Chapter Text
The parking lot outside Bellamy University was already packed by the time the buses pulled in.
Students spilled onto the sidewalks in waves, teachers counting heads before anyone had even made it ten feet from the bus. Tables lined the courtyard in front of the science center, each covered in banners advertising different departments. Engineering. Biology. Chemistry. Astronomy. Volunteers handed out maps while professors talked over microphones no one was paying attention to.
"Stay with your groups," Mr. Hastings called. "Lunch is at noon. Meet back here by two."
Brando Copeland stepped off the curb, dropped his skateboard onto the pavement, and pushed off.
"Copeland."
He looked over his shoulder.
"No skateboard."
Brando picked it up without saying a word and kept walking.
Mr. Hastings watched him for a second before shaking his head and turning back to the rest of the class.
Wilson laughed. "I don't know why you even bring it."
Brando shrugged. "Looks cool."
"It doesn’t."
"It totally does."
Charlotte looked between them. "I'm with Wilson."
Brando looked offended. "Traitor."
"I was never on your side."
Wilson smiled to himself.
Ahead of them, Willa caught Hannah by the sleeve. "They're doing something with robotics first."
Hannah glanced toward the map. "Let's go before it gets crowded."
"You guys good?" Willa asked.
Wilson nodded. "We'll meet up later."
She gave him a thumbs-up before disappearing into the crowd with Hannah.
The courtyard swallowed people almost as fast as they arrived. Brando walked beside Wilson, skateboard tucked under one arm now, while Charlotte unfolded the campus map she'd been handed five minutes earlier.
"I think chemistry's in this building," she said.
Wilson leaned over to look. "You've already planned this out, haven't you?"
"I looked at the schedule."
"Of course you did."
"You didn't?"
"I forgot there was a schedule."
"I know."
Brando nudged Wilson's shoulder. "I didn't even know where we were going today."
Wilson stumbled a step before bumping him back. "Shocking."
The science building was louder than the courtyard. Demonstrations filled every hallway, students crowded around booths, and university volunteers tried to convince fifteen year olds to major in subjects they hadn't even taken yet.
Wilson slowed near a biomedical engineering display.
Charlotte smirked. "I had a feeling this would be your favorite."
He nodded, eyes already scanning the equipment behind the table. "It already is."
The display was smaller than most of the others, tucked between robotics and environmental science. A handful of glass cases sat beneath bright lights, each holding samples of synthetic fibers and small models of laboratory equipment. Behind them, a graduate student adjusted something on a monitor before noticing Wilson lingering nearby.
"You into biology?" he asked.
Wilson nodded. "Mostly chemistry, but, yeah."
The student smiled. "We're doing a lab walkthrough if you want to see what we're working on. It's nothing crazy, but you'll get to see where everything actually happens."
Wilson looked over his shoulder.
Charlotte had already wandered a few booths down, reading every poster she passed. Brando stood beside her, absentmindedly spinning his skateboard on one foot while pretending to read a display that Wilson knew he wasn't paying attention to.
"I'm gonna check this out," Wilson called.
Charlotte looked up. "We'll be around."
He pointed toward the hallway. "I'll find you."
She gave him a nod before turning back to the exhibit in front of her.
Wilson followed the graduate student through a set of double doors and into the biomedical engineering building.
It wasn’t as loud as the hallway was back there.
The crowds disappeared almost as soon as the doors closed, replaced by polished floors, glass offices, and laboratories lined with windows. A few other high school students had joined the tour, though none of them seemed nearly as interested as Wilson.
The guide stopped outside a laboratory where researchers moved between workstations.
"We study bio-inspired materials," he explained. "Things that already exist in nature and how they might be useful in medicine or engineering."
Wilson stayed near the front.
Inside the lab were shelves filled with labeled containers, microscopes, and equipment he didn't recognize. A researcher demonstrated a strand of synthetic spider silk, stretching it between two gloved hands until it caught the light.
"It's stronger than steel for its weight," she said. "We're trying to understand how nature builds something that efficient."
Wilson barely blinked. He watched every step, following the explanation from one workstation to the next.
Near the back of the room, a small research enclosure sat open while someone replaced a filter cartridge. It took less than a second.
A spider slipped through the narrow gap and disappeared beneath the counter.
No one noticed. The tour moved on.
Wilson rested a hand against the edge of another workstation while the guide explained a different project.
Something brushed against his wrist.
He looked down just as a sharp sting made him pull his hand back, and there it was. A tiny red mark.
"You alright?" the guide asked.
Wilson rubbed at it. "Yeah. Probably just scratched myself."
He looked around the floor for whatever had caught him, but there was nothing there.
By the time the tour ended, he'd forgotten about it entirely.
The rest of the afternoon passed faster than Wilson expected.
He found Charlotte and Brando outside the engineering building, where Brando had somehow convinced three other sophomores to see who could balance the longest on a slackline. Charlotte didn't bother asking where Wilson had been. She only handed him one of the brochures she'd picked up and started walking toward the buses with the rest of their class.
The sun sat lower now, warming the pavement just enough that Wilson tugged at the collar of his hoodie.
"You okay?" Charlotte asked.
"Yeah." He said a little too quickly.
By the time they crossed the parking lot, the warmth had settled across his shoulders and neck. It wasn't unbearable, it was just strange, like he'd been standing in the sun too long.
He rolled up his sleeves.
Brando glanced over. "Dude, it's like fifty degrees."
"I know."
"So why are you sweating?"
Wilson looked down. A damp spot had already started to form around the cuffs of his sweatshirt. "I don't know."
"You've got, like, a fever or something?"
"Maybe."
Charlotte frowned but didn't say anything. They climbed onto the bus with the rest of the class. Wilson took his usual seat beside Brando while Charlotte slid into the row behind them.
He thought sitting down would help. Instead, the heat disappeared as quickly as it had come.
A shiver ran through him and he rubbed his hands together.
Brando looked over from the window. "You good?"
Wilson nodded, though he wasn't convinced himself. "Do you feel weird?"
"Weird how?"
"I don't know." He looked around the bus. "Hot. Then cold."
Brando shrugged. "I'm fine."
Wilson twisted around in his seat.
"Charlotte?"
She looked up from her phone. "What?"
"Do you feel sick?"
"No."
"You sure?"
She gave him an odd look. "Yeah, why would I lie about that?"
A few rows behind them, Willa leaned into the aisle. "Why?"
Wilson shrugged. "I was just wondering."
"Did you eat something weird?"
"I had the same lunch as everybody else."
Willa looked toward Hannah before looking back at him. "You better not be getting sick."
Wilson managed a smile. "I'm probably not."
She pointed a finger at him anyway. "I'm serious. If you get me sick, I'm never speaking to you again."
He laughed quietly and leaned back against the seat before resting his head against the cool window.
For the first time in his whole life, Wilson Webber hoped he was just coming down with something.
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The fever hit before Wilson made it home.
By the time the bus reached Manhattan, his sweatshirt was damp against his back, his teeth were chattering, and every muscle in his body felt like it had been pulled too tight. Brando offered to walk home with him, but Wilson insisted he was fine.
He made it halfway up the stairs before Willa had to catch him.
The rest of that night came back in pieces. Aunt May pressing the back of her hand against his forehead. Willa standing in his doorway with her arms crossed, pretending she wasn’t worried. A glass of water untouched beside his bed. The glow of the hallway slipping beneath his door whenever someone checked on him.
Wilson slept for nearly fourteen hours and when he woke the next afternoon, the fever was gone.
Not even lower. It was completely gone.
He sat up slowly, expecting the room to tilt, but it stayed perfectly still. His head didn’t ache. His throat wasn’t sore. Even the heaviness in his muscles had disappeared.
He felt better than he had before the field trip. He also felt like he hadn’t eaten in a week.
Wilson emptied two bowls of cereal, made three pieces of toast, ate half of Willa’s leftover pasta directly from the container, and was reaching for an apple when she walked into the kitchen.
She stopped in the doorway.
Wilson froze with the refrigerator still open.
“That was mine.”
“I thought you didn’t want it.”
“It had my name on it.”
He glanced at the container on the counter. Willa’s name was written across the lid in black marker.
“I didn’t see that.”
“You’re holding the lid.”
Wilson looked down. “Oh. Sorry”
Willa stared at him for another second before walking over and taking the apple from his hand. “You’re sick. You don’t need to eat everything we own.”
“I’m not sick anymore.”
“You looked dead last night.”
“I got better.”
She narrowed her eyes, unconvinced, but eventually left him alone.
Wilson assumed she was right. The sudden hunger was probably his body making up for everything it had burned through during the fever. He went back to bed that night expecting to wake up feeling miserable again.
He didn’t.
By day three, Wilson knew something was strange.
It started when he dropped a mug. He was standing in the kitchen before school, still half asleep, when the handle slipped from his fingers. The mug fell toward the tile.
Wilson caught it before it hit the floor.
He didn’t bend down, he didn’t even remember moving at all.
One second, the mug was falling. The next, his hand was beneath it, holding it inches above the ground.
He stayed crouched beside the counter, staring at it.
Willa walked in behind him, stepping around his legs to get to the cabinet. “What are you doing?”
Wilson looked from the mug to her. “Nothing.”
“You’re sitting on the floor.”
“I dropped this.”
“Congratulations.”
“No, I-”
She had already turned away.
Wilson placed the mug back on the counter and he spent the rest of the morning testing himself without admitting that was what he was doing. He let his pencil roll off his desk and caught it without looking. He tossed his keys higher than necessary and grabbed them behind his back. When someone bumped a stack of books from the edge of a table in the library, Wilson’s hand shot out before the first one could hit the ground.
Each time, the movement came before the thought. His body seemed to know what was happening a fraction of a second before he did.
The other changes were harder to ignore.
The bruise on his shoulder from walking into Charlotte’s bookshelf the week before had vanished. A paper cut on his thumb closed within hours. The red mark on his wrist from the laboratory was almost completely gone, leaving only two tiny dots against his skin.
His vision had gotten better, too.
From the back of English class, he could read the dates written in the corner of Mr. Hastings’s desk calendar. He could see individual dust particles drifting through the beam of sunlight beside the window. When Brando whispered something from two rows away, Wilson heard him as clearly as if he were sitting beside him.
Unfortunately, he could also hear everything else.
Pencils scratching across paper, shoes dragging beneath desks, the low electrical hum inside the lights, someone tapping their fingernails against a binder, and all thirty separate conversations in the hallway beyond the classroom door.
By lunch, Wilson had a headache so intense he could barely look up from the table.
Charlotte watched him push his food around his tray. “You still feel sick?”
“No.”
“You look sick.”
“I’m tired.”
“You slept through first period.”
“I know.”
Brando reached over and stole one of Wilson’s mini corndogs.
Wilson caught his wrist without looking.
Brando stopped.
Wilson stopped and quickly released him.
Brando slowly took the corndog anyway.
“Okay,” he said. “Weird.”
Wilson forced a laugh. “You’re dramatic.”
Charlotte didn’t laugh with him.
By day four, the sounds had begun to settle.
Wilson still heard too much, but he was learning how to push most of it away. If he focused on one voice, the others faded into the background. If he concentrated hard enough, he could make the humming lights disappear altogether.
The strength was more difficult to control. He tore the handle off his bedroom drawer while looking for a clean shirt. He snapped a pencil between his fingers during algebra. When the front door stuck against the frame, Wilson pulled once and nearly ripped it from its hinges.
Aunt May blamed the old wood. Wilson didn’t correct her.
That afternoon, he waited until no one was home before standing in the middle of his bedroom and studying his hands.
They looked normal.
No swelling, no bruising, no obvious sign that anything had changed.
Wilson wrapped his fingers around the metal post at the end of his bed and squeezed.
The metal bent inward and he released it like it had burned him.
For several seconds, he could only stare at the shallow impression his fingers had left behind, then he tried to convince himself that the frame had already been damaged.
It hadn’t.
Wilson stepped backward, his pulse climbing. His heel caught on a shoe lying behind him. He lost his balance and threw one hand toward the wall.
His palm struck the paint, and it stayed there.
Wilson frowned as he tried to pull it away but nothing happened.
He pulled harder, bracing his other hand against the wall, but that one stuck too.
For one ridiculous moment, Wilson Webber stood trapped against his own bedroom wall.
His breathing quickened as he twisted his wrist, and his hand finally peeled free with a soft ripping sound. The other followed. Wilson stumbled backward and landed on the edge of his bed. A thin strip of paint clung to his palm.
He stared at it for a long time.
That evening, Wilson searched every variation of sudden strength, enhanced reflexes, fever, and hands sticking to walls that he could think of.
Nothing helped.
Most results suggested dehydration, anxiety, or a serious neurological condition. None explained the bent bed frame.
By day five, Wilson knew it wasn’t just a cold.
Colds didn't heal cuts overnight, or let someone hear a phone vibrating through two closed doors. Colds didn't make the world slow down every time something moved too quickly, and they definitely didn't leave fingerprints embedded in a metal bedpost.
Wilson hadn’t told anyone. Not Aunt May, or Willa, or Brando. He hadn’t even told Charlotte.
He came close twice, though. The first time was when Charlotte called to ask if he had finished their chemistry assignment. Wilson had stared at the wall above his desk and nearly said everything. Instead, he told her he had been sleeping.
The second time was outside school that morning, when she caught him looking at his hands again.
She asked what was wrong and Wilson shoved them into the pockets of his hoodie and told her nothing was.
Now he sat beside her in chemistry class, staring down at a worksheet he had already finished.
The room was warm from the afternoon sun. Long black tables filled the laboratory, each lined with sinks, gas valves, and drawers full of equipment. Glass cabinets covered the back wall, crowded with beakers and bottles bearing faded warning labels.
Charlotte sat on Wilson’s left, her notebook open beside the worksheet. She worked through the final equation, tapping the end of her pencil against the paper whenever she paused.
Brando occupied the stool across from them, leaning over his own work with his forehead resting in one hand. His skateboard was tucked beneath the table beside his backpack.
Two stations away, Willa and Hannah shared a textbook between them. Hannah copied something from the page while Willa searched through the pile of notes spread across their table.
Mason Barrett sat near the front, his worksheet was already complete, placed neatly beside his closed textbook. He was reading through the next chapter while the rest of the class finished, one hand moving down the page as he studied.
Wilson lowered his eyes to his own paper again. Every answer had come like they were already on the paper.
Equations that would have taken him several minutes the week before now arranged themselves in his head before he finished reading the question. He could picture the molecules. He understood how each element would react before he wrote anything down.
Around him, the classroom turned into separate pieces.The scratch of Charlotte’s pencil.Brando bouncing his knee beneath the table. Hannah turning a page. The quiet ticking of the clock above the door. Mason’s fingers sliding along the edge of his book.
Wilson sat at the center of it all, one hand curled beneath the table and the other resting beside his completed work, trying not to touch anything too hard.
The bell rang before he could look away from his paper. Chairs scraped against the floor, notebooks snapped shut, and the room filled with voices as everyone rushed toward the door. Brando shoved his worksheet into his backpack without folding it, while Charlotte gathered her books into a neat stack beside Wilson.
Wilson reached for his pencil, but a hand grabbed it first.
He looked up as one of the boys from the table behind them held it between two fingers.
“Give it back.”
The boy grinned, tossed it upward, and hurried toward the door.
The pencil struck the ceiling and stayed there. Wilson stared at it.
It had lodged between two loose ceiling tiles, with the eraser pointing down toward the tables.
Brando looked up. “How did he even do that?”
“I don’t know.”
Charlotte turned toward the boy, but he had already disappeared into the hallway with the rest of the class.
Their teacher looked up from the papers on his desk. “Why are you still standing around?”
Wilson pointed toward the ceiling. “Someone threw my pencil.”
The teacher followed his gaze, then looked back at him. “Then get it down before you leave.”
Wilson frowned. “I didn’t put it there.”
“I didn’t ask who put it there.”
Brando stepped forward. “We all saw who did it.”
“It wasn’t Wilson,” Charlotte added.
Willa and Hannah had stopped near the door, and Willa looked between Wilson and the teacher. “He left already,” she said. “Wilson didn’t do anything.”
The teacher closed the folder in front of him. “Another word from any of you, and you can all stay after school.”
Brando opened his mouth, but Wilson shook his head.
“Just go.”
“Wil-”
“I’ll meet you outside.”
Charlotte hesitated, and Willa stayed beside the door.
Wilson gave them another look. “Go.”
Brando muttered something under his breath before pulling his backpack over one shoulder. Charlotte followed him into the hallway, while Willa waited another second before Hannah caught her shoulder and guided her out.
The teacher gathered the rest of his papers and walked toward the adjoining office. “I expect it down when I come back.”
The door closed behind him.
Wilson stood alone in the classroom and looked up at the pencil. It was directly above one of the lab stations, caught high enough that even standing on the table might not be enough.
He dragged a stool closer and stepped onto it, then climbed onto the black tabletop.
He reached upward, and his fingers missed the eraser by several inches. He rose onto his toes and tried again, but he still couldn’t reach it.
Wilson looked around for something taller. There wasn’t anything nearby except glass equipment and metal stools, and he wasn’t about to stack either of them on top of a lab table.
He stretched again.
Nothing.
Wilson dropped his arm and stared at the pencil.
Five days of hearing everything, breaking everything, and sticking to anything he touched, yet he couldn’t reach one pencil.
He jumped one time and his fingers brushed the eraser, but the pencil stayed lodged between the tiles.
He clenched his jaw. “Come on.”
He jumped again, higher this time, and grabbed for the pencil and his hand missed, but instead of falling back to the table, both palms struck the ceiling and stayed there.
Wilson hung beneath it with his legs swinging below him. For one second, he forgot to breathe, then he pulled one foot upward and pressed it against the ceiling. It stuck too.
He slowly brought the other foot up, until his entire body was suspended above the classroom. He stared down at the lab tables. The floor seemed much farther away from there.
Wilson shifted his weight carefully, then crawled across the ceiling toward the pencil. Every movement felt strangely natural, as if his body understood the balance even if his mind didn’t. He reached over and pulled the pencil free.
Wilson held it between his fingers and laughed under his breath.
The classroom door opened.
“Wilson, I forgot my-” Charlotte stopped.
Wilson froze against the ceiling.
Her chemistry book was still on the table beneath him, but she didn’t look at it, she looked at him.
Her mouth opened, but no sound came out.
Wilson tightened his grip on the pencil. “Charlie.”
“What are you doing?”
“I can explain.”
“You’re on the ceiling.”
“I know.”
“How are you on the ceiling?”
“I don’t know.”
Charlotte stepped into the room and shut the door behind her. “When did this happen? Can you get down? Have you done this before? Is that why you’ve been acting weird? Were you actually sick? Did something happen at the university?”
Wilson stared at her.
Charlotte pointed at the ceiling beneath his hands. “Are you stuck?”
“No.”
“You hesitated.”
“I’m not stuck.”
“Then get down.”
Wilson looked toward the table beneath him. “That part might be harder.”