This is the story of Jacob Vick. Better known only to himself as Jake, he is a boy of many descriptions. None of which are very nice.

“Weird.” “Crazy.” “Stupid.” “Just don’t let him near me.”

Anyone else who was on the receiving end of these insults would argue that they were untrue. Not Jake. Jake was more than happy to be called these things. After all, it meant more time to play by himself if nobody else was bothering him.

He was born on the exact date of the winter solstice. His parents jokingly referred to him as “the boy of the snow”. He never understood why. He never understood winter. He just knew that, sometimes, white cold stuff fell from the sky. That’s all he saw it as. When people tried to get into technical terms with him about it, he just tuned them out. He was good at doing that.

Jake’s father was a homebuilder. He was seriously injured one day on the job and was taken to the hospital. Jake never knew much about what happened, but he knew that one day his mother came home from visiting the hospital sobbing quietly. The babysitter she had left with Jake took one look at this and left, as though she knew what was going on, saying something on the way out about not needing to pay.

His mother went out one day and didn’t come back. Jake was confused, but continued to just play in the basement where he had been left. He didn’t know what else to do.

Some people came by his house the next day. Jake was sound asleep in the basement, having dozed off after getting tired from staying up late playing. The people took him away, and when he woke up, he had been checked into an orphanage.

That’s where he stayed for the next eleven years. And then he was almost in his twenties, and he still didn’t know what happened.

Nobody ever talked with him too much. He didn’t mind. The only time he ever had to talk with other people was when he was brought to school and the teachers called on him. Most of the time, he was way off the mark with his answers.

“Jacob, if x here is forty-five, then what is y?”

“...eight?”

“Not even close.”

Sometimes, he surprised even himself.

“Jacob, what is this circle’s diameter?”

“Fourteen and a half inches.”

“...correct.”

There was no consistency. Either he understood or he didn’t. No middle road. Oftentimes, he wouldn’t understand one day something that he understood perfectly fine the previous day. It was as though his brain were playing tricks on his memory. Students even formed small betting pools for which day of the week Jake would get everything right, and some for when he would get a simple multiplication problem wrong.

Jake himself had no clue what was going on. His life was all a mess. He barely remembered anything before going to the orphanage, and it all blurred together. Now his life consisted of just waking up, going to school, saying things to adults, going home, and playing for hours until he slept and repeated the cycle.

The cycle was broken the day of his seventeenth birthday.

He didn’t wake up. In fact, he wasn’t even there.

All because of a visitor to his dreams.