Mama gasped behind us.
“Thank you,” Flint said to the tree. He let go of my hand and we turned around.
“Beautiful,” Mama murmured. “Wonderful.”
Flint smiled. “We were going to do the hedges, too. You want that?”
“That might be a bit gaudy, don’t you think?”
“Yeah.” Flint nodded and grinned. “Colored lights.”
“Just say no to colored lights!” Mama said.
“I love colored lights,” I said.
Mama frowned. “Tasteless!”
“I bet we’d make them nice.”
She looked at the tree. “Give it a shot.”
Flint and I wandered outside. “How you holding up?” he asked.
“Power to burn.”
“That is so cool. Okay, she challenged us to make it tasteful.”
“I leave that up to you.”
We faced the pittosporum hedges that walled our front yard off from the little street, except for right in the middle. In the center of the yard, there was a landing with a stone railing, and a double staircase descended to the roundabout across from the front door.
I held out my hand to Flint and closed my eyes again, imagined safety and timing while he did all the creative work with lights. This time it took longer, and drew enough power that my charge was nice and low. I wouldn’t have to curse anything for a while.
“Done,” Flint said eventually.
The lights glowed faded colors, in spiderweb patterns that flickered as though wind blew on them; they weren’t gaudy. You had this sense you were seeing fairies, and that if you looked away it would all disappear. Mysterious, faint, lovely.
“Wow,” I whispered.
Mama stood in the doorway. “All right. You managed it. Flint, I’m so proud of you.”
“Me and Gyp.”
“I’m proud of you and Gyp. You did a wonderful job.”
“Thanks, Mama. Did you look at the house yet?” he asked.
She stepped out into the driveway for a look. She did us the honor of not saying anything for a good minute. Then she came and hugged us.
WHEN I woke up Sunday morning, Altria was sitting on my bed. She still looked like the me of yesterday, black raven T-shirt and jeans. I felt this longing to have her hold me. She was my half-remembered safety in the midst of sun and water when I was small.
She smiled.
I remembered there was something wrong with this picture. “I didn’t call you,” I said.
“You’re leaking.” She waved at my chest. A blanket of red light lay over me. “And you called me in a dream.”
“Can you come into people’s dreams without asking?”
“Dreams are where I spend most of my time. But I didn’t need to sneak into your dreams. You invited me.”
How could I help dreaming about things that had happened during the day? She had been a big part of my Saturday, so it didn’t surprise me I had dreamed about her. Still, it made me suspect strange things. I still didn’t know who she was or where she came from. She spent a lot of time in dreams? One of the few pieces of information she had given me. “Are you a nightmare?”
“Of course.” She dipped her hands in the red blanket of energy over my chest and smiled. “So lovely. You make the best.” She scooped up my power in cupped hands. “What do I want to do with this today?”
I sat up, held out my hands, and sucked my power back inside of me. My shoulders locked up, so tight with power that my elbows locked, too. “No.”
“Cough up a little of the red stuff. Come on, Gyp. Give.” She tickled me. I couldn’t help laughing. I tried to cover all my ticklish spots, but she found others, and I lost hold on the power. There was a pile of it, anyway; I hadn’t cursed anything after Flint’s lights last night, and I had slept—I managed to catch a glimpse of the clock—until nine this morning. Hours of power. We rolled around in a red haze, hot with it, but not sweating, either of us; only the smell of campfires that she brought with her, and bread. We were both acclimated to my power. I tickled her, surprised when she fell prey to laughter too. I tickled her into helplessness. “Stop! Stop,” she gasped. “All right. You win.”
“Whoa!” I didn’t know it was possible for me to win.
She poked me. “You always win, don’t you?”
I thought about our relationship. In every encounter, she had given me strange gifts, and she had saved my life once and my brain another time. She had given the yard a new staircase without asking for anything back. She had given me the opportunity to experience myself in strange ways, and she had taken care of me even when I was afraid she wouldn’t. “I guess that’s right.”
“Well, of course, I win, too. I get to play with you.” She lifted red in her hands, shaped it into a ball. “Why won’t you give me some? What do you need it for?”
“I don’t want to change today. Not until after the party, anyway.”
“Give this to me now and I’ll save it until later.”
“You can do that?”
“Of course. Simple. I might use some. A girl has to eat.”
“Use it how?”
“I could arrange not to bother you.”
“Would you be bothering someone else?”
“I might. I’ve never capitalized sufficiently on my relationship with Jasper, for instance, and I haven’t even touched the rest of your family yet.”
“Forget it.”
“Give me what you’ve got now, and I’ll save it for later,” she said again in a resigned tone.
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
I wondered if she considered a promise binding.
“My word is my bond,” she said.
“How can I trust you?”
“Realistically, you can’t. Yet you do, again and again. I call that a fine basis for a relationship. Don’t you?”
“You always say scary or threatening things, and do scary things, but you soften up afterward.”
“It’s all part of my diabolical plan. I’ll string you along until I get what I really want, and then whoosh! You’ll find out you shouldn’t have trusted me that last time, but it will be too late.”
“Is that true? What do you really want?”
She lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. “This is too much like work.” She faded.
I sat in the welter of sheets and blankets, haloed and heated by red power, so much power my shoulders couldn’t tighten any more than they already had, and wondered what to do. I thought about Altria saving me when the computer had turned me into a girl droid, Altria repairing that pillar yesterday up at the Center just to ease my mind, trying to teach me a new direction for curses, holding a tiny, helpless me safe as we rocked on the ocean.
I could fly to the Antarctic and blow off power there, but I might just make the hole in the ozone layer bigger. “Altria?”
She materialized on the bed, raised an eyebrow.
“Hypothetically, could you take today’s power and keep it until I get home from the party tonight, and not torture my family with it?”
She sighed and nodded. “But after that, we do something major.”
“We would have to, wouldn’t we?”
“Yep. Something huge.”
I outlined my next step in my head, and then aloud. “Altria, would you take the curse energy I generate today and save it for me so we can use it when I get home from Claire’s party? And I mean we. I get to direct it. Okay?”
“Mmm.” She ran her fingers through the red glow, drew out scarves of it, released it so that it flowed back to me. “All right. I agree.” She opened her arms, and all the red in the air around me flew to her as though she were a vacuum. It melted into her chest. More red came out of me; she drew it slowly, so that I was conscious of the tension leaving my shoulders. At last I relaxed enough. She hugged her stomach and lay back. “Oh, glorious,” she murmured. “I’m drunk with power! I love this!”
She sat up after a while. H
er face was flushed, her eyes bright. “You are the best,” she said. “Oh, and while I’m drunk, I should tell you a secret about later.”
“Yes?”
“It’s good you told me we’ll work when you get home from the party. Because if you agreed to let me save the power until later, like I promised, well, it’s always later. Could have taken it now and used it in ten minutes.” Then she whispered, “Everything people say has a loophole, if you know where to look.” She leaned forward, hugged me, kissed hot cinnamon on my cheek, and disappeared.
SUNDAY pancake breakfast was the one meal a week that Dad cooked. He brought the electric frying pan to the dining room table and made pancakes to order for everybody who wanted them. When we were little, he made pancake shapes: animals, our initials, mystery shapes we were supposed to guess—clouds was always a safe guess, though usually wrong. I got him a book of pancake recipes, and now he experimented with batter instead of shapes. This morning we were having blueberry pancakes, a favorite.
Today everybody was at breakfast, even Aunt Hermina. When everyone had a plate with pancakes and syrup on it in front of them, Mama said, “We need a family meeting tonight.”
Four or five people sighed.
Mama glanced around, but it was too late to tell who had done it. “Come on,” she said. “Give me a break. Christmas is only three days away, and I’ve fallen down on the job of planning for it. I don’t know what’s the matter with me this year. I’m grateful to everyone who went ahead and did their chores without my asking them to. That’s worked surprisingly well. We still need to do some planning, though, and we have new factors to consider.”
Everyone looked at me.
“That’s right. Gyp is still settling. We’ve never had a transition this close to a major holiday before. She doesn’t have as much room for mistakes as the rest of us had. The mistakes she makes cause different kinds of problems, too.” Mama lifted her shoulders and shuddered.
“What happened?” Jasper asked. “Something else?”
“More evidence that what she has is not benevolent,” Mama said.
“You couldn’t tell from what that computer did to me on Friday?” asked Hermina.
“Sorry, Aunt. It came closer to home for me yesterday. So anyway, everyone please meet in the living room tonight after nine, all right?”
Everyone nodded.
I had a thought. “You guys, will you think up curses all day and bring them to the meeting, too? I could use some new ideas.”
“Curses,” said Opal.
“I’d like to have a bunch ready to try. So far my own ideas haven’t worked out that well.”
Beryl smiled. “Curses.”
“Sure,” said Flint.
After breakfast, I said I was going to the mall to shop, and did anyone else want to come? Provided we could separate for the actual shopping part and meet up later.
“You driving today?” asked Beryl.
“Yeah, if I need to.”
“You’re not afraid you’ll curse somebody on the freeway by mistake?”
“I’m storing up my power for later tonight.”
Tobias’s gaze sharpened. “How?”
“Are you putting it into something?” Opal asked.
“Sort of,” I said.
“Gypsum,” Tobias said.
“Uncle.”
“Are you sure what you are doing is safe?”
“Nope.”
“Nothing is ever one hundred percent safe, and we survive it all,” Dad said, and gave me a plate with a giant pancake on it.
I had such a normal afternoon that I felt weird.
Beryl went to the mall with me, and then we split up.
I loved that afternoon. The air was clear and warm; the shops swarmed with other last-minute Christmas shoppers, and I wasn’t afraid I would turn them into doorstops or statues or mutes, because I didn’t have the power. Every once in a while, Altria appeared, brushed against me, and pulled curse energy out of me. I hadn’t felt so relaxed in days.
I went down my list of people and found gifts I thought they would each like. Maybe I hated some things about being normal, but I enjoyed this time I spent not worrying about power.
Beryl and I met for lunch at a place with sidewalk tables and big umbrellas, where they served forty-seven different kinds of wraps and roll-ups. She was toting big shopping bags full of stuff too. After lunch we stopped at the car to drop off bags and went out shopping again. We finished by three-thirty and drove home, full of secrets.
Then I went upstairs to figure out what to wear to Claire’s party.
I’d never paid much attention to that stuff before. But this was almost the first time a boy who wasn’t a member of my family was going to pick me up and take me somewhere, and I wanted to look decent.
I had three shirts I thought of as “good” shirts, and one pair of black jeans that I considered formal enough pants. Or, that was what my closet had looked like before UFS me had gone through it.
Now I had a bunch of clothes I didn’t even recognize, and they all looked good on me for weird reasons I could no longer understand. How had UFS me known to make this shirt that color, or to decorate the collar of this one with those silver pointy things? Who knew. I stood in front of the closet mirror holding things up and being surprised.
Opal knocked while I was still deciding. She came in and sat on my bed. I held up two shirts, one after the other in front of me, and asked her which was best.
“The red one with the pirate sleeves,” she said. “Since when do you wear red?”
Good question. I remembered Opal’s poppy-red dress, my first venture into red. I put the green shirt away and hung the red one on the closet doorknob. “Opal, Friday I was under a curse, and I went in your room and wore your clothes and stole your makeup. I apologize.”
“I could tell you’d been in there. What, you cursed yourself?”
“I cursed something else, and it cursed me.”
“And that’s your excuse for messing with my stuff?”
“I’m sorry. What can I do to make it up to you?”
She smiled. “Let me make you up for your date.”
“That’ll do it?”
“That’ll do it.”
I dressed in my red shirt, black pants, and black cowboy boots with the pointy toes, then went to Opal’s room and sat at her vanity. She draped a thin towel over my shirt collar, and did things to my face and hair. Then she did my fingernails, made them longer, colored them a glittery red that matched my shirt—all without compacts, bottles of foundation, eye shadow, lipsticks, blush, or nail polish. Makeup was what she did for a living, though on the job she used props—she waved store-bought makeup around and pretended she was using it.
She could be turning me into a movie monster; she wouldn’t let me look until she was finished.
“All right. You can open your eyes now.”
She had turned me into someone else, and not really a monster. I wasn’t as nervous about this self as I would have been before my various forays into fashion on Friday. Dark brown lines around my eyes made the hazel of my irises look intense, and on my eyelids she had blended shades of green and gold and pink. My lips looked larger, in a color that was my natural color intensified. She had styled the curls on top of my head taller, and clipped the other curls to the sides of my head with red sparkle star-shaped barrettes, giving my head less width, more height.
“Oh, Opal,” I whispered. Last week I would have been terrified of this new self. I was still a little scared, but I was ready to actually leave the house looking like this. “Thank you.”
She opened a drawer in her vanity table and took out a brown leather-covered box. She opened it. Her pretties. When I was a little kid, she had sometimes let me look through her pretties. I had loved to sit on her bed and take each thing out, cherish it, long for it, put it away again. Sometimes she had let me try on the necklaces and bracelets and rings.
Now she lifted out the top layer of the
box, which was covered in white velvet and divided into lots of little compartments for rings. She rooted around in the lower compartment. “Here we are.”
She held up a pair of dangly earrings, bunches of tiny papier mâché strawberries dipped in red glitter. She handed them to me and I put them on.
I stood up and we both studied me in her vanity mirror.
This red and black garbed stranger might have posed for a fashion shoot in Mode. I cocked my head, tried to see myself under the surface. Would Ian know me? Would Claire?
“Too much?” Opal asked.
“Did you change me a whole lot? I mean, like, my features?”
She shook her head. “Just the colors.”
“Weird. You’re amazing.”
“Thanks.” She cocked her head. “Maybe it is a little too much. I could tone it down a touch.” She lifted a hand toward my face, and I backed up a step.
“No, let’s leave it. Try it out on Mama, see what she says.”
Mama was astonished. She hugged me carefully so she wouldn’t smear anything—though when Opal did makeup, it was smudgeproof. Mama took Polaroids of me. “It might be overkill,” she said after considering both me and my photographs.
Opal drew her fingers across my face and removed a layer of sophistication. I ended up looking like my UFS self. I felt more comfortable that way.
“Thanks,” I said again.
“My pleasure.”
I went downstairs, grabbed one of my gift cookie tins, and went out front to wait for Ian.
Altria appeared next to me on the bench. She looked like present me now, though earlier in the day she’d looked different from me. Still a twin, but wearing different clothes and attitude.
“Love the boots,” she said, sticking her legs out straight and studying her footware.
I opened the cookie tin and offered her some.
“This is what you were working on all day yesterday.”
“Yeah.”
She selected a cookie and bit it. “Oh! Nice. Not what I usually eat.”
I ate a chocolate chip cookie. I had maxed out on bites of cookie dough yesterday, ate enough that I got sick of it by dinnertime, but I hadn’t had a cookie yet today. Delicious.
A Fistful Of Sky Page 29