The Future People, Page 2

others was what had caught Kenneth's attention. He had earnestly expected to see some of varying length, perhaps of varying color, yet when he glanced about, they all seemed the same to him.

  He knelt before the worm, extending one thin finger to poke at it. The worm felt slimy to his touch and curled up into a ball when he made contact.

  From past experience, he knew the worm would stay that way for some time, at least until it thought a perceived danger had passed.

  Kenneth thought about putting the worm in his pocket-he had done so before-yet the day had only just begun.

  He didn't want a repeat of last time when he'd forgotten about the worm he'd collected. He'd discovered that one squashed to juicy bits in his pocket when he'd put a hand in there.

  He could think of only one thing to do.

  He picked up the worm with two fingers and threw it, under-handed, back into the grass. He didn't know if a worm could survive such a throw, yet he hoped it did.

  "Mr. Yardrow, care to join us this morning?"

  The gym teacher had asked this question amidst silence, which to Kenneth meant that he'd been asked a previous question, one he hadn't heard.

  Three girls standing together giggled at him.

  The gym teacher, a thin, wispy woman known to Kenneth as Mrs. Wren, scowled at him. In her wrinkled right hand, she held an old wooden tennis racket with white tape about the neck. She'd judged the morning weather warm enough for all the students to go outside in their tight white t-shirts and loose green shorts, yet she herself had opted to wear a white windbreaker jacket with gray sweat pants and green sneakers. Her salt-and-pepper graying hair swayed in the morning breeze. Beside her sat a plastic barrel full of plastic tennis rackets. Another barrel, unopened, contained frayed white shuttlecocks.

  The class was set to play badminton, as they had done the previous day.

  Kenneth turned away from his study of the worms. He glanced at his teacher before looking down at the ground. "All right." He sighed.

  "Good. Then let's start. You all remember the rules, right? We're short one net today, so you'll have to split into teams of three. Let's see, there are thirteen of you, so one person will have to be a substitute."

  Kenneth, already knowing where this was going, sat down on the damp ground. The rest of the class, understanding all too well, pulled out rackets and shuttlecocks. Before long, the sounds of children playing badminton could be heard throughout the courtyard.

  Kenneth noticed that one team only had two players. A tall girl with thick glasses had paired up with a boy who had yellow sweat stains decorating his armpits. The boy's left shoe was untied. The girl's hair appeared not to have been washed recently.

  The student who was supposed to be their partner, a thin girl with a hole in the top of her sneaker, sat down next to Kenneth. Kenneth huffed.

  "I don't want to do this either," the girl said.

  Mrs. Wren, occupied with demonstrating the finer points of serving to a group of three, hadn't noticed her. The girl swiveled her head towards Kenneth. "I'm Savannah. You're Kenneth, right?"

  "Only when I'm awake," Kenneth said.

  Savannah pulled at one of her two pigtails, frowning. "I don't get it," she said.

  "It's supposed to be a joke. You know, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? They both transform when they sleep by the dark of a new moon."

  "What, both of them?" Savannah studied Kenneth's face intently, trying to discover if he was lying. "Who do they transform into?"

  "They change into each other. They're like, what do you call it, alter egos. They're two people sharing the same body. You know what I mean? When I sleep, I turn into somebody else."

  "I don't believe you. You're not a werewolf," Savannah said.

  A short girl whose ponytail had come halfway undone took a clumsy swat at a shuttlecock. So close was she to the net that the object struck it, bounced off and dinked her on the forehead. She dropped her racket, falling to her knees, tears coming to her eyes as she began wailing. Mrs. Wren, having seen such episodes before, did not hurry to remedy the situation. The game continued in spite of the girl's crying.

  "Like that, see? Like how Sarah there can turn on a dime into a weepy mess," Kenneth said, pointing.

  "You don't turn on a dime. That's too small to turn anything on. Anyway, she's always like that. One time, in sewing class, she dropped her needle onto her shoe. She didn't even cut herself, but there she went. Stupid Sue, we all call her. Always crying about everything. That's not like sleeping in the presence of a new moon."

  "Meh, you don't understand anyway. Why am I even talking to you?"

  Savannah grumbled, "I'm the one who started talking to you."

  "Why'd you do that?"

  "Oh, I don't know. Maybe I thought I could stop you from being such a smelly face. I can see that I was wrong about that."

  "If I have a smelly face, then you have a smelly butt."

  "If I have a smelly butt, then you have a smelly belly button."

  "How would you know that?"

  Savannah said, "It's obvious, isn't it? Everything about you is smelly, even your belly button."

  "What would you know? You're just a girl."

  Savannah, who had heard this statement many times before, got up and joined the team she had left. By this time, Sue's crying, with the teacher's consolation, had subsided into sniffling sobs. Kenneth crossed his arms over his chest.

  "Play all you want. See if I care," he said.

  THREE

  AFTERNOON CAME THE same way it always did for Kenneth. The day drew to a close while he sat at his homeroom desk, waiting to hear his bus announced as being ready for departure.

  He was only one of two students in his class who rode the number seventy-four bus, along with Savannah. The thought of sharing a bus with her made Kenneth remember everything she'd said during gym class.

  They hadn't spoken to each other all day, even during lunch when they stood next to each other in line to get french fries. He decided that when his bus number was called, he'd be the first one to board so he could sit as far back as he wanted. Savannah always sat in the front seat next to the door.

  Kenneth found himself doodling on a piece of scrap paper when bus number fourteen was called over the PA system.

  Fourteen had always been called after seventy-four. He probably missed hearing his number, but if he had, Savannah, sitting on the other side of the room, also missed it as well. Kenneth had never known her to be absent-minded about anything, particularly when it came to leaving school for the day. She never hesitated to leave, unlike Sue, who sniffled every time it was time to go home.

  Kenneth glanced over at his homeroom teacher to see if anything might be amiss.

  Mr. Dunkelson sat behind his desk, grading papers as he always did at the end of the day. If he had observed anything unusual, he hadn't thought it significant enough to look up from the motion of his red pen upon white paper. By this time of day, stubble had started growing on his face so that his normally open, smiling mug looked older than usual.

  He reached with an index finger to push his glasses further up his nose. He seemed not in the least perturbed, not from where Kenneth sat.

  Bus number thirty-three was called.

  Kenneth's foot tapped against the floor.

  He resisted the urge to bite his fingernails, a habit which had drawn the ire of his mother one too many times for his liking.

  Only two more buses to go.

  Seventy-four might be late, but surely not this late.

  Eighty-three and forty-one were called.

  Kenneth found himself sitting alone in the classroom with Mr. Dunkelson and Savannah.

  To Kenneth's surprise, his teacher appeared drowsy.

  Dunkelson's head drooped while his eyes, half-closed, failed to observe that he had scribbled red marks on the surface of his desk instead of on a test. Shortly thereafter, he fell asleep.

  That was when everything changed.

  FOUR

  A
COLUMN OF air shimmered in front of Mr. Dunkelson's desk and bent in upon itself, as though from a nearby source of heat.

  Kenneth had no other way to describe the phenomenon he observed.

  It split vertically down the middle, like he'd seen on that Charlton Heston movie they put on television every Easter. In the movie, Heston had raised up his staff, and the sea had split apart so the Israelites could escape the pharaoh's chariots.

  Now, the very air in front of Kenneth was doing the same thing.

  A vertical blackness opened up, a blackness so complete that Kenneth thought no light could ever penetrate it.

  A faint whirring sound echoed throughout the room.

  Kenneth saw Savannah put her hands over her ears.

  He wondered where the sound was coming from.

  Then, he noticed a pencil suspended in mid-air next to his leg.

  He'd knocked his pencil off his desk, yet it hadn't completed its fall. The pencil pointed upward, stuck in mid-air as though encased in glass.

  Kenneth reached out a hand to grab it. The closer his hand got to the pencil, the more resistance he felt.

  It reminded him of the time in science class when the teacher had him work with magnets. He had tried to nudge both north poles together, but no matter how hard he tried, they would slide away from each other of their own accord.

  He thought of this as his hand slid off to the side, as though an invisible force prevented him from grabbing his pencil.

  He tried standing up.

  Before his knees could strike the underside of the desk, the resistance made itself felt again.

  His whole body slid off abruptly to the left.

  He struck the carpet, backside-first.

  Kenneth blinked in surprise.

  He