He shrugged dismissively, the ghost of a smile playing about his thin lips.
“Do it, Rebecca. Activate him.”
Alex woke up slowly, his awareness returning to him piece by piece, a little like waking up after a night of serious drinking, but without as much immediate pain. First, he felt the soft cotton sheets bunched in his hands, and realized he was in a bed. And not his own, unless someone had replaced his institutional bedding with high-thread count sheets and added a bunch of unnecessary pillows. It was warm, he realized, but not uncomfortable. He was lying on his back, his head propped up and his arms folded neatly over his stomach. Then he became aware of smells: some kind of incense, his own sweat, and then a hint of the soft, unmistakable scent of a girl’s hair coming from the pillow beneath his head.
So, he was in a girl’s bed. Alex thought briefly about opening his eyes, but he felt too tired to manage it. It seemed pleasant, anyway, lying there, in the softness and the cozy warmth of the bed, only languidly aware of his aching body. He felt strangely calm, almost blissful, immobile and safe.
Perhaps he fell back asleep then. He couldn’t be certain whether the sound of a lighter and then a protracted coughing fit merely jarred him from his reverie, or whether it actually woke him up again. The effect was the same, regardless — Alex was jolted from his placid contemplation into awareness of his situation, his body’s litany of aches and pains, and his presence in the strange bed. A strange girl’s bed. With a certain amount of trepidation, Alex opened his eyes.
The room was dim, as the shades had been drawn across the room’s single window, and only a sliver of the late afternoon sun made its way across the giant four-post bed that occupied much of the room’s available space. A pair of old-looking bureaus made of dark wood and a dresser topped with a muted television displaying commercials rounded out the furnishings. On the other side of the bed, wrapped in a red Anaheim Angels-branded blanket, Rebecca hacked and coughed sheepishly, red-faced, motioning for Alex to look away.
“Are you smoking pot?” Alex asked skeptically, sitting up against the headboard and attempting to extract his lower body from the tangle of sheets and blankets he was wrapped in. He seemed to have picked up a headache to accompany his body’s various pains at some point. “You are a seriously terrible role model.”
“Give me a break,” Rebecca croaked. “I have a headache. Anyway, it’s your fault.”
“What? How is that possibly my fault?”
Rebecca shrugged and reached over to the sideboard, retrieving a heavy blown-glass pipe and a cheap plastic lighter.
“Never mind. Do you smoke this stuff?”
Alex shook his head.
“Fine,” Rebecca said, putting the lighter to the bowl and taking a long hit. She held her breath for a moment, and then exhaled a stream of dense, skunky smoke at the ceiling. “Be a drag. Whatever.”
“Why do I feel so,” Alex paused, searching for words, “um, bad?”
“That’s your fault, too,” Rebecca said, making a face at Alex. “You started freaking out, when we activated you. First, Michael tried to hold you down, and when that didn’t work, I had to bliss you out.”
“Yeah. So, uh, bliss?”
“State of semi-conscious ecstasy. Nicest way I know to put somebody down. I’m an empath, remember,” Rebecca said, rolling her eyes. “You sure you don’t want any of this?”
Alex looked warily at the bubbled blue glass pipe. He started to refuse again, and then it occurred to him that the random drug tests he’d been subjected to for so many years that they had become routine were unlikely to ever happen again. The Academy probably didn’t have any such policy, he figured, if Rebecca, who he thought was some kind of school councilor, was trying to get him stoned. And his head really was starting to hurt.
“Fuck it. Sure. Why not?”
Rebecca chuckled and handed him the pipe and lighter.
“Famous last words, right?”
Alex barely managed to get the bowl lit before he started coughing, his throat raw and his mouth filled with spit. Rebecca prized the pipe from his limp hands while he coughed, then grinned and pounded him on the back approvingly.
“You are such a baby,” Rebecca said cheerfully.
Alex managed to stop coughing, caught his breath, and then gave her his best sheepish, glassy-eyed smile. She laughed and tousled his hair. He didn’t feel stoned at all, and he thought for a moment about asking for another hit, but then decided to let it go. He figured he’d already embarrassed himself enough as it was.
“So, uh, why I am in your room, Rebecca?”
Rebecca turned to glare at him, the pipe still at her lips, the bowl burning cherry red.
“You owe me a new couch, you little shit,” she said, blowing smoke at him. “I’d had that thing for years, too. It was like a friend of mine. So many memories.”
“And you made me lie down on it? That’s gross.”
Rebecca smacked at his head playfully.
“It was clean, asshole. And leather couches last forever… oh, shit,” she said, panicked, patting down the bedding around her. “Where is that fucking remote?”
“What?”
“Aha!”
Rebecca pulled the remote from underneath the pillow next to her. She hit a button and the TV’s speakers squawked to life.
“Rebecca?”
“Shh.”
Alex squinted at the television, and then looked over at Rebecca in surprise.
“Are you serious — ” he began, only to be cut off by Rebecca waving at him to shut up.
“Hush,” she commanded, glazed eyes glued to the television. “’Survivor’ is on,” she said, helpfully pointing at the TV with the remote. “You ever watch this show, Alex? They make them do some pretty messed up stuff, eat bugs and shit, you know?”
“I can’t believe that you watch this crap,” Alex grumbled, settling back against the pillows behind him.
“Well, I do, and we are in my room, so, you’ll just have to deal. Give it a chance. You should like it — half these girls spend the show making a concerted effort to show America their tits, anyway.”
Alex considered pressing her for answers, and then gave up on the idea almost immediately. After all, he figured, why take on a fight he was guaranteed to lose? Anyway, he had to admit that she was right about the boobs on display, even if they did appear to be mostly on the fake side. He waited patiently for the commercial break, wondering if the dialogue on this show had always been so vapid, or if he was just stoned and tired.
“Okay,” Rebecca said breezily, hitting the mute button and silencing a detergent ad, “you have until the commercials end. Knock yourself out.”
Alex felt a bit groggy, if not exactly wasted, but his headache had receded a bit. In balance, then, he figured he was no worse off than when he had woken, but it was still hard for him to formulate the questions he wanted to ask. Or perhaps it was simply that he had too many.
“So, what happened when you activated me? I mean, except for being tired and a little sore, I don’t feel any different.”
“Besides destroying my couch? Well, we didn’t have much trouble activating you, but I guess we did a little bit too good of a job. Normally, it’s a pretty simple procedure, even for one of you rare types. Technically, a telepath would work almost as well as an empath, but Gaul likes to have an empath on hand, in case things go wrong. As it turns out, that was a very good idea.”
Rebecca cleared her throat, and then reached for the glass of water on the bedside table beside her and drank deeply, making Alex acutely aware of how thirsty he was. He didn’t want to interrupt Rebecca’s explanation, though, so he decided to deal with it for now.
“That catalyst effect of yours is a pretty unpredictable thing, Alex. The moment I put you under, it started to affect me.” Rebecca looked a bit uncomfortable to Alex as she spoke, and he wondered what about the situation bothered her. “I thought I had it under control, but it’s… intoxicating, you know? It’s all this power, right? And the further down I pushed, the closer I came to activating you, the more intense the effect became.”