Beheld

by Alex Flinn

  How did we get home? “I don’t know. I have my own travel documents, from the old lady at the War Office, but you . . . ?” I looked at Phillip.

  “Check your pockets,” Kendra said in the mirror.

  I did, and I found Phillip’s passport and all the documentation we needed.

  And so we returned to London, wrapped in each other’s arms and planning for our future. “I’d still like to take you to Paris,” Phillip said as we snuggled on the train. “Perhaps we will be able to go someday, when this cruel war is over.”

  “In the meantime,” I said, “since we can go out in the daylight, perhaps you can take me to Regent’s Park.”

  “I will,” he said. “But first, I will take you home, to our home.”

  But the best of all surprises awaited us when we reached my parents’ apartment. I expected to see only my father there, for my mother and sisters had said they were going to live with Aunt Lydia. But when I knocked on the door, it was opened by another man, tall and gaunt and far younger than my father.

  “Jack!” I said, and fell to embracing him. “Jack!”

  “It was the strangest thing,” he said. “Two days ago, I was in a Nazi prison camp. Then, yesterday, I was free and walking along Whitehall. I went into the War Office. I was worried they’d think I was a deserter, but strangely, they seemed to know I wasn’t.”

  After I introduced Jack to Phillip, I said, “So many odd things have been happening.” I preferred to wait to tell Jack the whole story. “Haven’t they, darling?”

  “Yes,” Phillip said. “Yes, they have, my love. But happy things.”

  “Yes, happy things.” To Jack, I said, “You must come to see us, at our home. I am a grown-up woman with a house now.”

  Jack laughed. “I cannot imagine that. I just remember the silly girl who laughed because Ethel and Esther would not share their dolls.”

  At that moment, a man who had been sitting on the sofa cleared his throat.

  “Oh!” Jack said. “How rude of me. I found a friend when I was at the War Office.” He gestured to the man, tall and handsome, with dark-auburn hair.

  “I’m sorry. I hadn’t seen you. Jack, introduce me to your friend.”

  “Grace, this is James Brandon. He was the bravest man in our unit, saved hundreds of lives in battle, volunteered for every dangerous mission, and he’s planning to go back for more. Brave as he was, you’d have thought he had a death wish.”

  James laughed. “Perhaps I’m immortal.”

  “It would explain a lot,” Jack said. “James, this is my baby sister.”

  “And my husband, Phillip.” I squeezed Phillip’s hand, and he smiled.

  There was a knock at the door, and I ran to get it. It was Kendra. “Oh, Kendra! He is back! He is back!”

  “I thought I’d see you here.” She was carrying a mince pie. “Your father said you and your Phillip were back, and I thought I’d just . . .” She stopped, and the pie nearly slipped from her hands.

  I caught it. “Kendra, are you all right?”

  “James?” Her voice was a whisper.

  “Kendra? Is that you?”

  PART 4

  Kendra Speaks

  “Yes.” I was trembling. “Yes.”

  “I have looked for you for so long,” he said.

  His hair was shorter than I remembered, likely a product of being a soldier, but still the same copper color. He never truly changed.

  “Not long enough,” I said. “I found you once, in London. About to be married.”

  He took my arm and pulled at it. “Perhaps we should talk out in the hallway.”

  Once out of earshot of the others, he said, “Aye. I was once married, for a time. For forty years’ time. She was a mortal, and I had to watch her age and die. I used magic to pretend I was doing the same thing too, while folks marveled at my longevity. Poor Lucy—sweet woman. She never knew our life together was a lie. A man gets lonely when he doesn’t find the woman he loves. But I learned it was just as lonely to be with someone who doesn’t understand. Poor Lucy has been dead nearly a hundred years. Our son has been gone for more than fifty.”

  I knew what it was to be lonely. I had not lacked for male companionship either in that time, but I wanted to marry someone who would be with me for eternity. I wanted to marry James. I nodded. “And since then . . . ?”

  “No one. I have been waiting for my equal, my darling, my mirror image.”

  I didn’t quite know whether to believe him, but a moment’s thought told me I should. “So we can be together forever? And never be alone?” I could wait no longer. I threw myself into his arms and kissed him.

  He kissed me back, and in his arms, I found every bit of the passion, the danger, but also something else that I had never had in Salem. Safety. I was safe. No one was hunting us. We could be together.

  “Yes, darling, after the war is over, we can be together.”

  “After the war?” I drew back from him.

  “I’m off on another tour in two days’ time, this time to France.”

  “But why?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “It’s a theory I have, that someone who has been given the dubious gift of immortality, as I have, should use it for good. I’ve enlisted in every war, always fighting on the side of good. I’m a paratrooper, and nothing can kill me. I could be the one to get Hitler.”

  I had to admit that this was a worthy goal. I pushed back in my mind the idea that something could happen to him. Of course he would survive a war where people were stabbing one another with bayonets, but planes could explode in a ball of fire.

  “You have two days?” I pressed my lips together to keep them from quivering. I had only just found him. It wasn’t fair.

  “I leave Tuesday.”

  “Well, then.” I kissed him, swallowing my protest. “We’d better make good use of our time.”

  We bid our good-byes to Phillip and Grace and went to walk along the Thames, as I had dreamed of doing so long ago.

  “My first war was the American Revolution,” he said as we strolled together in the light of the slivered moon. London was dark, and no one was out, but we had nothing to fear. “I wasn’t involved in the Seven Years’ War. I didn’t quite understand what that one was about.”

  “I see. And which side were you on, in the Revolution?”

  “Oh, the American side. I was an American then. I fought in the Battle of Saratoga, along with Benedict Arnold. Nice fellow.”

  The uniform. The tricorne hat. That was when I had first seen him in the mirror!

  “You must have been handsome in your uniform,” I said.

  “I don’t know about that.” He laughed.

  “I do.”

  We were passing the Tower of London now. Though it was unlit, I could see it in the moonlight. I was at the exact spot where James had stood that day I had seen him in the mirror. James squeezed my hand, seeming to know this.

  “Benedict Arnold is commonly viewed as a traitor, is he not?” I asked.

  “Oh, he was a traitor,” James said. “He would have surrendered West Point to the British. But in the Battle of Saratoga, he was a great hero. The Americans would not have won it without him, and that was the battle that started their winning the war. It was only later he went bad. I was sorry for it. But people have reasons for what they do, I suppose.”

  I nodded. No one with my history in Salem, with my history of history, could doubt that people did strange things.

  Do you have to leave? I wanted to ask, but I didn’t.

  “What next?” I asked instead. I would be waiting for my soldier, just like all the other girls. That wouldn’t be that bad. That is what I told myself.

  “Next was the Franco-American War.”

  “Oh!” He must have been there, when I was looking for him all that time. “Was that how you happened to come to Europe?”

  “Yes. And then, the Crimean War, and the Spanish-American War. Oh, but before that, I fought in the Civil War. I was b
ack in America by then. Over fifty thousand men died at Gettysburg. I was one of the lucky ones.”

  “You were a wizard,” I said, kissing him. “But I am sure you were very brave.” I remembered how brave he had been for me in Salem.

  “A man can be brave when he has nothing to lose,” he said, “though, even then, I had hope that I might find you.”

  This time, I did say my mind. “Then why are you leaving when you finally have?”

  “Because I said I would. If only I had but known, my darling.”

  “But—”

  He kissed me. “This war will be a minute in our lifetimes. We have centuries to spend together.”

  We went back to my flat then and spent two days together, reminiscing and planning our future and kissing and more, before it was time for him to ship out. On that day, I handed him a mirror and explained how to use it.

  “Look for me,” I said.

  “I will,” he said, tucking it into his duffel bag.

  I did not go with him to the dock. I did not want to see him leave again, as I had seen him fade from view that night in Salem. But we spoke sometimes, though often he could not contact me for fear of being seen. And I wrote to him every day. Sometimes, he wrote back.

  But then the contact stopped. His letters stopped too. When I asked to see him, I saw a battlefield, but I could not pick him out.

  Had he been burned alive? My James? Or had he simply lost the mirror?

  In 1945, I left London to go to the United States. It was peacetime, and I would start a new life for myself. One with no hope of James. I stopped looking for him. If he was alive, if he wanted to find me, he would look. I lived in New York City for a time, because it is a good place for those in hiding. But, eventually, I settled in Miami. Miami is a place for those with nothing to hide, and I realized that is what I was.

  I enrolled in school like the obsolete teenager I was. That was how I met many friends, including a boy named Chris, who thought himself an ugly duckling.

  1

  Amanda Lasky Is a Badass

  Miami, Florida, present day

  This is the story of Amanda and me. How we met, how we became friends, how we stayed friends, and how we stopped being friends. Hopefully, it will have a happy ending.

  Like the stories my mom read me when I was a kid.

  When I was little, my mom put me to bed with stories every night. Her favorite was The Ugly Duckling, which was about a young duck who suffered physical and emotional abuse at the hands of his duck peers and other barnyard animals alike because he was so ugly. But when he grew up, it turned out that he was really a beautiful swan.

  As you might have guessed, Mom had always wanted a girl. Since she got two boys, she was big on helping us explore our feminine sides. My brother, Matt, was having none of it, so I got to be the sweet one.

  At the time, I thought the ugly duckling story was just a story, like the kid who went where the wild things were, or the one about Sam, who rightly rejected green eggs. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized it was more than that. Really, it was Hans Christian Andersen reaching across the centuries with a hand pat and an “It gets better” to homely kids everywhere.

  That realization started on the first day of kindergarten.

  I didn’t go to preschool. Maybe Mom was overprotective, or maybe she just liked having me around. So it wasn’t until the first day of kindergarten that I realized I was kind of an ugly duckling.

  That was also the first day I met Amanda Lasky.

  And the first time I learned that Amanda Lasky was a badass.

  I didn’t cry that day when Mom dropped me off at school. This was partly because my dad had told me, before he left for work, that only girls and babies cried, and partly because my mother had bought me a Pose and Stick Spider-Man. She said I could take it to school as long as I didn’t cry and promised to put Spidey in my backpack when the teacher said it was time to work.

  The Pose and Stick Spider-Man was possibly the most awesome toy ever made. It was soft, with wires in its arms to make it poseable and suction cups in its feet so you could hang it on walls. I’d gotten one the Christmas before, but I’d played with it so much and stuck it to the refrigerator and waved it around and hit stuff with it and fought about it with Matt, and eventually, Spidey’s arms came out of their joints and the wire started protruding through so it was kind of dangerous, and my mom had to throw it out so I wouldn’t lose an eye. I had cried then, quietly in my bedroom, so my dad and Matt wouldn’t hear, but anyway, I was really happy to get a new one.

  I was sitting at the table with my name, Christopher B., on it. A lot of kids had missed the memo about not crying. There were so many of them, and they moved around too fast for me to count, but it seemed like about a third of them were crying, and half of those were boys. The chair I sat on was cold and hard, but just my size, and I was sitting, sort of hugging Spidey, when a blond boy, who was bigger than I was and looked as old as Matt, came and took the seat by mine. I couldn’t read his name at the time because I couldn’t read. But now, I know it was Nolan Potter.

  “Why’d you bring a doll?” he asked.

  At first, I didn’t think he was talking to me. But when he repeated his question, and no one else answered, I realized he was.

  “It’s not a doll.” I hugged it. “It’s Spider-Man.” I couldn’t believe anyone wouldn’t know the difference.

  “Let me see it,” Nolan said, and without waiting for my okay, he yanked Spidey by the arm.

  “Hey! Don’t do that! You’ll break it!” I looked around for the teacher, but she’d been swallowed up by a tidal wave of kids and parents.

  “I just want to see it. You need to learn to share.”

  “No, I don’t. Stop it.” I tried to hold Spidey’s elbow with my fingers, to keep the wire from coming out, but Nolan’s hands were twice the size of mine, and he crushed my fingers. “Ow!”

  I felt my eyes get hot and hurty. I didn’t want to cry, not just because I’d promised I wouldn’t, but also because I knew Dad and Matt were right. Only babies cried. I didn’t want to be a baby, especially since a quick look around told me I was the shortest, smallest boy there. I was smaller than some of the girls. A little runt like the ugly duckling. I looked down so no one could see my eyes getting red, but I was also slowly realizing that the only way to keep Spidey’s arms from being ripped from their sockets on the very first day was to let go. I was about to do that when suddenly Nolan lost his grip, and I was tossed back, almost falling out of my chair.

  “Let go, Nolan!” a voice said. “Stop being a bully!”

  I looked up, hugging Spidey close. In front of me stood a red-haired girl. She was one of the girls who was bigger than me—a lot bigger. Several inches taller and what my mom would call “heavyset,” she’d apparently just karate-chopped Nolan, because he was holding his arm like it hurt.

  “Ouch! Why don’t you get a Barbie, Amanda?” Nolan reached for Spidey again.

  Amanda got between Nolan and me. “Why don’t you get a Barbie, Nolan, or steal one from a three-year-old girl? If you keep taking other people’s stuff, I’ll tell your dad, and he’ll spank your butt.”

  “He won’t care,” Nolan said.

  Amanda shrugged. “Then go ahead and take it, I guess.”

  I hustled to get Spidey into my backpack, but I was sort of amazed Amanda had said butt in school.

  Nolan sat down. “Aw, forget it.”

  “Good.” Amanda took the seat on my other side, where the name tag had a ladybug sticker and a name that started with A. She said, “My name’s Amanda. What’s yours?”

  “Toph—I mean, Chris,” I said, remembering that Matt had also said that Topher was a wimpy nickname that would make me have no friends. My name tag said Christopher, so I could say either. “Chris Burke.”

  I shared my oatmeal scotchies with Amanda at lunch. There were assigned seats in the cafeteria, but I’d have sat with her anyway. I didn’t know anyone else.
/>   “These are good cookies,” Amanda said. “What are they?”

  “Oatmeal scotchies. My mom makes them.” I offered her another one. “I think the recipe’s on the bag of butterscotch chips.”

  I knew it was, because Mom and I had made the cookies, but for some reason I didn’t want to admit that.

  “Oh.” Amanda chewed the second one. “My mom doesn’t make cookies.”

  “Does she work?”

  Amanda took a second bite and shrugged. “She doesn’t live with us.” She gestured at Nolan, who was picking on some other kid, the second-smallest kid in class. “Nolan lives next door to me. He thinks he’s tough because he’s the best hitter on the team, but my dad says I’ll be better than him by the time the season starts.”

  “Oh.” When Amanda had said “best hitter,” I thought she’d meant fighting-type hitting. Now I realized she meant baseball. “You play baseball?”

  “I used to. But they said I had to switch to softball because I’m a girl. It’s so unfair, because I’m better than most of the boys. Dad says that’s what they don’t like.” She took a third cookie without asking. I didn’t care. As usual, Mom had given me way too much food, hoping I’d bulk up, like Dad said.

  “Aren’t you one of the best on the softball team too?” I asked.

  She snorted like that was obvious. “Do you play?”

  “Softball?”

  “Baseball. You don’t have to be big to play. Lots of smaller kids are fast.”

  I shrugged. I sort of wanted to play, and my dad would have loved it. But he’d probably be too busy with work ever to practice with me. Matt only played with his DS, and my mother wasn’t into sports. I knew there were tryouts, and I didn’t want to be the worst.

  “You could come over, and my dad would practice with us.”

  “Really?” It was like she’d read my mind. “You could come over to my house and . . . make oatmeal scotchies with me and my mom.”

  “Cool.”

  From then on, like oatmeal and butterscotch chips, Amanda and I were hard to separate.

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