"Are you okay?" Mom had finally decided to take control of the situation. Thea reached out to touch the boy's injured leg, but he lurched away, and stumbled to his feet.
"Uh, yeah, I'm fine. My dad's a doctor, he's got some medicine at home for it. I'll be fine, um, I just need to get home." He limped across the road, ran between two houses, and was gone before Thea and her mom had time to say anything. They just stood there for a minute and gaped, first at the place where the boy had been, then at each other.
"Well, I guess he's okay, then. Come on honey, let's get home before anything else goes wrong." They got into the car, and rode in silence all the way home.
Dinner was unusually silent that night, all three of the Watsons were deep in their own thoughts. Dad asked how their days had gone, and they both mumbled, "Fine," without looking up at their plates. Normally, such silence would have been met with more questions, but Dad seemed to be as distracted as Thea and her mom, and no more was said that evening.
Thea went to bed early, and she didn't hear her mom and dad speak until after they had come into her room to make sure she was still asleep. After they left, she crept to the door and opened it a crack. She could hear their voices downstairs, and went out into the hallway at the top of the stairs.
She couldn't make out any words, but they both sounded angry, and, if Thea was completely honest, a little scared. She started to go down the stairs, but the second her foot touched the top stair, their voices stopped all of a sudden.
"Did you hear something?" Dad asked from just around the corner at the bottom of the stairs. Thea jumped, and ran back to her room as fast as she could. She closed the door and got back into bed. She thought she heard the front door open and close, and then there was silence.
She was going to have to do some investigating if she was ever going to find out what was really going on here. School started in two days, and she hadn't met any kids except the boy her mom had hit with her car. That, the fact that she'd only talked to Angela and the twins a couple of times, and the new weirdness with her parents, were weighing on Thea's nerves until she though she might lose it.
Thoughts whirled in her mind until she finally fell asleep from exhaustion. That night the dreams began. The next morning, Thea couldn't remember any details, just the feeling that she was being sucked up into a tornado of chaos from which she might not get out.
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