Anomalies
Chapter One: Under the Radar

A ’96 DeVille rattled to a stop outside of San Domingo High School as the first drops of morning rain shepherded the students inside its dank halls. From the passenger seat, hunched in a fading black trenchcoat, Jordan McClain watched the students scrambling inside, studying their movements with dark, unblinking eyes. Beside him, Hill McClain was digging into the glove compartment, fumbling with a sagging brown paper bag.

“Remember to keep your head down, kiddo,” Hill was saying as Jordan kept his eyes carefully trained on the students. “Don’t call too much attention to yourself and just try to blend in and everything will be okay.” Hill set the parking brake and placed the bag down and gripped Jordan’s shoulder. His tired, grey eyes searched Jordan’s sharp-featured face, his brow furrowing with apprehension. “Just stay low. Stay low, and we’ll be fine.” Hill picked up the bag again and pushed it into Jordan’s hands. “And don’t forget your lunch; I made tuna.”

Jordan took the bag from Hill and forced a grateful smile that looked more like a lopsided grimace. He hated tuna. In the four years Jordan had been under Hill’s care, his guardian had never quite grasped the finer details of Jordan’s likes and dislikes, but he knew he meant well. Jordan was still alive, for one. It was more than he could say for the majority of his brothers and sisters.

“I know, Hill. Under the radar,” said Jordan, opening the bag to peer down at a very soggy tuna sandwich, an apple, and a can of Sprite. One out of three wasn’t bad. Maybe Hill was getting better.

“Under the radar,” Hill repeated, smiling so that the corners of his eyes crinkled. At thirty-six, Hill already seemed to have more than his share of grey hairs and smile lines. It was as if he had compounded twenty years worth of experience into the four years he and Jordan had spent in hiding. Jordan eyed the grey at Hill’s temple with a nagging guilt, and opened the car door.

“Call me the moment you have any trouble, kiddo. I’ll be in town getting supplies, so I shouldn’t be to far away.”

“I’ll be fine Hill,” said Jordan, and he slid out of the car with an uncouth squelching sound. Hill’s car, a `96 Cadillac DeVille he affectionately called “Cruella,” had peeling leather seats that were icy cold in the winter, blistering hot in the summer and currently, in a drizzling autumn, were slick with rainwater the second Jordan opened the door.

He pulled his trenchcoat around him, shoved his lunch into his brand new backpack bought just yesterday, hoisted it over his shoulder, and gave Hill a brief wave, shutting the door before anymore rain could find its way inside. Hill returned the wave, and Cruella gave a cough and a lurch and putted away.

Jordan was determined to skirt by unnoticed on his first day of school, two weeks after school had officially started. Hill had spend the better part of a month pouring over cryptic-looking documents, comparing notes and charts and stats that Jordan only comprehended in bits and pieces. There was even an online database that Hill frequented that looked like nothing but a complicated mailing list to Jordan, but apparently made perfect sense to Hill.

According to Hill’s copious amounts of research, San Domingo High School boasted a student population of two-thousand and twelve, so Jordan assumed he would be able to slip into a quiet anonymity here. There was also a relatively low dropout rate compared to other schools in the area, which Jordan didn’t find particularly interesting, but Hill seemed to think was fascinating. Jordan was sure there were more populated schools elsewhere, but Hill was insistent on San Domingo.

“The safest place to hide is in plain sight,” Hill had said. “We call attention to ourselves if we sneak around, so it’s best just to try to blend in.”

San Domingo High School was nestled between a swollen, upper-middle-class suburb to the north and a stretch of rundown strip malls and lower-end apartments to the south. Jordan and Hill had just moved into the South End only days before, haphazardly unpacking items as they needed them. There were still boxes in Cruella’s back seat full of summer clothes, forged legal documents needed for Jordan’s school registration, and piles of mismatched Tupperware that neither Jordan nor Hill remembered acquiring.

Jordan kept his head low, pulling up the collar of his trench coat so that he hid his face. His features, as striking as they were creepy, had no discernable ethnic rhyme or reason to them, a hodgepodge of everything as though made from a cocktail of different DNA samples.

As he made his way to the main office to pick up his class schedule, he roughly finger-combed his dark hair around his face, all the while eyeing the dissipating crowd of students over his shoulder as he went, adjusting his movements to match their own. Combined with the trenchcoat and disquieting staring, the look said “scary loner circa 1999” and granted him a wide berth through the students as he trudged up the stairs to the office.

Hill’s words rang in his head, and he made little eye contact as he pushed through the glass doors, the smell of wet carpet and a mélange of cheap perfume hitting him square in the face. A few curious and heavily-made-up faces glanced at him from behind their desks and cubicles when he made his way to the reception desk, but then quickly seemed to lose interest, dropping their gaze back to their desks.

Jordan approached the main desk where a middle-aged woman sat, flipping through a month-old issue of Us Weekly with her two-inch long Lee Press-On nails and a beehive that resembled the tower of Babel.

She asked, “Can I help you?” though there was no trace of helpfulness in her voice. She said it as though Jordan had just rudely interrupted her from something important.

“I’m new; I need to pick up my class schedule.” Jordan afforded her the same curt tone she used on him.

“Name?” the receptionist asked without looking up, flipping another page. He told her, and she took her time typing it in and printing out his schedule, fishing out a school map from a stack of papers the size of a toddler. “There you go.”

Jordan muttered a deadpan “thank you” and left the office, glancing quickly at the schedule and map before braving the rain again.

When he joined the milling crowd of students outside his classroom before the first period bell, huddling under the overhang, he continued to keep his head low, hiding his face behind a curtain of hair. A familiar, dull ache rippled down his back and he shuddered visibly. The surrounding students found interest in anything that was at least two feet away from him.

Jordan winced at the shrill ring of the school bell as though it were ringing right against his ear, and everyone pushed their way inside, cramming into the doorway to escape the weather. Jordan hung back, partially because he didn’t want to get trampled in the rush, and partially because everyone seemed in a hurry to put distance between his or herself and him anyway.

Finally, he slipped into the classroom amid the scramble of students finding seats, his piercing dark brown eyes scanning the few empty desks as he weaved in between them. Jordan barely blinked, his eyes dilating and constricting rapidly like a camera lens constantly shifting focus. He slid into a seat towards the back and removed his wet coat, slinging it on the back of his chair while fishing out his schedule and map. The map had all but disintegrated from the rainwater but his schedule remained intact.

“Hey. Are you new?”

Jordan chanced a look from behind his curtain of hair, now plastered to his face to give him a charming, homicidal look about him. A short Filipino boy from the seat next to Jordan was staring at him, a small frown of confusion affixed to his round face. The boy’s dark brown hair was about the length of Jordan’s, somewhere between long enough for a ponytail but too short to look any good in one. It was splayed out around his face as though the boy spent all morning shuffling across carpet in wooly socks.

Another wave of pain rolled down Jordan’s back, and he suppressed a grimace and turned away without answering.

“You are new here, aren’t you?” Came the boy’s voice when Jordan remained silent. The way he said it, he might as well have been asking if Jordan had a horrible birth defect that he was hiding. Which, considering the circumstances, wasn’t too far from the truth.

“Yeah,” Jordan answered finally, glancing back at him.

“Thought so,” the boy said, smiling to himself as if he had just solved a puzzling riddle. The smile quickly faded, however, and he looked at Jordan pointedly. “You’re in Vanessa’s seat. Could you move over one?”

Jordan glanced around the classroom and saw that open seats were dwindling rapidly. He turned back to the boy, sizing him up. Considering he was in the same class as Jordan, he had to be at least fifteen, though, unlike Jordan, was obviously still awaiting his growth spurt. He could take him easily, Jordan thought, but he could hear Hill’s words echoing in the back of his mind.
Jordan sighed and stood. He gathered up his coat and backpack and said as evenly as he could,

“Sorry. Is she your girlfriend or something?”

The boy gave a spluttering laugh. “Dude, no. Gross.”

There was an open space a seat over behind a boy whose massive bulk spilled over the edge of his seat, wedged into his desk chair so that he resembled a popped can of biscuits fighting their way back inside their cardboard tubing. Jordan sat down behind him and draped his coat again over the back of the chair and pulled a slightly damp notebook from his backpack.
A harsh electronic buzz blared from the loudspeakers, and Jordan cringed as it pierced his ears much like the first bell.

“Dude, get a grip,” the round-faced boy laughed, seeing Jordan’s reaction. “It’s just the late bell. They didn’t have bells at your old school or something?”

“No.” Jordan dug a finger into his ear as if to dig out the echoing ringing. The boy quirked an eyebrow at him, but said nothing. A blur of pink passed by Jordan and he turned to see a girl with her hair in long, auburn pigtails take her seat next to the round-faced boy, shedding a pale pink puffy jacket with some difficulty.

“What took you so long?” the boy asked the girl, grabbing hold of one of her sleeves and yanking. She jerked over to the side, caught unawares.

“Ow! Michael, be careful; I just bought this thing last week and if you rip it—” She stopped when she noticed Jordan, who had been studying the proceedings with a sort of half-interest as though he were watching a mildly interesting documentary. “Who’s that?”

“New guy. Uh…”

“Jordan McClain,” Jordan supplied.

“Right. Sorry. I’m Michael Biagan, and this is Vanessa Macias,” Michael said, waving the jacket sleeve still in his hand in Vanessa’s direction. She was about the same height as Michael and wore a similar look of earnest curiosity on her heart-shaped face that Michael had been directing at Jordan since he walked in.

Jordan did a quick sweep over his shoulder to look at the rest of the class. No one else but the two of them seemed to notice or care about Jordan’s presence once his coat was off and he had pushed his scraggly hair from his face. Instead, the rest of the class were largely talking with their neighbors about their weekends, or catching up on precious last minutes of sleep, heads lying on their folded arms on top of their desks.

Michael eyed the schedule sitting on Jordan’s desk and reached over to pick it up with his free hand and let out a low whistle. “Wow, no classes together. Oh, wait—looks like you have World History with Vanessa.” Michael cast his friend a knowing glance, and she quickly turned her attention to Jordan as if she hadn’t noticed.

“So, uh, what school did you go to before?” Vanessa asked as the last students made their way inside, shaking off water like dogs fresh from a bath. She and Michael had finally freed her of her jacket, her cheeks flushed and hair disheveled from the effort. The corners of Jordan’s lips twitched upward at the sight. “Lincoln? Wilson Heights? Deer Grove?”

“I was homeschooled,” Jordan replied, and another wave of sharp pain rolled down his back, this time a hair stronger than before. He gripped the edge of his desk until it passed, and when he let go his fingers had left deep imprints from the pressure. His slid his notebook over it before Michael or Vanessa could see them.

But the look of mild horror on their faces made Jordan think it was too late. Not even a full period in class and already they suspected—

“Homeschool? Ugh,” Michael said wrinkling his small nose, and Vanessa very indiscreetly jammed her elbow into his side.

“So, I guess this is pretty different for you, huh?” Vanessa asked, but Jordan didn’t get a chance to answer. At that moment the door swung open once again, and a tall, gangly woman stumbled inside. She was fighting with her paisley umbrella the whole way, her short blonde hair whipped all over her face and her tent dress twisted around her lower half like she had just escaped a hurricane.

“That’s bad luck, Ms. Anderson,” the large boy in front of Jordan said as the teacher’s open umbrella scraped the ceiling.

“Bad luck is the least of my worries, Christopher, thank you,” said Ms. Anderson, finally snapping shut the umbrella and then hoisting her worn beige briefcase onto her desk with a loud thud. Jordan flinched again at the noise, but to his relief, Michael didn’t notice this time.

While Ms. Anderson began to unload her briefcase, Michael turned back to Jordan and whispered, “That’s Ms. Anderson. She’s the English teacher for our year. She’s kinda weird, but she grades easy, so she’s cool.”

Jordan pretended to process this information by giving Michael a short nod, and then started to rise from his seat when Michael held him back by the arm.

“Where are you going?”

“To let her know I’m a new student.”

“Dude, it’s been two weeks and she still hasn’t learned my name. They’ll print it on the roster tomorrow and everything will be fine.”

“I dunno, Mike,” said Vanessa, twisting a strand of hair around her index finger. “He might need to catch up on some of the assignments, plus she’s our homeroom teacher—”

Jordan silently shook off Michael’s grip and stalked up to Ms. Anderson’s desk. She had just finished pulling out a stack bulging manila folders when Jordan reached her, and didn’t seem to notice him until he cleared his throat loudly.

Her head snapped up, pale blue eyes searching Jordan’s face and eyebrows knitting with confusion.

“I’m new.”

The eyebrows relaxed only a little.

“Jordan McClain.”

Ms. Anderson shuffled the folders in her arms, deposited them on the desk, and then rummaged through the topmost one, pulling out a list. “McClain…McClain…” she said, running her finger down the list, tapping her tongue against her top teeth in thought. “Oh, here you are.” She set the paper down and rounded her desk, sitting down in her chair, and it squeaked softly beneath her. “Stick around after the bell for a minute or two and I’ll get you up to speed, Jordan. Nice to have you.”

Jordan nodded and proceeded back to his seat where he noticed Michael and Vanessa both watching him with interest, their heads bowed close together as they whispered to each other out of the corners of their mouths, quickly turning their heads away when he caught them staring. He took his seat without saying a word and counted down the minutes to his next class.

* * *

Jordan was unsurprised to find himself the only one in the locker room by the time he’d located the gymnasium. Ms. Anderson had to fish through her piles of manila folders to find all of the worksheets, forms, and handouts that had accumulated in the two weeks before Jordan had started class, and even after that Jordan still had to navigate his way to the gym with only his ruined map and Michael’s abysmal sense of direction for help.

The gym, much like the rest of the school, looked like it had been built something around 1970 and hadn’t been updated since, its beige paint peeling off in large flakes.

Jordan pushed open the double doors to the locker room, and his footsteps echoed off of the grimy linoleum and chipped red lockers, bouncing back to his ears so he could feel the emptiness around him. The silence was interrupted however by a boy’s soft voice sharpened by hints of stress.

“Mr. Greenglass, I know this is the third time since school started, but I swear they’re gone again. My lock, my clothes—everything that was in there.”

Jordan paused. The voice had come from down the hallway and away from the lockers. Another strong ripple of pain shot down Jordan’s back as he peered around the corner of a row of lockers, stepping over the benches that sat between the rows. He sucked in a breath, waiting for it to ebb away; the waves were coming faster now.

At the end of the hallway by the double-door exit were two people: a tall, blond boy dressed in khaki shorts and a simple green t-shirt despite the miserable weather outside, and a stout teacher with thinning brown hair whose crossed arms and set jaw weren’t enough to disguise the look of pity he was giving the boy.

“Jesse, we can’t help if you don’t report it,” Mr. Greenglass replied in a gruff voice that was as menacing as it was sympathetic. He disappeared for a moment into a side room and came back, holding a pile of what looked like lumpy rags. Jordan ignored the pulsating, sharp jabs that continued down his back and across his shoulder blades long enough to focus his eyes on them. He realized, on closer inspection, that the rags were old gym clothes.

“I don’t know who it is,” the boy named Jesse said, taking the clothes from Mr. Greenglass, holding them to his chest. “It could be anyone.”

Mr. Greenglass sighed, and slapped a thick hand onto Jesse’s shoulder, the soft thwap reaching Jordan’s ears all the way at the other end of the hallway. “You should probably start taking your gym clothes home with you, then. If they get stolen again, we’re gonna have to ask you to buy new ones—I’ve given you nearly all of our spares.”

Jesse nodded and Mr. Greenglass disappeared out of the double doors. Just moments after the doors swung shut, Jordan felt a particularly strong wave hit him, and a cry of shock escaped from his mouth before he could stop himself.

“Is someone there?” Jordan heard the boy Jesse call out, and he slouched against the closest locker, digging his back against the metal handle, lining up the pressure points in hopes of suppressing the next wave.

He had squeezed his eyes shut, trying to block out any feeling when there was suddenly a faint, earthy aroma like he had been transported into an open field.  When he opened his eyes again, he saw the blond boy peering curiously at him, hazel green eyes imploring and soft and a little bit unsettling in their earnestness. Long blond hair swung into the boy’s face, and Jordan tried to press himself further into the locker as he realized the boy had no concept of personal space.

“Are you okay?” Jesse asked, reaching out a hand to touch Jordan’s shoulder. Jordan flinched and swatted it away, thoroughly weirded out.

“I’m fine,” Jordan replied, though the budding drops of perspiration on his forehead and the color draining from his face were suggesting otherwise. “I just need to sit down for a bit…” And as if on cue, Jordan promptly collapsed onto the bench, panting.

From his prone position, Jordan heard a soft rusting by his head and chanced a look upwards. Jesse had placed his gym clothes down on the bench and was now saying, “You don’t look okay. I’m gonna go get Mr. Greenglass—”

Jordan’s head snapped up at Jesse. “Don’t. I’m fine. Really.” Another wave and Jordan could fell his skin crawling up from the base of his spine and out to his shoulder blades. He bowed his head, thinking, It’s early. I still had a week left….

“Just a fever,” he grunted, gripping the bench, forehead pressed against the wooden slats. Suddenly the spike in his hearing made sense. It was starting.

And then Jordan felt his back explode in pain. He gasped, doubling over as he felt a thousand needles digging into him, felt the skin on his back stretching and tearing underneath his shirt and trenchcoat, felt his collar bone thickening and fusing together. It was as if someone were prying opening his back from the inside and reorganizing the parts without any anesthesia.

“What’s going on?” came Jesse’s voice from somewhere above him, high and tense with panic. “Look, I’m going to get a teacher—”

Jordan’s eyes shot open and his hand flew up and caught the boy deftly by the collar of his scratchy green shirt. His grip was inhumanly strong as he held Jesse in place, Hill’s words screaming in his ears. “Don’t. Please,” he added as an afterthought.

There was no time for Jesse to answer. Jordan had started to scream. Long, anguished screams muted to the outside by the locker room’s heavy double doors. The screams seemed to climb an octave as the skin on Jordan’s back split down the middle, something large pushing its way out from inside, fighting to free itself. It strained against the back of Jordan’s shirt and coat, and he moved to rip the coat from him to relieve the pressure, but he could only wretch in pain, the contents of his stomach splattering onto the floor. When Jordan warily moved his trembling hands up again to his coat, he found a set of hands helping him.

The coat came off, but it was too late for the shirt. Jordan could feel his shoulder blades lengthening unnaturally, extending out from his mangled, bloody back, shredding the shirt as they did so that it fell in tatters to the floor, soaked in his puddle of sick. Jordan shuddered and then there were great sounds of bones cracking, slush hitting the floor, and the overwhelming, coppery smell of blood. His shoulder blades continued to pull away from him, growing impossibly long, and he could feel their weight above him as he lay against the bench, his screams dissolving now into pants. The pain was at last subsiding, but he found himself still shaking as if the locker room was suddenly thirty below.

The bloody protrusions had now stretched high above his back, as tall as Jesse. When he tested the joints, flexing new muscles that had suddenly come into existence, Jordan realized that the protrusions appeared to be folded in on themselves, hinting that they were even larger than he previously thought. They gave a feeble twitch, flicking off some of the blood so that silver glinted from underneath the red.

“What…?” Jesse’s voice was barely above a whisper, quavering as spoke, and whatever he was going to say next died in his throat.

Jordan lifted his head up slightly and looked down at his hands, spotted now with splotches of yellow. He had gripped the bench so hard that the section he had been holding splinted in his fingers like strips of bark. But Jordan could tell Jesse wasn’t looking at the destroyed wood in his hands. The giant, bloody protrusions gave another clumsy twitch, this one more of an exaggerated mimicry of an arm flexing upside down.

“You’ve lost a lot of blood,” continued Jesse, his voice hollow and automatic as though he wasn’t really even thinking about the words as he said them. “A hospital. We need to get you to a hospital. I’ll call 911—” He reached into his backpack and began to pull out a cellphone, but Jordan’s hand was on his arm, his grip unnecessarily tight.

Jordan had pushed himself up into a sitting position, and the protrusions flopped around uselessly with the movement, drooping against the locker like the legs of a fresh-birthed calf. He took the cellphone from Jesse and closed his fist around it. The phone spilled out of his hand in dozens of tiny jagged pieces.

“You can’t tell anyone,” Jordan said, those piercing brown eyes boring into Jesse’s wide green ones with not just a look, but a promise of what would happen to him if he didn’t listen. Jordan’s voice was low and hoarse, but the pain was now just a dull ache now. He could feel the sickening sensation of his skin beginning to stretch and pull and crawl over the open wound his shoulder blades had created. He was healing.

The protrusions shook again, harder this time, and the blood that hadn’t been flung off was beginning to dry. The silver underneath was becoming more prominent, now revealing itself to be of a soft downy quality, and the protrusions were looking less like long, bloody stumps and more like—

“Wings,” Jesse said, and there was a suddenly a strange, closed expression on Jesse’s face that Jordan didn’t like. “You have wings.”

Jordan looked away. I couldn’t even go one full day...