I could tell John was nervous. He always had an air of cocksure superiority about himself but that night he was quiet, still, consciously trying not to look around for fear of revealing his unease to me.
"You scared?" I teased him with raised eyebrows.
He snickered and shook his head. "I'm not scared, Liz."
"Afraid your head will explode?" I mimed an exploding head with my hands. "Not completely unreasonable you know."
He narrowed his eyes then looked away. "I know it's supposed to be safe."
"Supposed to?" I say. "You sound confident." I know he's never been to a spatial distortion before. Neither have the other two who are supposed to meet us here tonight. I've only been here once before. It's a region of space that has become warped and no longer obeys the rules of Euclidean geometry. Its most distinctive trait is the way it bends light so that it looks like you're staring into a giant lens, but the reason we're here is to bend.
I stand up and silently lean against the wall, purposefully jutting my left hip out as I face him. I know he likes it because when he thinks I'm staring off into space I catch his eyes flit downward and look me over. "Bending's fun. No reason to be so stiff about it." I wink at him but he doesn't even smile.
"Liz, chill, I'm fine with all of this. I was just thinking about my granddad. You know he used to have a drug problem."
I shrugged. "It's not a drug. Sure it temporarily messes with your brain chemistry but no one has ever died from one, not even the class five distortions. And this one has been basically cleared as completely safe."
"Yeah, I know Liz. I told you I'm fine."
I rolled my eyes and shoved him in the shoulder. "Off your balance today huh?"
Finally he grinned. "Don't even." He stood up and held out his hands. "Let's go." So we held up our hands and played. The game was a test of balance. You had to keep both feet planted and the only contact you could have with the other person was pushing on their palms with your own, and the first one to move a foot was the looser. He usually won but when I did I made sure to rub it in his face.
As soon as he got in position I smacked his palms and he stumbled backward.
"What the hell was that?" His eyes flared and he got into position again while I stuck my tongue out at him. "Let's go again," he said.
This time when I shot my hands out he grabbed them and then when I pulled them back he toppled onto me as we hit the wall of the entrance building.
"Come on now, that's just straight up cheating," I said. But we both just started laughing.
When the other two finally arrived we'd already devolved into a boxing match. Nothing too violent but I did knock the air out of him once.
I can't even remember the names of the other two who joined us that night. They weren't honor students so I didn't really give a damn. All I do remember is they were holding hands when they approached us.
"You guys ready?" I asked as they joined us, barely able to contain my excitement.
The boy nodded nervously and the girl asked if it was dangerous and if there were guards around.
"You'll be fine." I laughed a bit and then started working the door open with a crowbar. Before I opened it John insisted on helping. When we finally wedged it open we both stumbled back into the other two and laughed again. I saw an unspoken challenge in John's eyes; whoever got to the basement last was a coward, so we both walked through the door without even waiting for the other two.
We made our way down staircases and past hallways covered in graffiti of the others who had made illicit visits to this sacred underground lair in the past. Surprisingly one of the overhead lights still worked, so we flipped it on and there in front of us we could see it, the spatial distortion.
John stood in place, mouth open, smile slowly forming at the edges of his mouth. I walked a bit along its perimeter. The door on the opposite side of the room warped and rapidly receded as it approached the center of my field of vision. I took a step forward.
"Wait, are you going in already?" The other boy asked as he and the girl entered the room.
I looked back at them. "Yeah, it's fine." Then I broke out into a sprint toward the center. The world shrunk and warped away from me, and the door opposite me grew a little closer while John and the others shrunk precipitously when I looked back at them.
Finally the visual distortion evened out and I knew I'd reached the center. "Come on in!" I yelled, feeling a little out of breath. Or perhaps the bending had already taken effect.
First I saw John start to walk toward me, moving at an almost glacial pace. I couldn't help laughing hysterically. Yeah, the bending had definitely started taking effect. The other two, holding hands once again, made their way in as well, swiveling their heads to take in the visual spectacle the whole way in.
When they all reached me at the center, wide smiles on their faces, John looked to me and slowly nodded his head. "It's bigger on the inside."
The other two became fascinated with the iron meshed floor and wouldn't stop speculating as to how it was constructed inside of a spatial distortion. I will admit, it had an amazing geometry to it.
I felt a wave of bending coming on so I walked closer to John. I think he was starting to feel it too. He swayed back and forth, putting his hand up to light and scanning the warped background of the abandoned lab.
"Do you hear something?" he asked.
I grinned at him. "That's the bending. Sometimes it makes you hear things, sometimes you see things, and sometimes you just feel really really good." Then I felt a powerful breath well up from inside me and started giggling as I felt my body become almost half as light as it usually is. At first I couldn't tell if it was in my head or we were beginning to go weightless but then I saw the other two start jumping higher into the air.
"Antigrav's kicking in!" Then I found myself in John's arms, sitting on the floor, unsure of how I got there, and apparently still giggling. One of my hands ran up his chest, then through his short jet black hair. His eyes narrowed at me more than they usually look but I could only focus on running my fingers down his light earthy colored and subtly muscular arms. "Spin me!" I yelled at him.
"You can't hear that?" he asked again, ignoring my wandering hands.
I stood up slowly, watching the other two holding hands and frolicking across the noisy mesh floor in the presence of reduced gravity.
"John!" He looked at me and rubbed his forehead for a moment, so I grabbed the front of his shirt, pulled him close and kissed him. For a minute there he ignored the voices in his head and kissed me back, running his hands across my cheeks and down my back. I could feel strands of hair begin to stand on end. I'd heard some very preliminary asymmetry studies that class one distortions provided higher antigravity for light wispy appendages like strands of hair. It was exhilarating, I was lost in his embrace and yet my mind was opened, separated from my body to admire the physics of it all.
"Liz, are you sure this is okay?" He asked after pulling away from me.
"Oh just kiss me again already!"
"No, not that." He held a hand to his head. "I swear I can hear something. It's like it's right next to my head."
"What's it sound like?" I didn't really care, I just figured he'd shut up about it quicker that way.
"It's like an animal, a cat maybe? I can't place it. I think it's trying to talk to me."
I pushed him away and made a running jump into the air, staying afloat for almost three seconds I think. "Look at this place! It's amazing." I could feel my heart pounding, a series of periodic explosions getting louder by the second. I danced to that beat, twirling and running and jumping into the air until I finally stumbled on my own ankle and fluttered to the ground like a feather.
"John, come dance with me!" I raised my head and the world around me swirled for a moment before the oscillations decayed into a steady state and I saw the other two, far away standing pressed up against the southern wall of the lab, then I slowly turned and saw John at the eastern wall.
I couldn't stand so I crawled along the rattling mesh toward him. He later told me I was breathing heavily and moaning out loud as I did, but I can't remember making any sound then.
I already knew that distances inside this distortion were much longer but even so it felt like I crawled for hours before reaching John. He was sitting against the wall, eyes closed and head rhythmically rolling around as if to the sound of music.
"John!" I started laughing at him again, then straddled him and leaned in to whisper in his ear whatever lunatic thoughts I had at the time.
"No, Liz, get off. I can still hear it."
"You gonna kiss me again?"
He pushed me off and walked outside. I remember only collapsing to the ground and laughing until I ran out of breath.
I don't know how long I laid there, but it wasn't until my heartbeat faded from my hearing that I started to worry about scaring John off. The other two were talking with each other in a corner. They barely noticed me walk back up the stairs. Outside I couldn't see John in the dark at first but through the trees I saw his silhouette in the moonlight, standing by the shore.
"Hey John," I said, trying to keep as quiet as possible. "Went a little crazy in there, huh?"
He glanced at me for a moment, then looked out at the ocean again. "Yeah."
"Sorry about… you know, whatever." I felt my cheeks growing hot with embarrassment.
He shrugged. "I'm fine. Just felt really weird in there."
I took a seat on a fallen tree stump and motioned for him to join me. As he took a seat I ran my hand through the soft wet sand at our feet. "I know it's… uh…" How was I supposed to breach the subject? What do you say in that position? We'd been in this limbo where we both knew we liked each other but hadn't said or done anything about it yet. The night was one long blur.
"Elizabeth?" I heard the girl calling. They'd made their way up as well.
"Over here." I waved at them.
"Oh my god, that was the most amazing thing I've ever experienced!" the girl said, her face aglow and hands gesticulating wildly.
She and her boy started going on how I was so cool to have shown it to them and John mostly nodded and gestured at the conversation without saying much, but before I had a chance to talk with him alone again we heard a low rumbling from further beyond the old lab entrance.
That's when we first laid eyes on it. It was one of the monsters. I recognized the general shape of its giant segmented snakelike body but this one was covered in a shiny metallic coat that reflected the moonlight.
John asked what we all had on our minds. "Is that an Onix?"
But it wasn't an Onix, it had large triangular eyes and an almost demonic smile.
As the monster raised its head above the building it trained its eyes on us and let out a low pitched bellow before wildly plunging its head into the lab entrance's roof. I didn't see what happened next. The other two were already running away when John grabbed my hand and yanked me away. As we ran toward the gap in the gate we'd entered through, the ground shook and fearsome bellowing echoed through the air that night, and in the morning we heard the news: the building had been completely demolished and the spatial distortion was buried. We would never set foot down there again.
That was all more than two years ago, but they still call me Elizabeth Maxwell, the girl who angered Steelix.