A Fistful Of Sky

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  By that time Jasper and I were in my closet, a much tighter fit than Opal’s.

  “What if she can’t take off her face-lift without the brush?” I whispered. “Maybe we’ll never get rid of these faces!”

  “They’ll wear off,” Jasper whispered back. “It’s Opal, remember? Besides, I think permanent, lasting change feels different. You didn’t feel changed all the way through when I painted you, did you?”

  “No. Just surface. Barely that.” But what if I had to go to school Monday morning with red cheeks, a green nose, purple eyelids, and black lips?

  I’d have to stay home sick. For as long as it took.

  It was hot in my closet and Jasper and I were both sweating, but we didn’t dare venture out until we changed back to ourselves.

  “Jasper,” I whispered presently, “are you going to get all weird when you go through transition?”

  “Hah!” he said. “When I go through transition, things are going to change, you bet. I’m not going to put my power in anything but me, for one thing. For another thing, Opal will never be able to get me again. I’m not going to blow my power on anything stupid like makeup. I’m going to do real stuff with it, mage stuff like figuring out how water runs or where the top of the sky is. And I’ll practice turning people into things. What would you like to be?”

  I thought. “A cat. You better not do anything much to me,’cause I’ll transition right behind you.” I said that, and then I shivered even though I wasn’t cold.

  What if I wasn’t right behind him?

  What if transition killed me?

  What if transition killed Jasper? That would be worse.

  Things stayed tense in the closet for the next hour, but around midnight I touched Jasper’s forehead and felt that his horns had gone. We opened the door and let light in, saw that our faces had reverted to normal.

  Getting free of that spell was like getting out of prison. I felt such a lift in my heart, I didn’t even care Saturday morning when Daddy sentenced me and Jasper to eight hours of extra chores for going out without telling and staying out past curfew.

  IF Opal had been her old self, she probably would have gone to Daddy and told him that someone had been in her room disturbing her things, and he would have gotten her justice.

  But this was post-transition Opal.

  Our lessons with Uncle Tobias had gotten more interesting since Opal transitioned, because she could demonstrate what he was teaching us, and we could think about what it would be like when we got our own powers. Tobias had always been able to demonstrate what he taught, but that wasn’t the same as having one of us show us.

  The Saturday morning after Jasper and I had our date with Opal’s beauty brush, all five of us met in Uncle Tobias’s tower schoolroom as usual, around a wooden table covered with black velvet. I had my notebook. I was the only one who took notes during Uncle Tobias’s lectures. Flint had a string he was practicing Jacob’s ladders on. Uncle Tobias let him do it, because it stopped Flint from shaking his legs or tapping on the table or doing some other distracting thing to shed extra energy. Jasper slumped in his seat, arms across his chest. Beryl put her elbows on the table and propped her chin in her hands, staring at Uncle Tobias. Opal took her place beside Uncle Tobias, ready to try anything. Today she was frowning.

  Uncle Tobias showed us a special mirror. It had a small scuffed reflecting surface surrounded by worn silver ivy vines, and the handle was a tarnished twist of vines and leaves. “You can see into the future and the past and hidden places if you look into this mirror and channel your power just right and speak a rhyme to help you focus the energies. An easy rhyme is, ‘Staring in the mirror, I see/The past looking back at me,’ or ‘ . . . future looking back at me.’

  “It doesn’t get you a picture of the distant past or future,” he continued. “It’s not a powerful spell. But it can be interesting.”

  Opal channeled power, then spoke the words to see the past. She held up the mirror and aimed it over her shoulder so she could look at each of us in turn.

  “Jasper and Gypsum,” she said. “You’re the ones who played with my change brush and stole all its power!”

  Oh, man!

  “Daddy said you guys were out all evening! How can this be?” She spoke the rhyme again and studied Jasper’s and my reflections. “Well, of course you were out, with faces like that,” she muttered. She stared into the mirror at us for what seemed like way too long. I met her gaze and saw an Opal I had never seen before. She looked furious but remote. Something cold lodged in my chest.

  She put the mirror down and turned to stare at us. “I can see the future without the mirror.” She smiled.

  “How come you put your power in something outside yourself, anyway?” Jasper asked. “Seems stupid.”

  “Opal?” Tobias said. “What have you been up to? Using objects as power reservoirs is advanced work. I haven’t laid the groundwork for that yet. You could hurt someone.”

  Opal raised her hands, rubbed her thumbs back and forth across her fingertips, then opened her hands so her palms faced up. Thin smoky light came down in two cones from the dark ceiling, twisted into tight zig-zaggy strands and dove into her fingertips. She smiled this spooky smile that made her look like someone in the kind of movies that gave me nightmares.

  “It worked just fine until those two messed me up, Uncle.” Lightning danced across her fingertips and made little zissing noises. She closed her hands into fists and the light stopped spinning down to her.

  “This will be a simple spell.” She held her hands out toward me and Jasper, snapped her fingers out in two fans. I felt something jolt into me. My face got blister hot and my nose and chin hurt and made creaking noises. I looked at Jasper through a haze of tears. His face was red, and it pulsed. Then it shifted. His forehead bulged, and his nose melted down to nothing. His eyes changed from green to solid black, and his hair and eyebrows melted away.

  After a minute things stopped happening to my face. I saw parts of it I had never been able to see before. My nose and chin stuck out like the upper and lower parts of a duck’s beak, and they looked brown and warty and hideous. Jasper looked all flat-faced and big-eyed like the bigheaded aliens I saw on the covers of newspapers at the supermarket.

  My face ached. I touched my nose. It was sore and soft. My chin felt bony, but it hurt, too.

  Opal lifted the mirror and aimed it toward me, and a gnome woman looked back, brown and wrinkled, her eyes like small black beads, her eyebrows bushy, her hair gray and wispy. Opal showed Jasper how he looked. “Don’t you ever mess with my stuff again,” she said. “Or I’ll do worse to you.” She set the mirror face down on the table.

  “You’re going to regret this,” Jasper said. His voice came out squeaky. I couldn’t believe he would threaten her right after she’d done this to us. It seemed suicidal.

  Besides, how could he be sure?

  Opal lifted an eyebrow and smiled at him. “Or I could do worse to you right now,” she said.

  “Opal, that’s enough,” said Uncle Tobias.

  She frowned. Then she stood, dusted off her hands, and stalked out of the room.

  I glanced at Beryl. She looked scared. Flint looked unnerved too.

  “Can you breathe all right?” Uncle Tobias asked us.

  I was afraid to speak. I breathed through my nose. I noticed I could smell a lot more than I usually did. Uncle Tobias’s tower room always smelled incensey and smoky and strange, but now I could tell there were spices under the smoke, cinnamon and amber and paprika, and somewhere a trace of beer, and the presence of a cat. I could smell Flint’s grass stains and Beryl’s baby shampoo and Jasper’s sweat left on his shirt from yesterday. I could smell Uncle Tobias’s years: he was much older than he looked.

  “Gypsum?” he said as I sat there sniffing decades and sorting the nuances of different ages of skin. “Can you breathe?”

  I wasn’t yawning, and I felt okay, except my face hurt. I nodded.

  “Jasp
er?”

  “I can breathe,” Jasper said. His voice sounded high and metallic. He touched his face gingerly, then stroked his fingers across his cheeks, his non-nose, his forehead. He frowned, and only his mouth moved. “Jeeze! I never knew she had it in her.” He reached out and touched the end of my new nose. “Gosh.” He looked at Uncle Tobias. “How long is this going to last?”

  “Until she relents, I suppose,” said Uncle Tobias.

  “It’s not going to just wear off like most of her spells?”

  “It wasn’t that sort of spell,” said Uncle Tobias. “It would behoove you to treat her a little better.”

  “There’s nothing you can do about it?”

  Uncle Tobias cocked his head. “I wouldn’t say that. But this is part of the self-sorting any family goes through. It would be against the rules for me to interfere.”

  “We can’t go to school like this.”

  “School is two days away,” said Uncle Tobias.

  “We can’t leave the house like this,” Jasper said.

  Uncle Tobias nodded. “Probably better if you don’t.”

  I picked up the mirror and looked at myself. My face was a mass of wrinkles and warts and outthrust features. I really did look like something you’d find under a mushroom in an unpleasant forest. But only my head had changed; the skin on the backs of my hands was still smooth and unwrinkled. “Uncle,” I said, and my voice came out deep and hoarse, “can you look in the mirror for me and see if I get my face back sometime soon?”

  “That much I can do.” He channeled power and repeated the spell he had taught us, then aimed the mirror over his shoulder and studied my reflection in it. “I see you back to normal and cleaning Opal’s room,” he said, “and ironing her dresses.”

  I sighed. I hated ironing. None of my clothes needed it. Opal hated ironing, too, but that never stopped her from buying things that needed ironing. What counted with her was how things looked.

  “What do you see when you look at me, Uncle?” asked Jasper.

  Uncle Tobias aimed the mirror to pick up Jasper’s image. He set the mirror down and turned to look at Jasper. “How do you feel, boy?”

  “How do I feel? Hot.”

  “Yes,” said Uncle Tobias.

  “And cold,” said Jasper. Sweat beaded on his alien forehead and ran down the shallow slopes of his face.

  WHILE Jasper went through the first stages of transition, I apologized to Opal and did chores for her, and she gave me back my face. She gave Jasper back his face even though he didn’t do her any favors, because he was sick.

  I spent the next three days taking care of Jasper, tipping water into his mouth whenever he would let me, sponging off his forehead when he got too hot, piling covers on him when he got too cold. Transition hit him a lot harder than it had hit Opal. He shivered so much he lost weight, and he was out of his head all the time. He yelled and thrashed and fought with invisible things.

  Even Mama was worried.

  There was a time near the end of the third day when I got under the covers with him and hugged him hard because his skin was icy and I didn’t know how else to warm him up. “Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die,” I whispered to him. I rubbed his arms and his chest and tried to stop his shivering. I knew I should call down to Mama, but I didn’t even want to walk to the bedroom door. I was afraid if I let go of Jasper his spirit would escape his body. I hugged him and chafed his skin and cried and wished somebody, anybody, would come and help me. “Stay here. Stay here. Stay here,” I whispered to Jasper.

  When my throat was sore from talking to him and my arms were so tired and heavy I wasn’t sure how much longer I could go on, Jasper hugged me. “It’s okay,” he whispered. I touched his forehead. It wasn’t too hot or too cold. It was wet with sweat.

  I fell asleep smiling.

  WHEN I woke up Jasper was sitting up among the snarled, sweat-soaked blankets and shoveling hot Cream of Wheat into his mouth. “Want some?”

  I shook my head.

  “You should eat, Gyp. You haven’t been getting enough food or sleep.”

  I rubbed my hand across my face. My skin felt greasy. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. Starved is all.” The cereal he was eating was steaming, but that didn’t seem to bother him. He swallowed without chewing.

  “Did the power come on you?”

  He smiled down at me. “Oh, yes. Oh, yes.” He put the spoon down and drank the rest of the hot cereal, set the bowl aside and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I need a shower, and then I need lots more breakfast. You want to sleep some more?”

  I checked in. Every muscle in my body felt stretched and tired. I nodded.

  He smiled again and touched my forehead; I fell into a deep comfortable sleep.

  JASPER and I sat in the bamboo thicket a couple days later. The sun pounded down on the yard, but the bamboo shade was cool, even though no breath of breeze moved through the canes.

  Jasper had had three accidents already—power surges that once shut off the electricity in the house for two hours, once did unfortunate things to most of the food—popped popcorn, melted butter, burned bread, cooked eggs in their shells, baked apples in the fruit bowl, exploded milk and juice cartons all over the inside of the fridge—and once made all the paint in his room blister and peel off the wall in long twisted strips.

  Flint and Beryl were afraid to be near him. Flint moved out of the kids’ wing to sleep on a couch in the living room. Mama and Opal and Tobias could channel power surges, so they weren’t scared of him, just irritated. Daddy was on a business trip.

  A power surge could really hurt me, but I didn’t care.

  Jasper had tried to make me stay away from him. I wouldn’t. Now he was holding a green stone I had found at the beach that morning. He stared at it. He murmured a chant Uncle Tobias had taught him. I huddled on the papery white leaves, hugged my knees, and watched my brother speak to a stone in a language I did not know.

  “Keep this.” He held the stone out to me.

  “Why?”

  “It’s got power in it. I know I said I wasn’t going to do that, but you need this. It should protect you from power—mine, or Opal’s, or anybody’s.”

  I took the stone. It felt warm in my hand. I looked up at my brother. “I thought your transition was going to change everything for the better.”

  “I feel a lot different.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He stared over my shoulder, leaf-green light touching his eyes. “I don’t know. I just—I can’t imagine hiding in a closet to spy on Opal. I can’t believe I did that just last week. There are so many more interesting things to do.”

  “Mage things?” I whispered.

  He nodded.

  “Things I can’t do.”

  He licked his upper lip, then nodded again. He looked beyond me. “Everything’s singing, Gyp. I couldn’t hear it before, but now I can. There are voices everywhere. I have to learn their languages.”

  A minute went by before he met my gaze again. No wonder he had looked so distracted since transition.

  I said, “Can you do a predicter mystery for me?”

  “Which one?”

  I set down the rock he had given me. I opened my backpack and pulled out a watch and a little zipped-shut bag of flower petal dust. This was something Uncle Tobias had taught us last fall. “Tell me. . . .”

  “What, Gyp?”

  “Tell me when I’ll transition. I don’t like being on the other side of a wall from you.”

  “You really want to know?”

  I thought about that. Tobias had told us to be careful of questions. Some would offer us answers that hurt. I felt a chill brush the back of my neck. Then I thought, Opal’s sixteen, Jasper’s fourteen, I’m twelve. Will my transition be soon? Will it be this year? Or will it be four years before I know what Jasper and Opal know now? If I have some idea of when I’ll transition, I can plan. Or at least I can stand it.

  What if I do
n’t survive? Do I want to know?

  If I don’t survive, I should know so I can do what I need to first.

  “I want to know,” I said.

  Jasper took the spell ingredients from me and prepared them, then said the chant that would give us an answer. He tossed the flower dust up and watched it float down. I watched too.

  When Uncle Tobias had demonstrated Image in the Air, I had seen a picture of Mama as a young girl, which was what Uncle Tobias had asked about.

  This time I just saw flower dust drifting, swirling down. Maybe only Jasper could see the picture. I looked at him.

  “No,” he whispered, shaking his head.

  “No what?”

  He hesitated. “No transition.”

  “What?” I felt like someone had punched me in the gut.

  The dust settled. Jasper looked away. “I could be wrong. I haven’t tried this before. Maybe it’s not one of my gifts.”

  “What did you see?” I whispered.

  “Nothing.”

  “What did you see?”

  He shook his head.

  “What did you see?” I asked him a third time.

  “I just saw you, older, but without any magic, Gyp. You. Just you.”

  Some people never went through transition. People in our family always married outsiders. Sometimes outsider genes stopped children from having a magical heritage. I had never imagined it could happen to any of us.

  “Hey,” Jasper said. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I probably did it wrong.”

  I felt cold despite the hot still air of the afternoon. I hugged myself and shivered.

  Since transition, Opal had changed into someone I didn’t know and wasn’t sure I liked.

  Jasper had changed into someone I didn’t connect with the same way I used to.

  I wasn’t going to change.

  The future stretched ahead of me like a dark corridor I would walk all alone. All those notes I had taken while Uncle Tobias was teaching us . . . I might as well burn them. There was no skill inside me. My family was no longer my family. Cold welled up in my stomach and my chest, traveled outward to my toes and fingers.