by Jen Brooks
Kylie and Mandy Breuger do starts for their pre-meet workout. I have eight slow laps, so I watch them race each other, over and over, to their coach’s mock starting gun. Kylie, who’s the best starter on the team, gets beat by Mandy almost every time.
My workout finishes first, like usual. When the sprinters’ workout eventually ends, I get the feeling Kylie deliberately avoids me. She goes off with Mandy to stretch by the shed. I sit with Rob and his girlfriend, Jessie, while Jessie finishes her stretch. When Kylie stands up as if done, she goes into the shed. All the hurdles, blocks, cones, etc., are stored in there, and she might be checking over some equipment. I decide it’s time to go see her, so I wander over, casually, though I sense disaster coming.
When I round the door to see her talking with Mandy inside, I put on my most confident boyfriend smile.
Kylie ignores my entrance. She stops talking to Mandy and goes over to a set of tape measures, inspects how well each is rolled up. The field event officials are famous for tangling the plastic measuring lines on the wind up. Before big meets the captains sometimes take it upon themselves to check the shed equipment and perform little fixes, but Mandy makes no move to help Kylie. I don’t think they’re in here to check equipment, and Mandy’s giving me a bit of the stink eye.
“Hey, Mandy,” I say.
“Hey, Jonathan.”
“You guys all set, or should I wait up in the parking lot?”
Kylie starts rerolling a tape measure. “I’m gonna be here a little bit. You can go without me.”
That never, ever, ever, ever, ever happens.
Mandy takes that as her cue to leave. “See you tomorrow,” she says with one more glance at each of us as she goes out the door.
“Have I done something wrong?” I ask.
“No,” Kylie answers a little too quickly.
“Why are you doing your best to half ignore me?”
“I’m not ignoring you.” She pulls out another tape and unwinds the mangled part.
“I said half ignore.”
“Whatever.”
She just whatevered me. My heart sinks.
“Kylie, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just have to do a few things and there’s no need for you to wait.”
“Can I help? You could get done faster.”
“Uh-uh.” She shakes her head for emphasis. “I’m fine. Really. You can go.”
“You’re getting rid of me.”
Her hand pulls length after length, spinning the remaining tape around its axis. I think she’s about to deny it, when she stops pulling and sighs. “Maybe I am.”
The admission means we’re getting somewhere. Since we’re on opposite sides of the shed, I take a few steps closer. “Is it because of this morning?”
She shakes her head.
“What, then?”
“I don’t know. Just . . . I need a little space.”
The words no boyfriend wants to hear. “Did something happen?”
“No. . . . I don’t know.” I’m pretty sure I’m wearing an expression of utter devastation, but with no remorse she plows right past me to put the tape measure into the triple jump crate. “Just don’t come over tonight, okay? I have to sleep for the meet tomorrow.”
“I understand,” I say. She does look tired. She tries to plow back past me to get another tape. I reach for her shoulder, mostly to show her I’m still here for her when she’s ready. She draws a startled breath and yanks away. She realizes a second later what she’s just done.
“I’m sorry, Jonathan. I didn’t mean that.”
The damage, however, is done. I saw the appalled expression on her face, though it morphs quickly into something that begs me to forgive her. I’d begun to think Kylie wasn’t capable of breaking up with me because of how I made her world. Looks like merging with your counterpart who has no loving-Jonathan requirement might change all that. Hurt as I am, I’m mindful enough to remember this is all my fault, not hers.
“It’s okay,” I say. I don’t make another move to touch her, just back slowly away. “See you in school tomorrow.”
Her hands are fisted at her sides, and her eyes glisten as she watches me go. “Yeah. See you tomorrow.”
CHAPTER 16
I SHOOT TO THE SITTING-UP-AFTER-A-NIGHTMARE position, shivering all over even though the sheets are soaked with sweat. I have this lingering image of seat belts in a tangle, arms and legs and necks strapped to a chair like in an execution, the buckles on those seat belts rising up and floating away. In the shadows I might even detect the echo of a scream I think I made.
I’ve thrown my comforter to the side, and the sweat on my body cools in the bare air, only making me shiver harder. I pull the bedcover back around me and hunker down against the mattress, working through the shivers and calming my breathing. I check the clock and find it’s just after two a.m. The dream recedes as dreams do, and my body slowly rediscovers its own warmth.
Apparently my body also thinks it’s slept long enough, because my brain clicks into worry mode, assaulting me with memories of the previous day. One Kylie’s pseudo-affection in creative writing, one Kylie’s pseudo-rejection in the shed. The snickering in the hallway. Is it really so bad for people to think real Kylie might like me? Shouldn’t I go to school tomorrow and strut around all proud or something? Maybe it’s time to finally show up in my fancy red car. If I’m seeing Kylie, that should bring me only good attention, right?
But the dark side of my soul says no one in the real world could think it’s natural for Kylie to like freakish Jonathan Aubrey with the faded scar and the BEWARE OF LONER sign. In the real world people won’t be happy for me. They’ll be horrified for Kylie. And they’ll be right. What’s happening to her is not natural.
A movement of air behind me causes my warmed skin to prickle again. Someone is in my room.
“If you’re gonna be awake all hours of the night, you may as well be productive, Big Brother.”
My first instinct is to tell her to go back to wherever she came from, but my second instinct wins out. I roll over.
“So . . . are you ready?” she asks.
“Ready for what?”
Tess smiles and flips some of her gorgeous dark hair. “Only the most important lessons you’ll ever get in your life.”
“And that means . . .”
“I’m going to show you the full power of being a world-maker.”
“Does that mean I get to visit your make-believe worlds?”
“Not even in your dreams.”
“But that time at the mall, when we ended up at the beach, that was your world, right?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
“That answer gets less and less funny with time.”
“Forget my worlds, Jonathan. I’ll teach you what I can to help you save Kylie. That’s it. Most of what I’m going to show you is stuff you should have figured out on your own already. You’re just too chicken to experiment.”
“What? I’ve experimented.”
“Yeah, right. You made your first world by accident. The rest was just the same exercise over and over. Get up and get dressed,” she commands.
“Turn around,” I say, because I’m wearing boxers and a T-shirt. She obliges me, and I slide my sweatpants back on. “Ready.”
She raises her eyebrows at my ruffledness. I was sleeping, after all. “What?” I say. “I have to dress up or something?”
“No, the slob look suits you.”
“Go climb up a tree and branch off.”
She laughs out loud, and as she laughs, her skin and clothes change color. They become a uniform, scaly brown as her arms lengthen and her legs fuse together. Her fingers split and elongate into tree branches, complete with bushy green leaves. Several more branches sprout from her head and shoulders, and soon the
plaster on my ceiling is chipping away behind the thick canopy of a tree.
For my part I fall rather inelegantly back onto my bed with a shriek.
Tess’s laugh echoes through the branches as though each leaf is a mouth emitting sound.
“It’s not funny!”
The leaves shrivel and contract along with the branches, and Tess morphs back into the human being she was a moment before. “You have no sense of humor.”
“No, I have no sense of your humor.”
“Same thing.”
A piece of plaster about the size of a quarter falls to the carpet between us. We both look up, and the ceiling blinks. One second it’s tree-damaged; the next it’s like new.
“What are you?” I say.
“I’m not doing anything you can’t do.”
“I can turn myself into a tree?”
“Yep.”
“I can fix broken ceilings?”
“Yep. Your first lesson this evening is how to manipulate objects within a world. Let’s take a little trip to Jonathan’s-smokin’-hot-dance-club, shall we?”
Before I can consent, I’m whisked through that moon-slivered, sphere-filled vastness between worlds, and my bedroom is replaced by an enormous sound stage. The familiar intoxication seeps through me and dulls my ability to think. This place is not for thinking. It’s for moving and for doing.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
A dancer slinks up to me, a bleached-blonde with leather suspenders and a turquoise tank top. Her lips blow me a kiss as she arrives, and she slides one glossy red fingernail down my cheek, my neck, my chest. Then she latches on to me from behind and starts grinding to the music.
I created this world so I could do this kind of thing, and through a druglike haze I inevitably absorb the beat into my muscles. The music in the air and the bodies writhing all around are fast-acting intoxicants, and although I’m seriously embarrassed about being here with Tess, I can’t help but move with the dancer. No one here cares that I stick out like a sore thumb with my T-shirt and sweatpants. Nor do they care that I’m a terrible dancer. With the world in my blood, I have rhythm, if not moves.
Blondie’s hands caress my hips, and I close my eyes. We push and pull against each other as the music changes to a new song and a woman’s voice starts crying out about the “Dance, dance, dance.” Rolls of satin drop around us like banners from the rafters, and a red sea of fabric billows all around in the fan-made wind. Blondie turns me around, and I see her face and stop breathing.
Blondie is Kylie.
Her red-brown hair is curled and styled with about seven inches’ more volume than normal. Her lips are Valentine-red with lipstick. She’s wearing a black leather bra and bikini bottom with black leather boots that reach halfway up her thighs. Her hips slink side to side as she dances in place.
But what has me cold is her eyes. The Kylie brown is covered with bright violet contacts. Purple and silver makeup covers her eyelids and flares out to her temples like a butterfly wing mask. She’s wearing thick black eyeliner and fake lashes so long, I can’t believe she can hold her lids open.
To the beat she moves her arms up to her head and slinks around some more—like a pole dancer without a pole. I can feel the conflict in my core—the intoxication I’ve made a parameter of this world versus the revulsion of seeing Kylie turned into this thing I picture walking the streets soliciting Johns, not Jonathans.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
“A little much, isn’t she?”
Tess is at my ear. Kylie reaches an arm out to me and caresses my cheek with the back of her hand. Tess’s head bobs with the beat, and when Kylie steps back and gyrates a little more, Tess imitates her.
I can’t stop my body from finding all this a little stimulating, so I do what I always do when I lose control. I skip out of the world.
Poof.
My bedroom in the real world is remarkably silent compared to the blaring bass and soprano of Jonathan’s-smokin’-hot-dance-club. My head is also remarkably clearer. I stand in the center, waiting for Tess, but she doesn’t follow right away. Maybe that same high I jumped home to escape has enthralled her. Somehow, though, I think Tess is immune to that kind of stuff.
With a flash of strobe light Tess whirls out of thin air. Her hair is done up in the seven-inch style Kylie wore, and her makeup and outfit match Kylie’s too. Tess’s body is curvier and fuller than Kylie’s, so the skimpy leather is even less able to hide what needs hiding.
She still moves to a beat, and the creak of her leather boots echoes in the room.
“Stop that,” I say.
“Oh, you’re just jealous.”
“What could I possibly be jealous of?”
“That I make this look good. But don’t worry, Brother dear . . .” She reaches a hand toward me and flicks it like a magician. One second I’m in comfy grays, and the next I’m sporting formal black suit pants, shiny leather shoes, and a white dress shirt unbuttoned to the waist. By instinct I turn away from Tess because my scars are exposed.
“I can fix that,” she says, and when I look down, my skin is beautiful. Having the old weight gone leaves me lighter, airy almost.
The bedroom booms with Jonathan’s-smokin’-hot-dance-club again, and I’m lying on a mattress covered in pink silk. Somehow I’ve acquired a pink bow tie at my neck. Tess smiles down at me and says, “In that outfit you definitely look smokin’ hot.” She licks a finger, touches it to the air, and makes a sizzling sound.
Not funny. I don’t want to look smokin’ or any other kind of hot. Already the dancers are converging on me like zombies from a horror movie. It doesn’t take more than a second for the high of Jonathan’s-smokin’-hot-dance-club to kick in, and I find myself reaching for them as they undulate closer with the music. Parting two especially buxom dancers with a delicate shove is Kylie, coming at me like a predator for the kill.
I have never had this problem before. I have never come here without wanting this. The conflict between the sensuality I created in this world and the rationality I need to hold on to actually hurts my brain. Kylie climbs on top of me, her movements a weird slow motion because of the strobe light. I can’t stop any of this, so I get ready to blink back to my room.
Then the last functioning part of my mind remembers Tess saying this was a lesson and something about manipulating objects within a world. “What do I do?” I cry out to Tess, whom I’ve lost track of but assume isn’t too far away.
“Whatever you want,” she calls from the dance floor.
That advice is not exactly helpful.
Kylie is pawing me like a cat, and I hear the words of the song comparing a woman to a lioness. Other dancers on the edges of the bed start pawing around too, and grooming their arms with their tongues. When Kylie opens her mouth to do the same, it’s clear that there are two things I want to be different: (1) I want Kylie to disappear from this world, and (2) I want to turn off the world parameter that makes me—well, not want Kylie to disappear from this world.
I think of Tess sprouting leaves and sporting a tree trunk, and the assurance that she did such an impossible thing gives me the confidence that I can make these two changes to Jonathan’s-smokin’-hot-dance-club. I concentrate with the core of my being and will Kylie away, then will myself a little self-control, and suddenly the person about to groom my face is the bleached-blonde, and I shove her off me. I roll off the bed and watch her stumble backward into the crowd.
This changes the mood of Jonathan’s-smokin’-hot-dance-club, and instead of continuing the prowling cat dance, the dancers begin to growl. The strobe lights turn crimson, and the scene looks like it’s being shot in a fog of blood. I spot Tess jerking back and forth with a partner.
Instead of a place where desire and music converge into what I used to think was healthy teenage escapism, Jonathan’s-smokin’-hot-dance-club has become nothing b
ut animal savagery with leather boots and cheap pink bow ties. I remember the ridiculous outfit I’m wearing and change that back into my comfy T-shirt and sweatpants. None of the dancers comes my way. I stand alone while they claw and bite one another. The spell is broken for me. I go back to my room.
Tess doesn’t make me wait for her.
She arrives with a feline nose and mouth and furry pointed ears adorned with pink bows. Her skin, which I can see almost all of because she’s wearing that skimpy dancer outfit, is a mottled tan and white. I think that’s a tail twitching behind her.
“Not bad, hon,” she says, and licks the back of her hand. “That’s two lessons in one.”
I stare at her while she finishes the cat-grooming thing. She makes a little meow with her cat mouth and crawls onto my bed. I stand in the middle of the room giving her my best death stare. Then it occurs to me . . . I might be able to change Tess.
I concentrate with my inner being, and instantly she’s in pigtails and a frilly yellow dress with white kneesocks and white patent leather shoes. Her face is cat-makeup free and cutesy like a doll’s.
She inhales sharply with surprise and switches back to a more Tess-like outfit of jeans and a hot-pink tank top. I, however, end up in the frilly yellow dress with white kneesocks. Ha-ha.
I switch myself back to the T-shirt and sweatpants.
“You learn quick,” Tess says. “I guess that’s good.”
The last thing I care about right now is Tess’s assessment of my progress. “Please tell me that wasn’t Kylie back there.”
“That wasn’t Kylie back there.”
“Really, I need to know whether that was Kylie.”
“Relax, Brother. In order for Kylie to appear in Jonathan’s-smokin’-hot-dance-club, you would have to physically bring her, which is lesson number three.”
“What were lessons one and two again?”
“Manipulating objects and changing parameters. When you make a world, it comes with a certain set of rules. In Jonathan’s-smokin’-hot-dance-club, one of the rules was the power buzz you set up for yourself so you could relax to what those girls do. You were pretty young when you made that world, so you were probably nervous. I’m betting you didn’t make that parameter on purpose, but it still set itself up according to your need.”