AN: In case anyone is interested, I put up a quick scribble of some of the more developed OCs from this collection in the DN folder of my dA gallery (sarapsys . deviantart . com)
7: Inches
Jeffrey Timmons would give almost anything to see his parents.
It's weird. Two weeks ago he wouldn't have believed it. His mother was always traveling for work, selling fancy lotions and facial creams, and his dad…well, it was obvious that his dad thought he was a freak.
Bad enough that the kids at school treated him like alien with an infectious disease (which made no sense; they were the ones who were ignorant and strange and incurious), but his father was on a mission to fix him, always finding new "special" tutors and psychological tests, tedious and never-ending. Every time his father caught him with the ruler, he would frown and get that frustrated look, that look asked where he had gone wrong to end up with a son like him.
If you asked Jeffrey (which no one ever did) his parents were the ones with the problems, sleep-walking through a marriage that even their nine-year-old son could see had been crushed by the combined weight of her ambition and his perfectionism years ago, too scared to leave each other and too proud to honestly try to make it work. His mom found a way to escape and his dad projected his issues onto his son.
No, a few weeks ago he would have jumped at a chance to escape his family.
They're gone now, though, and he'll never see them again. Everything is gone, even the name Jeffrey Timmons, which he's been told not to use anymore. The only remotely familiar thing is the tape measure he managed to swipe. The weight of it in his pocket is a small comfort as he is whirled through strange cars and planes and buildings by strange people, whirls through more tests like the ones his dad used to make him take, more cars and buildings, and then a study where a tired-looking old man tells him he's reached the end of the whirling and that if he works hard and excels in his studies, he might inherit the title of the greatest detective on earth.
By this point he's long past the limit of new unmeasured spaces he can handle in a day. Most of what he's told is tuned out as white noise while he fingers the edges of the tape measure and waits numbly for the time that he can use it.
When the tired old man and the big Russian woman are done talking at him, he is shown a room that he is told is his (whoever he is, since he's not Jeffrey anymore, he has a new name that fits like new Sunday shoes and he isn't sure he likes it but as usual no one has asked him) and is left alone to sort himself out.
Finally.
First he measures the room itself, side to side to side and top to bottom; then every door and doorframe, the diameter of the doorknobs, the distance between the doorknob and every edge of the door, the window and each pane and the windowframe and sill, then every splinter of furniture and the height of the shelves and hanger pole in the closet and every measurement he can think of on every single object in the room, from the computer to the sheets to the ceiling fan to the electric sockets; he writes them all down in neat columns and then calculates volumes and angles and distances until he knows this space and how he fits in it.
Then he crawls into bed fully clothed with the lights still on, pulls the sheets over his head, and mentally recalculates all those measurements again and again and again.
He doesn't realize he's fallen asleep until he's abruptly woken by hands seizing his wrists and ankles and thick fabric being pulled tight over his face.
At first he is too startled to struggle. Then he decides to play dead, because there are at least three of them, and struggling is unlikely to help. It's not long, just a quick trip down the hall, and they set him down again and remove the fabric from his face. It makes no difference, because it's pitch black.
"English?" a voice whispers in his ear.
"I speak English," he says, "but I'm not English, I'm—"
A hand claps over his mouth before he can finish the sentence. "Never tell where you from. You in the House now. Outside doesn't matter no more."
They're kids' voices. He hasn't met any of the other students yet, though he's had glimpses of them through cracked doorways. He's never much liked kids his own age, who don't understand anything and call him names and leave him out of their games. If what the tired old man said was true, these kids won't be like those kids. Under the circumstances, though, he's not convinced different necessarily means better, and a cold little finger of fear tickles the back of his neck.
The hand leaves his mouth. There is a clattering of computer keys in the darkness, and the dim glow of a monitor washes the faces of the children ringed around him with its eerie light. He can't see the walls in the dark, can't guess at the size of the room. His chest feels tight, and he anxiously rubs the corner of the tape measure still in his pocket. "What do you want?"
"To make this fast so we can get back to sleep," says the girl sitting across from him, who looks vaguely Middle Eastern but has a British accent. "My letter Q for Qarri."
"R for Rom," says the boy with dark curly hair, and the small Asian girl is "X for Xie".
"We draw the short sticks so we your welcome committee, fishie. You know your letter?" says Qarri.
"My name…my letter is Zane. Z. Z for Zane."
"Congratulations. You the last letter in our alphabet," says X for Xie.
He doesn't like having a letter and not a name. It feels like a lie. He wants his old name back. He wants to pull the tape measure out of his pocket and clutch it in his hands. He wants to know how far away the walls and ceiling are, needs to know how tall Q and X and R stand, because letters tell him exactly nothing about them.
"No cry. Don't let no one see you cry," R for Rom admonishes him.
"New kiddies get three days slack, almost anyone gonna help you screw you head on straight. After that, you tie you own shoes. Warden Roger explain what this House for, da?"
He's having a little bit of trouble following what Q is saying. She talks faster than anyone he's ever met. "Erm…he said that they are looking for a replacement to the detective L."
"Right," says the girl, and there are quick smirks and stifled snickers. "Well forget all that blakabaka. We tell you the House rules. First one: the brass gonna lie if they think they get away with it, an' don't tell us nothing if they don't."
'Warden' Roger told him a lot of rules, like no running in the halls and no hitting, but he failed to mention any of these. They're less like rules and more like a verbal tour of this bizarre place.
For instance, teasing about others' therapy is taboo. "Everybody here a genius, everybody got they own crazy. Alla everybody gotta get they head tuned," Q says. "You don't poke about tuning and nobody poke you back."
They explain about the Crusties (not to be antagonized) and the Twins (best avoided).
"M and N aren't actually twins," R interjects. "But suppose'ly they brought together, see? But don't you call them Twins to their face or M probl'y kill you dead."
And speaking of the Twins,
"They the Warden's favorite. If one'a them isn't picked for L, you can scrub my letter," X mutters.
"Then why does—then why anyone want to stay?"
Q, R, and X exchange glances.
"Not supposed to talk about when we were Outside," Qarri finally says, leaning forward and lowering her voice confidentially. "But you on slack days, fishie, so I tell you. Maybe Outside there were some wormbaits that you liked, you family or friends, maybe. Maybe not. But were you one'a them?"
"No," Rom and Xie answer for him. Rom continues, "The wormbait think we're freaks. 'Oooh, this liddle kid he so smart, so special', they say, but really they thinkin' 'scary, sick in the head, gotta fix 'em up'. And they lie but you know better, cuz you are smart."
"In the House, everybody crazy smart," Xie says. "Always someone crazier than you. Everybody gets it. You can play games and not hafta hold back cuz you might get called freak. Nobody treat you like a bitty baby that don't understand."
He digests this for a moment, then reaches hesitantly into his pocket, pulls out the tape measure. Turns it over in his hands, taps each corner once then measures his palms while he thinks. The other three watch, but don't seem to think anything of it.
"So if they go in alphabetical order and I'm Z, there are—there only 26 of us?"
Their faces darken in the dim light. "No," says Qarri. "Only 23. A, B, and E all gone."
"Gone?"
"Gone. Scrubbed," says Xie, when Q doesn't answer.
"What's that mean, scrubbed?" That little cold finger of fear is back, tracing his spine. For the first time, the other three letters look uneasy.
"Everybody got their crazy, but gotta keep it tuned. If the crazy control you, your letter get scrubbed. Erased. Back to the Outside," Qarri says.
His chest contracts, and he holds tightly to the tape measure. It's all rather a lot to take in, and his parents are dead and his name is gone. But he knows the exact dimensions of his room, and though he hardly knows the three letters in front of him, he finds that he feels more of a kinship with them than any of the kids at his old school. There's a certain look in their eyes, a tension in the way they hold themselves—they're watching, and thinking, calculating and measuring.
They're like him.
"Can I measure you height?" he tests.
"What you gonna use that information for?" Rom asks, but he doesn't sound creeped out, just suspicious.
"I just need to know how tall you are."
Qarri shrugs carelessly, and they all stand up.
"Don't touch," Xie warns, flinching a little as he pulls the tape measure straight and holds it by her head, squinting at the little numbers in the dim light. None of them asks why they're doing this, though Qarri does tell him to hurry it up so they can all go back to bed as he's taking a second measurement to double-check. Q, R, and X are 52.6, 54.0, and 46.3 inches tall respectively.
He's still a bit numb and overwhelmed, but Z is starting to think he would give almost anything not to be scrubbed.
