But his words got me thinking … maybe I was embarrassing. Bill, definitely. He refused to sit on the bleachers with the rest of the parents, preferring to stand on the sidelines with the coaches. He was loud, but he only shouted words of encouragement, unlike some of the subtler parents who waited until they were in the car to tell their kids how much they sucked.
I guess I was just as embarrassing, only in a different way. No one asked me to bring snacks. The other parents hadn’t asked me to make PARENT PEP SQUAD T-shirts or organize team pizza parties. I had done that all on my own, and no one had offered to help. I told myself it was because I loved my kids more, but maybe it was because the other kids told their parents what Gunner told me and the other parents had listened.
Clay played in a summer soccer league in a snooty nearby suburb, and it was the day of their big rivalry game. I insisted Micah come along, and he threw a fit. Clay had been giving Micah a hard time lately, and I blamed it on Gunner and the rest of his crew of under-parented misfits. Clay had always been rambunctious, but never hurtful or spiteful, and he and Micah had mostly gotten along. I only hoped he wouldn’t push Micah so far that he could never get him back.
I asked Weylyn to come along, too. He and Clay had kicked a soccer ball around in the backyard a few times, and he seemed to really enjoy it. I also thought it would be good to get him out in society again, even if the soccer parents were a bunch of snobs and alcoholics. He had been in a particularly good mood the last few days—excited, even. I asked him what his new attitude was all about, and he answered in typical cryptic Weylyn fashion, “I’m in training.” I asked him what he meant, and all he did was wink at me and walk away with a little bounce in his step. I had no idea what this “training” of his was, but as long as it didn’t involve natural disasters, it was fine with me.
The forecast said it was supposed to be sunny that day. When we arrived at the field, a foreboding wall of clouds was rolling in, and the other parents were suggesting postponing the game. After five minutes of bickering, the parents and coaches finally agreed that they would allow the kids to play but would suspend the game at the first sound of thunder.
I had brought a cooler filled with lemonade and ice cream sandwiches topped with—you guessed it—peanuts. I wore my PARENT PEP SQUAD shirt, and Weylyn wore the matching hat and cheered even louder than Bill when Clay’s team scored. Micah had his face buried in a book and only looked up when Weylyn spoke to him. The two of them had been spending a lot of time together in the beeyard and seemed to be getting along really well. Micah needed someone in his life other than Bill and me, especially since his and Clay’s relationship had become strained. It was good for Weylyn, too.
“What an accurate kick!” Weylyn exclaimed as Clay passed the ball halfway downfield to an open teammate. I had to hold back laughter. While the other parents shouted stock sayings like “Go, Urchins!” and “Nice shot!” Weylyn offered much more specific commentary. “Excellent maneuverability!” he cried as Clay dribbled the ball around an opponent, then turned to me. “Has he ever considered dance lessons? He’s very light on his feet.”
“I doubt it. He cares way too much about what the other kids think of him.” Weylyn looked confused, as if he couldn’t see any reason why dancing would embarrass a twelve-year-old boy.
“Atta boooy, Claaaaaaaaaay!” Bill’s voice boomed, rattling the bleachers.
“Why does Dad have to yell so loud?” Micah grumbled from behind the pages of his book.
“At least he’s not reading a book when there is an exciting sporting event right in front of him,” Weylyn half teased, half reprimanded.
“It’s not exciting. It’s boring.”
“Your uncle is right,” I jumped in. “Put the book away and watch your brother.”
“Why should I watch his stupid soccer game when he ditched me at the Honey Run?”
“Because he’s your brother,” I said, then added, “and he hasn’t noticed his cleats are untied, so there’s a good chance he might trip.”
Micah gasped. “You’re not going to tell him?”
I shrugged. “Boys like your brother need to fall on their face every once in a while. It reminds them they’re human.” I handed him an ice cream sandwich. “Here. Eat this and look happy.” He pretended to be reluctant about taking it, but ate it with the happy urgency of a dog under the dinner table.
It was only five minutes into the second half when Clay fell, but not because of his shoelaces. He was kicked in the shin by one of his own teammates—number thirty-seven, Gunner!
Before I had time to process what had happened, Micah was running down the bleachers and onto the field. “Micah!” I called after him, but he didn’t look back. I turned to Weylyn. “What’s he doing?”
Weylyn shook his head.
Clay lay on his back, rocking and clutching his shin. Bill and Clay’s coach went to check on him, but Micah headed the other direction, toward Gunner. He had his stick—I mean, wand—held out in front of him and was mumbling something I couldn’t hear.
Weylyn stood abruptly. “I’ll be right back,” he said, then trotted down the bleacher stairs.
“Wait! Weylyn, where are you going?”
He pretended not to hear me and disappeared behind the bleachers.
I turned back to the field to see Micah waving his stick in little circles and chanting. All the kids were laughing, Gunner especially. “Micah!” I called after him. Don’t give them another reason to tease you!
Then Micah’s voice rolled like thunder above the laughter, “Electro Spectrum!” There was a sound like a whip cracking, and a bolt of lightning struck the tree behind Gunner, causing him to nearly leap out of his skin. The other parents gasped.
Gunner backed away from Micah, his eyes wide with fear. A few of the tree’s branches had caught fire, and the ref squirted it with his Gatorade bottle to put it out.
Bill rushed Clay off the field, and I ran to the sidelines. “Clay? Are you okay?” Clay nodded, looking mildly stunned.
When Micah joined us, none of us knew what to say, mostly because none of us knew what had just happened. Clay was the first to speak. “Thanks, Micah. That was awesome.” Micah nodded, embarrassed, then sat back on the bleachers and reopened his book.
When Weylyn returned a minute later, I noticed a distinct limp in his right leg. “What happened to you?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Just stubbed my toe.”
“Uh-huh…,” I said, watching him closely.
Micah kept his eyes on his book, but I saw the slightest hint of a smile cross his lips.
57
MICAH BARNES
The rest of that summer was the best I’ve ever had. Clay and I started spending more time together, riding bikes and building forts like we used to. He said his friends were all scared of me now. They really thought I had magic powers. “I’m sorry I made fun of you for all that wizard stuff. It’s actually kind of awesome,” Clay admitted as we ate ice cream on the front porch. “Now no one can mess with either of us!”
Weylyn and I never spoke about the lightning. There was no need. We both knew what had happened and there was no need to belabor the subject. I showed my thanks by helping him in the yard for a few hours every day. During the day, I harvested honey. At night, I harvested light. Weylyn called the latter our training sessions because together we were learning how to harness the power of the fireflies in a safe and controlled way. I wasn’t doing magic, but I was in it, surrounded on all sides by incredible, beautiful things. It made me feel like a wizard even though I wasn’t one, even though I could never be one.
We kept the light in jars, just as Weylyn had shown me on that first night. I pulled out the files and poured the firefly honey—as we started calling it—into the jars, making sure the seal was nice and tight. “Just don’t open them up once they’re sealed,” Weylyn explained as he screwed one on himself. The jar made a popping noise, completing the seal. “We wouldn’t want any light escaping.”
<
br /> Soon, we had so many jars that the thicket lit up like a Christmas tree. To avoid being conspicuous, we dug a hole that we kept the jars in and covered it with a tarp. The fireflies must have thought we were crazy, burying all their precious light, but we were saving it. I asked Weylyn what we were saving it for, and he said, “For a rainy day.”
“Wouldn’t tickling your feet be easier?” I said.
He held a jar of light under his chin like a kid telling a ghost story. “You’re assuming that I enjoy having my feet tickled. Maybe I hate it and you tickling them would end the world as we know it.” He was probably right. I decided not to test his theory.
After a few weeks of training, however, I started to get bored. Every night was the same thing: put firefly honey in jar; make sure jar is sealed; put jar in hole; repeat. I wanted something new. I began to wonder what would happen if I opened one of the jars. Would the light fly out like a shooting star? Would it evaporate into a shimmering cloud? Would it explode? My curiosity gnawed at me. Every time I looked at one of the jars, I felt the urge to smash it on the ground and see what happened. It was reckless, I know, but for the first time in my life, I felt like I had power, and I wanted to see where it would take me.
On one of those nights, the power was out in the house—it had been like that for a few days—so I spent most of the day outside where the air moved. Weylyn had gone inside to fetch more empty mason jars, and I held a full one in my hands. It was warm to the touch and brighter than most of the others. One jar can’t hurt, I told myself. I hadn’t even finished the sentence in my head before I broke the seal.
The glass shattered in my hands. Something heavy landed with a leaden thump on my toe. I hollered and staggered back. There, on the ground, lay a sphere of light, the size of a baseball. I reached out my hand toward it and felt a zap of electricity. Whatever this thing was, it was charged and ready to shock.
“Stay back!” Weylyn dropped his pallet of jars and rushed at me, eyes flashing beast-like in the dark. I scrambled out of his way as he began digging a new hole.
“What’re you doing?” I asked.
“Go home!” he barked, not looking up.
“Not until you tell me what you’re doing.”
We locked eyes. I squirmed under the heat of his stare. “I told you not to open it,” he said, livid. “We don’t know what this stuff is or what it can do. What if you had gotten hurt? Or worse?”
I had messed up bad. How was Weylyn ever supposed to trust me again when I couldn’t resist opening a stupid jar? I looked away and tried not to cry.
He sighed and sat back on his haunches. “Sorry,” he said, his voice softening. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that. It’s just … I’ve seen what happens when this kind of stuff gets out of hand. You said it yourself: powers need to be honed. If they aren’t, people can get hurt. Do you understand?”
I nodded silently.
“Good.” Weylyn shoved the glowing orb into the new hole with a stick and kicked dirt over it. He wiped his hands on his pants and turned back to me. “The power’s back on. You should go inside.”
I sulked back to the house, tail between my legs. When I got inside, the power was back on as Weylyn had said it would be. As I walked up the stairs to my room, I heard my dad talking to my mom in the kitchen. “We’re lucky. Rest of the county’s still out.”
58
LYDIA KRAMER BARNES
It was the worst blackout in our county’s history, and the state government couldn’t get their story straight. One minute it had to do with failing transformers; the next minute they blamed it on budget cuts. The power had been out for almost two weeks, and there was no end in sight.
Except for us. Our home had only been out for three days before the power inexplicably came back on. At night, I used as few lights as possible to not attract attention. I didn’t want strangers knocking on my door asking to charge their cell phones. I wasn’t unsympathetic, though. I made fifty pounds of ice in my freezer and distributed them between the retirement homes and day care centers. I gave them honey, too, but mostly because I needed to get rid of it.
Twenty days into the outage, I heard a knock at the door. I reluctantly opened it to find Elliot Wharton, my kids’ pediatrician, looking pale and anxious. “Dr. Wharton?”
“Hi, Lydia,” he said feebly. He looked past me into the house at the TV show I had been half watching. “So, it’s true,” the doctor said matter-of-factly.
“Yes,” I said, chagrined. “Do you want to come inside and cool down?”
“That would be wonderful. Thank you.” He walked inside and paused for a moment under the vent, letting the air push his thin, wispy hair back from his sweat-beaded forehead. “Lydia, I feel embarrassed even asking this…”
“What is it?”
He wiped his brow, then continued, “My friend from the retirement home said she saw you dropping off ice, and I figured I had to come see for myself. The hospital’s been running on the back-up generator for over three weeks now, and we’re almost out of fuel.” He paused, then continued, “How are you getting your power?”
I shrugged. “I honestly don’t know.”
“The whole grid’s down. And I don’t hear a generator.”
“We don’t have a generator. Honestly, Elliot, I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Okay,” he said, his voice thick with disappointment. “I hoped you might know something we didn’t.”
I was a little insulted now. “Don’t you think if I did, I’d tell you?”
“Yes. You’re right.” He angled toward the front door. “Sorry to have disturbed you.” Dr. Wharton vanished back into the dark the way he came.
I turned off the TV and sat listening to the silence. Then I heard faint footfalls on the wooden floor behind me.
It was Weylyn. “I think it’s time I showed you something.”
* * *
Jars of light. Hundreds of them buried in a hole in the ground in my backyard. I turned to Weylyn, whose face glowed an eerie shade of green. “What is this stuff?”
“We call it firefly honey.”
“We?”
“Micah and I.”
“Micah knows about this?”
Weylyn nodded sheepishly. “He found me out. I wasn’t prepared to share it with anyone yet … not until I knew what it was.”
“You let my kid keep something like this from me?”
“I’m sorry. I should have included you.”
“Damn right you should have!” Once I had blown off a little steam, I took a deep breath and looked back at the jars of light. “What are they?”
He walked over to another tarp on the ground and pulled it back. It was another hole with one small sphere of light sitting in the center. “I think it’s the reason your house has power.”
“Holy shit, Weylyn! Do you know what this means? You discovered a new energy source!”
Weylyn snickered to himself.
“What’s so funny?” I asked, slightly annoyed.
“I may have eaten a very small amount of my great discovery.”
“You ate it?”
“It looks like honey when you first harvest it. Don’t worry; if I’d poisoned myself, I would have known weeks ago.”
“What about this?” I pointed to the ball of light. “Is it dangerous?”
“You wouldn’t want to play a game of catch with it, but other than that, I think it’s mostly harmless.”
I thought about Dr. Wharton and the hospital and the hundreds, possibly thousands of people sitting in their dark, steamy homes praying for a miracle. I once asked my dad if he believed in magic, and he said he believed in possibilities. I liked to think I felt the same way. Call it a miracle, call it magic, call it whatever you want, but I was looking right at it.
“All right, Weylyn. What do we do with this thing?”
* * *
I couldn’t borrow Bill’s truck without telling him what I needed it for. “I want to load it up with a
bunch of jars of energy and drive them out to the windmill site so we can open them and end the blackout.” Bill’s reaction was not what I was expecting. I thought he would laugh and ask what I really needed it for. Instead, his eyes bugged out with intrigue. “I knew they weren’t telling us the whole truth.”
“Who?” Now I was confused.
“The government.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“You found the secret energy source the government has been keeping from us! Come on, Lydia. Keep up!”
“I hate to break it to you, honey, but this has nothing to do with the government.”
“No?” he said, his enthusiasm dampened.
“No. But if you want to get back at them, you can help us move these jars.”
Of course, Micah—the little spy that he is—heard the whole thing, and he and Clay hopped in the truck with us. Between the five of us, it only took half an hour to load all the jars and drive them over to the windmill site. Weylyn rode in the back of the truck with the jars, carrying the ball of energy himself with a pair of oven mitts. “Be careful over those bumps!” he shouted to Bill as the jars jostled and clinked against each other.
The windmill site was distinctly windless that night. The air was so still and black it felt like we were in a vacuum. The steel base of the windmill only added to the effect, as it looked like a discarded piece of a space station whose mission had been cut tragically short.
The base was hollow with a small oval door, so we agreed inside it would be the best place for the jars. “That way it won’t draw too much attention,” Weylyn reasoned.
It took another half hour to load all the jars into the base. By the time we were done, it had started to drizzle, but we still stood back to admire our work. A beam of light poured out of the open top of the base, making it look like something alien.
Weylyn picked up the sphere of light in his mitted hands and nodded to me. I nodded back, trying not to wear my nervousness on my face. “Come on, guys. We have to clear back.” I prodded my boys back toward the truck.
“But what about Weylyn?” Micah said.
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