Disturbed Lincoln

3

     I place my tray down at the table. I sit across from Clyde and the two others, Rusty and Stella. They both stare at me with a happy face while Clyde introduces us to each other. "Everyone, this is Lincoln; Lincoln, this is everyone." They both waved. "Hi Lincoln, I'm Stella. I'm the cool one of the group." She pointed to the red-haired kid with buck teeth sitting beside her. "That's Rusty, he's the pathetic loser that keeps spreading rumors that we're dating. Have you heard those rumors?" Rusty looked nervous and was visibly sweating. "No, I have not," I tell her, to which she grins. "Good. I'd hate for you to get the wrong impression." Rusty switched from a nervous to a more angered expression. "You know, I don't appreciate you talking about me like that! You're gonna make him hate me!" She takes out a stick of bubble gum and plops it in her mouth. "He probably already hated you after he saw your face." Rusty groans and I start gnawing off small pieces of my pizza.

     "Guys," Clyde says, "be nice! Lincoln is new here, we don't want him to think we're all mean, right? Let's show him how we have some fun, who's with me?" Clyde and Stella give a contemptuous look at each other before agreeing. Clyde reaches down beside him into his backpack and pulls out a pack of cards. He opens it and spills the deck in front of him. "Okay, Lincoln, the game is simple. I pull a card and you have to guess what card I have! Got it?" I nod my head. Clyde took a card out from somewhere in the middle of the deck, then held it up with its artful back facing me. Rusty talks over the moment like a baseball announcer right before a home run is struck. "Clyde has pulled a card from the deck and Lincoln is studying it carefully. Will he be able to guess what's on the other side? Will he win the grand prize of fifty thousand dollars?!"

     "There's a prize?" I ask. Stella strikes Rusty across the shoulder. "No, there's no prize." Rusty stops commentating and instead rubs his hurting shoulder. "Hey! You could've left a bruise!" he yelled at her. I ignore them both and stare intently at the card. Nothing seems off; there are no bends or creases, nor are there any marks that separate this card from the rest. Then, something mystical happens. In my head, I hear a voice—my own voice, calling from within. Along with this audible oddity came a sight. Everyone's eyes, as I glanced around, no longer had circular pupils, but tiny black spades with an even tinier white five inside them. "What the..." I mutter. Clyde takes my incredulous whisper as hesitation, and so he rushes me. "Just take a guess! Hurry up!" I sigh deeply, and then say: "...Five of spades?"

     Clyde's jaw drops, and then when Rusty and Stella lean over behind him to see the card, their jaws also drop. "How the hell did you know?" Rusty asks, laughing at the chances. Clyde threw down the card, and staring right back at me was a large black spade and a five in two corners. "We have to try again! I mean, what if you're a visionary?" Stella leans towards my end of the table. "Yeah! Can you tell the future?" My mouth readies to say no, but forcibly, thoughts start to reemerge. I remember the world-ending storm outside the window, could... could it be that I saw the future? No! Nonsense! First of all, guessing a card isn't proof of anything! Second of all, I did not see the end of the world! It was a hallucination, and taking it as truth would be feeding my already-empowered delusional mind.

     "Let's go!" Clyde yelled, "Second card!" He flips another up from the deck and holds it in front of me. This time the sight comes faster. A red heart with a black eight looked tattooed on Clyde's neck. I hum an uninterested tone, then say "Eight of hearts?" Clyde shoots up from his seat and throws down the card. My guess was correct. "Unbelievable!" he shouted. Stella starts giggling. "You HAVE to be cheating! You dirty trickster, did you look at the reflection in Clyde's thick bottle-cap glasses?" I shook my head. "I just guessed like you asked me to." Getting uncomfortable with the unsettling pattern, I wished to move on. "Can we just... eat? I'm tired of staring at cards." Rusty jolted forward to ask "Can you guess what grade I'll get this year in math?" A giant black 'F' appeared on Rusty's forehead, but I told him "You'll pass, for sure."

     The bell sounded its horrid tone once more, dismissing us to our next class, and on the way to my next period, all three of them followed closely behind me. I turned around and confronted them. "Are you guys following me?" To which Rusty replied, "How did he know? He really is a visionary!" I refuted his assertion immediately, responding flatly "I could hear you whispering to each other. Now will you please leave me alone?" That's when Stella stepped ahead of them both and handed me a crumpled paper, and then they all three left, still gawking at my "ability." I unfolded the note and read the penciled text centered on it. "Tonight, 4235 Helmgrove Street, blue house, can't miss it." I'm going to assume (without using magic wizard powers) that this is Stella's address. What does she want from me? A relationship? Surely not. We just met, and if she isn't impressed by Rusty then I doubt she'd care much for me. I moved my thumb incidentally, and it revealed tiny parenthesized text: "Clyde and Rusty are coming. Show up, idiot."

     Dear god, I can only imagine what that'll be about. Does she want to take advantage of my lucky guessing streak? Is that it? I hope not, because I'd disappoint her. I don't have a superpower, I have a disorder, and it's absolutely detrimental and disrespectful to tell someone with a disorder that they can do magic tricks with their imbalanced brain. Ugh... but I have nothing else to do tonight. Is it even worth it? When I was with them I didn't spiral into my mind's abyss and I didn't feel anxious either. That was relieving. Maybe one time wouldn't hurt. Who knows, maybe I'll be getting a kiss. Wouldn't that be wonderful? The school's walls start to shift and squirm like revolting flesh crawling with infection.

Any distraction is better than this.

Anything at all.