Broken Circle

by J. L. Powers

  “Leave me alone.” My voice is unsteady, uncertain, even though I mean what I say.

  The anaconda sneers, lips pulled back, fangs gleaming.

  “I mean it.” Really really wish my hands would stop shaking. “Just go. Before it’s too late.”

  The mountain snickers. The bull moose grabs my arm, slams me to the floor, and stomps on my head with his boot. I twist away, rolling across the sticky linoleum floor, but can’t escape the boot. My nose is pouring blood and something hot and liquid drips out of my ear onto the floor. My vision narrows, black around all the edges, with only a pinpoint of light revealing the hallway’s tiles.

  And just like that, it happens. Have you ever seen heat shimmering off the asphalt so the air warps and distorts how things look? Suddenly, we aren’t in the school hallway anymore. The four of us are standing in the middle of a deserted highway in the Sonoran Desert. Saguaros, straight arrows pointing to the blue blue sky. Cicadas whirring their wings together in endless song. Hot hot hot sand. The blinding sun.

  A woman huddles at the foot of a nearby yucca. Her skin is fish-white, burnt holes where her eyes and mouth should be.

  She’s here.

  As She stands, the anaconda slithers off the asphalt and disappears over a small hill of sand. The bull moose’s eyes flash panic. He hoofs it down the road, aimless, unsure how he got to this hot hell but hoping he can outrun this sudden apparition. He won’t survive long. He’s already frothing at the mouth.

  She hobbles toward us. I look at Dominick, wondering if he, too, will back down. But his small, mean shadow glares at me. “Is She your secret weapon?” he spits.

  No, I think, but do not say, She’s my nightmare.

  He jerks left then right then left, then darts around my back, grabbing hold of me from behind. I reach around and rip him off me—shadows are slippery but they’re light, easy to grip and hold, rip, tear, shred—

  “Adam!” Sarah shrieks. “Stop!”

  I’m startled back to the crowded hallway just before first bell, students flattened against lockers, staring at me. The three guys who attacked me lie prone on the floor, knocked out or dead, I’m not sure which yet. And the principal of the school is bearing down on me, flanked by two security guards.

  Sarah’s so close, I see the startled whites of her eyes. Jeremy and Carlos stand beside her, faces twisted with surprise and fear.

  I stumble over the guys on the floor. One of the security guards catches me, his arms locking under mine and gripping me against his chest so tight, I can’t move.

  Chapter 3.5

  Her Excellency was astonished. She sat back, shook her head, and said, in as sardonic a tone as she could muster, And what happened next? Pray tell us. And don’t spare a single detail.

  He grinned, baring his teeth, and continued the story:

  The Grim Reaper and her betrothed fled east to the desert. They honeymooned in a small hut, rust-red dust creeping in through all the cracks. They spent their nights clinging to each other, basking in the glow of passionate love. And so they woke each morning coated red, laughing at the way the land clung to them, seeped into their pores, soaked them in a strange ethereal glow, drenched them in deep happiness.

  What in the world? Her Excellency asked. What is this drivel? What is this dreck?

  What exactly do you think honeymooners do? he said. I thought I would spare the Synod the salacious details . . . unless you want them, that is . . .

  No thank you, Her Excellency said, her voice high and pinched.

  During the days, they hiked through the strange wilderness. Nights, they clung to each other in front of a fire. While she slept, the lover-husband wrote poetry.

  This barren land

  and you, my love,

  and each day awakens

  a new longing

  for you alone.

  But deep inside, they both knew the truth. It was something about which they did not speak.

  CHAPTER 4

  The less said about the horror show in the principal’s office, the better. One of the guys has heatstroke. Another is severely dehydrated. One of them has burns on the soles of his feet. “And this is my fault how?” I ask, but they don’t have an answer.

  I point out, to no avail, that they attacked me. I’m the one with what I suspect is a broken nose, an aching head, and something wrong with my hearing in the ear that the bull moose slammed with his boot. Okay, yeah, one of those guys also has a broken arm and they all seem terrified and one of them can’t say anything but “uh-uh, uh-uh” like The Wraith sucked all the words right out of his head. But still, why am I the only one in trouble?

  They couldn’t get ahold of Dad, big surprise. At least this time I don’t have to get Grandpa to bail me out. But I am carrying a letter that says I can’t return to school unless Dad comes to the office. I’m guessing this isn’t good.

  I text Sarah on the way home, just one word, Sorry, and she texts me right back. It’s okay, Adam, they hurt you first. It scared me to see you like that but it was three against one, whatever the principal says. We can talk about it later.

  Relief lodges deep in my stomach. I hadn’t realized how stressed out I’ve been until the moment it lifts. At least Sarah’s not completely, totally, 100 percent through with me. Maybe there’s still a smidgen of hope.

  * * *

  A fat guy in a meticulously tailored suit is sitting on the steps right in front of the door to our apartment. His mouth is like an eagle’s beak, his shadow shaped like a bird of prey. His small beady eyes dart this way and that, settling on nothing.

  I stop and look at him. A smile—one of deep satisfaction—breaks out on his face. I shiver and feel the desire to scurry into a dark hole, mouse-like.

  “Well, well, well,” he says in an accent I can’t quite place. He stands up—lumbers is more like it—and holds out his hand as if I’m supposed to shake it. Force of habit, I suppose, makes me take his hand. He grips it so hard, I wince. “Very good to meet you . . . ? And what is the name you go by . . . ?”

  His voice trails off and I guess I’m meant to supply him with my name, but my eyes are caught by the silver medallion hanging around his neck—a circle, broken by a curved line that looks like a shepherd’s staff. The dragon in the illuminated manuscript I was reading last night wore a similar symbol.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  His smile curves up, the sharp points of his mustache piercing his teeth. “Ah, of course, you would be drawn to the Broken Circle. It is the symbol for what we do.” He unhooks it from around his neck and holds it in the palm of his hand, offering it to me.

  My eyes are riveted by it, throat suddenly aching with unshed tears.

  He’s saying something.

  “What?” I say.

  He closes his palm over the Broken Circle medallion and suddenly I can look at him again, concentrate on what he’s saying. “I said I’m a Finder. My job is to find people. People like you.”

  People like me? Just put a flaming-orange trucker hat on my head with the word WEERDOUGH emblazoned in neon pink. Yeah, I’m a freak, just like those assholes said.

  “How old are you, my boy?” he asks.

  “Fifteen.”

  “Shame.”

  My eyebrow crooks skyward. “Just so you know, my sources tell me being fifteen is only a temporary condition. Lasts about a year.” I speak sotto voce, conspiratorial: “I’ve also heard that every adult has done it at some point . . .”

  He shakes his head. “No. It’s a shame you’re fifteen, Adam, and you’re just now going to learn your True Destiny.” I swear, he speaks so I can see the capital letters.

  Get lost, creepfest, I think very hard at the spot right between his eyebrows. “I’m going inside,” I say.

  His mouth parts, revealing a gap between his front two teeth and a missing canine tooth. One of his bottom teeth glints gold. “We thought you were dead. We thought you died during that unfortunate . . . accident . . . with your mother. Your fa
ther is a very naughty man, hiding you away like this.” He tsk-tsks.

  I close the door behind me and lock it, turning the dead bolt.

  He shouts through the closed door: “Thank god you’re still alive! Thank god I found you! Now the world doesn’t have to fall apart when your grandfather dies.”

  I call Dad again, hoping for a miracle. And I get it because this time he answers.

  “Adam.” Dad has one of those deep, mysterious radio voices, the kind you might have heard narrating horror dramas back in the 1950s. Which I totally listen to, by the way. One of my favorite ways to stay awake.

  “Dad, where the heck are you?”

  “What do you need?”

  The fat man is standing outside our door, looking inside the window, straight at me, smiling. That smirk isn’t going anywhere.

  “There’s a weird guy standing on the steps of the apartment,” I say.

  “Tell him to get lost.”

  Dad has this irritating habit of assuming I can take care of Big Problems.

  “He’s not going anywhere,” I say. “He’s huge. Besides, he says he’s quote-unquote ‘found’ me. He says he’s here to reveal my True Destiny or something like that. He’s wearing a silver necklace with a broken circle.”

  “What?” Dad’s phone begins to crackle.

  I start to repeat what I just said, but he says, all in a rush, in that commanding radio voice, “Adam, keep the door locked. Whatever you do, don’t let him inside. And don’t go back outside. I’m going to be right there.”

  Dad’s not one for “language,” but I’d swear I hear the F-word roll off his tongue as he hangs up.

  * * *

  I stay in the foyer, watching the fat guy on the porch. He’s looking at me, grinning his foolish face off. Dad sweeps up the stairs a few minutes later, black coattails flapping in the wind. Tall. Gaunt. Grim. Dad would look younger if his hair wasn’t so straight, so black, with such a severe part. I’d swear his shoulders droop just a millionth of a fraction. Barely noticeable, but it makes my own heart drop.

  He climbs the stairs, opens the door, and gestures with his arm for the gentleman to pass inside, glaring at him all the while.

  “Your life is about to change forever,” the fat man tells me.

  “We’ll see about that,” Dad says.

  “No, no, no,” the man says. “I trust you understand what my visit means.”

  “This is all a big mistake,” Dad says.

  “Oh, it’s a mistake all right,” the man counters. “Yours.”

  They go into Dad’s office and Dad closes the door firmly behind them. Although this meeting seems to be about me, apparently I’m not invited.

  I wander around the apartment. It’s not big. I’m able to cover the perimeters of the kitchen, living room, and my tiny-ass room in less than a hundred steps. I continue to pace. What does he mean, my True Destiny?

  I think about all the crazy classes Dad’s made me take all these years. Latin and Italian. Japanese cooking, where I learned how to make a mean teriyaki sauce, not to mention the art of sushi. Zulu jewelry–making. A drumming class. I always figured they were his way of trying to help me figure out what I have a passion for, what I might want to do when I grow up, my “destiny”—though I can tell you right now, Zulu jewelry–making is not it. (Not to lie: it’ll come in handy if I’m ever homeless and need something I can sell on the street.) Anyway, the point is, I have this eerie feeling that everything Dad’s given me, even all those things I didn’t want, like those crazy classes, are about to be taken away from me. What kind of True Destiny is that?

  * * *

  They spend less than ten minutes inside Dad’s office. Then the man tumbles out like Dad’s chewed him up and spit him out, but instead of looking cowed, like Dad’s the hawk and he’s the mouse, he looks triumphant.

  Using slow, deliberate motions, he touches my shoulder, closes his eyes, breathes in deeply, and releases the breath slowly. “Well now,” he says. “Well, well, well. This suddenly became even more complicated.”

  He pulls the medallion from around his neck and holds it out to me. I look at the circle, broken by the shepherd’s crook. I can’t take my eyes off it.

  “Take it, Adam,” he says, voice hard.

  I want to look at my father to see what I should do. But for some reason I can’t. At last, I reach out and he drops the chain into my outstretched palm. My fingers close over it involuntarily. His eyes meet mine. He smiles, turns, and closes the door gently behind him. A kind of victory in the soft motion.

  Dad sighs and gestures for me to follow him into the office. He sits at his desk—an ancient wooden thing that was probably built during the Civil War and is so heavy that nobody’s dared remove it, so it’s been here since the apartment building was erected. He props his elbows on the desk, rests his chin on his hands, and stares at me. His face is bathed in the pale green light cast by an old Tiffany glass lamp, its brass chain swinging gently, casting shadows on the pile of yellowing papers on his desk. The floor-to-ceiling bookcase behind him is missing random books, the empty, blank spaces like rotten teeth.

  I have this theory about Dad: he seems younger than he really is because he surrounds himself with ancient things. I mean, what seems older, an old guy with dark hair that he combs over or a crumbling two thousand–year-old manuscript? Exactly.

  “I suppose you’re wondering why that man visited.”

  I fidget in the old wingback leather chair and pick at the stuffing spilling out of a crack in the armrest. My feet scuff the worn wooden floor. “Yeah, what’d he want?” I’m bursting with questions but I don’t want to scare him off.

  He shuffles and reshuffles the papers on his desk. “He was here to remind me of my obligations.”

  “What are those?”

  He’s silent again for a long time. Finally, he steeples his long white fingers and clears his throat. And instead of words, rocks fall out of his mouth.

  “I must start training you to take over the family business,” he says.

  “Oh,” I reply. Let me just be perfectly honest here and admit that I don’t know exactly what Dad does. I wish he did something normal, like finance or trading or some such thing. But I think maybe he’s, like, a voodoo god or something equally weird and scary. I suppose now would be the time to ask. Especially since I’m supposed to take over for him. Voodoo god Adam in training. I don’t ask. Maybe I’m scared to know the answer. Instead, I follow up my brilliant “Oh” with the equally brilliant: “So what does that mean? Sometime after college?”

  He looks terribly sad as he watches me with his deep-set eyes. Bits of energy spark off his bushy eyebrows. “I’m sorry, Adam, I had always wanted you to have a choice. But things are worse than I thought. You’re not going to college.”

  I watch his mouth for some sign that he’s joking but it stays flat. “I thought you set up a college fund! I thought . . . Dad! I’ve always been on the college track.”

  “The problem isn’t money.” He takes off his spectacles and wipes them. “Universities can’t train you to do what I do. This is why I’m sending you to a special school, a boarding school.”

  A big black hole swallows up the whole universe. I jump out of the wingback chair. “You’re sending me to a boarding school?”

  “As soon as you finish, you’ll join me in my work.”

  “No way!” I shout. “I want to stay in school here. With my friends.” I forget for a second that my friends now think I’m crazy, that Sarah’s a bit scared of me even though she knows it wasn’t entirely my fault because those guys jumped me, and that the principal may or may not have expelled me yesterday, which I’ll only be able to find out if I can convince Dad to accompany me so we can get the bad news in person . . . which is apparently not going to happen.

  “I wish you could stay here too.” Dad’s eyebrows droop. “But we’re in a contract and we can’t get out of it. You’re the sole surviving eligible member of the family, so you must go.�
��

  “God, Dad, this is total crap.” Spit flies out of my mouth and lands on the spectacles he just wiped. He blinks but doesn’t remove them. “You’re always gone, you’re always working, you’ve never cared about what I want, and now this?”

  The words start spilling out of my mouth and I know I’d keep on going—I hate you is on the tip of my tongue—but Dad stands up, eyes flashing. His shadow swings angrily, a spiked mace above his head. He inhales deeply and suddenly, sucking all of the oxygen out of the room. The papers on his desk flutter, the thick velvet curtains ripple, and a fly crawling over his desk goes careening across the room. The air shimmers like a million dragonflies flying away. Just when I think I’m going to pass out or puke, or both, oxygen rushes back into the room with a clap.

  “You should start thinking about what you want to take with you when you go.” And with that, he dismisses me.

  My hands shake as I stagger out of the room. I go to my bedroom, place the medallion on my desk, sit on the bed to play Kill Sam on my laptop. But Sam ends up killing me exactly the same way three times—a knife to the back of my head. My eyes keep wandering back to the medallion.

  Finally, I unhook it and chain it around my neck. I know I’m choosing something. I wish I knew what. I wish I knew what the hell is going on.

  Eventually I sleep. But She doesn’t follow me into my dreams. No, this time I’m alone on a tall mountain—just me, the trees, and the sky. When I look down, I see that the sea roils and rages below me in an ecstasy of green waves and what looks like sea monsters chomping at the bit, froth raging at their mouths. They’re looking up at me, waiting. And when I look around to see if there’s any way out, I realize that there’s nowhere to go but down. Toward them. Toward the monsters.