by Hiatt, Bill
“I can’t do that,” he said simply.
“Why not? I thought you would do what I tell you while you are in this state.”
Dan chuckled at that.“I will always come to your aid when you need it, Tal, but it’s not like I’m some robot and you have the control box. If anyone has that box, it is the person who, well, I guess you could say possesses me from time to time, but mostly I use my own common sense in determining how to help you. Whoever my “possessor” is, however, has placed certain…constraints on me. I can’t remember afterward what happens during these times—you already know that—and I can’t tell anyone else about you, unless that’s the only way I can save you.”
Damn, that was a problem. However, I felt responsible for Dan and Eva’s current situation, so I decided to take one more shot at getting them back together.
“Dan,” I said slowly and in Welsh, putting as much mystic force behind my words as I could, “forget the secrecy order; tell Eva everything.”
Dan looked dazed, but only for an instant. Then he looked me straight in the eye and said, “No, and don’t try that again. Whoever it is that speaks through me is likely to be angry.”
Undeterred, I started singing. Much to my surprise, Dan tackled me, knocking the wind out of me and effectively silencing me.
“Tal, stop it! Evidently there’s another rule I didn’t realize I had until just now. I seem to have a compulsion to prevent anyone, even you, from interfering with my…” He struggled for the right term but couldn’t come up with one, “programming, I guess you could say. I can’t let you up until you promise to stop.”
“Okay,” I finally gasped. Dan let up but still looked uncertain.
“No more of that, now,” he said finally, as if his earlier attitude had not been blindingly clear.
“No more, but I wish there was something I could do…”
“Eva and I will just have to work that out on our own. Look, I appreciate your trying to help, but telling Eva your secret is just too dangerous. Even I don’t know how she will react. Now, if the ‘emergency’ is over, I need to get back into my normal mode—big practice today, you know.” I nodded to him, and he shot off down the path. I didn’t really understand how the spell on him worked, but I knew that when I next saw him, he would no longer remember the conversation, just as always.
So he couldn’t tell Eva the truth. That didn’t mean I couldn’t.
Once I thought of the idea, I realized that was the only way I could avoid the guilt whose cold fingers kept clenching in my chest. My life was what it was, and sometimes undeniably a mess. That didn’t mean Dan’s life had to be one, just because he helped me from time to time.
Yeah, definitely a good idea, but one of the things I have discovered in recent years is that if I find a way to keep my life from sliding down into hell one way, it finds a different way to do it. In this case, the slide commenced only a day later.
I hadn’t had a chance to talk to Eva privately, but the resolve to tell her the truth was diamond-hard within me. In fact, that’s what I was thinking about when I went to weight training with the football team. And that’s when one of those unexpected jolts hit me. No, not a supernatural one this time. That would have been easier to deal with.
When I entered the weight room, Dan was there already, in quiet but intense conversation with two of the other players, Eric and Shahriyar. He looked up when I came in but did not say hello. His expression was unreadable, but his eyes had a darkness in them I had never seen before. His focus quickly shifted back to whatever the football players were telling him. I didn’t walk over because the general vibe was clear enough—this was one conversation I was not welcome to join.
Then Stan came in, and all hell broke loose.
“Schoenbaum, get your ass over here!” bellowed Dan, red faced and looking as if he were out for blood. I had never seen him like this, even at the height of his jerkiness.
Stan froze with a “deer caught in the headlights” expression I hadn’t seen on him in a long time. Not about to wait for him to pull himself together, Dan charged him. Reflexively I moved between them.
“Is it true, Schoenbaum, is it?” Dan was practically snarling now. I remembered he used to have a temper, but it had been years since I had seen it, and never like this.
“Dan, what the f—” I began. Dan moved as if to shove me, but his arm stopped short with an abrupt jerk. The binding spell no doubt prevented his making such violent contact unless he had to to save me from something worse. Unfortunately, Eric was not so bound, and he shoved me so hard I staggered back.
“Tal, stay out of this,” Dan ordered in a voice intense enough to send a chill down my spine. “Well, Schoenbaum? Man enough to admit what you did?” Now Dan’s voice was more quiet, but deadly cold. I tried to get up, but Eric and Shar both grabbed me. I struggled, but they had caught me by surprise, and their grip was firm.
“Man enough? Or just the pathetic, sniveling wimp I thought you were?” Dan took another step toward Stan, whose back was literally against the wall.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Stan very quietly…and not very convincingly, even to my ears.
They say the brain picks up random details you aren’t consciously aware of, and then your subconscious works on them for a while. This process is the source of many “lightbulb” moments. When Stan first came in, I noticed that he was different in some way. At this moment, just as Stan was denying whatever Dan thought he had done, I realized how Stan was different.
He smelled like jasmine perfume. You know, the kind Eva always wore.
Damn!
Dan grabbed Stan and slammed him against the wall…hard.
“Say it, Schoenbaum! I want to hear you say it!”
I wondered in passing where the coach was, but clearly I couldn’t wait for him to make an entrance if I wanted to keep Stan in one piece.
“You want to let me go!” I said in Welsh, softly but intensely, to the two players who had my arms. They were pretty intent on holding me, but the magic behind my words caused them to loosen their grips momentarily, and that was all I needed to pull away. Had this been a combat situation, I would have used that moment that try a physical attack, but I didn’t want to risk injuring them if I could possibly help it.
“Stay right where you are! Don’t interfere!” I had to hit them fast, there were two of them, and they had a strong drive to disobey, all of which meant that the best I could do would be to slow them down, but for the moment that was all I needed. I turned away from them as they struggled toward me and threw myself at Dan, grabbing one of his arms and throwing him off balance, though somehow he retained his grip on Stan.
“Weaver, I said stay out of this!” hissed Dan.
“Let Stan go!” I ordered in Welsh, putting all the magic I could muster behind my words. Dan fell back a step, dropping Stan, but instead of running as I had hoped, Stan sagged limply to the floor. Dan grabbed him again and hauled him to his feet. Stan made no move to defend himself.
“Say it, Schoenbaum!” Dan yelled, shaking Stan with a violence I wouldn’t have thought Dan capable of. I threw myself in between him and Stan, breaking his grip again. At that point, however, the other two players reached me, grabbing my arms with such determination I doubted I could get away as easily as last time, which hadn’t been that easy in the first place.
“Stop!” I commanded in Welsh, again with as much mystic punch as possible, but split three ways, the effect was less than impressive.
I tried to sing, but Shahriyar punched me in the face, splitting my lower lip.
How could he have known that he needed to stop me from singing? Something did not seem quite right. Dan melting down at the same time one of his friends just by coincidence showed an uncanny knowledge of how to disable me? I would have to be a fanatical believer in coincidence to assume all of this happened naturally, but I didn’t really have time to worry about that until later.
“I said hold him, not
hit him!” barked Dan irritably. I couldn’t tell if the blow had flipped into Voice mode or whether Dan was becoming a bit more rational.
“Okay, okay,” said Shahriyar. “He’s tricky, is all. I wanted to make sure he wouldn’t try anything else.” Blood dribbled from my injured lip and speckled my gray gym shirt.
Dan turned back to Stan, who had started crying. “Man up, Schoenbaum! Sooner you do, the sooner this will be over. That is, if you can man up. I’m beginning to think it isn’t in you.”
Stan looked over at me, took in how much I was bleeding, and started crying harder. Whatever will power he had to resist Dan dissolved in those tears, and I feared he might crumble completely. My heart was bleeding more than my lip.
“Okay,” he whispered hoarsely. “Okay, I did it. I kissed Eva. It just sort of…happened. I didn’t mean it.”
Dan punched Stan in the face, and Stan crumpled up in the corner.
“Oh, sorry,” said Dan mockingly. “That just sort of…happened.” I struggled against my captors, again frustrated by the fact that I could get away from them, but probably not without hurting them pretty badly. I couldn’t even use magic, since Shahriyar had unaccountably clamped his hand over my mouth.
“Make him tell the whole story, Dan. That’s just the beginning,” pointed out Eric.
As soon as I realized Stan smelled of jasmine perfume, I realized that he must have been a little too close to Eva, but I had imagined a hug, maybe a single kiss, maybe even just Stan trying to cheer Eva up. Stan was the kind of guy who might do that without realizing how it would look to other people. The truth, as Dan ripped it out of Stan word by word, turned out to be much worse. Eric and Shahriyar had walked out to the woods during lunch and had stumbled upon what looked like Eva and Stan about to have sex. At least, that was how the guys interpreted what they saw: a long, passionate embrace, Stan shirtless, Eva without her blouse on. The guys put some distance between themselves and the illicit couple, then made enough noise to get them to stop, after which they hurried back to tell Dan, to whom they, like every other football player, were unswervingly loyal.
I felt as if someone had just caved in my skull with a heavy, medieval mace. My image of an innocent misunderstanding disintegrated, and in its place was some damn, steamy, soft-core porn. If I had been shocked by Dan’s earlier fit of temper, now I was even more shocked by Eva and Stan…especially Stan. Stan was nothing if not a good friend; now he was friends with Dan and yet had stabbed him in the back at the first opportunity. And Eva, the girl who filled my imagination day and night—she had fought with Dan, yes, but to betray him so dramatically when they were still technically a couple? I could never have imagined that, not even in my worst nightmare. And Stan admitted it, admitted it all, or else I would have sworn Eric and Shar were lying.
Despite the fact that my emotions were a pile of glass shards cutting my innards to bits, I did not completely lose the capacity for rational thought. Dan, Shar, Eric, Eva, Stan—every one of them either did something that pressed coincidence to the breaking point or behaved uncharacteristically. I had already wondered about Dan, though having heard the whole story, I could almost understand his agitation, if not his violence. But as far as Stan and Eva were concerned, hardly anybody hung out in the woods during school. They were technically off-campus, and there were penalties for leaving campus. So why take a random walk out that way? And, even assuming Eva and Stan were both one step below scum, to go out into the woods with the intention of having sex? The local neighborhood treated the woods as kind of a park. Someone could easily have stumbled upon them, just as Eric and Shar had. And I still couldn’t figure out how Shar knew exactly how to disable magic he didn’t know existed.
I would have pondered further, but at that point Coach Miller made a belated entrance. I had to give him a lot of credit. He sized up the situation immediately, and took an incredibly hard line with Dan, despite Dan’s undisputed football star status.
“What were you thinking, Stevens? This kid’s half your size! And what’s up over here? Two against one? Fighting is bad enough, but this wasn’t even a fair fight.” Dan tried to explain, but the coach cut him off immediately. “I don’t care what Schoenbaum did or didn’t do. Football is about discipline. It is about self-control. It is not about giving in to your emotions like this. Anyone who doesn’t understand that does not belong on this team. Is that understood?” Dan, Eric, and Shar all nodded sullenly.
Coach Miller was ready to pull all three out of the homecoming game, but Stan pulled himself together enough to plead for them to be allowed to play. I could tell the coach didn’t think much of Stan— coaches often don’t really understand guys who cry—but Stan was the victim, after all, and he gave Miller a reason to do what he probably wanted to do anyway—play his star whenever possible. So he settled for detention for all three—after football season—and then walked us down to the nurse’s office to get patched up, embarrassingly babysitting us outside while Nurse Florence worked on each of us one by one. Eric and Shar didn’t really need the nurse, though Shar did get my blood washed off his hand, and then Dan, who had somehow cut his fist, got bandaged, after which an assistant coach whisked them back to the weight room—but not before Dan had had a chance to glare at me, remind me I had gotten him to be friends with Stan in the first place, and tell me that I could no longer be friends with both of them—I would have to choose. The nurse spent much longer on Stan—ice packs on the face, perhaps—and when he emerged, the coach sent him home; it was unspoken, but clear, that he would no longer be welcome at workouts.
With Stan on his way, the nurse gestured for the coach to come over, giving me a chance to use some of my best eavesdropping skills.
“I’m not happy with this, Carl,” said Nurse Florence. “It’s a miracle Stan wasn’t more seriously injured. Thank God you came in when you did.”
“What do you want me to do, Viviane?” asked Coach Miller. “The boy admitted to practically having sex with Stevens’s girlfriend. Of course, Stevens should not have roughed him up like that, but I have to admit, in high school I might very well have done the same thing in the same circumstances.”
“He should be benched next game, and you know it! He should be suspended for fighting!”
“And I was going to, but the Schoenbaum boy begged me not to, and frankly that was wise on his part. If Dan gets benched, and we lose, everybody will be on Schoenbaum’s case about it. Besides, if we had thrown the book at Stevens, what about Schoenbaum? Off campus without a pass, and engaging in sexual conduct. We don’t tolerate fighting on campus, but the last I heard, we don’t tolerate sex either. I think the boy is already embarrassed enough without a suspension to explain to his parents.”
Nurse Florence sighed. “Well, you have a point there, I suppose. But Carl, you better make sure Dan Stevens never does anything like this again—and you’d better make sure the rest of the team leaves Stan alone.”
“I will, but I doubt that’s going to be much of a problem. Truth to tell, some of them wouldn’t still be on the team without his tutoring, and they know it. Once Dan cools down, I think the rest of the team will let go of it easily enough.”
After a little more discussion, the coach stepped back, and Nurse Florence called me in. I was so numb and exhausted that her presence failed to have the stimulating effect on me it usually did. However, it took her awhile to get my lip cleaned up properly, and during that time she got me talking. I never realized how good a listener she was, how much she could put someone at ease. Anyway, I told her about my view of the day’s events, naturally leaving out the magic part.
“The thing I don’t understand, though, is why Dan is trying to get me to choose between him and Stan. Why does he really care anyway? I don’t think he and I are that close.”
Nurse Florence looked at me quizzically. “You really don’t remember that you and Dan were good friends once?”
“We played AYSO soccer together, sure, and we were good friends, almost as
close as Stan and I, but he kind of dumped me when I was hospitalized for a while.”
Nurse Florence sighed again. “Do you remember his little brother, Jimmie?”
The mention of Jimmie cut me. I tried not to think about him, usually.
“Yeah, Jimmie was my age. We were great friends. He died in a car crash when we were both about nine, and Dan was ten.”
“Can you imagine how hard that must have been for Dan?” asked Nurse Florence gently.
“Yeah, I’m sure it must have been rough. It was hard on me, and I wasn’t Jimmie’s brother.” Actually, I didn’t have to imagine what Dan went through. We were still friends then, and I saw what he went through, a quiet kind of hell, but hell nonetheless.
“Well, when people suffer loss, they sometimes unconsciously try to fill that void by attaching themselves to someone similar.”
“Are you saying that Dan thought of me as a replacement for Jimmie?”
“Not necessarily consciously, but yes. To him you became like the little brother he no longer had, a process made all the easier by the fact that you were already his friend.”
“How could you possibly know that?” I asked incredulously. “I don’t think you were even in town back then.”
“One hears things,” said Nurse Florence vaguely. “But I got most of the details from Dan himself. I’ve had to do a lot of patching up for him in the last four years, and over time, he’s said a lot of things that might surprise you. For instance, when you were hospitalized, he didn’t visit because the situation reminded him too much of Jimmie’s last hours, not because he didn’t care. He wanted to, very much, he really did; he just couldn’t. He was too afraid of losing you the same way he lost Jimmie. Afterward, when you came out of the hospital, he expected things to go back to normal, but instead you dropped out of everything, like soccer, that the two of you used to do together. More than anything else, he feared losing you, just like Jimmie, and that, in a way, is exactly what happened.”