Nope, things were not better outside. Something felt off the moment Piper stepped out through Hammer Hill Middle School’s front doors.

When she breathed in, there was a sour taste to the crisp, cool air of another autumn in Connecticut. The golden trees that covered the surrounding hills felt like a facade, a beautiful mask hiding something hideous. It all felt wrong--bad wrong.

Goosebumps flared across Piper’s arms as she quickly walked past the school parking lot to join the hordes of students filling the track field. They were clumped in chatty, random packs, some running from group to group, thrilled to have something real and dangerous to discuss with their friends.

Now, like any other day, Piper kept to herself and walked through the crowd alone.

She had never felt comfortable hanging out with any students at the school. When she’d first entered middle school months before, she’d told herself this time it will be different. But it wasn’t; either people found her odd and off-putting, or she found them slow and dull. School for Piper was a lonely place where she never felt like she fit in.

Piper felt nauseous and tingly. What weird chemicals were in that greenish smoke? She wondered if she’d gotten an early sniff of it back in the classroom and it caused her to hear imaginary gods. That was a theory, right? Could intense schizophrenia be an allergic reaction? Well...maybe, but that voice certainly seemed real — and loud. There was...

She was being watched.

She could feel it, almost painfully. Piper’s eyes darted across the crowd of excited sixth-through-eighth graders; not one of them was paying her the slightest bit of attention.

“Hey! Move it, Pipsqueak! I almost stepped on you!”

Piper turned to find Kristine DeBelk glowering at her with two other cheerleaders. So someone was looking at her, but it was just one very unpleasant girl. Piper pushed down her anxieties, took a short breath, and said, “Hi, Kristine,” through a forced smile.

“Don’t ‘Hi’ me. Don’t even talk to me,” Kristine growled. She moved as if she was going to knock Piper aside to pass, something she did regularly, but then she stopped and regarded Piper with an icy squint. “So what do you think happened in there?” she said, tipping her head back at the school in a way that made her long blonde ponytail swing.

Piper was surprised. This was the first sentence Kristine had said to her in months that didn’t contain an insult. Despite the pretty girl’s cool exterior she must really be worried to be talking to Piper like a person. Piper gave her answer some thought. “Um...the explosion was in the science lab. It was probably some kind of chemical reaction. Plenty of chemicals ignite when mixed, but I don’t know what they would be doing at a school. The greenish pigment of the smoke might provide some clue to its contents. Maybe some auromine—that would provide a yellowish tint, and if there was something indigo like... ”

“Typical!” Kristine exclaimed in disgust, “I ask for an opinion and you use it as an excuse to show off!”

“No, I was just trying to...”

“You’re ridiculous!” Kristine brushed passed her with force. Piper fell back a step and bumped into a very large guy from the football team. She turned to apologize but the jock hadn’t even noticed she was there.

“Aw, what are you doing, Kris!” said a new voice. Piper was surprised to find one of the cheerleaders holding her shoulder and setting her straight. “You okay, girl?”

“Yes! Fine, thank you!” blurted Piper, surprised at kindness from one of Kristine’s friends.

“Aw, look at you! You’re so cute!” The cheerleader turned to Kristine. “Yo, Kristine! How can you be mean to someone so teeny and cute?”

In an instant, Piper boiled with hate. Being called ‘cute’ was acceptable, but ‘teeny’ was one of the unforgivable curses. She shot a look down at her fists; they were shaking with rage. She wondered if she was going to use them.

The cheerleader turned back to her. “So you’re that smart girl. The one people talk about.”

Instantly, curiosity poked a hole in Piper’s anger. “People talk about me?”

“Yeah, they say you would have skipped a couple more grades by now if you weren’t so short.”

Wow, every word this girl said was a slap. Piper had never been skipped ahead in school even though she was quite capable of doing more advanced work. She had tried to convince her parents to let her jump a grade or two, but her teachers had told them stories about smaller students who had advanced a grade and had a difficult time fitting in with older kids. Piper’s argument that she didn’t fit in now didn’t help. Her worried parents thought it best that she stay where she was.

The cheerleader was still talking. “Yeah, little girl, big brain.”

Before Piper could boil over about the “little” remark, Kristine was back in her face. “Her brain’s not big. She just wants people to think it is!”

Piper had been so hopeful when Kristine approached her the year before to help her study for a test on the Civil War. Then she watched her (admittedly far-fetched) plan to ‘tutor her way into the popular crowd’ die a quick death on a Tuesday evening as her carefully prepared graphs and illustrated timelines lost their battle with Kristine’s cell phone and her undiagnosed attention deficit disorder.

“I bet you did it!” sneered Kristine. “I bet you did whatever happened in the school with the green smoke. Some science thing!”

Piper burst out with a bitter laugh. “Oh, that would make an ironclad opening statement in court, Kristine. ‘Your honor, I accuse the defendant of doing some science thing!’”

“Don’t you laugh at me!!” screamed Kristine. “That ‘F’ I got was your fault!”

Piper couldn’t believe it. You’re kidding, her brain screamed. NOW you want to get this out in the open? She rolled her eyes up to the sky in disbelief and decided it was time to destroy Kristine. Through observation, Piper had collected quite a list of everything the pretty blond cheerleader was insecure about. It was time to throw it all in her slightly asymmetrical face.

But she didn’t.

She froze.

She couldn’t take her eyes from the sky.

Kristine didn’t matter. The cheerleaders didn’t matter. Nothing down here mattered. Piper locked her eyes on the sky and knew that one thing was certain in all the world: The sky was looking back.

That intense feeling she’d had of being watched wasn’t coming from the students and strangers around her, it was coming from above. Something up there was staring down at her, and it was something BIG. There was nothing out of the ordinary to see, just a blue afternoon sky with clouds gathering in the east, but it felt like giant invisible eyes were burrowing into her with x-ray vision.

But how would you feel that? Piper asked herself. That’s not real. That’s...

She was barely aware of the hand touching her shoulder. “Hey, girl, you okay?” Kristine’s cheerleader friend sounded genuinely concerned. “Kristine’s just mad about something…well, you. Nobody believes you did it.”

“Martha! Come on!” snarled Kristine as she moved away into the crowd with the other cheerleader, muttering about “the little mental freak.”

Piper forced herself to pull her gaze from the sky to look the cheerleader in the eye for a moment. (Was she Martha or the other one?) “Please,” Piper whispered, “tell me you feel it, too.”

Maybe-Martha smiled, confused. “Feel what?”

“Like you’re being watched?” Piper said quietly. “I mean...really being watched.”

The cheerleader laughed. “Well, y’know, we are being watched.“ She gestured to the crowd around them. “Kristine’s yelling about you and you’re just standing here. Everybody wants to see what you’re going to--”

“I don’t mean them!” Piper jerked her head dismissively at the eavesdropping students around them. “I mean...” She tipped her head back and took the barest of glimpses up.

The cheerleader looked up at the sky for a few seconds. Her confused smile made it clear she saw nothing. “What? You mean ‘Up?’ Like God?”

“Well,” Piper said uncomfortably, “maybe like God…” She looked up again. The air seemed to vibrate with eyes. It was nothing she could see, but it was certainly something she felt. It hurt. She shuddered. “…but I hope not.”

The cheerleader possibly named Martha ruffled Piper’s hair like a child. “I think you’re freaked out by the explosion,” she said, “You need to go home.”

Piper said, “Home? But school isn’t out, it’s just...”

The cheerleader laughed. “There’s no more school today! There’s, like, one period left, and you don’t hold classes with green smoke in the hallways caused by terrorists or whatever. That’s gotta be a school policy somewhere. And listen to that -- the fire trucks are just arriving.”

It was true. Sirens were getting closer. Flashing lights were shining against the golden trees as the first fire engine pulled up to the parking lot.

“Yeah,” said Piper. She had never ditched school in her life, but if ever there was a time--with loud voices shouting nonsense in her head, invisible eyes in the sky, Kristine--this would be it. “Thank you. You’re right, yeah…” Piper turned and started walking through the field of students.

“Wait!” called the cheerleader. “I didn’t mean just ‘go!’ I meant call your mother or something!”

But Piper’s mind was set. She wasn’t going to wait for the schoolbus, she was walking home.

“That’s right! Get out of here!” yelled Kristine running back to the spot Piper had vacated. “You better run! You did this!”

“Kristine, shut up!” the cheerleader snapped. Piper smiled a bit as she walked away. Maybe-Martha was cool. Piper pushed her way through a group of crowded teenagers. She could still hear the conversation behind her. Maybe-Martha was chastising Kristine. “Look at you, picking on a little girl like that. What is she — eight? Nine?”

The anger shot back into Piper’s eyes. Somebody told the cheerleader the answer. “Twelve?!” she shrieked in disbelief. “No! Really? How was that almost a teenager!” Laughter drowned out whatever else she said. Piper hissed under her breath and muscled her way through the rest of the crowd, mentally kicking herself. She’d all but gone ahead and forgiven Maybe-Martha for the ‘teeny’ crack from before and look where it got her. ‘Teeny’ was unforgivable for a reason, and now, here she was, angrily wiping away tears for a casual betrayal she should have seen coming.

Piper could still hear Kristine complaining, her words fading to garbled noise as Piper pushed through the last of the milling students and walked on to the edge of the school field.

Stopping for just a second to flick the last tear from her cheek, Piper crossed the street to start her long trek home up Hammer Hill.

From immeasurable distances above and beyond, the eyes followed her.

* * *

Apart from the overpowering dread, it was a gorgeous day for a walk. The air was cool and the radiant trees were in their full red and gold autumn glory. Hammer Hill, the mountain-ish lump upon which Piper lived and from which her school got its name, was mostly forestland, with homes and streets crisscrossing their way though the wilderness. This side of Hammer Hill featured a fairly sizable incline with no sidewalks. Progress was achieved slowly and painfully. Piper had never walked home from school before. It was quite a hike.

Up. Up. Up.

It could be done. Whenever her neighbor Mr. Viper went on tour with his old heavy metal band, he always spent weeks running up and down the hill to get back into his ‘rock star’ shape...which apparently included very muscular thighs.

After a quarter mile of walking, Piper was already exhausted. She glanced up at the ever-watching sky, wishing she could ask whatever was up there to lay off for five minutes so she could take a break. She was about to try it when she slipped in a puddle full of wet leaves and fell forward onto her hands.

Hissing in pain and breathing heavily, Piper pulled herself up off the road and sat on the curb. It was time to stop and think rationally about this: What was going on?

• Fact: God-like voices don’t yell at you in science class.
• Fact: Giant invisible eyes in the sky don’t follow you wherever you go.
• Conclusion: Whatever was happening here wasn’t really happening here.

Piper sighed in relief. It didn’t matter how real everything seemed, it was all in her head. It would all fade away as the smoky chemicals cleared from her system and her life would return to normal.

Unless it didn’t...

And she was crazy forever...

Like her Uncle Seven.

No! Not that! Never that. She was fine! She was taking deep breaths of fresh air and her lungs were filtering out whatever toxic green goo was giving her intense hallucinations.

Did Uncle Seven think the sky was watching him?

No, no, no! She was smart and, yes, she was related to a guy who a lot of people called an actual “Mad Scientist,” but that didn’t mean her brain was waiting to head over to the dark side the moment a funny smell crawled up her nose.

Piper forced herself to stare up at the sky -- a sky she knew was empty. “It’s in my head, it’s in my head...” she said over and over, feeling braver with each repetition.

As she stared, a gaggle of Canadian geese flew in a low V-formation from the north, heading south for the winter, occasionally honking.

“There you go,” whispered Piper to herself. “Geese know the sky better than I do. They would know if something was wrong. It’s in my head. It’s all in my head.”

As the geese flew over Piper, they suddenly began honking in strange, panicked cries. The flying-V dissolved into a flurry of wings as the crazed birds battered and bit each other in terror. It wasn’t until they had chased each other away from the airspace over Piper that the birds calmed down enough to resume their orderly migration.

Piper stared after them, stunned. That was no coincidence. She stumbled up onto her aching feet and began running. There was something up there...and now it was real.

The burst of energy didn’t last long. Within minutes, Piper was wheezing and gasping. She was two-thirds of the way home, and she couldn’t go any faster than a pitiful trudge.

It was time to use her weapon.

For the first time in years she doubted its power. It had always worked before, but this time she didn’t know what she was up against. Because she knew it wasn’t just the sky looking down at her, it had to be something in the sky. And what could that be? What made sense? God? No, God didn’t make sense. She was open to the possibility of the existence of God. But God would have omnipresence, meaning God could be looking at her from any direction. The only reason He would look down at her from above would be to make her feel small...in which case He wouldn’t be Piper’s God, because Piper’s God would know how sensitive she was about that kind of thing. So that wasn’t God up there playing Mr. Burning Eyes.

How about a UFO then? Was that a possibility? She did believe there were other planets capable of supporting life out there in the universe. It was usually a fun thought. But did she believe that people from those planets were floating over Earth in flying saucers taking a particular interest in her? No. She was smart, sure, but not ‘interesting to an alien’ smart. That would have to be some genius who invented incredible machines that could save the alien’s homeworld from drought, or a techno-plague, or whatever else an alien problem would be.

They would need some genius like Uncle Seven.

A man she was related to.

A man who probably had powerful enemies who would be loathsome enough to go through members of his family to get to him. Who might be looking at one of his relatives right now--say, a helpless preteen niece--through some spy satellite trying to zap her brain with some hallucination-causing space ray.

Piper wasn’t proud that the best theory she could come up with for what was wrong with the sky was ‘spy satellite space ray.’ But if this last idea was right, then what was watching her through that satellite was human, and therefore susceptible to Piper’s weapon.

And Piper’s weapon was a doozy.

She stopped.

She forced herself to look up

She took a deep breath.

And with a small tilt of her head, she flashed The Disarming Little Girl Smile.

What Piper lacked in size, she made up for with cuteness, and she knew how to use it. Big brown eyes, adorable button nose, a dusting of freckles on her pale, round cheeks, and white teeth with just a hint of a gap in the front; all composing the perfect frame for The Disarming Little Girl Smile, the nuclear bomb of Piper’s defense arsenal. Parents, adults, and older school bullies were powerless before it. Usually, Piper longed for the day when The Smile would no longer work; it would mean she was growing up, happily giving up the power of Girl Cute for Woman Cute--an entirely different power with a new set of rules. For now, Girl Cute would have to do. The Disarming Little Girl Smile was nothing to laugh at.

Until today.

The sky laughed!

This was so much worse than it had been before. And again, it wasn’t a sound Piper could hear or a giant gaping mouth she could see, it was a knowing that something of infinite size and dimensions had found her ridiculous.

Very creeped out, Piper forced herself to resume jogging toward her home. She thought about machines floating in orbit around Earth, about the kind of people who would use them to stare at her, and about the only reason they would have to do so.

Uncle Seven.

Uncle Seven was Dr. Steven Lobe, an undisputable scientific genius, whose work tended to head in...odd directions. Piper had never really known him well, but according to family horror stories, he was like one of those guys in old black and white horror movies who somehow can’t see the harm of turning a bunch of dead body parts into a grumpy monster, or keeping the brain of some friend alive in a jar, or making a radioactive insect grow one thousand times its actual size.

Uncle Seven used to work for the government...actually, if the rumors were true, he’d worked for several governments. These days he mooched off his brothers to live and work in their basements. That was a problem. Wherever Uncle Seven lived, things tended to blow up. Three of Piper’s uncles now had large burnt areas of their cellars and a fourth uncle could point to the blackened rubble where his old house used to be.

Uncle Seven was the seventh of seven brothers. He was currently living with brother number five. Piper’s dad was brother number six; too close for comfort -- Uncle Seven was running out of brothers.

At long last, Piper reached the dented sign that marked her street. She limped along the road, past the purple mansion on the corner that everyone knew was haunted, past the elegant house of Mr. Viper and his family, the sweet flower gardens and curlicue latticework fences in complete opposition to the heavy metal music that had paid for them, and on towards her own home, where she could close the curtains, fall exhausted onto the living room couch, grab a lovely Jane Austin novel to read, and have no view at all of the chuckling cloud farm overhead. Gasping for breath, she huffed and wheezed her way past the grove of trees that separated her family’s property from the Vipers and turned onto the driveway that led up to her home.

She took one more look at the sky…

Wham! Piper ran straight into the front grill of a rental moving truck that was backed up to her garage.

What was this now? There were too many surprises today. Her family wasn’t moving and no one should have been home at this time of day.

Thieves! Piper thought. Piper had heard about that kind of thing: Criminals pretending to be moving men so the neighbors wouldn’t suspect they were robbing you blind. Piper had to do something. She had to think. The first thought she had was a realization of how loudly she was wheezing while she was standing there thinking. If thieves were nearby, they could hear her breathing.

A shuffling and bumping sound came from the back of the truck — the thieves were right here!

Piper would run to the Viper’s yard and use her cell phone to call the police. That was a plan! Piper turned to run, but in her terror she’d forgotten how tired and weak she was from all the running she’d done. Her legs collapsed under her and she fell forward onto the asphalt road.

She cried out as she skinned the palms of her hands for a second time, and now there was blood. Had the thieves heard her? She listened; something was still moving in the back of the truck. They hadn’t heard.

But something else had.

Three plastic storage tubs had been placed upside-down by the side of the truck. The red tub that was closest to Piper suddenly shifted in her direction. It shuddered and raised itself off the ground a few inches; it did this by sprouting six mechanical legs from its underside where the lid should have been. Piper stared at the red tub in utter confusion as it stood there on the driveway. A panel like a small door slid open on the end facing Piper. It was dark in there, but the light outside reflected off of something metallic inside when it moved ever-so-slightly. Piper’s heart skipped a beat. This couldn’t be happening.

The red tub stuck out one of its stubby legs to kick at the two blue tubs next to it. Instantly, they both stood up on legs of their own. Their feet had wheels, and they used them well. The three tubs skated down the driveway toward Piper, moving as smoothly as only six-legged roller skaters could.

Piper’s limbs flailed as she tried to propel herself away from the mobile plastic boxes, but she couldn’t look away from them, couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing. She eventually stopped and sat in the street, too astonished to move.

The tubs screeched to a halt mere feet away from her. All three now had the same panels open, facing the girl in the road. There was a moment of stillness, and then from the darkness inside the little doors crawled the most terrifying things Piper had ever seen: they were baby dolls — old, used, dirty, naked, broken baby dolls, with mismatched parts, missing hair, and marker stains. The joints of their elbows and knees had been cut apart and reattached with machine bits. They were connected from their backs to the insides of the plastic tubs by telescoping laundry tubes that stretched out as the dolls moved — and they did move, quickly. They walked towards Piper, their little wire-enhanced hands reaching out for her.

It was too much. Piper screamed.

The nightmare babies pulled back.

The shuffling in the moving truck stopped. A frazzled head of blond hair peaked out from the back of the truck and stared at Piper through large owlish glasses.

It was Uncle Seven.

Goodnight, everybody! Thanks for coming to the show! screamed Piper’s brain as the overwhelmed girl sank senseless to the road.

Next Chapter: Chapter 3 - Dangerous Minds