Eben Sosna
January 25, 2022 9:24 PM
Where It All Began by Eben Sosna
"You're doing it again," said Euan, in a tone which implied that 'it,' whatever 'it' was, was a monstrous act of pure betrayal.Eben, startled out of his thoughts, looked at his brother without comprehension. "I'm doing what again?"
"Sticking your hands in your pockets like you're looking for something. Do you have to pull a rabbit out every day before they feed you lunch at weirdo school or something?"
"No," said Eben. "I think that would be really advanced magic or something - I've seen - well, it looks like some of the teachers and some of the, like, juniors and seniors can just make stuff appear out of nowhere, but nobody in my class can." This was also why Eben could go no further than 'looks' when it came to talking about things appearing from nothing. That wasn't how things worked. Even a ghost didn't come from nothing, it came from a dead person. If he got to junior year and it turned out that yes, he could make a rabbit appear out of thin air, then he'd have to accept that that was how things worked, but until then....
He realized Euan was giving him a strange look, like people at their elementary school had whenever he'd tried to have interesting conversations with any of them. "Cool," he said, this time in a tone which implied Eben was both incredibly lame and possibly off his rocker.
He did keep patting his pockets, though he didn't really mean to. It was just that for so long, it had been Very Important that he always keep up with where his wand was, and since he had the organizational skills of a small tornado, that had been a challenge. Therefore, when he couldn't find it, he sort of low-key panicked, figuring he was about to repeat that time when he'd borrowed something and lost it, or done some homework at his gran's in another town and left it there, or...so on and so forth. It probably didn't help, either, that he'd made it a habit to practice little spells when he had nothing else to do - changing the color of his shoelaces while waiting for class to start, or flying objects around his and Phil's room for a while when he had trouble settling down and focusing on his homework, that kind of thing. So now, it was hard not to feel like something was constantly going wrong.
Of course, there were other problems with being home, too. Like how while he'd been working on those habits, the rest of his family had developed some new ones, too, none of which - obviously - involved him.
It wasn't as if he'd ever been super-close to his parents, of course. They both had jobs. If there had ever been a time when they'd even had enough time to be super-interested in him or Euan, it had been long before Eben had learned how to remember things long-term. Now, though, they often seemed kind of surprised to even notice he was there, as though he was...some sleepover guest who wasn't supposed to still be around, or something, and that was when they noticed he was there at all. It wasn't like they were upset when they did - but it wasn't like he thought they would have noticed, either, the day he got bored enough to leave Euan with his handheld game and wander out of the house.
He wasn't entirely sure where he was going until he was almost to the bus stop, and by that point, it seemed obvious that it was the only place he could possibly go. He needed...something. Something to prove it had all been real. Just one sighting of something from the secret world that was definitely not something that could have been faked. Where else, here at least, could he possibly get that except back where it had all began?
Not that it was easy to get there. His sense of place hadn't been great when he was six, so he'd had to spend most of the bus ride desperately brainstorming, trying to reconstruct a route from hazy bits and pieces of memory. He knew, for instance, that they'd been driving toward a nursing home to visit a great-auntie or something when it had happened - but there were two nursing homes vaguely in the direction he remembered going, and nowadays, neither of them was anywhere near a Taco Bell. One, though, wasn't that far from a kind of run-down-looking breakfast cafe which looked like it had been installed in the empty husk of a Taco Bell. Which was great, except that there were three or four possible ways to get from that Point A to the nursing home Point B....
He walked for a long time before he found it - long enough that his hair had gone all sweaty and he had started to dread the walk back to the bus stop that he'd have to take sooner or later, and to worry about how much sooner that might really be. All that, though, went straight out of his head when he looked up and realized that he had finally found it.
He almost didn't recognize it. The day his life had changed forever, the lot had contained half of a big white house, which had been in the middle of being demolished. Now, the site was an ex-gas station, long since shut down. There was a funny sort of mini-wall of red brick against the sidewalk, though, which had been in front of the house and hadn't been removed, and he recognized the flowering trees behind and to the left of the building. It was here. It was real.
Well, the place was. He still didn't see what he was really looking for, which was Proof. But at least the place being real was a start. Ignoring the 'no trespassing' signs, he hopped over the low bricks and walked toward the building. Without a single thought about what else could be lurking in or around an abandoned building like this, he looked around and called out, "Hello? Is - uh - is anyone who's a ghost around here?"
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Eben Sosna
Where It All Began
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