“Just water, thank you. I’m Weylyn. What’s your name?”
“Gail.”
“Gail! That’s pretty. I’ve never met anyone by that name before.”
“That so?”
“It’s nice to finally meet a Gail, and I can tell you’re one of the better ones, so I don’t suppose I need to meet another.” He flashed her a smile.
Gail blushed and said, “I’ll get you that water,” then hurried away.
Weylyn grabbed a pen and a napkin and wrote Gail on it. “You gonna ask for her number, man?” I asked.
“No. Just the name will do.”
Seemed like this guy had a screw loose. Then again, I was the one who’d believed the ludicrous story he’d told me over the phone, the one about his magical pet pig that controls the weather.
I thoughtlessly took a big bite of bacon and said, “Where’s the pig? I didn’t see him get out of the car.”
“His name is Merlin.” Weylyn pointed out the window to a small pig nosing through an overturned trash can. When he popped back out with an apple core in his mouth, I noticed the horn on his forehead.
“Most places don’t let me bring him inside. I tell them pigs are cleaner than most humans, but they tend not to believe me.”
“Maybe because they saw him digging through their garbage.”
“Touché,” Weylyn said, doffing his imaginary cap to me. “Luckily, Merlin doesn’t mind the rain.” It had been spitting all morning, one of the downsides of living in a near-tropical climate.
“Well, I do. I was planning on going to the beach today,” I grunted and scowled out the window at the murky, gray sky. “So, how does it work? Merlin’s … powers or whatever you call them?”
“Well, I don’t exactly know. It’s still a bit of a mystery to me. He’s gotten pretty good at stopping and starting tornadoes. Snow is tricky, though.”
“Wait. I thought you said he stopped storms, not started them.”
“Yes, but sometimes the opposite happens. Not intentionally, of course.”
Well, that makes me feel better, I thought.
“I have to say, I was surprised when you called me. I didn’t think you got tornadoes this close to the coast.”
“We don’t,” I said. “I’m talking about hurricanes.”
Weylyn frowned. “Hurricanes? Merlin doesn’t have any experience with hurricanes.”
“Yeah, I figured. Do you think he would be willing to try?”
He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he stared anxiously out the window for several seconds. “I’m just worried, you know?” he finally said, not yet looking back. “It takes a lot out of him. I don’t want him to get hurt.”
“I don’t want him to get hurt, either, but a lot of other people could get hurt, too, if a hurricane hits.”
Weylyn turned back to me, his brow furrowed with worry. “I wouldn’t want that.” He fiddled with his fork while he mulled it over. “Okay. We’ll do it. We’ll try to help you, but I make no guarantees. Like I said, this is new territory for him.”
“Understood.”
We shook on it and worked out some of the finer points of the deal—compensation, lodging, and so on—then Weylyn handed me his business card. It had his name printed on it in plain black type and the words Assistant to Mr. Merlin, the Storm-Taming Pig! scribbled beneath it in pencil.
“I’d better be going,” he said. “I think Merlin is getting antsy.” Sure enough, the pig was staring at us through the window, squirming impatiently.
“Wait,” I said as Weylyn stood to leave. “How do I know this is, you know … real?”
Weylyn smiled. “I guess you’ll just have to trust me,” he said, then left the diner the way he came.
A minute later, I heard a knock on the window. I looked up and saw Weylyn on the other side of the glass. His voice was so muffled I could barely hear him, but it sounded like he said, “Looks like it might clear up.” As he walked away, the rain clouds outside suddenly evaporated, exposing a perfectly blue swatch of sky.
* * *
I couldn’t stop staring at that sky. It just didn’t seem real. It was too … blue, like someone had taken a regular sky and cranked up the saturation. I looked around me to see if anyone else was as confounded as I was, but no one else seemed to notice. They just continued to sunbathe and play Frisbee like it was any other day at the beach.
Weylyn had made his point. I was convinced. Now, I just needed a cover story that wouldn’t tip off my buddies at the city council—namely, Teddy Mitcham. It was obvious my dad had instructed him to keep an eye on me, so I had to be particularly careful what I said around him. If I so much as farted, my dad was sure to find out about it.
“You’re not supposed to incur any new expenditures before we finalize a budget, Bobby,” said an exasperated Teddy at our meeting that afternoon.
“Sorry,” I said, trying to keep my cool. “I would have run it past you guys first, but it was kind of an emergency.”
“An emergency?” Councilwoman Maria Flores piped in. Her mustache was almost as thick as Teddy’s. “Did your car get towed from Taco Bell again?”
The other council members snickered.
“No, Maria. It’s for the levee project. I secured funding.”
The reaction from the room was mixed. Some of the council members looked mildly impressed, while others, like Teddy, looked doubtful. “Then why is money going out and not in?” he pressed.
“Because I had to hire an engineer. The money is contingent on plans that prove the project would be eco-friendly since the grant came from a green energy company.”
Teddy raised an eyebrow. “Oh? And what company is that?”
“The Green Energy Company.” Okay, so it wasn’t the greatest name, but I thought the rest of my story sounded pretty convincing.
The council members looked at each other and shrugged, but Teddy was clearly still suspicious of me. “I’ll need to see the paperwork.”
“Yeah, sure. No problem.”
“In the future, Bobby, don’t go spending money before it’s been approved.”
They all thought I was a joke—and maybe they were right—but the way I saw it, I had nothing to lose. We didn’t have the money to build a levee, anyway, so even if Weylyn turned out to be a fraud, it would be no worse than if I had done nothing. Well, except losing a thousand of the city’s dollars to pay for an “engineer” who was really a pig. Maybe my dad would find it funny or, more likely, he’d lose me in a tragic boating “accident.”
24
MARY PENLORE
I’m not sure how I ended up at the beach. I just remember waking up with no plans and a ravenous craving for sunshine. The past three weeks had been difficult. Without work to keep me busy, I felt utterly useless. I could feel Quan getting frustrated with me, too. The first week, he came home every day to find me still in my pajamas. The following Monday, he laid out a shirt and jeans for me on his side of the bed. I left the outfit where it was so when it was time for bed, he had to move the clothes to pull the covers back. We never spoke about it. The gesture itself had said everything.
I folded my legs on the sand, closed my eyes, and let my breath empty me slowly. When I had fully exhaled, I lingered in that dark, airless place and tried to imagine the rest of my life. I thought maybe a little oxygen deprivation would help clarify things, shake out the cobwebs. But my mind didn’t take me forward; it took me back, back to that summer with the wolves. Before I knew what was happening, a melancholy howl escaped my lungs. I looked around me, acutely aware of how foolish I must seem, but no one paid me any attention.
I nearly jumped out of my skin when I heard a howl in return. I thought it was my imagination or some teenager mocking me. I scanned the beach for the latter and saw something move out of the corner of my eye. I whipped around to face a runty, old pig with a crooked brown horn poking through his fleshy forehead. I stared at him, aghast. The pig peered back at me with an alien calmness, his glassy black eyes m
otionless behind fat, whiskered lids. I bent down until my face was level with him. Up close, I could see that his eyes were not completely black but freckled with browns and golds. His brow bowed into a curious arch, and he grunted the way my dad did when he had just read something confusing in the paper. I grunted back as if to say, “You and me both.”
“Mary Jane?” said a voice. I didn’t need to look up to know who it was. My eyes lingered on his feet, bare and muddy, shadowed by an awning of dirty rolled-up cuffs.
“Where are your shoes?” was the only thing I could think to say.
Weylyn laughed strangely—strange in that it had the timbre of a man, not the boy I had met seventeen years before. His body clearly belonged to a man, too, although his long limbs gave him a lanky, adolescent quality. His face was as I remembered it, only with fewer round edges. In my subjective opinion, he was objectively handsome.
He offered his hand to help me off the sand, and as I grabbed it, my heart gave one hard thump. My head was swimming with questions, so I just started spitting them out like a frantic game show contestant. “Howareyou? Whatareyoudoinghere? Doyoulivehere? Isthisyourpig? Whereareyourshoes?!”
“I don’t wear shoes on the beach. His name is Merlin, and he’s my business partner. I’m renting a place nearby because I’m helping out the mayor for a bit, and I’m doing just fine,” he said evenly. I nodded as if this information were completely normal and expected. “What about you?” he asked.
I hesitated. I thought about that T-shirt and jeans flattened out on my bedspread like a paper doll and the way Quan had silently folded them and placed them back in my drawer. “Not so good,” I admitted.
Weylyn studied me, not with pity but as a problem that needed to be solved. “How can I help?”
* * *
“What’s a Chaoborus?” Weylyn asked as we sat on a bench, eating the ice cream cones we’d purchased from a nearby cart with a striped canvas awning. As we ate, we watched students wearing backpacks zip by on bikes and Rollerblades and families wait in line for tacos while their off-leash dogs scavenged for discarded popcorn on the boardwalk.
“It’s a type of larva. Basically, a freshwater worm.”
Weylyn stared at me quizzically. “You’re right. That does sound boring,” he said, oblivious to the ice cream that was melting down his forearm. Merlin, however, was closely monitoring the situation and was lapping up the raspberry-flavored puddle at Weylyn’s feet.
I stared down at my own plain vanilla cone, wishing I had chosen something more interesting: mint chip, maybe, or lemon sorbet. Hell, even cookie dough had the added thrill of potentially contracting salmonella. “I guess that makes me boring, too,” I said glumly.
Weylyn shook his head. “How could you be boring? You ran away from home to live with wolves. That fact alone disqualifies you from ever being boring.”
“That was a long time ago. I was a kid.”
“So what? Just because you’re old now doesn’t make you a different person.”
While I tried to decide whether to take offense at his quip about my age, Weylyn continued, “If you don’t like studying water worms, study something else. Bears or alligators or something else with lots of teeth.”
I smiled to myself, thinking about the letter I had written to the Canis Fellowship. I was tempted to tell Weylyn about it—out of all the people I knew, he would appreciate what an amazing opportunity it was—but at the same time, I didn’t want him getting his hopes up on my behalf. It was a long shot, after all. The only reason I had told Quan was because my getting accepted would affect our living arrangements.
“You’re right. I do need a change,” I conceded and tossed Merlin what was left of my vanilla cone. “Although, it probably won’t be as crazy as running away with a boy I barely know and a pack of wolves.”
Weylyn flashed me a winsome smile. “Even I thought you were crazy.”
“Really?” I laughed.
“Yeah. I thought to myself, This girl has a house and a family and she wants to run around in the woods with me?”
I looked away, embarrassed. He was right. I had a home and a father who loved me, and Weylyn had neither of those things. I suddenly felt ashamed for not seeing that before. “I’m sorry. I never thought of it that way.”
“No, no. Don’t be sorry!” he said, placing his hand tenderly on my arm. “I’m glad you did, and I’m really glad we ran into each other again.”
The warmth from his hand radiated up my arm, and my cheeks began to burn. “Me, too.”
* * *
When Quan came home, I was watching an episode of Mythological Mysteries. He sighed disdainfully as he threw his man-purse on the kitchen table, but I barely even noticed. I was engrossed in the events unfolding on the screen in front of me. A huge tornado was barreling down on Weylyn and Merlin; then, like a disappearing act at a magic show, it was gone. The woman behind the camera gasped and thanked Jesus. “You should be thanking the pig!” I said.
“Why should I be thanking a pig?” Quan had taken his socks off and was inspecting his athlete’s foot.
“I was talking to the TV.” Now he thinks I’m lazy and crazy, I thought. And maybe I was crazy, because I had a B.S. and a year of Ph.D. studies under my belt, and yet, I was still considering the possibility that a pig could stop a tornado with his mind. The video defied everything I had learned in Physics 101, but it appeared to be authentic. It was so popular that it had even inspired a parody video on The Tonight Show depicting other barnyard animals fighting natural disasters: a goat stopping an earthquake; a chicken putting out a wildfire; cows launching themselves into space to deflect an asteroid. These were comped together with the help of green screens and cheesy, generated effects. The video of Merlin was too realistic to have been doctored, not without the help of a Hollywood effects house.
It wasn’t just the video that had me questioning my better judgment. I believed Weylyn, or at least, I wanted to believe him. The story he told me that day on the boardwalk was sad and strange and no less than extraordinary.
After the tornado, Meg and I moved to Alabama. I studied hard and got a scholarship for college. Meg paid for my books, and Mr. Kramer covered my room and board. Meg got sick while I was in school, and I asked her if she wanted me to move home, but she said no.
Merlin came with me, of course. My roommate and I hid him in a file cabinet whenever the RA came by. His name was Gordy, my roommate. He saw ghosts and said that our dorm room was haunted by the spirit of a boy who had fallen out the window throwing water balloons at coeds twenty years earlier.
So, there were four of us: me, Gordy, Merlin, and Joe—that was the ghost’s name. Sometimes Joe would spell out messages with the magnetic letters on the mini fridge. “Hands off my Froot Loops!” and stuff like that. We never had any Froot Loops in the room, so we could only guess that that was what he had for breakfast the morning he died. Aside from that, he was pretty amenable.
I found out through Joe that Meg had died. I came back from my chemistry final and he had spelled her name out on the fridge. Maybe it was coincidence—her name only had three letters, after all—but it was only a few minutes later that I got the call from the doctor saying she had passed. I imagined her and Joe hanging out, sharing a box of Froot Loops, and Meg chastising him for throwing water balloons at other ghosts.
After school, I joined a crew that rebuilt houses that had been destroyed by tornadoes. Three days into my first project, another storm came—or maybe it was the last one returning to finish what it had started. I hadn’t seen a twister since that one Christmas. I’d tried to push it out of my mind like a bad dream, but here I was again, standing inside the partially built frame of a house and a crew of people clinging to the support beams, hoping their handiwork was good enough to withstand the winds. Then … well, the rest is on video …
When I snapped back to the present, Quan was hovering over my shoulder like an annoying parent checking on the progress of my homework. “Have you finishe
d that application yet?”
“I already turned it in.”
“You should have let me look it over first.”
“It didn’t need looking over,” I snapped and stormed out of the room.
I crawled into bed and let my duvet form a fluffy mold of my body. Within minutes, I was deep inside a dream.
In the dream, I was standing in a barren field with a tornado barreling down on me. I didn’t try to run. It was too late for that. I closed my eyes as the winds began to wrap around me. Then I heard Weylyn’s voice say, “It’s never too late.”
I jolted awake and looked over to see Quan drooling on the pillow next to me.
25
BOBBY QUINN JR.
He said we should go out to “celebrate.” Those were his exact words. I hung up the phone and tried to swallow the lump that was growing like a tumor in my throat. Teddy had filled my dad in on the levee funding and the engineer I had hired, and now he wanted to take me out for lobster tails so we could “catch up.” I knew this was going to happen, eventually. I had just hoped I would be able to avoid him for long enough that he would give up, but he tricked me by calling from the phone inside the bait shop. I thought they were calling to tell me the lures I wanted were back in stock.
That night, I met my dad at Crableg Joe’s. Fortunately, Lacey wasn’t working. The last thing I needed was two awkward conversations in one evening. The hostess sat us at a table underneath a hanging fisherman’s net filled with plastic crabs, and my dad ordered a pitcher of pale ale for the table. I hated pale ale, but at least it might take the edge off what was bound to be an uncomfortable dinner.
“Soooo … Mr. Mayor,” he began.
I winced. It was possibly the most condescending thing I had ever heard my dad say, and he had once told the governor of Mississippi to “go make yourself useful.”
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