UNPARALLELED - Chapter One

​Back cover description:
​​Ted, just Ted, is about as normal as you get. Until one day he's not. After a traumatic near-death experience, he wakes up the next morning without—of all things—his reflection. Little does he know, that's not even the weirdest thing that will happen to him that day. (No, he's not a vampire, calm down.)

Chapter 1

When I was in middle school, I had a huge crush on Ella Rice.

She was this super nice girl, one of those introverts that’s somehow friends with all the cool kids. Dirty blond wavy hair. Played the trumpet in band—I played the clarinet.

Everyone loved her.

I was just Ted. Or Teddy. Yes, like the bear. Thanks, mom.

I spoke maybe five words to her in those three years. Total. High school wasn’t much better. I maybe had a few classes with her outside of music. We ended up going to the same college, though. UCLA. Pretty much where everyone from my high school goes after graduating.

As chance happens, we got placed in the same study group for World Literature this semester. But there’s like a couple hundred people in that class, so we really only interact on Mondays when our study group meets.

I could always just suck it up and actually have a real conversation with her, but that would require a monumental shift in confidence for someone with debilitating introversion such as myself.

Growing up, I would always have these fantasies about being some big hero, usually involving Ella somehow. Saving her from a burning boat as a Coast Guardsman, rescuing her and her research team in the arctic after a mechanical failure downed their aircraft, carrying her wounded over my shoulders to safety as some undefined enemy invaded America.

I was thirteen, okay? I don’t want to hear it.

But considering all of that, you’d think my current situation would be one of my wildest fantasies come true.

I stare, unmoving, at the coal-black body of an assault rifle being held aloft by a masked gunman, and I find all my fantasies slapped away by the cold hand of reality. The man has camouflaged body armor and a side-bag full of what looks like additional weapons and ammunition. Smoke trails lazily upward from the barrel; he’s just fired three shots directly up into the ceiling, right in the middle of the dining commons, not ten feet from me. My ears are still ringing.

Most of everyone else in the commons has already fled the building, but the six of us in Study Group L remain frozen in place, painfully aware of how vulnerable we are, completely at the mercy of whatever the gunman has in mind next.

You know those computer-based trainings that companies make you take? The ones where you button-mash your way through instructions on how to be a respectful coworker and how to operate the time-punch machine? I feel like one of those trainings is always about situations like this. I remember some morbid mnemonic about the three progressive responses. Flight, hide, fight.

Of course, my brain has dumped all of that out the window and is now refusing to cooperate with my sense of survival.

I glance over at Ella from the corner of my eye. She looks more startled than scared. I rarely see anything other than a kind smile on her face, so the expression she now wears rattles me more than anything else that has happened yet.

The gunman turns to face us, lowering his weapon. I can only see his eyes through his balaclava. I expect to find something menacing behind them, some kind of twisted pleasure or evil fury, but instead I find nothing but cold, disinterested indifference. As if he’s nothing more that one of the dining hall custodians, coming to pick up our dirty dishes.

He puts his left hand on the rifle’s barrel and points it at Ella.

I expect my heart rate to spike, to feel some urge to cower or maybe stumble backward out of my chair in a last-ditch effort to save myself. But what happens next takes me completely by surprise. For all my timidness, and despite my essential lack of assertiveness and self-confidence, I’m filled with an incomprehensible sense of invulnerability. A feeling that I’m somehow superior to this gunman. He suddenly seems so small to me, like a child playing with the nerf gun, one that his mother took from him as a punishment.

With all the confidence of a being unknown to me, I stand and grab the gunman by the strap of his body armor, and throw him backwards against the handrail behind him. He hits his head on it with a loud clang and flops lifelessly to the ground. Amid the chaos, a shot rings out as the rifle jostles out of his hand, something that elicits another round of shouts and screams from across the dining hall.

Then all is still.

I stare at the gunman, crumpled up in a heap, his eyes now hidden under his balaclava, which must have gotten jostled around when he fell.

In that moment, of all the things I could be thinking, of all the things my brain could be doing instead, my attention is drawn to a ruby crested ring on the gunman’s finger. The gemstone shines like nothing I’ve ever seen before, its color rich and alluring, like a forest of maples in the first month of fall, and the band has an intricate gold pattern engraved on it.

Why this sticks out more than anything else, I’ll never know.

I shake my head, clearing my mind, and find myself back on Earth, back in my timid, self-conscious body. It takes me a moment to remember to breathe, and when I do, the air comes rushing back into my lungs, sweet and cool.

There’s a mix of reactions among those left in the hall. Some have broken down into tears. Others flee without giving it another thought. Some tentatively approach us, coming to help us by taking the weapon away, or by giving the gunman a good kick in the head to make sure he’s actually out. A few shake my hand and say words that I’ll never remember.

Truly, though, I can’t even believe it myself. After reviewing in my mind what has just happened, it’s like watching somebody else’s actions entirely.

Never in a million years would I have done something like that. Never would I have had that amount of confidence.

And yet, here we are.

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