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Ignorance is bliss.
When she’d first run across that particular saying, then ten year-old Caitlyn Connor had scornfully dismissed it as nonsense. The intervening two years had given her no cause to change her mind and in fact had further strengthened her initial judgment. Learning things was the key to success and happiness in life, not remaining ignorant! Science and knowledge had created the modern world, with all of its technology and conveniences! Moreover, the better educated you were as an individual, the more choices you had for a career when you became an adult. Mom said over and over again she wished she’d gone to college, and was adamant her only daughter would not repeat her mistake. Dad wasn’t as passionate about her education, probably because he really enjoyed his job as a semi-truck driver, but he still supported Mom’s stance. That was fine with Caitlyn; she did well in school, enjoyed reading and writing, and was already looking forward to leaving town when it was time to go off to college.
Not that there was anything wrong with Brightburn, not exactly, but it WAS awfully small. There was a lot out there in the world, and she wanted to see it. Dad already had; he’d witnessed the stark majesty of the Rockies and the wide, endless azure of both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. College would offer her a chance to see some of these things for herself and aid her in getting a good job as well. Ignorance wasn’t bliss; knowledge was power!
Of course, you wouldn’t know that from the behavior of most of her male classmates. The way they acted out in school made it seem like they really DID believe ignorance was bliss (probably it was a boy who’d said it in the first place)! The primary exception to this general rule was Brandon Breyer, the quiet kid whose grades were always at the top of whatever class he was in. Maybe that was why he didn’t often hang around with the other seventh grade guys: he just didn’t fit in with them. He was too mature, too smart. His answer to Ms. Epenschied’s biology question on Friday had been typical of him: impressively thorough, informative and correct. Naturally Royce had to throw out some stupid insult afterwards. It wasn’t the first time, but for some reason it had been the last straw for Caitlyn that day. She’d turned around in her seat to face Brandon, comforting him with a smile and with what she knew to be the truth, “Don’t worry, smart guys end up ruling the world.”
She was only being nice, although the fact that Brandon was cute might have had a little something to do with her decision. Caitlyn hadn’t started dating, but the prospect was growing more appealing. Out of the rowdy, immature group of seventh grade boys, who would be a better choice for going out with than Brandon?
She and Dad went to the movies Saturday afternoon and out for ice cream afterwards, their usual ritual before he left on another week-long trucking run. Perhaps someday she wouldn’t miss him as much while he was gone, but if so, that day had yet to arrive. Sunday was spent attending church, finishing all of her homework due Monday (though she still hadn’t started on her English paper about the current state of criminal justice) and talking on SnapChat with Candace and Emily. Candace had teased her about liking Brandon, but she hadn’t risen to the bait, simply responding, “You know what I told him was true”.
She went to bed at nine, feeling tired, but satisfied with what she’d accomplished this weekend. Within half an hour she was fast asleep.
Caitlyn awoke later that night to the sound of a romantic song of some kind playing from her open laptop. How could that be? She always closed and shut down her laptop before she went to bed in order to save the battery, and tonight was no exception. Slowly getting out of bed, the preteen padded through the darkened room toward the bright beacon of her laptop.
Her door was still closed, so Mom probably hadn’t come in and done it. Why would Mom turn on her laptop, set it on a music site, and leave anyway? That didn’t make any sense!
Resolving to worry about it in the morning, Caitlyn shut the lid of the laptop and headed back to her warm bed. She liked leaving her windows open at night, enjoying feeling the occasional breeze on her cheek. Now that autumn was here the time to shut the windows was fast approaching.
Halfway to back to her bed the sound of the song resumed. Slowly turning around, she saw the lid open once more, though she had closed it herself not ten seconds before.
That was when Caitlyn began getting not merely confused, but scared. Wasn’t this how it always went in horror movies? Small, inexplicable events happened to the victim and the next thing you knew the monster was pouncing? Not that she’d ever watched any horror movies, not at her age, but she’d seen more than enough commercials and trailers for such films. There’d been one the other day at the theater, a preview for an upcoming movie about an evil doll.
That line of thought wasn’t helping, so with an effort of will Caitlyn firmly squashed it down.
Her mouth dry and her heart beating rapidly now, she walked back to the desk again and firmly shut her laptop once more before piling stuff on top of it. She looked around her room, trying to figure out what the heck was going on, to discern the cause of this strangeness.
“Mom,” she cried out almost instinctively, wishing with all of her heart Dad was home too.
Then she’d spotted him. He was standing next to one of her windows, hiding behind the fluttering, floor-length curtains. It was Brandon Bryer! He must have somehow climbed up the side of the house and then snuck in through the open window!
At last the bedroom door burst open and Mom raced in, looking almost as afraid as Caitlyn felt.
“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” Mom demanded anxiously.
Caitlyn fled to the embrace of her mother, needing the comfort of feeling those loving arms around her.
“Someone’s behind that curtain!” she told her mother.
Leaving her daughter near the door, Ericka edged forward until she was within reach of the curtain, then seized it and flung it to one side, revealing nothing.
How had he gotten away so quickly? Did he dive out the window? No, that couldn’t be the case, it was a two-story drop!
Mom turned back toward her.
“Honey, there’s no one here,” she said.
“You have to believe me! He was right there!” Caitlyn insisted, frustrated by Brandon’s inexplicable escape.
Mom walked back to her, brushing the hair from her right eye and placing both hands on the sides of her face.
“Who was?”
Caitlyn pulled herself together. She couldn’t afford to seem hysterical here; she had to appear credible, in possession of herself, so that Mom would know she was telling the truth and not reacting to a nightmare.
“Brandon Bryer,” she stated firmly.
“Are you sure, honey?”
“Yes. I saw him!”
As she slipped back into bed and under the covers, Caitlyn had a moment of doubt, wondering if she really did have a bad dream. Then she’d looked back over at her laptop, with the notebook and other objects piled atop its lid. She’d definitely been awake when she did that, and it was only afterwards she’d seen Brandon. She got up, closed and latched both windows, but it still took her a long time to get back to sleep.
Her insomnia doubtless contributed to her sour attitude the next day; Dad always said his little princess got cranky when she didn’t get enough sleep. Much of her class time steaming over the violation of her private space by that stalker. And the worst part was she’d been nice to him! She’d complimented him, and this was how he had repaid her! She’d thought Royce was bad; Brandon made him look like a prince! She successfully avoided the jerk all of Monday, got little sleep once again that night, and saw her luck ran out the following morning.
Coach Bishop was in charge of the middle school football team, and he carried his emphasis on having a united, team mentality there over to the gym classes he also taught. He’d taken them out to the track circle Tuesday morning and had them engage in a game called “Wind in the Willows”, which he explained was a trust exercise. The class gathered around in a small circle of their own and one by one each of them was told to go stand in the center. That person would then fall backwards to be caught by whoever was behind them, before being propelled outward for a new person to catch and so on, for about five minutes. This went on without a problem until Caitlyn saw Brandon’s gray-clad back coming toward her.
Ugh! The last thing in the world she wanted was to have to actually touch him! Exclaiming “Ewwww!” she dodged to one side, taking a certain vengeful satisfaction in seeing Brandon hit the pavement hard. That would teach him to sneak into her room!
“Way to trust the floor, Brandon!” Royce chortled, several of the other boys laughing along with him until Coach Bishop snapped at them to knock it off. Then he told her to help Brandon up.
The order made nearly made her explode, since touching him was exactly what she’d been trying to avoid!
“He’s a pervert!” she protested, to the renewed laughter of their classmates. It was a relief to finally get to say that out loud!
“You lie!” Brandon hissed from his place on the ground, visibly angry now. How dare he?!? SHE was the one who had something to be angry about. She wanted to go on, to explain to everyone how the little creep had snuck into her room Sunday night, but Coach hadn’t wanted to hear it.
“Help him up, or you fail this class,” he told her sternly.
This threat was enough to make her reluctantly extend her right hand down toward him. He seized it in his own right hand, with a scowl. She tugged, but she couldn’t budge him and he wasn’t using her arm as an anchor to pull himself up, instead merely pulling back against her.
Then he’d lifted his eyes to meet her own and his already firm grip had tightened exponentially.
“What are you doing?” she’d demanded, completely shocked at how strong he was.
“Brandon!” Coach Bishop yelled.
Brandon only squeezed harder in response, making Caitlyn feel like her hand was trapped in a closing steel vise!
“Let go!” she shouted frantically, in real pain now. “Stop it!”
“Brandon, stop!” Coach Wilson echoed forcefully, but he was too late.
Caitlyn screamed as her fingers broke in his crushing hold, and her screams redoubled when Brandon went on to snap her wrist in half like a twig.
Coach Bishop had rushed her straight to Nurse Simmons’ office and that’s where she was when the paramedics came for her. They’d immediately given her something for the pain, so her memory of her ride to the hospital was more than a little hazy. She recalled with crystal clarity, however, the doctor there sympathetically telling her she had two broken fingers and a broken wrist. She’d have to wear the cast he was putting on her for at least three months, and afterward she might need physical therapy to regain the full use of her hand.
Mom had arrived by then, and held her tightly as she cried. Three months! Three months without the use of her dominant hand! Its loss was going to make everything she did during that time period so much harder than it had to be!
“There, there, honey, it’s going to be okay,” Mom told her soothingly, kissing her forehead. “You just rest here, and I’ll be right back, okay?”
Caitlyn nodded disconsolately. Mom was back in less than an hour, looking tight-lipped and stern. Caitlyn was discharged then, one of the hospital workers taking her out to the car in a wheelchair. Mom drove them home and fussed over her. She’d be allowed to stay home from school at least for tomorrow, maybe longer.
“When you do go back, though, I don’t want you talking at all to that Breyer boy,” Mom told her firmly.
“I won’t,” she had assured her mother. She hadn’t wanted to talk to him today, or to interact with him at all, for that matter.
Mom made her favorite for dinner that night, lasagna with garlic bread. Then she’d asked if Caitlyn would be okay being home alone if she went back to the diner and finished out the second half of her shift today. Caitlyn had told Mom that of course she would be okay.
When Caitlyn was firmly settled in bed, tucked under the covers, with a tray holding her fully-charged laptop and a glass of water on her nightstand, Ericka finally left for the diner, leaving her daughter alone with her thoughts.
Which naturally turned back to the events of this morning. Upset as she’d been by Brandon’s invasion of her home, she still hadn’t regarded the shorter boy as a real threat to her well-being.
She’d been wrong.
Which led her to a question, one no one else seemed to have thought to ask: How had Brandon been able to do that to her hand? It wasn’t like he’d slammed a classroom door on it or bent it with all of his weight against a metal railing. All he’d done was squeeze and twist, and in doing so he’d broken two of her fingers and her wrist. That shouldn’t be possible! Like her, Brandon was only twelve years old, so how on Earth could he be so strong?!?!
Wanting to get her mind on something else, she switched to Microsoft Word on her lap top and began typing out her English essay on the state of justice in the United States. She was barely a paragraph into it when the screen suddenly flickered and went dark. In exasperation she flipped the lid closed, and there he was again, this time standing right in front of her bed! His first words were a command.
“Don’t scream.”
She’d have disobeyed him and yelled her head off, except doing so wouldn’t do any good. Mom was still working at the diner, Dad was probably in Ohio right now, and the nearest neighbors lived more than half a mile away.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, her voice trembling as she struggling not to show her fear. He’d mangled her hand already; had he come now to finish her off?
“I brought you flowers,” he said by way of explanation, and she realized he was indeed holding a couple of flowers. The sheer cliched banality of that gesture, under these insane circumstances, might have made her laugh if she hadn’t been completely terrified.
“You can’t be here,” she informed him, praying he would listen and leave.
“Don’t be scared,” he urged her, by far the most ridiculous thing he’d said so far. “I wanted to talk to you.”
He stalked toward her, advancing up the left side of the bed.
“I want to tell you what I learned tonight. I learned that I’m very . . special,” he declared, his eyes never leaving her face. “You’re one of the only people in the world that knows how special I am. But someday, they will all know!”
“Special”? Did he mean how unbelievably physically strong he was? Or was there even more to it than that?
Despite her best efforts to hold them in, a single tear escaped and slipped down her right cheek.
“My Mom told me not to talk to you,” she protested hopelessly. Why she was even bothering, she didn’t know; it wasn’t like he’d care.
To her surprise, he replied, “I’m going to take care of that”.
She turned her head to the right, closing her eyes as she braced herself for whatever he was going to do next. When she looked back toward him, however, he was gone. Vanished. For a wild instant she hoped she’d had a hallucination, caused by the drugs she’d been given today.
Then she looked down, and saw the two white-petaled daisies he had been holding, lying atop her closed laptop.
It had been real.
She went over the memory of their brief conversation, especially worrying over that last part. What exactly had Brandon meant? How was he planning to “take care of” Mom’s forbidding she speak to him?
She flipped open her laptop again, the flowers falling unheeded onto her bedspread. Her computer was working now and the clock showed it was 10:01 P.M., a minute after the diner’s closing time. Mom would be cleaning up the diner right now and should be home within half an hour. As soon as she got in, Caitlyn would tell her everything which had happened.
Despite her intentions, however, the twelve year-old’s recent lack of sleep and the side-effect of the pain medication she was on combined to pull her down into a deep, dreamless slumber. It wasn’t until Caitlyn woke the next morning that her nightmare began.
The ringing of the doorbell brought her out of her slumber. It was full light out, well past the time the bus would have left, but she wasn’t going to school today anyway, because her hand was broken.
That memory brought Caitlyn bolting upright with a gasp, the events of last evening flooding back into her consciousness.
The doorbell rang again. Why wasn’t Mom answering the door?
Throwing on her robe over her pajamas, Caitlyn hurried toward her parents’ bedroom.
“Mom?” she called out. “Mom!”
There was no answer, and the bed was cleanly made, with no sign it had been slept in last night.
Cailtyn hurried downstairs, praying that Mom was the one ringing the doorbell. Maybe she’d locked the door before went out to get the mail and had forgotten her key?
She swung the door open and found Deputy Aryes waiting on the front step.
“Good morning, Caitlyn,” she said with a forced-looking smile. “Is your Mom home?”
“No,” she answered shakily. “Why do you ask?”
“The diner got messed up a little last night, and we just wanted to ask her about it.”
I’m going to take care of that.
The terrible promise echoed endlessly in Caitlyn’s head as she dissolved into a paroxysm of terrified weeping, mourning for the mother she now knew she’d lost.
Deputy Aryes ended up calling the Thompsons, their nearest neighbor, and the elderly retired couple was kind enough to take Caitlyn into their house, explaining she would be staying there until her mom came back or her Dad arrived home Saturday evening. Except Mom wasn’t coming back, ever.
In the days which followed she sought to delude herself into thinking perhaps Brandon had only kidnapped Mom and would let her go after she promised not to tell Caitlyn to avoid him anymore. She couldn’t even manage to make herself believe that childish fantasy. She’d personally seen and felt what Brandon did when he got angry.
She didn’t understand how a boy her age could possess such unnatural strength, or how he was seemingly able to appear and disappear at will, but that he did have these abilities was now undeniable. Equally undeniable was that she couldn’t tell anyone what she knew; she didn’t dare! Breathing a single word of this would only put her and whoever she told in danger, assuming she could even get her listener to believe her in the first place.
Mr. and Mrs. Thompson were kind to her, and didn’t even argue when she told them she couldn’t go to school on Thursday and Friday. It was the truth. She was grief-stricken to concentrate on learning, and too terrified of seeing Brandon to let herself go within a mile of the Brightburn middle school.
Caitlyn thought she was all cried out by Saturday evening, but when Dad came into the Thompson house, calling her name, they were again running down her face as she hugged him. Dad being here again meant the world to her.
By contrast, there was no happiness whatsoever to be found in returning home. It wasn’t really home anymore, not the way it had been. Brandon had destroyed the sense of security and safety implicit in the very idea of a home. Sleeping in her own bed no longer carried any kind of comfort, not when HE could appear at any moment.
The next morning, when she got up for breakfast, Dad was sitting at the table with the news on in the family room. That was unusual; Dad usually didn’t bother watching the news. She glanced at the screen curiously. It showed a plane crash, one which had taken place right here in little Brightburn!
“Among the dead are Kyle and Tori Breyer. They are survived by their twelve year-old son, Brandon,” the announcer finished.
“Caitlyn, you need to get ready for church, honey.”
She heard Dad’s words, but they held no meaning for her. She could only stand there, staring at the screen, at the jet wreckage strewn all about the remnants of the Breyer farm.
He had done this. Somehow, he had actually managed to bring down an entire jet plane, killing hundreds of innocent people!
When he’d broken into her room Tuesday night, Brandon told her she was one of the few people on Earth who knew how special he was. He spoke as if that knowledge was some kind of privilege or gift, but it was the opposite. It was a curse, an awful burden which had been placed upon her. Like Eve after eating the Apple, she could only mourn the loss of the innocent ignorance she’d unwittingly enjoyed.
And dread the punishment to come. Brandon said he would take care of her mother forbidding her to talk to him, and he had. He hadn’t done that for nothing. How much longer it would be before he approached her again, she thankfully did not know. But she knew, with unshakeable certainty, that one night soon she would again experience the terror of seeing Brandon Breyer in her bedroom.
Ignorance was bliss.