“Let’s do it,” Zane jumps to his feet. “We can crash at our Gpop’s farm, if you can actually sleep after a trip on the Free Ball.”
I don’t want anything to do with Zane’s Free Ball, but I figure I’ll just opt out. What I really want is the chance to talk to Clint. If he knew Roger, he might have some ideas about where Roger would hide my grandfather’s Memory. I can’t help getting lost in the hope that Clint will have a piece of the puzzle that helps me find The Key. Whether or not I die of exhaustion before I get there.
“Okay, I’m in,” I tell Zane and Garrett flips open his phone, reporting to Mrs. Reese that we’re going out to the Middleditch farm for the night.
“It’s too dark to ride it tonight. There’s no moon,” Robin says, but then Zane counters with, “It’s more fun in the dark.”
Zaneen adds, “It’s scary as hell in the dark,” and Zane ends with, “Which makes it way more fun.”
And next thing I know, we’re all getting on our shoes and going down all the back hallways of the hotel until we’re at Zane’s car. It’s a compact and the only thing holding up the back bumper is a bungee cord. And then Brandon pops up out of nowhere as we’re piling in.
“Where ya goin’?” he says. Garrett and I are crammed onto the backbench seat, with Deeta between us, and Zane, Zaneen and Robin are smashed together on the front. “And where’d you get this hunk of junk?”
Zane, still hanging half out of the door, tips his head back so he can look down his nose, even though he’s looking up at Brandon.
“It’s a loaner,” Zane says. “Don’t need the Contego cars attracting attention. And speaking of that, shouldn’t you be more concerned with watching for the Fury?”
“I’m supposed to be watching for whatever isn’t normal,” Brandon says. He pokes Zane’s chest with one finger. “And you’re as not normal as it gets. Where are you going?”
“What are you doing, writing a book?” Zane sneers.
“We’re just taking Deeta home,” Garrett says, beside me in the backseat.
Deeta chimes in, “You want to come, Brandon? Hessa would love to see you. She talks about you all the time.”
Whoever Hessa is, she’s some kind of Kryptonite that sends Brandon stumbling backward, away from the car.
“Nope, nope…I’m good,” he says. “See ya.”
Zane jumps behind the wheel and we’re off. He wiggles his eyebrows at me in the rearview mirror. “Ever rode a Free Ball before, Nal?”
“How would she?” Zaneen snorts. “You think her mom kept her out of the Ianua, but let her go looping around on Free Balls? She doesn’t know anything about them.”
“Well, there are only like five of them in the country.” Deeta adds.
“Zane and Neen’s nutty old…what was he anyway? Your great, great uncle?” Robin says. “Anyway, their uncle invented it and named the thing because it’s ball-shaped and it can float around in the air without tethers. Think of a carnival ride that shoots you up in the air, but then, instead of coming back down, you can float around, kind of like a hot air balloon.”
“Except that you’re strapped to the outside of the rubber pipes,” Zane adds.
“You’ll just have to see it to really get what we’re saying,” Robin says.
“If it really freaks you out, you can always stay on the ground with me or Bella-Neener,” Zane adds. “Whoever does the controls.”
“Shut up, butt zit,” Zaneen slugs him.
The shiver only expands inside me as I wonder what I’m getting myself into.
It’s a four-hour car ride and I sleep through as much as I can, even though my head keeps bouncing against the car wall. I don’t want to droop onto Deeta’s shoulder. When Zane hits the brakes and my head slams into his headrest in front of me, I’m not so tired anymore, but I’ve got a headache.
Zane throws open his door and jumps out to unlock his Gpop’s farm gate. But it’s not a simple wooden ranch gate, like I expect. We’re parked in front of a high brick wall with an iron gate and floodlights that replace the need for the moon. As the gate slides open, I wonder if we’re really going to a farm or a prison compound.
A winding dirt road runs right down the center of rows of leveled crops. Zane drives us in, following the snaking road. The land is pretty flat, but goes on too far to see in the dark. Even if I press my temple to the window, I can’t see anything up ahead until we finally stop in front of a mammoth, red wood barn.
Zaneen squeals to Garrett, “Do you remember that one time, when Zane sent us up together and left us up there for an hour? I was so scared and you held my hand the whole time.”
“That was when we were all, what? Ten years old?” Zane chimes in. “Besides, now Garrett only wants to hold Nali’s hand.” Zane gives Zaneen a crushed-lip grin and pulls me from the backseat. “Ready for the ride of your life, Nali Girl?”
No. No I’m not. But I am as far as Zaneen will ever know.
“Sure,” I say.
The barn door is on sliders and Zane and Garrett heave it open. Deeta squeals and yanks on my arm and I stumble along beside her into the barn.
My eyes catch on it, glinting in the dark, before Zane even flips the switch for the floodlights. What I was looking at was only a few bars at the bottom. Zane’s Free Ball looks about as big as the Epcot ball. It’s not exactly a ball. It’s more like a hollow ball frame of connected, rubber-coated bars. There is a solid, hexagon-shaped piece at the bottom and another at the top.
“You ride in that?” I ask.
“Duh. No.” Zane says with a laugh. We follow him around the ball. “You hang on the outside of it.”
Zane tugs on one of the harnesses that are molded to the rubber bars. They raise right out of the frame, like thick rubber bathing suits, split down the middle. And they have buckles. It makes me queasy just looking at them.
Whatever my face looks like, Deeta starts explaining everything, like I’m just totally confused instead of completely horrified.
“We buckle into these things,” she says. She pulls back one side of a harness like a flap of skin. My knees wobble and Zane assures me, “It’s totally safe.”
“It’s a total rush!” Robin hoots as Zane reaches up and jerks on one of the bars. The enormous ball actually jiggles like it might roll on top of us. I’m the only one who jumps back.
“You okay?” Garrett asks. He reaches out to touch my arm and then drops his hand with a grimace. He takes a step backward, as if to be sure he won’t be able to reach me if the impulse hits him again. I’m glad when the grinding sound, coming from overhead, drowns out the answer I don’t give.
I look up as the barn roof slides open; two large slats opening like a secret compartment door, letting in the night sky. I feel myself go pale as it finally hits home. This Free Ball and the barn are designed for full scale launching.
“Oh, you look terrible, Nali!” Deeta scurries over and steps between Garrett and I as she gives me a quick squeeze. Garrett’s eyes drop to his feet, watching how easily Deeta loops her arms around me. He takes a tiny step back. Deeta just keeps talking, a mile a minute. “I’ve done it before! We’ve got to be launched up to be able to float and when you go up you get that whooo….oooop! in your stomach and then it’s just like having that dream where you’re flying…except that you actually are! And when you come down, the bottom is weighted, so it usually lands on the base.”
“Usually? What if it doesn’t?” I ask, trying to keep my voice level. “How does it work?”
“Magic.” Zane flashes me his devilish smile. “That’s all you need to know.”
“Yeah, right. There wouldn’t be a control station if it was magic.” Zaneen says, motioning to a black podium in the corner. There are knobs and dials and switches on the slanted top of it.
“Wrong.” Zane says. “That’s just the man behind the curtain. But do you really want me to explain the gravitational gases and all that? Because you’ll never get it…and then you’ll be a real mess,” he says
. I’m already a real mess, but I’m glad it isn’t showing. “All you have to know is that it’s totally safe, Nal. My family has used this thing for years. It’s fun. I give you my word.”
“I, uh,” I stammer, staring up the expanse of the ball. The only way I’m getting on Zane’s Free Ball is if they knock me out and strap me to it. “I believe you? But I’m…uh…just really not with it tonight.”
“Me too,” Garrett yawns. “We’ve been going since this morning. Let’s just save it for tomorrow, after we visit Big Dog’s. How ‘bout it, Zane-o?”
“You’re serious?” Zane glowers. “We drove all the way out here to just sleep?”
But he closes the slats in the barn roof. As we walk up to his Grandfather’s farm house, I’m already making a list in my head of all the excuses that I can use tomorrow to get out of riding on that thing.
“Where’s your grandfather?” I whisper as Zane unlocks the door. The farmhouse windows are all black and there are no cars in the gravel spaces outside. I expect Zane’s grandpa to meet us at the front door with a shotgun.
“Gone,” Zane says, rattling the key in the lock until it pops open. “Passed on, about seven years back. And Gram was the year before him.”
He says it so casually that I have to swallow the knot that pops up behind my tonsils. I’m not sure, even having felt what I did in the circle, that I’m ever going to be able to talk about my mom being gone like it’s not the hugest event in my entire life.
“This place has been the family cottage since then,” Zane goes on.
“It’s not a cottage, jock strap,” Zaneen says. “It’s a safe house.”
“Going to be,” Robin underlines each word in the air with her finger. “Since it’s not quite finished yet.”
“Which no one’s supposed to know,” Zane grumbles.
“Like it matters,” Zaneen adds, stepping inside. She flips on the lights without having to feel around for the switch.
“We have an alarm system that is so accurate, it can zap anything from flies and nuclear warheads,” Zane says it’s hard to tell if he’s just joking. He points to a silver panel installed on the wall. There is a TV screen over the top of it and the whole thing looks like the controls for a space ship- weirdly out of place on the weathered, old paneling. Zane taps it with a finger. “This sucker is wired from the fence, to the grounds, to the barn, to the perimeter, and to the house. Even if someone popped their head through a hole in the perimeter, they’d trigger the ground sensors first. And if they somehow got past the ten acres of trip wires and booby traps, then they’d set off the motion detectors around the barn or the house. And the sirens. And then the knockout gas starts spraying. We’ll just make it easy and say this: No lights and no sirens means we’re all good.”
I lean a shoulder on a doorframe and suddenly feel that degree of tired where I’m fantasizing about how soft and comfortable the wood floor looks. I don’t even realize I’ve closed my eyes until Robin taps my shoulder and I open my lids to see Garrett and his soft grin.
“Go with the girls,” he says as Robin goes to a staircase, around the corner of the kitchen. She breaks in with a deep voice that I’m sure is her imitation of Zane’s grandfather.
“Girls up and boys down,” she barks as she stomps up the stairs. “There’ll be no foolin’ around in Gpop’s house.”
We sleep like slats, the four of us lying wrong-ways, across the king size bed upstairs. But when I wake up with what turns out to be the back of Deeta’s limp hand across my forehead, I scramble out off the bed and my field blows out in a panic. It takes a minute for me to remember where I’m at.
Robin’s gone. Deeta flops over and her hand slaps Zaneen’s cheek hard enough that Zaneen wakes and scrambles out of the bed like I did. But when Zaneen spots me, she gives me an instant glare, as if I was controlling Deeta’s hand.
“That was Deeta,” I say.
“I didn’t say it wasn’t,” she snaps.
Maybe it’s because I’m so tired or because my back is creaky from sleeping with my feet bowed off the side of the bed or because I just can’t take it anymore, but I turn off my I’d-really-like-to-be-friends censor and say exactly what I’ve wanted to.
“I don’t want to be enemies,” I tell her.
Her glare narrows even more, until I’m only looking at the smear of yesterday’s mascara. “Who says we’re enemies?”
“You consider us friends?”
“I don’t need to be friends with everyone.” She shrugs. I should just let it go. I should just walk out and know that I tried, but I can’t. I grab her arm and as she tries to wrench it back, the words come blasting out of me.
“Why do you have to hate me so much?” I say, my fingers clamped tight. “I’m not trying to get with Garrett just to stomp all over your feelings.”
“I know,” she growls, ripping her arm loose. Her eyes well up and her smeary mascara runs in fat gray drops down her face. “But nothing’s like it should be. You should’ve been Alo and I shouldn’t be Simple. Did you know I’m the only one in my family, for generations, that hasn’t received a sign? You can’t imagine what that’s like—being the useless twin. Especially in my family.”
“You’re not useless,” I say, but I know it’s not very convincing. I don’t know her well enough to know all the ways she’s not.
“It doesn’t matter anyway. It wouldn’t even matter if I got the sign of Addo stamped on my forehead right this second. All everybody talks about is you. Nali’s got balls! Nali re-Impressioned without blinking! Nali’s so awesome, of course Garrett chose her as his Vieo!”
She breaks down in sobs and I lay my hand on her shoulder. Zaneen is not what I thought. She’s only trying to be the twin that can measure up. She’s trying to thrive as a stem of lethal belladonna, different but still adequate, among the generations of Middleditch hemlock. And when she lifts her face out of her hands to look at me, I feel like we’re both trying to chisel through the concrete pain and metal emotions to poke a hole in everything that separates us and finally get a real glimpse at each other.
“I don’t know what other people say about me,” I tell her, “but I can tell you what’s true. I don’t have balls. None. I wish I did. What I’ve got is a corner that I was backed into. The only reason I re-Impressioned without blinking was because…well, what else could I do? The Fury killed my entire family. I re-Impressioned because I know I can’t stop The Fury on my own, but I want to be a part of the community that does.
“And Garrett…I…” My eyes travel away from her, across the floor, up the wall and back to her. “I understand. I’m blown away by him too. It’s just so messed up that we both have to feel that way, about the same guy, at the same time. I’m not with him to drive you crazy. I’m with him because I’m crazy about him. I won the lottery on this one, but it could’ve just as easily been you.”
She steps back, but I see something happen in her eyes. Like a ship rocking, turning upside down. I want to believe that everything she thought of me before is capsizing and that she’s making the effort to climb up the other side of it and see my point of view. She looks away, but then she smiles and wipes her eyes.
“I’ll try,” she says. “Not to hate you, I mean. I’ve gotten pretty good at that kind of thing though. Probably from years of being the Simple Twin.”
“Thanks. Belladonna.”
She smiles again before she turns and walks out the bedroom door. Just as she disappears, Robin bellows up the stairs, “Nali, Deets, Neen…GET UP! WE’RE LEAVING FOR THE JUNKYARD!”
The farm looks a lot different than it did last night, in the dark. The grounds are a huge mess, chunked up all over, like it’s been turned for planting.
“Those are all the sensors,” Zaneen says beside me. I don’t know why she’s the one wedged between Garrett and I, but I worry that it’s like peeling open the wound in her a little wider. But as I watch her leg knock against Garrett’s, I wonder who’s wound is really worse right now. I try
to ignore the itchy, raw feeling I have every time their shoulders bump together.
After what Zaneen told me upstairs, I shouldn’t be the jealous one, but I am. I’m not freaking out that Garrett might suddenly feel something for her and run off to be Simple. It’s way worse. I’m jealous that Zaneen can touch him at all.
I remember fantasizing about being able to touch Garrett whenever I wanted, but then I finally did, and now I know exactly how smooth and soft his skin really is. Even my fingertips ache with the memory. And the whole right side of Zaneen is over there just smashing and touching and brushing and bumping into Garrett like it’s nothing. I let my forehead drop against the window with a thump.
I start counting the clumps where I think sensors might be hidden, but there are too many of them. There’s not a foot between chunks and it’s impossible to tell where one is and one isn’t.
Once we’re out of the front gate, the road twists and turns like a nauseating drinking straw and when it straightens out, we pass through a town that is lined up along the single main road. Then we pass another town that’s only a little more sprawling than the first and the silly-straw road returns for a full half hour of rollercoaster tricks that eventually shake off the black top and give way to a dirt road. And the entire time, Zaneen sings and talks and puts her fingers on Garrett’s arm. Even though I can tell that Zaneen is going out of her way to show me that her touch is completely casual and means absolutely nothing, not being able to do it myself makes me want to rip her fingers off in the nicest way possible.
When I finally catch a glimpse of the junkyard, it’s in the middle of nowhere. It’s a flat cinder block building, miles from the last sign of life we saw, with a crazy-tall, chain link fence behind it. Flattened cars, old tires, and rusty junk are piled so high behind the fence that we can see it over the top of the building when we pull up. The windows are covered in dust the color of dried clay and there’s a sign in the window that looks like it’s never been moved. Handwritten in fat, red marker, it says OPEN. I touch the photo and the card in my pocket and try to make myself happy that the place isn’t closed.
Cornerstone 02 - Keystone Page 18