She shoots me a look like I’m crazy. “You saw it. There was no voodoo. Just a simple ask.”
“I’m impressed.”
She shrugs happily and admires her ring. “This ring is awesome.”
“Have you talked to him before? Do you know him?” I press on, wanting to know how she can be so gutsy to ask out a guy she doesn’t even know. Kissing a boy on my last night in town is one thing, but laying it out there—you’re cute, do you want to go out?—is entirely another.
“No. But now I can get to know him,” she says, and the smile on her face is so natural, so normal that I bet Gem never had to keep the kind of secrets I keep.
A few days later, my phone buzzes with a text from Elise.
Mindy invited Jana to the mall today. J said couldn’t go. Said she had to spend the day at swim practice. She’ll come over later though for dinner.
My spine stiffens. I write back, pressing hard against the dial pad.
See if her hands are cold.
Really?
Yes.
After practice that evening Elise replies.
Hands are warm. Said she was tired from swimming all day. She went home.
I call Jana at home. She doesn’t answer. No one answers. I finally reach her the next day.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You didn’t answer last night.”
“I fell asleep.”
“Is Dad working you too hard in the water?”
“No. I just—”
But she’s cut off by the sound of my father. “We need to go.”
“High tide is soon,” she whispers to me. “He wants me to become stronger by swimming against the tide.”
Swim away from him. Swim across the ocean, I want to say.
14
Looking Out
By the time the first show rolls around a few weeks later, the legend of the fire twin has been scratched from the lineup. I’ve been relegated to the “chorus,” where I back up the better elemental artists.
We perform in Intrepid Arena, which was built several years ago in the middle of the green fields of Central Park for the New York Yankees but has become better known as the home for the Coeur de la Nature show, the name for our troupe. The Yankees still play here, but only in the mornings now, and the ground crews have to slap up sliding walls over most of the seats because the team only generates a fraction of the crowds that they did back when spectators used to watch big boys smash balls.
A slice of the ground has been left exposed, a canvas of dirt and grass for the earth artists to paint on. On each side of our stage is a glittering black curtain that shimmers in the breeze, with silver—real silver—streaked into it to make the arena appear as some ethereal night. The stage itself is set like New York City, with backdrops of tall buildings, glowing streetlamps, and luminous building stoops after a rain.
There is no starlight in New York City. There is too much light pollution. But tonight, it’s my task to make starlight. It’s one of the hardest tricks I’ve had to master in the last year because it requires pinpoint precision and patience. Tonight I craft the tiniest little flickers, scatter them above me, and keep them stoked because my starlight becomes the backdrop for Mariska as she makes the ground in Central Park rumble, the earth under the audience shifting and tilting.
After the show, I call Elise to tell her about my first performance in the M.E. Leagues. We chat as I walk back to the dorm, and a construction crew jackhammers a section of concrete on Broadway. “It’s always like this here,” I say, laughing over the noise. “Even at night. How’s home?”
“Boring without you.”
“Ha. I find that hard to believe. Kyle is probably thrilled to have you all to himself.”
“Yeah, but doing doughnuts in the parking lot was more fun with you.”
“I bet other things in the parking lot are more fun with him.”
She laughs, then her laughter fizzles out. “So listen, I have something to tell you,” she says.
No good news has ever begun with those words. But I barely have time to brace myself because she continues. “I’ve been recruited too.”
“Are they sending you here too? Because that would be perfect.” I let myself feel hope for a second.
“No.”
“Where then?”
“The Lookouts want me.”
“The Lookouts? But what about college?”
“My dad wants me to postpone it for a year. My dad thinks it’s good experience. A real honor, he says. Like this honest, noble thing you can do. He said it’ll look great on my résumé.”
“But, do you want to?”
“I’m not talented in the way you are, Aria. But I can use these talents in other ways. To help with the storms. To lessen the impact,” she explains, but she barely has to because the Lookouts are the perfect fit for Elise. They’re the altruistic elemental artists. They don’t use their gifts for fame and glory. They use them to make the world safer. They give. Like Elise does.
“Right. Of course. You’ll be amazing.”
But there’s a heaviness in the phone lines, a cracking pause, and I have a feeling everything in my life is about to rattle out of order, two sides of a fault line slipping far away.
“The thing is, Ar,” she continues. “They’re sending me to sea next week. With the Coast Guard. I’ll be working on a boat for the next few months. I’ll be on storm duty in the Atlantic.”
“A boat?” I repeat as if it doesn’t compute, because it doesn’t. I’m finally settling in, I can finally see freedom, and so this just can’t be happening.
“Yeah, we train out at sea, in the middle of the ocean. We’re stationed there too so we can fight the hurricanes.”
“A boat,” I say, the words like tar in my mouth.
“I’m so sorry, Aria. I feel terrible. But we can still try to meet up in August. I’ll see if I can get leave, okay?”
I want nothing more than for her to tell me she’s pranking me. But that isn’t her style. The Lookouts is her style. I just wish I didn’t feel as if the sidewalk is crumbling under me.
“No, it’s okay,” I manage to say, even though my carefully planned life is slipping away. “Don’t worry about me.”
“But what are we going to do?”
“I’ll figure something out,” I say through tight lips, my insides hollow.
“You will?”
“Sure. There are always other ways.”
That’s what the Lady said. You can be born with fire. You can steal it. Or you can bargain for it.
With a granter.
I weigh the odds. On the one hand, stealing fire can bring life punishments.
But I’ve been stealing fire since I was thirteen and I haven’t been caught. All I have to do is maintain my track record. After I end the call with Elise, I dial my brother and we make small talk for a minute or two. Then I slide into the important stuff.
“How’s Jana?”
“She kicked my sorry butt in Monopoly tonight,” Xavi says with an appreciative tone in his voice.
“That’s because I had Boardwalk,” Jana shouts in the background.
“You’re really playing Monopoly?”
“Yeah. I told you I’d look out for her. She spent the day at the pool with Dad, and now she’s with me.”
I cringe inside, picturing her daily water workouts with Dad. But at least for tonight she is safe. “So, I have to ask you a question,” I say, and I bet he can smell the lie coming, but I also doubt he’ll care.
“Hit me.”
“The Leagues are crazy intense about granter use and say they’re doing some new testing this year. Everyone here is kinda freaking out, and some say you can test for granters, and some say you can’t, and no one knows. You know some guys who used them, right? Is there a way to test?”
“You using a granter, Ar?” Xavi asks me, but he doesn’t sound like he’s judging; more like he’s impressed.
>
“No,” I say, forcing a laugh. “I’m just curious.”
“Here’s what I know. All the guys who were caught got caught because of what they wished for and what they did. But there’s no way to test for granter use. That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Good.
Because I have no more choices. When I run out of fire in a month or so, they’ll know I stole my fire in the first place. I’ve come to the end of a rope knotted by all the untenable choices I’ve already been forced to make.
The choice now is clear.
Somewhere in this city of millions there’s got to be a granter who’ll bargain with me.
15
Thoughts and Actions
They’re found in tunnels, they’re found behind doors.
Xavier’s earlier words about granters clang around in my head a few nights later as I walk along the edge of the park after our performance. There’s an apartment building across the street with double brass doors and a doorman. Maybe the doorman is holding the door open for a granter.
Maybe that’s why Gem said granters are virtually impossible to find. There are tunnels everywhere. Doors everywhere. There could be granters everywhere.
But that doesn’t matter. I have to find one. If I have to open every door in New York City, I will. I’ve been hunting for the last few days, inspecting every last one. But I’ve found no door marked “G,” no tunnel that leads to the lair of a wish giver.
I trek across town, continuing my hunt. An hour later, I’m on the East Side, and I walk past a subway stop. Maybe there’s a granter down in the tracks. I’d claw my way through the dirt and grime to uncover a granter. I’d race in front of a train to track one down.
After I hunt through the subway station, I walk south toward the Chrysler Building, wishing I’d never stolen fire in the first place. If I’d been tougher and stronger, I wouldn’t be wandering through Manhattan now in a frenzied state of wanting. I wish I’d never become a fire girl, because now I can’t be anything but a fire girl. I need too much, more than I needed back then.
Now I am desperate. Consumed by a desperate wish for a granter.
My boots are heavy against the sidewalk grate. Where do these things even lead to? What’s under these stupid grates that women are afraid of getting their heels caught in? I flash back on the boy descending below the grate when I first saw him. But all I can picture is a cesspool of grime and dirt, of cigarettes squashed and stubbed out, of flimsy white plastic bags from the drugstore floating in dankness, of a wet dirty muck oozing underground. Then I picture a door in the grate, and suddenly I stop.
Because it’s not my imagination.
There is a door.
The grate has become a door, and I see a pair of hands pushing from underneath the grate, lifting the iron hatched bars above the sidewalk.
Then a loud clanging thunk as the grate hits the concrete.
There’s a boy stepping out of the sidewalk vault. A boy with strong cheekbones and dark hair, wearing pressed pants and a white button-down shirt that looks freshly laundered and black shiny shoes. He hoists himself up onto the sidewalk, and I look around, out of instinct, to see if anyone else notices. The crowds have thinned, and the people far on the other side of the street don’t seem to care. It’s just me and the Chrysler Building and this boy.
The beautiful boy.
16
Bound
Taj readjusts the grate, positioning it back over the vault so the sidewalk is safe for others.
He wipes one hand against the other.
“Do you need help?” I ask, each word coming out as if I’ve never said them before, because I’m not sure what to say or do.
“No, I’m totally fine. But I have a feeling you might need help, Aria.” He gestures to the long stretch of sidewalk in front of us, the ribbon of concrete that lies between us and the tip of Manhattan island. “Ah, but isn’t it freeing to be able to go for an evening stroll?”
There’s envy in his words.
I’m not sure I should go for a walk with him, seeing as he’s emerged—though unscathed—from a grate. But in some weird way I feel as if I know him, even though we only talked that one time in the hall. Besides, he’s not the picture of a boy who’d be scrapping around underground. He’s the picture of the boys in fashion magazines, the ones with sculpted bones, smooth skin, and smoldering eyes, who wear clothes as if the clothes should be lucky to be so close to their flesh. Boys who have that enigmatic sense of where they’re from—they don’t tell; they’re just not from here.
“Sure.”
We walk, and he lifts his face to the night sky as if he’s soaking in the stars. He takes a deep breath, and when we reach the light at Forty-Second Street, we both stop, waiting for our signal to cross. He shifts his head from side to side like he’s working out the kinks in his neck. “Ah, no one ever tells you that all that time in between gives you one sore neck. It’s been a while.”
“Been a while?”
“Yes. It’s been a while since I’ve been summoned. Well, a few weeks to be precise. You were looking for a granter, weren’t you?” He can read my mind. “It’s okay. You can say yes. I’ve never been wrong before. It’s just kind of … one of those things. That’s how it works with us. You really want us, truly need us, we appear.”
“You’re a granter? Mariska was using a granter?” My jaw hangs open. Mariska is so straitlaced, so by the book. She’s constantly harping on about the need to work harder. I can’t believe she’d use a granter.
Taj shakes his head. “I don’t grant and tell.”
“Like doctor-patient privilege?”
He shrugs evasively but says nothing.
“You weren’t her boyfriend? You were hanging around because she was using you?”
“I love how you just cut straight to the chase. But I’m afraid there’s nothing I can say about the past. So let’s focus on now.”
“Okay,” I say unevenly, because I don’t even know how to process all this information flying at me—the beautiful boy in her pictures is a granter. But then the brilliant truth lands in my lap, bright and shiny. Mariska was using a granter and she’s still in the Leagues. Ergo, both Gem and Xavi are right. You can’t test for granter use.
My luck is changing.
“So you just appear? Like that?” I snap my fingers. The light changes and we cross.
“Did you think we were found in bottles or something?” he asks as if I’m a little kid who believes in fairy tales.
“I wasn’t sure,” I answer quietly.
“Because that whole genie-in-a-bottle thing is a total myth. I don’t know where that came from.”
“I’m pretty sure it came from 1001 Arabian Nights.”
“Ah, but perhaps all those stories are myths too? The genie and the merchant, the genie and the fisherman, Aladdin and his wonderful lamp? Perhaps the jinni in those stories are all fables too,” he says, and we’re circling each other’s words. Suddenly I’m not so sure it’s a bright idea to be jousting with a granter, especially one who seems so ready to call me out on the slightest inaccuracy. After all, I don’t really know 1001 Arabian Nights that well. “Now you see them, now you don’t.”
He snaps his fingers and is gone. Like that. Nothing left behind. Here one second, gone the next. My heart speeds wildly, bangs its tiny fists in my chest. I didn’t want him to go, and I have this impulse to hunt for him like a crazed woman who has lost a diamond ring. Because I need him. I need him.
And of course, that’s why he appeared. He appeared because my wish for him was so deep, so potent, so full of raw desire. That’s all it took for him to appear—monstrous need.
They’re virtually impossible to find. Unless you absolutely must have one. Maybe I can return him to me with that same canyon of need. I close my eyes and make a wish he’ll show up again.
When I open my eyes I’m still alone on this stretch of Lexington Avenue, and he’s neither behind me nor in front of me;
neither perched in a doorway nor hiding around the corner. Then I spot him. He’s across the street, leaning against the streetlight on the corner. He waves at me, a “gotcha” sort of wave.
I cross Lexington. “So you don’t live in a lamp, and you can just come and go as you please?”
He narrows his eyes and purses his lips. They look soft. “I wouldn’t say I can come and go as I please. But the lamp thing”—he waves a hand to dismiss the idea—“ancient history. Would it make you feel better if I told you that not everyone who wants a granter can have one? That you’ve got to be desperate enough to find one?”
Desperate. That sounds about right. Even so, something doesn’t compute. “But I didn’t find you. I thought granters had to be found,” I say. Because even though he’s telling me how his kind work, I somehow feel the need to point out—with my extraordinarily limited and thirdhand knowledge of granters—that he might be wrong.
He rolls his eyes, then speaks slowly, as if he doesn’t expect me to get it. “We are found. We are found in the wanting, and blah-blah-blah.”
I look him over, this tall, dark, and handsome boy walking next to me. This magazine model boy, who was found below a grate. This is crazy. This is a freaky dream I should wake myself from. But I’ve had lightning pierce my heart, I’ve made fire from my hands, I’ve touched an ice-cold gator. I’ve been stripped free of the capacity for shock.
That doesn’t mean I’m not doubtful. “So let’s say you’re not just an apparition and that everyone can see you, does that mean nobody cares that you just disappeared and reappeared across the street?”
“Welcome to New York City. Where no one pays attention to anyone else, especially those living in the sidewalk tunnels.”
Taj tips his forehead west. We begin walking across town.
“Where are we going?”
“Much as I simply adore the foundations of New York City’s finest architecture, I find I’m rather partial to the open spaces. I get a bit tired of being underground all the time.”
The Fire Artist Page 9