Riser (Teen Horror/Science Fiction) (Book #1 in The Riser Saga) ((Volume 1)) (3 page)

I reached the designated steel bench to wait for the Hover-Shuttle. The waiting area itself was circular like a fifteen-foot bulls-eye made of grey asphalt. A few seconds later, I could hear the whizzing sound of the Hover-Shuttle coming my way. Closer and closer the rectangular metal box buzzed toward me. It was clunky and old, but most things that came to the trailer park were. Society pretty much wanted to pretend we didn’t exist, so when it came to public works and transportation we were last on the list of repairs. That’s what happens when there are twenty-seven billion people on the planet and over half of them are rich and demand their needs come first. The other half of us does all the menial work and shut our mouths. No one wants to stir the pot in fear that the National Insurance for Age-pro would be cut. As it stood we had to wait until we were thirty. If the government decided to cut the funding, they could push that limit to forty or even fifty!

The orange-yellow glow and the whirling of ducted fans from the belly of the Hover-Shuttle lowered to the center of the waiting area. The propulsion fans ran on hydrogen fuel cell technology, so to kill two birds with one stone, there were containers under the vehicles collecting the steam and water from the cells and then later to dump it in recycling plants. There the plants would send the water to all sorts of places from drinking water distribution facilities to watering tanks located in most suburban neighborhoods for their greens. Anywhere and everywhere they could use it.

The metal on the shuttle was chipped and dented giving the appearance of a beat up refrigerator. The passenger door lowered to the ground with a loud CLUNK and turned into a set of grated metal steps. Skipping two at a time, I climbed up the stairs and entered.

The interior wasn’t much nicer than the exterior. The seats were arranged like any public transportation: two rows of two-seaters with a middle aisle in between. There was only one other passenger besides me: a businessman, suit and tie, reading from his electronic reader, keeping to himself. I sat down near the front. The driver waited a few moments as if someone from the trailer park would come running up the stairs at any second. Or maybe he just counted to ten in his head at every stop. Whatever it was, at some invisible marker of time, he closed the door of the craft and we were off.

The humming sound of the Hover-Shuttle was almost deafening as we sailed toward
Geoffrey Turner High School
, the next stop. I looked out the window as we traveled and admired the landscape. Where the trailer park was stark and devoid of much vegetation, once outside its perimeter, the ground became lush with bright green grass and a field of California Oaks. Once the International Law of 2142 was passed requiring the planting of a tree every twenty feet, most places decided to re-plant near extinct trees like the California Oak. The law was passed as soon as everyone realized the down sides to Age-pro. Overpopulation. This basically meant we’d run out of oxygen if we didn’t start evening out the balance of the world. More people meant
more
things, which meant
more
natural resources being drained, trees being one of the highest for paper alone. The first law to be passed was in 2068 that outlawed anything printed on paper. Electronic reading devices were already a popular luxury item back then, but they soon became a requirement if you ever intended to read anything. Only e-books were legal. But it just wasn’t enough. There just wasn’t enough plant life on the Earth to sustain the amount of people inhabiting it so they had to make planting more trees a worldwide law. It was hard for me to imagine living on this planet without the amount of trees we had now. I loved trees. I loved getting lost in the forest with a good book or to just sit under the shade and have a moment to myself.

The Hover-Shuttle flew past the oak forest and I could see my high school drawing near. It looked like something from a fairytale: early 1800’s architecture (re-created of course: the school was only twenty-years-old) made entirely of brick and mortar, iron-wrought gates and ivy growing up the sides of the school like veins pumping life into the building.

I just wished the people inside it were as nice and the building was to look at. Being poor in a rich school didn’t exactly lend itself to making friends. I had two people who were brave enough to socialize with the “leech” as I was so fondly referred to. And I truly considered them friends. Bill and Nancy. Bill was a sweetheart. He was loyal and simple in the kind of way that made it nice to be around him. He was also easy on the eyes with his perfectly messy brown hair, well-muscled body (I think the guy had a ten-pack if that’s possible!) and a boyish face with long eyelashes. In the entire high school, his family was the richest by far! That was why they didn’t give him much of a hard time hanging around with me. The one thing the rich kids had in common was the hierarchy of elitism. And since Bill could buy and sell almost everyone that attended Geoffrey Turner High, he’d get his usual kiss ass line of admirers every day whether I was with him or not. I always felt safest when I was with Bill since the worst kind of behavior I’d experience from the true nasties of the school was a total ignorance of my existence. When I wasn’t with him it was an entirely different story. That’s when the claws came out.

Bill and I met randomly sophomore year when I rounded a corner and slammed into his six-foot wall of a body. His stuff flew, my stuff flew, it was a mess. But the most tragic part about it was I broke my electronic reader, a lightning bolt shaped crack straight down the middle. Electronic readers weren’t cheap mind you, I had to work double shifts at the ice-cream shop just to buy mine. I nearly cried between gulps of apologies. I thought I’d be crucified right then and there for daring to touch the precious Bill Merryweather, let alone knocking him on his butt. And without an electronic reader I’d have been kicked out of school for sure. I couldn’t count the amount of times the school informed me, “Geoffrey Turner High is not a charity. If you can’t purchase your own items, you will be excused.”

Jill Forester (the ringleader of my torment for the last four years) was the first to kneel down and try to help Bill up, sending nasty glares at me about five times a second. Her hair was as black as her heart and bright green eyes that made her cruelly beautiful. Why are all the mean girls gorgeous?! She was thin and perfect and she knew it.

When she saw my broken reader she simply smirked and said, “Karma.”

Karma,
this
! I wanted to say, but held my tongue and apologized to Bill again.

“You should be sorry.” Jill couldn’t help herself.

If ever I wanted to smack someone it was in that moment. But Bill did something I’ll never forget. He shrugged Jill off and stood up. That alone caused a dramatic gasp from the crowd. He offered me his hand and smiled in a way that said,
don’t listen to her. No harm, no foul, I’m fine.
I took his hand and he lifted me to my feet. He picked up my reader, handed it to me and genuinely looked like he was sorry. The group surrounding us already started to close in on Bill, shutting off any conversation, until I was standing alone in the middle of the hall with my broken reader. Later that day when I sat down in Geometry class there was a brand new, state of the art, grossly expensive, electronic reader lying on my desk with a card. The card simply said, “Sorry about your reader. Hope this will work for you. Bill.” My heart stopped. No one had ever done something like that for me before, especially someone as popular as Bill. He was really sticking his neck out on the social line for me. It was the nicest thing I had ever owned
and still own
to this day. I knew he had a ton of money and buying a reader was probably like spending a penny to him, but it was a kindness he was in no way obligated to do, and genuinely came from the goodness of his heart. Ever since then we’ve been close friends, despite Jill’s agony over the union.

My friendship with Nancy was a different story. She was considered upper middle class which was still super rich compared to me, but not rich enough to give her the same respect that Bill had. We met freshman year when we were forced to be lab partners in Biology. She wasn’t happy about it. I was new and everyone knew I lived in the trailer park before I even arrived on campus. That put me in the below filth category on everyone’s radar though no one would openly admit this for fear of looking like the prejudiced jerks they were. I knew they’d come up with a “real” reason for hating me later, but as for the moment of my arrival, it would just be an unsaid loathing toward me. Nancy did the usual: rolled her gorgeous blue eyes and flipped her long locks of blonde hair, in annoyance of my presence, audibly grunting exasperation, all for the pleasure of the rest of the class. Just another perfectly beautiful mean girl. When the teacher handed out the dead frogs we were supposed to cut up, her face turned greener than their corpses. For me it was a room full of black swirling holes.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

Nancy tried to ignore the fact that I even spoke to her, but after a few moments she shook her head. “I don’t think I can do it.”

I didn’t know what to say. I was afraid if I said anything she’d guffaw and tell me to shut up anyway, but as rude as she was to me, I could still see how much the frogs were upsetting her.

Then she spoke. Her voice barely audible, her face growing paler by the second, “I had a pet frog that just died… Jimmy.”

She said it with such emotion and heartache, all my feelings of annoyance toward her melted away.

“I don’t think I can cut into him.” Even though her voice was a whisper her eyes were screaming with panic and anguish.

That was when I decided to use my gift. There was no way I could let this poor girl cut into what she saw as her pet.

“We won’t be cutting anything today,” I said and I popped every single frog back into existence.

It was pure and utter chaos. There were jumping frogs everywhere: on the desks, on the students, on the stools, on the floor. Screams and laughter mixed together like a symphony of bedlam. The teacher tried to wrangle the frogs into the garbage receptor, but since I controlled the frogs, that didn’t happen.

“Open the windows,” I said very calmly to Nancy, whose expression had done a complete turn around. There were tears of joy streaming down her face: joy and relief. Whether she knew exactly what I was doing or not, she didn’t say, but she knew I was somehow responsible and she nodded and walked to the windows, opening them wide.

I made the frogs jump and whiz toward the windows like moths to a flame and within seconds they were gone. All that was left was a very excited and amped up Biology class. Nancy sat down next to me, wonder in her eyes, but she didn’t say anything.

“Calm down, okay, calm down, get in your seats.” The biology teacher tried to bring some semblance of order back to the room. “We won’t be dividing into lab partners today, obviously… I need to sit for a second.” The teacher had finally grasped what just happened and he couldn’t seem to keep it together. After he sat he said, “You can sit in your regularly assigned seats if you like. Just read chapters four and five, I’ll be right back.” He got up and left the classroom without another word.

The room broke out into chatter and laughter at what just happened. Jill Forester waltzed over to Nancy and said in the most condescending and superior voice she could, “You don’t have to sit next to
that
anymore, Nancy. Come over and sit with Joan and me.”

I waited for the inevitable rejection from Nancy. I expected it and I honestly wouldn’t have been offended. Social ladders in high school are tricky things. If you get knocked down a few rungs, it’s really difficult to climb back up, and being friends with me would probably knock her off the ladder completely.

But Nancy didn’t even flinch, didn’t even hesitate, she just turned to Jill and said in a cheerful voice, “No thanks.” Then without another word of acknowledgement to Jill she turned to me with a smile, “What are you doing after school?”

Jill was in shock, standing there as if she had just been slapped in the face. After a moment she seemed to recover. “Nancy, this is your last chance. I’m serious.”

Still smiling, acting completely oblivious, Nancy turned to her. “Serious about what?”

Jill didn’t have a response to the directness of the question. As if spelling it out would somehow expose her as the raging bigot she was. In one fell swoop Nancy had beat Jill at her own social game by either making her admit to her prejudice against me, or back out and fight the fight in some other way. People were starting to stare at this strange confrontation, so she decided to back away, but not without an evil glare directed at the two of us. She was always full of those.

Ever since then, Nancy and I have been best friends.

The Hover-Shuttle landed at the station on the outskirts of Geoffrey Turner High. It was right next to the black iron wrought gate that served as metal open arms to the school. I did love this school, despite the people in it that made my life torture. There was something so comforting about its presence that I couldn’t quite explain. Maybe it was because I earned my right to be there. I earned the scholarships, I worked a part-time job, I made the grades, I deserved to be there. I wasn’t born into it; I made it happen and I was actually a little proud of that.