I Become Shadow by Joe Shine

letting the other students “feel good” tossing me around like a rag doll. Each one got specific instructions from Cole on how to modify the move in different, painful ways.
    “Here’s how you do it for more height.” And then, “Here’s how you do it for more rotation.” And so on and so forth. He made Junie do it in the way that caused the most pain. Junie tried to do it wrong, but Cole made him repeat it until he got it right.
    Here’s the thing, though: I learned to relax my body in the air and land relatively pain free, so after a bit I was almost enjoying myself. By the end of the class I was actually having fun. I egged them on to toss me as high as they could. That odd sense of weightlessness had always made me smile; this felt like when I was a kid being tossed around the pool by my dad. Only the pool was a lightly padded floor now.
    Cole didn’t seem happy, but I didn’t care. He wasn’t as scary to me anymore. Refusing to go full throttle on Junie told me that he feared what we (or at least Junie) would become. Cole was just a bully, nothing more.
    After the tossing, we had our regular couple hours of circuit training in the massive track center. I left limping, bruised, and exhausted, but holy hell, conscious.
    Driving, here I come!
    MY HEART SANK AS I walked into the class. No cars. None. Just a bunch of big railcar-box-looking things spread across the room. I was too furious to pay attention to the instructor. I only caught snippets like “virtual reality” and “immersive.” It was crap.
A video game?!?! A freaking video game?!?
The disappointment on my face was mirrored by the others. Everyone was pissed.
    Final instructions were to team up and get to it. Today we were to learn the basics of driving while we followed a car through a town. Simple. Easy. Stupid. Oh, and might I add, FAKE! I wish Cole
had
knocked me out earlier to save me from the disappointment of this garbage. I trudged after Junie toward a dumb box.
    It was about thirty feet long, ten feet high and about twenty feet wide too. Junie pressed a button on the outside of the box and a door slid open.
    Inside sat a full-size black sedan. It looked like a cop car. Not even a fun car to pretend-drive, like a Porsche or something. Lame.
    “Want to go first?” Junie asked me. He sounded as unhappy as I felt.
    “This is stupid,” I mumbled and walked around the car to the passenger side and got in.
    “I’ll take that as a no,” he said and climbed into the driver’s side.
    Now, I hadn’t been at FATE that long, but I had been there long enough to know that this place had some pretty amazing gadgets. Why I’d assumed this would not apply here was stupid on
my
part. The moment his door went
thunk
we were no longer in a dimly lit box, but sitting in a car on the side of the road surrounded by a forest.
    I gasped. It was so real. If I hadn’t known I was actually in a box I would have believed I’d escaped the training center. I looked over at Junie and shared a
holy hell
look.
    I rolled down the window and felt a breeze that matched the fluttering of the leaves on the trees. Birds chirped. I listened to the trees speak to each other as they swayed back and forth. I took a deep breath. Even the air smelled like forest: clean and leafy and cool. My heart stirred faintly. It was familiar. It all reminded me of home.
    “Soooo,” I said in that way that means you want something.
    “Yeah,” Junie said.
    I gave my finest sad puppy dog performance as I asked, “Can I drive first?”
    Junie rolled his eyes. “Okay. You’ll have to climb over me though.” He started to slide toward me so we could perform the awkward dance of switching places when a green car zoomed past us down the road. It was the one we were supposed to follow. We froze, both deciding if we had enough time to do this. We didn’t.
    “Never mind, just go,” I said, collapsing back in the passenger seat.
    “You sure?” he asked.
    “Yeah, it’s fine,” I