Part XXI - 3: The Greatest Tests Are From Within

Joey sensed me twenty miles from the Kenton county boarder. Damn his excitement was contagious. The moment I felt his mind touch mine I instinctively sped up.

I was shocked to learn he wasn't linked with anyone. Neil had gone home to visit his family for the holidays, and without Suzi around he just hadn't felt the need to link with anyone else. But he gladly accepted my offer, and after that it was like he was in the car with me from all the talking we did over our two-way link. What we talked about, I don't have a clue any more.

I totally forgot about my concerns of feeling uncomfortable while I was there. In total honesty, I never felt more comfortable as we spent the day hanging out in his new home watching cable TV, working out in the basement, and playing Super Mario Brothers on Tommy's Nintendo which Joey had borrowed.

That night after his parents turned in, we watched an old Abbot and Costello movie somehow neither of us had seen before, then surfed channels for hours, watching parts of some B movies just like old times.

We slept until almost noon the next day, spent half the day in the shorts we had slept in while doing the same as the day before until Margaret ordered we had to get dressed for dinner.

It was while I was getting my clothes out I uncovered the key to the apartment Joey and Suzi had rented for me. I had totally forgotten about it and everything else I had worried about the past two weeks. I think that was the first moment I actually truly considered what it would be like to use their gift the way they had intended it. I took a shower just to give myself time to think about how to bring it up with Joey.

During dinner, I found myself again completely at ease. I was with the family I had spent many meals with, and the changes time had made to us all didn't seem to matter. The surroundings were unfamiliar, but the feelings were just as they had been ten years before.

After we finished eating, Joey and I were trying to find something worth watching on TV in the family room when Joey sighed and suggested, "Wanna go out tonight?"

"Sure," I managed to say convincingly even though I would have rather not. "Where do you have in mind?"

"Well," Joey said thoughtfully, "The Rave is open till midnight all week. It's a restaurant and dance hall on campus. It shouldn't be too crowded since half the students are still gone for the holidays."

"Sounds good to me."

"Is there anywhere else you can think of you want to go too?" Joey asked innocently enough.

"Well..." I said as the key in my pocket poked me when I stirred uncomfortably. "What about taking me to see that apartment you two got me before we go dancing?"

"I'm with that," Joey said, trying to constrain some of his enthusiasm. "I was beginning to think you forgot about it and left the key at home."

"You kidding? I haven't stopped thinking about that damn key since I got it," I said, then bit my tongue for having said it that way.

When Joey didn't respond, I added weakly, "I do appreciate why you did it and all..."

The TV snapped off, and even though I sensed his eyes on me, I was afraid to look at him.

"Tim, I want you here, Suzi wants you here, but if you really don't like it here, there are plenty of other people who are interested in that apartment. If you're worried about us losing our money on it because you don't want it, we won't. You can take it or leave it. Okay?"

I relaxed after that sunk in, but I couldn't help but still feel a little guilty.

I opened my mouth to tell him how I felt, but he cut me off saying, "Come on. Let's go. Don't worry about the apartment. Let's just go and have fun."

There were maybe twenty people in all when we entered the Rave, but that was good, for if it had been overly crowded right away, I would have been overwhelmed by the churning emotional tide of a crowd. At first I was a bit bored, Joey having recognized some guy from one of his classes last semester and had struck up a conversation about the final.

But as more people showed up, I started paying attention to the women's body language, especially when they started to dance. It was a very flirtatious atmosphere, and while there were couples, most didn't seem so serious so as not to flirt with others when the opportunity arose.

I wasn't there an hour before I was out on the dance floor doing my best to flirt and dance like the rest. I felt so alive, so free, even a bit wild, letting my empathic senses go with the flow of the crowd, feeling the crowd's combined emotional force, and shaping my responses to amplify the free good feelings.

Without really knowing I was doing it, I began to drive the crowd's good mood and free spirits higher with the simple gestures and expressions I had learned to restrain the year before. I just completely let go, generating the vibes that would make everyone around me feel what I wanted to feel myself, and reveling in the results.

I had... No, everyone had a blast. They were supposed to close the place at midnight, but no one made any announcement about it until well past one, probably due to I having taken a long breather at a table with some girls I had met on the dance floor.

We went back the next night and completely wore ourselves out, but left well before midnight after some of the girls I was dancing with started getting a little too flirty with me. I decided the accumulative affects of my empathic abilities were to blame, and told Joey I thought it would be best if we did something different the next night.

So Joey and I went to a keg party the following night and we both got nicely plastered. I had always associated getting drunk with escaping my worries and fears, and never really saw what was so fun about it until that night. Shit, I've never laughed so hard and so long over the stupidest things before. And oh man, did I ever make a fool out of myself. But I don't regret a moment of it because Joey was right there with me making as big of a fool of himself as I was. Of course I might not feel that way if I could just remember some of the details...

We decided not to go out the fifth night even though I was supposed to go home the next day. We spent most of the day in bed recovering, and between the hangover and the growing desire to stay, I was pretty uncomfortable. So was Joey for probably the same reasons, but neither of us mentioned anything but the hangover when sharing our mutual displeasures.

After dinner, Joey decided he needed to workout, but I wasn't really in the mood for it myself. So while Joey did his thing in the basement, I pretended to watch TV while sorting through my very mixed feelings about whether to stay or not.

Joey startled me when he suddenly came up and said, "If you're gonna see the apartment before you leave, now would be a good time."

I felt some urgency in his words, but I just attributed it to being similar to my own need to come to some kind of decision about staying.

"I think you're right," I said, getting up.

"Good," he said with relief. "And I need explain a few things on the way over."

The short drive over to the two-level, four-apartment, apartment building started out with Joey explaining how there were a lot of things he still wanted to show me, but he couldn't without knowing I wanted to stay. But the rest of the drive and a good twenty minutes after we got there ended up being all about my reasons why I didn't want to stay, and more importantly the reasons I did want to stay.

I was just as undecided as I had been before we got in the car when Joey's sister Sarah showed up at the open door.

"Well?" she queried right off the back without even a simple hello.

"He hasn't decided yet," Joey said, visibly uncomfortable by her sudden appearance. "I told you I'd let you know if he did."

"I can't wait all night," Sarah insisted. "I'll give you ten more minutes."

"Ten minutes!" Joey said exasperatedly. "Come on Sarah! I haven't even told him yet!"

"Tell me what?" I interrupted, sensing Joey's panic.

"If you stay, you have to join the Group," Sarah stated.

"What if I stay but I don't join the Group?" I said while I felt my heckles rising up.

"That isn't a choice," Sarah stated coolly, then huffed from Joey's scalding stare and left as sudden as she had arrived.

"What is this all about, Joey?" I asked as calmly as I could after following her cluster of symbols out to what was probably a car where three other shielded minds were waiting.

"Tim," Joey said anxiously to my face while putting both hands on my shoulders to get my full attention. "I can't tell you anything until you can tell me for certain you will stay. I swear to God the last thing I wanted to do was put you on the spot like this, but it's now or never."

"Why is it now or never?" I demanded. "I've had a great time, Joey, and I really want it to continue, but we both know this isn't the way it would normally be. I just need more time to figure out what I really want."

"But everything you want is here," Joey urged. "God, I wish I could show you. Please, Tim... if there was ever a time to trust me blindly, now's the time. I can't tell you why."

"That's only because of her!" I nearly snarled.

"No! I mean, yes, but its not just her!" Joey said, turning away, suddenly unable to face me. "I can't say anything else. I just can't, Tim. I can't."

I could hear the tremble in his voice even though it had only been ever so slight. I opened my mouth to ask why he couldn't, but I already knew why, so what was the use? I had to decide what I wanted more. To either be with Joey and Suzi or... not.

Suddenly the very concept of not being around either of them for long periods of time upset me immensely. To go without Suzi's council, to live without Joey's camaraderie, to return to the life I had before Christmas break...

"I want to stay," I whispered.

"What?" Joey said, turning around.

"I said, I want to stay," I said again, this time louder but shakier. "I don't care what I have to do. I just don't want to go without you and Suz again."

"Are you sure?" Joey excitedly restrained himself from yelling out.

I shivered from the new mixture of emotions I was struggling with, but without much hesitation I said, "Yeah, I'm sure."

The next thing I knew the air was being squeezed out of me as Joey gave me an exuberant hug that almost made me see stars.

After he released me and I gasped for breath, Joey was telling me something about the Group's new precautions against ensuring the loyalty of newcomers and protection of outside attacks.

When he mentioned that every member had to submit to having what he called a failsafe program inserted into the deepest portion of their minds, my stomach knotted up and I immediately objected.

"What do you mean, no?" Joey said almost argumentatively. "You said you didn't care what you had to do to stay, and you can't join the Group if you don't allow this one thing."

"But I just can't let someone put something in my head like that. What's to stop someone else from using it against me?"

"We've been really careful to make it almost impossible for it to be triggered by anything but someone enslaving you to work against the Group. You can even fine tune it if you want as long as we approve of the changes."

"No, Joey... I... I just can't..." I said as I struggled to understand why I felt so certain I couldn't allow it.

Suddenly the four minds out in the car probed and attempted to command me not to resist, but even with the element of surprise on their side, because they had probed for my mind, I was able to cancel the command symbols before they reached even half the distance between them and I.

Joey seemed as startled as I, but just as I started saying, "Joey, what the fuck is..." four more minds probed me and attempted to break through my newly raised mental barrier.

The first four tried to use the second four's attack as a distraction, but detecting and canceling bursts of symbols like that was really trivial if you know how.

"What's going on!" I demanded when I saw he was communicating with his sister.

"Sarah's says she's sorry but she can't let you go without the failsafe. She's afraid someone might use you to get to Suzi and I. I didn't know she was planning this."

"Tell her to stop or I'll start fighting back!" I said just before ten more minds joined in the fight and they simultaneously attacked.

"Shit, Tim. She's not going to back down. But if you can hold them off without fighting back, Sarah says she might let you in without the failsafe."

"Shit, I don't know if I can..."

"Just try, okay? The worse thing that will happen is you have the failsafe put in. I'll help you take it out later if you really want me to."

"Promise?" I grunted out, looking him in the eyes while detecting another six minds preparing to add their own streams to the now steady flow of symbols.

"I swear," Joey said truthfully.

I closed my eyes to focus myself entirely on my symbolic sight just in time to see Sarah send a telepathic transmission to a distant group of symbol clusters.

While I was holding off the twenty or so people's dynamically changing streams of symbols, I wasn't sure I could hold off many more without seriously straining myself, and if all those distant clusters of symbols that were coming closer were telepaths coming to join the fight, I knew I was in deep shit.

My heart was already racing from the excitement and effort I was exerting, but as the large group of symbol clusters drew closer (and thus the number of other minds between them and I diminished giving me better clarity of their clusters), my heart started beating even faster out of growing sense of terror due to their numbers.

"Joey tell them to stop!" I yelled when I felt at least twenty more minds probe for me.

Whatever his reply, it was lost in my effort to protect myself from the combined attack of forty-three minds. I was frantically canceling as many symbols as I could while the ones I simply couldn't get around to pounded my barrier of purely telepathic energy. My heart was pounding so damn hard I could hear the rush of blood in my ears. Then I felt the knife stabbing inside my brain that meant I was overstraining my telepathic abilities, but suddenly found some measure of relief when I surged more blood into my head somehow.

But it wasn't enough. My barrier was weakening, I was having painful bright flashes behind my eyes, and there was this noise rising above the almost deafening shhhhhing in my ears...

I had just recognized that sound as coming from my open mouth when I felt my defenses fail and my heart leapt up another notch in a burst of pain.

Joey said he had felt the pain in my chest the moment my barrier fell, and between that, the blood coming out of my nose and eyes and the look of total fear on my face made him realize Gladius's conditioning would kill me before allowing my mind to be taken by another.

The next moment Joey began shielding my mind as he shared his strength with me, startling the others long enough for me to recover from my near fatal panic attack. I kept my grip on the world around me in case the attacks began again, but to my relief they never did.

Just Joey's telepathic message I was safe followed by a query asking if I needed to go to the hospital.

I opened my red blurred eyes and croaked, "Take me home," to which he worriedly nodded and proceeded to gently gather me up and carry me out to the car.

My head hurt, but thanks to Joey's share link the stabbing knife was for the most part gone. I felt so weak, so violated, so defenseless. All I wanted to do was rush home and seek the comfort and protection of my mom and dad. But at the time, the best I could do was to stay linked with Joey until I was strong enough to go home.

I must have looked terrible when we got to Joey's house. Despite Joey having cleaned up the blood from my nose, Margaret nearly freaked from the blood on my shirt and the little bit around my eyes from what my tears had been washing out. Joey managed to explain what happened while Margaret carefully cleaned around my eyes, then after I took some aspirin and said I wanted to shower and go to bed, Joey helped me get undressed and showered with me in case I might pass out.

After the shower, I called home and told them I was coming home first thing in the morning. When I hung up, Joey handed me a glass of orange juice, then asked the question he had been avoiding ever since we got there.

"Are you going to come back?"

I didn't answer him right away, but instead laid down on my side of his bed and rested long enough for the sharp pounding in my head that had been building up while I was upright to go down to a dull throb.

"I don't want to join the group. I don't know if I even want to be around them."

"I'm sorry Tim."

"It wasn't your fault."

"Yes it was. I pushed you and Sarah into it."

"You didn't push me into anything I didn't want. Now shut up and let me go to sleep. We can talk about this tomorrow when you drive me home."

"But..."

"Shhhh!" I said, then I moaned from the new throb that had created.

My sinuses started acting up pretty bad in the middle of the night. I felt like I had a serious head cold, and the one time I risked blowing my nose, I nearly shit from all the really dark red and chunky blood I got out. My eyes hurt, my head hurt, and I swear at times I could hear three different ringing sounds in my ears.

I felt so much worse the following morning than the night before that when Margaret learned the details of what hurt, she immediately called up my mom and they both agreed I needed a CAT scan, against my own protests I might add.

At least they didn't push taking me to Central State's medical complex when I objected to it. Instead we went to a local hospital and after only about an hour of waiting I was injected with something to make the scan come out clearer, then laid there as this thing rotated around my head as it x-rayed.

Once the scan was finished, they moved me to a hospital bed when I complained I felt sick to the stomach, which I blamed on the substance they had injected me with. I rested in there alone, which was fine by me, but then I sensed something was wrong, and out of instinct reached out and found Joey.

"... not sure it's a tumor?" Margaret asked the doctor and technician while Joey immediately started explaining to me they really didn't seem to know what they found.

Through Joey's eyes, I examined the computer screen that displayed the results of the scan, and as the technician varied the views, I started getting a sense of where this supposed tumor was located inside my head.

"Joey, I'm not sure of this, but I think that's where it hurts when I overexert my telepathy."

"So you don't think it's a tumor either?" Joey queried while asking the technician for a bigger view of the anomalous tissue in question.

"I don't know. You said yourself they don't know what it is. If it doesn't look like a regular tumor to them, then maybe its something to do with telepathy."

"Sarah says none of the other telepaths she had CAT scans done on ever showed anything like this."

"You're talking to her about this?" I angrily thought to him.

"Can you think of any other doctor who might know more about the medical aspects of telepaths?" he bluntly thought back.

I broke off my link with him and muttered, "If it wasn't for her, I wouldn't be here in the first place."

Having at least found forming simple links wasn't causing me any further discomfort, I started scanning some of the other resident doctors for information about tumors.

Brain tumors are pretty dangerous things to have. While this supposed tumor wasn't in the exact center of my brain, it was deep enough to rule out any kind of surgery to remove it. The absence of any symptoms before the attack, its location, and the doctor's uncertainty all made me think what they were seeing was a result of the depletion of sugar in that area of my brain. Of course when I tried to pass that idea through a couple of doctors' minds, they all rejected it since they couldn't fathom the brain using glucose at such a high rate like that. Brain cells would die from hypoxia (lack of oxygen) long before the lack of glucose would. Of course that was always based on something blocking the flow of blood to those cells.

At least they were able to help clear my sinuses and relieve my headache, which was the reason I had come there in the first place. And I also learned my venous sinuses (cavities in the skull that act like wide blood drainage canals) were larger than average, but the doctor who pointed this out also said he had seen larger.

After many hours of consultation with other doctors, a new prognosis was starting to gain favor, especially with me. The golf ball size area which they were detecting was similar to scar tissue, but no one had seen scar tissue so deep in the brain, so localized, and without any symptoms beyond the pain which was not even noticeable any more.

What cinched it for me was the comment it looked like something had burned out part of my brain somehow.

While these doctors didn't know anything about telepathy, I did know from past experiences that whatever tissues in the brain responsible for telepathy used sugar for their energy source. I deduced that in my case those tissues could even steal the sugar from surrounding tissues when needed.

All those times I had strained my telepathy until it hurt believing I was strengthening my abilities, I had actually been killing brain cells by depriving them their supply of glucose, the type of sugar the body and brain actually burns.

The result: My brain had a dead spot.

I was feeling pretty drowsy after all the drugs they had given me kicked in, but at least I only had a mild soreness left by the time we got back to the Connors' house that evening.

Joey had some sort of Group thing the next day, so I was seriously considering just have a limo pick me up and have another driver drive my car back. But with Suzi planning to make the trip to school the day after, Joey talked me into letting someone else drive me home in my own car and then they'd come back with Suzi.

The next morning my driver arrived promptly at nine. I had expected an Eta, but Joey had wanted someone with voice, and more importantly, someone he trusted.

"Neil Rhine, Tim Brandton. Tim, Neil," Joe introduced us formally in his living room.

What to say about Neil... Hmmm... Well, he was oriental in heritage, but born and raised in America as had been his parents before him. He was as tall as I was, had a roundish youngish face, yellowish tan skin, perfectly straight black hair, and while not up to Eta standard, he was quite muscular in build.

We shook hands with the regular exchange of pleasantries, and I noted he avoided looking me in the eyes, something that was becoming a regular occurrence with people who knew of my empathic abilities but hadn't experienced me using them.

Despite myself, the sense of friendship between Joey and Neil stirred some feelings of jealousy in me. I could feel they shared secrets that Joey couldn't share with me. Was it due to their friendship, or were they just secrets of the Group? I didn't know, and I made a point not to look into it.

My purple feelings were somewhat dispelled a short while later when Joey and I exchanged manly hugs while Joey only gave Neil a friendly pat on the back. Of course that might have been due to the fact he would be seeing Neil again the next day.

Neil was verbally impressed with my car to my chagrin. He loved all the buttons and gadgets, and especially made a big deal about the CD player, which I think I had used maybe twice up to that time. When he mentioned he wished he had brought some of his CDs with him, I suggested we stop by his place so he could do so.

I didn't have to suggest it twice, and while I didn't go inside with him, I got the impression his apartment wasn't as nice as the one Joey and Suzi had gotten me. It was one of those larger apartment buildings with three floors and dozens of individual apartments of varying sizes.

He brought out six CDs, all of which I liked, even the four I had never heard before. I think I drifted in and out of consciousness after a while, but I always seemed to snap awake when he changed CDs.

I don't think either of us realized we were doing it, but we both had avoided topics concerning Joey. But after finishing our lunch without saying much, I was a bit surprised when we got back on the highway and Neil didn't start up another CD.

I could tell Neil was gearing himself up to say something he was uncomfortable about bringing up, so I wasn't surprised when he suddenly broke the silence saying "You're not going to hold what the Doc and the rest of us did to you against Joey, are you?"

"Of course not," I said a moment before realizing he had been one of the attackers. "He didn't know, and you were just following orders."

Several minutes of silence passed.

"Joey's worried you won't come back after what happened. I personally couldn't blame you if you didn't."

I sensed an understatement in his words.

"I don't know what I'm going to do," I said in all honesty.

More silence.

"I've never had a friend like Joey before. You're lucky to have known him so long."

"Yeah, well... You're pretty lucky too. From what Joey's told me, you two have had some pretty outrageous times together."

"What has he told you?"

"Shit, what hasn't he told me. No offence, but when he was staying with me before Christmas, I got sick of him constantly talking about what you and he did together the past four months."

"Really?" he exclaimed, followed by an explosion of laughter.

"What?" I said, finding his laughter full of relief as well as humor.

"From the day I met him, all Joey could ever talk about was what you and he did in high school!" he gurgled.

"Really?" I exclaimed myself before finding the humor of the whole thing and chuckled.

"Yeah really!" he said wiping his eyes. "I got to the point where I wanted to barf every time I heard the name Tim."

"Shit. I only had to endure a week of 'Neil, super bud.' I can't imagine what months would be like."

"Yeah, he drove me crazy with it, but I couldn't tell him it did. He gets so..."

"Excited," I finished for him.

"Yeah. Exactly... Wow," he exclaimed as it all sank in.

"You can say that again."

More silence as we both wondered what stories Joey had told about each other.

"You know what we should do?" Neil prompted.

"What? Oh... Yeah."

"Only seems fair."

"Want me to go first?"

"Excellent."

For the rest of the trip we traded stories about what Joey had told us about each other and sometimes gave our own versions. Nothing really embarrassing came up, not that we limited ourselves in that fashion. I guess you could say we bonded that way, and the more I got to know him, the easier it was to see him as one of us. Yet to this day can't explain what it was about him that made me feel that way. He was different, yet he was the same.

I had Neil drive my car into the garage and park it near the door leading into the North Mansion. Servants immediately showed up, and one of my dad's part-time nurses made me get in the wheelchair she had brought while my luggage was taken in and my car was taken over to the cleaning station where it was vacuumed out and later probably washed.

Neil was rather shocked by all this. He had known of my dad's wealth and wasn't the least bit surprised by the size of the North Mansion or its grounds, but Joey apparently had never mentioned the enslaved servants my parents had. He was just getting over that when my mom showed up in her birthday suit and he witnessed our hug and kiss.

Not that our hug and kiss was inappropriate or anything. It was just your standard mother and son squeeze and peck on the lips. No tongue or anything like that. Just a quick smooch on the old facial puckers. Joey used to kiss his grandma like that.

My mom's nudity made Neil uncomfortable, and while I sympathized, I wasn't about to ask my mom to put some clothes on or send her away. And after I introduced Neil to her and told her a little about him, I teased them both with the suggestion they get to know each other a little more intimately while I took my next dose of pills and probably pass out.

I actually did dose off once the pills started kicking in again. When I awoke I found Suzi had come over, but she had already left and had taken Neil with her without me having been able to thank him for the trip and all.

My mom was gone too, but she had told me earlier she was going to meet some of her old co-workers for dinner and probably wouldn't be back until late that night.

I laid around watching TV until it was time for dinner, and then went to the dining room for some grub even though I wasn't really hungry. My head was a little cloudy from my medication, so I didn't really concern myself with the uncomfortable feelings I got whenever I passed someone in the halls on my way down. I just thought it was the medication making me feel odd.