A Loner Mentalist Pt. 01

The boys stepped under the hoop and the stick acted like a lever against it, unjamming the ball and sending it falling onto the head of one of them. "Ow," the boy complained.

"Ok, hold it together until he comes down," Jack said, indicating the scrawny kid. As soon as he was down safely, they finally let go of one another and took a collective breath of relief.

They started thanking him, but then one of the kids said, "How come we've never seen you before?"

"Wait a minute," the scrawny kid said, "I've seen him around before! In school. He's lumped in with the Navy kids."

The gratitude evaporated from the kids' faces and they all but glared at Jack. The biggest of them stepped forward. He was almost Jack's size. "Is this true? Are you one of them?"

Jack sighed and said, "My father is in the Navy, but I'm not-"

"Get away from us," the big boy said.

Another spoke up, saying, "Wait! He's ok. He helped us get our ball back."

"He's one of them," the big boy insisted.

"Look, let's call a truce, ok? We won't come after you and you don't come after us. Ok?"

"Ok," Jack said, having no other choice. "But, listen, you guys! The other brats only come after you because they envy you." The kids looked confused. "Your fathers are with you all the time, while theirs are away at sea most of the time. That makes them jealous."

"The brats whose dads are stationed in the base are the same as the rest of them," one of the kids said.

"Yes, but that's only because they feel they have to be," Jack said. "They've learned from their parents about loyalty to their shipmates."

"Too bad they didn't also learn about right and wrong," the big boy said. "Look! You're cool and all, but we just don't hang out with your kind. You can go play on that hoop and we'll play on this one, but that's it. After we part ways today, the truce is over. We find your bike unattended, we remove all the cables."

Jack took his ball and went to practice his free throws, while behind him the six townie kids laughed and played together. It irked him to hear their mirth, while he was condemned to solitude. If the kids didn't want to play with him, then that was their choice. He didn't really know how to make them choose differently.

Despite knowing that the right thing to do was to just enjoy himself and practice his aim, he wasn't enjoying himself nowhere near as much as they were as he took shot after shot. He got tired of it after a while, took his ball and went home.

As he was leaving the park, he decided to jump over one of the benches. During the run up, he stepped on a dry twig, hidden under some fallen leaves, and lost his momentum. He sailed over the bench, but his knee caught on the edge of the back of the bench and he tumbled end over end on the dirt in front of it.

When he stopped rolling, his eyes immediately locked on to the huge, gaping hole in his knee. He saw the bones under it. He was at once both fascinated by seeing that the biology textbooks were true and that he did have bones that looked just like the pictures, and scared shitless that this little accident would end his dream of someday playing in the NBA. He got up and hobbled home on just one leg, as quickly as he could.

When he hopped to his house, he saw his mother out front. She was just leaving. He panicked. He needed her to fix his knee. He screamed and she turned towards him.

Janice rolled her eyes and huffed in annoyance. Her son, Jack, was hopping towards her and screaming like a stuck pig. It was so embarrassing. He was twelve years old, already, and his father was a Navy lieutenant, yet Jack sometimes acted like he was five. Janice patiently waited for him to skip to her and then said, in a tone that meant he was in big trouble, "Jack Watts, why are you hollering for all the world to hear?"

Jack hopped to a stop in front of his mother and looked down, stymied by her tone of voice. He kept his injured leg elevated and bent at the knee, and Janice saw the big tear on the front of his jeans. She bent over to inspect it more closely and was about to chastise Jack for ruining a perfectly good pair of pants, when he flexed his leg a little more and she saw the gaping hole in his knee. The sight of bare bone peeking through the blood and retracting skin made her think about her father's butcher shop, where she had spent her teen years helping out. In particular, it made her reflect on how similar human and pig bones were. Those thoughts lasted only a split second and were immediately overridden by a fear that her only child would limp forever, if his leg could even be saved.

Jack was shaking with the adrenaline coursing through his veins. The fear and the pain that had been overwhelming him were fading now that his mother was there to help. He felt ashamed for having screamed like that. As he relaxed and let go, his senses shut down, one by one. For a moment, he was blind, deaf and had no sense of where he was or how he was feeling. He lost track of time, so the moment could have lasted for all eternity, for all he knew. He even lost track of who he was. The timeless moment came to an end and a deluge of thoughts rushed into Jack's mind.

Jack felt ashamed for what the other service wives would think of him for having raised such a wimpy son. His shame immediately dovetailed into guilt about having planned to go to the hotel and meet with Mark. The shame of being in bed with a man while his son hopped around, injured and afraid, was almost making him cry.

Jack flinched and his senses were suddenly restored. He was standing on one leg in front of his mother. He shook his head, blinked in confusion at the thoughts that had just flowed through his mind.

Janice sniffed back tears, took Jack by the hand and said, "Come on, we need to clean that up!"

Jack was still baffled by what had been going through his mind and he paid very little attention as his mother began to help him up the stairs to the front porch and into the house. He mutely hopped along and tried to sort out the confusion in his head.

Soon, they were in the bathroom and Janice cut open the leg of the jeans. She got Jack to stick his leg in the tub and used the shower to wash the blood and grime off of him. The gash was deep, long and irregular. It would need stitches. She reached for the first aid kit and took out the antiseptic spray. "Be brave, Jack," she softly said.

Jack was still trying to make sense of the brief flurry of thoughts that had cropped up in his mind a minute ago so he didn't even notice the disinfectant spray until it was too late. She sprayed the disinfectant over his wound and Jack's mind cleared in pain. He yelped and tensed, but it was too late. His knee was on fire.

"We have to go to the clinic to get this stitched up," his mom said.

Hearing that made Jack feel even worse. Janice wrapped a quick bandage around his knee and wasted no time getting him to the emergency room. They waited for half an hour before a young doctor came over and led them to an exam room. He stitched up Jack's knee and ordered five days without walking or flexing his knee and gave him a tetanus shot.

"Will I still be able to play in the NBA, doctor," Jack fearfully asked.

"Of course you will, champ," the doctor said, mussing up his hair. "You'll just need to take some time off from your training, ok?"

He left, saying that an orderly would come round to wheel Jack out of the clinic and give him a pair of crutches and the discharge papers. "Wait here, sweetie," Janice said, "I have to go make a call." Jack, angered at having his hair ruffled, bit back a sardonic response about rushing off to join the circus and mutely watched as his mother left the room, mumbling about finally getting herself a cellphone.

Left alone in an exam room, he thought back to the silly thoughts that had entered his head, for just a split second, earlier that day. He had felt a combination of fascination, fear and shame, followed by guilt and the image of a man called Mark. The more he thought about it, the less it made sense. He didn't know any grown-ups named Mark.

His mother came back with the orderly and they left the hospital. He spent five days in bed with his mother spoon feeding him ice cream and letting him watch all the TV he wanted. Despite living the dream, by the standards of a twelve year old, Jack found himself bored by daytime television and frequently considering his memory of briefly thinking about this man Mark. He was just about to discount it, when he reread one of his X-Men comics. His brief experience wasn't all that different from what Professor X and Jean Grey did in the comics.

Jack gasped aloud as he remembered himself thinking about his son Jack during that weird burst of thoughts. He realized he hadn't been the one thinking that. It must have been his mother's thought. She had a son named Jack. He was him. Jack felt goose bumps run up and down his arms as he realized that he must have read his mother's mind. For a brief moment, he had felt what his mother felt, thought what his mother had thought.

Jack asked himself if that could really be the truth. He wanted it to be the truth, he wanted to be a superhero, like Professor X, but could he really do it? Wasn't mind reading just the stuff of fiction?

Stuck in his bed and with nothing better to do, he decided to give it a try. He closed his eyes and listened intently, but he could not hear his mother's thoughts. He screwed up his face in concentration, but perceived nothing. He spent the night awake, thinking about what it would be like to be able to read people's minds. He found himself wishing he could read anyone's mind, more than anything.

Soon enough, he was well enough to go back to school. He spent the entire day flexing his imaginary psychic muscles and trying to read a mind. Anyone's mind. He failed miserably. He consulted all the comics he had at his house for guidance and even asked the guy at the comics store about mind reading. The guy recommended a lot of comics, but Jack didn't have the allowance to buy more than a few of them. He perused their content online, on a computer in the school's library. His mother refused to let him have a computer at home, which would "let all the filth from the net come in", as she liked to say.

One of the things many of those comics' plots had in common was that the mind reading heroes used meditation techniques to improve their powers. Jack spent all his free time looking up information about meditation online. The computers in the library were always available, since most of his classmates had smartphones, but he could only use them for a few hours between the end of his classes and when he had to be home for dinner.

He spent the time on the computer making notes on meditative techniques and then tried them out in his room, late at night. He kept at it for over a month, but he made no progress. He began to think that that timeless moment of disconnecting from all his senses and thinking his mother's thoughts might have been just the pain in his knee making him confused. It was vivid in his memory, but he guessed he could have just imagined it in the first place.

With the weather too cold for basketball, he kept up with his efforts to master the ancient art of meditation on his own. Eventually, his online searches led him to an ad about a course in transcendental meditation that would be taught in his town.

If the mystic art of meditation could make him read minds, then attending that course was the way to do it. He emailed the address in the ad. He got all the info on the course in response and wrote it down, but his hopes were fading. He needed to pay for it and, because he was only twelve, he needed a parent's signature to attend.

He brooded all the way home. His mother was a devout catholic and if she thought he could even spell the word meditation, she'd have a fit and make him eat soap. He sighed heavily and shook his head. He could never catch a break. His dad was on his aircraft carrier and Jack had no way of getting him to sign a permission slip for him, even if he could somehow get him to go against his wife's wishes.

He came home and sat down heavily on the sofa. His knee ached and he winced. His eyes started to mist up. Here he was, sitting on a sofa, instead of learning meditation, and his mother was off somewhere, completely oblivious to the fact that she was stopping her own child from achieving such a great destiny as becoming a superhero.

Jack wiped his eyes and bunched up his brow. He glanced at the clock. His mother was supposed to be back home by now. She only worked part time. He started to get worried about her. What if she had also taken a tumble somewhere? He shut his eyes and concentrated on reading her mind. She might be in trouble.

After a few minutes, his cheeks and eyelids began to hurt from all the squinting. He opened his eyes and rubbed the fatigue from his face. His efforts gave no result. He was starting to get very worried about his mom. It wasn't like her to not be there when he came home. He thought about calling 411 and asking them to connect him with Mark, thinking he might know where his mother was, but he didn't know Mark's last name. Jack's brow drew down. What had his mother been doing, thinking about going off to meet with Mark while he was injured?

During that flurry of thoughts that had invaded his mind, she had felt guilty, Jack was sure. Why would she be feeling guilty? Jack's mouth tightened as he figured it out. His mother was meeting with the man to cheat on his father. It was the thing all the Navy kids feared and talked about in hushed tones, a mysterious disease that prowled unseen and struck down families, seemingly at random. Infidelity. A lot of the kids whose dads were at sea for most of the year would one day come to school in tears and tell their friends that their moms had been unfaithful and that their parents were getting a divorce. In this town, that meant that the kids would be leaving town along with their mother. Jack had seen many of them go over these past two years. All of them secretly feared that they would be next.

The thought of his mother being unfaithful made him angry, but he didn't know what to do. Should he stand up for his father and expose his mother as a cheater? Wouldn't that destroy his family? He sat back down on the sofa and waited for her to come back home, thinking of how to best handle the situation. As the minutes passed, he realized that he had exactly no proof of her infidelity and that he should either let it go, or find some proof.

Before long, his mother came in, wearing her Sunday finest, a lot of makeup and a big, warm smile. "Hello, dear."

Looking at the woman that was cheating on his dad and had the gall to teach him morals, Jack's anger turned cold. He decided to find proof. He drew upon the old saying for catching flies and forced a smile. "Hi, Mom!"

"Did you have a nice day at school," she absentmindedly asked.

"Yes, I did," Jack said. He innocently asked, "How's Mark?"

"Oh, he's great," she said, dreamily. "He's going to..." Her voice trailed off and she looked Jack in the eye. He could plainly see the emotion on her face. It was fear and guilt and worry. She was cheating on his father. For the briefest of moments, Jack felt the elation of being right and truly having mind reading powers. In the very next instant, the realization that his mother was cheating on his father came crashing down on top of it.

"You're cheating on Dad," he whispered.

Janice sent him to bed without supper and Jack was too astounded to protest. He just shuffled off to his room. He spent the night crying on his bed until he fell asleep. When he woke up in the morning, he was done with tears and he had come to a decision. Janice Watts was the enemy and Jack was going to take her on with everything he had. He wanted to run tell his father, but he didn't know how to get in touch with him while he was at sea. He was also aware of the fact that he had no proof of the affair. He couldn't just tell people he had somehow managed to pick up on his mother's thoughts. They'd laugh at him. His own father would most likely choose to believe her over him. Even if he got his dad to believe him, the other grown ups never believed the word of a kid over that of another grown up.

He remembered some of the stories about the divorces of the other Navy brats' parents. He knew that he had to have absolute proof of infidelity, or the wife would bleed the husband dry. He had no intention of allowing Janice to bleed his father dry. He was going to get the proof himself. He was going to become a mind reader and find out all the details of her affair before he told his dad. Then his dad would win the divorce and justice would be served.

First step was getting into that meditation class. He decided to blackmail his mother. It was the honorable thing to do, he told himself, as it meant standing up against her wronging his father with her infidelity. With his cheating mother out of the picture, his dad would be free to live a better life. Jack would be, too.

When Jack breached the subject, Janice yelled at him, trying to scare him into not telling on her to his father, but he just glared at her. She sent him to school without breakfast and threatened him with a severe beating if he told anyone anything. When he came back home, she asked him if he was going to listen to reason. When he told her he was going to tell his father about Mark, she withheld dinner from him and forbade him from watching TV. As she sat to eat dinner, he turned on the TV. She rushed to the living room and turned it off, after slapping him for disobeying her.

Jack just glared at her and said, "Wait 'till I tell Dad about Mark."

Janice wasn't going to let herself get blackmailed by a child, especially not one that was her own son. She took a deep breath, calmed down a bit, and told Jack to go to his room. He just sat there and glared at her. Janice smirked. If Jack wanted to play the waiting and sulking game, she was going to teach him patience.

Days passed and Jack refused to cooperate with her on all fronts. He dug his heels in with such pigheaded stubbornness that he reminded her of her own father. Every day, he came home and told her he was going to tell on her indiscretion to his father. Janice punished him with every punishment she could think of, but it didn't work. The day of her husband's liberty leave was coming closer and she was starting to really resent hearing Jack's declaration every day. She started denying him food and limiting his bath time. She hoped it would work, but Jack just kept on with his glares and threats.

As the day of her husband's arrival got closer and closer, she was starting to panic. If Jack so much as mentioned Mark's name to his father, he'd immediately flip out. Mark was her old flame and she had cheated on Bert with him before. In fact, their marriage only survived because she had solemnly sworn on her own mother's copy of the good book that she would never, ever, even think of Mark, let alone speak to him.

Her husband would divorce her, she'd get kicked out of her home and lose her part time job on the naval base, which she only got on account of her husband. All of her friends were also Navy wives and they'd shun her. She'd be out on the street, with just the shirt on her back, if she allowed Jack to tell his father anything. Mark was married and would lose everything, his business and his kids, if he tried to divorce his wife. The timing for the two of them to get together had to be ideal, and now just wasn't the right time.

Janice made a banana nut cake and invited Jack into the kitchen. She cut two big slices of cake and served them on two plates, one for her and the other for Jack. She could hear his stomach growling. He kept glaring at her. "Eat up, Jack," she said, "it's your favorite." She took a big bite of the cake and made a show of enjoying it.