by Estevan Vega
Enough of this, I thought. There are no aliens, it’s an optical illusion, once the car starts rolling uphill she’ll be screaming like an honor roll student with her first F and then she’ll be mine. I’ll play her like a violin. At least like a ukulele.
So then we get there and I run it down the same as Jimmy did to me. Stop the car, Blue Eyes, put it in neutral and turn off the engine. I can’t guarantee there are aliens here tonight but if there are we’ll know in a minute. They’ll start pulling the car up the hill toward their spacecraft. If that happens, remember the magic word. “Louie.” Twice. Louie, Louie. Like that oldies song.
All the time I’m setting her up, I can tell she thinks this is all a crock. It wasn’t so much what she said; it was more the tears her laughter brought to her eyes.
But then it began to happen. The car moved. Not much at first, about an inch. And then another and then another, still barely moving, but then we went a little faster and then that baby started to roll! I must confess that at the very first movement I gave out a little scream myself, about a thousand decibels worth, but so did Liz. Well, not a scream exactly, but she did quit laughing. For a whole minute. Then she giggled but it was a nervous giggle and I knew I had her.
It was plain she didn’t want me to see that she was frightened. Her mouth was moving, saying something, but I couldn’t hear her. Then, I did. “Louie, Louie.” In a whisper. The car started to pick up more speed. It was hurtling along now at about ten miles per hour.
She said it again—“Louie, Louie”—and this time loud enough to hear plainly. We kept on rolling, the speed now up to a dizzying fifteen miles per hour or so.
“Louie, Louie.”
I almost jumped out of my skin and the mirror!
“Louie, Louie, Louie, Louie, Louie!”
All right! It was working!
“Liz, listen to me.” Here went everything, the whole ball game. Bottom of the ninth, two outs, score tied, me at bat. “You must have the wrong voice tone or something. There’s only one way to save us from the aliens.” We were halfway “up” the hill now, whipping along at about twenty miles per hour.
“Louie, Louie, Louie, Louie, Louie, what?”
“We have to change places. Now. Before we reach the top of the hill. Once we’re there, they’ll sweep you up into their spaceship. Then it’s on to Mars where they breed you with Spider People. Your only chance is to trade places. Now. Right now. My voice will work.”
There. Now she would have to look at me.
Except she wasn’t.
CHAPTER TWENTY
SHE WAS LEANING OUT of the window and singing. Louie, Louie was the song. By the Kingsmen. My dad’s favorite song. And she was laughing.
“You didn’t think I’d really fall for that weak stuff, did you?”
I considered the next twenty years or so as a mirror person.
“I know all about Gravity Hill, dummy. I was at your pajama party the night after you went the first time. I was in your bedroom mirror.”
She started hooting again.
She was fruit. Just plain fruit.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I MUST HAVE WHIZZED in and out of ten mirrors before I ended up at Joe’s Gas. It was late, after eleven o’clock. I’d gone home directly from Gravity Hill. Calamity Hill was more like it. Party time for Miss Blue Eyes; disaster time for the twin on the inside. It’s wrong to hate people maybe, but it was the only enjoyment I was having, at the moment.
The situation was hopeless. My fail-proof plan had gone south. With wings. My life was canceled for this season on the boob tube of existence, and any future seasons, thanks to Miss Blue Eyes. I guess I should quit calling her that. Miss “Blue Eyes,” that is. I was the one with the blue jobs now and she was sporting the brown numbers. Big deal. I’d give a trillion dollars to have my plain brown ones back again. I knew one thing—if by some miracle I ever got out of here, I’d never wish for a different eye color again. I wouldn’t even consider colored contacts. Or red hair or whiter teeth or anything other than what I was shipped with from the factory. Well, maybe I wouldn’t be entirely and deliriously ecstatic over the teenaged curse of acne, but I’d still trade having jumbo zits from head to toe for being out of here.
I was so bummed at what had happened at Gravity Hill that I’d completely forgotten Mirror Jim’s plan. Somehow, my mind had blanked it out, like intense sunspot activity on Channel 10. I just felt so sorry for myself that I sulked in the mirror at Joe’s, my head in my hands, invisible to everyone except Miss Blue Eyes who was gosh-knows-where by now, probably destroying the little bit of my life that was still intact.
Junior was there with one of his slimy buddies, Wimp Belvedere, and they were telling each other jokes, the kind that require an I.Q. that matched the average number of fingers on the average hand. One day soon, Junior and Wimp would end up cellmates, I figured. I sort of was eavesdropping, but my heart really wasn’t in it. This was going to be my life from now on, sitting on the sidelines of reality, listening to other people’s adventures and never having any to call my own.
Wimp was talking. About me. Natch. Everybody in town was talking about me. I was the center of attention in ways I never dreamed possible. I’d achieved a popularity beyond my wildest nightmares. Wimp was saying, “Yeah, I knew her when she was in the Pom-Pom Club. Really cute. Who would have ever thought she’d turn out this way? I almost took her out one time.”
Oh, really. This was news to me. Think again, weasel-face. You must be thinking of someone that looks like me but is more closely related to the Marquis de Sade or is heavily into self-abuse of the third kind. That earthworm had some nerve! Once, I said “hi” to Wimp in passing and almost immediately afterward realized I’d erred on the side of gross dumbness. That was the only communication we’d ever had.
“I remember when she was a pompom girl.” This was Junior. Somehow, I just knew what he was going to say next and he didn’t disappoint me. “She was a pompom girl at the game where I broke my leg. That was on the play where Jerry Lerendet ran ninety-six yards. Remember that? Longest run from scrimmage in county history!”
Give it a vacation, Junior! If I hear about your broken leg one more time or Lerendet’s run or the block you threw, I’m going to throw up nickels. One for every time you’ve brought this up in conversation—say about a million bucks worth. I’ll be barfing nickels for a month and when I’m done I can retire to the Bahamas on a permanent income of nine million bags of small change.
“He does go on about his broken leg, doesn’t he?”
I jumped about a foot, straight up.
It was Jim. Mirror Jim. Standing right beside me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“YOU SCARED ME, MIST-MAN!”
“Sorry. Didn’t work, did it?”
“What? Oh, you mean Gravity Hill.”
“Yes. It didn’t work, did it? I told you so.”
Those are the worst words in the English language. “I told you so.” I think they make moms and dads learn it before they allow them to become parents. They, in turn, teach it to your siblings so they can torment you with it.
“So what? It might have worked. It should have worked. If she hadn’t been snooping on me years ago at a pajama party, it would’ve worked!”
I sniffed.
“I suppose you have a better idea.”
As a matter of fact, he did, and as soon as I said that, I remembered. Hope sprang up again. In my bosom or wherever hope springs up at.
“Will it really work?”
“Trust me. It can’t miss.”
He chuckled.
“What’s so funny?”
“Oh, nothing. I was just thinking about Junior there.”
“What’s so funny about him? I mean, I know what’s funny, or rather, pitiful, but what strikes you funny?”
“His living in the past. He should be in here, instead of you. He’s a perfect mirror candidate.”
“Why on earth?”
“
Because he lives so much in the past. He could always live in the past in here. Break his dumb leg, over and over. Wouldn’t that be some fun!”
“I don’t understand.”
“Time travel, Elizabeth. Don’t you know about that?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
TIME TRAVEL…
Interesting…
I had to admit this was news to me. Miss Blue Eyes had never mentioned anything about it.
“You really are naive, aren’t you? Don’t you know you can go anywhere in time as well as anywhere geographically?”
This was a break-into-prime-time-news-flash.
“You can?”
“Sure. There’s a drawback, though.”
Figures. There’s always a drawback. “What’s that?” I said.
“Well...” Mirror Jim paused, as if he was deciding how to tell me. It must be some drawback. “...sometimes there’s a problem with the molecules of your body all arriving at the same time when you go back and forth in time. I remember one time, I wanted to see what Shakespeare looked like so I went to Stratford, England.”
“Well? What happened?”
“I got there, all right. It was really neat. They were all dressed just like you’d figure and all and they had the neatest accents. You know what was wild? Their accents weren’t English at all. They sounded more like they were from North Carolina or something. Weird.”
“Yeah, that’s weird all right, but WHAT HAPPENED!” Get to the point, Jim-O.
“Well, like I said, I got there, in merry old England, but not all of me. Not right away.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, all of me got there except for my left foot. My left foot was missing. It must have taken a wrong turn across the ages or something.”
I looked at him. Carefully.
“But you have both your feet here.” He did, too.
“Oh, it got there. About an hour later. That’s the drawback. It all seems to get there, your body, I mean, but sometimes not all at once. It’s happened to others in here. All of you gets there, but sometimes not at the same time. Sometimes you have to wait on body parts. Actually, it seems to have to do with the distance you travel. In time. Short trips don’t seem to have the same effect. If I went back a couple of years, all I might have to wait on is a finger, say. Maybe a couple of minutes.”
I had been getting an idea when Jim first told me about time travel, but that cooked that idea, at least put it on the back burner. I returned to the subject at hand. I’d think about my idea later.
“This great plan of yours you keep talking about, Jim. About tricking Miss Blue—Liz—back into here and me out there. How do I find a mirror like that?”
What I was talking about was Jim’s plan. Like I said before, it was so simple and obvious I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it myself.
All I had to do was get her to look into a mirror she didn’t realize was a mirror. Just long enough for me to say the phrase that would set me free.
And what kind of mirror was that? The kind that had been painted over, for example. I hadn’t realized it, before Jim explained it to me, that there were some people who used mirrors for a canvas. Kind of a novelty thing. Sounds like something shut-ins who couldn’t get to the mall would end up doing. What was good for my predicament was that some of the paintings left just a bit of the mirror uncovered with pigment. Sometimes just a speck or two would be left bare. All I would have to do would be to get Miss Blue Eyes to stare at one of those paintings long enough for me to say my five little words. She wouldn’t realize it was a mirror or that I was looking into her eyes until it was too late.
That was the plan.
There was something else Jim had brought up. Once we were switched, another problem arose. How to keep her there. Even if I was successful at trading places back, I would forever have to be on my guard lest I gazed too long into my reflection and she switched us back again. I would always have to sweat that possibility and I knew she would always be there, watching and waiting for her chance. Talk about a lifetime paranoia!
There was a simple solution to that, too, Jim explained. I only had to get her into a six-sided mirror, a “box” mirror, and then somehow quickly paint all six sides with black paint before she fled to another mirror and safety...and she would be forever imprisoned in that mirror. Jim would help with that, he said, by diverting her attention while I painted the mirror. Then, he would be with the girl of his dreams forever, even though they couldn’t see each other. Just two happy mole-mirror-people, was the way he saw it. I could see the beauty of that. If I never saw her face again, it would make me deliriously happy. I think Jim looked at that differently. Like it was a small sacrifice he’d be making to be with the girl of his dreams, although that’s the kind of dream I’d put in the nightmare category. So far, he seemed like a decent enough guy, so I tried not to think of the horror he was setting himself up for. Being locked up forever in a dark box with Miss Blue Eyes was not my idea of wedded bliss. Ol’ Jim, though, was convinced that once she was back inside her mirror world she would become the sweet girl he had once known. I hoped he wouldn’t get a smart-attack before we could achieve our goal.
The problem now was twofold. First, to find a painted mirror, and second, to get her to wherever it was so she would look at it.
Good ol’ Jim knew where such a mirror was. Actually, he said he knew where several such mirrors were, but the one he had in mind, she had already looked at. Naturally, when she did I hadn’t been there, probably off at Junior’s or somewhere, but according to Jim she had been there several times and most likely would be there again soon.
The mirror was behind a painting of dogs. It was in Derek Whistler’s basement. That was the bad part. Derek was a dropout from Grover Cleveland and a general bum. Derek was the kind of guy that wherever he was standing automatically became the bad part of town. The gossip was that not only did he do drugs, he sold them also. In general, the kind of guy you want to cross the street to avoid. Nobody decent would have anything to do with him. Miss Blue Eyes did, of course. According to Jim, she’d been to his house several times, to parties, smoking grass. That was beautiful. Not only had she destroyed my grades, my relationships, my college education, now she was trashing my brain cells and chromosomes and taking a chance of screwing up my future children. Not to mention taking a chance on mangling my body in a car wreck every time she was high. Lovely girl.
Jim had been spying on her also, and knew she was due to be at a party tomorrow night at Derek’s.
“Eight o’clock, that’s when it starts.”
“Oh, Jim, this has got to work. If it doesn’t work, what am I going to do?”
“It’ll work, Elizabeth. And I’ll be there with you. Don’t worry.”
Don’t worry! My whole life was riding on his plan.
We made plans to meet at Derek’s. Jim started to leave when something he’d said earlier came into my mind.
“Jim, you said something about time travel. Can I really do that? Tell me how. I want to know exactly how you do that.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE NEXT DAY, THE hours sped by like a turtle on Prozac. Kind of like the last day of school. I had now been inside mirrors for three weeks. It felt more like thirty years. Finally, it was seven-thirty, the time I was to meet Jim. In Derek’s basement. We wanted to get there before anyone else, just in case Miss Blue Eyes decided to come early. I wasn’t about to miss whatever chance I had.
There were just two little paintless specks in the mirror. Whoever painted the picture hadn’t meant to leave them; it was an accident. Luck was on my side. They were just the right distance apart for my eyes and they were in a strategic place, in the center of one of the dog’s eyes. Right where a viewer’s own eyes would be drawn. Jim figured the artist had meant to paint them in and somehow had forgotten. Probably got distracted when the Lawrence Welk show came on. Lucky for me. Thanks, Lawrence.
We could see Derek coming and g
oing. He was doing things like bringing down bags of ice to the refrigerator and setting out bottles of booze. From where we were, we could only see part of the room. It was a dumpy basement. The wall we were opposite was paneled with this stuff they did a thousand years ago and there were several holes in the paneling. Fists, Jim said. Drunk kids punching holes. I hope they broke a few knuckles, I thought. Nice parties. Nice folks. Like from the right distance, Cujo probably looked like a nice doggie.
People began arriving. Sort of the cast for a movie to be called “Scum People With Unsuccessful Lobotomies.” Not a one in the bunch I’d want to share a cab with. So these are Miss Blue Eyes’ new friends. My friends, as far as the world was concerned.
I began wondering if getting back to the real world would be worth it. I was going to have such a reputation when I got out. It would take the biggest P.R. campaign in the history of politics, just to get my image back up to the level of Typhoid Mary.
It was now eight-thirty and the party was in full swing, but still no Liz. I was beginning to worry but Jim calmed me down. “She’s learned a tactic called ‘being fashionably late,’” he said. “She does it all the time. Don’t worry, she’ll be here.”
Sure. Easy for you to say, Jim. You’re safe at home with nothing to worry about. Me, I’m this ghost with a zero future, with this insane person running around going potty on my rep.
What a party! A bunch of pea-brains sitting around using their twelve-word vocabularies, prefacing each sentence with, “like, yeah, man,” and whiz-kid stuff like that, and smoking dope and chugging beer. They really thought they were “with it” and what they were, mostly, was pathetic. I recognized a couple of kids I realized I hadn’t seen in a while. They’d dropped out of life, at least school-life, and now I saw why. They were all zombie-heads. That’s our term for dopers. I felt sorry for them. Some of them had been pretty good kids, but here they were at Derek’s, performing major brain and body damage to their earthly units.