Warnings

   “Mr. Pierce, Would you please contribute more attention to your class work than your sleep, or may I remind you that you have your final exam in a month?” Said Mrs. Ekydrus glaring at him from behind a large pair of pink glasses. “Sorry.” he yawned. Out of every class he had this year; Mrs. Ekydrus’s math class was by far the worst one.

    His name is Riley Pierce, and he was never a normal child, and there are some things you must know about him. First of all, most people have videos of when they were young, like their first steps and stuff. He didn’t. In fact, the earliest documentation of him ever existing wasn’t until he was five years old, and at that, it was his first day of school. It was only a picture. He couldn’t remember anything before that, and when he asked his parents why, all I ever got was “we do somewhere.”  Then they would quickly change the subject, or just walk away.

     Also, he had a knack for getting into bad situations. On his sixth birthday, his parents took him to Niagara Falls, where he wandered off, and fell over the wall. His memory ran short after that, but his parents told him his shirt had gotten caught on a nearby tree, and he was able to be rescued.

     For his eleventh birthday, he fell into the pond deep in the woods behind his house. Unable to swim, he quickly sank down to the bottom where he believed death would take him. Next thing he knew, there was a bright light, and he was in his bedroom, soaked and in a large puddle of water.

     Last month, for his sixteenth birthday, Riley had almost killed his uncle, when he had burst into the kitchen carrying a large blue birthday cake. At the moment, Riley had happened to be carrying a set of knives to set the table. Surprised by his uncle’s sudden entrance, I reacted by taking one of the knives he had in his hand, and threw the knife, point first, at his head, He managed to block it with the cake and save his life, but he never tried to sneak up on Riley again. The event was a strange occurrence for a normally clumsy teenager

      Abnormalities aside, Riley Pierce was a junior at his high school, He wasn’t popular, but then again, he wasn’t exactly at the bottom of the list either. He often kept to myself with the exception of a few friends. Here, they all had a common enemy: the school and all the teachers that made them cringe in their plastic chair-desks.

    He lazily flipped open his text book to the page 328, which Mrs. Ekydrus had spared no space on the chalkboard advertising. Once she had looked away, and her attention was safely on another topic, however, He laid his head back down and closed his eyes.

    He hadn’t slept well that night. Come to think of it, he hadn’t slept well in three months. He was trying to get all the sleep he could but he was having strange dreams. He would wake up in a sweat, bed covers askew. He could never remember what they were about, but I could see the effect they were having on him.

    These dreams were nearly every night. Most of the time they would wake him up in the middle of the night. Sometimes he would awake yelling, and his parents would come in and attempt to comfort him, most nights he simply lied in my bed until it was time for school, unable to bring himself to close his eyes.

    It had eventually become routine for him. When he would have a dream, he would watch T.V. into the early hours of the morning. He had become familiar with the late night talk shows, and adult swim marathons.

    Every time he would get ready for school, he would notice the bags under his eyes getting deeper and darker and his skin paler. His parents were starting to show a deepening concern for his sleep habits. He assured them that he was fine, but three months had gone by. What if maybe He was going crazy?

    He woke up at the bell. This day would go by, he was sure, like every other. Ekydrus was shouting something about tonight’s homework. He wasn’t going to do it. Nobody was.

    His next class was geography. He knew it was a waste of time like math, but unlike math, he was good at it. Besides, Mr. D. was one of his favorite teachers.

     It wasn’t like he was a bad student or anything; on the contrary he was very good. It was just that he was only good at things that made sense to him, and that didn’t include math.

     He walked into Mr. D’s room, and said hello. He responded with a cheerful “morning Riley, finish the essay?” 

     “Yep, took me all night.” he lied. It hadn’t. In fact it would have been considered extreme if he had spent more than ten minutes on it.

     Riley handed him his packet of hastily written papers. Mr. D tossed it onto his desk and strolled out of the room. Riley sat at his desk and crouched into his usual position of head down and feet on the rack of the chair in front of him. He didn’t know when, or if he fell asleep. Only that, at some point, his body became blisteringly hot. He wrenched open his eyes and let out a gasp. He thought he was on fire.

    After realizing that he wasn’t about to die a horrible flame-induced death, Riley began to notice the lingering eyes of all my classmates. He looked around at all of them watching him. 

    “Um, bad dream.”  

    Even Mr. D was giving him an odd look.

    “Uh, Mr. D, can I go to the bathroom please?” Continuing his odd gaze, He said slowly “sure you don’t need to go to the nurse?” “Yeah, I’m fine.”  Riley quickly took the pass and walked out, feeling the eyes of everyone in the room on the back of his head.

      I walked into the bathroom, and started cleansing every exposed part of my body thoroughly with water. The idea of being lit on fire wasn’t exactly the most appealing prospect.

       I washed my face last, momentarily pausing to look at my pale reflection in the mirror. The small bathroom window was casting a melancholy shadow across my face. My dark hair and eyes, accompanied by the deep shadows under them, gave off a sort of dark appearance.

       I looked terrible. My skin had become pale, and my body: weak. Was this the result of my frequent dreams?

       I used to be happy. My face bright, my eyes youthful, my body well built. An image now portrayed, only in the pictures above our mantelpiece.

       “What’s happening to me?” I said out loud. It was a question I had asked myself every night for three months. Still, I had no answer.

        I waited out the remainder of the period in the seclusion of the bathroom. After the bell rang, I collected myself, and made my way through the mass of people trafficking through the hallways, the noise of a hundred indecipherable conversations ringing in my ears.

        I slid into Mr. D.s room trying not to be noticed. I picked up my things, and headed for the door.  ‘You really should get some more sleep Riley, I enjoy you as a student, but, well, recently, you haven’t exactly been up to par.”  I turned around to see Mr. D. watching me intently from behind his desk.  “I know, it’s just, I don’t know why, but, I’ve been feeling sort of different lately.”  Mr. D. leaned forward in his chair, “Well, I know it may be difficult sometimes, but maybe you need something to attract your attention, I don’t like to say this, but your grade suffers every time you put your head down in this class.”  “I know, it’s not like I want to, it’s just that I haven’t been myself lately, I’ve been having weird dreams.”  

      Mr. D. looked away for a moment and muttered under his breath, “So it begins.”   “What?” I asked confused.  “Oh nothing, nothing at all.” Mr. D. gave a weak smile. “Now, I want you to have this homework ready to hand in by tomorrow.”  “But isn’t it due on Wednesday?” I said looking at the board.  “Yes. Yes it is, but I would like you to have it done by tomorrow, I trust it is not an unreasonable request?”  Not wanting to push the point that I had missed the majority of his class, I agreed, and took the homework.

      As I was leaving the room, he called out to me one last time and said “Oh, and Riley, wear something running savvy tomorrow, I feel we may be having a surprise field day.” 

     Confused, I kept on walking out the door.

     Two minutes later, I was sitting at my usual lunch table in the corner of the cafeteria.  Next to me, were my two best friends, Mike and Travis. We had kept the same seating arrangement since the seventh grade.

     Travis was a sports legend, but, for some reason, refused to sit with the other jocks, and had always preferred to sit with us. He was tall, slender, and strong. He had medium length brown hair, and a slight goatee, and also had the appearance of someone much older.

      Mike was an incredibly strange character. He never spoke. Instead, he would write down anything he needed to say on paper. This made conversations difficult and lengthy. 

     Even more mysterious, I have known him as long as I could remember, and never once has he mentioned where he lived or anything personal like that. It was like at the end of the day; he simply crawled in a whole and fell asleep. Because of this, I have never truthfully been able to say I was best friends with him, for I knew almost nothing about him.

      Mike was slightly taller than me, and was oddly built, with broad shoulders, thin waste, hardened muscles, and light sandy hair. He always reminded me of a stereotypical surfer dude.

      For a while, I stared at the disgusting mush of taco salad on my tray. I was considering whether I was hungry enough to stomach it. I decided against it, and pushed it over towards Travis, whose ravenous hunger never ceased to amaze me.

      He mumbled thanks through the enormous amount of food in his mouth, and slid it closer to himself.

      I looked at Mike to tell him how strange Mr. D. had acted moments ago, and saw him staring at the wooden table with a look of the deepest sadness.  “Mike, what’s wrong?”

      He turned to me. As he did so, he pulled out the tiny red notebook that he kept with him at all times. He flipped open the notebook and rifled through the pages until he found a blank page. He quickly scribbled something down and handed it to me.

      I read it once, then again. Even after a few more times I still had no clue about its meaning.

      I looked past the notebook at him to see that his depressed look had only gotten sadder. He saw me look at him and met my gaze.

      I looked back down at the note which had yet to make any sense to me. The black words “Tomorrow it comes, we must be ready” staring up at me from the pale white paper.