The Boy in the Gray Hoodie

15...

15…

I peeked through the closet door, opening it just enough to peer through without dad knowing I was there. Thank goodness Aunt Pam kept the hinges in good shape. Nothing but the floorboards creaked around here.

            My jaw fell slack as I watched dad pull a syringe from his pocket and uncap it before plunging the needle into Roy’s sore, bruised arm. They were talking, but I couldn’t hear a word of it. Their voices were too quiet for that.

            Still, it wasn’t hard to tell that Roy didn’t want whatever dad was giving him. He was obviously freaked out, and my father was just way too calm about that.

            Adjusting my position inside the cramped closet space, I tried to get a better view of Roy. Right now, dad’s broad shoulders and back were blocking just about everything. I wanted to know what was happening, but I couldn’t see.

            As I moved, a couple of metal hangers touched the very top of my head and pinged together. I bit my lip and stopped breathing, waiting for dad to turn around. But he didn’t. Probably because he was too distracted by what was happening outside the closet.

            Roy was completely still. My guess was that he’d fallen asleep from whatever juice my dad had pumped into his veins. But nothing else was. Every piece of furniture in the bedroom had started to shake—including the shelf above my head and the closet door. It was all shaking, like an earthquake had suddenly hit the house.

            Dad was doing nothing; he just sat on the bed, watching the shades smack against the window. After a second, he reached out to steady the bedside table, which had started to clunk noisily against the wood floorboards.

            The two large photo albums on the shelf above my head inched their way forward until they fell off, narrowly missing my face by about half a centimeter.

            By the grace of some unknown force, I managed to stay silent as I pushed the albums into a corner and pressed myself against the wall, away from any more falling debris.

            What the heck. I mouthed the words, my eyes as wide as saucers as I waited for the shaking to stop.

            “I’ve seen this already, Roy. Do something else, something new.” I heard dad say. He sounded…excited. I wanted to throw my shoe at his head.

            What are you doing to Roy? My head screamed the question, but there was no way I was opening my mouth to say it. Letting dad know that I was in here, that someone was watching his sick little experiment, would have been a huge mistake—one that I wasn’t dumb enough to make just yet. I started to rethink that assessment after only a few short minutes.

            Inching closer to the door once again, I watched open-mouthed as Roy began to move. It wasn’t just his head, or any one part of him that started to rise from the mattress, but his whole body. He was levitating.

            This time, dad got up and stood back, watching in silence with something that resembled a smile on his face. I couldn’t decide which thing creeped me out more—Roy, hovering above his bed like some freaky alien experiment, or dad smiling about it.

            But what happened next was worse.

            As the room continued to shake, and Roy continued to rise, I began to hear a strange sound. It started low, and then rose to a higher pitch, almost like the cry of a wounded animal. In the same instance that the sound arose from the silence, I saw Roy’s body tense, his hands clenching at his sides. As I stared, he tossed his head back and let out a scream so loud and so desperate that it hurt to hear it.