Borderline [On hold for major revision]

Chapter 13: No Hablo Ingles

Okay, let's play Spot the LGs again. Dedication to anyone who can tell me where one is. :P

Chapter 13

That night I tried cleaning the house for the first time in months. I never really found a reason to do it earlier since no one ever visited except Terra, and I was never concerned with impressing her. I didn’t care about impressing Ryan or Ben either, but cleaning just seemed like the right thing to do.

When I clean, I have to have music or something turned on and I can’t think about what I’m doing. If I am focused on working in a silent house, I just end up boring myself into a coma—really, that almost happened one time. So I tuned the radio to a random station and let my thoughts wander as I cleaned dishes in the kitchen.

Before a single minute had passed I was already distracted and pondering my seemingly psychic powers.

I tried to count how many times over I’d be dead right now if I hadn’t gotten a weird sense of oncoming danger every time. I counted six, but I might have forgotten a few specific times. Sometimes I found myself reacting before I consciously knew why, so it was hard to pin down an exact number.

That time by the elevator a couple weeks earlier certainly wasn’t the first time I’d been alerted that something was wrong by my “sixth sense”. It had been happening since I was in my mid-teens. It might’ve been happening earlier, but I wasn’t the most attentive kid in the world.

The first time I felt it and consciously followed my instinct was in my sophomore year of high school. It was the day before exams, and as usual I was cramming that the last minute. I remember being really worried about it because my exams would have a huge impact on my already delicate grades. I had been taking a shortcut home from the library so that I could get into my room to study faster.

I also remember the heavy rain that was pouring down that day; we hadn’t had a proper storm in months, and my new library books were becoming drenched in the downpour. The quickest way back to my house at that time had been a bridge across a small valley, so that was the way I took to get home. Near the middle of the bridge was when I first felt it, that first flash of fear so brief that I didn’t have time to consider what I was doing before I reacted. I dove to the side of the road, just as a speeding cargo truck whizzed by the spot where I had been standing a second earlier. I hadn’t heard it coming because of the loud rain and my distracting thoughts of the upcoming exams. I never heard it, I never saw it. Yet I jumped out of the way just before it hit me.

After that, I just went home and didn’t tell anyone about what happened. I knew they wouldn’t believe me anyway. Even I didn’t fully believe myself at the time. But then occurrences like that happened again…and again, and again. Eventually I decided that I simply had better instincts than other people, a “sixth sense” as the weird ESP scientists on TV prefer to call it. It saved my life countless times since the incident on the bridge, especially in my line of work.

I looked down at the counter and realized that I had already scrubbed it twice. I didn’t even remember taking out the surface cleaner. I threw away the brown paper towel I was using and moved on to the living room. Picked up some garbage. Shot it basketball-style into the trash can in the kitchen. Zoned out again.

What I didn’t understand was why it was happening so often all of a sudden. I mean, sure there had been more instances in which I needed to react quickly than usual, but it was starting to become a regular thing. I wasn’t so sure how I felt about that.

My phone rang, causing me to jump. Unfortunately I was underneath the table, so I banged my head really hard on the underside of it. I couldn’t even remember how I’d gotten there.