To that small group of Disturbed people who have enjoyed my previous efforts and encouraged me, thank you.

I have always been a little different than the other kids. Not different enough that it brought me a lot of grief. I’m not a big jock. But I’m a good enough athlete I suppose. I play baseball. I’m never going to be a big-league pitcher but I have one hell of a deceptive sinker which keeps me off the bench. I play a little basketball but I’m mostly a bench warmer in that sport. I’m also into track and field. I love to run. Not sprint, I don’t even get warmed up until I’ve run the first mile. I love to run long distances. Once I get into my zone I sometimes think I could run forever, sort of like Forest Gump. My mind soars when I run.

My mind. That’s what sets me apart from the other kids. That’s what seems to set me apart from everyone. My mind seems to be wired differently than the minds of other people.

When it comes to looks I guess I’m about middle of the pack. I’ve had about as many zits as anyone else in the ninth grade. But I suppose I’m a reasonably good-looking kid. I have dark blonde hair. I’m in good shape from running. I have a nice smile. I like people and I think they react to that. People like me and accept me even though I’ve always been a little different.

For one thing I’m a voracious reader. I learned to read shortly after I turned three. I was reading adult literature by the time I turned five. There were a lot of discussions about placement when I started school. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get a little bit too taken with myself during all that.

I already knew at that age I was different. When I started kindergarten my friends were learning the alphabet. I was reading King and Grisham and Clancy, though it bothered my parents that I was wasting my time and my talents on modern fiction instead of the classics or some scholarly tome. I tried reading some science fiction but except for the first two or three books from the “Dune” series I couldn’t really get into it.

The biggest challenge for me has often been to not lose interest in school since I often seem to know about as much about the subject as the teacher. I’m not a showoff or a smart ass about it, though. I keep my mouth shut when it’s appropriate. I enjoy being with my friends and the teachers seem to like having me in their classes. They always try to challenge me and that helps to keep me on my toes and awake.

You might have thought the other kids would give me a hard time because I’m so different. But I’ve always been personable enough and good enough at sports that I never really had a problem with other kids. I think one of the things which work in my favor is that I live in a very small town. I’ve been friends with the same people throughout my elementary and high school years. It’s very rare here for anyone to move away. Sometimes new people come to town. But when they do they’re usually people who moved away to take a job somewhere else. Then they returned because they miss the people and the way of life in our little town.

I stay in school with my peers and I do pretty much the same things they do in school. My teachers do their best to keep me challenged and my parents make sure I’m constantly exposed to learning opportunities my school can’t provide. They’re convinced I should have started college level work when I was five or six. They made sure I was exposed to higher mathematics and college level science material at an early age.

I read the things they gave me to read. I absorbed the information but it didn’t excite me. I think that may have been a part of my problem. I have a prodigious ability to learn. But I seem to have a serious lack of ambition. People keep asking me what I want to do when I grow up. Do I want to be a doctor or lawyer or Indian Chief? What about science? With my mind people assume I could become anything I set my sights on.

I can’t answer them. I have no burning desire to be any of those things. Unlike my parents and teachers though, I don’t worry about it. I’m content to absorb knowledge and enjoy my childhood with my friends. Looking back now I realize that by the time I started high school I was one of the few kids I know who didn’t have at least an inkling of an idea of what I want to do after I get out of school.

A big change in my life took place during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school. With all of the reading I do you might think that I don’t watch much television. Well, I don’t watch a lot I guess. But there are some shows I enjoy. I don’t read much sci-fi, but some of my favorite shows are in that genre. I still think that one of the best shows which has ever been on television was “Firefly.” It nearly broke my heart when they canceled that show.

Two more of my favorite shows were “Stargate, SG1” and its spinoff, “Stargate Atlantis”. I liked them because the premises were so exciting, and because they didn’t take themselves too seriously. I didn’t see them when they were being broadcast. I saw them several years later when my parents bought the DVDs. I took a break from my heavy reading when summer vacation started and had my own little Stargate marathon. The reason I have brought all this up is because halfway through the series, one of the characters on the show follows in the footsteps of an advanced race of people known as “The Ancients” and ascends. The whole process, and in fact the end result, are quite mysterious. I gathered that by dint of their superior, highly evolved mental powers they ascended to a higher plane of existence where they now exist as some form of energy.

I found that entire concept to be fascinating. I have no desire to ascend to a higher plane. I like my existence just fine. But it made me think about the mind and what it might be capable of if you really focus its power. I have come to believe it’s possible I have access to more of the power of my brain than anyone I know, or know of, but I’m not doing anything productive with it. I began to suspect I’m turning all that power outward. What might I be capable of if I tried turning it inward? Do I have the power to affect my own brain? And what about psychic powers? I’ve never even thought to try to

manipulate the world around me. Is that even possible?

I didn’t sit down and start trying to move things with my mind or read the minds of my friends. At least, I didn’t try that at first.

I started to think about the way my mind works and I began to wonder about my capacities. All of my short life I have just accepted the fact that I’m different and that I have a higher capacity to learn and understand than most other kids do but I’ve never wondered what’s different about my mind or just how much difference there really is.

I browsed the internet for information on the subject. I quickly learned that there are very few documented incidents of extrasensory powers. And even those are sketchy and viewed by most people as hoaxes. There’s almost no reliable science on the subject. There are references to postmortem examinations of brains which were thought to be remarkable. But what it all boils down to is that nobody knows shit about the brain’s remarkable powers.

I started doing more thinking about thinking. Not the mechanics. I’m more interested in what my brain might be capable of if I really applied myself. I began by doing a lot of quiet contemplating. Some days I would sit for hours and just try to control my thoughts and focus my mind. Trust me, that’s every bit as difficult, and as boring, as it sounds.

Sometimes, just playing around, I would try to focus on other people. I would try to read their thoughts or project my own. Once in a while there would be what I took to be a strange coincidence. Usually while trying to project my thoughts on others. But nothing earth shaking. Nothing ever happened that I didn’t find amusing but entirely coincidental.

I sometimes concentrated on moving objects with my mind. But it really wasn’t so much that I was trying to move the object as I was trying to focus my mind. In any event, the only thing that ever moved was the earth around the sun and I know I’m not responsible for that.

I soon found that the best time to practice focusing my mind was on my morning runs. There were even times, after I had been running for eight or nine miles and I was really in the zone, that I could actually imagine that I could do things with my mind. I seemed to be able to adjust my heart rate and my breathing. I could invigorate myself. I felt like I could run forever.

I was playing around with those minor powers one day when suddenly I blacked out. I was actually unconscious for a while. I don’t know how long. It was scary as hell. I came to and I was lying in a crumpled heap in the ditch on the side of the road.

I got up and started walking back toward my home. I thought about what might have happened. I didn’t hurt anywhere. I didn’t have an aneurysm or even a headache. My heart rate seemed normal when I awoke. I didn’t feel any different. Could I have actually caused myself to black out from playing around with my heart rate?!

I didn’t think that could be it. When I finally got home I still felt fine. I decided not to say anything to my parents. They’d probably take me to the emergency room. I can’t allow that. I have a ball game to go to this afternoon.

I got cleaned up, changed clothes and read for a while. I had just about forgotten all about it by the time I got on my bike and headed for the ball field at Crawford Park.

When I got there I started warming up my pitching arm with our catcher. There were still a few kids who haven’t arrived yet. I pitched to Kerry until I was warmed up and the rest of the kids showed up.

We aren’t part of an organized league or anything. We’re just a couple dozen kids who are all in the same age range who get together once or twice a week to play baseball during the summer.

There isn’t a hell of a lot to do in this little town. We don’t have a theater or a mall. We have a small library and we have a decent swimming hole down at the river. But you can’t go swimming every day. Some of the kids are into hunting and fishing. I like guns and I enjoy target shooting. But I’m not a big fan of killing animals for pleasure. I would have thought our species had evolved past that point by now. But of course, reading the newspaper on any given day would make it obvious that isn’t the case.

When we play ball a few of the girls in town sometimes play with us. Some of the guys don’t like that, or at least they didn’t at first. But the truth is we have a couple of girls who can out-throw and out-hit most of the guys. And there are usually half a dozen or more girls sitting in the bleachers watching. As I said, there isn’t a lot to do in this town.

I’ve had a crush on Lynn Gibbs since I found out there was a difference between boys and girls and I came to realize that’s a good thing. We dated for the first time early in our freshman year. I’ve taken her to a few school dances.

But we actually spent a lot of time together before we started dating. We’ve been going swimming together in the summer for several years now but we don’t call that a date. We go for walks sometimes. She invites me over to her place once in a while to go horseback riding, play a game or watch a movie.

We like each other, a lot. But I haven’t even kissed her yet. I actually think she would let me and even kiss me back. I just don’t have the nerve.

We’re the same age. We’ve been going to school together since kindergarten. We live in such a small town that there’s only one class at each grade level so we were always in the same class.

We argue now and then. Most of the time it’s because I said or did something that was just as dumb as the rest of the boys my age are prone to do. You know how boys are. But we never argue for long.

Lynn usually comes to the games to watch me pitch. She isn’t a big sports fan but it’s a chance for us to see each other and after the game we always walk home together or ride our bikes if we rode them to the ball field. I saw her sitting with her best friend Paula and two other girls.

After warming up, the other kids on my team went to the bench. It’s our turn to bat first. I moved down the sideline fence and Lynn came over to talk for a few minutes. As soon as we got close I saw a worried look on her face. She looked at me closely and exclaimed, “What the hell happened to you?!”

I didn’t know what she was talking about. Nothing has happened to me.

She saw the confusion in my face. She grabbed my arm and said, “JD! What’s wrong with your eyes?! Can you see okay?”

Now I’m getting worried!

She hurried back to the bleachers and got Paula to loan her a mirror from her purse. She came back and held it up in front of my face. When I saw my image in the mirror I got dizzy and almost fell down. It scared the hell out of me!

I looked around but my vision seemed completely normal. Nothing hurt. But I put the mirror back in front of my face and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It almost doesn’t look like me. I look like an alien! My irises are dark, dark black. Sometime between when I got up this morning and right now my hazel eyes turned black. They didn’t just change color though. They also appear to be half again as large as they should be, the iris, not the eyeball. It’s scary as hell to look at.

Lynn finally found her voice again. The urgency in her voice didn’t do a lot to calm me down when she said, “JD, come out here and sit in the shade. Something is bad wrong with you!”

I went down to the gate by the dugout and went over and sat under the bleachers in the shade. Lynn knelt beside me and kept asking me what was wrong and what happened.

I didn’t know what to tell her. I thought back to my blackout this morning, of course. But there hadn’t seemed to be any lasting effects from that. And when I got home and took a shower my eyes had been normal. I think they had. If they weren’t I’m sure I would have noticed the change when I was combing my hair.

Yes! Of course they were! I would have noticed this!

Lynn interrupted my nervous train of thoughts to say, “We need to get you to a doctor!”

I don’t feel like I need to see a doctor. I feel fine!

Just then the guys started calling me and yelling at me to quit making out under the bleachers. I’m up.

I decided to give it a shot. What the hell, I feel fine!

Lynn held onto my arm as I got up and tried to make me go home. But I said, “I’m fine, Lynn. I don’t know what the hell that is. But I feel great. Let’s just see what happens.”

I pulled my baseball cap out of my back pocket, pulled it down low over my eyes and went back onto the field. Kerry tossed my bat to me as I approached the bench and I walked out to the plate.