Janis glanced around. Except for a McDonald’s employee who had unfolded a yellow CAUTION sign and begun pushing a mop under the tables, they had the dining area to themselves. She looked at Blake’s questioning eyes. They had gone out on five more dates since Ghostbusters (Janis supposed this counted as their sixth), and already the student body had them pegged as “an item.” She shied from that title. How could they be an item if she couldn’t be honest with him — about who she was, about what she could do, about what had happened at the game?
She pushed the straw in and out of the plastic top, listening to it squeak. “What if I told you that I never touched the ball?”
He laughed as though it were an odd joke. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Blake…” She moved her drink aside and leaned nearer. “I never touched it.”
“Of course you did. We all saw it.”
Janis closed her eyes and shook her head.
“Well if you didn’t, who did?”
It was a good question, a fair question. She replayed that moment in her mind when, with the ball spinning above her, she had commanded her arm to push even though she knew she was never going to reach it. But she had felt something, hadn’t she? A pulse shooting the length of her outstretched arm, beginning inside her chest and ending at the tips of her fingers? At the time, it had felt like the shock of a strained nerve. But now she wondered.
Spinning ball. Spinning plastic egg.
Janis shrugged. “I just didn’t feel the ball.”
Blake took her hands in his and bounced them playfully. “You were wearing thick goalie gloves, for one. Two, it was cold enough out there to numb your fingers. And three, your thoughts must have been going a hundred miles a second. I know mine would’ve been.”
Janis dropped her gaze.
“Hey,” he said, leaning nearer. “You were fantastic.”
“Then why don’t I feel fantastic?” Why do I feel like a fraud?
“You just need a couple days for it to sink in.”
Janis hadn’t brought up the paranormal since the night of their first date. She knew Blake well enough now to know that such things were outside of his experience. She couldn’t tell him about her strange dreams and couldn’t talk to him about what had happened tonight — what she was beginning to think had happened. He wouldn’t understand. It wasn’t his fault, but he just wouldn’t. They clicked in so many ways, just not there.
“I guess the whole thing kind of overwhelmed me,” she said at last. “Sorry.”
Even though Blake was still holding her hands, still smiling his concerned smile, he suddenly felt far away from her. “Don’t be.” A squeeze. A kiss. “C’mon. Let me take you home.”
The McDonald’s mopper tipped his paper hat to them on their way out of the restaurant. As Blake opened the car door for her, Janis thought of someone who might understand what was happening and, more importantly, who might be able to help her understand what was happening.
Blake checked to see that she was all the way inside before closing the door gently, then walked around the back of the car. Janis watched him in the rearview mirror, hating herself for lying to him. The next day, she would talk to this person, she told herself. Yes, the next day, after school.
23
Thirteenth Street High
Friday, November 16, 1984
2:31 p.m.
Janis waited for the final students to funnel out of the classroom while she pretended to organize her books. Two girls lingered at her back, whisper-chattering about so-and-so who had overheard so-and-so saying such-and-such about a third so-and-so and oh, the scandal. Janis gripped the back of her neck and dug at the tension. Would you two scram, already?
She tried to think of other things, like how Scott had been one of the first ones out of the classroom when the bell rang. He couldn’t move quickly enough these days, it seemed, his head bobbing above the receding masses by the time Janis would get to the doorway. Since their conversation that night on the couch, he hadn’t spoken a word to her, much less glanced over. And she’d long since lost the nerve to ask whether he’d experienced something unusual that night.
At the front of the classroom, Mrs. Fern sat at her desk in a mauve turtleneck and white woven vest, peering over the student papers just handed in. She laughed once to herself, her hair shaking like silver curtains. Finally, the two chatterers at Janis’s back receded away. She took a deep breath as she stood, leaving her books stacked on her desk.
“Um, Mrs. Fern.” She stepped toward the teacher’s desk.
Mrs. Fern had been shaking her head as she continued to leaf through the typed assignments, several of them nearly opaque with correction fluid. Their teacher was an eccentric, for sure, but also a stickler for spelling and punctuation. “Even the most hallowed cathedrals of antiquity are nothing but for the soundness of plain brick and mortar,” she often said.
“Hmm?” Mrs. Fern answered without looking up.
Janis glanced toward the door, then took a seat in Dougherty’s desk, directly across from her. Soccer practice had been cancelled that day — Coach Hall’s gift to them for last night’s effort.
“I was hoping I could talk to you.” She swallowed. “If you’re not busy.”
Mrs. Fern patted the papers back into a neat stack and blinked up. Her hazel eyes swam inside the thick lenses. Janis’s gaze fell to the white crystal her teacher wore around her neck. She debated whether or not to use her Get Out of Awkward Situation Free card, which would be to ask for a few reading recommendations, thank her, and leave. But something in her teacher’s expression told Janis that she was already aware of why she’d come. Mrs. Fern tilted her head, her eyes glimmering with amusement and knowledge.
“The first day of class…” Janis said, “you, um, you talked about a Roman god… Janus?”
“Ah, yes, the god of doorways.”
“Can you tell me more about him?” She decided to rephrase it. “What you know about him?”
Mrs. Fern grinned as though reading her thought process and sat back.
“Well, it’s like I told you. The god Janus has two faces. One looks to the past, the other to the future. One face sees the world as most do, as it appears to exist. And the other… well, the other sees another world, quite beyond the perceptions of most. It is what makes Janus so special.”
“What is that other world?”
“Ah, it was much debated by the great thinkers.” Mrs. Fern gathered her hair in back and let it fall. “Some believed it to be a realm that supports our physical world, that manifests it. Not a realm of people and objects, but of the passions and energies that constitute them.”
When Mrs. Fern spoke this last part, Janis felt the familiar vibrations rise and oscillate throughout her awareness before settling down again.
“Do people go there?” Janis concentrated anew. “To this other world?”
“Why, artists go there all the time, writers of poetry and prose — some we’ve read in this course. And how fortunate we are that they share it with the rest of us. Think what our world would be like if it were just plain matter.” Mrs. Fern brushed her fingers through the leaves of the potted fern that sat on the corner of her desk.
“I think what you’re saying is that’s where they get their inspiration.” Janis hesitated. “But can people actually go there? Can they, I don’t know, wake up and just find themselves there?”
“I suppose it can happen.” Again, the amusement in her gaze.
A warm breeze smelling of fall leaves streamed through the open windows and rustled the fern’s fronds. Janis frowned, considering how this had quickly become the weirdest conversation with a teacher she’d ever had. But she was getting somewhere. If she could just find the right question…
Mrs. Fern tee-peed her fingers beneath her chin.
“What would you say to someone who it happened to?”
Mrs. Fern smiled. Well phrased, the smile seemed to say. “I would tell her that she had been g
iven a unique opportunity. I would advise her to explore that world, to learn its laws, its rules — because they are said to be different from the rules governing our own world.”
Janis watched the vertical lines above Mrs. Fern’s lip.
“Similar in certain ways, the rules,” Mrs. Fern continued, “but quite different in others. Time and space are not so… absolute in that world. Past events can seem very present, as can future probable events — and that word, probable, is an important one, I would tell her.”
“Important, how?”
“I would leave that to her to find out.” Mrs. Fern’s eyes became huge — and did one of them just wink? “If I told her everything there was to know, why, goodness, there would be nothing left for her to discover. And wouldn’t that be a shame?”
Janis drew her brows together in thought. “If that world supports this one, can it also influence this one? You know, thoughts, objects — that sort of thing?”
“Here again, something I would leave for her to discover — oh!” Mrs. Fern clapped her hands. “I almost forgot to congratulate you on last night’s match nul. I understand you made a spectacular save in the last seconds. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to see it. Not something one witnesses every day, I wouldn’t think.”
“Thanks…” Janis eyed her teacher carefully.
Is it just coincidence she brought that up after my question about being able to influence objects?
“Well, I do have your papers to get started on before the weekend,” Mrs. Fern said with a little waggle of her head. “But let me end by saying this. The worst thing anyone newly awakened into that realm can do would be to deny her experience of it. It can be frightening, I understand. But it is a tremendous source of intuition. It is how people come into intuition — some of us more consciously than others. Better to keep your eyes open, I think.”
She just switched from third-person to second — from “her” to “your.”
“Does that answer your question?”
“I think so,” Janis said, not at all sure, and feeling the first stabs of a headache.
“Hmm, fascinating god, that Janus. So much from the ancients we still have to learn. If you’re ever of the mind to delve deeper, my door is always open.” Mrs. Fern picked up her battered leather satchel leaning against her desk and pushed the stack of papers into it. “Good day, then!”
* * *
Janis’s headache worsened that afternoon, and by dinnertime, it had become almost unbearable — piercing red throbs. She left a message for Blake that she wouldn’t be going to the football game that night. Her mother administered aspirin and came often to her bedside to change the warm towel across her forehead. Janis remained on her back. The effort to move, or even string together the smallest thoughts, had become a dozen strands of barbed wire winching her skull.
Little by little, the dissolving aspirin dulled Janis’s senses until she became dimly aware of her mother removing the towel, kissing her forehead, and clicking off the bedside lamp.
Janis dreamed that she was back in Mrs. Fern’s classroom. She was sitting at the front of the room again, but the fern plant on her teacher’s desk was enormous, its hairy fronds writhing in whispers. Mrs. Fern appeared from behind the plant, and Janis realized she had been tending to it, burying crystals in its soil. When her teacher spoke, her voice sounded like a record player whose volume had been turned up and its speed slowed way down.
“PAST EVENTS CAN SEEM VERY PRESENT AS CAN FUTURE PROBABLE EVENTS.”
As Janis looked at her teacher, she felt herself standing on an empty beach where black clouds gathered into an hourglass. She heard the ticking of a giant clock, its minute hand edging toward midnight.
“Nuclear war?” Janis asked Mrs. Fern. “Is that…?”
“PROBABLE.”
Janis’s eyes began to water. “Wh-what can I do?”
“KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN.”
Mrs. Fern turned in her chair so her back was to Janis, her silver hair flowing down to where it disappeared behind the desk. She took her hair up in layers with her long, slender hands, turning it over the top of her head. When the final layer had fallen away, Janis saw a second face. It wavered in and out of focus but appeared to be a younger version of her teacher. The eyes shone with preternatural light.
“No longer can you deny the experiences, Janis.” The face spoke clearly. “There are things to see. Things you have already seen.”
“What? Tell me!”
“Things you have already seen,” she repeated.
When Janis awoke, her head no longer felt like a spool of barbed wire. Her thoughts were clear. And she was standing in her backyard, beside the island of oak trees and azalea bushes, just out of reach of the English ivy that trickled away from the house. Janis peered around. A faint light similar to what she had just observed in Mrs. Fern’s eyes imbued the night. A familiar whooshing sound filled her ears — a sensation she’d denied herself for the last three months.
Now she remembered all the times in those three months she’d awakened in this state only to will herself back to her room, back to dreaming, to normalcy. The occasions must have numbered in the dozens.
Janis rose into the air and turned toward the back line of bushes.
Things you have already seen.
He wasn’t outside tonight, wasn’t pacing or propping his arms against the deck rail, the burning end of a cigarette illuminating his glasses. The deck was dark, as was the Leonards’ house.
Janis flew to the place in the bushes that had pulled her through the last time. She remembered it was near the tree where her mother emptied compost from the plastic container she kept under the kitchen sink. As Janis extended her arms, she felt herself being repulsed. Then, like air inhaled through a straw, she was siphoned from the backyard.
WHOOSH.
The cement culvert wavered beneath her. She lifted her face to where the Leonards’ chain-link fence stretched to either side, the house looming large beyond. Janis spotted the leaning shed, but it no longer stood in tall grass. A couple of days after seeing Mr. Leonard with the drill, she’d heard the roar of a mower and looked out to see flashes of his shirt beyond the bushes, moving in a line. He had since maintained the yard in a trim state, using a weed whacker to blast away the tall grass and weeds that had once grown along the fence.
The entire yard stood open and naked.
Janis passed through the fence at the edge of the yard and flew up to the shed. It had been a long time since she’d last flown, and a part of her sang with the rediscovery. But she glanced around as she went, making sure that the shadows along the edges of the house were just that — shadows. She hadn’t forgotten the last time. The horrific memory of the shed door opening on Mr. Leonard’s pale face took form in her mind before Janis could stuff it down again.
Keep your eyes open.
Janis peeked up toward the deck before drifting around to the shed’s front. She hovered before the lock, whose bolt seemed larger and more solid than the one she’d seen the last time.
He changes the lock. He mows the yard to eliminate places to hide…
Which could only mean that whatever lay beneath his shed was worth protecting. Janis concentrated, her hands propped against the door. She fell through. The inside of the shed crackled to life around her. She rotated. It appeared the same as it had the last time, although perhaps a little tidier. The pile of kindling still stood in a heap beneath the shelving, but the roach-infested sacking was gone — replaced by a solid piece of plywood.
She probed the plywood with her thought-hands. Yes, the metal hatch remained beneath the pile, as did the electrical field surrounding it. Janis felt along the lines of energy, not pushing too hard. She feared the field had alerted Mr. Leonard to her presence the last time.
Janis withdrew her hands and listened outside before returning her gaze to the kindling. She nodded to herself. That was where the answers lay. Beneath the pile. Down below.
But how to get ther
e?
The vibrations that sustained Janis’s out-of-body state began to fade. Another dream was intruding on her experience, a dream about getting ready for a soccer game but not having the right jersey or shoes, finding holes in her goalie gloves. The vibrations diminished further. The scent of the sea drifted away, but before she could be whisked back to her sleeping body, where the anxiety dream awaited her, Janis pushed her hands beneath the plywood again. She had been so occupied by the hatch that she’d forgotten about the small, square-shaped panel embedded in the cement beside it. Her thought-fingers explored its three-by-three arrangement of blocks. It felt to Janis like a miniature typewriter.
No, a keypad. She would have to remember that…
24
Thursday, November 29, 1984
6:50 p.m.
“What are you supposed to be, again?”
Scott’s mother frowned past the steering wheel, then over at his outfit. Scott shifted in his seat and glanced down. He had borrowed the shoes from his father — seventies-era derby shoes, two sizes too big. They shifted over tube socks that showed half their length, thanks to a pair of rainbow suspenders that drew his pants nearly to his sternum. One of the front pockets of his shirt bulged with his scientific calculator, the other with pens and mechanical pencils. A plaid bowtie bloomed from the shirt collar. He tapped his old pair of glasses against his thigh, the thick plastic bridge and both bows bound with masking tape.
“It’s Dress-up Night,” Scott said. “We’re supposed to look ridiculous.”
“Well, you’ve certainly succeeded.”
“Thanks,” he mumbled.
Older brothers chose the costumes for their pledges, and Britt had come up with his — The Nerd Look. Scott kept telling himself it was just for fun and didn’t mean anything, but apprehension stewed in the pit of his stomach. His mother wasn’t helping the situation.
“I see what this is,” she said. “I see exactly what this is.”
“What what is?”
“This.” She jutted her chin toward him. “They’re going to humiliate you.”
XGeneration, Books 1-3: You Don't Know Me, The Watchers, and Silent Generation Page 19