Rush

by Minard, Tori

  “Max isn’t crazy,” I said. I didn’t know why I felt compelled to defend him. Maybe it was the broken ribs picture. Even if he was crazy, he couldn’t have deserved that. Could he?

  “You barely know him,” Trent said. “Unless there’s something you’re not telling me.”

  “I talked to him long enough to know he’s not insane.”

  “He’s unbalanced. He believes in magic, Caroline. I mean, come on. Magic? He thinks he can cast spells and talk to spirits.”

  Maybe he really could. “That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s nuts.”

  Now Trent was looking at me like he’d never seen me before. “I can’t believe you just said that.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ve never told me you believe in that crap and why are you defending Max? You know how I feel about him. Is this about the box you found?”

  This wasn’t what I wanted for our lunch out together. I should have known better than to try talking to either Trent or my parents about anything paranormal. They’d never understand. They wouldn’t even make an effort to understand.

  Max would. He’d get it immediately. But Max wasn’t here, and Trent was looking at me with the same combination of concern and bafflement as my parents.

  “It’s not about the box,” I said. “It’s about a real experience I had.”

  “But you don’t believe in ghosts. You know better than that. At least, I always thought you did.”

  “I’m not sure what I believe. I only know Max isn’t crazy.”

  “He worships the devil,” Trent said.

  My eyes must have bugged out, I was so shocked. “He what?”

  “You heard me. He worships the devil. He’s a Satanist, a witch, a whatever they call themselves nowadays.”

  “No.”

  Trent smiled grimly. “Oh, yeah. You’ve seen that pendant he’s got around his neck? It’s a pentagram. He wears it all the time.”

  “I think you’d better stay away from Max,” my dad said.

  “I can’t believe it,” I said.

  “It’s true. He’s been messing around with that sh—uh, stuff since high school, maybe even earlier.”

  “Okay. Forget it,” I said. “I’m sure you’re right. It was just a dream, ghosts aren’t real, and Max is crazy. Can we eat now?”

  They could think what they wanted, and I didn’t care if they believed I’d capitulated the same way I always had. In my heart, the knowledge that I’d seen something not easily explained away remained intact. If Max was really a devil worshipper, though...that put my attraction to him on a whole new level of stupid.

  Chapter 10

  Max

  Trent and his fellow bullies were between me and my science class and the bell was about to ring. The hallway boomed with the loud voices of kids laughing and shouting as they dashed into their classes at the last minute. I’d been late three times this semester already. If it happened again, Mr. Brown had promised me detention. But in order to get in the class, I had to make it around the knot of football players and wrestlers that had congregated near the door of my class.

  Trent was at the center.

  I was small for my age; I hadn’t hit my growth spurt yet. That gave Trent and company a major advantage over me, not to mention all the social clout they had as athletes. But they couldn’t keep me from getting into my class—not really. They could only make it difficult and embarrassing. I lifted my chin and squared my shoulders, my hand tightening on the strap of my backpack. Striding forward as if they didn’t intimidate me, I pretended I hadn’t even seen them.

  One of the bigger boys stepped directly in front of me. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  I stepped to the right to get around him, but he mirrored my actions.

  “My class is right there,” I said with a movement of my head to indicate the room.

  “My class is right there,” he mocked in a high voice.

  Was that the best he could do? Idiot. Still, he was bigger than me and he had back-up. I glanced at Trent. He was watching with a grin, arms crossed, legs spread, obviously enjoying my discomfort.

  I tried again to pass, but the bully wouldn’t let me. Like I said, I was small for my age. A lot smaller than Trent and his buddies.

  “Let me by.” I tried to make my voice strong. Unfortunately, it cracked in the middle of the sentence.

  They laughed. One of them shoved me.

  “Don’t be in such a hurry, Maxi-pad,” Trent said.

  “Yeah. What’re you in such a hurry for?” someone echoed.

  “Maxi-pad,” another guy said. “Good one.”

  Other students began to gather around the spectacle we were creating, their faces alert with interest. I was burning all over, my neck and face hot with shame. Would Mr. Brown take this incident into account when he decided whether or not to punish me? Probably not. He hadn’t any of the other times it had happened.

  “You’re going to be late for your classes,” I said.

  “Oooh, we’re shaking in our shoes,” the first guy retorted. They could probably get away with lateness. Their type always seemed to get away with shit that would get a kid like me in huge trouble.

  The bell rang. Their audience melted away as kids scurried to make their classes before they were officially late. I heard a few of them repeating “Maxi-pad” to each other and laughing. Great. That would be my new nickname from today onward.

  Mr. Brown came out of his class, frowning. “What are you boys doing out here?”

  “We’re just helping Max get to class,” Trent said.

  Mr. Brown fixed me with a stern glower. “Late again, Max? I warned you what would happen, didn’t I?”

  “But they’re late, too. Why don’t they get detention?”

  “This isn’t about them. It’s about you. Now get in the classroom and take your seat.”

  I obeyed with a sullen clench of my jaw as my stepbrother and his friends stood in the hall, chortling.

  ***

  Caroline was avoiding me. She wouldn’t even look at me. In the essay class, she kept coming in late and choosing the seat farthest from me, her gaze carefully turned away from me.

  It hurt. It shouldn’t have, but it did. She was supposed to be nothing more than a means to an end, yet here I was moping because she wasn’t friendly to me anymore.

  I needed to get my head back in the game.

  There were more important things to think about than whether or not Trent’s sorority chick girlfriend liked me or not. Fred’s warning, for example. I hadn’t heard anything more about this ghost who was trying to contact me and I’d been too busy to do any ritual work designed to bring the spirit closer.

  On Saturday morning, I drove out to Brad and Marie’s farm. I found them in the garden in back of the house, working at some gardening activity I couldn’t identify. Marie’s hair was braided and coiled on her head like an old-fashioned milkmaid. They both wore ragged jeans and ratty old sweat shirts and were dragging around a plastic tarp covered in some kind of brown chunky stuff.

  Brad looked up at me and waved. “Max! You’re here just in time to help.”

  “I don’t know what you’re doing,” I said.

  “That’s okay.” Brad grinned. “I’ll teach you everything you need to know.”

  “That’s just what I was afraid you were going to say.”

  “We’re spreading mulch over the beds. When we finish that, we’ll set some cold frames over our winter crops.”

  “Okay, sure. Mulch. Cold frames.” What the heck was a cold frame?

  Although I’d grown up in Billings, I’d really been a town kid. I’d had little exposure to the country, and when I ran away I ended up on the streets in Seattle with no way out to the countryside that bordered it. My parents hadn’t been gardeners. So I hadn’t experienced the deep-down inner quiet that came along with clean country air and the wind-rustled murmur of tall grass and trees until I’d followed Brad and Marie down to Avery’s Crossing.<
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  I’d been here a few months, and it still surprised me how quickly I’d adapted to small town life and how much I liked being out here on the farm. It was almost like an instant meditation, where all I had to do was get out of my car and a light trance state came over me.

  When Brad and Marie had told me they were moving down here, I’d dreaded it. I wanted to go with them, but live in Avery’s Crossing? I figured there would be absolutely nothing to do here, and that was sort of true but I loved it anyway.

  “What brings you out here today?” Marie said after a while.

  “Can’t I just come out and visit my family?” I said.

  “Of course you can. But I can tell there’s something else.”

  I glanced at her, then at Brad. He had a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, so it was hard to see his expression.

  “Fred told me something recently,” I said. “I wanted to run it by you guys.”

  Brad sat back on his heels. “What was it?”

  “He said...” I chewed on the inside of my lower lip as I thought about how to approach the subject. Direct was probably best. “He said there’s a spirit trying to get in touch with me.”

  “Did he have a name?” Marie said.

  “No. He couldn’t even tell if it was male or female.”

  They exchanged a glance. Did they already know something about this?

  “What?” I said.

  “Huh?” Brad replied.

  “You two looked at each other like you were having a silent conversation.”

  He still looked puzzled. “I don’t think we were.”

  Maybe it was just the effect of being married to the same person for so many years. What would that be like? My dad had lost my mom when I was five, and they’d only been married about six years at the time. Of course, he’d been with my stepmom for a long time, but that wasn’t a marriage I’d use as a role model. My stepmom followed his orders...to the letter.

  “We don’t know anything about your spirit,” Marie said. “But we can find out for you if you want.”

  Did I? I’d driven out here for the express reason of talking to them about the situation, yet now I was here I wasn’t sure I wanted to investigate. Something about this particular spirit...I could sense it would change me in a way I couldn’t imagine and wasn’t sure I wanted.

  “I don’t know,” I said finally.

  “It’s probably better to find out than to wonder,” Marie said.

  “Whatever this entity wants, you know you have free will, right?” Brad added. “You don’t have to cooperate with it. If you don’t like what it’s telling you, send it away and ignore it.”

  I bowed my head with a sigh and pulled another dandelion from the ground. Something told me ignoring this spirit wouldn’t be so easy. “I know.”

  “Let’s get washed up and have lunch,” Marie said. “Then you can decide if you want us to go further with it.”

  I followed them back to the house, thinking how lucky I’d gotten when I’d found them. Or when they’d found me. Most kids on the street weren’t so fortunate. They never found any significant help, or they ended up with adults who only wanted to use them. Sometimes worse than they’d been used in their families of origin.

  It was thanks to Fred, of course. He’d nudged me in their direction, the same way he’d protected me from the worst effects of living on the streets. Fred had been a guardian angel of sorts for me ever since I’d been eleven. If it weren’t for him, I might not have survived my adolescence.

  ***

  For lunch, we had turkey sandwiches around Brad and Marie’s kitchen table. After we’d cleaned our dishes and put them away, we re-convened at the table and Marie pulled out her Tarot cards. She hadn’t done a reading for me in a long time.

  Brad lit the pillar candle in the center of the table and Marie closed her eyes, whispering the invocation she always used before a reading. The atmosphere in the room settled and deepened as Brad and I also focused our energies on the cards and the question. I wondered which spread Marie would use. The particular spread chosen would shape the reading and affect the kind of answer we received.

  She opened her eyes and began to shuffle the cards. After a few repetitions, she sorted through the deck and pulled out a card. Then she handed the deck to me to shuffle.

  “Celtic Cross,” she said. “Using the Knight of Cups as significator.” The significator represented the querent—that was me—while we took turns shuffling the rest of the cards.

  “The Knight of Cups?” I looked at her with a quirk in my brows.

  “A young man with powerful psychic abilities and a deeply emotional nature.”

  “Deeply emotional. That’s me,” I said dryly.

  “Just keep shuffling.”

  Brad winked at me. I finished shuffling and handed her the cards. She gave them another few rounds of shuffling and then laid them out in the traditional Celtic Cross design. A Tarot reader usually lays the cards face down and turns them up during the course of the reading. The Knight of Cups remained at the bottom, face up, to represent me.

  Marie turned up the first card. “Seven of Swords. This represents the situation you’re in and what you’re doing at the present time.” She took a breath. “Seven of Swords indicates sneaking around, deviousness. You’re hiding something from those around you and hoping you don’t get caught. You’re either spying on someone or carrying out some kind of plot against another.”

  Although she didn’t look at me, I flushed. This was not what I’d expected to come through in the reading. It was supposed to be about the spirit who was trying to contact me, not my plan to take revenge on Trent.

  She overturned the next card. “What crosses you is the Two of Cups. A new love affair opposes your sneaky plans. You have a new chance here, a chance to change your direction. Will you take it?” She glanced up at me, her gaze full of meaning. I said nothing.

  The next card was the Six of Cups, reversed. “This card indicates a bad childhood. No surprise there. You have memories of evil being done to you and this is what’s at the bottom of all the sneaking around you’ve been doing. Now, behind you is the Seven of Swords. There is much strife in your past, but you didn’t fight well. Or you were unable to fight. Unable to defend yourself.”

  I nodded. I’d been too small to fight Trent then. Too small to fight my dad.

  She moved on to the next card. “Above you—this is the best that can be expected in the circumstances. The Reversed Hanged Man. In the past, you acted as a sacrifice, a scapegoat. Your days as a sacrifice are soon to be over, but only if you can conquer your perceived need to be devious.”

  That couldn’t be right. Only deviousness would allow me to get back at my stepbrother.

  “In the future,” Marie said as she turned over another card, “you have The Hermit, which indicates you will soon be looking for truth. A solitary search. Only you can say what is right and what is wrong for you in this situation. But you surely have a search for truth in your immediate future. Maybe a reckoning with it. A great truth is going to be revealed.

  “Here we have the way you see yourself. The card in this place is Queen of Cups.”

  “I don’t see myself as a queen of any kind,” I said dryly.

  Marie frowned at me. “It’s metaphorical, as you know perfectly well. You are in an emotional place. There is an emotional woman who is very close to you. A woman who is having powerful psychic experiences of her own. She can look into your soul and divine your true nature. She can make or break you.”

  This immediately made me think of Caroline. Even the hair on the woman in the picture was blond like hers. But why did the Queen of Cups appear in my place? Shouldn’t she be in another position, like friends and family or the future?

  “Friends and family,” Marie said. “The Page of Cups. A young child, perhaps? Someone very close to you, with a powerful emotional connection to you.” She closed her eyes. I could see them fluttering back and forth beneath the lids,
as if she followed an inner vision. “This person is...this is the person, or spirit, who is trying to reach you. I feel it very strongly. It’s a boy and he’s trying to reach you because he has some very important information for you. It’s personal. He knows you. I think it’s Carter.”

  Her eyes popped open and she stared at me. My throat closed up and my mouth went dry. Carter was trying to reach me? But why? What could we possibly have to say to each other?

  “It’s Carter, Max. Your brother is trying to talk to you.”

  I licked bone-dry lips. “Why?”

  She studied the cards. “I’m not sure. But I think it has something to do with the reversed Six of Cups and maybe the Hanged Man. It’s something in your past.”

  “It would have to be in my past, because Carter is from my past.”

  Marie shook her head. “Not necessarily. He could be like Fred, trying to help you in your current life. But, judging by the other cards in the spread, I’m convinced it has to do with the past. Let’s see what the final two cards have to say.”

  My palms were slick with sweat. I’d never been nervous during a reading before and it was a strange feeling. Because I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what the other cards were going to tell me. The gist of the reading so far...well, I wasn’t sure what it was trying to say. Stop looking for revenge? Go for Caroline? Give her up? What did Carter want from me?

  “Hopes and fears,” Marie said, turning over the next-to-last card. “Justice. You long for justice, but you fear it too. This is because you don’t understand your true nature or your true place in the story. Justice is a two-edged sword and those who wish to wield it must realize it can turn on them. Those who have impure motives beware. They can be harmed as badly as those against whom they seek justice. In your case, it’s surrounded by the Page of Cups and the reversed Four of Swords, so I believe this is justice in favor of you.”

  Still, it was a timely reminder that justice could cut both ways. Did I want to risk my revenge twisting and coming back on me? Was it worth the possible fall-out?