The school office was the second-to-last door on the right near the end of the hallway. The door was identical to that of each classroom except for a plain white sheet of paper taped near the handle with OFFICE printed in a bold and boring font across the front.

Jeffrey gradually slowed from running, then took a few breaths, preparing himself, before he gently cracked the office door and stepped on through.

Inside, way too close for comfort, hovered Madge, Dr. Finnel’s receptionist.

To Jeffrey, Madge resembled a dinosaur that had somehow scooped and arranged itself into almost human form. He was sure at certain angles he’d unwittingly borne witness to hints of extra appendages such as backplates, a spiked tail, wing-nubs…

Today her face was covered and exaggerated by inches of extra cream. Her hair appeared crunchy and brown like petrified wood unearthed from an ancient forest.

“What are you doing here?” Madge cackled, fighting back a cough.

“I was . . . drawing . . . in class,” he answered, feeling his own lungs threaten to expel an itchy pretaste of what he knew lay beyond the next and final door to Finnel’s inner lair.

Madge slashed at a small wood-paneled box across from her, and wretched, “Jeffrey Teller here for dillydallying again, sir.”

There was a static scratch, then the lowest and harshest inkling of troubled wheezing. This sound might have been the most recognizable of all in the school. For it was how Finnel’s morning announcements always began, every Monday and Wednesday . . . a distorted clip, and then intensely labored breathing, which apparently needed to be ramped up (slowly) from silence so as to build strength enough to carry voice and words.

After several seconds of the sick, unpaced in-space-out-space, the doctor’s voice grumbled, “Send him in.”

“Go,” grunted Madge.

Now, Jeffrey had been forced to visit Finnel like this at least a dozen times. Yet even his great measure of experience seemed nowhere near enough to calm his nerves as he shakily took those last few steps up to and through the enormous black door behind Madge’s oversized workspace.

The huge area he came to enter had always seemed to have come from another world. Instead of the usual academic decor, the walls were painted a black so deep and rich as to give the feel of empty space. There were no artworks or photos anywhere, only a single skinny bookcase at the far end of the room covered in unlabeled texts like relics from whenever books were first conceived of.

Finnel’s desk was a massive chocolate-grey station that arced around into three big standalone sections. All Jeffrey could see on the desk were a silver tin of tobacco and a faded dark pipe from which thin lines of near-white fumes curled up.

The stench of what smelled like centuries of unventilated smoke made him fear gagging uncontrollably at any moment.

All of a sudden, the peppered-ash throne of a chair behind the desk creaked and wheeled around, bringing Finnel face-to-face with Jeffrey. The sight was not really something one could well prepare for. Dressed in a drab leaden coat with matching slacks and tie, the doctor perched, slumped over his chair’s left monstrous armrest, the steep hunch atop his back skyrocketing high above a glop of hair somehow painted every shade from white to black.

As if on cue, Finnel let forth a raspy string of coughs, each more impressive than the last. The coughing was like a greeting, the doctor’s way of rounding out his opening speech and thoughts. “Teller, Teller…” Finnel hacked and sputtered, “Do tell: What brings you to see me today, young man?” More barking hacks tumbled out.

Jeffrey waited for some semblance of a pause in the sound, then offered, “I got kicked out again for drawing. But I didn’t mean to. It’s just what happens when I…” He stopped.

Finnel seemed to be working at folding his chin right down into his left shoulder, not exactly a hard feat considering the hunch’s position of prominence way up over the doctor’s back and head.

The hunch itself had the character and presence of a rich business mogul or crime boss who could buy up a run-down town center, renovate, and then drive up the prices.

The angle of hunch-to-neck-to-chin brought to Jeffrey’s view the top of Finnel’s head, highlighting once more that eerie mire of textureless hair.

“Eh?” the doctor fizzed. “I didn’t catch that. Kicked out for drowning?”

“Drawing,” Jeffrey over-pronounced, longing again to bolt from this alien room, depressing school, and ho-hum life.

“What do you draw?” prodded Finnel, not quite fighting back another wheeze.

“I don’t really. It’s more like I…” But Jeffrey was at a loss for how he might describe whatever it was that happened with him whenever everyone else got busy doing their thing.

“You see things.”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“You see things others don’t see.”

Stunned by the doctor’s sudden lucidity, Jeffrey stared down at the floor, where his eyes took in cloudy-iron carpet, short and hard, the color of slate.

Finnel clawed at the pipe on his desk, and raised it shakily to his stained lips before taking in an eager drag. “I’ve had my eye on you,” he chimed, his tone suggesting a skeleton pirate’s best stab at sounding kind and comforting.

“Why?”

“I’ve had my eye on many students in this school. It might be reasonable to wonder whether you and others like you are not, in fact, here by accident. But I won’t go into that, young Teller. Not now. Instead, let me venture a guess. You see your teachers and fellow students as gears and cogs fit perfectly to this great big working machine . . . a machine that you not only know you have no part in, but that drains you to even watch or be close to. And when you try to pretend you do belong, your natural tendencies can’t help but bleed over, making obvious to everyone just how different and disconnected you are. And that’s…” a stray cough wriggled its way out sideways around the pipe on Finnel’s lips. “...that’s when you come see me.”

No one had ever really commented on Jeffrey’s problem before. So, he’d never had to face any real resistance to the likes of burying himself in online videos, and rushing from place to place . . . from assignment to assignment, and role to role. Of course, he’d also never been forced to acknowledge how his true underlying hope had always been to one day find his own right spot to show up (amongst others) and start to function . . . the idea being that reaching that particular juncture would mean no longer needing to run.

What if Finnel was right? What if Jeffrey simply didn’t fit? What if he never would?

He felt a quiver deep in his chest which threatened to shake in waves like a storm of independent tornadoes out through his shoulders, down his arms. His face flushed again, hopefully not with too much red.

There was a long pause before he mumbled quietly, “What should I do?”

“Eh?” wretched Finnel, the sound twanging some at its edges as the doctor nibbled at the lip tip of his pipe.

“What should I do?” Jeffrey repeated. “What should I do now?”

“Do? Nothing.”

“But I don’t want to be different. I don’t want to see things . . . weird.”

“That’s no concern of mine, boy. Just know that we see you. Know that you have no secrets here. Nothing you do will go undetected by us. By me.” Finnel withdrew his pipe and wrapped it lightly against the insides of an ashtray the shape and color of a hollowed out beetle’s back. “Remember that, young Teller.”

“So, that’s it? There’s nothing I can change?”

Every such meeting with Finnel had involved the same choking pipe smoke and bomb-blast-croak coughs. But all before had resulted in some set punishment: four days detention, a Saturday helping the groundskeeper lug a pile of rubble from one side of the school to the other (then back again after lunch), threatened meetings with parental guardians, creative combinations of lost privileges...

Yet now that the heart of the matter had been dug to and laid bare like an unrolled scroll, the final outcome was . . . nothing. Essentially: We know, now go.

“There is one thing,” Finnel spat, his tiny eyes gleaming with twinkles so small as to be missed by most. “Do come let me know if you ever see, or draw, anything about me.” He paused. “Madge, anything else?”

“No, nothing from me,” came the sharp, distorted voice of Finnel’s assistant through some invisible speaker system apparently fused to the blackness.

Repulsed, Jeffrey found the notion of Madge listening in to be even more repugnant than the directionless conclusion of the discussion itself. For not only did he have no idea what to do going forward, but he now knew his unbearable strangeness and utter helplessness were most likely common knowledge amongst the faculty.

“You can leave,” offered Finnel, sucking in a fresh lungful and leaning back in his coffin-esque throne.

Jeffrey rose, his shift in perspective causing the greys of Finnel’s hair, coat, suit, and just about everything else to swirl in the surrounding dark, creating a dreary portal to absolutely nowhere.

For a split second, there in the center of the nothing above where Finnel sat, right at the point where all faint attempts at non-blackness sank to, Jeffrey was absolutely not sure he saw the whitish outlines of jagged, slender, maybe kind eyes and a pointy-toothed mouth like an eager, smiling shark.

In fact, being so not sure, he decided there certainly could be no good reason to keep looking that way.

He darted his gaze toward the light surrounding the door out to Madge and the everyday world beyond.

He did glance back at the very last moment as he pushed his way out the huge door, but saw nothing except for Finnel and spiderweb funnels of thin, smoky haze.

Wrenching his vision hard away from Madge as he clung to walls like edges of cliffs to avoid her desk, he climbed and maneuvered his way back through to the lengthy hallway.

He then dashed to the nearest set of restrooms to wait out the remainder of his current class (or double, as was the case).

Propped with his feet up hidden in a stall, he simply couldn’t get his screen on and pods in fast enough . . . the cheerful sounds and flashing colors there to greet him like the sweet release of sleep after a long, troubled night.

Though the next hour and a half would indeed seem to fly, Jeffrey already had the beginnings of an odd sense that the videos might not always serve as his perfect means of just getting by.

He felt it due to Finnel’s words about him having no ultimate place of purpose to reach and feel at home.

He felt it even more from the look in those eyes on that face in the darkness he was determined not to have seen.