DON’T GET INVOLVED WITH THE GIFTISTS.
Just let me know if you’ve heard anything and what you’ve been up to. I’ll check my email every day. There are computers here, woohoo!
Miss you.
Chrys
I hit send and then pull the phone out of my pocket. I turn it on.
It’s already at 68% and it’s been off this whole time.
I type out a text to Ron that says, “Check your email. No charger so I keep phone off.”
I send it and stare at it for a couple seconds.
“Yeah cuz you forgot your charger dingus. I’ll check,” pops up from Ron.
Laughing, I power down the phone. Looking back, I should have taken the charger but in that moment, it was the last thing I on my mind.
I open a new tab and type “news about gifted” in the search bar. Just like old times. I find myself doing it on impulse.
As I press enter, the door opens. I snap my head in that direction, my body tense and my breath held.
Ana Maria walks in, holding that sea slug plushie in one arm. Her hair drapes over the backpack on her back and down over her shoulders, ending just near her knees.
I release my breath slowly.
She closes the door behind her and sits down at the computer next to me with a huff.
“The kids in my cabin are so annoying!” she says, taking off her backpack and putting it down on the floor. “They keep asking me to heal all their dumb little cuts and bruises. They’re acting just like the idiots back home. I thought things would be different here.”
“Yeah, well, reality doesn’t usually live up to expectations, kid,” I say.
“Why do they hurt themselves so much anyway?” she says.
I shrug. “Because they’re kids?”
“You know, they say you killed that boy.”
“I didn’t.”
“Can I stay in your cabin instead? I heard there’s an extra bed there.”
“Uh… which cabin are you in now?”
“Two.”
“Jeez, Li put you in Adrien’s spot?”
“Elise did. She said the other cabins are full besides ten, but there’s no adult supervisor in there so she put me in two. But I mean, you’re practically an adult.”
“Look, no offense, but I’m not a huge fan of kids. I don’t have the patience to watch a kid all day.”
“Well luckily for you, I don’t need much watching.”
“There are two boys in my cabin.”
“So? There are two boys in mine too—three, if you count the supervisor, James. Come on, please? I can’t be with those kids. They’re so annoying!”
“Whatever. I don’t know. Ask Li about it.”
She beams. “Awesome sauce.” She leans over to look at my computer screen. “Whatcha doing?”
I sigh. “Just reading the news.”
I look at the search results. The number one result says, “Gifted girl missing in Utah.”
I click on it.
“Not that one!” Ana Maria says, holding down the power button on my computer.
The screen goes black.
I groan. “Will you leave me alone please? You’re annoying me.”
Ana Maria shrinks back in her chair.
I instantly regret yelling at her. The way she talks, sometimes I think of her almost as my peer, or maybe even someone older than me. But really, she’s just a kid.
I turn the computer back on and wait for it, fidgeting with my hands under the table.
“Don’t read that one,” she says quietly.
“I already know it’s about you. That’s why I want to read it,” I say.
“You know?” she says.
“Yeah, I read an article about you a couple weeks ago, the wonderful ‘healer girl.’”
She looks down and holds her plushie tighter. “I didn’t tell my parents I was leaving.”
“That’s probably for the best. I mean, if you told them, do you really think they would have let you leave? I didn’t tell anyone I was leaving either.”
“Do you think there’s an article about you?”
I shrug, but actually I know the answer. It’s one of the things I always look up too. I look up me and Ron’s real names plus “missing.” Nothing ever comes up.
“Do you regret leaving?” Ana Maria asks.
“No. Do you?”
“I don’t know…”
“Do you believe all that stuff? What your church says about you being a blessing from God and stuff?”
“A blessing?” She puts her sea slug on the keyboard and then turns back to me. “It’s a load of bologna. I’m not the only one who’s gifted. If my gift is a blessing then logically, shouldn’t your gift—and everyone else’s gifts—be blessings too? Frankly, I can’t see how killing people or making plants grow or reading people’s minds are blessings. Plus, Li can remove gifts. I mean, if gifts are such a blessing, why create one that can remove that blessing?”
“Maybe only certain gifts are blessings and the others aren’t, hence the need for Li’s gift,” I say.
“But how is one to determine which are blessings and which aren’t?”
I laugh. “I don’t really know. By the way, making plants grow—is that someone’s gift or were you just making that up?”
“That girl in my cabin—Yumi, I think?—it’s hers.”
“Oh the girl with the pigtails?”
She nods. “She says she can also understand them. Plants, I mean. She says when she steps on grass, she can hear them screaming.”
“Oh my god. That sounds…”
“Awful?”
“Yeah.” I turn to the computer screen, forgetting that I was waiting for it. “Anyway, I’m going to read the news, okay? I need to catch up. So you, uh, I don’t know—find something to do. Do whatever you came in here to do before you saw me.”
She sighs. “I was just going to watch YouTube. But I want to keep talking. I never get to talk to anyone! Everyone always just comes to me when they need something healed.”
I look over at her. She’s pouting.
“Yeah, well,” I say, “it seems like you had an interesting conversation with Yumi about her gift. You could go talk to her some more.”
She huffs. “That’s only because she asked me if I can heal plants.”
“Can you?”
“No. I can’t heal anything. My body can. All I can do is transfer wounds to myself so my body can heal it. I can’t transfer plant or other animal wounds. They’re different from human wounds.”
“Oh, so that’s what you meant about hurting yourself?”
“You remember that?”
“It was just this morning.”
“Yeah but I mean, no one ever really listens to what I say.”
“I’ve been listening to you. I remember everything you said. Even that.” I point at her sea slug on the keyboard. “And how it’s a sea slug.”
She smiles. “Are you interested in hearing more about sea slugs?”
“Sorry, but not really, no.”
She frowns. “Okay…”
“Listen, it’s nice talking to you and all, but I really need to read the news and do some research for the investigation.”
“Right. The investigation.”
“So why don’t you go talk to Li? You can ask her about switching cabins.”
She jumps up out of her chair. “Good idea.”
She puts on her backpack and hugs her sea slug to her chest. “See you later, in our cabin!”
She giggles and leaves.
I sigh. She’s going to be a lot to handle, but maybe Remington can keep her busy. He seems chatty too, and good with kids.
I look back at the computer. I open up the web browser and type in “Bluewa
ter Oregon gifted” and press enter.
Chapter 17
Ron heads past the pool table, bringing the glass of Coke with her. The guys standing around there finally seem to notice her and look at her like she’s an alien from another planet, but they don’t say anything so she walks past them coolly. She looks out the window, taking a deep swig of her drink.
Carl and those other guys are standing around Carl’s motorcycle. Besides the motorcycle, there’s just one truck parked outside of the bar.
Carl gets on his bike without a helmet, and speeds off. The others start walking in the direction of Iris and Giselle’s place. Ron watches them until they’re out of view.
She drains the glass and brings it to the bar.
“Thanks for the drink,” she says to him.
He nods and takes the glass.
She goes out the door in the direction she saw the guys go. She can hear them talking loudly from here and see their shadowy figures walking past Iris and Giselle’s store now. They turn in between two houses on the left, away from the store.
Ron walks a little faster to catch up, but tries to make it look like she isn’t in a hurry, in case someone sees her and gets suspicious. No one else is out, but someone could be looking out of their window.
When she reaches the two houses the guys walked between, she pauses and sticks just her head out to see.
The pathway is lit up because of the lights on in the two houses. She doesn’t see the group of guys but she can still hear them talking, not well enough to pick out any words. They must be getting farther.
Ron walks through and scans the area. She hasn’t been this way before and frankly, she kind of thought that the town only had a row of buildings around one main road. But now, she can see that there are two more roads back here—a larger one that’s parallel to the main road, and a narrow one that leads from where she is and cuts through the bigger road at a diagonal to the right. The buildings are more sparse and disorganized here, like they were built wherever the owners pleased and then they tried to make roads later.
The streets are empty and many of the houses here don’t have any lights on, so it’s significantly darker.
Their talking sounds like it’s coming from straight ahead, rather than to the sides of her, so she heads up the diagonal road as carefully, but also as quickly, as possible.
Just as she reaches where the diagonal and big roads intersect, she hears a door slamming and the talking stops. She stops too, straining to hear something else. All she can hear is the distant sound of a TV running in a house somewhere nearby.
The talking doesn’t start up again. Did they go inside?
She continues up the diagonal road, where it gets even darker. Holding her breath, she walks up the entire road, which only takes a couple minutes. It ends at the forest, which surrounds the town. Releasing her breath, she looks around. Where could they have gone? This small road only holds two houses, one on each side of the road, but both of the lights are off and she doesn’t see Carl’s motorcycle anywhere.
“Stop it!” a man’s voice screamed from somewhere in front of Ron. It was muffled but it sounds like it came from the forest.
Ron peers into the forest. There isn’t any visible trail but she thinks she sees a light up ahead. She puts her foot out, feeling the ground to make sure she can step there and enters the forest.
Her heart pounds in her chest as she approaches the light, every crunchy leaf and snappy twig she steps on making her stop in her tracks. She hopes no one is outside because if someone is, they’d hear her coming from a mile away.
Finally, she reaches a small, square log cabin. The light coming from the windows is dim and yellow, like candlelight perhaps. Parked in front is Carl’s motorcycle. How did he even get it here? Maybe he rode to the end of the diagonal road and then walked the bike through the forest, but Ron doesn’t see any obvious path that he could have taken to get here from the road.
Luckily, no one is outside, but she doesn’t hear any sounds coming from inside either.
She goes into the clearing that surrounds the cabin and creeps over to the window. It’s open. Her body against the wall, she looks in so only one eye is visible.
No one.
All she sees in the square room is a futon sofa that’s pulled out so it’s a bed, blanket and pillows strewn about messily on the futon, a tiny kitchen off to the right, and gas lanterns hanging on the walls.
“Let me go!”
It’s the same man’s voice from earlier, and very close but still a bit muffled. The desperation in it sends a chill through Ron’s spine.
She skirts the wall of the cabin and peers through the window on the adjoining wall. From here, she can see the kitchen better. There’s another window on the opposite wall in the kitchen. There isn’t a window on the wall the futon bed is leaning up against.
Ron continues around the cabin to the back. There’s light here too, coming from the ground. She walks over to it. It’s a half-buried window.
She kneels on the ground and looks inside with just half her face. It’s a basement with wires and circuits and various other bits of technology Ron doesn’t recognize all along the walls on tall shelves. In the center of the room is a mattress on the floor and someone seems to be laying in it but is covered head to toe in a thin sheet that looks like it’s supposed to be white but hasn’t been washed in years.
Dead?
No. The sheet is rising and falling where the person’s chest would be.
A hefty black cord snakes its way from under the sheet to a laptop on the table in front of the mattress. Carl is sitting in a folding chair at the table typing furiously with a large pair of white headphones on his head. The other guys are huddled around him, eyes glued to the screen and jaws dropped open.
A white bottle and soaked rag sit on the floor next to the mattress.
“What is that? Some kind of monster?” one of the guys around Carl says.
No one answers him.
Ron moves away from the window. She wants to look in again, but she knows if she does, she probably won’t stop looking. She’s already lucky no one has seen her yet. The longer she stays here, the more she risks getting caught.
She gets up and walks back to where she entered the forest. As she walks back to Iris and Giselle’s, she can’t get the image of what she saw in that basement out of her mind.
That person under the sheet. It’s probably a man since she didn’t see any breasts contouring the sheet. And earlier, those screams she heard. Who else could that have been except the sheet guy?
They’re holding someone hostage, and they knocked him out somehow. And what if that man is gifted and they’re running experiments or something on him?
In that case, Carl might not be as delusional as Ron thought.
Chapter 18
Ron wakes up to a knock on her door. She rolls over and opens the flip phone, which is charging next to her.
11:11 AM.
A small part of Ron wants to laugh at the coincidence of the string of ones. But the larger part of Ron—the groggy part—just groans. She had gone straight home and to bed after following Carl and his guys, and got a decent amount of sleep too, but somehow she still feels like she didn’t sleep at all.
She isn’t sure if her heart is racing because she was woken up suddenly, or because of the dream she had. She only remembers snippets of it and even those are quickly fading away. What she does remember is that she was back in the foster home sitting at the dinner table, Mary screaming at her, calling her big and stupid, and Chrys or the other kids nowhere—just her and Mary. Ron hated being alone with Mary.
Another knock.
“Come in,” Ron says, sitting up in bed and covering her legs—she was sleeping in her underwear and a tank—with the itchy quilt.
Giselle opens the door and walks in wearing her pajamas,
a white camisole dress. She leaves the door open. She sits on the edge of the bed facing Ron so that the right side of her body is visible, most notably her thigh thick with burn scars.
“Sorry about yesterday,” she says.
“It’s fine.” Ron yawns. “And you were right. We shouldn’t get Carl involved.”
Giselle turns her body more towards Ron, a cautious but hungry look on her face. “Why do you say that?”
For once, the pure, unadulterated truth would be perfect. As much as Ron enjoys concocting lies, it’s a relief to tell the truth. It’s so much easier after all.
“Do you know if anyone is gifted in this town?” Ron says.
“Most everyone in this town hates the gifted. They wouldn’t be welcome here. But it’s not like we can tell who is and isn’t gifted.” Giselle shrugs. “So I guess it’s possible there could be. Why? Did you see someone?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I think it’s pretty likely they’re gifted, but I don’t think this person is here willingly.” Ron looks over at the dolls on the dresser, remembering that man’s screams. “Last night, I spoke to Carl at the bar. He seemed like a real ass so I decided not to ask him for help. He mentioned having ‘something important to do’ so I followed him to some sort of cabin in the forest.”
“Yeah, that’s where Carl lives. A bit in the forest down Gravel Road.”
“Did you know he has a basement?”
She shrugs. “I’m not surprised. Everyone ‘round here does.”
“It looks like he’s holding someone hostage down there. Someone gifted, I think.”
Giselle turns her whole body to Ron now, lifting her legs onto the bed and sitting cross-legged. Ron notices she’s wearing baby pink panties and looks away quickly, back at those creepy dolls.
She keeps her eyes there as Giselle says, “What does this person look like?”
Ron shakes her head, meeting Giselle’s gaze again. “No clue. He was under a sheet. But not dead. I don’t know why they covered him like that.”
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