I shut the door quietly and entered the empty hallway.  Part of me wanted to sink to the floor in happiness.  I still had a chance. 

I walked back to the nursing office to tell Dr. Kang I was leaving.  The door was locked so I assumed she had stepped out.  Rather than wait, I decided telling her my situation could wait till Monday morning.  Turning around, I walked right into a tall, muscular body.  I jumped back, stunned that someone had been standing right behind me this entire time and I hadn’t noticed.  I looked up into a ruggedly attractive face, why was everyone in this school so good-looking?  The man stared back silently, looking me over once.  He then nodded and walked away.

..…

What the heck just happened?

As if this day wasn’t weird enough.

As I lay in my bed that night, I let the day replay in my head.  It was a memory exercise that the professors who studied me had told me to do to keep my “gift” intact.  Rather than gift, I would call it a curse.  They told me it was called an eidetic memory, more popularly termed as photographic memory.  Although I could memorize textbooks and weird facts like they do in the movies, my strongest memories were the ones I experienced in person.  It wasn’t just visual memory that was recorded either, everything I heard or felt, both physically and emotionally, they all were stored in my brain and I could choose to play whatever I needed.  That was how I thought of it, as a movie library. 

When the gift first activated, it had been devastating.  The police found me, screaming, behind a restaurant dumpster as everything I had ever felt, ever seen, ever heard, all fought to come out.  The first year I had the “gift” was a nightmare.  I was studied like a specimen in a lab with specialists from all over the world coming to see the freak of nature.  You see, a case of eidetic memory has never been proven or studied before, there have been whispers of cases like mine in history but none were ever as extensively tested.  After five years of staying in a lab, I was finally freed, although I still have to go in for testing and follow-up every two weeks.  I was grateful to them for one reason though, I was now able to control my memory instead of it controlling me.  Thus the movie library.

That was probably what came up in my background screen although I had asked to remain anonymous in the numerous studies written.  This was a detective academy nonetheless, it wouldn’t have been hard to put two and two together.  I wouldn’t have expected less although I wondered how much more of my past they had dug up in the process.  There were many things I wanted to keep buried.

I closed my eyes and hoped for sleep.

The alarm blared at 7:00 am. I was tempted to push snooze but yesterday’s events flashed through my mind.  I couldn’t risk another potential concussion because of lateness.  Sighing, I dragged my achy body from the bed.  I could see the beautiful blue-purple of a baby bruise on the skin under my right elbow.  I looked even worse when I saw myself in the mirror.  A pale face stared back at me, oval with subtle baby-fat that seemed to cling on even though the rest of the body was, some would argue, a little too slender.  I studied my face in the mirror, I knew I was pretty as my mom had been.  Big brown eyes, framed by long black lashes, a tiny up-turned button nose and a small pink mouth; everything seemed to be in its place but I felt like I wasn’t half as pretty as Myungsoo and that irritated me a little.  Worse even, a large palm-sized bruise mottled half my forehead from where I collided with Dujun’s hard skull.  His head would probably look perfectly untouched…  They were both irritating.

I showered, ate quickly and set out at 8 am so I would be an hour early, just to avoid encountering those two again on the way.  I had decided to walk today, just to warm up slowly and then stretch for an hour before the test just in case.  Everything was riding on this 2 mile run.

I arrived at the field at 9 am and started stretching immediately.  I was wearing an over-sized sweatshirt and leggings but the day was starting to get very hot, luckily I had worn a dark blue tank top underneath.  As I struggled to remove the sweatshirt without pulling my tank top off as well, I heard some male voices getting louder.  Cursing under my breath and not wanting them to see me struggling with the sweatshirt still around my head, I yanked on the fabric really hard and was rewarded with it popping off.  I sat down on the grass, fixed my tank-top, threw my long hair into a ponytail and relaxed, trying to look effortless.  Luckily this all happened in time for me to look up and see Myungsoo and Dujun turn the corner of the building to enter the field area.  I was so happy to not look like a klutz in front of them today.

Dujun saw me as they got closer and waved at me while smiling.  Myungsoo, on the other hand, was giving me an amazing stink-face even though he looked like a disco ball in a lime-green t-shirt and electric blue basketball shorts.  As I stared at him in the light, a flicker of recognition crossed my mind.  I wasn’t able to concentrate on his face yesterday but I could swear that I had seen him before.  It was strange that I couldn’t remember how, given my memory.

As they approached, I looked down at my watch.  9:45 am.  They were cutting it a bit close.  They looked as relaxed as I was trying to pretend to be.   Standing up, I started to stretch my hamstrings by touching my toes.  How I looked to them wasn’t worth failing this test.  When I came back up again, they were right next to me, stretching too.

Dujun was wearing shorts and a zip-up hoodie which he ped to reveal a white tank-top.  I couldn’t stop myself from staring when he removed the hoodie, flexing his biceps in the process.  Suddenly aware that someone was looking at me, I turned my head away only to meet Myungsoo’s eyes.  He had a mocking smile and I blushed.  Dang it.  He still looked prettier than I did in the sunlight, even though he was wearing the most ridiculous outfit.

From behind Dujun, a man cleared his throat.  We all spun to face the culprit.  I was surprised to see two men, one of them being the guy I had bumped into yesterday afternoon.  In the sunlight, his blond hair glinted, his eyes were hidden by a pair of aviators.  He looked like an army drill-sergeant in his red tracksuit.  The other man was a little shorter and plumper.  He looked like he was in his mid-50s with graying hair at his temples.  He whipped off his sunglasses and smiled at us, his round face revealing two adorable dimples.

“Good morning candidates.”  Oh my, his voice was just as adorable as his dimples, a little higher and scratchy.  “I am here to lead you to the course that has been set up.  My name is Henry Young and I am the vice dean of this academy.”

I was completely confused, out of the corner of my eye I could see that Dujun and Myungsoo were as well.  The field we were standing on was the only one with a track around it and was the easiest place for us to run the two miles.  Where was he leading us?

Both men turned and started to walk back to the school and we followed them in silence after picking up our stuff.  At the entrance to the school was a black van and as soon as we got close, six men ran out of the school.  They split into groups of two and came at us.  Shocked, I tried to step back to turn around and run but I realized in that instant that I couldn’t outrun them and took up a defensive stance.  I had been learning karate and taekwondo since I was 5 as my father had been very overprotective, and I started running through possible attack sequences in my mind as the two men approached.

“Stop!”  The order rang out and I froze as did the men attacking us.

“There is no need for the shenanigans today, the candidates will willingly put on the blindfolds before their test.”  I instinctively knew that this voice belonged to the Mr. Lee, the dean.  He stood on the steps of the entrance, his sunglasses on.  He was holding a walking cane in one arm, his other arm was hooked around the slender arm of Dr. Kang who was smiling at us.

I relaxed slightly and noticed that one of the two men closer to me had a black blindfold hanging from his right hand.  He stepped forward and gave me a look that was asking for permission to place the blindfold on my head.  I saw out of the corner of my eye that Dujun was already having his placed whereas Myungsoo was doing it himself.  I nodded and the man handed me the blindfold.  I sighed and was about to put it one when I noticed that Dr. Kang was walking towards me. 

She was smiling when she said,” I’m sorry I wasn’t in yesterday afternoon, Leo told me you came by.”  I gathered that Leo was the scary drill-sergeant.  I nodded.  She went on to ask “How are you feeling today, did you have any nausea or headache?”  She quickly examined my eyes by creating shade over them and watching my pupils react.  I remembered my mother doing this when I had fallen from my tricycle as a child.  Satisfied, she eyed the growing bruise on my forehead and winced.

“No,” I answered.  I gave her a smile of assurance and she nodded her head and waved her hand as if telling me to proceed to put my blindfold on.  After I put it one, she took my right hand with her small, delicate one and led me to what I hoped was the van.

“Do you know where they are taking us for the test?” I asked, my nerves showing in my voice.

I could hear the smile in her voice when she answered, “No, I’m sorry but I don’t.  You should rest assured that you won’t ever be in any danger, however.”  Her reassurance fell flat against the secretiveness of this test. 

We walked a lot longer than necessary for us to reach the van.  I was wondering if this was part of the test, whether we were supposed to keep track of the number of left or right turns or steps.  I knew we had reached the van because she stopped abruptly and the sound of a car door opening rang throughout the air.  She helped me climb up into the van, it was a lot higher than I had thought and I stumbled a little.  Then the door slammed behind me and a pair of hands strapped me in rather strangely.  It wasn’t a normal seatbelt.  My heart was sinking, and it full on dropped to the floor as I heard a very loud and distinctive sound before a pair of headphones was placed on my ears. 

This was no van, this was a helicopter.

Author comments: Haha, what kind of chapter ending was that, you ask?  I definitely used the Mudo prank as inspiration, I had to add a helicopter.  Hope you enjoyed the chapter. ><   I'm still trying to decide if I should push the three of them out of the helicopter.