Thursday dawned with a deathly silence, broken only by the creaking of the pine trees and the incessant drumming of the rain. I stayed in bed, staring at the ceiling, feeling the weight of "normality" crushing my chest. When I went down to the kitchen, Charlie was already finishing his coffee, with that look of worry etched into the wrinkles of his forehead.
"Dad, I've been thinking..." I said, leaning against the doorframe. "I think I'd rather stay home today. I don't want to overexert myself. I feel like if I see one more ball or hear one more shout in the hallway, my head is going to explode."
Charlie looked at me with evident relief. He always preferred the safety of his home's four walls over the uncertainty of the outside world. "Seems like the sensible choice, Mael. Rest, read something, sleep. You have absolute permission."
Bella, who was filling her coffee thermos by the counter, turned slowly. Her eyes sought mine with an analytical intensity. She knew I was lying. She knew my "rest" had nothing to do with fatigue, let alone laziness. But, for once, she decided to be an accomplice to my deception. She said nothing; she only gave me a short nod before leaving with Charlie for the patrol car.
I was left alone. The silence of the house was absolute, a vacuum I needed to fill. I ate the eggs Bella had left for me and, as a consolation prize for my own mental health, I cut a generous slice of the chocolate and coffee cake I made yesterday. I paired it with a cup of black coffee, hot and strong, feeling the sugar and caffeine ignite my brain's circuits.
I spent the morning cleaning the kitchen and sketching quick strokes in my notebook, but my mind wasn't on art. It was in the gym. It was on that invisible vibration that saved me from a certain impact. So, driven by a curiosity bordering on obsession, I channeled my "inner Bella." I took her laptop—which always smelled vaguely of vanilla—and sat on the sofa, sinking into the abyss of the Internet.
I started by searching for strange medical cases: "Savant Syndrome after head trauma." Links began to sprout like mushrooms after the rain. I read about a man who, after a blow to the head, woke up a genius in fractal mathematics without ever having studied it. I saw a video of a woman who spoke three languages fluently after a car accident—languages she had never heard in her life.
But that wasn't my case. I wasn't calculating the area of a circle or speaking French. I was manipulating the air.
I went deeper. My fingers flew over the keyboard. I combed through parapsychology forums, conspiracy theory blogs, and articles of dubious scientific origin. Telekinesis, Telepathy, Pyrokinesis... Until, near the end of a page with a nineties aesthetic, a phrase stopped me cold: Psychic Force Field Generation.
I clicked it, my heart hammering against my ribs. The description was chillingly precise: "A latent psychic ability that allows the individual to project mental energy to create a physical or energetic barrier. It is often triggered by severe trauma or a life-or-death situation where the survival instinct breaks through subconscious barriers..."
I laughed. A dry, nervous laugh that echoed in the empty room. "I'm going crazy," I whispered. "I am officially in the asylum of my own head."
But the more I read, the more I remembered Monday's sensation. That internal rupture. Something had snapped inside me the moment I saw Tyler's van, releasing a pressure that had been contained for years. It wasn't madness. It was evolution. Or a curse. Or both.
The house began to suffocate me. The walls seemed to close in on me, as if they knew my secret and wanted to crush it. I needed space. I needed cold air and the smell of wet earth.
I prepared a quick lunch, took my notebook and pencils, and headed into the woods surrounding the property. I walked until the sounds of the road disappeared completely, replaced by the crunching of dry leaves and the dripping of branches. I sat on a moss-covered rock and opened my notebook.
I drew the membrane. I tried to capture its essence on paper: a semi-reflective structure, like oil on water but invisible to the careless eye, a web of sacred geometry enveloping my body. But the drawing wasn't enough. I needed to know if I could control it.
"Alright, Mael. Either you're a superhero or you need serious medication. Let's find out," I told myself.
I closed my eyes and searched within. At first, there was only darkness and the beat of my own heart. But then, I looked for that "psychic energy" the article mentioned. It took an eternity of absolute concentration, ignoring the cold seeping into my bones. Suddenly, I saw it.
It was a tiny flame, a vibrant bluish spark hidden in the recesses of my mind. It was there, waiting, latent. Carefully, I tried to touch it with my thoughts, but it slipped away like mercury. It wouldn't be caught.
"You're not going anywhere," I growled through gritted teeth.
I changed tactics. I visualized mental arms, hands made of pure will. I grabbed that spark firmly, feeling an electric jolt that ran down to the tips of my toes. I began to mold it, kneading it as if it were invisible clay, forming a ball of dense energy. Then, with a slow exhale, I commanded that ball to expand.
Little by little, I felt the energy flow outward, seeping through my pores. The sensation was like being wrapped in a blanket of static electricity.
I opened my eyes.
I couldn't believe it. Two centimeters from my skin, the air vibrated. It was an almost imperceptible distortion, like the heat rising from asphalt in summer, but it was there. It surrounded me completely, an egg of pure force separating me from the world. I stayed like that for a long time, marvelling, watching how the raindrops falling from the trees hit the vacuum and slid to the sides, never touching my clothes.
"It's real," I murmured, a manic smile spreading across my face.
But then, I felt the resistance. The membrane wanted to return, it wanted to retract toward my chest like a rubber band stretched to its limit. I refused to let go. I wanted more.
"Expand," I ordered.
I pushed with all the strength of my will. The membrane stretched another centimeter, moving away from my body, but the price was immediate. A sharp pain, as if someone had driven an ice pick into the center of my brain, made me let out a stifled cry. My vision clouded with red, and the membrane snapped back, returning to its hiding place within me.
I collapsed forward, panting, hands braced against the damp earth. I felt something warm and fluid running down my upper lip. I swiped the back of my hand across my nose and saw the red stain, bright and thick.
But I didn't care. I smiled like a madman, face stained with blood and eyes alight. I had done it. I had gained a centimeter of space. I had controlled the impossible.
"One more centimeter," I whispered, wiping my nose with the sleeve of my sweater.
I sat back on the rock, ignoring the cold starting to numb my thighs. The silence of the forest was deep, broken only by the distant caw of a crow that seemed to watch my efforts with ancestral judgment. I breathed deeply, filling my lungs with the damp, ozone-heavy air.
"Alright, Mael. Let's do this smartly," I said, closing my eyes.
First was access. I couldn't afford to take an eternity to find the "spark" if a van lost control in front of me again. I visualized that little blue flame in the center of my mind. This time I didn't chase it; I called it.
I pulled the energy out. I felt the electric vibration run through my shoulders and expand outward, creating that translucent membrane two centimeters from my skin. I counted the seconds. One minute. Two minutes. The concentration was exhausting; it was like keeping a muscle tensed to the maximum while trying to solve differential equations. At five minutes, the pain began to bloom behind my eyes—a clear biological warning: stop or you'll break something.
I retracted the energy. I returned it to its core. I waited a heartbeat and pulled it out again.
In. Out. In. Out.
I repeated the process over and over. At first, it was clumsy, like a rusty switch that gets stuck. But with each repetition, the path became smoother. I began to automate it, linking the deployment of the shield to my breathing. Exhale to expand, inhale to retract. After an hour, I no longer needed to "search" for the spark; it responded to the slightest flicker of my will. It was becoming a reflex, a new sense starting to operate almost unconsciously.
Once I mastered the "ignition," I moved to the next phase: consistency. A bubble was useless if it was as soft as jelly. I remembered what I read on Bella's laptop about visualization. Psychic energy is malleable; it takes the shape and properties of whatever the wielder imagines most strongly.
I looked around and found a river stone—smooth, gray, and extremely dense. I took it in my hands. I observed it under the fading light, analyzing every vein and imperfection. I felt it: heavy, cold, immovable. I even dared to smell it, perceiving that scent of ancient earth and minerals. I even ran the tip of my tongue over its cold surface, catching the metallic, earthy taste of basalt.
I closed my eyes and stored that sensory information in a compartment of my mind. I summoned the shield, but this time, as the energy flowed, I imposed the "template" of the stone upon it.
"Be hard. Be impenetrable. Be rock," I ordered mentally.
The membrane changed. It was no longer just a vibration in the air; the distortion became sharper, almost opaque at the edges. I felt the density of the barrier increase until the air itself seemed to weigh tons around my body. I picked up a small branch and threw it against my own protected arm. The branch didn't just bounce; it snapped in two upon hitting the nothingness, as if it had struck the side of a mountain. I smiled, though a new sting in my forehead reminded me that playing force-alchemist came with a price.
Finally, I worked on the shape. Until now, the shield was an instinctive egg that enveloped me completely, but that consumed too much energy. If I wanted to be efficient, I had to learn to focus.
I concentrated on diverting the energy from my back and legs, sending it all to the front. I visualized a wall, a rectangular shield floating half a meter from my chest. This was the hardest part. The energy tended to want to surround me; it was its natural state of preservation. I had to use my "mental hands" to stretch it, flatten it, and hold it fixed in a single plane.
I managed to create a wall about fifty centimeters wide. It was unstable, vibrating like a bad television signal, but it was a wall. I tried to move it: right, left, up. It was like operating a heavy puppet with invisible strings connected directly to my optic nerves.
I was progressing, yes, but it was slow. My physical body was spent. Monday's concussion didn't help, and every centimeter gained or extra minute of maintenance cost me a drop of blood or a dizzy spell that made me lose my balance. I wasn't a comic book superhero who learns to fly in an afternoon; I was a human breaking his own biological limits, and biology was complaining.
Around three in the afternoon, the forest began to darken prematurely under a new layer of black clouds. My head throbbed with a final warning. I stood up, my legs feeling like lead.
"Enough for today, Mael," I muttered, stowing the notebook with trembling hands.
I returned home walking slowly, processing everything I had learned. I had managed to maintain the shield, give it the hardness of stone, and begin to mold its shape. It was little, but it was real. Upon arriving, the house was empty; Bella wasn't back from school yet, and Charlie was still at the station.
I went up to my room and collapsed onto the bed without even taking off my boots. I needed to rest. I needed my brain to cool down before Friday, because I knew that school would be a constant trial by fire.
I closed my eyes and, before falling asleep, I felt the tiny blue spark in my mind—now brighter, more familiar.
The sound of the front door opening echoed through the house like a gunshot, violently pulling me from a dense, dreamless sleep. I sat bolt upright in bed, heart hammering against my ribs, my right hand extended by pure instinct, searching for that blue spark in my mind. It took me a second to remember I was in my room and not in the forest surrounded by invisible barriers.
I breathed deeply, wiping the sweat from my forehead, and went downstairs trying not to let my legs feel like jelly.
In the kitchen, the atmosphere was the polar opposite of my chaotic thoughts. The smell of golden garlic and roasted meat floated in the air, a homely fragrance that helped me fully ground myself in reality. Charlie was hanging his duty belt on the rack, shoulders slumped from the exhaustion of a day patrolling in the rain, while Bella moved between the burners with quiet efficiency.
"Hey, Dad. How was the shift?" I asked, stepping over to grab the silverware and start setting the table.
"The usual, Mael. Lots of fender benders because of the ice and people forgetting how to brake," Charlie replied with a sigh, but he gave me a look of approval seeing me on my feet. "You look better. Seems like the rest did you good."
"Much better," I lied—though technically the "training" had left me exhausted, Carlisle's pill and the nap had worked wonders on my appearance.
We sat down to dinner under the warm light of the dining room. For a moment, I could almost forget that yesterday I had bled from my nose trying to move atoms with my mind. We were finishing our meal when Bella, with that quiet determination she has for school matters, pulled a couple of sheets from her backpack and slid them across the table toward Charlie.
"Dad, we need you to sign these. It's the authorization for Monday's field trip to the botanical greenhouse," she explained, handing him a pen.
Charlie took the papers, squinting as he read the fine print with the natural distrust of a policeman toward any legal document. After a moment, he signed both passes with his firm, square handwriting.
"Alright, here you go," he said, handing the sheets back to Bella, but then he turned to me with a spark of amusement in his eyes. "Mael, I'm giving you a special mission for this trip."
"Oh, yeah? What's that?" I asked, taking a sip of my water.
"Keep an eye on your sister. Make sure she doesn't fall into any giant carnivorous plants or end up head-first in the compost," Charlie teased with a sly smile. "Knowing her balance, she's capable of causing a botanical catastrophe."
I couldn't help it. I let out a clean laugh that made my chest vibrate. The mental image of Bella fighting a Venus flytrap was just too good.
"Ha, ha. Very funny, really," Bella grumbled, though her cheeks flushed a soft red. She gave us a look of feigned indignation, but seeing that Charlie and I were still laughing, her resistance crumbled and she ended up letting out a giggle too. "It's not my fault the floor has something personal against me."
"I know, Bells. That's why I'm going—to be your anchor," I told her, winking.
We finished dinner in a strange but comforting harmony. Tomorrow would be Friday, the last day before my date with the Cullens. I tucked my signed pass into my backpack and went to bed, falling asleep like a log.
***************
"Hey guys, good evening. I'm sorry to say that I won't be posting very often anymore because I'm short on time. I'm actually considering dropping this story because it isn't getting much traction. I haven't made a final decision yet, but we'll see. I also hoped for more support on Patreon and was honestly disappointed when it didn't happen, but I get it—money can be tight for everyone."