Chapter 1- The Boy Next Door

--- Alexis, December 23rd, 2022. 7:53 AM ---

“Class,” our teacher’s voice somehow managed to break through the chaos and anarchy that is an elementary school classroom the day before Christmas vacation. “Before we begin, I’d like to announce our new transfer student, Gabriel Morris.”

The rest of the room started up in hushed whispers, and even I couldn’t help it.

“Who moves at this time of year?” I had asked the question quietly and rhetorically, only to get an answer back anyway.

“Seriously?”

Artemis had a point. I wasn’t going to admit that to her, but she did.

Anyway when I looked at the new kid the first thing I noticed, strangely enough, were his eyes. They were unlike anything I had ever seen before.

They shone like an emerald, in the same shade of green that breaks through the snow to remind you that spring is here. The same color that grows on the winter’s victims, bringing life back to what once was dead. The color of the forest as it stands tall after the hurricane. They were the color of life, and of hope. The kind that never wavered, and never gave in.

His hair was longer than most of the other boys in the class, and as dark as the midnight sky on a moonless night. It reminded me of freshly printed ink, dripping off of paper into every strand. The light even gave it a kind of indigo blue hue.

His skin was tanned, like he’d just moved here from Florida.

Everything about him seemed healthy, save for one thing. The wheelchair.

His entire lower body was sitting in one of those electric wheelchairs I had thought only existed on TV until today.

Something inside of me told me I should know him, but stayed silent on how.

According to the story being passed around at lunch, he was paralyzed from the waist down after a car accident about a year ago. He didn’t seem reluctant to talk about it, but he also didn’t give anymore details beyond that.

The whole thing seemed kind of fishy.

--- Artemis’ House, 3:49 PM ---

“Mommmm,” Artemis called out as we walked through her front door. “I’m home.”

“Hey girls,” A woman’s voice called back from the kitchen, the smell of homemade cookies drifting through the air. “Be right there.”

It wasn’t uncommon for Artemis’ mom, Carol, to watch me when no one else would be home; but that didn’t help to shake the feeling of how I felt like a burden every time.

Carol was a bit on the shorter side of scale, and not to be disrespectful or anything, but was actually a little on the overweight side too. Not dangerously or anything, and in spite of it she actually had a rather healthy glow to her.

Although Artemis’ hair was so white it almost seemed to glow silver in most lights, her mother’s hair had the same burnt out orange color as a sunset, almost glowing with warmth as it tumbled onto her shoulders like rusty water. Carol’s hair was cut rather short, reaching just past her shoulders when straightened. I could only guess that she kept it that way because she spent a lot of time cooking and baking in a hot kitchen.

Carol’s personality was always warm and loving, the mom of the group that always had everyone at their house. The one all the other kids always called mom.

“Hey Mom,” Artemis started out of what seemed to be nowhere as her mom entered the living room. “Have you met the new neighbors?”

“Wait wait wait, new neighbors?” I asked genuinely confused, causing Artemis to roll her eyes in an overly dramatic fashion before answering.

“Seriously, there’s been a moving truck outside for, like, a week. With real movers and everything. Don’t you ever walk outside?”

“I decline to answer.”

I didn’t even get around to asking what house had been for sale before there was a knock at the door.

“Hey,” a woman whom I had never seen before spoke up as Carol answered the door. “We just moved in next door, and I was hoping to get to know some of the people who live in the neighborhood.”

The line sounded rehearsed, like she’d said it a couple hundred times into a mirror before finally knocking on the door just now. It was a feeling I knew well.

“Why doesn’t anyone ever just bring a cake and say ‘I brought you this cake to see if you’re weird?’” I was only asking what I believed to be a fair question.

“What if they don’t like cake?”

“Then mission accomplished. They’re weird.”

Once again, Artemis rolled her eyes at me. I was starting to notice a pattern here.

“I’m Ellen Morris,” the woman at the door went on, oblivious to the conversation I was having with Artemis. “And this is my son Gabriel.”

“Isn’t that…” I started to ask before Artemis cut me off.

“Yep.”

No one broke the awkward silence until almost eight minutes after that, despite Carol and Ellen’s laughter starting to echo in from the kitchen. The only sound to be heard clearly was a tea kettle making that annoying whistling sound to signal it was done.

“So,” Gabriel finally spoke up first, the silence probably unusual and uncomfortable to him. “Artemis and Alex, right?”

“Alexis,” I corrected, although maybe a little too fast. I could barely hear myself over the sound of my heart trying to burst out of my chest. Did he know? No. He couldn’t.

“Any plans for vacation?” Gabriel just went on like everything was normal, causing an involuntary sigh of mass relief to escape my lips.

In actuality, I did. And that was rare for someone who went a week without noticing a moving truck a few houses down from theirs.

Monday, December 26th. The day Resistance Online’s public servers would finally go live.

The Dreamscape and the game card were actually supposed to go on sale that day as well, although a few people had already gotten it through whatever methods it is people use.

The bigger issue for most people was getting the copy of Resistance, and not because of the ninety-nine dollar price tag.

Since the game was the first of it’s kind, they were only selling about fifty-thousand copies at launch to see if the servers could handle it. If everything went as planned, it would be a couple weeks at most before it was sold again.

Both the price tag and the fact that it was so rare had basically had me giving up all hope until this morning. Then the strangest thing had happened.

There was a Dreamscape and a Resistance cartridge sitting on the kitchen table, a handwritten note in cursive that read ‘Merry Christmas and Happy Birthday’ sitting in front of them. No one I knew even wrote in cursive.

The fact that it had ‘just appeared’ today wasn’t an accident either. I was sure of that. The message was clear enough to me.

‘Don’t give up,’ the card may as well have read. ‘You can make it.’

And it was true that before I could neglect the world for days while there’s no school, I had an even bigger problem. I had to survive tomorrow first. I didn’t like those odds.

“Nothing in particular,” I finally answered. “How about you?”

“Not much,” Gabriel responded. “Just play a few games, spend some time with my mom.”

Just then there was a knock at the door followed shortly by it opening before anyone could actually respond.

“Sorry I’m late,” Cindy, my older sister, said as she entered. “I’m just here to grab Alexis. Gotta hurry or I won’t be able to make dinner before Grandma gets home.”

By this point Carol and Mrs. Morris had entered the room, although I didn’t pay any attention until Mrs. Morris spoke up.

“We should be on our way as well,” she said as she thanked Carol. “It was a pleasure to meet you.”

“What’s for dinner?” I asked Cindy as we were leaving.

“I was gonna order a pizza. We still need to start preparing whatever we can ahead of time for Christmas dinner. But someone’s still gotta be there when they deliver it. Hey so, was that family the one who bought Bertha’s old house?”

“Yeah, I think so.” Well at least that answered that question.

“Maybe we should bring them over a cake or something as a housewarming gift.”

“So what kind of pizza?” I asked hoping she’d forget what we were talking about before. I’d already used up my ability to be social for the rest of the year.

--- That same day, About 7:13 PM ish ---

I was in my room, pointlessly staring at the ceiling, when my computer made that annoying noise it always does to let me know I got a message.

Clicking on the online messenger notification that popped up, a new window opened from the game I had open a moment ago.

My DMs opened, showing a message from my online friend who went by ShadowSwordsman.

I had just finished typing a reply when another random notification popped up on my computer; a video chat request from my old friend Sophia’s username.

Sophia had moved away a couple weeks before I had come to live with my grandma, although we still talked online most days. Even so, it had been months since the last time we video chatted, leaving three thoughts to go through my head at roughly the same time.

‘What, why?’ ‘Ugh more social interaction.’ and, of course, ‘Is it too soon for an after dinner snack?’

“Heyyyy,” Sophia’s voice snapped me back to reality, calling from the other end of the video chat I didn’t know I had accepted yet.

“Hey… Why’d you just randomly call?” I finally managed to get past my initial state of shock and confusion.

I’m not sure why my usual ‘run away in a panic’ instinct didn’t kick in. It could have just been because I was only talking to her via video chat, or that even after all this time I still considered her my best friend. Or maybe it was purely the fact that we had still talked online all this time.

Sophia looked almost the same as she did all those years ago, albeit older. Even after three years, I could still picture her as if she were here in the room with me.

Her hair was dark as the sky on the night of a new moon. It was a sharp contrast to her skin, even paler than my own somehow. The combination made her appear all the more ghostly, all the more like a haunting presence. Her eyes were as dark as her hair, so black that it had taken me awhile when we were younger to finally find any the light in them.

When I had first met her, it wouldn’t have taken much to convince me she was a spirit who had frozen to death.

In spite of her being paler than me, she didn’t look nearly as delicate or frail. She was actually rather tall, lean and thin like a runner. She held herself with confidence, maybe even arrogance, standing tall with her arms crossed impatiently over her chest. She shifted her weight from foot to foot, but not in a nervous way like I tended to do. Rather in an impatient way, never really being a fan of waiting. Her eyes darted around the room, a mixture of taking in her surroundings and of her being distracted easily.

“Oh yeah,” Sophia finally started to answer my question. “Just a whim. Hey, that’s a cute unicorn.”

“Where’s Amy?” I couldn’t help but wonder where Sophia’s little sister was at the moment. Usually she took any chance she could to be with Sophia.

Their parents had divorced back when they moved away, with her and Amy moving in with an aunt I knew was less than kind to them. That is, when she even bothered to be around.

“She’s out like a light,” Sophia laughed. “I’d call it a sugar crash but we don’t have any sugar in the house.”

“Hey…” My voice trailed off for a second, the feeling I had met Gabriel before today getting the better of my judgement. “Do you remember another kid our age? His name was Gabriel…”

“Only vaguely,” Sophia’s answer took a moment, practically showing the gears turning as she thought. “Why?”

“No reason,” I decided I’d burn this bridge when I got to it. I wasn’t exactly the kind of person who liked to face conflict straight on, let alone seek it out before the need arose.

“Ok,” She didn’t seem to fully accept that answer as the truth, but she also didn’t directly challenge it either. Silence hung over the air for a moment before she spoke again. “Hey so have any fun plans for tomorrow?”

“Not exactly… It’s, uh, it’s visitation day…”

“Oh right… Sorry I forgot. That’s kind of a mood killer.”

The custody battle tends to go a lot smoother when your parents don’t care if you drop dead, only wanting to keep your successful older siblings. The court did finally grant full custody of all three of us to my Grandma, after all the other two were legally old enough to decide where they wanted to live, with one ugly condition.

Twice a year, once on Christmas Eve and once on Easter Sunday, we’d have to go over there to spend the day with them.

We never did quite make it a full day, always ending in a huge fight less than three hours from when we got there. Always because of me.

As I waited to fall asleep that night, listening to Cindy’s quiet snoring as I stared at the ceiling, I knew one thing for absolutely certain.

Tomorrow would be a long day, one way or another.