Michael didn’t get back to either of us. We even tried calling him, but our call went straight to voicemail. It was starting to look like our best lead had gone cold, but hope came in the form of Gav’s message history with Michael. During their initial conversations, it seemed that Gav had been hesitant about taking the green stuff, but eventually cracked sometime between Michael’s visits to the facility. Not wanting to wait, Gav had asked to go to him instead and Michael agreed, dropping a residential address in their chat.

  “Bro, I don't feel so hot,” said Gav, one hand on the steering wheel, another on the hand controls.

  We were heading for Michael’s house, which would be our last stop for the night.

  “I told you not to eat that fourth meal,” I said, flipping through some apps on his phone.

  “I swear, I was hungry! Man, I’m still hungry, even though my stomach hurts. Everything kinda hurts.”

  “Maybe it’s the withdrawal. That guy Keith said if you didn’t take the green stuff then you’d experience something like a hangover.”

  Gav didn’t say anything for a second, pretending to clear his throat.

  “Yeah, uhm… I’ll hold off on that. It’s cool bro. I’m cool.”

  “Right,” I said. Unlike his moment of self pity at the diner, I didn’t feel this was an issue worth pressing him on. Partly I think because it would have felt like encouraging a friend to drink or continue to abuse a substance when they were thinking of going sober.

  So I let the matter rest, and we drove in relative silence. Gav driving, and me invading his privacy for the sake of my investigation. Like with his locker combination, Gav had managed to unlock his phone by sheer muscle memory after it had finished charging.

  Apart from his message history with Michael, Gav’s phone had little else to offer in terms of personal history. His social media consisted of apps with empty bios, and profile pictures of cartoon characters. He didn’t have any friends on these apps, and if he’d ever bothered to post something on them then he’d erased it. With one exception.

  He had a profile on a platform dedicated to uploading photos of yourself. It was the only app he had any history on, and it only went back about two months. Most of the pictures were of him and Lexa. Going by the pictures on this account, Lexa had severely undersold her relationship with Gav to me. It looks like they’d really hit it off. This was also where she had tried to message him when she didn’t hear from him for a week. As much as I didn’t want to check their messages, I wouldn’t feel like I was doing my due diligence if I didn’t. They ended up being unimportant, just messages expressing concern over the lack of communication.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Lexa ended up being a majority of what Gav had on his phone.

  I decided to tell him about Lexa’s messages. No matter what I’d said earlier at the diner, he was probably still feeling a bit like a phone, but Lexa’s messages were filled with a very personal concern.

  “Hey, Gav–”

  I started to speak, but I felt my stomach turn, something to do with the car’s momentum. I looked up and saw that we were aggressively switching lanes.

  “Gav?”

  Gav was out, fully catatonic, face planted into the steering wheel. The green tinge under his skin had darkened and fully overtaken his fair complexion. He looked like a piece of spoiled broccoli.

  As bad as Gav looked, I needed to get control of the car first, so I squeezed the hand control for the brakes, bringing us to a quick and sudden stop. Gav shifted in his seat and I was thrown against the restraints of the seatbelt. We had come to a full stop just before entering the lanes with oncoming traffic.

  I took a moment to thank every deity I had met personally, and a few more than I could remember off the top of my head. It was a miracle that we hadn’t crashed into any of the cars that shared the lanes beside us. It was also very lucky that we had happened to be on a wide stretch of road, because as good as our luck had been, I doubted we would have survived unscathed if oncoming traffic had only been one painted line away.

  I threw on the emergency lights, and tried to wake up Gav.

  “Gav? Hey, big guy, you still with me?”

  With a greater amount of effort than I care to admit, I brought him upright in his seat to check him out. He was still breathing, but his eyes were vacant, and his breathing sounded like it was struggling.

  I threw myself into the backseat where Gav had tossed the gym bag, and ripped out the water and the protein shaker. I frantically opened both to mix up the contents, then jumped back up to feed it to Gav. I dribbled some into his mouth, desperately hoping he’d be able to swallow, and that I wasn’t accidentally choking him.

  I was relieved when his hands came up to grab the shaker himself. He started drinking on his own, and his eyes began to open. He was back.

  Gav scarfed the green stuff down to the last drops. When the bottle came away from his lips he was gasping for air, having drunk the whole of the contents without hardly stopping for breath.

  And there was something else. His skin.

  The green tinge was completely gone, but that wasn’t all. His muscles had grown. In the course of scarfing down the protein shake his body had swelled, his already world class physique becoming larger, more defined. He was taller, definitely taller. His head scraped the roof of the Van. He had become the giant that the doctors had first recorded, the man with a body out of this world.