I thought long and hard about adding another section about the guy and the mountain lion out in the spot where the UFO had been seen. I got chills like a warning sign just thinking about writing it. I couldn’t fathom why it scared me so much. In the end, I took the plunge. I described the guy and his mountain lion and his circuslike truck. I tied it all into the circus atmosphere of the UFO Festival. Done. I now had two versions for my friends at the newspaper club to read.
I pulled out my colored pencils and the notebook where I had been working on Leotard Girl. I added a hospital scene in which she had Kai’s powers. She held her friend’s hand. Suddenly, her friend rose from her hospital bed and pulled out the tubes going into her arm.
The bell rang. I packed up everything and headed off to Biology class with Mr. Mhavryck Taylor. That’s where my day got really weird.
The lights in the classroom were low. The animals floating around inside the jars were tinged with neon green. They appeared to have eyes that darted around, surveying the kids, sizing them up and making plans.
When class started, Mr. Taylor showed a film about the dissection of a frog. I almost threw up. Just as the film credits started rolling, someone knocked on the door. I couldn’t see who it was, as I’d taken to sitting in the back of the classroom, but they handed him a note. He read it while he walked back to his desk.
He looked up suddenly, searching the class until he found me. He stared at me intensely for a few seconds. My ability to stay calm maxed out. I thought I’d die.
He lifted his arm and pointed right at me, his finger shaking in anger. I knew it was anger because his face had scrunched up into a serious scowl. I don’t know how loudly he actually said my name, but it sounded like he bellowed it at a high enough decibel for people outside the building to hear. “Galactic Shade Griffin!” Jeez! Why don’t you just shoot me with a blowgun full of poison dart frog venom? Now, that would be some Biology lesson ... and a way for me to completely disappear!
I’m not sure how I responded. I have a memory of squeaking one word: “Yes?”
He said, “Give me that cell phone right now!”
I had an out-of-body experience right then and there. I hated when anxiety did that to me. Free-floating anxiety just kind of gets more and more and more intense until, rather than heart-pounding fear controlling my body, I become enveloped in an overall sense of dread and part of me detaches from reality. At that point, I usually feel like something’s going to snap inside my body and kill me. I used to think I was having a heart attack, but a school nurse in junior high told me those are anxiety attacks. She asked me if I wanted to see a shrink. I said, “No.” She said, “Maybe you’ll outgrow them.” So far, I hadn’t outgrown them. This one was bad.
I said, my voice cracking and breaking and squeaking, “I’m not using my cell phone!”
Mr. Taylor’s face turned bright red. I pictured him having a heart attack and it didn’t exactly make me feel sad. He said, “I know! I saw you put it away. Take. It. Out. And give it to me! Right now!”
He totally messed with my head. That feeling of detaching from reality was usually just that: a feeling. Suddenly, I was second-guessing my own reality. Had I been on my cell phone and not known it? Did I have a multiple personality? Were there other people lurking around inside me who sometimes take over and do things that Shade isn’t aware of? I was so confused, I meekly pulled my cell phone out of my backpack, walked up to the front of the classroom and handed it to him.
He gave me the ugliest look, as though fire and brimstone were smoldering in his eyes. He said, “Thank you! Return to your seat.”
He tossed my cell phone into a drawer.
I couldn’t be without my cell phone! I just couldn’t! Annie might call. All my contacts and private messages were in there. Photos of me with my best friends.
Fear and anxiety have ways of warping the world. As I walked back to my seat, my perception of the event distorted as though bounced around by a funhouse mirror. The aisle lengthened. Kids’ eyes grew frighteningly large and dark and piercing. I moved as slowly as I run away from monsters and other horrible things in nightmares.
Finally, I sat down.
Mr. Taylor was staring at me. Had he been watching me the whole time?
He looked around the room. He said, “Class, open to Chapter 3. Start reading on your own. Tonight’s homework is to read Chapters 3 and 4 and answer all the questions at the end of both chapters.”
A flurry of pages turning. Then the kid named Astral Plane shot his hand up into the air.
Mr. Taylor in a weary voice: “Yes?”
Astral Plane: “The first chapter has ten questions and the second one has twelve. That’s twenty-two questions. Did you mean to give us that many?”
Mr. Taylor with a grumble: “I can add. And ... Yes.”
A groan from the class.
Everyone started reading. A lot of kids fidgeted in their seats. There were sighs, along with the sound of pages turning.
Mr. Taylor reached into his drawer. He pulled out my cell phone. He slid his finger across the screen. Why, why, why didn’t I password protect it!? I always saw that as inconvenient. Well, now, all my private information was up for grabs. Creepy Mr. Taylor was in my cell phone, checking everything out!
Finally, the bell rang. As I walked past his desk, he nonchalantly handed me back my phone. Like he hadn’t violated my privacy. Like he hadn’t done anything wrong. Like I’d dropped my phone and he was playing gallant gentleman, picking it up and handing it back to me. He even smiled at me. The most evil smile. Like a snake. I envisioned a forked tongue slithering out of his mouth.
I grabbed my phone and shoved it into my pocket. I tripped over someone’s red sneakers on the way out the door. I didn’t even see who it was. Just their sneakers. They got mad, yelling, “Hey, watch it, dork!” Tears of frustration streamed down my face. I swiped at the tears with my sleeve. No way was I letting anyone see me cry.
Next class was English Lit. That went a whole lot better. Ms. Bell had dyed her hair. It was all pink now. She had on a sleeveless orange dress with a purple T-shirt underneath. It was blinding. If I were her, I wouldn’t go anywhere near bees. They were sure to mistake her for a giant flower. Bzzzzzzt!
She had decided we’d discuss The UFO Came for Me, the comic we’d read in her last class. What was there to say? It was terrible.
I decided to raise my hand. I wasn’t in the mood to put up with any more crap from teachers. I said, “It’s pretty simplistic.”
She said, “What do you mean?”
My heart sank. If I was going to get anything out of this class, I’d hoped she’d know the difference between a good graphic novel and a cheesy comic book.
I said, “Well, it’s more of a comic book than a complicated graphic novel.”
Ms. Bell said, “Yes, that’s true.” She bristled. “It’s what I could afford right now. Hopefully, we’ll have our graphic novels next month. But in the meantime, we can talk about the ideas inside comic books. I mean, think about graffiti—that’s completely free, but it’s also capable of making points worth talking about.”
I thought, Yeah, but only good graffiti does that. You have to know the difference between art like Banksy’s and a kid scribbling on the sidewalk or a vandal mucking up train cars and buildings. I kept that to myself.
When I didn’t answer, she got back to teaching. She said, “This comic book teaches us something about myth. It came from the mind of a local artist affected by the zeitgeist around here in which people believe that aliens have traveled all the way from outer space to visit us right here where we live. It makes us feel that we’re special.”
The rest of the class involved students telling stories about people they knew who’d been visited by aliens or abducted by them. No one admitted to seeing aliens themselves.
I came to the conclusion that I should definitely publish my newspaper article. Considering the serious interest in aliens around here, it should be a
big hit.
At lunch, I sat at the table where I was a regular now. I’d been eating with the same kids ever since Starshine invited me to join them. It felt good to be there. Figuring out where one belonged at lunchtime was at least as important as not being the last one picked for a PE contest. More important, actually. You could be picked last in every single PE event; but if you didn’t have a lunch table where you could join up with other kids lacking physical prowess, you were doomed.
I passed around my rewrite of the article on the UFO Festival. Starshine commented first. “I think we have to go with this one. I mean, Bobby Huffman was murdered. You can’t ignore that. And I don’t think we should leave him out of the article. It’s really compelling how you tied everything together about the UFO Festival and the UFO sighting.” She looked around the table. “What do you all think?”
Violet, Moonjava and Wolf agreed with her. So that was settled. That was the version I’d submit to Ms. Bell. I wondered if she’d see the difference between the facts in my story and the garbage in the comic she’d handed out in class.
I don’t know how I got through the rest of the day. I fell asleep in Music class. I couldn’t help it. We were listening to opera. A. Nice. Slow. Opera. That did it. I went out like a cell phone with a drained battery. I only woke up when the end-of-class bell rang. Thankfully, that was my last class.
Kai had been on my mind all day. I was extremely worried that her mom’s boyfriend would come back home and hurt her. Or worse still: come home and kill both Kai and her mom. I didn’t want to think that was within the realm of possibility. I just wanted to think my overactive imagination had run amuck. But Kai had been terrified that he’d hurt her mom. She’d said his T-shirt had been covered with blood.
But why had she been holding a bleeding, injured wolf when I’d caught up with her at her house? She’d said that was her mom. Kai had healed the wolf. The wolf had disappeared down the hallway. Kai’s mom had come out of the hallway shortly afterward, looking tired.
That was so freaking weird. Maybe Kai meant the wolf was her mom in the sense that it was her mom’s whole life or something like that. Was the wolf her mom’s pet? How could anyone ever let an animal as wild and ferocious as a wolf live in their home? Especially when they had children! That was more nuts than the guy out in the desert trying to train a mountain lion.
Kai wasn’t safe at home. My mind started whirling, thinking about how to get Kai permanently out of her house. Oh, my God. Maybe there was blood on the T-shirt of her mom’s boyfriend because the wolf had attacked him. Maybe he’d been a victim, not an abuser. Maybe he shot the wolf in self-defense.
I wanted to go home and crash on my mattress and go to sleep. But I had to talk to Kai.
As soon as I got off the bus, I made a beeline to her place. I found her pacing in front of her trailer. She’d worn a path in the loose dust. As soon as she saw me, she came running over, her lime green sneakers flying through the billowing dirt. She grabbed my arm. She said, “Shade! Finally! I need you to help me!”
I said, “I’m exhausted, Kai. After the wolf, I hardly got any sleep...”
She didn’t want to hear it. She said, “I know. I’m sorry. Me neither. I seriously need your help. This is a matter of life and death.”
I asked, “How much a matter of life and death? Is it your mom’s boyfriend?” I was fully prepared to help immediately if it was needed. I figured the guy should be reported to the police if he was a threat. Having a mom who couldn’t be counted on for anything, I had little patience with bad parenting. I felt her mom should be reported to Social Services for endangering Kai’s life. A violent guy in the home was a threat to everyone. And no one with an ounce of common sense would keep a wolf in their house, children or no children, and Kai was her child.
Kai said, “Not directly. He’s gone. It’s my aunt!”
I asked, “The one who was at your award ceremony at school?”
Kai said, “Yeah. I don’t think there’s much time. I have a really bad feeling about this.”
This was way too mysterious for me. My brain was fried. I said, “Look, Kai, I’m exhausted. Just explain to me what’s going on.”
She said, “I can’t. You have to see this for yourself. Do you trust me?”
I thought about that. I guess so. She healed Annie. For that, Annie and I should owe her our lives. But, then again, it was kind of like voodoo, her holding Annie’s hand and Annie suddenly getting better. Maybe Annie’s meds had just kicked in. I didn’t actually know Kai all that well. Her home life was super-secret. Kai was so afraid of her mom’s boyfriend, when she saw him with blood all over his T-shirt, she assumed he’d hurt her mom. She never once considered that maybe he was hurt and driving himself to the hospital. And Kai’s mom? I’d met her twice, one time with an injured wolf in their house!
To keep things simple, I just said, “Yeah. I’m just tired.”
Kai said, “Then I’m telling you, my empath powers are tingling so intensely, I feel like I could crawl right out of my skin. My mind is filled with darkness, a feeling of impending doom. My aunt’s in danger, I just know it.”
MY BS radar went off. How did she know it was her aunt? I said as much.
Kai said, “Because she was dragged off into a van by some guys with a bad reputation.”
I said, “Kai! How could you not tell me that right off the bat? All right, tell me what you want me to do.”
She said, “The last text message I got from her said they’d taken her out to Bottomless Lakes State Park. It’s about fourteen miles outside of Roswell. I want to go check it out.”
I said, “Shouldn’t you call the police?”
She said, “No. They don’t help in cases like this. Trust me.”
I wondered again if this was all domestic abuse, her mom and aunt involved with the wrong guys, and the police won’t touch it. Especially if they’d been called out to their homes a bunch of times already. I said, “OK. Let me see if my mom’s home. I’ll drop my stuff off and then I can go with you.”
When I walked in the front door, I found my mom passed out on the couch with a bunch of beer bottles tossed on the floor in front of it. Apparently, they hadn’t all been empty. There was a big wet spot on the carpet. The place smelled like a brewery. I tossed the bottles in the recycling bucket and covered my mom with a blanket. She stirred a bit, mumbling something that was more grumble than words, and fell back to sleep.
After dropping my backpack off in my room, I took some time to pee and stuff Oreo cookies in my mouth, then headed back to Kai’s.
She had already gone to the parking lot and was waiting in the road for me with her truck.
I hopped in. She didn’t speak all the way to the park. She played a CD instead—some kind of spiritual drum music.
I’d never been to Bottomless Lakes before. I had no idea what it was. Turns out the name was legit. The lakes were actually underground caves with collapsed roofs. Some of them were 90 feet deep. I found this out later when I read up on the place.
My impression when we got there was that it would be a really cool place for hikers and photographers. Red rock cliffs surrounded greenish-blue water in a bunch of the lakes. The only place I’d ever seen green-blue that vivid was in pictures of the Caribbean.
No one was there except an old guy taking money and handing out tickets in the Visitors Center. He wanted to tell us all about the park, but Kai brushed him off, saying she’d been there before. He looked disappointed, like he’d been alone for a while and was hoping for conversation.
When we got back outside, Kai said she had a premonition about one of the lakes. She said, “It was my aunt’s favorite. It’s not one of the blue ones. It’s the one that acts like a void, reflecting back the colors of the cliffs around it.”
We hiked over. Surrounded by red cliffs, the surface of this lake was copper and green and rippled. It reminded me of autumn leaves or melted copper with the green tarnish it gets. It was divided in the middle b
y a white strip of minerals that looked like salt.
Kai grabbed me by the arm and pulled me down behind spiky bushes. She put a finger to her lips. Her eyes were wild and maniacal and frightened. She pointed.
I hadn’t seen them before. In the shadows of the cliffs: a cougar and a black cat. Technically, they were both cats. But one of them was a small cat, either feral or escaped from the safety of its human’s house. It was black; but unless black cats truly possessed the power to spray bad-luck karma at anything crossing its path, this one was about to become lunch. The cougar was circling around it, pacing on muscular legs, its body lean and strong and hungry. The little cat hunched its back, fur bristling and tail straight up. It let out a warning Meeeowww, a flare of hope in a hopeless situation. I flashed back to Moonjava wielding an assault rifle, storming out into the desert, threatening to mount the heads of the guy and his mountain lion on the wall if they didn’t hightail it out of there. I didn’t feel so brave.
I felt powerless to stop the inevitable. I wanted to jump up and chase the predator away. My autonomic nervous system held wisdom that my conscious mind did not. It recognized that I was prey every bit as much as the animal I wanted to protect and it froze me to the spot.
Deep, rumbling growls rose up out of the cougar’s throat and bounced off the cliff walls, magnified echoes of its ferocious hunger. My heartbeats scattered, jumping around in my chest. My hands trembled.
The cougar leapt. In an instant, it grabbed the cat in its mouth, sank its bestial teeth into its neck, shook it around until it went limp and lifeless, all the fight drained out of it.
Kai stood up and yelled, “Nooooooo!” She broke through the bushes and went tearing down the hill to the salt flat.
Fear scrambled my brain, obviously causing me to hallucinate again. While I stared at Kai, wanting to stop her, I saw the cougar change shape in the corner of my eye. It turned into a man. The image of a nude man racing up over the hill and around the other side of the cliff wall played out in my brain while Kai shrieked.
When she reached the shadows, she lifted up the damaged cat. She cradled it and sobbed, her sadness echoing off the hard surfaces all around her.
Shade and the Skinwalkers Page 10