Later that day, Lee is seated on the couch looking at the TV, but he is lost in thought. He is recapping his bike riding earlier and comparing it to his previous rides.

  He then notices that his reaction time was much faster. “Well, it wasn’t just my reaction; it was everything.” He thinks as he leans back, with his right arm crossing his chest and his chin supported on his left fist. “My reaction was faster, the speed I reached was faster too, but I didn't feel any wind resistance like before. Normally, I feel the wind suffocates me, but not this time.” He then looks down as he thinks clearly. “And that car; it was going so fast coming towards me, but then it was like time froze and I managed to calculate the best way to avoid it.” As Lee is so deep in his thoughts, everything around him falls into background noise.

  So, when Sue places a hand on his shoulder, he jumps startled. “Are you okay, son?” Lee blinks in confusion then nods. “I was calling you for a minute and you didn't responded.”

  “Sorry mom, I didn't hear you,” Lee says, then continues. “I was just thinking about my bike ride.”

  “Was it about almost getting hit by a car?” asks Kenji, standing behind Sue. “Someone was just here—the car driver—and he showed us the car's safety recordings.” Lee looks at his father, but before he can say anything, Kenji continues. “You came out of nowhere, Lee! The driver did not have time to react; not even the safety controls reacted in time.”

  Lee slightly tilts his head to the side. “What are the car's safety controls?”

  Sue and Kenji sigh in their heart as they look at one another and take a seat on the big couch; then Kenji continues. “Each car has a safety control that is always looking around the car, looking for objects, people, or animals. If it finds something, it will alert the driver; then the driver can continue or stop. Sometimes it’s nothing or the car won’t hit the object; if the driver, like before, is going straight and a child crosses in front, if the driver doesn't stop, the car will stop on its own.”

  “But this time, the car didn’t see you!” continues Sue when Kenji stops, as she knows that he is trying hard not to lash out due to how stressed he is. “Son, one moment there was nothing in front of the car; the next, you are on top of the road; then in three seconds, you are standing in front of the car. The gentleman thought he was seeing things because there was no damage on his car and no child around. He had to check the recordings to see what happened. It was supposed to take twenty seconds before you got near the car.”

  Lee raises his eyebrows. “Was I really that fast? Everything happened so slowly,” he says, but in his mind, he thinks. ”Well, it got slow when I saw the car.”

  Kenji nods. “Yes, you were! We just want to know. First, if you have any injuries?” Lee opens his arms and looks at them, then shakes his head. “Second, how did you not crush your bike?”

  Lee shrugs. “I was going down the road on my bike, then I saw the car and that I had nowhere to go, but then I saw the statue of the old merchant with his cart.” Sue and Kenji nod, knowing that Lee is talking about the statue of a man pulling a wooden cart of old times; the statue of the cart has the foldable back door open and the man is bent over, picking up a box. “So as I saw that I had nowhere to go, I remembered the video from the hospital—the one with the children playing—so I used the cart statue and did the same as the children. I jumped over the car, turned the bike sideways, jumped against the wall of the shop, and went back to the road.”

  “You did what?” both Kenji and Sue ask, and then Sue continues. “Did you really do that, or did you imagine it?”

  “I did! You can see the bike's paint on the wall!” says Lee, having looked back after bouncing off the wall and seen the paint scratch left behind.

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  Kenji sighs deeply. “No bike until the end of next week!” Kenji utters as he stands up and heads to the kitchen, but then halfway he turns around and asks rhetorically, “How fast do you think you had to be to do that?”

  Lee shakes his head. “I don’t know, but I was breathing fine even without the helmet! So I thought I was going slow and the car fast.”

  Sue joins Kenji in the kitchen as Lee gets back to his thoughts. Sue looks over and finds Lee back in the same position as before. Then, facing her husband, she asks, “Could he really have done it?”

  Kenji shakes his head. “I don’t know, but you saw the video; the car was barely moving. The driver did say he had been looking at the fruit stands when he looked up and saw Lee at the end of the road; then, after blinking twice, he was on top of his car.”

  Sue nods as she cuts the vegetables for dinner. “I know, but how can Lee move that fast and still breathe normally? In the video, I also saw that Lee had his head raised up, and if it really was that fast, how was he breathing?”

  Kenji shakes his head. “I never felt so sorry for not giving him a gift!”

  Sue chuckles. “You're talking about the camera to mount on the bike, the one he has pestered us about for months?”

  Kenji nods and hugs Sue from behind. “Yes, I could have bought it, but we promised that we wouldn’t spoil them.” He then moves Sue's long hair to the side and plants soft kisses on her neck.

  Sue shivers with pleasure. “Stop that! I have a knife in my hands and the kids can walk in.” Even though she asked Kenji to stop, she leans into his kiss touch.

  Kenji places his chin on Sue's neck and asks in a whisper, “Do you ever regret having taken Lee in?”

  This time, Sue's body shakes, not with pleasure but with shock at the question. “Never!” she utters, shaking her head. “He was one of the best choices that I made in my life.”

  “Really? What was another you did?” asks Kenji.

  Sue turns around and loops her arms around Kenji's neck. “The first one, since I met you, was accepting marrying you.” She finishes by kissing Kenji on the lips.

  Sakura, who was playing in her room, goes to Lee, but again he is unresponsive, so she walks away.

  Lee is jolted awake from his thoughts by a scream from Sakura; before his brain can process anything, his body reacts and he is heading to the kitchen where he sees the back of Sakura; then she turns around and heads back to Lee.

  “Yucky! Don’t go there, big brother; Mom and Dad are kissing,” says Sakura in disgust, waving her little hands in front of her face.

  Lee laughs and looks at Sakura as she passes by him; when he looks back up, he finds his parents at the kitchen’s doorway. Lee shakes his head and turns around, and accidentally, he speaks his thought. “I guess this is a case to say, ‘Get a room’, no?”

  The smiles on Sue and Kenji freeze, having heard Lee's words; then they look at one another as they retreat back into the kitchen. Sue is the first to breaks the silence. “Since when does Lee speak English so well?”

  Kenji shakes his head, still in shock. “He sounded almost like a proper English; there were no traces of a Japanese accent!”

  Sue leans against the counter. “We need to keep an eye on him. Maybe he did get affected by the test failure.” Kenji looks at Sue, waiting for her to continue. “First, he says he feels like an outsider in his body; then the incident with the bike, bike that he wouldn’t ride without putting his helmet on first; now this?” She finishes, pointing at the kitchen door. “Not to mention how fast he did his homework.”

  “What are you thinking? That Lee's soul somehow got swapped with someone else?” asks Kenji.

  Sue shakes her head. “No, isekai only happens in anime, and they never mention anything about it; they know exactly who and what they are.” She then takes a step forward and hugs Kenji. “I was thinking more that the machine was connected to the internet; some information might have been accidentally and forcefully downloaded into his mind. And if so, who knows what people publish online that has been dumped in his mind.”

  Kenji hugs Sue to comfort her. “If that happened, we just have to hope that he is capable of staying in the righteous path, and it’s up to us to show him that path.”

  “Mom, Dad,” calls out Lee from the kitchen door in Japanese. “I’m hungry; will dinner take much longer?”

  Sue looks around the kitchen, at the half-cut vegetables, then at the door. “Why are you talking behind the door?”

  Lee steps into the kitchen. “Because I didn't know if you were kissing again,” he says with a smile.

  “You little rascal.” Says Sue trying not to smile. “I was going to make some beef chow mein, but with so many distractions. Why don’t we just order Pizza today?”