Scorpion Christian Cantrell (free ebook reader for ipad TXT) 📖

white wall, placed paper and felt-tip markers in front of her, and while she stared straight ahead at nothing at all, he watched as she diligently drew.

He maintained a journal of everything she did during the day, and at night, they sat down together while she drew. After she was in bed, Henrietta’s father pinned the material up on the wall he had dedicated in his home office and searched it for clues.

And then one morning, while looking for his glasses before leaving for work, he glanced up at the wall, and in the uncorrected blur, it was all somehow instantly clear. The ghosts his daughter saw were simply transformations and novel combinations of everything she came across over the course of that day. Henrietta’s father realized that there was nothing wrong with his daughter’s brain; the problem had always been her eyes.

With the portfolio of Henrietta’s drawings, the ophthalmologist was able to diagnose her condition in a single visit: chromatic illusory palinopsia, or CIP. Everyone experiences the phenomenon of afterimages—when photochemical activity in the retina continues briefly in the absence of stimulus—but for CIP sufferers, the condition is pathological, long-lasting, and remarkably vivid. Images can remain for up to twenty-four hours, and certain color combinations dramatically intensify the effect. It was a rare enough condition that drug companies did not bother developing therapies, but there was a simple, safe, noninvasive cure: a pair of experimental active glasses that subtly shifted specific colors and dynamically adjusted contrast, luminosity, and hue. They would take some getting used to, but in a week or two, most people didn’t even notice the intervention anymore. While the onboard AI usually required time to learn, once they adjusted to the patient by comparing incoming wavelengths of light to those that were reflected—while simultaneously measuring irregular retinal activity—they were almost always 100 percent effective.

The worse the CIP, the better the glasses tended to work, since the more signal and data they had to train on, the faster they could adjust. Henrietta’s was the worst the doctor had ever seen, which meant her ghosts were entirely corrected by day three. But instead of relief, her parents were surprised to find that she was experiencing profound grief. For years, her condition had kept her at home, so the only friends Henrietta had been able to make and keep for most of her childhood were her ghosts. Even before her father made the connection, Henrietta had figured out that certain patterns in her behavior manifested specific colorful and exotic specters. She’d given them descriptive names that were combinations of Korean and English, come up with rich backstories, and ascribed supernatural powers to them, which she imagined them using to attack the kids at school who made fun of her.

When she was lonely, Henrietta locked her bedroom door, took off her specs, and stared at images in books to make her ghosts come back. Sometimes she intentionally broke her glasses even though she knew her mother would hit her and lock her in her room until her father got home and fixed them. Whenever she had the opportunity, Henrietta stole pills from her mother’s bottles and saved them in a pouch where she kept the baby teeth she’d lost. When the pouch was full, she planned to take off her glasses, summon her ghosts, and swallow them all.

One of those pills went to school with Henrietta the day Marshmallow died. The teacher had recently brought in a pet—an albino pygmy hedgehog—and the class adored it in a way that infuriated Henrietta. While the other kids were outside on the playground, and Henrietta was supposed to be inside using the bathroom, she opened the cage door and used the tip of her little finger to nestle one of her mother’s pills down to the bottom of the bowl of dried cat food.

The next morning the cage was gone, and while the teacher explained to the class that Marshmallow had gone to heaven, she did not look at Henrietta. When Henrietta was taken to the office, both her parents were sitting across from the principal and the school psychologist. Henrietta told them that she had just been trying to help—that the other kids had complained about Marshmallow sleeping all day, and she believed if she could get her to sleep at night instead, she might stay awake during school so that everyone would be able to play with her. That was what her mother did when she could not get out of bed—she took pills at night to help her stay awake during the day. Everyone in the room looked at Henrietta’s mother while Henrietta’s mother glared at her daughter. Even though Henrietta was crying, she pushed her glasses up on her nose and smiled. They both knew it was a lie. She had looked up the prescription. Researched the dose. Done the math. Known that one pill was enough to kill Marshmallow at least a hundred times over.

Henrietta left that day with her parents and never went back. Her parents enrolled her in online school, and from then on, she rarely left her room. She wore her glasses when her father asked her to, but only until he was gone. Ghosts were the only things left in Henrietta’s life that felt real.

And then one day her father came home from work with Henrietta’s very first Pokémon plush toy. It was a fantastic, chromatic, peculiar fusion that was instantly comforting and familiar. The next day, when Henrietta came out of her room to greet him at the front door, he knelt down, and with a fatherly flourish, dramatically produced two more. Pokémon became Henrietta’s path back to reality—ghosts that everyone could see and that it seemed everyone loved.

She stayed up late at night collecting, playing video games, and chatting with other Pokémon fans. Now that Henrietta was finally done with her ghosts, her big, round specs stayed perched on her little nose. Before he went to bed each night, her father came