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about than some doctor’s appointment. His body was going through some very odd changes that he didn’t understand; changes that didn’t feel medical, or natural. Everything around him seemed to be changing all of a sudden. Colors glowed with a brightness he had never seen before; his hearing sometimes was so acute that he could clearly hear conversations across a crowded room that should have been impossible for his human ear, like the conversation with Brooke and her sorority sisters. Twice already, when he was sitting alone watching television, he started sweating profusely and his heart pounded in his chest as if he had just completed several back-to-back sprints.
    His body would sometime tingle, like he was being pricked with tiny needles, right before something strange occurred. The other night at work when he was wiping down tables in the dining room his skin started to feel prickly, like with electricity. He looked at his forearms and the hairs on his arms were literally standing on end. Then, the power in the building flickered and the lights in the ceiling closest to him exploded, sending glass raining to the floor. Then, the power on the whole block went out, casting the entire neighborhood in darkness. He rememberedfeeling a surge of energy so great that he felt like he could power the electrical grid himself.
    The oddities he was experiencing in his body probably warranted a doctor’s visit, but he didn’t want to go. A part of him thought he should see a doctor, but he was so resistant to the idea. He had painful memories of doctors at free clinics poking and prodding him like prized cattle as a child. He had never been sick, but they wanted to inject him with all sorts of drugs that were mandated by law, so they told him. Those experiences never sat well with him.
    Maybe this appointment won’t be so bad , he thought, if for no other reason than to hear the doctor tell him he was okay. But, what would he tell him when he arrived? That light hurt his eyes so much that it gave him a headache? That he sweated a lot while at rest? Or, that he had really, really good hearing? Or should he tell them that he was having some really fucked-up dreams about snakes and shadows? Was that even relevant to his physical maladies?
    Simon exhaled, more out of frustration than anything else. He looked at Brooke’s note again. Her penmanship was exquisite, each letter given proper time and attention to develop as she wrote, especially in an age where handwriting was becoming obsolete. Her concern for him made him feel special and desired, feelings that had been foreign to him for most of his life. She was the only person in years that he believed really and truly cared about what happened to him; a small part of him believed that she always had his best interest at heart, but another part thought maybe she was pretending, in the ways that all the others had. The foster families. The fake girlfriends. He had been deceived by love, or the thought of it, so many times that his heart had closed.
    When it came to that four letter word, he couldn’t tell the difference between fiction and truth; even with Brooke he couldn’t be entirely sure what she felt. He had been burned far too manytimes to trust without suspicion; but, in spite of his trepidation, he allowed himself to go emotionally farther with her than he had with anyone. Sometimes when he thought he had gone too far, he’d pull back instinctively. He’d start arguments to push her away and sometimes not call her for days, always reminding her through his actions that her position within in heart was temporary, fleeting at best. Yet, she held onto him. She held onto him tightly, in spite of offers from more suitable Southern sons whose fathers bore the riches of their fathers before them.
    Her family couldn’t stand him and he knew her friends didn’t like him, either. He wasn’t from the upper echelon of southern society.