by Cyn Balog
“Hey.” He sounds drained. “What’s up?”
I peek through the slats of the vertical blinds on our window. The water is raging down Central Avenue, like rapids. The curbs are completely submerged. Other than that, everything is just lovely. But really, “Did you make this storm?” is like “You have six weeks to live.” Not exactly a conversation one can have over the phone. Plus my mom is staring at me, ready to pluck the phone out of my hands the moment the word “bye” leaves my lips. “Not much,” I lie.
There’s a pause. “Do you … want to go crabbing with me tomorrow?”
I burst out laughing. What planet is he on? I’m about to say, “Are you crazy? The waves are like tsunamis and the island is about to be washed away,” but if he created this storm, he must know that. And if he created it, maybe he knows when it’s going to end. “Um, the storm?” I ask.
“It’ll be over tonight,” he says. “I heard it on the weather.”
I turn toward the television. Above the headline SURPRISE STORM BATTERS THE JERSEY COAST, a blond woman in a smart pink suit is waving her hand over a map of projected rainfall totals. Did he really? “But the water will probably be too choppy.”
Although, not if he has anything to do with it.
“Humor me,” he says, sounding exasperated. “I haven’t gone crabbing in forever. I miss it. I don’t care if we don’t catch anything.”
“All right.”
“Pick you up at eight a.m.?”
“Okay.” I hang up the phone and see my mother studying the television and chewing on her pinky fingernail. “Wish says it will end tonight.”
“They’re predicting it will continue until Wednesday,” she says. Then she shrugs and turns off the set. “Mr. Wishman probably knows more than they do. They’re always wrong. Either way, we’re not evacuating.”
“Is that what they want us to do?”
“They probably will. They always do.”
Evie wanders in from her bedroom and grabs a bottle of iced tea out of the fridge. “The rain’s stopped,” she says.
My mother and I run to the window, since we don’t believe it. It was just pounding against the roof a second ago. But Evie’s right. The pools of water in the street are still, and the sunset is breaking through the clouds on the horizon. It’s over.
Completely, one thousand percent over. Not five minutes ago it looked like walking out the front door would mean drowning. But now the fading sun is coming through the blinds, painting rosy red slashes on the living room wall.
The phone rings again. My mother answers and then gives me a curious look as she hands me the receiver, likely confused about why I am fielding more calls in a five-minute period than I have all summer. “I’m ready,” the voice says, muted and serious.
It only takes a second to process. “Christian?”
“Yes. It’s time. For the mission.”
Great. Now he thinks he’s James Bond. He must have been staring out the window, waiting for the all clear. I wonder if he’s calling from his shoe phone. “Um, okay. The beach?”
“Yeah. Meet you out on the street in twenty.” At least he doesn’t say something goofy, like “nineteen hundred hours” or “let’s synchronize our watches.”
The line goes dead, and I check to make sure I have nothing between my teeth and walk down the staircase, trying to be nonchalant. Christian is coming out of the hotel at the same time. I hear Melinda’s voice behind him. “You should bring a jacket! It’s chilly on the beach at night!” she screeches. He raises his eyes toward the heavens and exhales long and hard. Leave it to Melinda to single-handedly destroy his James Bond image the way she destroyed my hair.
He’s barefoot, wearing a black T-shirt that shows his tattoos. He has his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his baggy black pants. He doesn’t say anything, just motions for me to follow him. “Um. Was I supposed to wear black?” I ask, looking down at my pink sweatshirt.
“Not a big deal,” he says. “We’re not really going to do it, anyway. I’ll just show you a few things.”
We get to the boardwalk and by now the tide is going out and there’s a small sliver of beach. I kick off my flip-flops near the entrance and step down into the cold, damp sand, shivering in the wind. The waves are still big and choppy but they’re not nearly as scary as they were earlier in the day. He walks with me toward an overturned rowboat and stares up at the sky. Then his eyes lazily trail to the sand. The footprints have been smoothed away by the waves, so it looks like we’re the first people ever to come here. He drags his foot along, making a perfect circle on the smooth sand, stopping every so often to survey the sky. “Now, what I would do is walk around the outside of the circle, three times.”
“Uh, okay,” I say, keeping my opinions to myself. “What for?”
“It shows the stars you’re welcoming them.”
I can’t help it: I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, but “Why not just bake them a pie?” leaks out.
I expect him to fire back a zinger, but he doesn’t. He gives me a tired look, then stares at the horizon, where a few lights from passing ships blink on and off. Then, reluctantly, he starts to walk it.
“I thought you said you weren’t going to—”
“If this is what it takes to get you to see that this isn’t a joke …”
“Hey, don’t blame me if you burst into flames or whatever,” I say. Still, I don’t stop him. I’m too curious.
“It won’t do anything,” he whispers. I’m unable to tear my eyes away as he steps around the circle, putting his heel directly in front of his toe, like a high-wire performer. I shiver and my breath catches. And maybe it’s the moonlight bouncing off the waves, playing tricks on my eyes, but do the angles of his face begin to soften?
When he’s done walking the circle, he pulls his shirt over his head. It’s freezing, but before I can ask him what the hell he’s thinking, he says in a rather breathless way, “Now I just lie within the circle.”
As he’s getting into position, I gasp. He has tattoos all over his chest. They look like stars, suns, moons, planets. When he kneels in the sand, I can see them on his shoulders, too.
I want to tell him to stop, that this is all too creepy for me, but I can’t find my voice. He lies down and soon he is quiet and it’s like I am the only one there, the only live person on the whole beach. Because suddenly, he goes still and then even his chest stops moving and I know he’s doing exactly what Wish did. Whatever that was. And I know he doesn’t really want to … he’s doing it for me. I feel a stab of guilt for that. He said it was addictive; maybe it’s like dangling a vial of coke in front of someone in rehab. It’s been a few days since I was afraid of him; mostly I’ve just wanted to wring his neck. But gradually, as he lies there, open and vulnerable, I realize that a whole new side of him has been emerging, one I kind of like. And I sort of enjoy our verbal sparring matches, as much as I hate to admit it. I like him. So I finally find the words. “Stop,” I murmur.
He doesn’t. He continues to lie there. A seagull screeches overhead, somewhere among the darkening clouds, as if in warning. And then the stars begin to dull, or maybe that’s all in my mind, because Christian’s skin begins to glow. And at once it’s no longer Christian. It’s the image of Christian, his body and all … but it’s him without flaw. His tattoos disappear. He’s beautiful.
I double over, wanting to retch, but everything inside me is dry.
“Stop!” I shout, shaking his arm.
Nothing. I scream it over and over again, but it’s like he’s gone.
Breathless, I sink to my knees and shove him hard, so that he’s lying facedown in the sand. He finally stirs.
“What the—” he says, as if I woke him from a long night’s sleep. He rolls over and sits up, looking stunned. “What happened?”
“Okay, okay. I believe you,” I say, unable to control my chattering teeth.
He rubs his neck. “Ouch. Good. Because I’m not doing it again.”<
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“It hurts?”
“When you stop, it’s like a hangover.” He notices me looking at his chest, unable to break my gaze. “I used to take it very seriously,” he admits sheepishly. “It’s stupid. I wish I could get rid of them. They were just for fun. This is the only one that matters.” He points at the star on his wrist. “I wasn’t sure what tattooing over it would do, when I did it. The ritual takes longer, and I can’t get the full power of the stars, so the effect is not as drastic … but I’ll always belong to them.”
“Belong to them?”
“To the stars. This mark … it identifies you to the stars. It says you belong to them. If you don’t have it, it doesn’t work.”
“So you mean, I couldn’t do it if I wanted to?”
“Nope. Not without the mark.” He throws his shirt over his head, pulls his knees to his chest, and exhales. “It’s funny. You start out thinking it’s so cool, to be able to control the stars. But eventually they end up controlling you.”
“And there’s no way you can get rid of it?”
“No. Well, tattooing over it … trying to remove it helped. It made it less powerful. But it will never really go away. And it itches like hell sometimes. It wants me to perform the rituals. When I don’t, it gets angry.”
Angry? Who the hell would voluntarily get a moody tattoo? Wish is too smart for that. I think. “Wish doesn’t have that mark. That star thing. Don’t you think I would have seen it?”
“It depends on how well you know him.”
I’m about to tell him that as a matter of fact, I know Wish really well, better than I know myself, so screw off, when he says, “It doesn’t have to be on his wrist.”
“Oh,” I say, feeling stupid. I know him well, but not in the way that would allow me to identify errant birthmarks on his butt or anything.
My face must be all twisted in horror and embarrassment, because Christian smiles slyly. “Is he hot all the time? Like on fire? Does he wear all black? Does he get all pissy when it rains?” I don’t say anything, but my face obviously broadcasts better than CNN, because he says, “He’s definitely Luminati.”
I swallow. “Okay, fine, say he is. How does he stop, then?”
“Everyone who plays with the stars has had to learn that attempting to use their power can have disastrous results. First, your boyfriend needs to learn it, too. Until then, he’s in trouble.”
I exhale. That’s so cryptic. I was hoping there was a precise, twelve-step program for staraholics that I could get Wish to follow, maybe even anonymously, by stuffing a pamphlet in his locker. “Great. But how did you stop?”
“The hardest way you can, I guess,” Christian says. “Cold turkey. I had to.”
“Why?”
He looks at me for a moment and then breaks into a slow smile and shakes his head. “You remind me so much of my old girlfriend, it’s scary.”
I’m surprised. After all, he hasn’t said much about his past life “out west,” other than the whole belonging-to-a-cult thing. I figured it didn’t matter much to him, because like he said, he’s never going back. “Ravishingly beautiful?” I mutter.
“Asked too many questions.”
“Well,” I say, getting defensive, “I think a bomb like this requires them, don’t you?”
He smirks. “There’s another one.”
“Shut up,” I snap. Did I say I was starting to like him? Because now all I want to do is grab a handful of dreads and shove his head under the sand.
“She was really smart,” he says, looking up at the sky. His next words are barely a whisper. “Smarter than me, that’s for sure.”
I’m about to say, “So she dumped you?” but that’s another question, and I’d hate to prove him right.
So then there’s a long moment of silence, during which I become aware that just about every pore of my body is bulging into a goose bump, screaming out for warmth. And since I’m not snuggling against present company, I stand up and dust the sand off my shorts, and the conversation is over.
29
IN THE MORNING, it’s blindingly sunny and hot. So hot, in fact, that the wild rapids that were cascading down Central Avenue yesterday are nothing more than a few wet spots in the depressions in the road. But its ending so quickly is not nearly as weird as Wish’s knowing that it was going to happen.
He picks me up exactly at eight. In the sun, he’s achingly gorgeous. As I follow him, I start feeling dizzy and disoriented again. He looks a little nervous as he jogs down to the curb, jingling the keys to his truck back and forth in his hands. In the bed of the truck, I can see the nets, the traps, the buckets. He is such the little Boy Scout. That makes me smile. That is just like the old Wish, always prepared.
On the way over, we barely say two words to each other, except when he offers me half his orange juice, which I decline. In his truck, I squint, more at him than at the sun, trying to see it. Trying to see the real him. If there is a fake exterior on him, it’s a seamless one, the perfect disguise. We ride across the island, to the bay. There’s a little rickety pier there, and a small beach with a swing set and a slide. The place is empty, though. Nobody in his right mind would be crabbing or fishing after that wicked storm.
Which reminds me … though the storm has passed, the water should still be a little rough. But it’s perfectly smooth, reflecting the sky like a mirror, glistening in the sun like diamonds. Lucky us. Or is this the kind of luck Wish made?
“I brought the seine,” he says. “Or would you rather just do it off the pier?”
“Pier,” I answer. I do have on my ratty bay-walking sneakers, and I’m wearing my only bathing suit, an old-lady thing with a girdle inside and a ruffle around the middle, with cutoff jeans and a big T-shirt over it. But I’d rather stay dry for the time being. I never liked the water much, mostly because of the way it makes my clothes cling obscenely to my curves, but now there’s something about it I don’t trust. In fact, I trust it so little I’ve just about sweated through my T-shirt. “Is it really hot today or what?”
He shrugs. “A little.”
“You must be roasting in that shirt,” I say casually, hoping maybe he’ll say something to put my suspicions to rest.
“I’m good,” he says, and that’s the end of that. I guess “But it’s so awesome for helping me control the stars!” was probably too much to hope for.
I haven’t been crabbing in ages. We used to go almost every day in the summer when he lived here, but since he left, I’ve probably gone only three or four times. It just wasn’t the same without him. We walk to the end of the pier and it’s kind of like déjà vu. Everything is the same as when I was twelve, except Wish is beautiful. Or is he still the same but I’m not? He throws down a paint bucket and I grab the drop lines. “What bait did you bring?”
“Chicken necks,” he says, holding up a plastic bag.
We affix the bait to the sinkers and toss in three drop lines and a couple of traps. Then we sit on the pier with our feet dangling off. “So …,” says Wish, and that’s when my suspicions are confirmed. This isn’t a crabbing-for-fun outing. Wish has something to get off his chest. Maybe he wants to tell me about the Luminati. Or …
The breakup. Of course! Somehow I knew it would come when I wasn’t expecting it. And I’ve been so wrapped up in Christian’s theory that I’d forgotten.
Fortunately, one of the lines bobs a little, so I interrupt him. “I think this line has one,” I say.
He grabs a net. I reach down and slowly, inch by inch, pull up the line. When the chicken neck floats into view, there are two huge blue crabs nibbling on it. Wish swoops the net under them and expertly snares them. “Ha!” he says, pulling the net toward him and emptying it into the paint bucket. Then he tosses the line back into the bay.
He points into the bucket. “That one is, like, seven inches.”
We stare at them for a moment, and then I get up the courage. Better get it over with. “You want to break up with me,” I say softly.
He looks up at me. “What?”
I look away, at another line. “Right?”
He laughs. “I told you before. No.”
“You didn’t tell me that. You cracked a joke.”
He raises his eyebrows. “Why do you keep asking? Do you want to break up with me?”
“Uh, no. I just …” I just want things to be like they were before you left. This is all so confusing. I wish we didn’t have to have this conversation. I wish we could just go back to when it was him and me, in the back of the bakery, playing Yahtzee and our version, the G-rated version, of Would You Rather. But that’s not possible. “I feel like there’s something you’re not telling me.”
He reaches down and quickly pulls up one of the traps. It’s empty, so he lets it fall back. “Is there another guy?”
Great, way to change the subject. I shake my head. Obviously he missed the fact that no guy at school, up until he arrived, knew I was alive.
“Because Terra told me something last night …”
Oh, right. Me and Christian. “What did she tell you?”
“She said something about seeing you on the boardwalk with another guy. Is it true?”
“No! Well, technically. He’s that guy who works at the bakery. You met him. We were just talking. He was telling me …” Okay, now’s the time. You can do it, Dough. “Um. When you were in L.A., did you ever … I don’t know. Did you ever start getting into that astrology stuff that your grandmother used to talk about?”
His gaze trails down to the water. I can’t tell if he’s checking the lines or if he’s just avoiding meeting my eyes. “What do you mean? What does that have to do with anything?”
“Did you?” I ask, pressing him.
“No,” he finally answers. “Astrology is a bunch of crap. You know that. And Grandma Bertha is a nut. All my clothes smell like some crazy Indian weed that’s supposed to ward off demons, because she stuck it in my suitcase while I was leaving. Why are you asking me?”
I can’t help smiling as I shake my head. “Oh. Forget it. It’s nothing.” I stare at a rainbow kite bobbing in the perfect, cloudless sky. “Um. Is there something you want to tell me?”