by Tom Upton
“Hurting people?” he asked, clearly not believing me.
“Yeah, hurting people. I’m not any different from Amy that way.”
“I don’t believe that,” he said.
“Why not?” I wondered. “Do you even listen to me when I talk? I’ve always tried to be honest with you, mainly because I hoped the truth would scare you off. I can’t figure out why that’s not working.”
“Maybe because you’re not that bad,” he suggested. “You just think you are. You’re afraid you are. I know that you’re not.”
“If I were you, I wouldn’t bet my life on that,” I said. “You should leave now. I want to be alone.”
He got to his feet, and paused to look down at me. His eyes were filled with something with which I wasn’t familiar, something that made me uncomfortable—compassion.
“Go, Jack,” I said.
“What about Amy?”
“The picnic is a week from Saturday. We have eight days to figure out what to do… if anything.”
“If anything?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you suggesting not doing anything?”
“Who said doing something is the right thing to do.”
“You mean just let a lot of people get hurt, maybe killed?”
“It happens, right?” I said. “There are accidents. There are tragedies. People get hurt and people die. Destiny can also be dark. Who are we to interfere with destiny? Some people are just doomed—it’s as simple as that. Now, please, go home. I need to get some sleep. You know how it is with me—if I don’t take sleep when I can get it--”
“—you don’t get it,” he said morosely.
“Good boy,” I said, fighting off a yawn.
“Call you later?”
“Yeah, later, tonight, after the vampires come out. I’m surprised you don’t want me to do something about them, too.”
“Maybe in time,” he said, joking—I hoped he was joking, anyway.
And then he was gone and I was asleep.
I seldom remembered my dreams. The ones I did remember were really normal. I never had what could be described as nightmares. There was never blood or gore or strange murderous creatures. I never dreamt of my hands turning into claws, or any of that psychotic stuff, either. My dreams were filled with commonplace events that never occurred in reality. I dreamt my parents took me to amusement parks, and I actually had fun riding on bizarrely large rides: a Ferris wheel fifty stories high, a carousel that couldn’t fit in a football field, a roller coaster that seemed to climb up to heaven before dropping back to earth…. I had blue eyes and blond hair. I had dimples and a sweet smile. I was Jules but not Jules; I was what I might have been in a different life, a life free of the bizarre. I knew what it was like to feel things that others felt every day but took for granted. I felt love and joy, and everything else I never felt in the waking world.
Sometimes I had vivid dreams, the kind that reflected things that would happen. I had one of these after Jack had left my room that day, a short snippet of some future insanity.
… I am running through twilit woods. The trees around me are huge and surreal under the moonlight that spills through the leaf-less branches above. The ground is clammy under my gym shoes, which make frantic sticky sounds as I weave a mindless path through the thick tree trunks.
Something dead is chasing me, some snarling mass of darkness so close behind me I dare not pause to turn round and see its face. I know I cannot run forever but I have no other choice. I have to run and run and run just to stay alive. For a second I think it has fallen back a little, maybe enough for me to turn and fight, maybe enough for me to focus my mind on it and drive it away. Should I do it? Should I try? Or should I just die?
My instincts tell me to give up—they always do. But there is something else inside me, barely there, something like hope, something like love, faraway voices in my mind, whispering “Fight, fight, fight, survive, survive, survive,” without giving me any reason, any future purposes, any promises. Like a fool, I listen to them; I turn and face my foe, my destroyer. I catch a glimpse of its red eyes, its long fangs, as it pounces on my so swiftly I cannot draw a breath to scream before its teeth tear into the flesh of my face, before its crushing weight drives me to the ground, from which I will never rise…
Gasping, I sat up in bed in the dark room, knowing now what I had always wondered: how I would die? It was weird, and somehow comforting, to know for sure. Some large evil thing would kill me some day. I would not crack, and slit my own wrists. My body would not fade away, worn down by the powers inside me. And I would not die by fire, Amy’s or anybody else’s.
I flipped the switch with my mind, and light flooded my room. I squinted and looked around my room. Everything within it seemed less real than what I had just witnessed in my dream. My black cat alarm clock said it was 10:53 in glowing orange numbers. There was a plate of diced fruit and a can of Coke on my night stand. Oddly this was how I received most of my dinners, my mom sneaking into my room while I slept and depositing a plate on my night stand. I hanged my legs over the side of the bed, and started to pick at the fruit, which, like, the Coke, was warm.
My phone beeped and I dug it out of my pocket. Jack had called three times, and left one voice message.
“I’ve been thinking about things,” he said, not sounding so sure. “Let’s forget this whole thing, okay? I wish I never brought it up. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
I snorted. Jack’s timing was horrible. Now he wanted to leave it all alone. Why couldn’t he have left it alone at the beginning? Then it would have been easy to look the other way. Now it was impossible, because it had become personal. Threats had been made. My tree—not that I even liked the big ugly thing—had burned. And now I had to prove, if only to myself, that I was not exactly like Amy.
I took a swig of warm soda, and called him back. He sounded drowsy.
“Just let them burn,” he said.
“Sorry, can’t do that.”
“What?” He sounded more panicked than surprised.
“I can’t just let some crazy bitch burn up a bunch of people.”
“But you said you could,” he protested.
“Well, I changed my mind—I can do that, you know.”
“So what are you planning on doing?” he asked uneasily.
“I’m going to fuck her up.”
The next day, Friday, I didn’t go to school. I didn’t want to chance running into Amy. It was like the beginning of a chess game played between two extremely paranoid people. Opening move: Amy had offered to include me in her grisly plans. My move: I had dissed her. Her next move: she had threatened me. My next move was pending. I figured I’d let her hang there, wondering. Had she gone too far? What would I do now? Come right back at her? Or would I wait? What would I come back at her with? She had seen me control the weather, and she had to be concerned about that. Maybe I had been lying. Maybe I had been practicing this freaky stuff as much as she had over the past few years. Maybe I could bean her in the head with a hunk of hail from a hundred miles away. I wanted to keep her wondering, growing more and more paranoid. Maybe, in the end, she would get so paranoid she would be afraid to do anything.
When my mom came home, she discovered me lying in bed in my room when I should be in school. I told her that I was sick, and for a full hour she grilled me as to the nature of my illness.
“Well, sick how?” she asked.
“You know, just sick.”
“In what way?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I’m not a doctor.”
“Well, what exactly is bothering you? Is it your stomach?”
“Yeah, my stomach.”
“You have a headache?”
“Yeah, that too.”
“When was the last time you ate?”
“Why does it always come back to that? Can’t I just be sick?”
“There has to be a cause. Does it have to do with the tree burning?”
“Why would it have anything to do with that?”
“You tell me,” she said. “Do you feel upset?”
“A little.”
“You feel irritable?”
“Yeah.”
“When did that start?”
“When you started asking me twenty million questions. Mom, I’m sick and you’re interrogating me. Please! You think that’ll make me feel better.”
“I just want to make sure it’s nothing serious,” she said.
“It’s not.”
But she kept asking if I had this symptom or that symptom. That was the problem with having a nurse as a mother: she knew a lot of medical conditions and had a vast imagination. I grew weary from answering questions. I actually started to feel sick for real. I started agreeing with whatever she said. Yeah, I felt feverish. Yeah, I had a pain in my lower back. Yeah, my throat was sore. By the time she left my room, she was probably convinced that I had malaria or Rocky Mountain spotted fever or something.
Saturday afternoon I drove over to Jack’s house. I had never been there before. He lived in a large brick bungalow, and when I pulled up to the curb, he was sitting on the cement front stairs. He looked tired, as though he hadn’t slept. There were tiny pouches beneath his eyes, and his hair was messier than usual. He got up slowly from the stairs and led me through the gangway to the back yard, where an old woman sat in a wheelchair on the patio. Her face was as wrinkled as an rotting peach, and she didn’t seem to be enjoying the sunny afternoon. She just stared straight ahead at some fixed point that only she could see.
“That’s Gramms,” Jack said, paused at the back stairs. “It’s a bitch getting her up the stairs from the basement apartment, but she likes sitting outside when the weather is nice.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” I said. Really, I didn’t think the woman even realized she was outside.
“Do me a favor. If it starts raining, remind me she’s out here. Last summer I forgot, and my mom had a hissy fit.”
“Sure thing.”
The old woman stirred. She craned her neck as though she heard faraway voices. Her beady eyes drifted toward where Jack and I stood.
“Hey, Gramms,” Jack called out loudly, waving at her although she was only about ten feet away. She looked vaguely puzzled, as if she didn’t quite recognize Jack.
“Sometimes, she doesn’t know what’s going on,” Jack whispered to me, and then shouted toward the old woman, “Gramms, this is Jules. Say hello.”
The beady eyes shifted toward me, locked onto me, and after a couple seconds became as hard and dark as tiny hunks of coal. She raised her hand and pointed a crooked finger at me.
“Witch!” she cried in a surprisingly strong voice. “Witch!”
“Do I need this?” I asked Jack.
“Sorry.”
“Witch!…Witch!…Witch!” the old woman screeched.
“There’s definitely a quality-of-life issue here,” I commented.
Jack quickly led me up the back stairs and into the house, as his grandmother continued to cry witch after us.
We entered a family room that had recently been built onto the back of the house. It had a cathedral ceiling, from which hung a huge fan. A large bay window overlooked the small backyard. A plasma television screen was mounted on one wall. There was a sofa but no other furniture, just a lot of floor space covered with tan carpeting. A doorway to the left opened on the kitchen.
I walked around, checking out the place.
“Love what your parents did with this room,” I said. “It’s nice and…cold.”
“They had it built on a few years ago. They’re still trying to catch up on furnishings,” he added, vaguely embarrassed.
I stood at the window and looked down at the patio. The old woman had calmed down. Again she was staring off into space, as though seeing her prize-winning azaleas, which probably died about fifty years ago.
“So, what were you planning?” Jack asked.
“Well, you don’t have a swimming pool. I doubt the basement stairs would be enough of a fall.”
“What?” Then he realized I was talking about his grandmother. “Jules,” he said in a chiding tone.
“Really, that woman is a poster child for euthanasia,” I said.
“She’s old. She can’t help that.”
“My point exactly.” I turned to look at him. He looked nervous. “I was just kidding,” I said. “I do that sometimes. I know it doesn’t sound like I’m kidding, but, really, I’m laughing inside. I’m sure your grandmother is a wonderful person. It’s not her fault she sees the real me, although technically I’m not a witch. You know what they say: old people, children, pets—they see things everybody else misses.”
“I was asking about Amy,” he said, obviously wanting to change the subject. “What are you going to do?”
I shrugged. I wandered to the sofa, and flopped down on the soft cushions. I hooked a leg over the arm, which at home drove my mom nuts. It was quite comfortable.
“Really, Jack, what do you want from me?” I asked, looking up at him, feeling exposed but not in a bad way. “You want me to save the world? I can’t do that. Nobody can. The world is doomed. So, aside from that, what do you want from me?”
“I just like you,” he said.
“That doesn’t answer my question. I know you like me, but what do you want from me?”
“The usual things, I guess.”
“You want me to like you back?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“All right, I confess, I like you back. Half the time I’m mad as hell at you, but I still do like you. I have to hand it to it; you stuck in there, you followed me around like a lost puppy, you never gave up. Somewhere along the way, I got used to you. And now I like you. So now what? You want to hang out together? You want us to go places? You want us to hold hands and get kissy-faced? Jack, I don’t think I have a lot to offer in this area. Still, if that’s what you want, I might be willing to try. But you have to understand something. I can’t have you dragging me into this weird shit all the time. I just can’t deal with it—I don’t want to deal with it. If I could, I’d run away from myself. So if you really want to be my boyfriend, try starting by being my friend.”
He sat down next to me.
“I never meant to--” he started awkwardly.
“I know,” I said.
“Sometimes I just get carried away with things.”
“Sometimes?”
“All right, most of the time. I just don’t think.”
“Well, start,” I told him. “Now, I think I’ve said too much about all that—I’m starting to feel stupid. So back to the Amy problem,” I said, and then added with emphasis, “which is going to be the last problem you drag me into, right?”
He chuckled. “I promise.”
“Okay, now what to do with Amy.”
“You think of anything?”
“I figure there are two ways to deal with her: the easy way and the hard way.”
“What’s the easy way?” he wondered.
“You won’t like the easy way.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“It’s pretty obvious, really. We know that she’s fireproof and waterproof, but she’s not bulletproof. So I find a gun and blow her brains out. End of story, right?”
Jack was horrified. “You’re not serious.”
“Sure, I’m serious. It’s the quickest way to solve the problem. It wouldn’t bother me. Remember, I don’t have much of a conscience.”
“But I do.”
“Which is why I said you wouldn’t like the simple way.”
“Well, what’s the hard way?” he asked, eyeing me suspiciously.
“That’s where I try to stop her by other means,” I said.
“How would that work, exactly?”
“Exactly? I don’t know. I can cause things to happen, but I never practiced. That would be the big problem: I don’t know what I’m doing, and she does.”
Jack frowned. “You could get hurt.”
“Possibly.”
“You could die.”
“No, I won’t. I already know how I’m going to die; I’m not going to burn up.”
“I’m afraid to ask.”
“Something’s going to kill me,” I offered.
“Something?”
“Some kind of animal.”
He leaned back on the sofa, and released a slow weary breath.
“Do you know when?” he asked.
“No, just that it will happen. It’s actually kind of comforting, knowing. At least I won’t wither away in some hospital bed.”
“But this could be years from now,” he said.
“Sure, it can—it probably will be. My point is that I’m absolutely certain Amy won’t kill me. And that’s a good thing to know. I figure I go to the forest preserve before the party starts. I lurk around in the woods and wait for her to show up. I’m sure she’ll be hiding in the woods, because, well, that’s what I would do. I’d want to be close enough to witness the pain and suffering I’m causing, otherwise, what the point?”
“And when she shows up…?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I guess I play it by ear. Maybe something will occur to me.”
“That’s your plan?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s not much of a plan.”
“You could always go out and find me a gun,” I reminded him.
“Isn’t there a third option?” he asked. “Something where you don’t risk getting hurt or becoming a murderer.”
“Hey, you tell me what that is. I’m all ears. Amy is just a nightmare. There’s not a lot to work with—you can’t reason with her, and stopping her is going to be hard. I’m telling you, it’s easiest just to shoot the bitch. But you don’t what me to do that. I understand why. You’re worried about my soul, and I appreciate that. You always seem to be worrying about things I’m not sure I actually have.”
“Well, what about practicing?” he asked. He just didn’t know when to quit.
“Practicing? Really? Practicing what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe there’s something you can do to protect yourself. Maybe your can create some kind—I don’t know—shield.”