Lockdown: Chapter 2

Jude

Jude Wake climbed out of his parents’ car, and hunched against a burst of frigid winter air that briefly swirled the powdery snow on the ground into swirling patterns. He reached into the car and grabbed his backpack. It felt impossibly heavy as he shrugged it on, despite being almost empty.

Then, with a feeling of desperate fatalism, he lifted his head and looked up at the main door of the Julia Howe High School.

Before he had first walked into Howe for his orientation tour three days ago, Jude’s head had been filled with visions of X-Men and Camp Half-Blood. Instead, Howe was a collection of modest brick buildings set in a woodsy area at the edge of a small town. The front foyer had a monogrammed rug in the school’s colors (black and gold), including line art of a mascot he thought was a fox.

As soon as they stepped inside, the door to the main office opened, and a petite, curly-haired woman emerged with a smile. Again, compared to his expectations of Chiron and Professor X, Principal Rachel Josen had been a bit of a disappointment.

Principal Josen shook hands with each of Jude’s parents as she greeted them. When she reached toward him, he wasn’t expecting it, so there was a weird pause between when she offered and when he realized what he was supposed to do.

Once he shook her hand, she said, “Jude, let me officially welcome you to Howe High School. Did you have any trouble settling into your dorm?”

He shook his head. His mother added, “Jude met the floor adviser, and stayed there for the first time last night.”

Maybe the scariest thing about Howe should have been why Jude was there, but it wasn’t. It was the fact that Howe was a residential school. A boarding school. His parents would be staying for a couple more days as he settled in, but then they would drive back home, hours away.

It had been less than two weeks since a doctor had met with them all in Jude’s hospital room, and shared a pamphlet describing a rare syndrome Jude had never heard of, and a slick brochure advertising Howe as “a high-quality residential program designed to suit students’ individualized medical and educational needs.”

His father had looked wary and tired; his mother, desperately hopeful. In a video conference, Principal Rachel Josen had talked about therapeutic programming, curriculum, scholarship opportunities, grants, and insurance coverage—things Jude had trouble caring about while he was still in a hospital hooked up to machines that went beep and buzz all night long.

“Do you have any questions?” Principal Josen asked.

Jude jumped and looked back at her guiltily. He had spaced out. He hoped she hadn’t been saying anything too important.

“Um…”

His mother squeezed his hand. “Your father and I will see you after school,” she said, which meant they had probably been talking about how it was almost time for the school day to begin.

I’m not ready. “Sure,” he said. He tried to sound confident. There had been talk about whether he should start on Friday or wait until the following Monday. Jude hadn’t been consulted before they decided he should start Friday to “get a sense of the place.”

He only needed to make it through one day, and then he would have a weekend to freak out… or do make-up work, or whatever. 

“And we’ll be in town all weekend,” his father reminded him.

They had driven fourteen hours to get here from their apartment in Chicago, and the crowded but comfortably familiar school Jude attended there. Had attended, until early January, when he had gone on a month-long, unexpected vacation involving a lot of hospitals.

A week ago, it had been easy to say he would keep in touch with his friends—the few who had stuck with him lately, at least. He could call and chat with his little sister, who was staying with a friend while their parents were here with Jude, any time he missed her annoying voice. And he might only be gone one semester; he would be back in the fall for Junior year. No big deal.

Big deal.

Principal Josen gestured to a girl about Jude’s age who had been hanging out nearby. She bounced forward when summoned, a sunny smile on her face as the principal said, “Jude, this is Megan. She’ll walk you to your first class. Do you need a copy of your schedule?”

“I have it,” he said, putting his hand in his jeans pocket to make sure the folded piece of paper was still there.

“Then I will leave you in Megan’s competent hands.” Turning to his parents, she said, “Mr. and Mrs. Wake, if you’ll come with me, we’ll set up Jude’s school points account.”

And like that, his first day at the new school began.

Jude’s legs felt like jelly, but he managed to follow Megan without falling down and listen as she said, “Every day starts with homeroom for ten minutes. They probably told you that already, didn’t they? It’s a good time to check in if you’re having any problems with classes… or, you know.”

They had emailed him his schedule the week before. It had some highlights, including gym every day. Otherwise, the schedule was mostly the normal stuff—biology, English, algebra, Spanish—except for two blocks a week dedicated to “counseling.”

“We had a lot of people start after winter break this year I guess,” Megan said as Jude hesitated at the door to their shared homeroom, “so you’re not the only new kid. Most of the classes here go by the semester, too, so you’re only a couple weeks behind.”

“How long have you been here?” Jude asked.

“Oh, I started in one of the elementary schools in fourth grade. I’m hoping to graduate from Howe,” she said. “Once you’re medically stable, you can choose to transfer back to your home school, or you can see about staying on. I wanted to stay with people who understood, you know? Let’s go on in.”

Those two words—you know?—seemed to be her catchphrase, but they worked all right. Jude did know. He understood.

They made it to homeroom, where Jude went through the obligatory “new student” introduction: What’s your name? Where are you from?

No one asked, Why are you here?

After the bell rang, he trudged along to sophomore English. There were only eight students in the room, but there were twoteachers—one at the front of the room, and one who drifted around to “offer support.” Jude assumed that meant peering over students’ shoulders and checking to see if they were paying attention or using their school-issued Chromebooks to play games instead of doing work.

Again, his introduction was blessedly brief before the teacher transitioned straight into class, talking about imagery and rhetoric. She gave Jude a copy of the notes he had missed before playing an old song from the anti-war movement of the sixties they were supposed to discuss. Jude tried to sit back and relax, to get a sense of the people around him and what the expectations were, but the teacher insisted on pulling him into the discussion.

It was a lot harder to hide in a class of eight students than it had been when he had over twenty-five other students around him.

He had his hand raised to say something when the first chill passed through him.

“Jude?” the teacher called.

“I—” Whatever he had been about to say went right out of his head. “Sorry. Never mind.”

He clamped his hand on his knee as the muscles in his forearm twitched, as if to protest the minimal effort required to first lift and then lower his arm.

Not here. Not now.

His skin prickled, and suddenly the air felt stifling, too thick to breathe.

He was about to ask to go to the bathroom when the second teacher, the one who hadn’t spoken much, walked over and put a hand on his shoulder. Jude was so tense, he nearly jumped out of his skin with surprise, smacking his leg into the side of his desk. The feet of his desk squealed as they shifted against the tiled floor.

All eyes turned to him, startled.

He didn’t get far into his grumbled apology before they all looked away again. The teacher kept talking, not looking at Jude, not drawing attention, and certainly not asking anything like, “Is there a problem, Mr. Wake?”

He had almost forgotten the hand on his shoulder until he felt a gentle squeeze. The second teacher leaned down to whisper, “Feel better now?”

That was when he realized the twitchy, suffocating feeling, which previously had preceded aggressive seizures, was gone.

What the hell?

He very vaguely recalled someone saying something in one of his orientation meetings about how most of the teachers would be able to settle his “energies” with nothing more than a brief touch. In retrospect, that had probably been incredibly important, but there had been too much too fast and okay he clearly hadn’t been paying enough attention.

“Can I get some water?” he asked. He needed to get out of there. Wrap his head around what had just happened.

The teacher nodded, and Jude dashed out of the room to the water fountain. In the hall, he leaned against a row of lockers, taking deep breaths and imagining what could have happened.

The first seizure had come during Christmas. After a few days of hospital observation, Jude had gone home. He went back to school after winter break, only to have the second, far more severe seizure start in the middle of the cafeteria at lunchtime. More doctors, more tests, not to mention abject humiliation. In-home and hospital tutoring had followed.

People he had considered his friends acted like he was contagious.

There was constant medical testing, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Endless blood-work.

Then the specialist, who first came to talk to Jude alone while both his parents were at work. He had been consulted on Jude’s file and recognized the condition. What he said after that sounded crazy, but he brought with him an outreach volunteer from an organization called SingleEarth—which, as far as Jude could tell, was a secret society in charge of keeping some pretty big secrets.

Like the fact that magic was real. Serious magic. So were werewolves, and all sorts of other shapeshifters and stuff. The doctor hinted there was more, but Jude’s mind had been busy being totally blown by the cute girl who had just turned into an awesome leopard right in front of him.

“Many humans have recessive shapeshifter genes,” the doctor explained, as if Jude gave a crap about the biology of it. “That means sometimes, someone like you is born to two parents who are otherwise completely human. The symptoms you have experienced the last few months are the result of your body changing.”

“Yeh, it’s what they call puberty,” Jude had grumbled, sarcastically. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe the evidence in front of his eyes. He just couldn’t believe it was true about him.

Without missing a beat, the doctor replied, “Yes, it is. Except in you, in addition to genes triggering hair growth and voice change, you have genes telling you to shapeshift. In individuals with your particular genetic makeup, the genes usually turn on during infancy–triggered by proximity to a shapeshifting parent–or never turn on at all. Rarely, they switch on at about your age, causing havoc on body systems incompatible with the newly activated genes.

“We can help you.”

And that was that.

The Howe School, they said, was a “specialty placement” for kids learning to cope with changes like this, as well as kids who just wanted to continue school surrounded by peers and teachers who didn’t make them feel like freaks. Okay, those weren’t the words the doctor used, but it was the gist as Jude understood it. To that end, Howe was one of only three schools of its type in the country, and SingleEarth had enough grants and scholarships that Jude could go almost tuition-free.

“In addition to your regular coursework, you will work with specialists who can get your body and aura stabilized to ensure your safety and well-being. All of Howe’s staff have been trained to recognize and respond to the symptoms of your condition. By the time the school year ends in June, you should be able to continue at your regular high school without worry if you want.”

“And I get to be a leopard?” That was the part that had mattered most to him, at that exact moment.

“Actually, our examinations have suggested your second form is probably avian—some form of bird, though we’re still analyzing your DNA, so we aren’t entirely sure yet,” the doctor said, unaware of having just crushed a teenage boy’s dreams of being a badass giant cat.

Though, he had said “probably,” right?

He could be wrong.

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