Chapter One

We were both grinning from ear to ear and I had never been more excited in my life. My heart was pounding in my chest like it was brand new from a transplant. I stared up at him in disbelief as he towered over me.

We had finally stopped laughing and screaming like little girls who'd been given back stage passes to see our favorite boy band. Only him and I existed in that moment. Our smiles faded as our eyes fixed on what I held in my hands. It was much heavier than expected, but I loved the feel of it all the same.

It didn't take much convincing to get him to let me hold it and I wasn't in a hurry to let go. I wanted to live in suspense. I stroked the thick, hard metal instrument in my hand. It was smooth and perfect in every way.

It was Saylor's brand new Fish eye lens.

"Put it on already!" he shouted. Saylor Reynolds was my best friend and exactly half of the total number of friends I had or ever had in my entire life. The other half wasn't in photography class with us. She'd chosen art instead, which was certainly the right choice for her.

At the moment, we were—or I was, rather—swapping lenses on the absurdly expensive Sony Alpha camera Saylor got for his birthday awhile back. We always referred to everything we did as we, even if it was only one of us doing it. We puked, we took a shit, our eye spasmed, although it was only ever my eye that did the spasming. Saylor was a great friend and this rule had been unfairly drawn up for my benefit.

I screwed on the new lens and returned the old one to the black leather camera bag sitting on the bench beside me. I handed the camera up to Saylor while donning the wide, pointed-canine smile I knew he had trouble resisting. It was one of exactly two tools at my disposal, but outside of my family and friends, tool one had been entirely useless. I was happy to let him use it first. It was his lens, his camera and he was the better photographer—screwy eye aside.

"No, Rudy." Saylor crossed his arms in refusal. "You're taking the first ones."

Rudy wasn't my name, but I didn't mind that he called me it. He clearly wasn't taking the camera or any of my honorable bullshit though. Man, I loved him. He was already backing away through the grass toward the Two-Faced willow tree that stood near the center of the park. It didn't actually have two-faces and aside from us, no one called it that.

To everyone else, it was the Lucky Freedom willow tree. It was the tree everyone took at least one classy senior picture under and the tree most shamelessly crossed at least one base under—a rite of passage even I hoped to achieve one day.

Bases referred to the cringe worthy sports style accounting of promiscuity. Though, my explanation probably wasn't necessary. The absolute worst jock-isms have a way of withstanding the test of time.

"Fine!" I shouted, looping the camera strap over my head. I was way too clumsy to risk free-handing it over to him.

I also gave up way too easily, but don't be fooled, I could be unreasonably stubborn about the most ridiculous things. Such as, the time when Saylor decided to keep a secret from me at a winter sleepover. I ran out of my cousin's house barefoot, wearing only boxers and marched through the snow in below freezing weather. I threatened to walk the two miles across town, all the way back to my house unless he told me the secret.

He did and he carried me all the way back to the house, but he didn't have to. I'd have died or given in. We both knew that. My mom wasn't home, so the door was locked and I wasn't hiding house keys in my corn hole.

Saylor was much taller and wider than I was, but he was also a gentle giant and everyone knew it. I wish they hadn't. It would've made high school a hell of a lot easier on me. Not to say Saylor wouldn't have given his life to protect me, but I was more feared than he was. If only for the attention my eye spasms drew. It wasn't anything major. I was born with an astigmatism that gave me a lazy eye and the horrible nickname Mad-Eye Rudy.

My actual name was Regal, but hardly anyone ever called me that and most had forgotten it entirely. To make matters worse, I also suffered from keratconus. That meant I'd inevitably need a corneal transplant to save my vision.

Relax.

It wasn't the same thing as needing a kidney. Apparently, spare eyeballs were much easier to come by. As if things couldn't get worse, the same condition prevented me from wearing contacts, so I was reduced to wearing thick, black 'nerd-alert' glasses that had a real lens only for the right eye. The left protected the second tool at my disposal.

The world's dumbest superpower.

I knelt down in the grass to get the perfect angle as Saylor sat on the old weathered bench underneath the giant willow tree, making a false candid pose. It wasn't hard to get a good shot. Saylor was handsome and very photogenic, but at times, I wondered whether he had the type of handsomeness only mothers could see. I was the mother and he, my handsome son—strictly in a platonic sense.

We did bat for the same team though. That's another jock-ism that will live on longer than the sport itself.

Right when I focused the lens on Saylor's chiseled jawline and square-faced smile—so that everything else was fish-eye warped around it—pressure sledgehammered my left eye. I groaned in agony as my glasses slipped off my face and fell on the ground. The bulk of the pain only lasted a moment. I had learned how to deal with it. I pressed the knuckle of my thumb against my eye until I felt the pressure release with a pop.

It didn't actually make a popping sound, but it felt like an air bubble had surfaced from behind my eyeball. It was followed by a skin crawling feeling, like a spider had crawled out from my brain to get a breath of fresh air. It hadn't. I definitely would've spooned out the eyeball myself if spiders were living behind it. Spiders terrified me, almost as much as snakes—real snakes and my copperhead tormentor, Juice Williams. I already heard his cocky, boisterous voice from across the field, saturated with laughter.

Saylor rushed over to me and grabbed me up by my arm. While the timing alone would've made my spasm seem suspect, Saylor didn't doubt me for a second. He never would've. He knew all of my secrets and I, his. He knew about my superpower. I covered my eye and followed heedlessly as he led me over to the greening bench underneath the willow tree. As soon as the creepy crawly feeling dissipated, I blinked hard and knew exactly what to expect.

#####

My superpower allowed me to see into the fourth dimension. Well, small parts of it anyway. Despite what any PhD theorist might've written to the contrary, the fourth dimension is a dimension of probability. It wasn't time, not folded pockets, nor geometrical shapes that we simply cannot perceive. Oh, and not my absolute favorite to chastise either: it wasn't some infinite piling up of alternate universes based off the decisions we made.

Admittedly, that one was the closest to the truth and entirely accurate once it had been cleaved of all the homegrown entitlement and self-importance. It bothered me that someone out there honestly believed that each of us, even me, of all people, was so important that every choice we made, or didn't make, created a new and equally vast universe.

There was the bit about there being a copy of us in each of these universes too, but I still thought that was way too much to ask of the old celestial forces at work.

Besides, I knew the truth.

In reality, the fourth dimension merely acts as a stabilizing structure for our one and only universe. It exists as probability rods that hold everything in place and push certain, life-changing events toward one another, or apart. And I had the limited—emphasis on limited—ability to see the ends of these rods as probability potholes that people crossed over unwittingly. The event could be good or bad, but in my experience, they were mostly all bad, which was why I avoided them like the plague. Back to my power.

Do you remember how it felt to watch the early 3D movies without those wonky red and blue glasses? Yeah, it was nothing like that. Or reading those books that you had to cross your eyes forever to see some miraculous, but simple, image pop out of the page? Not like that either. Though, the residual pain in my eye felt like I had been reading them for days. My superpower was infinitely less cool than either of those. It was so pedestrian that despite having it since birth, I had lived most of my life completely unaware of it.

I had googled the appearance of gray specks and spiral shapes in vision. They were called floaters and that explanation satisfied me for a long time, especially after reading up on an alternative: eye worms. Eye worms are the same as eye snakes, which are far worse than eye spiders as far as I was concerned.

The difference between floaters and what I had was simple. My gray flecks and the inverted spires above them did not float, they did not move and if I turned away from them, they were gone entirely from my vision. A few years prior, I'd found out they marked particular locations my uncontrollable and unpredictable spasms revealed.

So, alas, my power to see into the fourth dimension wasn't the kind that engendered crime fighting or any other form of heroism. I was a bird watcher. The gray specks were tainted bird feeders that I preferred the squirrels went after instead.