He stared at her smile the way he and his brother used to stare at the sun when they were little, seeing how long they could last before their eyes burned.
“Um,” he said. Regulations and lists of customs laws fanned through his head, the pages of rules, their printed clutter a noise loud enough to drown out the lushness of Savary Island, threatening to push away the woman before him who was the one kind person he had seen today, maybe even this whole month. He did not want the drone of his responsibilities to block out this sip of honey, the first taste he had had in a long, long time.
“I’m glad that won’t be a problem today, Tom. I’m so glad I came to your booth,” she said, leaning closer to him. He smelled the fresh apples on her breath, saw the ginger in her hair, heard the delight in her voice from having seen him. Really seen him, maybe even shared a part of his memory of Savary Island, tasting the charred hotdog he had cooked over the fire, felt the pressure of his skin against Laura’s, seen the canopy of western hemlock surrounding them as they had held onto each other and pushed on the forest floor.
The thought that this woman could see him was nearly too much, was …
“That’s right,” she said to him. “That’s right, Tom. Just. Like. That.” And he saw the pink tip of her tongue inside the set of her teeth, watched as it poked out, saw it grow brighter as she bit down on it.
He didn’t see the frail teenage girl approach the booth from the passenger line and stand next to the woman, her child eyes vacant, her mouth open, looking more like a street urchin than an international traveler.
His heart hammered against his rib cage. There was too much blood coursing through his veins. His head felt dizzy. For a moment, he couldn’t breathe. He pressed his hands against his desk to keep himself from pitching forward. He looked away from the woman without a passport, aware that something wonderful and awful had almost just happened, aware that he was in way over his head.
The woman gave him one last smile, like the final glimpse of a red dress before it rounds a corner, then stepped past his booth in a wave of cool air and the unexpected scent of wet wood. Then she was gone. He stared straight ahead, not seeing the dull-looking teenage girl shuffle after her.
Tom felt the brightness of Savary diminishing, the memories of pleasure fading away from him as if down a long dim tunnel, replaced by the dirty backwash of shame and the sight of the long line of impatient passengers with their passports and their self-importance.
He wondered if he should do anything. If he should alert someone.
But he didn’t. He sat still for a moment in his booth at Vancouver International Airport as the familiar film of boredom and ambivalence washed down over his eyes and mixed with this new humiliation.
“Welcome to Canada,” he said over his shoulder, too quiet for anyone but a witch to hear.
And then, facing forward, he sighed.
“Next in line.”
CHAPTER 49
Home Safety
CHARLIE HEARD HIMSELF SIGH. He rolled over in bed aware that he was awake. The bedside clock read 8:49. At first he couldn’t tell if it was morning or night. Then he saw the tiny letters reading “a.m.” beside the hour.
He counted the numbers in his head. Did that mean that he had slept over seventeen hours? How was that possible? Hadn’t Beverly told him that he had already slept for eleven?
He thought about their conversation as he climbed out of bed. His legs were wobbly. He staggered to the bathroom and stood peeing above the toilet for what seemed like a full two minutes.
He looked at his face in the mirror. Lines from the pillow were etched across his cheeks. One of his eyes looked swollen. His hair was even messier than normal, flat against his skull in places, sticking out in others. His mouth tasted like burnt ham and bad fruit. He rinsed it out with water and brushed his teeth.
The fuzziness in his head began to clear as he walked back into his bedroom. He saw his phone on the nightstand. He turned it on, then sat down on the edge of his bed.
Numbers were flashing in his text box and his voicemail box. One, two, three … eight, nine. He flipped to his voicemail and saw they were all from Diego. He smiled. He would enjoy listening to them.
The text messages started out with simple lines: Whassup? Hope CA’s fun. Thinkin bout u. But one from this morning read differently: Call me. And another one: Call me, Charlie. Bad news.
He pulled on some shorts and grabbed a sweatshirt, then began to head downstairs. He could hear voices from below. He pressed Diego’s number. It was answered after only one ring.
“Charlie! Charlie, is that you?”
“Yeah, what, what’s hap- …”
“Charlie. I hate to bother you. I know you’re on your trip, but …”
And just before he heard the rest of Diego’s words, just as his bare foot stepped down onto the floor at the base of the stairs, a sensation like running water flooded over him. It was as if someone had dumped the water, a bucket of it, lukewarm, onto his head just below his scalp. It was pleasant, if not a bit surprising.
Beverly came running toward him down the hallway from the kitchen. Rita and a man he didn’t recognize rounded the corner from the living room. They seemed to be moving in slow motion, and the looks on their faces ranged from worry to concern to downright panic.
“Charlie!” his aunt was calling to him, but the running water warped her voice, made it sound warbled, muffled.
“… Principal Wang had a heart attack last night, Charlie. He might not make it,” said Diego’s voice, clearer because it was on this side of the water, in the phone, close to his face, almost as if Diego were perched on his earlobe.
The water drained from his head and down through his face, a warm cascade on the inside of his chest cavity, past his hipbones, down through the soles of his feet.
He didn’t see the three flower vases explode in the living room. Nor did he see the couch upend itself, the magazines catch fire on the coffee table, or the dirty dishes in the kitchen sink fly up and crash against the ceiling.
He couldn’t feel the soft blue light descend as his aunt ran at him with her hands outstretched, her lips mumbling fast, didn’t know the coolness that the light offered him. He didn’t know that the strange man held his hands in front of him, turning the light in the living room dark, spreading a heavy fog throughout the rest of the house, protecting all that was in it.
He didn’t see Rita running out the front door, slamming it shut behind her, stopping Charlie’s explosions from getting outside. He didn’t see Daniel Burman on the deck, doing the same thing from the back of the house.
He sat down on the floor at the foot of the stairs, the phone in his ear, hearing Diego’s voice.
“What’s that noise, Charlie? Are you okay? Was there a crash?”
“No, I just, I just dropped something … uh, I gotta go.”
“Charlie, did you hear me? Principal Wang had a heart attack. He might …” Diego’s voice cracked, and he was unable to finish the sentence.
“Yeah, I got it. Diego, I’m sorry, my mom is, uh …”
He hung up the phone, and then looked up to see Beverly and the man he didn’t recognize standing over him.
“Did you hear?” he asked his aunt.
“Yes, we heard. We got a call just before you came downstairs.” The water was gone. Her voice sounded normal.
“But I knew. I didn’t, why didn’t …?”
“Honey, you couldn’t have. You just couldn’t have.”
For the first time he saw that the two adults had their hands facing toward him, palms outstretched. There was a buzzing sound in his ears, and the air around him shimmered as if rising from hot pavement.
They were looking at him the way police officers look at someone about to jump from a building. Or the way zookeepers approach a cornered tiger.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m sorry to have to do this, son, but …” said the man standing to Beverly’s right. He was
black-skinned and very tall. He wore a fitted shirt unbuttoned down to his sternum, and Charlie could see small black curls of hair on his chest.
The man clenched both hands into fists. They made a cupping sound. For a moment, the air seemed to be sucked from the hallway.
A sharp pain cracked through Charlie’s skull, and then all the lights went out.
CHAPTER 50
The Quick Brown Fox
THE NEXT FEW DAYS WERE a blur. Charlie slept a lot. There was always someone in his bedroom when he woke up, either standing over the bed and looking down at him or sitting in a nearby chair. At first he wasn’t sure why, but he was too tired to ask. Eventually Jeremy, his bedroom guard of the hour, told him that it was to keep him safe and the house in check. When he explained to Charlie what had happened to the vases, the dishes, the couch, and the magazines, Charlie couldn’t believe it.
“But I didn’t really do all that stuff, did I?”
“Yep, you sure did. You’ve got a mighty curveball,” said Jeremy, as if he admired what Charlie had done.
“But I didn’t mean to do that. Why did I do that?”
“You were upset about Mr. Wang, Charlie. All of that emotion boiled out of you. It’s normal to have craziness like that happen. That’s why we have folks watching over you. It was our fault that we didn’t have somebody in your room when you woke up and heard the news.
“He’s going to be okay, by the way. He’s out of danger. Looks like he had bypass surgery and is now in stable condition.”
Charlie breathed a sigh of relief. He didn’t know the principal very well but really appreciated the time he took to help Charlie get oriented at Puget Academy.
His thoughts wandered back to being popped and what damage he had caused to Randall and Beverly’s home.
“But I can’t control it. How will I ever …?”
“You will, you will. You’re forgetting everything you’ve been told—that it dies down after several days, or a week at the most. That once it dies down, it’s almost like you haven’t been popped. Well, that’s not exactly true. It’s more like …”
Jeremy paused, stroking his beard with his hand.
“It’s more like you can see and feel things differently, but you can’t do anything about it. Not right away. You have to learn how. Believe me, there’ll come a point in your studies when you’ll long for it to be as easy and chaotic as it is for you right now. I remember getting so frustrated when I first started learning. One minute I made stuff happen all around me, and the next minute I couldn’t even light a stupid candle!”
“But was it out of control for you too in the beginning?”
“Yeah. Most definitely. It is for everybody, Charlie. I ended up blowing the engine on my dad’s Volkswagen GTI, and I somehow managed to singe all the hair off of my little sister’s head.”
“You what?!” Charlie exclaimed, rolling over on his side, resting his head on his hands and staring at Jeremy in disbelief.
“Yeah, it’s true. She was so mad at me for the longest time. It didn’t matter how much my parents tried to explain to her that I didn’t mean to. She got over it when she was popped though. She completely dissolved the old tree house in our backyard, the one she’d loved since she was a kid.”
Charlie tried to understand. It was like new witches were ticking time bombs, and you never knew when they were going to detonate or how big the explosion would be.
“Am I still, uh, in danger? Or, I mean, am I still making things happen?”
“It’s died down a lot. Can you hear all that crazy stuff outside?”
He listened. He couldn’t hear, or feel, a thing.
“No, not at all.”
“That’ll come and go. About two hours ago all the pens on your desk shot across the room and stuck in the wall over there.”
“Jeez.”
“Then one of them pulled out and started writing on a piece of paper on your desk.”
Jeremy stood up and showed him the page.
“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, which is the stupidest sentence in the English language,” it said, in perfect cursive penmanship.
“I wrote that?”
“Well, technically the pen did. But, okay, yeah, you wrote it.”
“That’s embarrassing. And it’s not even my own handwriting.”
“What’s so bad about that? My friend made his dad’s dirty movie collection project on the kitchen wall one morning while the family was eating breakfast. His mom didn’t know about the secret stash. Ooh, there was fighting in that house for a while after.”
Charlie had been listening in dismay to Jeremy’s stories, worried about all the things he might do. But this last example struck him funny. He tried to hide his smile.
“Dude, you can totally laugh. It’s hilarious!” Jeremy said.
They started to giggle, and then Charlie fell back on his bed and laughed until tears came out of his eyes. Jeremy laughed hard too until Charlie slapped his hand down on his sheets and the comforter rose up off the bed and threw itself over Jeremy, knocking him off his chair.
Jeremy jumped up. He looked like he was trying on a ghost costume for Halloween. His hands moved around under the comforter until it floated off of him and settled back on the bed.
“Sorry! Jeez, I …”
This set them both off on another riot of laughter. Charlie made sure not to slap the bed again.
After they were able to calm down, Charlie thought about his dream again.
“I should have known it was going to be Principal Wang. I could have helped him.”
“Charlie,” Jeremy chided, still breathing heavily and wiping his eyes, “there’s nothing you could have done. It sucks to have dreamt what you did, but you gotta give yourself a break on this one. Beverly investigated it, by the way, because she knew you would worry. It was a completely natural heart attack. You didn’t cause it. And neither did any other witch. Your only involvement was that you picked up a hint of something in a dream. You can’t blame yourself for something out of your control. If you do, you’ll go nuts.”
Charlie nodded, relaxing a little bit. He felt awful about Principal Wang but started to believe that there really hadn’t been anything he could have done.
Later that night he told Beverly that he wanted to call Diego. He was worried that his friend would wonder why he hadn’t called him back. They decided it was a good idea, but she insisted on standing near him, “just in case.” He was beginning to understand what “just in case” meant.
“Tell him you got really sick in California. The flu. That’s one we use a lot when kids have to miss school after getting popped.”
So he did. The call went through to Diego’s voicemail. He explained that he wouldn’t be back from California for a few more days, that he was sorry he had had to hang up the phone so fast the other day, that he had gotten a nasty bug while down there and couldn’t talk much.
Charlie listened to his message once before sending it. He was surprised to hear how weak and tired his voice sounded, like he really was sick. He hoped Diego would buy it.
On the Thursday after being popped, with nothing else having broken, exploded, or caught on fire for a good twelve hours, Beverly declared that the danger was over.
“You may still feel strange, honey, but it’s back under control. We can declare emergency threat level yellow.”
Randall came home later that afternoon. He had flown for a few days, then purposefully stayed away, sleeping in a hotel downtown until things died down.
A warm weather front had moved in. He and his uncle sat in the backyard on the lawn furniture, enjoying the summer-like weather and the view of the Sound.
“I tell you, Charlie, I can’t imagine what it’s like. All that weird stuff happening around you, and how you sense it all? Beverly has tried to explain it to me, but I don’t think I’ll ever understand it.”
Charlie nodded. It wasn’t like anything he could have imagined either. He was glad he h
ad stopped breaking things. But his sense, or feeling, of everything around him had come back. It wasn’t as overpowering as before. He could control it better, by tuning in to one thing and blocking out something else. But it was still there. He could hear an argument taking place inside a house more than four blocks away.
“Cammie, I’m tired of you complaining all the time. ‘You don’t love me enough, you don’t show me how much you care, you don’t …’” he heard a man’s voice saying, fatigue and anger lacing every word.
“Do you think it’s fun for me to wait around for your scraps?” a woman’s voice yelled back. Embarrassed, Charlie shook his head, hoping Randall wouldn’t ask him what he had just heard.
“Um, see that tree over there?” Charlie said, pointing to the maple at the far corner of the yard. “See how it’s mostly green?”
“Yeah,” said his uncle.
“Well, I can sort of, like, feel the green evaporating. If I focus in on one leaf, there’s this feeling, you know? That the green is leaving and that it’s going to get a little crinkly and dry. I know, of course, that it’ll turn colors soon. Everybody knows that. But I can feel the pull of the green and the, uh, the push of it getting older. The tree is tired and wants to rest. It wants to stop having to feed all of the leaves for a while. But the leaf keeps holding on to the branch, like it doesn’t want to lose the green. Something like that.”
“You can feel that?”
“Yeah, if I pay attention to it. It’s way better than a few days ago, when everything was loud. I thought I was going crazy.”
Charlie softened his gaze a moment. “There’s a red Saab parked across the street from us. There are envelopes from a … from a King County credit union shoved on the floor in the backseat. There’s a water bottle in the front that says “Yoga for Life” on it. And in the glove compartment, there’s an owner’s manual and a, let’s see, a small plastic bag of something.”
“Uh oh. Is it something illegal?”
“I can’t quite see it yet. Oh, no, it’s little candies wrapped in yellow paper.”
The Boy Who Couldn't Fly Straight: A Gay Teen Coming of Age Paranormal Adventure about Witches, Murder, and Gay Teen Love (Book 1, The Broom Closet Stories) Page 27