by Brian Rowe
“Hmm?”
I just stared at her, having put off my question for a good twenty minutes or so. I couldn’t hold back any longer.
“Leese… what the hell was that?”
“What?”
“Those freakin’ karate moves! Duh!”
“Oh.” She laughed as she pulled the 4Runner into the left hand lane of the freeway. “Did your wife impress you, Cam?”
“Impress me? It was amazing! Where did you learn to do that?”
“When we got back from Europe, I knew I needed to learn some basic fighting skills, particularly since Hannah took all my powers. A lot of mornings when you thought I was working at Uncle Tony’s?”
“You were…”
She nodded. “I was taking karate lessons at this hole-in-the-wall in Wingfield Springs. It was just for a few weeks. So I could defend myself.”
“Defend yourself from an all-powerful witch? What’s a drop kick gonna do when she pummels you five hundred feet in the air by just a flick of her own hand?”
Liesel smiled at that one, but quickly re-focused her thoughts. “Cam, I didn’t train so much because I thought it would help me defeat Hannah. It’s gonna take the paint, and a whole lot of luck, to stop my sister. I trained to defend myself against all the others who will try to keep us from getting to our destination.”
“Like who?”
“Like… that security guard. And it’s only going to get worse.”
“What is?”
“Have you put any thought into what’s actually going to happen to us when everyone our age starts aging into their forties and fifties, when we stay exactly the same? We’re going to be met with opposition from here on in. Trust me. You’re going to be very happy I learned some fighting moves.”
I crossed my arms and stared forward for a moment. “Leese… I know… but why didn’t you let me join you in the karate classes?”
“I didn’t want to have to tell you about Hannah’s plan. Not until the last minute.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to give you a few more weeks of peace, OK? I didn’t want you to worry.”
I shook my head. “Well I’m not going to be doing much worrying if I’m dead in the middle of a bloodbath, now am I?”
“If there’s a bloodbath anywhere, I’ll likely be dead, too. It’s not like our paintball guns will be able to fight off anyone other than witches.”
“There you go with the plural again. How many witches are there, Leese?”
“There’s… a lot,” Liesel said, passing two trucks before pulling the car into the right hand lane. “I know of at least three in California alone. There has to be many more out there, and Hannah is bound to know of more. And it’s just like anything in life; some are good witches, and some are bad witches.”
“Like in The Wizard of Oz?”
“Yes, doofus. Like in The Wizard of Oz.”
“You’re Glinda the Good Witch, and your sister is Elphaba the Bad Witch.”
“Elphaba?” Liesel asked, dumbfounded.
“Nevermind. So what does this mean to us?”
“It means…” She took a deep breath, turning her gaze away if she was holding onto a secret.
“Leese… what is it?”
“I wasn’t going to tell you this until we got there.”
“Got where?”
Liesel slowly veered from the I-5 to the CA-14 freeway.
“Where are you going?” I asked. “We just came from this way.”
“We needed the weapons.”
“We’re not going all the way back to Reno, are we?”
“No.”
“Then where?”
I looked at the determination on Liesel’s face, and I realized just how helpless I was in the current situation. It reminded me of when I was a child, both back when I was a real child years ago, and back when I was an eighteen-year-old in a baby’s body last April. I was able to make decisions for myself in both of my previous aging conditions, but this time, I was a blind traveler in the midst of a never-ending forest. Without Liesel, I wouldn’t have a clue how to accomplish anything—how to find Hannah, how to kill Hannah, even that I needed to find and kill Hannah. I would’ve watched my little sister and parents grow a year older every day, until they passed away, until everyone I knew lay dead in front of me, and I’d be left with nothing. Liesel was the key to fixing this unthinkable problem. I needed to just sit back, shut up, and let her do the talking and decision-making. I knew she wasn’t God, but I knew she was my best chance for ensuring the safety of my loved ones.
It had been at least a minute since I’d asked Liesel where we were going. She hadn’t answered me. I decided not to press the matter any further. I knew that in a short amount of time I’d discover the secret destination.
I tried to forget about all of our problems for a moment, and I instead analyzed Liesel from head to toe. Considering the enormous amount of pressure she’d been under in the last few days, I was surprised to note just how pretty she looked, particularly with the sun hitting her the way it was. Her red hair was messy and dangling below her shoulders, the cute little freckles on her face were exposed for the whole world to see, and a light shade of pink lipstick covered her thin, somewhat dry lips. Her eyes finally made their way toward mine.
“What are you looking at?” she asked.
“Just you.”
“Really?” she asked with a chuckle. “The world’s about to end, and you’re thinking about sex?”
“What?” I shouted with a smile, as Liesel picked up even more speed and started heading toward Palmdale. “Just because I’m admiring you doesn’t mean I want to have sex with you!”
“Of course it does.”
“Sex entered my mind only, like, ten or twelve times in the last few seconds.”
“Ha. I rest my case.”
“I’m allowed to want to have sex with you. You’re my wife.”
“I know.”
“My pregnant wife.”
It was funny. Throughout all this madness, the fact that Liesel was pregnant seemed to be the furthest thing from my mind. It had startled me on Friday night in Washington D.C. when Liesel threw the factoid out there like it was a minor afterthought. But it occurred to me that I hadn’t even thought about her pregnancy once all day. I looked down at her belly to see it flat as ever. It didn’t look like she had a baby in there.
“Speaking of you being pregnant…” I started.
“This outta be good,” she said.
“Umm… we haven’t really discussed…”
“What?”
“You know… you being a witch and all. Does that alter the whole nine month process? Do you give birth really fast? Or…”
“I’m not a witch anymore,” she said. “Remember? I have no powers.”
“But you’re still you.”
“The powers are gone, Cam. For all intensive purposes, I’m now just like any other normal human being.”
“So you won’t be giving birth for a while.”
“Not for many, many months to come. I’m only six and a half weeks along.”
“But say you did have your powers.”
She turned to me and didn’t say a word.
“Say you could somehow get your powers back from Hannah,” I continued. “Would that affect the pregnancy?”
She shook her head. “Cam, I’d love to tell you this magical story about how my mother gave birth to me after being inseminated just three days prior, but such wasn’t the case. As far as I know, having powers doesn’t change a thing when it comes to having children.”
I nodded, and then asked the most important question of all: “Would our kid have powers?”
“Possibly,” she said. “Don’t worry about it so much.”
I sat there for a minute, trying not to freak out. I needed to close my eyes and calm my head, which, surprisingly, hadn’t exploded by now. “Don’t worry about it so much? Leese, we could potentially be bringing a child into a wo
rld that has been completely destroyed! We could have a little mini witch! We could be having a baby who shoots lightning bolts out of his ass when he needs to take a dump!”
Liesel put her hand up in the air. “Stop. First of all, we wouldn’t be having anybody. I would. Second of all, we’re not going to bring our child into a decimated world, OK? How many times do I have to tell you? We are going to stop this, all of this, and our child will be born into a world filled with love and hope and two of the most bad-ass parents of all time. Think of it, Cam. Our son or daughter will be only twenty years younger than us. When she’s graduating high school, we’ll still be in our thirties! The three of us will be best friends!”
“Yeah, or the kid will hate us even more. My parents are pretty young, and I’ve always had issues with my dad.” I put my feet up on the dash and turned toward Liesel again. “You just referred to our child as ‘she.’”
“Huh?”
“A minute ago. You said ‘she.’ Do you know something I don’t?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. My mom had three girls. Her mom had four girls. I just naturally assumed I’m going to have a daughter. Why? Do you not want a girl? Do you think two girls in your family may be too much for you to handle?”
Liesel just kept on talking, and I kept right on not listening. Something she had just said made me want to strangle her. She had slipped out another secret. I was getting tired of all these secrets.
What else about Liesel don’t I know? I’ve probably only scratched the surface. There’s probably a hundred things about her that would surprise me. When will she come clean with me? For good?
“Leese?”
“What?”
I stared at her for a moment. “You just said your mom had three girls.”
“Huh?”
“Just now. You said three. Not two. Three!”
“Cameron, there’s a cop up ahead. Damn it! I told you to keep an eye out for any cops!”
Liesel promptly slowed down, from eighty-five to sixty-five, right before we passed a cop on a motorcycle who appeared to be itching to ticket the next passers-by. Thankfully the cop didn’t come after us.
“Please, Cam. We can’t get pulled over. We can’t let anything wreck the plan.”
“Will you please answer my question?” I was trying not to yell.
“What? Oh, I meant two.”
“Do you have another sister I don’t know about?”
“No.”
“Are you lying?”
“Yes.”
I leaned forward and started rubbing my fingertips against my aching forehead. “There’s another witch?”
“She’s not a witch.”
“What? Why not?”
“You’ll see.”
“I’ll see?”
“Yeah. We’re meeting her in twenty minutes.”
I didn’t know whether to be mad about Liesel keeping this from me, or sad that she felt she needed to, or ecstatic that I had a new sister-in-law I didn’t even know existed.
“Can you at least tell me her name?” I asked.
“It’s…”
“Yes?”
“Yolanda.”
I had to take that one in for a moment. “Yolanda?”
MRS. GORDON
Walking through the quiet, eerie halls of Caughlin Ranch High didn’t fill Lolita Gordon with the positive energy she had been hoping for. Passing by the desecrated lockers and classroom doors didn’t make her nostalgic for a time when life’s outlook wasn’t so damn bleak. Mrs. Gordon had never liked the majority of the students. There were always the major troublemakers, like Reese Wilkins back in the 80’s, or prissy little Brandon Reed in the late 90’s, or, worst of all, Cameron Martin, who thankfully graduated a year ago, leaving her and her library in peace. But lately, most, not some, of the students had been grating on her nerves, asking ignorant question after ignorant question, talking above the appropriate level, returning books super late, causing her headaches on an almost daily basis.
No, she wouldn’t miss Caughlin Ranch High as much as the teachers and superintendents. But she knew, on this June afternoon, she needed to say a proper good-bye to the place she had called her second home for the last thirty-six years.
Mrs. Gordon took out the silver plated key from her purse and opened up the library front doors. As she made her way inside, she detected the wonderful smell of old, dusty books wafting through the air. It was so deathly quiet she could hear each of her footsteps. She looked at the various desks and computer center, but decided she wouldn’t be taking the time to sit down. She wanted to remain standing, and take a tour of her beloved library one last time.
She passed through the aisles, running her paper-thin hands along all the great works of literature in the Classics section. Soon she found herself in the back left corner of the library, the most hidden spot in the whole room, the area that gave Mrs. Gordon the most problems when it came to her more sexually active students. She backed up against the Greek mythology books and closed her eyes, remembering with a loud chuckle all those times she had run into Cameron Martin here during his four years at CRHS. He had been her most memorable bad student for sure, memorable because she had gone from hating him for three and a half years to seducing him into having sex with her at the end of his senior year.
“He was old,” she often told herself. “He was the most handsome sixty-four-year-old I’d ever seen!”
Mrs. Gordon had never told anyone of the controversial incident, and she was happy as hell that Cameron never did either, especially after he recovered from his horrific condition and could have easily gone straight to Principal Reeves with news that would have rocked Reno, if not the entire United States.
What would have been her argument? “I was not, I repeat, not, Mary Kay Letourneau! I would have never touched him if he was physically seventeen years old! But the rules didn’t apply to me here. He looked old… older than me. You’re not pressing charges! I forbid it!”
Before being whisked away to jail for the rest of her life, she would’ve kicked and screamed, knowing she now had years and years to spend wasting away in some dump of a jail when she had a better life waiting for her outside those cold metal bars.
But on this day in June, Mrs. Gordon realized she’d take that life sentence in jail any day. The woman was only fifty-nine years old and still had a good thirty years before she’d kick the bucket. Even when Cameron Martin had been going through that aging disease, the thought of rapidly aging had never really entered her head.
But now it wasn’t a hypothetical situation anymore; it was a reality. Nobody believed it for the first few days, but now, even though the world hadn’t erupted into total chaos yet, Mrs. Gordon knew that it was happening… to everyone. She didn’t want to wait until the madness began, until all the horrors of what mankind was capable of would inevitably rise to the surface. She wanted to get out while there was still peace. She knew what she had to do.
As she walked over to her miniscule office on the other side of the library, she thought about her first year as a librarian here at CHRS, a young new mom who had a simple but fruitful future ahead of her. She was never all that successful in love—she only married once, keeping the last name Gordon after her husband Henry died in a car accident in 1982—and found solace after a while raising her daughter all by herself. Mrs. Gordon loved her first ten years as a librarian, but lately the job had come to be more of a chore than anything else. She found the kids these days to not appreciate the quiet, and a good book, any longer. They were all busy playing with Twitter and Facebook on their iPhones and Blackberries, all riddled with ADD, all obsessed with their petty little problems. Anyone with a brain had to know that the world would be going to shit soon, anyway. What was there to look forward to? Absolutely nothing.
She unlocked her office and opened all of her desk drawers just to make sure there wasn’t anything incriminatory she’d be leaving behind. There was next to nothing—just some old newspapers and
a calendar from last year. She analyzed her three dying plants and realized she probably should have removed them from the room before the school year ended two weeks back.
“It’ll be fitting,” she said to herself, standing up straight and walking over to the mirror.
Mrs. Gordon brought her warm, sweaty hands to her cheeks. She could feel her heart beating faster than normal. She could feel the air already starting to leave her body. She leaned her head back just a smidge and analyzed her facial features in her tiny wall mirror. She had tried in the last year to doll herself up a bit more, ever since that night of forbidden love with Cameron when she remembered how fun it was to be a sexual being. She had one quick fling with Coach Welsh last summer, but other than that, she had been unsuccessful in her dating life.
She was aware that students didn’t know her age, and that many of them assumed her to be much older than she really was. She remembered when a freshman named Jake asked her if she was in her nineties. She slapped him hard in the face and never saw him again. But it had started her thinking that she needed to change up her wardrobe and make-up activities, and she found herself looking better than ever these past few months.
“That kid was right,” she said out loud. “I am starting to look ninety.”
Mrs. Gordon turned her face to the left and right. She had started to notice it as early as Saturday morning, but something was happening to her face. It wasn’t so much that she was developing more wrinkles and lines; her skin was literally sinking into itself, as if she was suffering a late life bout of anorexia. With each passing day she was starting to look more and more like a skeleton, and today, upon waking up, she realized she had never felt so weak in her long, uneventful life. She was slowly shrinking away, and she knew the pain in her back and upper bowels was signaling to her that something was really, really wrong.
Mrs. Gordon didn’t want to suffer anymore, so she made her arrangements.
She just had one thing left to do. She had gone by the house earlier and rung the doorbell, but to no avail. So she sat down in her office chair, the same one that had occupied this claustrophobic space for the last seventeen years.
She clicked on the office phone and dialed the number. She waited. She assumed nobody would answer. But after four rings, somebody did.