Casting - Volume 1.1: Drained

  *

  I left Grant’s house feeling the same way that I did whenever I left his or Vanessa’s side: incomplete and empty, except even more so tonight. I stayed in his driveway for ages, just sat parked in my car, needing to scream my lungs out… or at least get pissed drunk. I didn’t do either, though… I figured one would probably get me in the emergency room while the other landed me in a psych ward.

  Maybe I should be locked up; God knows I felt like I was going insane right now. Did I look it too? I pulled down my sun visor to inspect myself in its mirror, and I felt a jolt of shock at my reflection. It wasn’t that I looked any different – on the contrary, I looked exactly the same. Dirty blond hair covered my head like it always did, the exact same sapphire-blue eyes that I'd had all my life blinked back at me wearily; everything from my long nose to straight jawline was identical to what I knew it to be.

  In the span of one hour, so much seemed to have changed that it was unsettling and almost obscene that my appearance didn’t seem to match that. Vanessa had Drained, after the three of us had gone almost a year without it happening – that was a new record for us. Stephen, who we’d spent the last five months believing to be dead, might actually be alive somewhere. It was just too much to handle… and I was used to handling all kinds of major shit.

  Since we were thirteen, Grant, Vanessa and I have had our fair share of trouble and crises. That was the age that we found out that we were Casters. A few years ago, I'd probably have described a Caster as someone who could do really freaky shit with their mind, but now that I'm eighteen, I'd probably use a little more sophistication and replace “really freaky shit” with “extraordinary feats of supernatural prowess”… well, at least Grant would, anyway.

  Stephen was the one who’d found the three of us when we first started showing signs of Casting, and brought us together. He never told us how exactly he found us and to this day it remained a mystery because Casters are extremely rare and almost impossible to detect, but thank God that he did. I can't imagine the danger we would have gotten ourselves in at thirteen, not knowing or understanding the things we could do. But Stephen was like our savior, and we trusted him completely. He taught us pretty much everything that we know about Casting today. He taught us how to use it, how to control it and, most importantly, how to hide it.

  That’s one of the drawbacks of being what we are. Outside of the three of us, we can't really trust anyone… not even our families. If people found out about the things that we could do, we had no doubt that we’d end up in some Government research facility somewhere with tubes and probes shoved up our asses and every other orifice of our body. Because of that, we’ve mastered secrecy even more than we have Casting.

  I know what people think when they look at me. They see a good-looking, football-playing high school senior, so they kind of just assume that my sleeping around and refusing to have any serious girlfriend is natural for me, but it’s a lot more than that. I couldn’t risk getting close to some girl, having to worry every single day that she’d find out what I was. Still, though, I doubt that I'd ever find a girl who could mean as much to me as Grant and Vanessa, so I'm pretty sure I wasn’t missing out on anything.

  Ness is probably the most closed off of the three of us. At least I have a healthy sex life – she refuses to get close to any guy. I’ve never brought it up, but I think this also has a lot to do with the nasty divorce that her parents went through a few years ago. Outside of Grant and myself – and Stephen, when he was still around – I don’t think she sees personal relationships as being worth much.

  Grant is the only of us three who’s brave enough – or stupid enough, I don’t know – to actually allow himself a relationship, and he’s been with his boyfriend, Javier, for over a year now. Even though Javier has no idea what we are, Grant somehow manages to make it work, but it wasn’t always so easy at the beginning. Javier could never understand why Grant was so guarded about everything, and he was often offended by how much Grant would put me and Vanessa above everything else. I don’t think he minds so much now, though, and he makes a huge effort in tolerating our “unnatural codependency”, as he calls it. And of course he would; after all, Grant is super smart and even more handsome than that. Hell, if I were gay, I’d have hit that a long time ago.

  So, the inability to trust others was one of the two major downsides to being a Caster.

  The second was Draining.

  Draining is the absolute worst. It’s what happened to us when we tapped into the supernatural for too long. Its proper name is actually Preternatural Existentialist Depletion, but there is no way that we could ever say that out loud without anyone who’d overheard us looking at us like nutjobs. So, the three of us had nicknamed it “Draining”, so that if someone heard us in public, they’d just think that we’d had some totally awesome weekend. There was nothing awesome about it, though. See, no one should really have the kind of gifts that we do, and every time we use them, it takes its toll on us physically. When we overdid it, it was kind of like the Universe was trying to balancing itself out again… nature’s very own karma.

  And it was a fucking nightmare.

  It’s kind of like everything inside of you is simultaneously crushing from some invisible weight, and expanding to try to force its way out of you. We feel our heads splitting, but never down the middle like regular headaches. It’s as if every portion of our skull were cracking and exploding. The worst part is we never know how long it will last. The mildest Drains only last about twenty-four hours or so, but Grant had once Drained for four days straight, and there’s nothing at all that can be done to fix it. If we Cast during a Drain, though, it makes it exponentially worse, which we’ve all experienced. If it’s extreme enough, we know that it could kill us.

  It was Stephen who’d taught us how to avoid Draining, although tonight pretty much just proved that we don’t always succeed. But he’d been an incredible mentor… something of a father to us. Then, almost a year ago, he up and vanished. At first, the cops weren’t keen on taking his disappearance seriously. After all, Stephen had had no family of his own, and – despite our objections to the contrary – they didn’t consider us his family, so he'd had no familial obligations keeping him from disappearing, and the whining of three seventeen year olds wasn’t enough to spur them into action. Thankfully for us, although he’d had no family, Stephen had a couple of his own businesses. They weren’t anything that would ever make it onto a Fortune 500 list, but they were important enough to get the cops to investigate his disappearance after a while.

  No surprise to us, the police department never turned up any evidence, but the three of us did. For a while, Grant, Vanessa and I had been able to invoke several visions of Stephen, and establish mental connections with him. And although we didn’t know where he was exactly, we always knew that he was in a shit-load of pain, close to death. The cops were never amused when we would bring this to their attention but then not be able to tell them just how exactly we knew it, so they started ignoring us completely when we would come to them. About four months after Stephen vanished, we stopped getting any hits on him. There were no visions, no connections, and we figured out that he’d most likely been killed. It was the hardest shit that the three of us had ever had to deal with, but we accepted it and we’d mourned. A lot.

  Now, all this time later, Vanessa got something on him – spontaneously no less – suggesting that he might actually be alive. And I didn’t know how to fucking deal with it.

  To think, Courtney Gainsfield was pissed off tonight because she didn’t get laid. In a few months, her biggest worry would be choosing the right prom dress. These were the biggest issues that she had to deal with… and, honestly, I envied her for it.

  A loud beeping sucker-punched me right out of my brooding; my phone’s battery was about to die. Swallowing a sigh, I reversed out of Grant’s driveway, and made my way home.