Danny Fronter

Chapter 1
Waking Up

---

Chapter Description: This is a story I have not tried before, the results of which I look foreward to seeing. I present to you the story of Dr. Daniel Fronter.

---

"Daniel Fronter?" Droned Ms Gadby

"Here." Young Daniel announced sleepily.

"Are you sure about that, Danny?" the teacher asked, resulting in snickers from all the other children, "We don’t want you falling asleep now."

"But Ms. Gadby, I never fall asleep in class!" He defended

"Are you sure about that?" she asked, "Because I wasn’t calling role just now."

Renewed snickers caused Danny to sink in his seat a little, but not by much. "Well, I can’t help it if your class is boring." he blurted out.

"Well, there’s a time out corner over there. Maybe that will be more interesting." This also prompted a reaction from the class.

"Ooh!" one kid shouted, "You’re in trouble."

"There are plenty of corners in this room, Scott, I’m sure we can find one for you too if you’d like."

The boy got quiet pretty quickly and Danny, once seeing Ms Gadby point directly to the corner, accepted that this was an order and not a suggestion. He stood up sullenly and wandered over to the indicated corner where he sat down cross-legged and proceeded to pick at pieces of the carpet while no one was looking, trying not to think about his dreams.

Danny had been put on time-out several times for sleeping. He couldn’t help it, for the past week or so he’d been having the strangest dreams and would always wake up exhausted. He didn’t tell his mom about any of this of course. Even he knew that this wasn’t normal for any eight year old boy, so naturally she’d get him a psychiatrist and no kid wants to be the nut case who goes to therapy. No way.

Still though, that didn’t mean he liked it. Every time Danny closed his eyes he saw a laboratory full of bubbling chemicals and men in white suits. He was sitting in a wheel chair and wearing a hospital gown, but he wasn’t himself. He was a grown up, which was kind of cool. The scene always played out the same. He was wheeled into the lab and helped onto a cold metal table. Then the guys in white suits would grab needles and give him a whole lot of shots before he woke up.

On the way to the table, one guy is talking to him, and they always have the same conversation which played out one more time as Danny fell asleep again in time out.

"Are you sure about this, Dr. Fronter? If we do this, there is no going back."

"Dr. Yuan, what makes you think I want to go back? This will change the world, I hope, for the better. If all goes according to plan, I will once again be able to grow my mind, and possibly become one of the most brilliant men in history, a fate that that will not be exclusive to me. If this works, it will be a boon to mankind. We will bring about a new golden age."

"Maybe, but it’s a traumatic experience that could cause irrevocable damage to your brain. You might forget who you were, Dr. Fronter, and then we wouldn’t be the only ones starting from scratch."

"Dr. Yuan," Danny would respond impatiently, "your concern is touching, truly it is, but I am nearing the end of my life, and so that is quite simply a risk I am willing to take."

"Daniel Fronter!" Ms. Gadby called, "There is no sleeping in time out."

"Sorry, Ms. Gadby." he said groggily.

"No talking either." she said, "And don’t play with the carpet, it was just laid out over the Summer."

Danny did so anyway. It was the only thing to keep him from falling asleep, and he’d rather think about his dream that live it. The guy talking to him, Dr. Yuan, called him Dr. Fronter. That was his real name, minus the Doctor part. The weird thing is that he didn’t understand what the words he said meant some of the time. Silly words like "traumatic" and "exclusive" that belonged in a book, not real life. Well, a dream was a good place too. He probably made them up.

"Today, Class," Ms. Gadby said behind him, "We’re going to be writing a story about when we were really little. This will be the story of our first day of school, all the way back to kindergarten. If you went to preschool, you can write about your first day there. Daniel in the corner there may do it for homework." More snickers and giggling, "Now class, pull out your composition books."

The whole room was filled with the scraping of metal spiral bindings scraping across the metal insides of metal desks as the children did as they were told. Danny tried to think back to his first day of kindergarten. He had to walk to school holding hands with his older brother who died many years later in Korea. But that was only three years ago! Danny was only eight now, and he had no older brother that he knew of. He must have seen that moment in a movie somewhere or on tv. Besides, Korea didn’t sound like a real place to Danny, at least not like one he’d heard anything about.

But this didn’t feel like a bit from a movie. This felt real. He remember the warm sunlight and his hand in Richard’s. Richard. That was his brother’s name, Richard. He volunteered as soon as he was eighteen. Dad was so proud at first, and everyone was happy. But then war broke out in Korea. Daniel had escaped the draft solely by the grace of God, and it was during this time that he went to university to study chemical and biological sciences. He was devastated when he got the news that his brother had been killed in action. Richard had always been the kindest older brother anyone could have asked for. Any other boy of eight would have resented taking his five year old brother to school. But that was only three years ago.

Danny looked back and began to notice something different about his early school years. The roads weren’t so busy. Cars weren’t so fast and they really looked different. They were more box shaped in some cases. Some of them were big with large smooth curves over the wheels, and some were blockish with fins on the back. He remembered going to see a movie. That was different too. Richard snuck him into a grown up movie about gangsters. It had no color, and everything looked so bright and clear. Everything was different just a few years ago, even the way the stars on the American flag were arranged.

These weren’t dreams, and Danny wasn’t sleeping. These were memories. This wasn’t from a movie, or off of the tv, this was real life. He looked back one more time to prove that something was wrong. He tried to think of his mother in those times. She was young and beautiful. Her dark brown hair was tied into a bun behind her head. She was working in the victory garden, pulling carrots out of the ground for the stew that night. Her eyes were a light green, no, they were hazel. Yes, that’s what they were. He had those same eyes. But not his other mother. No, this woman looked nothing like the one he now called "Mom."

Daniel couldn’t remember more than one father. When he tried to think about those times he saw his mother with the hazel eyes sitting down, crying over a typewritten letter. No, wait. There was more about his father. Photos, also without color, of a man who looked familiar. He remembered another time, looking into the mirror and seeing a face almost like the one in the picture, but in color.

This was not normal, and Danny was scared out of his mind. He could remember this other life all the way up to last summer, but the more he tried, he couldn’t remember anything before that from this life. Before last summer, he had only one set of memories, enough to cover seventy five years. But he was only eight years old! He was in the third grade! None of this was possible!

"Danny?" said Ms. Gadby, "Are you alright?"

He started breathing heavily, in and out, in and out, trying desperately to control himself. His name was Danny Fronter. He was eight years old. His birthday was January twelfth of... the year was 2015 now, he was eight years old, he had to be born in 2007. That’s the only thing that makes any sense. But that’s not the number he kept coming up with.

"Oh my God." Ms. Gadby said, "Sally, your in charge for the next five minutes while I take Danny to the Nurse. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Ms. Gadby." Sally said quickly.

"Ha! Ha! Ha!" guffawed Scott, "Look at the spazz!"

"Scott, you’re on time out until I come back. Come on, Danny." Ms. Gadby said, gently lifting Daniel up from the floor, "It’s alright, Danny, I’m going to call your mom." and she carried him out of the room and into the hallway.

"Y-you can’t..." he said, "She died in 1983. She was coming to see me and my family when her plane crashed."

"Don’t talk now, Danny. You’ll be alright." She said, coming to the door of the school office which was thankfully propped open, "Nurse Maybloom!" she called as she walked in. Out popped a little old lady in a gray sweater and a little name tag reading NURSE, "This boy needs help. He’s breathing heavily and talking nonsense. I think he has a fever."

"I’ll run the diagnosis, Ms. Gadby, but thank you for bringing him in. I’ll take over from here."

Danny was carried into the nurse’s office and laid on one of the cots in there, still raving about his mother. "I was forty-three then, and I fought not to cry, I had to be strong for my little girl. I loved my mother so much," he choked out on the verge of tears, "but she loved her gramma just as much."

Danny cried in the way that a child cries. He held nothing back, he didn’t know how. The nurse came over with an electronic device in her hand, "Hold still, Danny. Breathe. Just breathe, Danny. Now hold still, can you do that for me? That’s better." He tried to stop shaking, and she dragged the device from one side of his forehead to the other. She clearly did not like what she saw. "Danny," she said, "We’re going to do this again. Can you stay still just a little linger for me, Danny?" He nodded slowly, uncertainly, and stayed rigid for her, sniffing quite a bit as she ran the machine again, looking once more at the little screen on the back. It said 98.2° F, the same as before.

"Nurse?" he asked through stifled tears and sniffs, "What’s wrong with me?"

She looked at him strangely, but then pulled herself back into her calm and reassuring manner saying, "Everything’s going to be alright, Danny. You just lay down and take a nap for now, okay?"

Danny nodded slowly and started to lay back down, resting his head on his arm and curling into a ball, clutching his legs with his free arm. It wasn’t long before he drifted back to sleep.

He woke up again in a hospital, only he was still himself this time. There was someone in front if him, a tall black man with a look of concern on his face. "Dr. Fronter?" he said, "Dr. Fronter, do you remember me?"

Danny didn’t know what to say and so answered honestly, "No." Even that one word felt like he’d climbed a mountain. He was so tired, so stiff and sore. The doctor in front of him changed his expression from one of anxiety to disappointment as he stood back from Danny’s bedside.

"He’s lost his memory." he said sadly to another doctor sitting behind him, "We lost."

"Hardly!" said the other man, who he recognized now as Dr. Yuan "Look at him, he survived the transition. That alone is enough to build our whole careers on. Using Dr. Fronter’s theories, we can become the biggest names in the medical community. We’ve successfully found the fountain of youth!"

"We’ve successfully turned the most brilliant scientific mind of the last century into a child. That’s what we’ve done. How do you propose we fix that?"

The conversation faded away and then back into focus, "We’ll enroll him in school, in the third grade. He can stay with his daughter. She’ll be about forty now."

Daniel blinked and he was in physical therapy, only to have it determined that he was in absolutely no need of it. He didn’t know why he would, but everyone else seemed to think it was a pretty big deal.

"Your name is Daniel Fronter." said Dr. Yuan, "Do you remember me?"

"Yes, Doctor," said Daniel calmly, "I do."

Daniel woke up once more in the cot in the nurse’s office, only this time it wasn’t any sort of dream. This was real life. But then, so were the dreams in a way. He sat up, swung his legs over the side and slid to the ground a foot below where his feet had been dangling as he started walking over to where the nurse was sitting talking on the phone.

"Yes, hello, Ms. Fronter?" she said, "I’m calling about your son, Danny. He’s been having a bit of a panic attack. He isn’t running a temperature, but it still seems very serious."

"It’s alright, Nurse Maybloom." he said calmly from behind, "I’m alright."

She was startled out of her wits for a second and turned around very quickly to face the little boy. "Let me speak to her." he said, "Please." She calmly handed the phone to him.

"Hello?" said a tinny voice on the other end. These were different too in the old days.

Danny held it to his ear and heard the voice of the woman he’d called Mom for the past three months, the voice of his grown daughter. "It’s alright." he said again, "I’m alright." and then added, "I know who I am."

 

---