Receiver - Chapter One

It was weeks after my mother's death, and I was only a little more than 8 years old. My father had begun to act strangely, and I didn't know why. Obviously, I told myself, he missed Mom just as much as I did. Mom was a fantastic woman; she was warm, tender, loving, and she always knew what to do. But I acted sadly, and my father acted so… angry. At the time, I tried my hardest to convince myself that I did nothing wrong, and he wasn't angry at me, but… thinking back, maybe he was.

My father was a great father, in my eyes, when my mother was alive. Even though he left mom and I alone all of the time to go drink with his buddies, I didn't know any better. For all I knew, he went on long walks after I went to bed. It was innocent. I didn't know how he treated my mother, and I didn't know she didn't actually fall down the stairs at work. Everything is innocent and believable through a child's eyes.

After my mother passed, though, he abandoned hiding all of the ghastly things he did from me. He'd leave me alone all of the time when he was out. I did what I could for myself, which wasn't much; I lived on cereal for dinners most nights. And on those nights, I knew better than to stay up. If my father caught me awake, it wasn't pretty.

Now, eight years later, I've basically learned how to keep him happy. Life's better now than it was then, at least. Sure, I have to basically provide for us, but it seems like that's how it's always been. I'm lucky I can work now, and that there's dinner on the table when he actually comes home.

This morning I awoke to the annoying chatter of birds outside my window, accompanied with the infuriating beeping noise of my alarm clock. I rolled out of bed groggily, not daring to look in a mirror, then went about my daily routine of getting ready and whatnot.
Or at least that was the plan.

My blood went as cold as my dripping hair as I saw his burly figure laying in a heap on the bed I always made before he arrived home at god-knows-when AM. The bed creaked as the half-asleep creature known as my father squirmed upon it. I found myself holding my breath as I prayed I didn't wake him. I knew if I woke him he'd yell at me until I cried. Hopefully that was all he would do.

I rushed quietly out of the house as quickly as I could, not truly breathing again until I'd turned the street corner.

I was almost ten minutes too early for my bus when I reached the stop, but I didn't care. I pulled out my old, beaten up MP3 player to listen to as I waited. Don't blink; they won't even miss you at all…

When the bus finally pulled up, I was forced to sit- I use the term loosely- on a seat with two other people. The district keeps saying they'll get another one, but at our school? We're lucky if we don't get internally harmed from the cafeteria food.

I'd like to say that school is the most peaceful part of my day. It would be, if I were able to go for an hour without some image I'd rather nor subject myself to seeing pulling at the edges of my mind. Take right now, for example. I can see that Bradley's soul is slowly dying. I can't see why just yet, not really, but it's going down quickly. How can I tell? I can see into dormant souls. What is a dormant soul? You see Kendra up there? She's been with so many guys she can't keep track. She doesn't love them all. Her father was killed when she was 12 and she's been trying to fill the void ever since it was created, leaving her broken. I can see right into her core and, by default, exactly what she and Brad did last week.

Like I said, not exactly pleasant.

If it weren't for this, school would be a marvelous place. It'd be a refuge. It's the one place where I can prove myself to be worth something, and where most of the adults actually take me seriously because I try my hardest to be a good student. I'm not saying it's easy, but being smart helps.

It was like a bug has suddenly crawled into the edges of my brain, then it hit me like a ton of bricks. I could clearly see one of my fellow classmates and his stepsister sitting in what seemed to be a clubhouse. But, of course, they were much too old for these types of shenanigans…

The vision was too strong; I couldn't pull out of it like I could weaker ones, and it rendered me almost totally blind.

What I saw made me want to scream and run. I knew Liam's soul was dead, but how could someone force themselves upon their own stepsister? I didn't know Amanda very well, but now I understood why I'd been getting the pull of a faltering soul whenever I passed her in the hallway…

Finally I was catapulted out after Liam took his seat. I was glad his assigned seat was behind mine, because my expression wasn't a very happy one…

For the entire class period I had to use all of my energy to avoid getting sucked back into Liam's memories. Poor Amanda… Was there something I could do to stop this? Was there something I could do to help her?

I'd been getting sucked into the memories and fantasies of dormant souls for as long as I can remember. I know I've always wanted to help, and I've never quite known how. Usually, though, I get sucked into the minds of those who have pitied their souls dead; this was another level completely. This was completely foreign to me, and though I'd never saved anyone's soul- an act they'd always had to accomplish on their own- before, I knew I had to do something this time…