Scott eyed the front door from the street, remembering the last time he had stood before it. Mr. Graystone’s stern visage, Mrs. Graystone’s pleading tears. Easily the most miserable day of his life.
He swallowed a lump of emotion as he stepped over the curb and into the Graystones’ side yard, past the BLUE SKY REALTY sign, and toward the entrance to the woods.
The late morning heat fell away as he entered the shadowy green foliage. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been in here, but he felt suddenly and strangely at ease. It was as though he were being held, the susurration of wind through the leaves assuring him that everything was going to be all right.
He inhaled the woods’ fecund odor and peered around.
Where to go?
He set off aimlessly, working the half dollar between his fingers now. Along the creek, past the site of their old fort, over the cement bunker that had since been removed. He would miss this place. Not only for the memories it held, but that an essential part of him and Janis, inseparable from one another, had grown up here. Maybe that explained the calm beneath the anguish. When he arrived at a familiar splay of upturned roots, he snuffled.
Their fallen tree. The one they had discovered as kids. He climbed onto its trunk for what was probably the final time. It crunched with rot beneath his weight. Up ahead, he could see where the branchless trunk had broken into several sections. Their tree didn’t have much time left, either.
He shuffled along its length, remembering his and Janis’s cross-legged meetings, their trips back in time. He snuffled again and shook his head. How in the world was he going to leave this place?
“Whatever you do, don’t fall,” someone called.
He wheeled so suddenly, he had to pinwheel his arms to maintain his balance. Above the rustling of undergrowth, a red-orange flame, the color of the autumn to come, flashed in and out of view. The head of hair ducked a final time before emerging around a copse of trees.
“I just made that mistake, and behold.” She lifted a leg to show Scott her mud-coated shoe.
But his eyes had never left her face. When he opened his mouth, his heart slugged his voice into oblivion.
The striking face leaned to one side. “Hello?” she said humorously.
“Janis,” he managed.
“Scott, right?”
The unfamiliarity in her voice killed him. Following her plummet to Earth, she had remembered nothing, recognized no one. Not even him. When her memories returned, they ended two summers before, around the time of her first out-of-body experience, the earliest manifestation of her abilities.
No one knew for sure what had happened that night, Janis suspended in the heavens between volleys of nuclear missiles, all alone. But Scott thought he did. Somehow, some way, she had given every last ounce of herself to prevent the unthinkable, burning out or relinquishing her powers in the process. In a final, probably unconscious, act, she had encased herself in an amniotic-like sac of plasma energy. But the Janis who had wielded those world-saving powers, who had safeguarded her physical return to Earth, was no more.
Not even in her own memories.
“I’m sorry, but you look nothing like I remember you. You look…” Janis stopped in front of him, surprise seeming to inflect her chestnut eyes—no longer green, not even up close. “…great.”
Scott scratched the back of his neck. How did you talk to someone you knew intimately but for whom your existence hardly registered? “I’ve been doing this, um, Bud Body program,” he offered and immediately felt stupid.
But Janis was peering past his shoulder. “Hey, didn’t you and I cross this tree when we were kids?”
“Yeah,” he answered mechanically. “We were trying to get to the end of the Meadows.”
“That’s right!” she said, her eyes growing large. “But that dog stopped us. What was his…?” Her voice trailed off in thought.
God, I can’t do this.
He swallowed. “Samson.”
She snapped her fingers as though another bulb had ignited. She looked toward the end of the Meadows and lowered her voice. “Think he’s still around?”
“I doubt it.” Samson’s job, after all, had been to keep them from discovering the back road at the end of their subdivision, the one that had led to the old command and control center. “He’s probably…” Scott almost said retired, catching himself at the last instant. “…relocated. I’m pretty sure the family moved.”
“Now’s our chance, then.”
“Our chance?”
She placed a fist on her hip as though it should have been obvious. “To make it to the end of the Meadows through the woods. Don’t know if you saw the sign in my yard, but we’re moving tomorrow, and I’d hate to leave a challenge half finished.”
She returned to the roots of the fallen tree and hopped off, cocking her head for him to follow.
Scott peered around, certain he was going to see Mr. Graystone stomping toward them. When he had attempted to visit Janis upon her return from the hospital, Mr. and Mrs. Graystone had met him at the front door—a parental blockade—and explained the situation. Janis’s mind had begun to repair the two-year hole in her memory, yes, but not with what had actually happened. Instead, she seemed to be taking what she had imagined her life would have been like before her powers manifested and using that make-believe caulk as filler.
Not her time as a Champion. Not her rediscovery of him.
For Scott, the realization had been like an axe blow to his chest.
Mrs. Fern assessed Janis telepathically and concluded that the matrix of make-believe memories was fragile but therapeutic, like a bone graft over an exposed section of brain. She advised strongly against trying to impose actual events in the graft’s place. Janis wouldn’t be able to identify with them without her powers, and it could do irreparable damage to her healing psyche.
“We like you,” Mr. Graystone had told Scott. “But we also want a healthy, normal life for our daughter now.”
“Please,” Mrs. Graystone added tearfully.
For Janis’s sake, Scott had made the most difficult decision of his life. He promised them he wouldn’t approach her, wouldn’t speak to her. All summer, he had kept his word. Except for the handful of times he had glimpsed her from his window, he hadn’t even seen her.
And now here she was, the most important and yet untouchable person in his world, beckoning him like in one of his recent dreams.
He lowered himself slowly from the tree. “Yeah. All right.”
The ground squished under their shoes until they cleared the dense growth bordering the fallen tree. Pine and scrub oak rose around them. Janis marched ahead, as she used to when they were younger, skirting a pond of saw palmettos. Scott followed, an ocean’s worth of words trapped in his heart. He kept having to remind himself that though she remained everything to him, to her, he was a half-forgotten friend from her childhood, a hazy relic.
She was wearing her softball jersey from that year, the number 15 staring back at him. He took in the perfect lines of her shoulders, remembering the warmth of skin and muscle beneath his hands. Better to consider this a stolen moment, he thought amid the aching, a final gift.
As the creek steered them rightward, houses began appearing through the foliage. The backs of the houses that had once seemed so sinister to Scott as a child now appeared pedestrian. He knew their secrets after all.
“One to go, and we’re there,” Janis called, her ponytail switching sides as she raced ahead.
By the time Scott caught up to her, she had stopped. They were standing at the end of the Meadows, behind the house that had once sat atop the command and control center. Deeper in the woods, Scott could just make out where the hidden road had run, a fading scar in the earth.
Janis turned in a circle. “It’s funny. As a girl, I had this feeling that we were going to … I don’t know … find something back here.”
Hope glimmered in Scott. “Like what?”
“That�
�s the thing, I have no earthly idea.” She laughed. “Something different, I guess.”
I’m sorry Mr. and Mrs. Graystone, but I really can’t do this anymore.
Scott cleared his throat. “Speaking of different, I, uh…” He would have to tread carefully. “Well, I had this dream about you the other night. About us, actually. You and me.”
Janis’s head tilted, mouth straightening.
“Yeah, you had this ability to read minds and control objects from a distance, and I…” He forced a self-conscious chuckle. “I could tap into data systems with a thought. And we were on this team together, the Champions, I think it was called, and we—”
“Fought for truth, justice, and world peace?”
Scott began nodding earnestly but stopped when he saw her sly smile.
“Sounds more like the X-Men. You were pretty fanatical about them, if I remember.”
His hope shattered like a clay pigeon.
“I was, wasn’t I,” he said faintly.
She squinted up at him, a patch of fading freckles on one cheek burning in a shaft of sunlight through the leaves. “I’ve never told you this, but I have a lot of special memories of the two of us in here, in the woods. The games we played, the worlds we imagined. That might be what I’ll miss most about Oakwood, even though I haven’t been back here in forever. Maybe it’s the same for you, which might explain your dream. Where are you off to?”
“Huh?”
“The ‘for sale’ sign in your yard?”
“Oh, that.” He straightened his thoughts. “Denver, Colorado.”
“My grandmother lives there!”
“Oh, yeah?” But Scott already knew that, of course. “My mom has plans to take their real estate market by bloody conquest. What about you?”
“San Francisco. My dad’s taking a chairmanship at the university where he used to teach.”
“California, huh?” But he had already known that, too. An insensate shell crept over him. So far away. “Just don’t go Valley Girl on us.”
Janis laughed. “That’s farther south, and I won’t.” Her mouth relaxed as she looked over his face again. “Scott Spruel,” she said with a sigh, as though in reflection. “I’m sorry we lost touch.”
“Yeah.” Scott almost couldn’t hear himself. “Me too.”
She was turning to lead them back when, without planning to, Scott found her hand. Janis stopped and looked at their joined grasp and then up at his face, question lines forming around her eyes.
“There’s something I need to do,” he said, new strength possessing his voice.
He leaned forward slowly, not wanting to force anything, watchful of her response. She began to draw away. And then, as though held by the force Scott felt humming between them, she hesitated. Her chestnut eyes flicked between his eyes and lips in almost wild uncertainty.
“You don’t have to…,” he started to whisper.
But it was Janis who closed the distance, her mouth collapsing against his. The shock of contact transported Scott back to their first kiss at the high school dance, almost two years earlier. Only this was two hundred times more intense—as though the seats of their souls were colliding, spawning a universe. In an instant, the woods vanished. Or became pulled in, along with their grasping bodies. Every experience he and Janis had ever shared, beginning with their first exploration of the woods, ending with their final farewell at the jet, pounded through him.
And then, like the plug being pulled on a super magnet, it ended.
He and Janis fell apart. The woods beat back to life around them.
“I…” Janis gasped, a hand to her chest, her pupils huge. “I’m so sorry … I … I don’t know what happened.”
“No, it’s okay.” Scott straightened his glasses.
Far away, someone called Janis’s name. She peered over her shoulder.
“That’s my dad. I have to go.”
“Wait, please…”
But she had already taken off. Scott squeezed the half dollar in his pocket as Janis’s swishing flame of hair flickered smaller and smaller and then disappeared beyond the trees. Off to some other world and someone else’s orbit.
57
Graystone house
The next morning - Sunday, August 17
8:05 a.m.
“Wait a sec!” Janis called.
She crawled into the thicket of bushes, squinting and stretching an arm until she was palming the stitched white leather she’d glimpsed from the driveway. She pulled the soccer ball out, shaking debris from her hair as she stood. She tested the ball between her palms. It needed air, but it had been her favorite one. Something about the way it bounced off the garage door.
Before Margaret could close the car trunk, Janis turned and punted the ball. It arced and landed dead center, wedging itself between a piece of luggage and the trunk’s ceiling.
“Hey!” Margaret cried.
Janis threw her arms up in triumph, even though something about the act felt hollow. She jogged to the passenger’s side and got in. Margaret slammed the trunk closed and joined her on the driver’s side with a shake of her head. She looked like she was about to say something when their father gave the let’s go sign from the window of the moving van. The van carrying her parents and their household possessions began rumbling up the hill ahead of them.
“Guess this is it,” Janis said, more to herself than anyone.
Margaret clutched Janis’s knee in mock anger that became a shake of empathy. She shifted into gear. The house Janis had grown up in, white brick with coffee-brown trim, slid away from her window.
At the top of their short street, her father stopped, then swung the van right. Margaret followed. As a square of sunlight moved over her face, Janis had the distinct feeling she was being watched. Shielding her brow with a hand, she twisted toward Scott’s house. The blinds over his bedroom window, the one she used to bug knock on, were raised. A lone figure stood beyond.
“Stop,” she said.
Margaret faced her. “What?”
“Stop, there’s something I need to do.” She was already unbuckling her seat belt.
“Janis,” Margaret said in exasperation, but she stopped. And was that a sidelong smile?
Janis got out and slammed the door. Before she could question what she was doing, she sprinted across the road and up the Spruels’ lawn. The figure in the window disappeared. She arrived on the front porch, a little dizzy, a little out of breath, and raised her fist to knock.
The door opened first. Scott stepped from the shadows in a black shirt that hugged his biceps, looking more solid, more handsome than she could ever remember him being. She felt a strange urge to wrap him in her arms.
“I need to know something,” she said, almost in accusation.
Scott looked from her to the street. Behind her, Janis could hear the van idling to a stop, a door opening and closing, Margaret’s voice, calming her father. Scott’s earnest brown eyes returned to hers.
“That dream you told me about yesterday,” she said. “It wasn’t a dream, was it?”
“Why do you say that?” Though an inner light seemed to suffuse his face, he spoke as if he was stepping over something very delicate.
“Because I had the same dream last night. It…” She studied the brick moulding of the door as she considered how to explain herself. It hadn’t been a dream, not exactly. More like something she’d forgotten, taking seed in her again. Germinating, spreading through the fugue of the last two years.
And it had all begun with…
“Our kiss,” she said, not knowing she was going to. “Something passed between us.”
He smiled even as he looked like he was about to come apart. “You told me to keep it safe.”
“I…?” She had, hadn’t she? “In Germany,” she blurted out, without even knowing what it meant. But the images and emotions were swimming up, amassing themselves, beginning to take faint color and coherent shape. She had given him something. A part of herself
.
“That’s right.” Scott’s eyes were shimmering now.
She stepped nearer and lowered her voice. “You and me?”
But she didn’t need to ask. She felt it, as intensely and with as much certainty as when their lips had met in the woods yesterday. Scott nodded and reached forward, his fingers coming into warm contact with her cheek.
“Your eyes,” he said.
She blinked away self-consciously.
“No, no,” he said, laughing. “They’re green again. Not entirely, but at certain angles.”
Her gaze crept back to his. There were so many questions she wanted to ask him, but she could feel the weight of her family and the moving van behind her. Scott seemed to sense it, too.
He let his hand fall away. “Now what?” he asked.
“Well, we usually spend the winter holidays and part of the summer in Denver, with Grams,” she said, “and the airlines run both ways. There are plenty of direct flights between our cities.”
“Would that be okay?”
She slugged his shoulder in answer—of course—her new memories coloring in a more recent, more intimate version of her childhood friend.
“And in two years,” she said, “we’ll be in college, right?”
“Right,” Scott picked up. “And who knows? Maybe our choice of school will coincide.”
As he spoke, Janis glimpsed that future, not as a hope or probability, but something predestined. Ever since awakening that morning, her intuition had been talking to her—telling her, even, where to find her lost soccer ball.
“Before you go, here’s my new number.” Scott pulled a slip of paper from his pocket and offered it to her.
She looked from the hand-written number to his face. “Wait, you knew I was going to come this morning?”
“Prayed desperately is more like it.”
They laughed together, Scott pushing up his glasses.
“Well…” She held up the paper, the fingers of her other hand hooking his as she leaned away. “Talk to you soon?”
XGeneration 7: Dead Hand (XGeneration Series) Page 28