Staccato

Clairvoyant Visions

I grit my teeth, exit the site, throw myself back against the chair and tip my head back, closing my eyes against the ceiling. I breathe out in frustration.

Am I going crazy?

There's no other explanation for it.

I have to be going crazy.

I try to breathe in and out and calm down the frenzied beating of my heart. I try to clear the chaotic fog in my head to think straight and logically deduce an explanation for this.

I passed out after seeing that vision last evening. After that, up until this point, I haven't seen any more visions.

Neither did I see him.

I was floored, when Laurie said that he was the one who carried me all the way from the Great hall to my bedroom, when I showed no sign of regaining consciousness.

She said, since he was the one sitting next to me, he ended up being the one who shook me and slapped my face, tried to bring me back, when I conked out.

As for the rest, they became aware that something went wrong when my dad stopped midsentence, and all of the people from the panel started staring at the last table as if the apocalypse were unfolding before them.

Well, everyone except for Brian Tyler, who Laurie said seemed caught between bafflement at the plain randomness of the event, to anger at the fact that it was his son who was proceeding to hoist me up over his shoulder.

And then my siblings and everyone came rushing and I was carried up - past the archway from the great hall, through the winding stairs, to my bedroom, where I was laid on the bed and mom was straightaway calling for our family doctor...

And that's when Efrim had slipped away. Laurie swears nobody saw him leave, nobody knows when he left. He just...left.

Before the doctor could arrive, though, I was up and ordering everyone out of my room. But mom made the doctor barge in anyway when he finally arrived, and I was asked a thousand questions while being poked and prodded at my eyes with a flashlight.

As I lay reluctant and hesitant and confused and tired, while my mom stood wringing her hands in worry and my dad kept looking at me with a concern that he tried hard to conceal, I considered responding to my doctor's repeated question of 'did you experience anything out of the ordinary' with an affirmative.

But of course, I didn't.

That look of tremulous concern in my mom's eyes made me stop.

Plus perhaps a reluctance to admit that I indeed might be going crazy.

Perhaps a reluctance to admit that before my parents who have always taken pride in their offsprings' excellent aptitudes.

Is it possible to go crazy out to too much of intelligence?

It sounds conceited to my own head.

But don't they say such people are often slightly cracked?

But what extraordinary feats have I done?

Got into the mensa society at the age of eleven?

But I haven't designed a freaking software, have I?

Except that you have built a cloud chamber to visualize ionizing particles at the age of fourteen?

But I haven't won any Olympiads, have I?

Only you are the highest scoring student, have consistently been the same, have received trophies for the same. Every year.

But scores don't reflect your capabilities.

Efrim scored the lowest in last exam.

But that's because he fails deliberately.

It's something that astonishes us all. 

I remember wondering about it with Laurie, when we were talking about how he was asked by our teacher why he marked off the multiple choice questions in a perfect pattern of one right answer followed by six wrong answers, and how he had simply stared at her with a perfectly unamused face.

I now realise why he does that.

After last night, after watching him look straight ahead at his dad, returning a certain cold stare with equally piercing frostiness, I realise that Efrim's always been brazenly challenging his dad.

Amid the chaos clouding my head into a frenzy, a single question now burns through me, and hurts me and confounds me.

If he has always been challenging his dad, why had he never tried to challenge him with me?

Up until last night?

~*~