by Lisa Beeson
“Yikes! Forty-five bucks,” I breathed out in astonishment. I only had thirty-seven or so left over from Christmas. So, when my Mom passed by and said, “Okay, kiddo…time to go pick up your sister”, I got an idea.
“Hey Mom, look at this.” I held out the box to her.
“Oooo isn’t that pretty, looks like it’s made out of rosewood.”
I put on the most pathetic ‘pretty-please’ face I could muster. “Its forty-five dollars, but I only have thirty-seven…can you spot me the rest? I’ll do extra chores this week. Please, please, please!” I clasped my hands together pleadingly, laying it on thick. I never asked for much, so she gave me a rueful smirk, and then looked the box over again. “Do you really want it that badly?”
I nodded emphatically.
She rolled her eyes and gave a melodramatic sigh, “Alright, I guess I could help you out.”
We both laughed, and then I kissed her on the cheek. “Thank you, Momma!”
I took the box out of her hands and brought it up to Margery. Her eyes lit up as I placed it on the counter. “Look what you found. Wouldn’t you know, this is one of the items from that estate sale I was telling y’all about. I wonder if there’s pirate treasure inside.” She gave me an excited grin and a conspiratorial wink. “Anything’s possible.”
I humored her and shook my head sadly. “No such luck. I checked. There was nothing inside.”
She clucked her tongue. “Oh, old boxes like these always have hidden compartments. You might want to try…you never know.”
Mom handed me a ten and then I paid the rest, giving her the change back. Margery wrapped up the box in paper, before carefully putting it in a plastic bag. We said goodbye, and then walked out the door towards our van parked down the block, around the corner.
I heard the bells tinkle behind us while we were walking down the sidewalk as someone else entered the store. I looked back over my shoulder to glimpse a brawny, well-dressed man opening the door and walking into the store. Mom had already turned the corner around the building, so I only saw him for a second before I jogged to catch up to her. But that second was all I needed to see that he was the brightest person I’d ever seen before. What kind of ‘gifts’ did a guy like that have?”
Chapter 7
“That night I had a strange dream – the kind that feels totally real, even though there are things that obviously could never happen in real life. I didn’t even know I was dreaming at first. It started out like a normal morning. I got out of bed and got ready for school, and when I went down for breakfast, Hector and Sadie had already left for school. Mom came into the kitchen and said that I was late and that I needed to figure out a way to get to school on my own, and that she couldn’t help me.
So, I decided that the only way to get to school was to run there, which seemed like a totally plausible way to get to my school – nine miles away – to my dream-mind. I grabbed my backpack, went out the front door, and then I started running – only it wasn’t like how I had ever run before. The world around me went into slow motion as I sped by. My feet barely touched the ground; it almost felt like I was gliding. It was exhilarating. It only took about a minute to get to school. I slowed down to walking speed when I got to St. Anthony’s and went up the stairs to the front doors with everyone else.
When I got to my locker, Nate and Ainsley were already there talking to each other. I said, “Hey,” as I put my stuff in my locker. They looked at me sadly and then told me to go ahead to class without them. Being a dream, I didn’t think to ask them why, so I just went ahead. When I opened the door to homeroom, it wasn’t Ms. Gillespie standing at the chalkboard, but a man writing the word ‘Absolem.’
He looked ancient – not just in age, but like he would be more at home in ancient Babylon than in present day Savannah. His long hair and beard were dark grey with streaks of black. And his skin was dark and cragged, like one of those desert nomads who’d been at the mercy of the elements for a long time. He stopped writing and turned to me, smiling. His eyes were such a dark brown color that they almost looked like a fathomless black. They looked like they held the answer to any question I could possibly want to ask. But somehow I intrinsically knew that even though he could tell me all the secrets to the universe, he would only tell me what he thought I needed to know, when I needed to know it. I couldn’t tell you how I knew this…I just did. He told me to come in and take a seat, and his voice sounded so familiar. I sat down at my desk, not taking my eyes off of him. The bell rang and I noticed that I was the only one in class. “Where is everyone?” I asked.
Absolem walked over to shut the door and then turned back to me. “This lesson is just for you.”
Looking back, his answer seems very disconcerting, but my dream-mind wasn’t worried about it. So, I sat there waiting for him to continue. He grabbed a chair from one of the empty desks in front of me. Even though his hair and face seemed almost biblical, he was dressed in a normal pair of khaki pants and a grey sweater, just like I was. When he turned the chair to face me and sat down, I noticed that he wore two different socks just like I did. In fact, he was wearing the exact mismatched socks that I was. He saw me look and smiled. “I like your fashion sense.”
He leaned forward and rested his forearms on his thighs, and interlocked his fingers. “You’ve been in the safety of dream for awhile now, Little One. But now it’s time for you to wake up and see the world for what it really is.”
I looked at him blankly. I had no idea what he was talking about.
He looked into my eyes intently. “Your true self is starting to manifest, and it’s not safe for you here anymore.”
“Where… school?” I was totally confused.
He shook his head and then stood up. As he did, the school began to pull apart and away, like a stage set for a play disappearing behind invisible curtains. I stood up as my chair and desk pulled away, and I saw that we were standing in the road in front of my house. I was about to ask him what the heck just happened, when I felt a breeze blow from behind me. Turning around to see where the breeze came from, I saw that where the Harrison’s house was supposed to be, was now a gigantic sink hole that spanned the horizon. The ground fell away until it reached where my feet stood. The hole was so deep and wide, that the bottom was hidden by a roiling bank of fog.
Screaming and wind-milling my arms to regain balance, I took a few shaky steps back and leaned over to take some bracing breaths. When I was sufficiently calm, I looked over at Absolem accusingly. “What…the heck…is THAT!” I yelled, gesturing to the ginormous abyss that opened up in front of my home.
Absolem looked at me calmly. “That, Little One, is a choice you will soon have to make.”
I looked at him incredulously. “If my choice is to fall off a cliff to my messy and mostly likely very painful death, then I’m going with a hard pass on that one. Thanks.”
Not rising to my bait, he patiently countered, “What makes you so sure you will die?”
“Um, I don’t know. A little something called common sense…and gravity.” To make my point I walked over to the edge and pointed down. “I mean, look at that! I can’t even see the bottom!”
He looked at me intently, as he walked over to where I stood. “The hardest part of a leap of faith is taking that first step. More often than not, we need a little push in the right direction.” And then he nudged me forward into the abyss.
That murderous jackhole pushed me off a cliff!
In the time it took me to realize what happened, everything was doing that slow motion thing again, like before when I was running to school, and I was able to twist around and grab the edge with my fingers. My hands were sweaty and I started to slip. “Absolem help me!” I screamed.
“I am,” he said, looking down at me sadly. “You need to let go of what you know and transcend.”
I tried to pull myself up, but I was only able to raise my eyes just above the edge. My family was right there on the front porch of my house, even Jack was
there. They were talking and laughing, oblivious to what was happening to me across the street. “Mom! Dad! Help me!” I screamed, but they were deaf to my panicked cries.
“Let go, Little One,” Absolem encouraged, like it was the simplest thing in the world.
“I can’t!” I screamed back at him. I couldn’t hold up my weight anymore, so I slowly extended my arms back down again. My fingers were starting to slip off one by one.
“But you are going to have to…for their sakes,” he warned, pointing back towards my family. Then he turned and walked away.
When my last finger slipped off the edge, I woke up with a gasp.
It took me a minute or two of slow, deep breathing before I was calm enough to look around. Sadie was still in her bed, softly snoring away. The alarm clock on my nightstand showed that it was 5:32am, more than an hour before I had to get up for school. There was no way I was going to be able to get back to sleep, so I got up to go take a shower. I needed to clear my head, and I needed to make absolutely sure I was not going to be late for school.
That afternoon, after I came home from a normal day at school, I decided to take a look at the box I had gotten from Adelina’s. It still pulled at me like before, and I was curious to see if what Margery had said could be true. Could there really be a secret compartment?
So I took it down from my bureau and set it on my bed. Dad walked by the open door to my room, then came back and peeked in. “Whatcha doin’, sweet pea?”
“Looking for a secret compartment in this box I got from the Antique store,” I replied.
“Oh, fun! Can I take a look?” He loved solving puzzles and things like that. I said sure, and handed it over to him. He looked it over and then opened the lid, inspecting all the nooks and crannies. He rapped his knuckles on the bottom, and then his eyes lit up. “Did you hear that?” He knocked on it again. “It’s hollow. There really is a secret space in there.”
Excitement bubbled in my belly. “No way!”
He placed the box back on my bed, and then knelt down on the floor in front of it. “Usually…” he mused as he brushed his fingers over the box like he was reading Braille, “…boxes like these have trigger points.” His fingers grazed the back corner edges. “Ah ha! Here we go.” He simultaneously pressed the centers of two carved flowers with his index fingers. There was a distinct click, and I quickly opened the lid and looked inside. The bottom panel had popped up a bit. We looked at each other like two little kids about to open a Christmas present. “Go ahead, sweet pea! Lift it up,” he urged.
I took a deep breath and lifted the panel up. A thin blue rectangular jewel about the length of my thumb winked up at me as the sunlight from my window shined down on it. “No… way…” I breathed as I lifted it from the impression that it fit into perfectly. It was attached to a silver chain necklace like a pendant, which I held onto and let the jewel hang freely, as it spun in the sunlight.
“That can’t be a real sapphire…,” Dad marveled incredulously.
This was what had been calling me, not the box. It had the same opalescent qualities that I had noticed in my own eyes. Hidden colorful sparks that winked in and out depending on the way it moved. No one else noticed the colors in my eyes. Like the energies surrounding everything, they were colors normal people couldn’t see. I wondered what my Dad saw when he looked at it.
And as if he read my mind he said, “It matches your eyes, Kira.”
My eyes snapped over to his –could he see the hidden colors? But then I realized that the jewel looked plain blue to him, just like he thought my eyes were. “Yeah, it does,” I agreed, looking at it spin on the end of the chain. That’s when I noticed some strange etchings running down one side. “What’s this?” I asked, handing it over to him and pointing to the strange symbols.
“Hmm…It looks vaguely Egyptian, maybe Sumerian...Sanskrit? I don’t know, I’m not an expert.” He shrugged then handed it back to me.
“What should we do with it?” I asked holding it out in front of me.
“Keep it…,” he said while taking the chain in his fingers. He put it over my head and around my neck. He smiled. “It was in the box that you bought. It belongs to you. Possession is nine tenths of the law, and all that.” He got up to go tell Mom about what we found.
“Dad, wait. I didn’t pay for all of it on my own. Mom gave me a ten, because I didn’t have enough.”
He turned back at the doorway. “It’s all yours, baby.” He winked and then walked down the hallway.
From then on, I wore it under my shirt. I liked how it felt warm and comforting against my skin. The only people outside my family that I showed it to were Nate and Ainsley. Nate said that I was way too lucky for my own good. And I had to agree, or so I thought.”
Chapter 8
“About a week after I had my weird dream, I walked into class with my friends and there was a man at the chalkboard. It wasn’t Absolem, but it was still strange. We hadn’t had a substitute all year. Ms. Gillespie always bragged about her iron constitution. She never got sick.
We sat down in our seats, looking at each other like ‘what’s the deal?’ The man at the chalkboard wrote “Mr. Briggs” at the top of the chalkboard, and then turned towards the class. He scanned the room until his slate grey eyes rested on me. I looked behind me to see if I was just in his line of sight, but nope. He was looking right at me. After a couple seconds he turned and went to go sit behind Ms. Gillespie’s desk. He looked more like some kind of police officer or secret service agent than a substitute teacher. He was tall and muscular with a stony face, and his blond hair was cut in a high-and-tight military style.
The bell rang, and a few stragglers eked their way in, trying not to be noticed as they sat down at their desks. When everyone was settled, Mr. Briggs cleared his throat then announced that Ms Gillespie was absent due to family matters and that he would be filling in for as long as was needed. Then he proceeded to call out everyone’s name for attendance. He looked up at each kid as they raised their hand after he called their name, committing their faces to memory. When he reached my name he looked up, and when he saw me reluctantly raise my hand he narrowed his eyes and gave me a slight tip of the head.
This guy gave me the creeps.
I looked around to see if anyone else noticed his special attention towards me, but it didn’t seem like anyone did. I couldn’t get a read on his intentions; there were too many people in the room and he was too far away.
When he was done with attendance, he got up from the desk. Holding the notes Ms. Gillespie left behind, he announced, “Alright class, you all were supposed to read chapters seven through ten of Huckleberry Finn over the weekend.” Then, he looked back down at the notes.
Judging by his accent, he was definitely a northern transplant, or maybe from the mid-west. He started asking questions about the chapters, so I slunk down in my chair and started mindlessly doodling like I usually do. Even though I knew all the answers to the questions, I never raised my hand. I left that to the eager beavers in the front who wanted to show off.
After moving through the lesson plan and asking a few questions, Mr. Briggs seemed disappointed that I had no intention of answering any of them. So he cleared his throat and asked the next question. “Who can tell me why Huck and Jim must travel together from the point of view of the characters and of the author?” A few eager beavers raised their hands, but he ignored them. I could almost feel his eyes boring into the top of my head as I bent over my desk, doodling on the cover of my binder. “Kira, can you tell us why they must travel together?”
Yes, but I wasn’t going to. “Umm… sorry, sir, I don’t know,” I replied.
He narrowed his eyes only a fraction, but I had caught it; he didn’t believe me. Miranda and her cronies turned around towards me and mouthed the words ‘Special K’.
Over the years I’d only had to deal with Miranda in a couple classes here and there, but for some reason this year I was cursed to have her in five of my classes.
Normally I’d just ignore her, but my nerves were already on edge, so at that moment something snapped. “Actually sir, I do know the answer. Jim needs Huck, because Huck is white and can accomplish things in the everyday world that Jim wouldn’t be able to without raising suspicion, since he is black and is seen as inferior. Huck could also pretend to be Jim’s owner, so they could be free to move about without branding Jim as a runway slave. Huck needs Jim close because he is the only one that knows that Huck is alive, and he needs to make sure Jim won’t betray his secret. Huck also feels morally obligated to him since Jim is suspected for murdering Huck, and would be put to death if he were caught. Twain’s reason for them travelling together is because the whole point of the book is to separate Huck from a racist society long enough for him to be able to rise above the ethos of racial superiority and be able to see Jim as a human being and not just property. Throughout the journey, Huck has to struggle between what society tells him is right and wrong and his own moral compass.”
The whole class turned to stare at me. This was the most I had said in class in the past seven years. Mr. Briggs smirked as though I had just validated what he suspected of me.
I was like, Crap, what I did I just do?
“Very good, Kira. Excellent answer,” he said.
My scalp has a way of tingling when I sense I’m in danger, and my scalp was definitely tingling.
The bell rang, signaling that the class was over. I grabbed my stuff as fast as I could so I could get the heck out of there. Nate and Ainsley looked at me like ‘what was that?’ I just shrugged my shoulders and moved towards the door. I had almost made it through, when Mr. Briggs called out, “Kira, can you stay behind for a minute?”
Dang, I almost made it. “Sorry, sir, I don’t want to be late for my next class.”
“That’s okay. It’ll only take a minute,” he assured me.