Spiritdell Book 1 Read online

  “Zan, your power's valuable,” Julie says. “I have nothing as good as that, whatsoever. If you wanted to give your power to me, I'd take it. I'd probably even pay you.”

  James starts the engine and drives the Jeep to the road exiting the lake. We spend the next half hour talking about ways to monetize my power, but most of them are pretty evil and involve extortion.

  * * *

  We're back on the highway now, getting closer to civilization, and my cell phone has a signal. Julie seems to not hate me, so I figure I'm safe asking her for Austin's number.

  “Julie-ee-ee-ee,” I say. “Could I bug you for Austin's phone number?”

  “Where?” she responds. “Who? Don't you want to call Raye-Anne and talk about your great night together? About all the … sexy sex you were having?”

  “Raye-Anne? No. I went home with Austin after your party. Austin. With the long hair, almost silvery-white. She has really beautiful hair.”

  “Who?”

  “I said. Austin. She's friends, or cousins, with one of your friends.”

  “I thought you hooked up with Raye-Anne Donovan.”

  “No, Raye-Anne has some … well, she has a dark side I didn't like the look of. Didn't you see? I left your party with Austin.”

  Julie pulls out her phone and scrolls through a list. “You mean Tina? Short for Austina?”

  “She said her name was Austin, but ... Austina, yeah, I guess that would be her!” I say brightly. “You have her actual number?” I grab for the phone, but she yanks it away.

  “You slept with Brain Tumor Girl?”

  I lean back in my seat, trying to process what Julie said. She said Austin is also Tina, and then she said something mean about her.

  “Just because she's cute and a blonde,” I say, “doesn't mean you can call her awful names.”

  “That name's not awful,” Julie says.

  James interjects with, “Actually, Brain Tumor Girl is the definition of awful.”

  “Yes,” I say. “I've heard you and your friends talking about each other. It's always Fatneck and Sadmachine and Stumpy. Who's Stumpy anyways?”

  “I'm Stumpy. They call me Stumpy,” she says.

  “Julie, you do know guys who are friends don't call each other mean names,” I say.

  Her voice getting shrill with agitation, she says, “Yes, you do so. You call James a jamtart and he calls you a nozzle, whatever that means.”

  “But that's to the face,” I say. “You can say anything to the face. You don't say it behind the back.”

  She crosses her arms across her chest. “Fine! Now that I know the rules for your boys' club, I'll try to follow them. Cut me some slack, okay?”

  The dash beeps and James grumbles to the Jeep, “Gas? Already? I don't understand, I just filled you up.”

  An image appears in my mind, as familiar as ... well, the back of my hand. “Around the next corner, on the right, there's that gas station. We'll stop there.”

  We round the corner and find the gas station, as though conjured. “You really have memorized this route,” Julie says. “You have some sort of photographic memory you're not telling us about? I don't remember this place, whatsoever.”

  James puts on the turn signal and we pull into a little gas station with no name, just a faded Orange Crush sign.

  “Julie,” James says slowly, as though negotiating a social minefield. “Why is Austin, or should I say Tina, called Brain Tumor Girl?”

  Julie turns to me with sad eyes. As the Jeep crunches to a halt on the gravel, the whole world stops, holding its breath. Julie's eyes tell me something is wrong.

  “Zan, I'm sorry,” she says.

  Something is very wrong.

  I want to punch something. I clench my jaw and wait for the punching feeling to pass, then say, “Just tell me. You're making it worse, dragging it out.”

  “She has an inoperable brain tumor,” Julie says. “For real.”

  I clench and unclench my fists in my lap.

  Austin. With her soft hair flowing all the way down to her waist, her perfect, creamy skin, and that laugh that's been stuck in my head since I first heard it. She's not the one who's sick; Julie must be mistaken.

  “No, she's totally healthy,” I say to James and Julie. James is also wearing the sad eyes, nearly identical to Julie's. Four sad, blue eyes peer into me. “Stop looking at me like that! I would have known if she was sick. It must be someone else. I'm talking about Austin, she was at the party.”

  “Yeah, in the dress with the stars,” Julie says, beginning to cry. James has watery eyes too, but Julie's tears are like nails being pounded into my heart.

  James turns off the engine and turns away. “Unreal,” he says.

  With the air conditioning off, the vehicle is insufferably hot. I have to get out. I have to get away. Now. The world is a blur.

  She's going to die, I think.

  “Shut up!” I yell. Blur. Everything's a blur.

  CHAPTER 10

  I'm running down the side of a mountain. James and Julie are calling my name, but I can't be held back by them. I need to find the river. I know there's a river here, because it feeds the lake. A jackrabbit hops across my path. I swear at the jackrabbit for taunting me.

  I trip over some rocks. I swear, out loud, at the rocks. Where is the water? Where is the river? I have to get there. I have to get to the water. Down, down the side of the mountain. I run faster. I have to go faster, I have to get away. The ground is rushing up to me and I'm falling, tumbling. Someone's hitting my head. Stop hitting me, I have to go.

  The mountain is a cruel entity, mocking me and pummeling me. Everything hurts. My eyes are piercing with pain and my lungs burn. Something trips me again, and I'm on my knees.

  Water? Where is the river? I need to be in the cool water.

  I look down at my hands, grasping handfuls of grass and dirt.

  It all stops. I'm staring at a screen that's blank, except for one cloud. I close my eyes. I can die right now, it's okay. I don't mind. It's okay.

  Why is this screen blank?

  My arm hurts.

  Why are people calling my name?

  “Zan!”

  “Zan?”

  Someone is crying. My hands are dirty and I'm rubbing them on my face. It feels good. The mud will staunch the tears and I can disappear into the earth.

  * * *

  The old woman says, “I'm a healer.” Her face is swollen and wrinkled at once. Deep lines at the sides of her mouth show two lifetimes of smiling.

  I don't remember smiling. Why does everything hurt?

  “You're in shock and you're dehydrated,” she says.

  “Am I in the hospital?” I ask.

  “No, dude, look around,” James says. “You're lying at the bottom of a ravine. You went batshit crazy and ran yelling out of the truck like a lunatic.”

  “I think you bumped your head,” Julie says.

  “Bumped?” I moan and roll my head slightly to the side. “Bumped may be an understatement.”

  The old woman spits on a handkerchief and wipes at my face. “Thank you for telling me about your gift,” she says. “It's very special to meet others with the second sight.”

  “You told her?” I say angrily to James. The hot sun is behind their heads and I can't make out anyone's expressions, except the old woman, who's kneeling next to me. She's kind, but she scares me.

  “You told me yourself,” the woman says. “You even asked me to put my finger in your belly button so I could see too. But the powers don't work that way, my dear.” She continues to clean my face with her spit-moistened handkerchief, like a mother cat.

  My brains hurt, but I like it here, at this hospital that looks like the woods. “The sighted can be sensitive to trauma,” she says to James and Julie.

  “He does freak out a lot,” James says. “Zan's got a bit of a reputation for overreacting, uh, emotionally.”

  I dig my hands into the grass, dimly aware of the pain in my fing
ers.

  “He's a very special boy,” the old woman says.

  James and Julie exchange one of their wordless twin looks, then grab me by the hands and pull me up. I do not care for this angle at all and try to lie back down, but they won't let me. “Five more minutes,” I say.

  “Tea,” the old woman announces. “There's nothing in this world that can't be made better over a cup of tea.”

  I spit some dirt out of my mouth and say, “My girlfriend with the inoperable brain tumor would beg to differ.”

  The old woman nods. “Good. You're back to reality. Though ... I don't know what you kids are calling things these days, but by the sound of it, she's not so much your girlfriend as she is a one-night stand. Or, a hook-up?” She turns to James and Julie. “Is that right, a hook-up?”

  My head's funny, like my skull's changed shape and my brain is being mashed into a pyramid. All the light in the world narrows to a tiny pinhole. In my mind, I watch Austin drinking from a glass of orange juice, her lips smiling around the edge of the glass. Now it's morning and she's throwing open the curtains in my bedroom, dust flying up in the sunshine. She's closing the door. She's gone.

  * * *

  What seemed like a mountain ravine when I was running down it is more of a semi-landscaped backyard. The old woman's ceramic garden gnomes give me accusatory looks as we walk up the hill, away from the trickling creek. The sun is hot overhead as we pass a small pine tree, lying sadly on its side, uprooted.

  “Was that from me?” I ask, but we all know I tore up the tree. I still have the mark of its thorny branches on my fingers, raw and bloody.

  Julie wraps one arm around my waist and assists me up the hill. I would tell her I'm fine—I can walk on my own—but her touch brings comfort. Even though I'm with three people, I'm so alone. I'm always so alone.

  We reach the top of the hill, and I'm impressed the old woman is still leading the pack. The climb has me winded, but she shows no signs of exertion.

  James and Julie's little blue Jeep is off to the side, therefore this house—no, this cottage—must be the back of the nameless Orange Crush gas station. The cottage is white, with dark wood accents, green-painted shutters, and wooden window boxes full of flowers. We've stopped here for gas dozens of times over the years, and I would have never guessed this fairy-tale-looking place was on the back. The building reminds me of those dolls you turn inside out by flipping the skirt to reveal an opposite creature—the wolf turns into Little Red Riding Hood, and so forth.

  “I'm Heidi,” the woman says to James and Julie. We all shake hands, and she invites us in for tea, and to get me cleaned up.

  Inside, we sit at a round, antique-looking pedestal table that wobbles when I put my bruised elbows on the edge. Julie swats my filthy elbows off the table and raises her eyebrows at my attire. My clothes look like the before photo for a laundry detergent commercial.

  When the woman, Heidi, gives us our tea in delicate, chipped cups, I miss my Gran so much, a breathless sob catches in my throat. I cough into my hand to cover, then ask for milk and sugar.

  Everyone's staring at me, and I wish they wouldn't. My mind is calm, but I feel like I'm slipping backward, slipping away from the world. “Did you say you have some sort of psychic ability?” I ask Heidi.

  “Well, I don't read tea leaves,” she says. “So this is regular tea from the grocery store, in case you're wondering.”

  “If you don't read tea leaves, what do you do?” Julie asks.

  James leans back in his chair, craning his neck to look around the inside of the cottage. He's tilted back on two legs of the chair when Heidi's hand darts out and whips him back upright. “Mind the chair, it's an antique,” she says.

  He reddens and apologizes.

  Heidi answers Julie, “I read the palms.” She turns to me and offers an empathetic look. “Zan, if you'd like, maybe I can see a way through your problem.”

  I don't remember telling her my name, but then again, I don't remember much of what happened by the side of the creek.

  Heidi extends her hand across the table to me. James and Julie are both quiet. Julie's tea cup chatters against the saucer, her hand trembling. My hands don't feel too stable, either. “Right now?” I ask Heidi.

  Heidi mutters something quietly and waves her hand over the table, then returns it to the spot just in front of me, open and waiting to read my palm—to look into me, and my secrets.

  I turn to James and Julie for support, but they're both staring straight ahead out the window, their faces bland. Snapping my fingers doesn't jar them out of their ultra-calm state.

  “None of us is getting any younger,” Heidi says. One of her teeth is gold. I want her to hug me, comfort me, but I think of wolves biting into me and I shiver.

  “My hands are still dirty, I should wash them again,” I say, but even as I protest, I'm already resting my hand in hers.

  A jolt goes through my arm, like I used to get whenever I stirred two pots at once on Gran's stove, before she got the ungrounded electrical plug fixed.

  Her voice stony, Heidi says, “She's terribly ill.”

  I yank my hand back as though stung. “Stop,” I say. “You're lying. You don't know anything.”

  Heidi slowly opens her wrinkled eyelids. There are little ridges on her eyes, where the white part meets the iris. “The long-haired girl you love left in the morning, just as the clock struck,” she says confidently.

  James and Julie continue to stare straight ahead, not even commenting.

  Heidi gestures to her open palm with her chin. A wave of surrender passes over me as I put my hand back in hers, then close my eyes. Her other hand clamps down on mine, snapping shut like a trap.

  * * *

  I'm in a black room, surrounded by stars. Heidi sits across the table from me, only she's younger. Her hair is brown, not gray, and falls in waves, moving like the ocean.

  “You didn't see any future for Austin,” Heidi says, inside this vision.

  “Right. I saw nothing.” My voice sounds big and angry, and small and pitiful at the same time.

  “Because she has no future. Not on this plane.” Heidi sways left and right, then the blackness splits in half along a horizon, and I realize this room has no walls. But of course. We aren't in a room at all. There's a sound, like a coastal storm, coming from her undulating brown hair, which is snaking around the base of my chair.

  “How long do I have?” I ask. “I want to spend every moment with her. Do we have the summer? Do we have a year?”

  “No.”

  “I hate all of this!” I yell. As the words emerge from my mouth, my voice becomes visible, red threads spraying from me. “It isn't fair!” The words, as red threads, wriggle into Heidi's undulating hair and disappear.

  My anger swirls around me, distorting reality—no—distorting the unreality. None of this is real. It's all a trick, a hoax.

  Heidi stands, towering over me like a redwood tree. Her face pulls further and further away until all I can see is the cloak she's wearing, flowing down from her and around me. Brown, coarse fabric piles up, pinning my arms to my sides, reaching around my throat, choking me. Now her hair and her cloak are as one, tightening.

  I call out to Heidi for help, but she's so far away. I catch a glimpse of her face, contorted into a frightening mask of evil.

  Oh, crap.

  I have no body here, but a chill registers anyway.

  A woman's voice whispers in my ear: She wants to take your power.

  I have to get away. I scream, but all that comes out is more red threads, thin as strands of fine hair. The word-threads fall back on my face in tangles.

  Instead of yelling with my mouth, I do so with my mind. GET OUT OF MY HEAD. The waves of Heidi's long brown hair around me loosen for an instant, then close in twice as tight.

  I feel revulsion at the idea of her holding my hand, touching me. Her spit. She used spit to clean my face, and now I can feel her saliva, all over my cheeks and forehead, burning like
acid. This is what dying is like when you don't pass away peacefully in your sleep. You think, over and over again, I guess I'm dying, I guess this is what it's like. And it isn't fair.

  GET. OUT.

  CHAPTER 11

  From deep within the vision I'm sharing with Heidi, I think of James and Julie, sitting across the table from me. Why aren't they waking me up, pulling me out of this? How much time has passed? I remember their glassy eyes. Did Heidi put them in a trance?

  Focusing my rage, I yell at Heidi again. GET. OUT. I may as well be yelling at a forest, for all I see of her is a thick, brown, gnarled tree trunk.

  There's a buzzing in my head, so I open my mouth to release the maddening hum, and bees come out. A gushing, endless stream of bees. They're flying through my teeth, through my cheeks, even.

  One stops at eye level and slows. Green body, ruby throat. They aren't bees, they're hummingbirds. He winks at me and flies up. More stream from my nostrils. They're bees and hummingbirds both, at the same time. I'm breathing them, deep in my lungs, vibrating.

  The air is hot with steam now. I breathe the steam in and it hurts like fire, like the time I tried smoking a cigarette. The vibration is growing, expanding, and pouring out of me. The clock is striking the half hour, the hour, the half hour, and I'm splitting in half. Now it's not just bees and hummingbirds, but giant crows, with greasy black wings.

  Everything. I'll hit her with everything I've got. The tree trunk begins to tremble.

  I hear Julie's voice, Julie crying. “You prick!” she's yelling. She's so far away, but I lock onto her. I lock onto Julie, who's yelling, “Again, you little pricks!”

  Something deep within pulls at me, zippering up, from my middle, like a hiccup. I close my mouth and open my eyes. Nothing changes. I open my eyes again. How are they still closed when I keep opening them?

  Julie lets out a string of curse words. I grab onto her words, as though they're a safety rope and I'm a man falling off the side of a mountain.

  With absolute focus, I hold onto Julie's curse and force my eyelids open.

  I'm back.

  Heidi's eyes are still closed. She's old again, maybe even older than before, and she's small.