Head Rush

by Carolyn Crane

  Could it be Fawna? “Have you met her?”

  “Nah. Rickert knows a guy, knows a guy who caught up to her a week later—she told him he’d have a roundworm problem if he planted beets. Sure enough—”

  “He sent soil samples to the lab,” I say.

  He nods. “And they confirmed it. Girl’s pretty sure of herself, I’ll give her that. Told one guy his field would flood come spring, and he says, how do I prevent that? And she says, If your field is not a field. If a flood is not a flood.”

  “And she’s heading east? A prognosticating girl who is heading east?”

  He looks surprised. “You heard of her? All the way in Midcity? Though she must be somewhere north of Midcity if she kept walking the trail—could be nearing town.”

  “You think she’s still walking the trail?”

  “I’d imagine.”

  “Walking the trail?” Otto comes up, puts his arm around me. I nearly jump out of my skin. “Is that anything like walking the plank?”

  Dad says, “There’s this little girl been walking—”

  “It’s stupid,” I cut him off. “It’s a Bonnerville thing. A whole long story. This girl…but if you don’t know the people involved. Just…hey—” I tug on Otto’s lapel, giving him a sly look. “Otto, you have to show Dad your Vernal vinca before it closes its petals.”

  He regards me strangely. “It’s hardly going to close its petals, Justine. Are you thinking of the Zentapha?”

  “Right, yeah.” Gently, I drag Otto. “I purposely didn’t tell Dad the story of the Zentapha so you could.”

  Otto tells the story, which involves his going to heroic lengths to protect it from the cold during transit.

  All the while, I silently marvel, and even freak out a little, over this amazing news. Fawna is walking the Old Arrowhead trail. This would explain why Otto’s people couldn’t find her on the roads or the bike path system.

  Many major Native-American trails in the Midwest became wagon roads, and eventually streets, but the Old Arrowhead barely stayed a trail. It runs along a series of dried creeks and rocky outcrops, forming the border of a few farmers’ fields, but you have to know what you’re looking for to recognize it. As it nears Lake Michigan, it veers north of Midcity, running through suburban developments, where it’s pretty much invisible, and then it goes south along the lakeshore for several miles. It’s all quite obscure unless you belong to the set of rural or suburban kids who had maps of it from the Historical Society and got into hunting for ancient Indian-warrior arrowheads along it—a set that includes pretty much every kid I grew up with.

  Digging for arrowheads was a major pastime for my brother and me—there was a good stretch of the old Arrowhead trail that was accessible to us by bike, and we actually did find a couple of real arrowheads over the years, but mostly the little boxes in our bedrooms grew full of triangular-shaped rocks that, when looked at in a certain way, could be explained as the beginnings of arrowheads, experimental arrowheads, or else arrowheads carved by warriors with poor carving skills.

  The other sort of people likely to know the Old Arrowhead trail are those who own cropland or hunting land that it runs through, because you’re forever chasing away kids, and grumbling about the little holes they dig.

  “Don’t you agree?” Otto’s speaking to me.

  “What?”

  “Your father can ride in a limo to the church. He doesn’t have to ride a horse.”

  Dad says, “I can ride if I have my gear on.”

  “Huh.” Otto gives me a look. He knows I don’t want Dad in biohazard gear for the wedding.

  “I think that sounds good,” I smile. “I’m proud of you, Dad, and I want you to be in the procession however you please.”

  It’s true, I think. True and new. I’m proud of him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It’s like a déjà vu, blading along the Midcity River in the cold night, on the lookout for cannibals, criminals, and cruising cops. Avoiding streetlights for the cover of darkness. But this time, instead of heading to the Tangle, I’m skating toward the prosperous downtown by the lake. When I finally hit the lake path, I turn north, following the Old Arrowhead in the reverse direction that Fawna’s supposedly walking it.

  The lake path is a little too exposed for my tastes. I crouch and speed when I pass through lit areas, wind biting through my face mask. The fear has built back inside me, an icy hand in my heart. It was so nice those few hours when it was gone, it almost makes me want to cry.

  Back in his heavily vented Midcity Arms hotel room, Dad and I had pulled out a map and made a few calls to his gossipy farmer friends, plotting Fawna’s known points. We figured out she travels about fifteen miles a day. Apparently, she has a warm sleeping bag, and finds refuge at night in barns and outbuilding ruins, though she’s often gone when people go to find her. We’d identified St. Peter’s Prairie, a near northern suburb with a strip mall and a industrial park, as Fawna’s most likely stopping area tonight.

  She’d said in the e-mail that she was bringing Otto the coon hand, that childhood good-luck charm he’d made. Is the coon hand a wedding present? I feel certain she’s timing her trek to end at our wedding; it makes sense when you look at her path and progress, and it makes sense on a gut level too. She’s Otto’s only family, in a sense—his foster sister from way back. Traveling to attend weddings is what out-of-town family does. And big things will happen there.

  Unless we can prevent it.

  Of course, the Old Arrowhead was erased by the city, but if she continues along the ghost of the path, it takes her within a block of our wedding on our wedding day. Tomorrow.

  I aim to find her before that—I have so many questions. I want to know what Otto’s planning, and how to avoid the ground running red. Will finding the glasses prevent the ground from running red, or cause it?

  Before I left Dad, I got ahold of Shelby. She informed me that they still had not located the glasses—still not found the special bouquet, as she put it, but that there are flower shops open tomorrow. One flower shop she calls promising, just outside town.

  Promising, coming from Shelby, is practically a guarantee of success, considering she usually looks at everything in such a negative light. She also let me know they stopped off for an old-fashioned dinner, the whole group of them, before going home. I take that to mean they all went to Mongolian Delites, including Packard. I told her that I hope everyone is minding the curfew. I’m talking about Packard of course. Shelby told me that everyone plans to mind the curfew.

  Right before I set off from the hotel, I thought to inspect my skates. Sure enough, underneath the cushion inserts of the right skate, there was a tracker. I pulled it off and threw it disdainfully on the floor, like it was some insignificant piece of trash, though in truth it quite upset me; and I checked the rest of my clothes thoroughly, vowing never to be tracked again.

  I pass the port, the northern city limits, and then veer left when I hit the stone crick that marks the inland turn of the Arrowhead Trail. It’s not hard to cover several miles on rollerblades in summer, but winter after a snowfall is a different situation. My winter-modified cleatskates grip the icy sidewalks pretty well, but where the snow is piled, I have to trudge.

  Finally, I reach the desolate commercial stretch of St. Peter’s Prairie. I loop around, checking the scrabbly spaces between buildings, thankful I’m in a suburb where the curfew isn’t rigidly enforced. I’m trying to think where I’d stop if I were her; not easy since I know nothing about Fawna, except that she’s a weird girl, all alone, and she can see into the future. She’s a few years younger than me—twenty-seven, Packard once guessed. And what’s her state of mind? Is she angry? Scared? Does she see herself as running away from something or toward something? Nobody has seen her for twenty years, not since she was kidnapped by the Goyces, taken from the boarded-up ruins of Riverside School where she lived with Otto and Packard and the others. Did she really end up in a lab as the rumors suggest? Did the lab kee
p her prisoner all this time? Is that why we’re only hearing of her now?

  After an hour, I widen my search area. Since people tend to the familiar, I look out for old cinder-block buildings that seem schoolish. Up and down dark streets I skate, cold and exhausted.

  And then it hits me—she would go to the familiar, yes, but it wouldn’t be a place like the old elementary school, it would be the old school. She’d do what anybody returning to their hometown does: she’d go home!

  The school is long gone, but I still think that’s where she’d go. Back before she was kidnapped, she and Otto and Packard and their little friends had built a decent life there, wild and on their own. It was only after she and the other kids started getting kidnapped that things got grim, and twelve-year-old Packard persuaded eleven-year-old Otto to use his powers to suck the Goyces into the wall. Packard promised Otto he’d take the Goyces to jail, that they’d be given justice, but Packard was lying. And all hell broke loose when Otto discovered the Goyces’ bones encased in the crumbling cinder blocks, and realized he’d buried seven men alive. Otto was shaken to the soul, in fact—that’s what started the battle between him and Packard. Their fight that day leveled the school. And they’re fighting still.

  It’s after one-thirty when I reach the quiet five-story condo building that sits on the old school site. A few lights shine from the upper windows, and in the entrance you can see a doorman behind a desk. I sneak around back to the dark picnic area, avoiding picnic tables.

  A walk winds along the shadowy grounds, past a bike rack that holds one ruined, ice-encrusted bike; it continues down to the Midcity River bike trail.

  Right at the river’s edge, I spot a lone figure on a bench under one of the old-style lamps that line the river. The person faces away from me. Small in stature, all bundled up.

  Fawna.

  My wheels rattle on the pebbled surface as I approach, but she doesn’t move. I go around, and stop; we’re eye to eye, or rather eye to eyelid. She’s sleeping.

  Closed eyelids are practically all I see of her, plus bits of blonde hair sticking out willy-nilly from under her green face mask and scarf. She wears a hodgepodge of layers, but these aren’t any normal winter layers—they’re weird and vaguely punk rock or postapocalyptic, except instead of being draped with chains and furs, she’s draped with bright things. A profusion of colorful ribbons, shiny stuff, and bright fabric shreds hang off her clothes; there are even small toys woven or somehow sewn into the fabric—doll parts and bright plastic dinosaurs. Stuff she picked up on the trail? Pelts of sequined fabric hang from her shoulders like overgrown lapels, and a plastic baggy clumsily stitched onto her sleeve holds two shiny rocks and a marble. A small backpack, equally decorated, sits by her side on the bench.

  She’s like a feral girl-animal, and I can’t stop staring at her. If there was a time to wake a person up, it would be now, but it seems rude.

  “Hello, Justine,” she says, startling me out of my wits. She opens her eyes—they’re big and gray and pretty, and she seems to look right through me.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Take a load off.”

  “Oh. Okay.” I sit. Take a load off. I’m surprised, because it’s sort of a normal, albeit outdated, thing to say. “Thanks.”

  “Well?”

  “So you must be Fawna.”

  She just stares at me, two gray eyes in a green mask.

  “I like your outfit,” I say.

  Her lips are small bumps under the fabric of her face mask. “Right. Liar. I might be done with you already.”

  “It’s not a lie. I like it,” I protest, but that’s not precisely true. “Well, I like its wild weirdness, but I guess I would never wear it.”

  She fingers a yellow, plastic flower that’s stuck onto her jacket near her shoulder. “Ask your question.”

  “So, I’ve heard the ground will run red tomorrow.”

  “That’s not a question.”

  “Oh, right.” I can’t think of questions, only requests: Tell me what will happen. Tell me what to do. Tell me how to save the people I love. Tell me how to not be full of fear.

  I gaze across the river at the Tangle; its higher interchanges, the ones that let cars bypass Midcity, are still open during curfew and cars stream around and around them like fireflies in the dark. “Okay, will the ground run red?”

  “I have already seen that. I have already revealed that. Why do you people want me to reveal things twice?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Okay, do you have any advice for me?”

  “Yeah. I’ll tell you the future. My advice is to walk away before I do it.”

  “I can’t.”

  She says, “I know.”

  “What kind of advice is that, if you know I can’t do it?”

  “The kind you asked me for,” she whispers. “If you don’t have a question, I’m going back to sleep. Big day tomorrow.”

  “No, wait. Okay, what will happen tomorrow?”

  “A question. Alert the marching band.” Fawna pulls off her face mask; she’s pale and pretty in a delicate, almost frail way, like glass filigree. Her nose is red from the cold, and her pale hair is still trapped in the scarf, making a poof around her ears. She sniffles, staring across the river at the Tangle. “You will fight Henji. You will win. The sun will shine upon your friends again.”

  Henji. That’s what they used to call Otto. “My friends will be free?”

  “I see the sun shining upon their heads.”

  “But that could mean that they’re standing inside a prison, with sun coming in a window.”

  She glares at me. “They are outside, with the sun on their heads. Free.”

  “Okay! Sorry. It’s not like you’re talking plain.”

  “That’s how I style my prognostication talk. I’m telling you the picture. If you don’t like it—”

  “No, no, I like it.”

  She watches me suspiciously, like she doesn’t believe I like it.

  “It’s good. What else? Was there something else?”

  “I see Sterling Packard growing old.”

  “Also with the sun on his head?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good! So, if I go to the wedding and fight Otto—Henji, that is—Packard gets to live to old age, and my friends go free.”

  She looks annoyed that I’m asking her to repeat herself.

  “Okay.” My heart pounds. “So, that’s good. It sounds positive. Wait, what happens to Otto? You said the ground runs red. Is it his blood?”

  “His and yours.”

  “Mine?”

  She gazes dolefully at the river. Dull flashes dancing on inky waves.

  “I get hurt?”

  “You die. You die with Henji.”

  I sit up as a cold blast of horror whooshes into me. “What?” The horror settles deep into my bones, heavy as lead. “No,” I whisper.

  “Sorry.”

  “No, Fawna. I can’t.”

  She’s silent. It’s not a question.

  “Are you sure?” I ask. “Tomorrow?”

  “Technically today.”

  Right. It’s after 2 a.m. My wedding day. My chest flutters like mad. “I don’t want to die. I don’t even want Otto to die. I just wanted him stopped from what he’s doing.”

  “Well…” she shrugs. Shrugs.

  “What? So we die? Just like that?”

  “Wait.” She turns her gaze up to the Tangle. Then, “I see another possibility. Another possibility now opens. Made most likely by my telling you the future. It’s another opening.”

  “Really?” My heart leaps. Another possibility has opened. “What is it?”

  “You do not fight Henji at the wedding. He is safe at the wedding.”

  “Oh, right. I can do that. I can not fight him at the wedding. That would get me out of death?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” Somehow it seems too easy. “Okay, what else happens if I don’t fight him at the wedding?”

 
; “Sterling Packard dies.”

  “Packard dies?”

  “If you don’t fight Henji at the wedding, Packard dies.”

  “But if I do fight Henji at the wedding, I die, right?”

  Her face draws tight with annoyance.

  “Excuse me if I want to get these crucial details straight.”

  “You have them straight. You just don’t like them.”

  “Well…don’t you see another way?”

  “There are two ways only.”

  “There has to be another way.”

  “No, Justine, there doesn’t have to be another way. You fight Henji at the wedding or you don’t fight Henji at the wedding. There’s no third possibility.”

  “I won’t accept it.”

  “I don’t like it either, Justine.” The Tangle hums in the distance.

  A frenetic flutter in my chest. “I don’t want to die.”

  Fawna’s silent.

  “What about nothing being set in stone? What about free will?”

  She turns to me, lips twisted tight under her pretty nose. “Free will? You don’t know anything about free will. You have two choices. That’s a luxury!” She says this urgently. “Some people don’t get any choices. You think you’re so special that you can’t die? You think Sterling Packard is so special that he can’t die? Nobody’s special. It’s just how it is.”

  I feel sick. Tears fill my eyes. “I’m scared to die.”

  “I know.” She gazes back across the river. “That’s what will keep you from fighting Henji.”

  “No! I have to fight him. Or else it will be Packard’s blood.”

  “Yes.”

  “No way. There has to be an alternative. Packard and I, we can’t just never”— be together. I don’t bother to finish the sentence.