"Not even if she can help you make sense of what's going on?" Levi asked.
"She? Who are you thinking of... Emily?? No way," Brett said. "She doesn't even like me."
"Emily likes everybody," Levi said. "And she's really smart, you know. I didn't even have to say who I was thinking of. You thought of her right away too." Levi started following back to the school. the more excited he got, the bigger his hand motions became, but he still kept his voice low. "You're going to want to think up a story for that arm, by the way."
"Dude, I'm not telling Emily anything. She's your friend, not mine." Brett still didn't notice any pain. It's not that he wasn't aware, in a peripheral way, that he'd been injured. It just didn't bother him at all. But at least this would give him the opportunity to visit the nurses office.
"One time I asked her about the Chinese ships that were supposed to have come to the Americas way back before Columbus," Levi said, ignoring what Brett said completely, "and she gave me pages and pages of stuff, pictures and citations and everything, all in a couple hours. She just knew exactly where to look. I'm telling you, she knows pretty much anything. I bet if we asked her, she'd be able to pull up a couple other cases of people like you. Unexplained stuff is her favorite."
"Wait, you think there could be others like me?" Brett asked. He felt a little uneasy about that. So far, anything that Brett had faced went down without too many issues. But if he ever ran up against someone like himself, someone who constantly had to keep his real strength in check? Brett didn't say it, but he'd always felt like some sort of superhero, an avenging angel or something, meant to fight monsters. That's what he did, all the time. Somehow, the thought of others like him made him feel smaller.
"Of course you wouldn't be the only one, Brett. If their are as many monsters as you say, constantly giving you grief, than I just bet that you can't be the only hero. Otherwise, wouldn't more people notice the monsters?" Levi said, sounding utterly convinced of his own logic.
"Still, I don't want to tell Emily the Weird," Brett said. Levi glared at him for it, but Brett didn't care. It was his life, and his secret. "I don't care what she knows. I don't want her to know about me. I don't want her adding me to her collection of 'strange encounters'. I got more than enough weirdness in my life as it is."
"But aren't you even curious to know how you got to be this way?" Levi asks.
"I doubt anybody really knows how we get to be what we are," Brett said. "No Emily. I'm trusting you on this, Levi."
"Fine," Levi grumbled. "I'll just have to try to figure it out on my own."
"That's what I've been doing for the past five years," Brett said, grinning. "Seems like my whole life sometimes didn't even start until then."
"Five years?" Levi sounds surprised. "I didn't think it'd been going on that long."
"The first time I didn't fight anything. I just saw it. I was on an airplane, and I looked out the window, and their it was, an eagle the same size as the plane. An eagle the size of a Boeing 747. It swooped right past us, and one of the little kids a few seats ahead of me started yelling, but nobody else noticed. Too busy sleeping or watching the in-flight movie to see what was right next to them." Brett thought often about the strangely immense intelligence he'd seen in the eye of the bird. It had kept pace with the plane for awhile, almost like it was waiting for him to notice it. Then, when he had, the eagle had swooped away.
"Roc," Levi said confidently, "Giant birds like that are called Rocs. If you'd talked to Emily, you'd know what it was already."
"Dude, shut up about Emily already," Brett growled. "I don't care what she knows, I don't want her nose in my business." He made a mock swing at Levi, who dodged it, grinning. "Anyways, I know what a roc is. I looked them up right after I saw the eagle. Wikipedia said they were from Madagascar, and this thing didn't look like that. It looked more... I don't know, more like it was used to cold weather. Northerly, or something."
They were almost back inside the school. As Brett opened the doors, Levi asked, "And that was the first time?"
"Yeah," Brett answered, "Although to be honest things didn't really start showing up on my doorstep until we moved to here."
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