Blink

“Why does it have to be so fucking cold all the time?” I mutter through shivers, my voice shaking from the icy wind.

I live in Canada, and technically I should be used to it by now, but it still gets me every year. I’ve lived here for my entire life—tomorrow would be exactly seventeen years—but I’ve never once gotten used to this. Every year it’s as if I hadn’t felt it before.

And it’s not like I’m not dressed properly either. I never leave the house on a wintery day without like, twenty layers on and a hat and mitts, plus the backpack on my back. Ah, I might as well be in my underwear at this point. It’ll make no difference, as far as I can tell.

Here in Canada, there’s more than six months of snow and in the summer, we’d be lucky to get up to twenty degrees. Canada—a stereotypical country full of nice people and maple syrup and, oh yeah, it’s a giant fucking freezer.

It doesn’t help that my school is twenty minutes away either. Every day, twice a day, I have to walk through this frozen hell. Sometimes I’d slip and fall on the ice, which never seems to go away. Or I would have to make it through a massive blizzard. Whenever really terrible weather comes, I always feel like an old man, since I always yell at the weather man. Light snow fall, my ass.

There is one thing that I can cling to that always warms me. This is going to sound cheesy as hell, but it’s a girl I like. Whenever I think about her, I get all warm and fuzzy inside, though there’s no doubt that she doesn’t feel the same way.

Logan Blaire. Even her name brings a smile to my face. She’s not like other girls. She doesn’t wear makeup or obsess over Starbucks drinks. She has beautiful light blue dyed hair and she’s obsessed with science. She’s smart, and pretty... but she’d never go for a guy like me.

Logan and I aren’t complete strangers, believe it or not. We used to be best friends in the fifth grade, but we got into different classes and eventually drifted apart. Ever since then, we’ve been nothing but acquaintances, the kind of people you make eye brief contact with when you pass in the halls, and if you’re lucky, an occasional ‘hi’.

As I walk through the doors to my classroom, my boots squeak against the flooring, wet from the melted snow. It’ll no doubt make a puddle at my desk when it fully thaws. Science class is first period. We’re not doing much today, since we have a field trip tomorrow and today we’re just preparing for it. We’re going to see the nuclear power plant. How they managed to get thirty-some kids into a nuclear power plant is beyond me, but I’m excited for it nonetheless.

My best friend, Brad is in this class with me, and it’s a good thing too, ’cause aside from him, I have no one else I can rely on. I’d be stranded. Without him sitting next to me, I’d actually have to pay attention in class. Sure, doing so would help me pass, but it’s a lot of effort for an almost seventeen year old. And it’s not like I don’t have any other priorities or things on my mind.

Once Brad steps in through the door, all eyes are on him. Well, the eyes of girls anyway.

“Hi, Brad,” one of them coos as he passes by her desk on his way to his.

“Hey,” he replies, nonchalantly, and the girl squeals with glee.

I never understood girls. They obsess over things like boy band members, fictional characters, or any guy they can’t have. But then again, I do that too, but about Logan, so who am I to say anything, right?

“Sup?” He slumps down in the chair next to me, looking exhausted.

“What’s up with you?” I ask.

“Party last night was wicked, dude. Barely got any sleep afterwards,” he bragged. “Dude, look at this snap I got from Lindsay.”

Lindsay is his girlfriend. They’ve been dating since the seventh grade. Now, Brad’s cool, but I never understood those people who would date when they haven’t even hit puberty yet. It just seemed so fake to me. I don’t know about them, but when I was in elementary school, I considered myself to be a child, and dating wasn’t even in my brain at the time.

I think they did it to look more grown up. Like, ‘Hey, look at me! I’m dating a girl now. I’m a real man, and I totally look grown up, but really by doing this, I look even more childish.’ I was never one of those people.

Brad tilts the screen of his phone in my direction so I can see the picture and I turn away instantly, closing my eyes and cringing in disgust. It was a photo of her naked.

“Aw man that’s disgusting. Why the hell would you show me that?”

Brad simply laughs. “I just wanted to see your reaction.”

“Man, you’re really sick sometimes, you know that?”

“Hey, if that was Logan and not Lindsay, I’m sure you’d think differently.”

“Of course I would, you dumb ass!” But just as those words leave my mouth, the room falls silent and my words are suddenly the only ones that are audible.

“Mr. Powers,” my teacher’s voice booms across the classroom, directed at me. “We do not use that kind of terminology in the classroom.”

“Sorry, sir,” I apologize. Embarrassment slowly turns into anger and once his attention is off me, I kick Brad under the table. “Thanks a lot,” I scold in a hushed tone.

“No problem,” he whispers back, but I can hear the grin in his voice.

After class is over, we stand off to the side of the hallway to talk about the inevitable field trip. It’s been on everyone’s mind since they announced it, and understandably so. I mean, you don’t get a field trip like this every day.

“What do you think we’re going to do there?” he asks, eagerly.

“A power plant, hmm. Not much to do really, just look at nuclear shit,” I respond. Although I understand the hype, I’ve grown a bit tired of it, and at this point, I just want it to be over.

“What if there’s some crazy stuff in there?”

“Like what?”

“Like… a UFO.”

“This isn’t Area 51, Brad.” His radical imagination always makes me roll my eyes.

“You don’t know that. What if I’m right?” He smiles at me with his infectious, mischievous grin that I can recognize in a heartbeat. He’s always the one bringing out the wild, party side in me, but I’m not necessarily complaining…

“Then I am so ditching the group to fly it.”

“Aw hell yeah, I’ve got a co-pilot!” He raises his hand for a high five, and we share a laugh for a few amazing moment. But mine is cut short when I see her pass us in the halls.

“Hey, Logan.”

“Hi, Colin,” she replies with a smile as she continues walking.

“Dude, you really need to ask her out or something. You have her number, right?”

“Yeah, but I explained this before, dude. I’d get rejected.”

“Maybe you will, but if you don’t give it a shot, you’ll never know.” The bell for the next period rings and he starts slowly walking away towards his next class. “I gotta go, but tomorrow, I’ll check your call history to see if you actually did it.”

“Damn it,” I mutter as I make my way to my next class.

It’s not like I’m not afraid to talk to Logan, because I’m not. It’s just that one subject that I can’t really bring up without looking like an awkward idiot—romance.

The next morning, while I wait to board the bus, Brad rushes up to greet me in a headlock. “So? Did you do it?” His sudden impact makes me stumble and I lose my place in the single file line, the kid that was behind me filling in the spot almost instantly.

“Yeah, I did it.”

“And...?! What did she say?”

“She said she’ll think about it.”

“Aw man, I’m sorry,” he says with a pitiful expression.

“What are you talking about?”

“Trust me, ‘thinking about it’ is just their way of saying no without hurting your feelings.”

“Whatever dude. We’ll talk about this after.”

The bus ride there is long, silent, and torturous, and the idea that Logan really doesn’t like me sinks in now more than ever.

The teachers guide my group to an area where we are given plastic yellow slacks, ponchos and emergency masks. The more this trip progresses, the more I start thinking that this might not have been the safest option for a bunch of teens. I mean, a bunch of nuclear and radioactive material that could explode at any moment, and you decide to have a field trip here? It gets me thinking that the teachers may not be as smart as they think they are.

My teacher said, “It would be a nice opportunity to get an in depth view of how they make electricity with nuclear material.” We have to do a report on this, too, once we get back—the pros and cons of nuclear energy, how it pollutes, how it benefits the community—all that boring shit.

We walk around and see a bunch of boring stuff that I’m really not interested in at all—the control panel, where the uranium comes from, and how it gets to where it is right now, and where the cooling systems are and how they work. I don’t see what coolants it needs. Just toss it all outside in the snow and it’ll cool right down.

We pass a large, iron door as the group walks down a wide hallway that has a sign on it with the word, “Caution!” in big black letters. Brad grabs my arm and pulls me away from the group.

“Dude, let’s go in.”

I cringe a little say, “I don’t know man. We should just stick to the group.”

“Hey!” he complains. “Whatever happened to finding the UFO? This could be the one exciting thing we would ever see on this entire trip!”

I had to think about it for a second, because I was practically dying of boredom, and just going inside the room wouldn’t be that big of a deal. We would just take a peek, see what’s inside. But the apprehensive voice in the back of my head speaks before I can.

“I still don’t know if we should be—” My sentence gets cut off as he yanks on my arm and lunges for the door that a staff member just went through, grabbing the door before it closes again.

“Come on. It’ll be fine,” he says, and I’m pulled in after him.

As soon as we step inside, we duck behind some boxes to our right until we hear a door close on the far end of the massive, warehouse-like room. Aside from the hum of various machines and generators surrounding us, the entire room is quiet.

“I think we’re alone now,” I whisper.

When we come out from hiding and take a better look at the large expanse before us, we both gasp simultaneously, amazed and astounded.

Six huge metal vats, at least eight feet in height, and double that in diameter. They felt ominous and somewhat powerful over us, like looming skyscrapers. It didn’t take long for us to realize that the entire room was only built to store the vats.

“Holy shit,” Brad says with awe, and runs at the nearest vat. “This is the UFO we’ve been looking for!” Of course it’s not a UFO—that’s not what he meant—but it’s definitely the most interesting thing we’ve seen since we got here.

There are metal grate steps that are against the wall to my right. Up those grate stairs are ledges with railings that peer over some of the vats near the wall. Brad dashes for the stairs and climbs them, eager to get a look at what could be inside the giant containers.

“Dude! Get down from there!” I scold, but he ignores me and leans over the railing and drops his jaw at what he sees in the vats. I groan and climb up the stairs after him, to try and coax him down, but when look down to see what he sees, the words that I was about to say freeze in their tracks, rendering me speechless.

I am met with a blinding, fluorescent green glow. The green goopy stuff bubbles inside the vat, as if it was boiling, but there is no heat coming from it. I have no idea what it is, and by the looks of it, neither does Brad. To my right is an opening in the railing, probably so that the scientists that work here had some way of accessing the stuff. I stand in front of the opening, peering down at the green substance bellow, no railing in front of me. Just as I open my mouth to tell Brad that we need to leave, a loud voice comes from the ground below. A staff member yells up at us with a sudden, startling voice, making me jump and my feet stumble.

The last thing I see before I pass out is the fluorescent green glow filling my world.