Earth to Me

The sky was red near a blood-colored moon, and it was deep black everywhere else. Somehow, it was all illuminated – the pixilated walls that stood all around me in a maze, horrible JPEG-quality rug patterns all over the one-dimensional barriers.

In my head, there was a pounding hum that kept getting louder. Like silence, it got louder the longer I stayed immobile, but even when I ran around corners and tried to get a grasp on where I was, the humming turned into a giant buzz that throbbed in tune with my heartbeat.

Looked around the edge – nothing. Just walls as far as I could see. Off-golden-brown tiles that stretched for miles, serving as their foundation.

I’d catch glimpses of my arms and legs. I was orange, even more foreign-looking than I already was; four fingers on one hand and three on the other. In the sky hung two more pixilated red blobs of numbers – two sevens, a little conga line of lucky numbers.

The drone kept going. Never stopped. Even when I stumbled and tripped and fell through the floor, descending into black-and-red nothingness, I heard its buzz, vibrating my brains into the worst headache of my life.

There was no floor. Yet suddenly, I hit something and was yanked out of consciousness.

I woke up, breathing harder than I did in gym class, and I whipped my head around. My dorm room was empty. None of my stuff was in it, Murray wasn’t sleeping across from me, and a weak moonlight illuminated the whole lot of nothing around me.

I tried to speak. Couldn’t. All that came out was a lone whimper, even when I tried to scream.

An alarm clock lay in the middle of the floor. It was upside down, its rubber legs poking up, the cord a long tail that plugged into nothing.

Spelled out in bright green digital letters was the word “hELL,” formed with numbers and flipped upside-down.

The second I saw it and comprehended it, I woke up again.

It took a minute. Weak sparkly dots of Christmas lights blinked at me from over Murray’s bed, and then my hazy vision came into focus. I was breathing too hard; my limbs were heavy and covered in sweat even though my sheets were thrown off my body.

For some reason I sat up and looked over at Murray, who was sitting atop his bed and gaping at me.

“You…are you okay, Osh?” he whispered, frozen in place. “There was a power surge and then you started making noises, and…”

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” I breathed. Sweat was pouring down my forehead and making my hair stick to my face. God, I really needed to get a haircut.

Wait. Power surge?

I coughed and cleared my throat. “What do you mean ‘power surge?’”

He motioned towards the lights in our room and his laptop. “The lights went on real bright for a second, then everything went out. Then it went back to normal, then it went out again, then it went back to normal. Then you started moving around and I thought you were getting electrocuted, and then you woke up right after it went back to this.”

My eyes wandered over to my alarm clock. It was blinking, “12:03” over and over.

Then I stared at my hands in my restless daze. When I didn’t know how to control my lightning, sparks would just randomly fly without my jurisdiction. Nowadays I thought I had it all right – someone could even tickle me and I wouldn’t accidentally zap them.

But could I have caused that in my sleep?

Murray snapped me out of thought. “It looked like you were either having a wet dream or a nightmare over there, dude. You okay?”

My face heated up even more. “It – not – it was a nightmare. I dunno.”

He smirked. “Alright, man. Just get some sleep, alright? Set your clock again and I’ll wake you up if it happens again.”

“You’re doing an all-nighter?” I wrinkled my eyebrows at him. Was he nuts?

“I got my Medieval Art final tomorrow. Gotta cram it all in and rely on coffee to keep me up tomorrow.” (Yeah, he was nuts.) He even winked at me.

For a second I forgot the fact that we were in the last week of classes, in the dead of winter, and I was sweating my butt off from a dumb nightmare. I already had a few finals and passed them, but I had one that upcoming day – my drawing class. I panicked for a moment before realizing that I had all my stuff ready to critique.

“Get some rest, Osh. Cherish it. It’s finals week.”

God, he was right. I was already losing sleep over some of the tests I ended up passing, and as the days went on, my worries melted away more and more. It was a nice way to end a semester I was dreading, at least…up until that night.

I kept my hands close to my chest all night. If I felt myself drift into dreamland again, I’d unconsciously jerk awake and snap myself out of it, just in case I’d continue the nightmare.

The last thing I wanted to do was lose control again. A year beforehand, I zapped the crap out of Shira when she almost killed my dad, and days later I almost shocked Andy when I tried to show him my power for the first time. God knows I didn’t wanna accidentally shoot a beam across the room and kill Murray, my only new friend.

I could feel my veins throb. The lightning scars that trailed down my shoulders and over my chest were always bright purple, and if anybody ever asked about them, I’d say it was just a tattoo. (According to everybody outside of our circle, Tegan and I had matching tattoos. I can’t even tell you how many times Murray said it was adorable for us to do that, even after he found out Tegan was gay.)

After a while of not using my powers, I even started to believe it. Yeah, these lightning bolts? I just always thought it was cool how they looked like veins so I got it all over my upper arms and chest. It had nothing to do with the fact that I was a human generator. Being at such a distance from it all was so weird in retrospect.

Now it was all coming back to me. Purple lines on my body showed the trace of supernatural in my system, the strange things that were bestowed upon me a year and a half beforehand.

Even if my finals ended up going well and Christmas break was the break I desperately needed before starting my second semester of college, there was a worried pulse in the back of my head every night that kept me from drifting off to my full potential.