Chapter 3 - ‘Dimming’

Chapter 3 - ‘Dimming’

Dead eyes, are you just like me?
Cause her eyes were as vacant as the seas – Smashing Pumpkins, By Starlight

Saj and El were nigh on inseparable after that day in the nurses office, and less than a year later their friendship was concrete. Where there was one, you’d find the second. Some of the crueller kids at the school, spearheaded by Thomas Prince, called them the fag and shadow whenever they were seen, but the surprising thing was that weren’t seen often. In fact, if it weren’t for Thomas Prince and his sustained campaign of hatred against the boys, the two would have been left to their own devices and forgotten. Prince was infuriated that he had had to keep refocusing his group of cronies on the boys.

Things had marginally improved for Thomas Prince, in that he was no longer shunned by all at the school. After his return to the school, originally ostracised from his peer group because of his vile temper and his perceived racist leanings, he had found a new group of friends that admired his new outlook. He was now the ring leader of a small but growing group of aggressive boys, mostly white, mostly skinheads. 

Now 15, Thomas Prince looked older and swaggered round the school, not at all worried about expulsion or reprisal from his increasingly thuggish actions. There was a rumour running through the school that he sometimes came to school with a knife, and he did everything in his power to encourage the gossip, fashioning a shiv in metalwork to taunt and intimidate. 

There was a long scar running across his forehead now, which it was commonly understood had come from head butting a bus shelter for a laugh whilst drunk. This rumour wasn’t true either, but again, Thomas wrapped the lie around himself like a cloak, and wore the scar like a badge of honour. The group who followed Prince (who he called “the squad”) were a likewise vicious and violent, but largely unintelligent group of socially disaffected boys. Prejudice’s past down from father to son, and from right wing media outlets catered specifically at these young minds had created a group of sociopaths who were seemingly incapable of empathy, remorse and independent thought. 

Once Prince had been outed at a racist by his peers in the school this squad had flocked to their new leader, one capable of directing them and showing them new ways to torment, terrorise and disrupt.  

This squad were largely indistinguishable from each other to outsiders. They all shared a uniform of sorts, even out of school were most of the damage was to be done, and there was an animalistic look about them. Predatory eyes and perpetually open mouths, framed by cropped or shaved hair, a pallid continence and gold plated jewellery was the shared look, and Prince slipped into the position of alpha without a challenge. A charismatic boy, once he could have been called handsome, but now the directionless hatred he had at the world had marred his features.

The squad spent most of their time outside of lessons smoking in the toilets, prowling round the school randomly pushing other students over or trying to lift the skirts of the girls in the school. More than once Prince and his squad had been reprimanded for groping the female students, and unknown to the staff the squad were engaged in an illicit trade of photos up the skirts of the prefects and younger female teachers. These images were circulated freely between the squad, as were similar compromising pictures of girlfriends, neighbours and even sisters in some cases. There had been one girl who had come across the group late one evening on her walk home, and had been chased all the way to her front door. When he father threatened to call the police, the entire squad stood on his driveway, picking rocks from him front lawn and one of the unidentified mass reminded him that they went to school with his daughter, and they knew where he lived. No police had been called that time, or any other time. 

Under the leadership of Prince, the squad directed their campaign of intimidation at specific individuals. Any girl who was unfortunate enough to catch the eye of Prince was hounded around school, pestered for pictures, or finding her social media hacked and replaced with obscene pictures and pornography. 

As the headmaster, Talwar Thapa despaired of the squad as he could never find the definitive proof for any wrong doing he desperately needed to exclude them, and he eventually found himself targeted by them. 

His eldest daughter Katha, 17 at the time and visiting school on an errand from her mother was approached by hooded members of the squad. Before she managed to slip passed them she’d been kicked and spat at, and had racial abuse at her. She fled home in tears, and found that her car had been keyed in the brief time she’d been at school. She'd not been able to definitely identify any of her attackers, and no one else had seen anything. 

For Talwar, eggs were thrown at this windows, then stones. Racial slurs were scrawled on notes and put under his draws, and his professional and personal emails were signed up for mailing lists ranging from the mildly amusing to the worryingly hate filled. His social media was inundated by messages of hate and racism, yet he couldn’t prove that the squad were responsible and he was reluctant to go to the police without this proof. Ever since the attack on Saj, it was widely understood that Talwar held onto the enmity for Prince, and that he wouldn't be sorry to see the rest of the group removed from the school. People seemed incredibly willing to continue to give Prince second chance after second chance. 

Raveena had seemingly been immune to these attacks, and wasn’t even particularly aware of the worst of the attacks, kept from her by her protective father. 

Saj would have been the natural and primary recipient of the worst of the torment, yet the squad seemed incapable of keeping a prolonged crusade against him. It was the same for El, for both boys had found they could dim themselves.

The two friends were used to being ignored and used to passing unnoticed wherever they went had eventually noticed something strange. It wasn't that people were ignoring them as they walked through their miserable school days, it was that people were actively not seeing them. 

Saj had first seen this when he and El were in the library flicking through the comics when a teacher walked in. 

The teacher, Mr Greenhauld was not a fan of either of the boys, and El had skipped out of one of his lessons. Greenhauld strode into the library straight past El, who was sat at a table engrossed in a comic, and shouted into the librarian’s office that as soon as anyone saw Elliot Easton he should be sent straight to his office on the second floor. El heard this and froze, his eyes focused into the middle distance in terror, and then Saj's eyes must have started to water as El seemed to blur where he sat. Saj’s eyes slipped from his friend to Mr Greenhauld who had turned around and stared directly at him.

“You! Thapa!” He barked

“Yu-yu-yes sir?”

“Where is Easton? Have you seen him?”

Saj desperately looked to wear El was sitting, mainly to avoid eye contact with the teacher who terrified him the most, yet when his eyes came to rest on the table he couldn’t see anyone there.

“No sir…”

“Well, when you do, you tell him to come see me.”

And off Greenhauld strode, straight past the seat the El had been sat in, and as the body of the large PE teacher eclipsed the seat where El had been sat, he was back in his seat.

El was staring fixedly at Greenhauld's back, sweating profusely and gulping for air. Saj waited for the door to close behind Greenhauld before rushing to the table where his best friend was gradually calming down, grabbed him by the shoulder and turned El to face him.

“How the hell did you do that?!”

“How did I do what?”

“Get under the table and back out so fast? And why did you come up so quick? He could have seen you!”

El stared back at Saj, the look of preoccupied fear melting like a fog, to be replaced by incredulity. “What? I didn’t go under the desk… Don’t be thick.”

“Well, what did you do? He walked right passed where you were sat.”

El stared at Saj, the look of confusion and disbelief growing on his face. He pushed the hair behind his ears, a familiar gesture Saj saw whenever El was uncomfortable. “I didn’t go anywhere, he just didn’t see me.”
“Oh yeah right!” Saj ejaculated. “When he was asked me where you were you were gone!”

“No, you saw me, you looked right at me…”

El and Saj stared at each other for a few seconds, between them trying to figure out what had happened, Saj had the beginnings of a grin growing on his lips. He knew El would turn round and explain where he’d gone, and this was an elaborate prank. 

El was looking more confused and annoyed by the second when the door burst open again and Greenhauld stood in the door well, staring directly towards the two boys. They both froze, Saj grabbing the shoulder of El’s blazer and El holding onto Saj’s wrist of the same hand. 

Greenhauld walked up to the table where one boy sat and the other crouched frozen still. Saj began to wheeze and stutter “F-f-f-found him su-su-sir…” but Greenhauld paid him no attention. Instead he drew himself up to his full height, glanced round the library and muttered under his breath “Fuck. Where has that fat little shitskin gone now?” before turning round and striding back out of the same way he came in.

He’d been stood no more than 12 inches from the two boys, who were alone in the room.

The two boys left the library, walking slowly and looking around corners before going round them. People were ignoring the two boys as usual, walking around them and not greeting them at all. El and Saj had become so used to this treatment that they usually thought nothing of it, but the two boys began now to explore what they’d just experienced in the library. 

They’d step in front of students, and the student would simply manoeuvre out of the way without blinking or acknowledging the strange behaviour of the two young boys standing in front of them. 

El began waving his arms in the face of two girls waiting outside the bathroom, and it was only with an effort the girls’ eyes seemed to draw towards him, and waved back halfheartedly. Her eyes glazed and her eyes slid away from El, and she was back talking to her friend. Listening in, El overheard the second girl ask the first who’d she’d been waving to, and the first girl shrugged and said she hadn’t waved, that she’d just brushed her hair. No one in the corridor saw the two boys, now seemingly invisible.

The end of lesson bell rang, filling the corridor with rushing bodies. El and Saj headed to the school playing fields, ignoring by the prefects and teachers they strolled past, and looked hard at each other. To each boy, the other appeared unchanged at first, the same as they had been every day for the last year or so. Yet, looking more closely and continued their examined their own arms and bodies, the each noted a slight blur and shadowy aura, very subtle at first but definitely there, on themselves and each other. Something they'd never seen before, and never noticed on anyone else. Cold sweat broke out on El's forehead, as he look around, alone with Saj not fifteen feet away from a swell of people. None of them saw him. No-one noticed as they barged past, not feeling the collisions and not noticing their shouting. The gnawing fear growing in the pit of his stomach erupted. What if they were never seen by anyone else again?

El turned and fled back towards the school, narrowly missing a prefect patrolling the field, choking back tears of fear, wishing to be seen more than ever, when the prefect grabbed him and pulled him round so they were face to face. El didn’t hear what the prefect said, or even recognise who the prefect was through the tears, before he squirmed out of his grasp. Carrying on for around the corner, El held his weight against a wall, coming to terms what had just happened.

Somehow this prefect had seen him, and now he was stood in the middle of the playground, face covered in tears. Other children seemed to finally notice him, pointing at the 2^nd year student caught by a prefect, crying and gasping for air, and they started to laugh. 

El suddenly felt the humiliation and the familiar desire to not be seen return, and as it did some of the kids in the playground lost interest in him, their attention going back to what they were doing before his outburst. Staggered, and unable to fully comprehend what was happening. El was able to walk back towards Saj completely unseen again.

The prefect that had grabbed him was stood, looking at his own hand in confusion. El felt that if he wanted to be seen again, he could be. For the moment though, El wanted to be left fully alone. 

Seen through the eyes of Joe Hall, the prefect who had caught El fleeing across the field, it was as though El was enveloped in a deep and consuming fog. His eyes couldn’t seem to fully focus on the boy, and Joe couldn’t fully remember why he wanted to speak to him. It wasn’t that the boy disappeared; it was more that he faded and became just a feature of the ever changing background, like a cloud losing the definitive shape it once had.

To Saj, El seemed to glow as he walked back. Sometimes with a bright white green and other times a dark shadowy glow. Saj could see the look on the prefects face and he understood that El was strobing between being seen and this new invisibility, though not quite at will. 

As El approached Saj on the field, Saj ran forward towards his friend, grabbed him by the arms. The aura seemed to vanish from the two of them, as well as the glow that had surrounded El. A grin split over Saj's face and he asked El “Do you know what this means?!”

Over the next two or three days, the two boys weren’t seen around school, but were not marked down as absent or missing from their lessons by any of the teachers. El and Saj were still diligently attending their scheduled lessons, but this new ability was being tested by each of the shy young boys.

They called the new ability ‘dimming’, and between them they’d discovered that to ‘go dim’ you simply needed to think yourself unseen. This came naturally to both boys, who had spent their lives either in the shadows of others or on the peripheries of groups. By focusing on their own introversion, they faded from notice of people, animals and even electronic doors. To be seen again all that was needed was a focused desire to be seen. It was really that simple. 

Once the boys had discovered that they were not trapped unseen and ignored forever they had walked without persecution through the corridors that had previously held so much dread for them. They past members of the squad without issue, who were uninterested in them at the moment anyway as Thomas Prince was restricted to a seclusion unit after throwing a drinks bottle at a pupil across the lunch hall.

El and Saj had experimented with what going dim meant in these lessons. Instead of taking their seats and working through the problems presented in maths, El started slowly and walked around the classroom, started trying to take pens and books from the other pupils whilst they were in use. 

Most of the time the unsuspecting pupils seemed to think they had dropped their pen and simply reached for another, or suddenly were under the impression they’d left their work books at home, even though they’d just been using them mere seconds before. One or two pupils seemed to notice that El was trying to take the pen, but were simply uninterested in the unusual sight of the slight and retiring young boy taking pens from their hands, tightening their grips and turning their bodies away to protect the books that he was trying to disrupt.

Taking the experiment to the next level, El walked down the row of desks to the front of the class, where Mr Cort was explaining some of the answers and workings to some of the problems he’d laid out on the board. Whilst he was talking to the class, El scrawled yellow chalk over the next set of questions and stood back. Mr Cort turned to the board to indicate part of a problem, and then tutted under his breath. “I will re-write the next set of questions. Please continue to part three.”, as though he'd scuffed the original writing with his elbow. 

As Mr Cort re-wrote the questions, El wrote ‘BLACK MAGIC’ next to one of the questions, and Mr Cort simply erased it without pausing to wonder where it had come from. When Mr Cort had turned back to sit as his desk, he was humming a song El knew from his dad’s record collection. It was Black Magic Woman by Fleetwood Mac. El had picked this phrase seemingly at random, but it had settled in Mr Cort’s mind. El paused, chalk in hand, curious as to where this avenue of experimentation would take him. Walking towards the teacher who was marking papers with a large green pen, El whispered close to his ear. “Drop the pen.”

The pen slipped between Mr Cort’s fingers. He picked the pen up again.

“Drop the pen.” He whispered again, but this time Mr Cort didn’t drop the pen, merely lost his grip for a second and marked the page with a broken line. Confused, El tried again, “drop the pen!”

The pen firmly held in his hands, Mr Cort looked up and stared blankly straight at El, the camouflage seeming to slip away, revealing him. 

El took a step back and thought dimmer. Mr Cort seemed about to say something, but his gaze slipped from El to the clock on the wall. “35 minutes remaining class, any problems please let me know.” El returned to his seat, his mind racing.

Before he reached his seat, El stopped, picked a student who looked to be struggling with one of the problems Mr Cort had laid out. “Ask” he whispered into the students ear, and immediately his hand shot into the air. “Sir? Can I have some help sir?” Some of the eyes in the room turned to the student as Mr Cort nodded and quietly walked over to offer the help he’d been asked for. El turned to another student and whispered in their ear “stand up.” The student squirmed uncomfortably in their seat, but didn’t stand up. There seemed to be a limit to what El could convince people to do, so El tried a different tact.

“Yawn.” The student yawned.

“Cough.” The student coughed.

Noticing a question the student had left unanswered, El pointed to where the answer should be and said “the answer to this is 42.” The student wrote 42 next to the question, but then looked up and around. He didn’t look at El, but the student seemed confused by what was going on. El took his seat and started on the questions on the board. “Help me out with these” he whispered to the girl sat next to him, as she stopped what she was doing to show El some of the workings on her sheet. El focused on bringing himself forward and started to work with Ruth on the problems at hand.

For Saj, the experiments were going along a similar road of discovery.

He didn’t share all of his classes with El, and as such he’d not seen what had happened in the maths lesson, but Saj had had a very similar experience of suggestion and response. He’d spent time in his own maths class pushing what could be done whilst he’d gone dim, and when he’d muttered under his breath to a student in his way to move, he was surprised when the student obliged. He walked to the back of the class where some students were occupying themselves texting and quietly chatting and suggested to one to stand up. The student, who was texting, did so immediately and then sat back down after a few seconds. Moving across to the students sat next to the windows and the radiators, Saj suggested that they should all put their coats on. The girls sat closer to the cold windows did so, whereas only a few students towards the radiators did. Saj thought this through, the radiators were infamous for belching heat out mercilessly throughout the year, and although it was a cold morning, overcast and windy, the students nearer the radiators were flushed pink with the heat. Picking one of the girls at the front closest to the radiator who was sweating slightly with the heat, Saj tried to see how far he could push the suggestion.

“Take your jumper off.”

The girl did so without hesitation. Saj paused, and considered his next move. At 12 years old, Saj was just noticing girls in his year, the sudden swelling in the bosom of some of the early developers had caught his eye. He was still a boy in the true sense of the word, but the curiosity he had got the better of him. He lent forward and touched the hair of the girl, who didn’t react to his gentle touch. He stroked the hair, a feeling growing in the pit of his stomach of fear and anticipation which he wasn’t familiar with, mixed with one he definitely was familiar with. Shame. 

He stopped and told the girl to put her jumper back on. The girl lifted her jumper and considered it for a few moments before putting it back down on her desk.

When Saj and El met for lunch after class, they were both eager to discuss what they’d learnt. Using this suggestion opened up many avenues for the two boys who were keen to understand exactly what it was they were capable of. Egging each other on with the enthusiasm of a new toy, the boys went dim in the lunch queue, and tried to get extra helpings from the lunch ladies. This wasn’t the best test they could have done, as the lunch ladies were not interested in what the students took, only whether it had been paid for. The boys were unable to persuade the lunch ladies taking the payments that they could eat for free, but they knew that if they really wanted they could go dimmer and just walk past. Neither El nor Saj did this, being honest boys, and both paid without any fuss. Walking towards a quieter corner of the dining hall, both silent and reflective, the two boys ate their food without discussing what had happened, and what was slowly dawning on each of them. Saj was the first to break the silence.

“We need to have rules about what we can and can’t do, you know?”

El was chewing on a chip, eyes slightly glassy and unfocused on his plate avoiding Saj’s eyes. “Whadya mean?”

Saj was glad El was avoiding eye contact, he felt a virulent bloom of shame in his stomach. Across from the two boys, with her back to them was Katharine, the girl who’s hair Saj has stroked. Feeling sick and ashamed of himself in a way he’d never felt before, he took a deep breath.

“We need to agree what we can and can’t do. You know, we could have people doing stuff they don’t want, or do stuff to people who might not like it…” Saj trailed off, the light shining on Katharine’s glossy hair, as she ran her hands through it turning it into a bun, so it wouldn't get in the way of her lunch. The feeling of shame was burning him now, and Saj shifted anxiously in his chair. He was glad El wasn’t looking at him, and he turned the shame he was feeling into anger, anger at himself and it became a burning need to be better.

Over the course of the rest of the day, the two boys talked about what they could and couldn’t do. They agreed, in the simple ways of children who’ve read a few comic books and held the same simplistic ideals of heroism from those pages, which they shouldn’t use their persuasion or dimming for evil. They wouldn’t spy on people, or have them do anything unless it was an emergency. It was clear to both boys that there were limits to what they could persuade people to do anyway, that they couldn’t get anyone to do something that they wouldn’t already have a predilection to do, but people may be caught unawares and people might be hurt or embarrassed. The boys knew that once they had gone dim people tended to forget about them as well, so they agreed nothing should be taken or stolen whilst dim unless it was absolutely necessary.

The boys even talked about using their new found gifts to do good deeds around the school, like the heroes in the comic books they both loved. Romantic daydreams of the two of them saving the school from armed robbers or rescuing classmates from the jaws of destruction were all well and good, but they both realised what they would really do.

They would continue as before, safe in the knowledge that they could get about unseen and unmolested through the halls of the school. What hadn’t occurred to either boy was to think whether or not this was a new gift, or whether they’d always been able to do this.