Meeting

by Nina Hoffman

  Maya fished her sketchbook and some colored pencils out of her pack. She opened to a blank page and drew Kachik-Vati. “We fused. Whatever that is.”

  “Sounds electrical,” said Travis. “Or nuclear! Are you really okay?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. I guess. I don’t really know what happened, except part of it was beautiful, but now Kachik’s going to tell a bunch of other people about us. Sissimi people, but still.”

  “Sure. He gets to talk, and we’re still stuck with silence.”

  Rimi darkened her shadow form and walked around the clearing, snipping vines that had poked in since the last time she and Maya had been here. She looked like an independent entity, except for a line of shadow that stretched from her left foot to Maya’s left foot. If Maya narrowed her eyes and peered through her lashes, Rimi almost looked solid.

  “Rimi, what did you learn?” Maya asked.

  One thing was how Vati hooks to Kachik, Rimi said. She sat in front of Maya and stretched out a shadow arm to the center of Maya’s chest. He says this is a way many sissimi bonds behave. Her shadow self drew tighter in on itself, losing its human shape, until it was a dense tube of darkness about two feet long. Maya felt pressure against her chest, then varying touches, as though fingertips pressed against her, and then a flurry of stabs that shocked more than hurt her.

  Rimi turned solid.

  A new limb had sprouted from Maya’s chest, a snaky limb like Vati had been, only with a hand on the end instead of a cluster of tentacles. Its skin was the color of Maya’s skin.

  The limb rose, moved itself in a jerky circle, and Maya felt it, as though her nerves extended along this limb. She clenched her eyes shut, then opened them, and tried to move the new arm. It jiggled. She felt that, too. Bend, she thought, and the arm bent. It bent in crazy directions an arm shouldn’t go, but it didn’t hurt, and she could almost control it. She felt the little bones and muscles working together, a strange, sinuous rippling. Wow, Rimi!

  I’ve been thinking about how human bodies work. There are better ways, Rimi thought. This way is good for manipulation, but not for strength, maybe. I’ll have to test different things.

  Can it attach anywhere on me? Maya looked down at her three arms. She turned her original arms so that her palms were up, then down. She touched the new arm with her right hand—smooth skin, warm. The central arm moved under her touch. She felt a shifting of hard bits under a padding of skin and muscle.

  Rimi thought, then said, For you to be able to use it, there has to be a confluence of—the hand wavered, trying to finish a thought Rimi didn’t have words for. If it’s just me using it, I guess I could—I don’t even know if it would have to be attached, as long as some of me is attached to you somehow. But that—

  Maya thought the hand into a fist and it responded. Wow, Rimi. This is us being together in a whole new way.

  I like it, Rimi thought. See what you can do with us.

  The hand picked up one of her pencils and sketched another arm onto Kachik’s pictured body. The control of the pencil was crude to begin with, but as Maya worked at it, it got better.

  “That is just so wrong,” Travis said.

  Now me, Rimi said, and the hand was no longer in Maya’s control. It picked up three pencils at once, sprouted extra fingers—such a strange, pushing sensation, as though she were a plant under the earth shoving out roots and shoots—and shaded in Kachik’s surface, making tiny strokes that showed his fur.

  “Even wronger!” Travis said.

  The new hand dropped the pencils and rose. The many fingers wiggled a wave at Travis. He flinched, then settled. “Hi, Rimi,” he said. “Is that all you now?”

  The hand waved up and down, like a nod.

  “Freaky, dudette. You don’t want to go out in public like that.”

  The hand shook side to side, a negative.

  “Well, all right. As long as you know. You’re making Maya into an alien.”

  Yes, I am, Rimi thought. The hand snaked around and patted Maya’s cheek. Well, enough of that. Rimi let the arm and hand unspin itself back to shadow.

  Maya pulled out her T-shirt front and studied the new oval hole in it. She poked a finger through. “Huh.”

  Oops, thought Rimi. Gotta watch that. Sorry.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Maya said. “Only where did it go?”

  I probably made it into part of me, Rimi thought.

  Travis looked at his watch. “Yikes! Rise and run, kids!”

  Rimi expanded her shield bubble to include Travis as they pushed out of the thicket in a different direction from the way they had come in. Before, she had made Maya into a shield Travis could hide behind. This time she stretched far enough around him that he could walk upright through the thorny blackberry canes instead of crouching. “Way to go, Sis-sis,” he said. “Way cool. Liking the new skills.”

  “Hey,” Peter said when Maya ran into the kitchen just in time for the five P.M. curfew, “I want to talk to you.”

  “Have to set the table,” Maya said. “Hi, Mom.” Her mother was chopping lettuce for a salad and frying corned beef hash on the stove; the kitchen smelled good. Her father sat at the table, buttering bread and sprinkling garlic powder on it.

  Maya shrugged out of her backpack. She washed her hands, grabbed a rag, and wiped off the dining room table, then set out the sunflower place mats. Peter followed her around the table.

  “This morning your shadow waved at me,” he muttered when Maya reached the far end of the table from the kitchen.

  “Sure,” said Maya. “Wanna see it happen again?” She turned on the overhead light and waved at Peter, and her shadow waved, too.

  “Come on. You know what I’m talking about. It wasn’t like that.”

  Maya turned away from him. She collected napkins and silverware from the sideboard and walked around the table, laying out places.

  “Maya,” Peter said from right behind her.

  She jumped and knocked a fork off the table.

  Rimi caught it.

  TWELVE

  Maya and Peter stared at the fork floating in the air. Then Maya grabbed it and put it back on the napkin where it belonged.

  “Don’t pretend that didn’t happen,” Peter said.

  “I can’t talk to you about this.”

  “Sure you can. It has something to do with all the time you’re spending with those people next door, right? Right?”

  “What does?” asked Candra, breezing in. “Peter, are you getting the dirt? Maya, you’re such a danged clamshell about Janus House. Sure, I saw Gwenda’s closet, but that didn’t tell me much. It just made me more curious! What’s up with Benjamin? What do you know about Fiona? What about that crazy old lady who’s always watching us from the porch?”

  “Namdi Sarutha’s not crazy,” Maya said.

  “Hah! You can talk about them! Spill!”

  “Why don’t you ask your own questions? That guy Evren seemed interested in you yesterday. He might be able to tell you something.”

  “I tried calling over there. Do you know there’s like, only one phone number listed for a Janus? How many Januses live in that pile? How can they all share one phone? The woman who answered wouldn’t even take a message for Evren. ‘You don’t find Evren, he finds you,’ she told me. What’s up with that?”

  “I don’t know,” Maya said. “I guess he’s around a lot, but I never saw him before yesterday.”

  “Don’t you think that’s peculiar?” Candra asked.

  “No. I see some people over there a lot, and there are bunches of them I never run into.”

  Candra pondered, then said, “You thought Evren liked me? I thought he did, too.”

  “Sure seemed like it,” Maya said. “Even though you were snoopy and rude.”

  “I was not either rude to him.”

  “You attacked him with questions.”

  “That’s what I do to everyone,” said Candra.

  “Well, anyway, he seemed like he wanted to get to know you bette
r.”

  “Exactly. That’s the message I got, too. So I’m trying to see him, but I apparently don’t have the clout to get hold of him. You’re all I’ve got until I make contact with him again. So give. Do they have their own religion? Is that why they won’t help me travel? They only help people who belong to their religion?”

  “I can’t tell you, Candra,” Maya said. “No matter how many times you ask, my answer will be the same.”

  “You make me so mad!” Candra said, and showed her clenched teeth.

  “Like that’s hard to do,” said Maya.

  Peter tugged on her sleeve. “Maya,” he said, his head coming forward, chin first, like a turtle about to chomp some lettuce.

  “Yes, all right, let me finish and then we can go to your room.” She got glasses and plates from the kitchen and set them on the table.

  “What are you going to do in Peter’s room, huh?” Candra asked.

  “Nothing,” said Maya.

  “Nothing,” said Peter. They stuck their tongues out at their older sister and raced for the stairs.

  “Mo-om!” Candra cried behind them.

  They dashed into Peter’s room and shut the door.

  Maya hadn’t been in Peter’s room since moving day, when she had helped carry any boxes anyone handed her off the back of the moving van. The boxes had all been labeled. She had brought several to Peter’s room. It used to be a clean, bare place with nice windows looking toward the street.

  Now it smelled like wood shavings and animal pee and rotting orange peels.

  Peter had two cages set up on his desk under the windows. Blond hooded rats lived in one of them, and a couple of guinea pigs, one short-haired calico and one long-haired beige, lived in the other. The guinea pigs meeped. Peter went over to their cage and dropped a few cherry tomatoes in, and they squealed in delight and settled down to munch.

  The pet cages were fairly clean—much cleaner than the rest of the room.

  Peter had piles of comic books stacked around the room, and he hadn’t made his bed in who knew how long. Dirty clothes lay in twisted tangles on the floor and draped over the desk, the dresser, and the chair. Plates with driedup food and not-dry-enough orange peels on them lurked under the desk and on the bedside table.

  “Gah, Peter, you’re worse than I am,” Maya said.

  Peter leaned his back against the closed door to the hallway and surveyed his room. “Yuck,” he said. “I guess I haven’t been paying attention.” He grabbed a laundry bag from the floor of his closet and stuffed clothes in it. “Have a seat,” he said when he had cleared off the desk chair.

  “Thanks.” Maya settled on the chair and studied the rats.

  What are those? Rimi asked. She sent out exploratory arms toward the cages on the desk.

  You haven’t met the pets yet? Maya wondered.

  Somehow I didn’t explore here while you were asleep. Something in the overall aura turned me away. I know what’s in Candra’s jewelry box and what’s in the bottom drawer of her dresser. I know where your mother keeps a secret stash of chocolates, and I know what’s hidden inside your father’s hat on the top shelf of the closet, but I never came in here before.

  What’s hidden inside Dad’s hat?

  Is it okay for me to tell you that? I don’t understand when I can tell you things and when I shouldn’t.

  I know, I’ve been very confusing about this. I guess I don’t need to know right now.

  The rats congregated near the cage wall closest to Maya. She saw their fur moving. What are you doing? she asked.

  They are soft, and they like this. I lizzer it. It makes a glow. What is a pet?

  Animals we take care of and own.

  Rimi twanged a couple of the bars on the cages. Pets live in enclosures they can’t get out of when they want to, she said.

  That’s part of little pets. I guess it’s part of Sully’s thing, too. He can go in the backyard and anywhere in the house, but he can’t just run around loose. If we want to walk him, we put him on a leash.

  Sully has an always curfew.

  Huh. A curfew is like being a pet? A curfew kept Maya from running around loose anytime she wanted to, but she didn’t think it made her a pet. For one thing, she could disobey the curfew. Then she’d have to live with the consequences. She could still do it.

  Sully got out sometimes. He was still a pet.

  Am I a pet? Rimi thought.

  No! Maya thought. Then she remembered stroking the egg-seed Rimi had been before she hatched, loving the way it purred. Rimi had seemed like her little pet then. That was before Rimi spoke to Maya, before she had a name. You’re not a pet, Maya thought slowly, but I don’t think everyone knows that. She remembered Noona talking to Maya as though Maya was the only person who had met Kachik-Vati. Maybe people had trouble knowing Rimi was a person because they couldn’t see her.

  “So are you going to tell me about the fork now?” Peter said. He had straightened the covers on his bed and was sitting on top of them.

  “I—” Maya felt the familiar paralysis in her tongue and throat. “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t. I physically can’t.”

  Peter frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  “And I can’t explain it—”

  But Harper didn’t put a silence on me, Rimi thought. Plus, I want to explore your silence and see if I can relax it. Maya felt warmth in her throat and mouth. Try to say it again.

  Before Maya could open her mouth, Peter spoke. “Do you have a poltergeist?”

  “I don’t—huh?”

  “You know, the kind of ghost teenagers get that makes noises and throws things.” Peter lifted a fat, tattered, bluegreen book off his bedside table and flashed it at her: Paranormal Phenomena. “I’ve been studying and that seems like the closest thing I can figure to what you do.”

  Peter had been reading up on her and Rimi? She had had no idea. How many times had they slipped? She had thought she was doing a good job of disguising her changes, but maybe Rimi had been doing other things when Maya wasn’t watching. “Huh. Maybe I do.”

  “Like, it happens to disturbed teenagers, and you’re pretty disturbed.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Because of Steph,” Peter said. He stared down at the book on his lap and bit his lower lip.

  “Oh.” So many things had happened lately that Maya hadn’t had much time to think about her best friend. She felt guilty. Stephanie was dead, but a way to keep her alive was to visit her in memory. If I don’t think about her, does she die all over again? Maya wondered, not for the first time.

  “Can you control it?” Peter asked.

  “No.” Not unless Rimi wanted to do what Maya suggested. Rimi was pretty agreeable on most things, but Maya didn’t even want to try ordering her around.

  “But you know what I’m talking about. You’re not going to deny it.”

  Rimi had switched to petting the guinea pigs, and they made contented burbling sounds.

  Maya stopped watching the fur ripple across the guinea pigs’ backs and looked at her younger brother. She shook her head.

  “I wish I had a poltergeist,” Peter said. “It would be so cool. Things moving around without anybody lifting them. When kids have poltergeists, sometimes stones fall on the roof of their house, mysterious rocks. Geologists can look at them and tell they’re not from around there. It’s like they come from space. And there are knocks on the walls or under the tables, and—are you sure you can’t make it do things like that?”

  “I can’t make it do anything,” Maya said.

  Rimi opened and closed a drawer in Peter’s dresser.

  “Whoa! Whoa! What was that?” Delighted, Peter jumped up and ran to the dresser.

  Rimi picked up all the dirty dishes in the room and piled them by the door. Peter was staring at the dresser and missed the new phenomenon until the dishes clattered as they settled in a stack. “Whoa!” Peter turned around and stared.
>
  Every dirty piece of clothing draped around the room rose and stuffed itself into the laundry bag. “Whoa!” Peter grabbed the laundry bag out of the air and peered inside.

  He looked at Maya. “Usually, poltergeists mess things up and break them. How’d you score one who does housekeeping?”

  “Just lucky, I guess.”

  “Hey, poltergeist!” Peter said. “Thanks for helping. Do you clean animal cages?”

  Rimi picked up the calico guinea pig, opened the cage door, and brought it out. It shrieked stridently, then settled into contented muttering as Rimi stroked and cradled it. She brought it to Maya and set it in her lap.

  “Wow,” Peter whispered.

  “She doesn’t take orders,” Maya said. “She does what she likes.”

  “It’s a girl? Poltergeists are girls and boys?”

  “You know more than I do,” Maya said. She pointed to the book he’d left on the bed.

  “Not about your poltergeist,” Peter said. He took his laundry bag to the bed, shoved the book over to make room, and settled down.

  “That’s true. She’s not really a poltergeist, Peter, but I can’t tell you what she is.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Uh-huh, but I can’t talk about it.”

  “You said that before.”

  “There’s a—” She felt the silence lock her throat again. She stroked her throat with her hand, trying to ease the closing. Rimi flowed into her mouth, a warmth in her throat. Words! Words lock up words! There are little squizzles in the walls of your air tube. I flurr them, spinning green brown things in here that close your throat. I will unspin them!

  Maya spread her hand against the skin of her throat. Surges of warmth and coolness alternated. She felt like she had a fighting fur ball stuck in her throat, and she coughed and almost choked, but then it smoothed out and she could breathe again.

  “Are you all right?” Peter asked, peering at her.

  “I-I-I hope so. Rimi?”

  Say something you’re not supposed to.

  “Janus House is magic,” Maya whispered. Nothing stopped her. She swallowed, her hand on her throat. Rimi. Rimi. Thank you. Maya dropped her hands to cuddle the guinea pig in her lap. Its furry warmth comforted her.