Forever Freaky

by Tom Upton

  “So, we do nothing?” he said, his voice sounding lost. He was one of those people who think there isn’t anything that can’t be fixed. He never learned that some things, and some people, are broken and there is nothing anybody can do to repair them.

  “For now, until I can figure out what to do with her.”

  “And what if she attacks somebody else in the meantime?”

  “We can’t do anything about that,” I said. “I don’t think that’s the real problem, anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This whole targeting jocks—I doesn’t quite make sense. Oh, sure, maybe these three guys lied to her, or did something else to piss her off. But, really, it’s not her style—it’s not how her mind works. If anything, this was more like practice.”

  “Practice?” He sounded alarmed. “Practice for what?”

  “Amy was more into—what would you call it?—mass destruction.”

  “Mass destruction?” he said dully.

  “You know, killing a lot of people.”

  “I know what mass destruction is. Are you kidding me? Is this just something you’re making up so that I’ll leave it alone?”

  “No, really, I’m not, Jack. She used to tell me her fantasies: throwing hand grenades in the lunchroom, poisoning the school’s water supply, fire-bombing the main office—that kind of thing. Like I said, she gave me the creeps.”

  “You think she was serious? A lot of people just talk.”

  “I thought she meant every word of it ” I said. “I even stopped using the drinking fountains at school.”

  “And you never told anybody this?”

  “Why? Everybody knew there was a problem with Amy. It was no secret. She was sent down to her counselor more times than I was.”

  “And nobody did anything?” he asked.

  “What could they do? She talked crazy, she acted crazy, but she never actually did anything crazy.”

  “Until now, until she knew that she could get away with it.”

  “That would be my guess,” I said. “She’s not stupid, you know. Just stay away from her, all right?” I said, getting tired of talking about Amy.

  After I got off the phone, I sat in the darkened kitchen for a long time, wondering why Amy was my problem anyway, and deciding it was something with which I was stuck, like a lot of other things in my life. It was, as I told Jack, a freak issue, and I was the only other freak available.

  ***************

  When my mom came home, she was soaking wet. She went upstairs, changed into some dry clothes, and then returned to the kitchen and asked me about twenty times if I wanted her to make me something to eat. I really didn’t need this type of harassment right now. She was nagging me about my diet, and I was worried about figuring out how to stop a human flame-thrower from going Carrie on everybody’s ass. Clearly we didn’t live in the same world.

  “I told you—I had a salad,” I said.

  But it was, like, How big of a salad? What kind of vegetables? Did I at least have some shredded cheese on it? How about salad dressing?...

  “Mom, please! I ate, all right?”

  “It’s just that we had this teen-aged girl admitted today. She weight only eighty-three pounds--”

  “Oh, God, not again,” I said. Every time the hospital got a patient with anorexia or bulimia, my mom got frantic. “I told you about a million times—I’m not anorexic. I eat. I eat. I eat. How many times do I have to say it? I don’t think I’m too fat. I think I’m pitiful skinny. I don’t know why I can’t put on weight.”

  “Well, you better do something,” she howled, “before it’s too late.”

  “I don’t need this—I really don’t.”

  I ran upstairs to my room, and locked myself inside. I left the light off and paced the floor in the gloom. It was bad enough that I constantly fought being that part of me that was a freak. But why couldn’t I even be the rest of me, the superficial part, the naturally scrawny kid? Was there no part of me that was acceptable? To myself, I was a freak, and that wasn’t all right with me. To my parents, I was too thin and cold, and that wasn’t all right with them. To kids at school, I was too weird, and that wasn’t all right with them. I just couldn’t make anybody happy. What was I supposed to do? If I were a building with too many defects, they could tear me down and rebuild. It was no wonder that I had gravitated toward Amy Nicci at one time. We had much in common; we belonged nowhere and we satisfied nobody.

  I stopped at the window and looked outside. The rain was falling hard, slanting down from the dark gray sky. The branches of all the trees bent in the wind, and new leaves were ripped away and flew around in a mad frenzy.

  I turned on the light and changed my clothes. I put on a pair of jeans and my Doc Martens boots. I threw on a black hooded sweatshirt.

  I went downstairs. When my mom saw how I was dressed, she looked stunned.

  “Where are you going?” she wondered.

  “For a walk,” I muttered.

  “In a storm?”

  But I just walked past her through the kitchen toward the back door.

  “There’s a tornado warning!” she shrieked after me.

  “Tornadoes avoid me—like everything else,” I said, before I went through the back door and stepped out into the storm; I figured if she and my dad wanted to send me to a psychiatrist, I’d give them a good reason. Other than that I wasn’t thinking anything at all. There is no greater freedom than the freedom you experience when you stop thinking. I had no idea what I was doing but I was doing it, and that was good.

  ***************

  I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt over my head, and walked down the street through the cold rain. Now and then, lightning flashed in large claws across the sky. Gusts of wind rose and whipped me pretty hard, but I kept walking. I didn’t care that I was cold. I didn’t care that soon I’d be soaking wet. I didn’t care if I ended up dying of pneumonia. I just needed to be alone out in the storm. Maybe I was always there, figuratively—the storm that rages between totally normal and totally abnormal; I was unable to reach normal and unwilling to commit to abnormal. Maybe the storm was my home, the only home I could ever know.

  After walking a couple blocks, I heard a faraway whine that became shriller and shriller. I knew what it was; a power transformer was about to blow. Sure enough, a moment later, there was a boom, like a gunshot, and then the streetlights flickered and went out and all the houses up and down the street became dark.

  I kept walking. Shadows stirred among shadows and things whispered in the darkness. Twice I spotted glowing figures venturing out of haunted houses, looking around in a puzzled way, as though they couldn’t fully comprehend the storm or the power outage.

  By the time I reached the old Victorian, I was drenched and chilled to the bone. I took shelter under the limbs of the old oak tree on the front lawn. It was a horrible place to stand in a storm—it was exactly the kind of tree that gets struck by lightning—but hardly any of the rain reached me beneath the thick gnarled branches. I pulled off my hood. Beneath it my hair was damp and clung to the sides of my face. I leaned back on the thick tree trunk and studied the Victorian. It was dark except for one window on the second floor through which the dim light of candles wavered. Each flash of lightning created an eerie snapshot of the old building. The faded white paint was peeling off the siding. The window boxes were empty. There was a broken chain on the porch swing, and one end of it rested on the floor and made scrapping sounds every time the wind gusted. A gaudy green and orange curtain flapped in the upper window before the wavering candlelight….

  What am I doing here? I wondered. I didn’t believe that I had planned to end up here. But, maybe, in the back of my demented mind, it was exactly where I wished to be, where I needed to be, at the moment—a place where I would never be judged for what I was. I wondered if I was really so desperate to be accepted? Well, maybe….

  “Are you lost, freak?” At first I thought the voice sounded in my
mind, but it came from behind me, from behind the tree trunk on which I leaned.

  I was not startled—not many things took me by surprise. I listened to the crackle of dry twigs as something crept along the ground in the dark. Then a shadow emerged from behind me, circling forward. It kept a wary distance from me; the last dealing I had had with Amy was to stab her in the neck, which, apparently, she hadn’t forgot.

  “I said, ‘Are you lost, freak?’” she asked impatiently. Lightning flashed, and I caught a glimpse of her evil pixie face. “Well…?” She waited for an answer, and when it didn’t come, she tried to probe my mind. But she had never been able to read me, and that much hadn’t changed. My thoughts were shielded from her. She wouldn’t have understood them at the moment, anyway-- my thoughts were so confused.

  We stood there, in the darkness beneath the tree, for what seemed like a long time. The rain pattered on the ground, and thunder began to roar overhead.

  Then, strangely, she burst out laughing. “I always knew you’d come crawling back,” she said, deciding that was why I was here.

  “Did you?” I said.

  “Of course. You don’t belong anywhere else—you never did. You are destined to be here, just like you are destined to be what you are. I wondered how long it would take you to learn that. And what if I told you to get lost? What then?”

  “You always have Jessica as your playmate,” I said.

  She snorted. “Jessica. What a joke! Oh, she’s filled with hatred, and hatred has its charms. Other than that, she’s nothing; she has no substance, she has no talent. Not like you.” Lightning flashed, and I saw her face, her dreamy expression. “Tell me, freak, can you still do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “That little trick of yours. You remember that one summer, that storm… Can you still do it?”

  “I think,” I said.

  “Show me,” she commanded.

  I walked out from under the sheltering tree limbs. She followed me, still keeping her distance. We stood on the front lawn and looked up at the dark sky. I had to squint as the rain fell on my face. Then I pointed to one spot in the sky. “There,” I said, and a few seconds later lightning flared where I had pointed. I studied the sky awhile, and then indicated another area, which soon erupted in long forks of light. Again and again, wherever I pointed lightning bloomed out of the dark clouds.

  Finally Amy laughed joyfully, clapping her small hands like a little kid who has witnessed a magic trick.

  “What a mind-freak,” she roared. She stared up at the sky in that creepy, dreamy way of hers. “I remember the first time you did that. I actually thought you were directing the lightning, commanding it to go where you wanted it to go. It took me a while to figure out you were just predicting. Oh, a good enough trick, but hardly practical. What are you supposed to do with it?—win a few bets? But what if you really could control it? What if you could make lightning do your bidding? Now, that would be awesome. Imagine what you could do with that? If there’s something you don’t like, ZAP—it’s destroyed. Somebody bugging you, ZAP—they never bug you again.”

  I watched her as she spoke. It was clear that she was totally serious. That had always been the really scary thing about Amy: not that she said weird things, but that she meant them.

  She lowered her eyes from the sky to look at me.

  “That was an old trick, freak,” she said, studying me warily. “What new tricks have you picked up?”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Bullshit. It’s been four years. You must have picked up something.”

  “I was really never interested in that sort of thing,” I told her.

  “Not interested? How can you not be interested? It’s a part of you, like your hands, like your legs. How can you ignore your hands and legs? How can you stop them from serving the function they were meant to serve?”

  I shrugged.

  “Pathetic, really pathetic, Jules,” she muttered.

  “And you?” I asked. “Are you still playing with locks of hair and eye of newt?”

  She grunted in disdain. “Witchcraft? Witchcraft is nothing—nothing. It’s for talent-less hacks. If you’re born with the gift, you don’t ever have to cast a spell. You see what you want to see. You know what others don’t know. You will things to happen. It’s that simple, if you have the right powers.”

  “Do you have the right powers?” I asked.

  “I have what I need,” she said, and I noticed that though she stood in the rain, she didn’t appear to be the least bit wet. “I have what I need to endure life, to never lose. I don’t need anything or anybody.” She looked at me with an expression that was part contempt and part pity. “But not you,” she continued. “You’re still in that gray area, aren’t you? You’re lost in limbo, just hovering there, between the light and the darkness. The light pushes you away, and yet you fight the pull of darkness. Why do you put yourself through it? It’s not so awful, you know. It’s simply accepting what you’re meant to be. Really, it’s not like you ever had a choice. A duck is a duck. A frog is a frog. A freak is a freak.”

  I stared at her. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t argue with her—I couldn’t say she was wrong about any of it.

  Finally she sighed. “Well, you want to come inside?” she asked, not quite friendly but dropping the psycho-bitch intensity. She sounded almost normal now. “You look like a drowned rat. I have the house to myself. My father is out drinking and my mother is out whoring. Or was that the other way around?—I never can keep that quite straight with those people. Anyway…” She looked at me, her eyes flickered something resembling hope. Maybe she wasn’t so comfortable being alone after all. Everybody needs a friend, right? She took a step closer to me, and though she wasn’t very close, I could feel the chilly air grow warm. “We could have fun, Jules, like before, only a thousand times better,” she whispered the temptation. “We’re not little kids anymore, Jules. Imagine what we can do now.”

  Although she was somewhat maniacal, I considered her offer. Could we actually be friends again? The idea seemed insane. But, really, was it? At least she understood me, not like dim-witted Melody, who understood nothing, or do-gooder Jack, who was always trying to make me something I was not—a lab rat or a saint.

  So I went with her, into the house and out of the rain, out of the rain for the first time in a long, long while.

  I never made excuses for the things I did, and so I didn’t make excuses for befriending Amy again. It seemed like a natural thing to do—birds of a feather flocking together, right? It made perfect sense to me.

  Jack, of course, had a different opinion. When he discovered that I was going to Amy’s house after school every day, he became utterly frantic. He just didn’t understand, and how could he? He had a few friends, and he could relate to them and they could relate to him. He took that for granted. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be so different that you fail to make connections with others on a very basic level. He was incapable of seeing the world as I did. When he spoke of paranormal things he’d read about, I could no more understand his enthusiasm than he could understand the vague thrill that I had when I had a vision of, say, a battlefield strewn with dead bodies frozen in hideous positions. But Amy would know how it was, because she had a point of reference, she had seen and felt similar things. “You just have to stay cool. Control the thrill—don’t let the thrill control you.” This was what my life had been lacking, the comfort of knowing that I was not unique.

  Still, I sat with Melody and Jack at lunch. It wasn’t that I was telling them to get lost, although with each passing day, I realized more and more how little I had in common with them.

  “I don’t see the big deal,” Melody said to Jack one day. “If she wants to make friends with somebody, what do you care? I know you don’t like Amy, but it’s not like anybody’s forcing you to hang out with her. So what’s the problem?”

  “She’s knows what the problem is,” Jack grumbled, glow
ering at me across the lunch table.

  “Jack, we’re not talking about this,” I said.

  We sat in edgy silence for a while. Nobody was even eating their food.

  Melody looked back and forth from me, across from her, to Jack, at her side.

  “You know, sometimes I get the feeling I don’t know anything about what’s going on,” she commented.

  “Believe me, you’re better off that way,” I assured her.

  The three of us fell into a long silence again. Finally, my disgust growing, I shoved away from the table, and walked outside.

  For once Jack didn’t follow me like a lost puppy. I was sure he was disappointed in me. I didn’t care one bit. He had no right to be disappointed in me. He meant nothing to me, and he never would. He had been a constant reminder of how different I was from others, as though I really needed that. Our becoming friends had been a fluke. Becoming more than friends, which was what he wanted, was impossible. We didn’t even live in the same world, but it was much more than that; it was also a matter of fate. Some things are just never meant to be.

  But Jack would never believe that. He thought anything was possible. He was so stubborn and stupid, no matter what I did, no matter what I said, he would always believe that somehow I could be “fixed.” Even my mom knew better than to believe that.

  After my last class that day, I walked outside toward the student parking lot. It was a beautiful spring day. There were soft warm breezes and not a cloud in the sky.

  Then I noticed that Jack was racing up the path toward me. I huffed in disgust—like doesn’t this guy ever take a hint?—but I didn’t try to evade him. I wasn’t the running type. I let him catch up with me.

  “What do you want, Jack?” I asked.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  “Well, let’s see, I’m done with school. I’m walking to the parking lot. Uh, I guess I’m leaving.”