, who told Anastasia, who told a bunch of girls, and since one of them hated me because I’d once made fun of her fashionably fuzzy boots, she told Hartūn. It was only a matter of time before he made use of the information. What made the situation even more hazardous is that Jemma had what grownups like to call “a nice figure.” I can’t deny that this caught my interest, but it wasn’t what made me like her. I liked her because of the way she’d once smiled at me during a school assembly, as if we shared a secret. But that didn’t matter. When a girl “has a nice figure,” everybody just assumes that’s the honey that draws the fly.

  We were in geography class, the first class after lunch period and my most hated. It wasn’t that I hated maps and memorizing the names of rivers (although as my friend Toby, the only African-American kid in my grade, says, “Rivers? Ain’t nobody got time for that sh__.”) Toby doesn’t really talk like that in private, but in public, I think he feels like we expect him to. No, what I loathed about geography class was Ms. Furbel, who was known to all as Ms. Furball. And I’m pretty sure the feeling was mutual.

  Ms. Furball wasn’t old, but she acted old. Maybe in the same way that Toby felt like he had to talk street talk, she felt like she had to be strict and old-maidish. She practiced on me. And I can tell you she got a lot of practice, because one thing I do is try teachers’ patience. I have a tendency to be what they call “disruptive.” Which really comes down to the fact that when I feel like saying something, I say it.

  So now you have the backstory. Anyhow, I sat in the second row, third desk. Jemma sat in the third row, fourth desk. And Hartūn sat in the fourth row, last desk. Naturally. What bully sits anywhere but in the last desk? Halfway through a lecture about what had happened to the country once known as Yugoslavia, I turned to get a glimpse of Jemma, hoping that she thought the subject as boring as I did. But Jemma had turned to look at Hartūn, who was passing her a crumpled up piece of paper. He caught me looking and gave me the Hartūn hate stare. But that wasn’t what made my throat close up.

  As Jemma swung back to the front, this nasty little smile slithered across his face. He pointed at me, then at her, and then made this curvy motion with his hands across the front of his ugly orange sweater. There was no doubt he was describing Jemma’s “nice figure.”

  In situations like this, a man has to act or be damned. “He who hesitates is lost,” my dad always says. I jumped up from my desk, crossed the aisle to Jemma’s desk with the sweat beading on my forehead, and grabbed the note from her hand, blurting out, “You don’t wanna see this!”

  And that, as they say, was that. I had just enough time to uncrumple the paper, see that same curvy shape drawn in Hartūn’s cave painting scrawl, and read JACOBUS THINKS YOUR (sic) HOT before Ms. Furball lowered the boom. “Jacobus!” she squawked. “One hour detention.”

  I thank all the gods, including the entirety of Greek, Roman, and Indian pantheons, that she did not see the note wadded in my hand. But I still got written up, and I still got detention. Worse, I had made a fool of myself in front of Jemma.

  And so, it won’t surprise you that as I walked home that day with Connor, I was feeling like crap. It was still cold in Chicago (it doesn’t really get warm until June), and my mood was as gray as the sky. I knew I could tell my dad, or my mom, what had happened, but only separately. If I told them together, they’d just find some reason to fight about it. I decided not to tell them at all.

  What finally snapped me out of my funk was that when we turned the corner onto Cleveland Street, Connor stopped in his tracks and said, “Holy crap! What the hell is that?” He pointed across the street to what, for as long as I could remember, had been a slightly sinister empty lot. Only now, there was a house. A tiny wooden house painted fire engine red. It wasn’t exactly on the ground yet, though. It sat on the bed of a huge truck that must have been made to move houses because it was bigger and wider than any I’d ever seen. Since this was my first encounter with a house planted anywhere but safely on the ground, the whole thing put me in a weird state of mind. The truck was just there, backed onto the empty lot, with the house kind of leaning sideways like it was about to slide off. No driver. No owner. Nobody.

  “C’mon, Jacobus!” said Connor. “Let’s check it out.”

  When a friend says, “Let’s check it out,” I’m usually right there. I’m not a daredevil or anything, but I don’t like to pass up things that might provide an escape from the normal, boring stuff that makes up most of life. However, when something is as out of place as this house was—and painted red—warning bells go off in your head. It just felt wrong. Like walking into class one day and seeing a giant Galapagos turtle sitting there instead of Ms. Furbel. It leaves a feeling in your head and in the pit of your stomach that I have heard grownups call “off kilter.” But that expression doesn’t quite cut it. There’s one I like better:

  Out of whack.

  Whack was the normal state of things, such that the lack of whack—like being suddenly lost in a place that was supposed to be familiar or having a déjà vu in the middle of reading a paper in front of class—was deeply disturbing.

  You may think that gamers, because they spend so much time in alternate realities, are better at handling this kind of stuff. Not me. I like to feel in control of my environment, but you can’t play life with a joystick.

  So, as we crossed the street and approached the house, my heart started racing. “Connor,” I rasped, “I dunno. Maybe it’s dangerous. What if it’s a terrorist thing, and it’s set up on a timer to blow up any minute? You know, like, instead of a car bomb, a house bomb.”

  “Aw, Jacobus,” he said. “You watch too many movies.”

  “I bet your parents say that, don’t they?”

  “Yeah. So what?”

  “My dad does, too. But my mom always argues back that movies are based on life.”

  “What, like X-Men is based on life?” he said, sure as hell of himself. “Your mom’s a little weird.”

  He had me on that one.

  We double-checked to make sure that no one was around. I hoisted Connor (who was shorter than me) up on the truck bed, then scrambled up after him. The house creaked ominously and began to rock just a little. “Damn,” said Connor, and that seemed like the most G-rated thing he could say.

  We tiptoed closer to what was obviously the front door. It was also painted red, and had a small glass pane. The old-fashioned windows on either side came complete with shutters, which made the house look like one of those slightly disturbing little kids’ drawings where the door is a mouth and the windows are eyes. But looking back on that day, the one thing that should’ve scared us away was that through the window we saw a single, bare light bulb, dangling from the ceiling of what must have been the living room, swinging back and forth on its cable. And it was lighted.

  Now, because I’ve called your attention to this, some of you will ask, “Where was the electricity coming from?” This question did not occur to either of us. Only an increase in the out of whackness, as if someone had just turned up the volume on it. We peered inside. Other than the light bulb, there was not a stick of furniture in the room, or anywhere in the house as far as we could see. But to make things even stranger, all the inside walls were painted salmon pink. Red outside, pink inside. Some decorating job. My mom would’ve thrown up.

  There were no paintings on the walls, no shelves, not even a single nail, but there was one thing I’d never seen before in a house. We noticed it at the same time, and I could tell that at that moment Connor and I were doing a mind meld, and that both of our minds were saying, “What the—?”

  On the opposite wall, just before a narrow hallway that must have led to a bedroom, there was a very big switch. Not like a light switch, or even like the circuit breakers you
r dad has to flip when the power goes out because your mom is using the hair dryer, the iron, and the microwave at the same time. This was a giant mother of a switch like something you’d see in a factory, or in Dr. Frankenstein’s lab. It was at least two and a half feet long and eight inches wide, the kind of switch that sends enough juice flowing to power a small city.

  It was painted metallic silver, and on the wall next to it was a plaque. That is to say, a sign with these words stamped into the metal in what I now know was Latin:

  NE UNUS, SED PLURES MUNDI

  CAVETE!

  My high school French gave me no help. My dad told me that when he was my age, they still had Latin in high school. When I asked why anyone would want to learn a dead language, he gave me some spiel about how Latin was the language of the classics and invaluable in understanding the other Romance languages, which to me at the time meant reading GREAT EXPECTATIONS and knowing how to talk smooth to girls.

  Although my memory of this day and this moment is now layered over like an archeological site, I think I had a kind of sixth sense that the words were Latin. Maybe I’d seen it in a video game, or in one of those ancient world movies that were popular at the time. I know that that last word—CAVETE!—standing all on its own with an exclamation point—sent a chill up my spine.

  “We have to check this out!” Connor exclaimed.

  This time I said, “No, we don’t have to check it out.”

  And then, I backed it up. “Connor, if that’s a real electrical switch, and who knows if it is, it’s gotta have about forty gazillion volts of electricity going through it. Don’t you remember science class? Conductors and potential and all of that. If we touch it, we might get fried. Or set off that bomb I was talking about.”

  “Na,” he said. “My dad’s an engineer. Current has to come from somewhere and go somewhere. That switch can’t be hooked up to anything. There aren’t any cables coming from under the house or connected to a utility pole that I can see.”