Chapter 2: Discovery
The next morning Samantha woke to the wonderful smell of breakfast. She rolled over, judging whether or not she wanted to go back to sleep, and looked at the clock. She remembered her Grandpa was staying with them and that he always got up early. If she hurried she might catch him before he left for his walk. Samantha got out of bed, put on jeans and a T-shirt, pushed her brown hair back out of her eyes, and walked down the short hallway to the kitchen.
Neil was standing at the gas range, frying bacon and scrambling eggs. Samantha sat down at the table. He heard her and turned around, smiling.
“Good morning Sam. Did you sleep well?”
“Of course Grandpa.”
“This stuff is almost done. Do you want any of it?”
“No thanks. I always have cereal but I’m not hungry this early anyway.”
Neil scooped the eggs and bacon onto a plate and sat down at the table. He started eating.
“Thanks again for your present. I started writing in my diary last night,” Samantha said.
Neil looked up at her and smiled.
“I’m pleased to hear that. Your father never took to writing a diary, although I asked him if he’d like too several times. It just wasn’t in his nature.”
“I wrote a paragraph before I fell asleep.”
“Excellent. You know what’s amazing? If that paragraph was half a page and you write that same amount every single day until you’re fifty, you’ll have written almost 7000 pages.”
“Wow!”
“And as you get older more and more things will happen you’ll want to write down. So, you write more and more pages every night. I’m sixty-one now. Guess how many pages I’ve written?”
“How about ten thousand?”
“Actually I have no idea,” Neil said, “but I know it’s a lot.” He laughed.
“What did you write about last night? I wrote about my birthday and the presents I got.”
“That’s what I wrote about too. But you know something interesting? I bet that our diaries are completely different even though we’re writing about the same thing.”
Samantha nodded at him, understanding.
“Because we’re different people, right?”
“That’s right. We’ll see it different ways.”
Neil stood up with his empty plate and rinsed it in the sink. Then he put his hands on his lower back and stretched, causing his back to pop several times. The sound was like a small string of firecrackers and Samantha laughed.
“You sound like you need oil Grandpa.”
He bent over to touch his toes. Then he looked at her with a sly expression on his face.
“But if I’m so old I need to be oiled would I be able to do this?”
He suddenly leaned over so far, without bending his knees, that he could nearly place the tips of his elbows against the ground. His head was upside down and he looked up at her from between his legs and laughed.
“Grandpa!”
He straightened back up and brushed his remaining hair into place. He took a small, battered notebook and pencil from his back pocket and made a little note in the book. Then he put them back in his pocket again.
“Like that, did ya?”
“How could you do that? I’ve never seen anybody do that before.”
Samantha got up from the table and tried it herself. She could touch her toes and get her palms flat on the floor for a moment, but then her legs started to hurt and she gave up.
“That’s impossible.”
“Not if you go for a walk every morning. Want to go with me?”
“Sure.”
“Great! And can you run back to your room real quick and get the diary I gave you yesterday?”
“To take on a walk,” Samantha asked, surprised.
“Yeah, I want to show you something.”
“What is it?”
“A surprise.”
He winked at her and walked to the front door to put on his shoes. Samantha looked at him for a moment. Then she ran to get her own shoes and the diary from beside her bed. Her shoes were her old pair and she could slide them onto her feet without even untying the laces. Neil opened the door and they walked out.
They walked a block without saying anything. The day was bright blue and warm for late autumn.
“Did you still want this,” Samantha asked.
She held the book up to him and he took it. He opened it and thumbed through a couple of pages.
“Have you read any of it yet? You probably didn’t have time.”
“I read the first page because I wasn’t sure how to get started on mine.”
“Read the first part of this page,” he said.
He gave her the diary and held it open to a location a few pages from the front. Samantha looked at the date, December 7th, 1941. Day 8.“It happened to me for the first time! The Japanese bombed us today. We heard about it on the radio, my Mom started crying, and my Dad started walking around the room, saying that no Japanese would be alive by the end of next year. He was very angry. And I was mad too. It just happened. I got mad and wanted to hit the kitchen table and so I did. And the table got smashed into splinters. I had no idea it was so easy to do.”
Samantha looked up at Neil with a small smile at the corner of her lips. She closed the book and handed it back to him.
“You made stuff up in your diary? Isn’t that against the rules?”
“Well, there aren’t any rules when it comes to your own diary,” Neil said, “but I didn’t make this story up.”
“You said you broke a table by hitting it with your hand. That can’t really happen.”
Neil stopped. There was a small park at the corner of the block with a swing set and a couple of picnic tables.
“Let’s sit over at the tables for a minute.”
“Sure.”
Samantha walked over to one of the tables and sat down. Neil followed along, a little more slowly. He sat down across from Samantha, who laughed because he sat on a pinecone. Neil picked it up and threw it towards a tall pine tree next to the swings.
“Why do you think I made that story up Sam?”
“Because you can’t hit a table and break it. You’d need a bomb to do that.”
“What if you were really, really mad. Do you think you could break a table?”
“No.”
“There is something I need to tell you Samantha. Your father doesn’t know because he didn’t inherit it from me. I’ve been told it sometimes skips generations and when it does all sorts of things can go wrong. Since your father doesn’t know about me that means he can’t know about you, at least not yet. I’ve also heard that when it skips generations it’s usually stronger.”
“What’re you talking about Grandpa,” Samantha asked. “What doesn’t my Dad know about you?”
“He doesn’t know I’ve got a special talent,” he said.
Samantha stared at Neil as if she hadn’t heard what he was saying. A light gust of wind blew a piece of paper across the park. Both of them turned to watch it flutter over the grass and into a thick patch of ice plant.
“A special talent? What does that mean?”
“Like a power that a superhero might have on TV.”
“Those don’t exist Grandpa,” Samantha said.
“I know it’s hard to believe,” Neil replied. “Like I said, since it skipped a generation you haven’t been prepared for this since you were little. But the talent does exist. I’m not teasing you. And the only way you’ll believe me is if you see what I’m talking about. I can prove it to you.”
Neil reached into the back pocket of his blue pants and took out an old book. A rubber band was fastened around the middle of the book to keep it from fluttering apart. He gently removed the rubber band and put the book on the park table. Samantha’s eyes got very large.
“How old is that?”
“This was one of my Father’s diaries. He started when he was twelve, just like I di
d. He wrote this one when he was sixty-one. You never met your great-grandfather but he was a good man. He died fifteen years ago.”
“And you carry his diary around with you?”
“I have to but it’s hard to explain. You’ll see why in a minute.”
Neil paged through the book for a couple of moments until he found the page he was looking for. He read it carefully, closed the book, and put the rubber band back around the cover.
“Right,” Neil said. “I knew it was safe but you always have to check. And my memory isn’t as good as it used to be.”
“Check what,” Samantha asked.
Neil stood up, raised his hands over his head, and closed his eyes. He started breathing very deeply and slowly.
“What’re you doing Grandpa?”
Neil opened his eyes and looked at Samantha. Then he walked over to a thick metal trashcan by the pine tree, picked it up, and carried it over to the table. Samantha got up from the table and took a step back.
“Don’t be scared Sam. I know this seems strange but you have to know what you are. Let me ask you a question? Do you think I can crush this trash can?”
“Of course not.”
Neil smiled at her, picked the trashcan back up, and suddenly squeezed it together with one easy motion. The trashcan made a horrible, loud squealing noise. He put it back down on the table, where it rattled around like a dropped quarter. Samantha was staring at him.
“Why are you trying to trick me?”
“It isn’t a trick Sam. Pick it up.”
Samantha took a step forward and picked it up. She dropped it immediately.
“It’s heavy.”
“Of course it is,” Neil said, smiling. “It’s an entire trash can smashed together. And watch this.”
He picked it up again and held it against his side. Then he took a step forward and threw it like a Frisbee across the park. It sailed into the street, where it hit the asphalt and clattered noisily into the far gutter.
“Grandpa! How did you do that?”
Neil sat back down on the green bench.
“I better stop or I’ll kill my poor Dad.”
He closed his eyes for a moment. Then he looked back up at Samantha.
“Like I said Sam, I have power and so do you. But you don’t know the talents yet. And when it happens for the first time it’ll be a surprise. As time goes on you’ll be able to control it but that takes practice.”
“I don’t have any powers. I don’t even get picked for baseball at recess.”
“They never show up until sometime after your twelfth birthday. But you can try it. It probably won’t work though. My Dad tried and tried to get me to do something the first week after I turned twelve but I never could. He had started thinking that I didn’t have a power at all. Until I broke the table that night I thought that myself.”
Samantha was looking down at her hands, flexing her fingers into fists.
“Do you believe me Sam?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s try it then.”
Neil stood up and walked over to the pine tree. Looking up he could see a limb about fifteen feet off the ground, with an old kite wrapped around it. He smiled at Samantha and suddenly jumped and caught the tree limb. He swung around it a couple of times. He jumped back down and landed on his feet. Samantha looked shocked.
“Want to try?”
Samantha walked over to the tree and looked up.
“I can’t jump that high. Nobody can.”
“I just did though,” Neil said. “You saw me.”
Samantha looked down at her legs, which she always felt were skinny and ugly. She bent and jumped but only rose about three inches off the ground.
“See. I don’t get picked for basketball either.”
But Neil was nodding his head.
“Don’t worry. Like I said, you probably won’t be able to do anything today. It takes time. Try to imagine yourself floating up there.”
Samantha looked back at her legs. For a moment she thought there was a little tingling in her calves but the feeling went away. She closed her eyes and jumped. A split second later she hit the ground again.
“Maybe four inches that time,” Neil said.
Getting frustrated, Samantha looked at the tree branch again. It was so high and she felt so small that she almost gave up. She readied her legs anyway. In her mind she imagined jumping to the tree branch over and over. A tingling started in her legs again and it was much stronger than before. She jumped.
Samantha heard a startled shout from her Grandpa and tried to look up to see what was happening. Her head hit the tree branch and she fell. The tingling in her legs disappeared and she panicked, flailing her arms around as she plummeted back towards the ground. She closed her eyes but instead of hitting the ground she landed softly in Neil’s arms.
Neil walked back over to the table and sat Samantha on one of the benches, looking shaken.
“Wow! You did it Sam! On your first try.”
Samantha put one hand cautiously to the top of her head, where a bump was already starting to grow.
“Ouch.”
“Did you hurt yourself,” Neil asked.
“I bumped my head on the limb.”
“Yeah I saw. I can’t believe how high you got on your first try. That was really amazing.”
Samantha looked up again, as if she only now realized what had happened.
“I did it,” she said.
“Yes. And you did it so quickly. I guess the ability really does get stronger if it skips generations.”
“I don’t like this. Why don’t Mom and Dad know?”
“Your Dad doesn’t know because he doesn’t have any special talent. We need to keep this a secret.”
“Why?”
“We just do. They might not understand and we would have a difficult time explaining everything to them. Adults usually don’t react to well to big changes like this.”
“But now I’m different. And I have to tell somebody. What will Becky and Marissa say when they realize I’ve got the talent. They’ll think I’m a freak.”
“You’re not a freak,” Neil, said, a touch testily. “This is part of your genes. It has always been there, like your brown hair and dark eyes. And almost all of your family has had this ability.”
“So then we’re all freaks.”
“No.”
“Yes,” Samantha said again, her voice starting to break up. “And I can’t even say anything about it? This isn’t fair.”
Samantha looked down at her hands. Suddenly she started crying. Neil looked startled. Samantha leaned against him and cried softly for almost two minutes before it dwindled into sniffles.
“Are you alright,” Neil asked.
“I don’t want this. I want everything to be like it was yesterday.”
“But it isn’t Samantha. This power has been in you since you were born and you would have had it whether I told you about it or not. It is better to know than to be surprised about it later on. Don’t you think?”
He paused. Then he looked back at Samantha and caught her eyes.
“Let’s go home. We’ve been gone for quite awhile. And you’ve learned a lot in the last few minutes.”
Samantha nodded but didn’t say anything. They walked back to the house.