

Forever Freaky

By Tom Upton

~~~

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2011 Tom Upton. All rights are reserved.

All characters in this book are imaginary. Any resemblance to actual person is purely coincidental.

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Freaky Jules

Vanished

It would have been a typical day at Adler High, except that Mary Jo Mason disappeared yesterday.

Cops came and went all day. All the classrooms and lockers had been searched yesterday, along with every nook and cranny of the basement that was the haunt of the school's creepy janitor. There were two squad cars parked at the front of the student parking lot at all times. It was hard to tell if they were always the same two cars. Every now and then, the school secretary came on the public address system and requested that some student or other report down at the main office.

I didn't have to worry about being summoned. Mary Jo wasn't a friend of mine—not many people were. I knew who she was; I'd seen her around. She was in the Green clique, an annoying group of tree-huggers who constantly complained about how the school, and the school district, could be more environmentally friendly. But I had as much in common with them as I had with any of the other cliques at school. Tree-huggers, jocks, nerds, artsy-fartsy types—forget all of them; I was a clique of one, without much chance of adding on more members.

School gossip was running thick and fast today. Somebody had sneaked into the school and kidnapped Mary Jo. Or she decided to run away and marry some old dude from Greenpeace. Or Carl Brunner, the creepy school janitor, had done something awful to her.... Gossip never ends. It's a cozy constant that helps you get through the day in high school.

Whether or not I wanted, I got the lowdown on Mary Jo from Melody Hansen, who was my best friend because she was my only friend. You could say she was my best friend by default. She was hopelessly shallow. She would talk, talk, talk, mostly about paltry things, and it was easy for me to tune her out. She was probably the perfect friend for me. Without a doubt we were the two most unpopular girls in school. I never spoke with anybody, and if anybody tried to strike up a conversation with me, I just ignored them. I didn't want anybody to get to know me, because I was sure nobody would like me anyway. I figured it is always better to be unpopular by your own choice.

Melody was a social outcast for an entirely different reason. The mere fact that her mother was the assistant principal in charge of discipline drove a stake through the heart of possible popularity. Without even trying, she was condemned to be as popular as me, and I was only slightly more popular than vaginal warts.

"It's weird," she said, sitting across the lunch table from me. She had to raise her voice a bit, because the lunchroom was so noisy.

"What's that?" I asked, trying to eat what the school passed off as food

"Mary Jo," she said, getting exasperated.

"Are we still talking about her?"

"What else is there? I can't believe you. This is big—maybe the biggest—and it's weird. How can you not be interested?"

I shrugged. Sometimes it was hard to talk to Melody. She knew my secrets. She knew my problems. Yet she was not bright enough to connect the dots. If she could have, she would have understood my lack of interest in what had happen to Mary Jo. Okay, the girl went missing. That was her problem, but one way or another, sooner or later, she would be found. Her problem would be over, and she would be fine. I understood that even if she turned up dead, she would be fine. On the other hand, my problems never ended, and I doubted I would ever be fine. It may sound cold and heartless of me to feel this way, but I couldn't help myself.

"I just don't see the big deal," I said. "And what's so weird about it anyway? People disappear, right? Happens every day."

"Not like this." she assured me. She leaned forward so that she could lower her voice. "She vanished in the bathroom."

"Yeah?" I said, like So what?

"You don't get it. I don't mean she vanished from the bathroom. You see the difference."

"She's missing either way."

Melody sighed. "They found her purse and book bag in the bathroom stall, and the stall door was still locked from the inside."

I was about to take a sip of milk, but stopped. That was sort of interesting, I had to admit.

"Not only that," Melody continued. "They questioned her best friend—you know the one they call Coco?"

"Yeah, I know who you mean. Short, dark hair. I think she's on one of the teams. Track or something."

"Right, that's her. Well, she was the one who reported Mary Jo missing. She told the cops she was in the bathroom with Mary Jo. She was talking to her, while Mary Jo was in the stall. Are you following me? Then she left to go to class. Only she forgot to tell Mary Jo something. So she went right back to the bathroom, and Mary Jo wasn't in the stall anymore. Her book bag and purse were there but it was like, poof, no Mary Jo."

Melody tossed back her long dark hair, and looked at me with wide eyes that awaited some response.

"Okay, it's weird," I said.

Melody was disappointed. "That's all?"

"Well, you're right—it's weird."

"I thought you'd have more to say than that."

"Like what?"

"Some kind of insight or something. Oh, you know. You know things—weird things."

"I don't know anything about people vanishing from bathrooms," I said. I knew weird things, true, but I didn't know all weird things.

Just then Mrs. Halsted walked up the aisle, nearing our table. She had been the head lunchroom monitor, walking through the aisles every day, year after year, until her back assumed a slight sideways bend from craning her neck to see if anybody was throwing food on the floor under the tables. She had passed away when I was a freshman, and yet here she was still looking for food on the floor. It made me wonder, What exactly is the purpose of death?

As Mrs. Halsted passed our table, she gave me a sly smile but kept walking.

"Jules?"

I looked at Melody. To her it must have seemed I drifted off. I did that a lot. In my school file it was noted that I often seemed distracted. My counselor, Mrs. Stock, had insisted my parents have me tested for attention deficit disorder. The tests had come back negative, of course.

"Mrs. Halsted?" Melody asked.

"Yeah."

"She say anything this time?"

"She never says anything."

"I wonder why. You think she knows you can see her?"

"Oh, she knows."

"Then why not say something?"

"She's one of the good ones," I said.

I slid my tray aside. I couldn't eat anymore. I felt agitated. Melody was talking too much. If she'd been talking about some guy or a handbag that she coveted but couldn't afford, I could have handled it. Her talking about strange stuff always got to me; it make me think about things I always tried to put out of my mind. Sometimes I wished I had never told Melody anything, but some secrets are impossible to keep. They gnaw at your insides until you can't bear it anymore. Sooner or later you have a weak moment and you tell somebody. I hated myself for the weak moments I had; they always ended up leading me into some trouble or other.

The walls of the crowded lunchroom seemed to edge inward, making the room smaller, more crowded, louder. I felt a panic attack coming on. I was prone to panic attacks, especially when I was around a lot of people.

I stood up. "I have to go."

"You okay?" Melody asked.

"I just need to get outside for a bit," I said, and she knew enough not to ask to go with me. "And I wouldn't worry too much about this whole Mary Jo thing," I added. "I don't know where she is, but I'm sure she's not dead.... Well, at least I haven't seen her yet."

Then I rushed out of the lunchroom, escaped the building, and wandered around the school grounds, until the bell sounded and I headed for my next class.

The next morning my mom and dad were at work. My mom returned to nursing as soon as I was old enough to have a house key, and worked the graveyard shift at a local hospital. She wouldn't get home until after I left for school. Dad was a fireman for the Chicago Fire Department. He worked two days straight and got four off, during which he usually moonlighted at his friend's body shop.

So most mornings I had the house to myself. I would shower and dress and go down to the kitchen to make myself breakfast. I would make fruit and toast, or sometimes I'd risk having an omelet, with a couple pieces of lightly buttered toast on the side. At some point, while I was at the stove cooking, Jerry would wander into the kitchen. Jerry was our house's previous owner. He had been a police officer, up until the time he was killed in the line of duty. Strangely, when I was home alone making my breakfast, Jerry would help by making my toast. Most of the time he wouldn't say a word. He'd get two slices of bread, put them in the toaster, and push the lever down. I never saw bread floating through the air or anything like that; I always saw him perform the task as though he were still alive. The way he appeared to me was the way he looked at the time of his death. He was wearing his uniform. He had been a stocky guy, with a handsome broad face, droopy eyes and short dark hair that was showing a little gray. The only disconcerting thing about the way he looked was the bullet hole in his forehead and the stream of blood that ran down one side of his face. He was stuck with that, apparently forever.

Over the past five years, I'd spoken with him a few times. He never pestered me to deliver a message to his relatives or anything like that. He never made the lights flicker or caused the walls creak. Basically, he was a really decent guy. He'd died saving the life of his partner, who was a two-year-old German shepherd named Sarge. How much more decent do you get than giving your life for a dog?

Today he made my toast, and then wandered away, presumably to do whatever it is dead people do when live people aren't round.

I sat at the table, and while I was eating, Jerry came back into the kitchen. He sat at the table across from me, which he had never before done. He looked at me with an expression of concern or mild confusion.

My hand froze halfway to my mouth, and I stared at him over the folk.

"What?" I asked.

"I was just thinking," he said. "You know what being dead and being alive have in common?"

"Not a clue," I said.

"In either case, it's impossible to figure out who's in charge. Always remember that."

"You know I'm trying to eat," I said.

"Go right ahead," he said pleasantly. I stared at him, at the hole in his head, until he finally caught on. "Oh, sometimes I forget. I'm grossing you out, right? Sorry." He put his hand over his forehead to cover the bullet hole. "That better?"

"I still know it's there, plus your brain is oozing out of the back of your head."

"I guess I picked a bad way to die," he said, lowering his hand.

I grunted. I wondered if there was a good way to die.

"Something has come up," Jerry continued. "Something you should know about."

"Yeah?" I said, trying to eat some scrambled egg, which was hard because I kept thinking about Jerry's scrambled brain.

"There's an issue," he announced.

"An issue? What kind of issue can you have? You're dead, right?"

"The issue involves you."

I pushed my plate aside, my appetite now totally gone.

"Really, the last thing I need is to have a dead guy tell me I have issues. I get enough of that from my parents."

"It's about this missing girl from your school," he persisted, and, trust me, there is nothing more annoying than a persistent spirit. "Well—I think—you need to find her," he said.

"I do?" I asked, surprised; it was the last thing I expected to hear from him. "That doesn't have anything to do with me."

"But it does, in a way. In a way, it involves you, everybody at your school—potentially it involves a lot of people."

"I don't see it."

"You want to know what really happened to her?" he asked.

"Can I stop you from telling me?"

He thought about it for a second, and then said, "Probably not."

I tossed up my hand, and leaned back in my chair, like, Okay, let's hear it.

"There are separate realities," he started carefully, as though he didn't quite know how to explain.

"You mean like being dead and being alive."

"Not exactly. I'm talking about physical realities."

"Okay, if you say so."

"These realities are parallel to each other, and they are separated by—well, I guess you could call it a membrane."

"A membrane?"

"It's easier to think of it that way. You have taken biology, right?

I rolled my eyes. "I know what a membrane is."

"Sometimes, in certain places, at certain times, this membrane, for some reason, can become thin, so thin that a solid object can pass through it from one physical reality to another."

"How interesting," I said, thinking Not. Then I realized, "You mean Mary Jo...?"

"Exactly," he said.

I thought about that for a minute, and then I burst out laughing.

"This is not funny," Jerry said gravely.

But I found the entire thing more hilarious than horrifying. "You're telling me that Mary Jo was in the girl's room, in one of the stalls, sitting on the can and doing her business, and she slipped into another reality. And you don't find that funny?"

"Not at all."

"I wonder... when she landed in the other reality, do you think she peed all over herself?"

He smirked. "Okay, maybe it's a little funny. But, on the serious side, you need to do something."

"What? Tell the cops? I could just see that. 'Oh, yeah, officer. I know what happened to Mary Jo. She didn't run away or anything. She just slipped through a membrane into another reality.' Oh, yeah, that would sound great! You know, my main goal in life is trying not to end up in a straightjacket. I don't see the big deal. Tough luck that something weird happened to her, but, you know, that's life."

"She doesn't know where she is. She's alone. She probably scared out of her wits. Don't you have any compassion at all?"

"No," I said. "Why should I?"

He sighed, frustrated.

"Well, it's more than just Mary Jo," he continued. "When she slipped into another reality, something else slipped into yours. To balance things out. I guess you could call it a kind of displacement."

"Something from the other reality."

"From another reality," he said, "not necessarily the reality Mary Jo went to. Some of these realities are pretty dark. Whatever came through—a spirit, a demon, whatever—has already disrupted things."

"How do you mean?" I asked.

"You remember when you left school yesterday? There was a bad car accident outside on the street."

"Yeah, so?"

"It should have never happened," he said.

I couldn't help laughing. "Okay, you're trying to tell me that because Mary Jo disappeared there was a car accident? This thing that replaced her is an evil spirit or something?"

"It doesn't have to be evil, really. It's just something that shouldn't be here; it's disrupting the natural flow of events in this reality. Now there are two people in the hospital—a seventy-two-year-old woman with a broken hip and her forty-five-year-old daughter who sustained a serious head injury. And, I should add," he said, holding up a finger, "the daughter would not have been so seriously injured if she had been wearing her seat belt. That's why you must always buckle up."

"Great," I said. "Just what I always wanted to hear: a public service announcement from a dead cop."

"Jules, this thing—whatever it is—needs to go back where it came from. For that to happen, Mary Jo has to be brought back here."

"I understand that," I said. "The part that is a little fuzzy is why me?"

"Because you have a gift?" he said.

"A gift? Please, don't make me vomit. I see things in my head that would gag a medical examiner. My mother always calls it a gift, but then she never had it, so what does she know? I got it from my grandmother, who never thought it was much of a gift either."

"I'm just saying: this has all got to be put right, or else people are going to keep getting hurt. But then maybe you don't care about that, either."

He got up from the table and drifted out of the room.

I couldn't believe it. I was getting guilt-tripped by a ghost. What next?

***************

I had only a half-day of school today, and yet I barely made it through. My last class, English, I kept nodding off at my desk.

I had awful sleeping habits. I'd had insomnia forever. Sometimes, I thought I was born with insomnia. I'd lie in bed at night and stare up at the ceiling of my bedroom. Everything was dark and quiet and peaceful, but still I couldn't fall asleep. It was always as though something was there, at the periphery of my senses. I was just aware of it enough for it to keep me awake, waiting to see something freaky. But usually nothing happened. I waited and waited, until finally I was so exhausted I drifted away. It wasn't so much falling asleep as it was sliding into unconsciousness. Other nights, the freak show began almost as soon as I turned off the lights. I'd look at the ceiling, and suddenly some strange face was staring down at me. Sometimes there were a lot of faces. Sometimes there were just sets of staring eyes. I had to pull the covers over my head to hide from them. When I did that, there were still times when I could see eyes looking at me from the underside of my blanket. I had no idea who they belonged to or what they wanted, but at times they were impossible to escape.

So, no, I didn't get a lot of sleep. I always looked pale and had tiny pouches under my eyes. This, too, was in my school file: always appears tired, along with, often distracted, anti-social attitude, emotionally detached, possibly anorexic. All of it was true, too, except for the anorexic part. Actually I ate like a horse most of the time, but still I remained on the thin side, as though my metabolism was all jacked up.

After my last class, I left the building. It was a sunny early-spring day. I walked round to the student parking lot, passed the two squad cars that were still parked near the front, and worked my way back to me car, which was an ancient Chevy Nova that still ran great. I climbed in behind the wheel, put on my seat belt (so Jerry wouldn't haunt me any more than he already had), but didn't turn on the engine. I was just so wiped out. The ride home wasn't far, but still I didn't want to chance falling asleep at the wheel. I was debating taking a little catnap, when my body decided for me and I drifted away.

I woke up with the side of my face pressed against the door window. I had a nasty crick in my neck, but otherwise I felt a lot better. I looked around to see that the parking lot was almost completely empty. Even the two squad cars were gone.

Since I felt better, I decided to check out an occult bookstore. I wasn't thrilled at the idea of involving myself in the whole Mary Jo thing. But, I had started thinking, if Jerry was right that this other entity might cause problems around the school and around people connected to the school, maybe I ought to see what I could do. After all, I attended the school, and my father was a fireman, whose job could be pretty dangerous; if he ended up falling through the roof of a burning building, I'd always wonder if that were something that I could have prevented.

So I headed for the bookstore. It was located in one of those congested north-side neighbors in which you had to fight tooth and nail to find a parking space. I passed the store about ten times, driving around in circles, until I finally found an open space about three blocks away.

I could have checked the school library, but that would have been taking a chance; I knew for a fact that the librarians reported if a student inquired about books on something weird. Librarians are notorious snitches—don't let anybody convince you otherwise. It would have gone straight back to my counselor, who would have jotted new notes in my file. Searching for unusual literature—the occult, demonology, or a possible interest in devil-worship?

I couldn't go to the public library, either. Public libraries, like hospitals and churches and, strangely, bowling alleys, attracted large numbers of earthbound spirits. I avoided any place that might be filled with ghosts. In my most horrifying dreams, I am in a place that is crowded with spirits, and then, suddenly, all at once, they realize I can see and hear them. I am stampeded and end up drowning in a small lake of ectoplasm.

I stopped in front of the occult bookstore and peered through the window. I was always a little paranoid about places I'd never gone to before. I couldn't see much; the lighting inside seemed dim. I took a chance and pushed open the front door. Chimes tinkled overhead as I walked inside. It seemed like a cozy little shop, with rows of bookshelves on one side and a line of glass counters on the other. I wasn't assailed by a hoard of spirits. The place seemed deserted of people, both the living and the dead. Then some guy wandered out from behind one of the rows of shelves. He had spiked hair, white make-up on his face, and was carrying a small silver tray on which burned a cone of incense. He wore a long black robe. He strolled past me, as though I wasn't even there, turned round at the front of the store and then started toward the back, leaving in his wake a strong smell of jasmine. I figured the guy must work here, but I couldn't figure what his job might be—maybe he was in charge of ambiance or something.

While I stared after the guy, a woman appeared behind the glass counters. She was middle-aged, and wore a lot of wooden beads around her neck and a long colorful dress. Huge gaudy hoop earrings dangled from her earlobes. She looked at me placidly but said nothing. During the silence I allowed myself to read her, which involved releasing that thing inside me that I fought so hard to control. Two or three seconds of freaky insight told me that the woman owned the store, that she was a total fake that didn't believe in any of the books or other items she sold, that she thought people were stupid for spending so much money on such utter garbage, that she had a pet boxer named Howard and a urinary tract infection for which she had a doctor's appointment tomorrow... . I blinked my eyes, and reeled in the freak senses; they always seemed to enter the realms of TMI (too much info), like did I really need to know about her urinary tract?

"Can I help you find anything?" she asked, pleasantly enough but she harbored nothing but disgust at the sight of me. Young punk. Street trash. Baggy clothes. Probably a shop-lifter... She would be of absolutely no help to me.

"No...no," I muttered, looking around, scanning the inside of store. I spotted a guy that was rearranging the books near the back of the store. He was tall and slim, and had a weird pale purplish light around him that I recognized. "No, thanks, but he can," I said, pointing at the guy.

The woman looked stunned, as though I'd just insulted her.

I turned away from her and headed toward the back of the store. I came up behind the guy who was straightening the books on the shelves against the rear wall.

"Hey, I need some help," I said, stepping up behind him.

He turned around. His face was thin but not unpleasant. His light brown hair was messy but in a good way. He gave me a look, a look that asked, What now?

"Just ask Helen at the desk," he droned, looking back at the books he was shifting around. "She knows everything about everything in the store."

"No, I think I need to ask you," I said.

He looked back at me. Maybe he saw me for the first time. Interest registered in his pale blue eyes.

"Hey, you go to Adler, don't you?" he asked, finally giving me more attention than the books.

"Yeah," I said. I didn't recognize him, which didn't surprise me; I spent most of my time at school trying to ignore just about everybody.

"I thought I knew you," he said. "What are you looking for?"

"I need a book on some weird stuff," I said.

He looked at the books that lined the shelves around us. "You think you can be a tad more specific?"

"I need something on reality."

"I'll save you some money. Reality sucks," he said, and seemed pleased with the joke.

"I mean parallel realities."

He sighed. "I see," he said. "Follow me."

He led me down one of the rows of shelves, and stopped at a section.

"You might want to check in through here," he said, pointing to a certain shelf.

Before I could examine any of the books, I caught a drift from him: he totally thought I was just another crackpot customer. I found that deeply offensive. I was, after all, the real deal, not just some wannabe. This ought to be one of the few places on earth where being me was a good thing.

"I am so not," I said.

"So not what?" he asked, staring at me, uneasy.

"I've never been in a place like this."

"What?"

"Oh, never mind," I said. I turned my attention to the books. "So which one is the best."

He gave me a strange look, but said, "Well, honestly, they're all pretty much crap." He reached up and pulled down a thick leather-bound volume and handed it to me. "This is the only one that's pretty much real, and that depends on what you believe is real."

I looked the book, which had no title. Then I glanced at him. He seemed absorbed in my interest. I could still see that pale purple glow around him; I'd seen that unusual shade of aura in people who were open, who were at least a little like me. I figured he had seen a few things, spiritual flashes or whatever, which he didn't quite understand. He knew that there is more going on in the world than everybody thinks, but he didn't know exactly what. He was curious about freaky things. This was why he had taken a job here, rather than at a local Kmart. He believed this place would satisfy his curiosity, but he was wrong. His name was Jack Kilgore....Actually, I was catching a good vibe from him. It was unusual; most of the impressions I got from people, especially guys, convinced me that you couldn't trust anybody—ever—with anything.

"If you don't mind my asking," he said now, "why do you need to know this?"

"I just do," I said, and then, against my paranoid nature, I added, "I need to figure out how to retrieve somebody who slipped into a parallel reality."

He frowned. "You're not in Mr. Hammerstone's physics class, are you?"

"No, why?"

"I heard he strays into metaphysics, sometimes."

"Nothing like that," I said. "And, by the way, Mr. Hammerstone strays into a lot of liquor stores."

Just then I became aware of an old man, withered and pale, his white hair wild. He was using a walker, edging down the aisle, nearing us. That he was wearing slippers and a hospital gown was a tip off he was no longer with us.

Looking at the old guy, I had one of my distracted moments. When I looked back at Jack, he was eyeing me curiously. He glanced over to where I could see the old man, but obviously he saw nothing.

"You okay?" Jack asked.

I shrugged. "A.D.D.," I lied.

The old man now stood near us. He stared at Jack and wagged his head. Sometimes, the boy's as dumb as a brick, he said to me. But he's got a good heart....

I blinked my eyes, and the old man was gone. Jack stood there looking at me, clearly concerned.

"You're sure you're okay?" he asked.

"Fine," I said. "So, how much is this thing?"

Jack took the book from me, and looked at the inside of the back cover. "Eighty-nine ninety-five."

I nearly choked. "Dude, I got, like, about thirty bucks."

He shrugged. "That's Helen. She does all the pricing—she thinks everything's worth ninety bucks. Hey, look, I'll tell you what," he said, lowering his voice. "Before I leave today, I'll sneak it into the back room and make copies of the important parts."

"Yeah?" I said. I couldn't help being suspicious; I knew how sneaky people could be—nobody does something for nothing. But I didn't pick anything that suggested Jack had an ulterior motive. He was just trying to be helpful. Maybe the old man had been right....He's got a good heart. "Okay, thanks," I said.

"I'll bring the copies to school tomorrow. Where do you sit during lunch?"

"Just about any table near an exit," I said.

That seemed to amuse him. "Okay, I'll find you."

I thanked him again, and left the store, passing the creepy guy wearing a black robe and carrying burning incense.

I headed back toward my car, but didn't make it half a block down the street before Jack came running up behind me.

What now? I wondered.

"Hey," he said, a little winded.

"What?"

"I had to ask you something," he said, falling into step next to me.

"You couldn't wait until tomorrow?"

"They'll be a lot of people around," he said.

"Oh." I understood that; crowds of people were always a bummer.

"Can I buy you some coffee?" he asked.

"That was what you wanted to ask? It hardly seems that important."

"Uh, no, no," he stammered. He took a deep breath. "What I meant was, there's a coffee shop up ahead. Can I buy you a cup of coffee, so that I can ask you something—you know, while you're drinking coffee."

"I can't have coffee," I said. "The caffeine doesn't agree with me." Actually, caffeine, or any type of stimulant, caused me to experience an onrush of psychic images. Two or three sips and I started seeing all kinds of weird things.

"Oh," he said, disappointed, and didn't know what to say next. I almost felt sorry for him. I didn't have to be a freak to see he liked me. Up until this moment that had been aside from the point—all I needed, or wanted, was some information on parallel realities. Now that his attraction to me grabbed my attention, my first thought was that he had terrible taste in girls. Really, I was no prize. I didn't even weigh a hundred pounds. My bones stuck out everywhere. My clothes, though they were the right size, always looked baggy hanging on my body. I was pale, as though I had some awful disease, and always had little pouches under my eyes. If how I looked wasn't bad enough, I had the personality of a cactus.

"Look--" I started, intending to tell him I wasn't his type—I wasn't anybody's type.

He blurted out, "You have it, don't you?"

I was surprised, which seldom happened. I thought he was about to ask me on a date or something.

"Have what?" I asked.

"Oh, you know," he said.

"What? Do I have—a song in my heart? No, I haven't had one of those yet. I don't expect to, either."

"You know what I'm talking about," he insisted.

"A viral infection of some kind?"

"Come on."

"A plan to stop world hunger?"

"Stop."

"Really, I don't understand the question."

"You see things."

"I see a lot of things," I said. I pointed around as we walked down the sidewalk. "I see cars. I see the sky. I see a poodle taking on poop. I see the owner of the poodle not picking up the poop."

He looked down at the sidewalk. He didn't say anything, just walked next to me for a while.

I started to feel bad. I couldn't understand why. Maybe it was because he was a decent guy. Maybe because it seemed so important for him to know. I was sure he had some personal reason to know. It would be easy enough to find out what. All I had to do was unleash the freak probe and see what was going through his mind. But I didn't want to do that; it was like peeping through somebody's bedroom window: you never know what you're going to see, but it always ends up being something personal.

"Why is it so important for you to know?" I asked.

He shrugged, and looked moody.

"Just stupid, I guess," he mumbled.

We walked along slowly now, as if one, or both, of us wanted the walk to last as long as possible.

Finally, I confessed, "All right. I see things." Although I knew it was bad for me to confess this to somebody, especially a complete stranger, I felt some relief to put it in words.

"I thought you did," he said, pumping his fist, way too joyous. "I do, too, sometimes—not a lot, just enough to know something is there."

"Trust me. You don't want to see more than that," I said.

"I would like to know if my grandfather is all right. I think he is, but I'm not sure."

"Your grandfather?"

"He died a couple years ago."

"Was he about five-foot-seven, thin, crazy white hair, probably died in a hospital?"

Jack's eyes grew wider and wider.

"Yeah," he said, clearly in awe.

"He's all right," I assured him.

"You saw him?"

"Just now—back in the store."

"That's what you saw? I thought you might be seeing something."

"He walked up to us, said something, and then just vanished," I said. "But he seemed all right—as all right as somebody can be when they're dead."

"What did he say?"

I couldn't help laughing. "He said you're dumb as a brick but you have a good heart."

"That sounds like Gramps," he said, bobbing his head. He was satisfied, probably relieved. "So, aside from seeing and hearing dead people, what else can you do?"

"Isn't that enough?"

"I supposed," he said. "Listen--"

"No," I said.

"No?"

"I'm not the dating kind, so no, I won't go somewhere with you sometime."

"You read my mind," he said, more amazed that I did that than dejected that I turned him down.

"I did," I said, "which makes dating a big problem for me. As much as I try not to hear what guys think, enough slips through to ruin the whole thing. Honestly, would you want to date somebody who could know everything that went through your head?"

He turned round and started walking backward out in front of me, so that he could see me better. "I could deal with that," he said.

I shook my head. "Trust me—you couldn't. You're a guy. You got guy things going through your head. Take now, for instance. We're having a nice little chat, right? You're attracted to me—I don't know why, but you are. And right in the middle of this nice little chat, you're wondering how I look naked."

His face turned a couple shades of red. "I see what you mean," he said, and still walking backwards, not looking where he was going, began drifting close to the curb, as we neared the cross street.

"Look, you're a nice guy, Jack. You need to date normal girls, with normal problems."

"What if that's not what I want?" he asked. "It's my choice, right?"

"No, definitely not."

"I don't want somebody normal," he brooded.

"If that's true, then you are dumb as a brick."

Then, as if to prove my point, he backed into the light post on the corner of the cross street, whacking the back of his head so hard against the steel post that there was a loud vibrating thunk. He grabbed his head, muttering something I couldn't understand, thinking something I got loud and clear.

I stood there and looked up at him as he massaged the back of his head. He leaned back up against the light post, and said simply, "Ouch." He was so pitiful, so likable; I wanted to keep him for a pet. I decided I had to get out of there quickly, before I did something stupid, like agreeing to go out with him.

"You okay?" I asked.

"Yeah, sure--"

It happened fantastically fast. Something snapped inside my head, making me act though I didn't know why I was acting. I lunged at Jack and grabbed the front of his shirt. I pulled him forward and to the side, away from the light pole. I caught a glimpse of the shocked look on his face. I heard the grinding bang of something nearby. Then we were falling to the ground, landing hard on the sidewalk. The first thing I saw when I looked up was the small faded red pick-up truck. It had been coming out of the cross street. It had already jumped the curb. And now it slammed into the light pole, just where Jack had been standing, a few feet away from where we lay on the sidewalk.

We got up slowly. Jack was gaping at the wrecked pick-up, its hood tented up, its radiator hissing steam. He turned to look at me with wide eyes.

"I—I got to go," I said, feeling a desperate need to escape, before the cops came, before people started asking questions, before anybody could realize I wasn't quite human.

I rushed past him, round the rear of the pick-up, across the cross street, toward where my car was parked.

I started running.

I heard Jack calling from behind me to wait up. I ran faster and faster.

I heard him yell, "I don't know your name."

But just then, I had no name. I am Freak, I thought.

Freak

Freak

Freak

Freak

Freak

Freak

Freak.

As soon as I got home, I went straight into the kitchen. I grabbed a glass from one of the cabinets, and then got a carton of orange juice from the fridge. I sat at the table and started chugging down the juice. I never understood why, but every time I had a major weird experience, I would get badly dehydrated. My mouth would be so dry. I would be so thirsty. I would feel weak in the knees. Sometimes I would feel dizzy until I got a couple glasses of liquid into me. The orange juice, going down, never seemed to make it to my stomach, as though it was being absorbed directly into my body.

After three glasses, I looked up and saw my mom standing in the doorway, watching me.

"Hey," I said.

She said Hey back, and then went to freezer. She took out a package of meat to thaw out for dinner. She put the meat in the microwave and set the dial, and then she sat across the table from me. She was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, and her long hair hung loose on her shoulders. Mom always dressed young when she was not working. She was afraid of getting old, but, really, I didn't think she had anything to worry about.

She was studying me, as I poured yet another glass of juice. I never read either of my parents, but I knew the look on her face: she wanted to ask, but she didn't want to ask. Finally she couldn't help herself.

"So what happened?"

"You don't want to know," I said.

"Yeah, you're probably right about that," she said, and let the issue drop. She was good that way; she knew that whatever I told her she could never understand, so why bother asking? She had learned that a long time ago, from my grandmother, who used to freak her out all the time. For instance, my mom would mention seeing somebody, an old acquaintance, and grandma would say Oh, I thought he died. And then a couple days later mom would hear that the person actually died. Things like that happened all the time. After a while my mom started to wonder if, maybe, my grandmother had actually caused the person to die. Really, it was impossible to tell for sure. So mom decided that the less she knew, the better off she was—and she was right.

"You feeling better?" she asked.

"A little," I said.

"You know your father is worried about you."

I didn't know what there was for him to worry about. My dad had no clue about my problems. Neither my mom nor I ever told him. How could we? He was a very well-grounded guy. Some people just don't believe in spirits and other weird things, no matter how much you try to convince them. If he knew half the things that went on in my head on any given day, he'd have me under a 72-hour psychiatric hold or worse. "Why is he worried about me?" I asked. "Tell him to worry about himself."

She shrugged. "It's just your weight."

"I have a high metabolism."

"Well..."

"I know. He's thinks I'm anorexic or bulimic or something."

"He thinks you're not getting enough protein. He thinks you need to start eating meat again."

"I can't do that," I said.

"I know, not eating meat is supposed to be healthy, but you don't really seem that healthy."

"It doesn't have anything to do with being healthy."

"Then what?"

"Do I have to explain?"

"I wish you would," she said.

"I can't eat meat, because every time I touch it, every time I try to eat it, I have these flashes."

She frowned. "Flashes? What flashes?"

"I see the animal it came from. I see how they killed it.... I just can't eat meat, all right? If Dad is worried about me not getting enough protein, tell him to get me some protein powder or something."

"I didn't know that," she said somberly. "Your grandmother never had that problem."

"Well, I'm a bigger freak than she was," I said.

"I wish you wouldn't talk like that," she said.

"I'm just telling the truth."

I needed to lie down for a while. I got up and left my mom sitting there in the kitchen. If I let myself think of it, I started to feel sorry for her. It must not be easy to be the mother of a freak. She wanted to make things better, but couldn't. How could she? She couldn't control what I saw, what I knew, what I felt. Nobody could, not even me.

***************

The next morning I almost didn't go to school. There was more than usual I didn't want to face. Jack would be looking for me at lunch. He would want to give me copies of information to help me retrieve Mary Jo Mason, which, honestly, I'd never wanted to do in the first place. He would ask me a million annoying questions. I'd have to fully explain yesterday's freaky event. Then, worse of all, he would probably thank me for saving his life. What an awful thing to do!—thanking me for saving his life. As though I had had any choice in the matter. Something had simply snapped in my head, and I had acted. It had absolutely nothing to do with me. As far as I was concerned, he could have ended up a crushed piece of meat pinned to the light post.

When it was time for lunch, I didn't go to the lunchroom. Melody would be looking for me, but I didn't care. I went straight outside. It was a warm early spring day. The sun was bright and the sky was a pale blue. There was plenty of fresh air to breathe. I sat on one of the wooden benches along the walkway that snaked through the campus. I had a good view of the student parking lot. There was only one cop car parked near the front now. Nobody was around, although people might start straying outside after they finished eating, to kill time before going to their next class. It all should have been peaceful, but I sensed a low hum of anxiety. It had been there, slowly growing, since Mary Jo Mason vanished. It was a generalized anxiety, not the kind of anxiety I felt in a single person sometimes. I sensed it the way you sense an annoying background noise, a tiny persistent buzz you hear sometimes on a cordless phone. People were concerned and uncertain. What exactly happened to Mary Jo? Could it happen again? I realized, then, that maybe I had no choice but than to find Mary Jo. I had hardly any tranquil moments as it was, but with her missing, and everybody all nervous, I would never have another peaceful second. The buzz would probably grow and grow, too, and maybe, finally, I would pop my cork and end up in Straight Jacket City.

Then I sensed him, Jack. What a stubborn tool! He had searched the lunchroom for me—twice. He had passed by the table I usually shared with Melody, and she—you have to be kidding me—checked out his butt as he walked away. I couldn't figure out what irked me more, that he was so intent on finding me, or that she actually sneaked a peek at his man cheeks. It was probably a tie.

Now he decided to wander outside. It wouldn't be long now. I waited with dread, counting down... thirty-seven...thirty-six... thirty-five...thirty-four...thirty-three...thirty-two... By the time I got down to one, he was sitting at the other end of the bench.

At first everything was going fine; he didn't say I word, and I didn't have to look over at him and acknowledge his presence. I looked out at the parking lot, and watched as nothing happened.

Then he said, "Hey," which I ignored; whenever anybody said "Hey" to me, or even "Hi" or "Hello," I treated it like a rhetorical question—really, I saw no reason to respond.

Then he asked, "What are you doing?" which I found extremely annoying.

"What does it look like?" I asked. "What? I always have to be doing something more than what it seems I'm doing?"

He shrugged. "Sorry," he said. "I brought those copies."

He handed me about twenty sheets of paper, and I didn't feel compelled to thank him. I scanned several of the pages.

"This all looks—theoretical," I said, more to myself than to him.

"What else is there?" he asked.

"I need something practical—you know, like practical applications."

"Practical applications in alternate realities? I doubt that you'll find anything like that."

"Well, that's what I need," I said.

"Why?"

I sighed. I felt like biting his head off, but that didn't seem enough of a punishment. Instead I considered doing something much worse: telling him the truth. Sometimes, especially with me, the truth is a horrible weapon.

"You wouldn't understand," I said.

"Try me," he said, and sounded a bit cocky.

"All right," I said. "Mary Jo Mason slipped into an alternate reality, and if I don't figure out a way of getting her back, I'm never again going to have another breakfast that isn't heinously haunted by a dead cop."

"What?" He stared at me, and I savored his confusion. "I don't understand," he finally said.

"I told you."

"Maybe if you explained it a little more," he suggested.

"No," I told him "You're curious—I get that. You like me—I don't really get that. But here's the thing: you really need to leave me alone, okay? I have never been reduced to begging somebody to leave me alone, but in your case I'll make an exception. So, please, please, go away."

He didn't give it a second's thought. "I don't think I can."

"Why?" I asked.

"I just have this feeling I'm not supposed to," he said. He was completely sincere, too, I was certain he wasn't joking or anything.

I didn't know what to say. I understood gut feelings all too well.

"Maybe I can help you," he offered.

"Help me? Help me what?"

"Find Mary Jo. Maybe that's what I'm meant to do."

"Help how?"

"I've read a lot," he said.

"Ah-hah."

"I know some spells."

"Spells? Are you kidding?" I asked.

"They might help."

"I need to find Mary Jo. I don't want to turn her into a frog."

"Maybe, it's just time for you to stop being so alone," he said.

"I don't think that's it," I sighed. "But for the time being, we'll go with that—until I can figure out a way to get you to leave me alone without having to maim or cripple you."

"That sounds fair—Julia Dundee."

I had never told him my name. He had me for a second, but only for a second.

"You looked up my yearbook picture, didn't you?"

He nodded.

"Nice try," I said.

He shrugged.

"By the way, don't call me Julia," I said. "I've never been fond of the name. I hate Julie even more—probably because that's what my parents call me. My friends call me Jules."

"Jules, then."

"We're not there yet."

"Then what should I call you?" he asked.

"Call me 'Hey you.' I don't care. We're probably not going to know each other for long anyway."

I got up and started walking away. He followed—big surprise; I figured he would linger like a bad rash.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Please, don't be shy," I said dismally.

"I've studied a lot about, you know, unusual phenomena. So far I know you can see dead people, read minds, see the future. What else can you do?"

"If you must know—and I suppose you must—sometimes, if I concentrate really hard, I can turn on and off light switches."

"That's telekinesis. Anything else?"

"If somebody asks me too many questions, they tend to burst into flames."

"That's pyro kinesis," he said, and then, finally getting it, "That was a hint, wasn't it?"

"Duh."

"Sorry, you're just so interesting."

"There is something seriously wrong with you, Jack," I said. "Just leave me alone, okay?"

I got up and walked away down the path that curved past the parking lot. He followed, of course, a step or two behind me.

I didn't know what to do with him. I was not a violent person. Other girls would have turned on their heel and clocked him in the head. I couldn't do that; it wasn't in my nature—besides, I probably only would have hurt my hand; Jack would have remained a persistent dunderhead.

"Most people can't even do one of the things you can do," he said.

I ignored him, and kept walking.

"I figure you have to be pretty rare."

I kept walking.

"I don't see why you don't think it's a good thing."

I kept walking.

"You're special," he said.

It was starting to get to me. It was as though he was rubbing my nose in how different I was from everybody else. That was supposed to be a good thing. He was so clue-less it was actually sad.

I stopped to sit on another bench, where the walkway ran near the parking lot, where landscapers had recently planted new trees to border the lawn. I put my elbows on my knees, and rested my head in my hands. I felt a sick burning in my chest. You never truly realize how much of a freak you are until somebody points it out to you. I felt like crying, but I couldn't cry—I never cried, not even when I'd been a little kid and hurt myself. Something inside me prevented me from letting go, prevented my emotions from blooming to normalcy.

"Have I ever done anything to you?" I asked, not looking up at him, the burning in my chest growing hotter and hotter. My closed eyes saw globs of faded orange that whirled around and as they whirl darkened to blood red.

"No," he said innocently.

"Then why are you tormenting me?" I asked, my voice starting to crack.

"I didn't think I was doing that."

"Just—just stop talking about me."

"But you have gifts."

"Don't call them gifts."

"That's what they are."

"Stop."

"I don't understand."

"Just stop."

"I'm just trying--"

"Stop!" I screamed, jumping to my feet.

And something invisible erupted from me, like heat shimmers over desert, erupting outward, away from me in all directions, knocking Jack to the ground, bending two of the newly-planted trees at strange angles, setting off the alarms of just about every car in the parking lot.

Jack looked dazed as he got back to his feet. Car alarms were honking and hooting and whistling.

I grabbed him by the arm, and we ran.

We didn't stop running until we reached the street that was buzzing with midday traffic. Then we walked at a fast pace down the sidewalk, away from the parking lot.

"What the hell was that?" Jack asked.

"I don't know. Nothing like that ever happened before."

I was scared. The only time I got truly scared was when I experienced some new weird experience. It's like, Well, what's that all about? Why did that happen? What next?

I ran my finger under my eye, and it came up wet. It was probably just a couple tears, not much, but more than ever before. I realized I wasn't just a freak, but that I could be a dangerous freak if I didn't control my emotions. It was frightening, more frightening still that I felt so good after I'd released just a little bit of everything that had always been pent-up inside me.

I stopped and turned on Jack.

"You can't do that," I told him. "You can't press me like that. I don't know what could happen."

"Sorry," I said.

"Stop being sorry," I snapped. "If somebody tells you to stop, then—you know—stop."

"I was just trying--"

"I know what you were trying. You think I don't know? You're trying to say I should embrace my weirdness. I should be who I am. You think I never tried that. I gave up on that when I was ten years old. I knew it would never work. How can anybody embrace what they hate? And what I hate most is what I am. You think you know me? Well, you don't."

I turned and walked away, leaving him standing there in the street. I must have given him something to think about, because he didn't run after me—not right away, anyway.

***************

I was laughing so hard my side hurt. It felt strange. I wasn't used to laughing—not much in my life seemed funny.

"Let me get this straight," I said, after I caught my breath. "You think I should use my powers for the benefit of mankind. Am I getting this right?"

We were sitting at a table in a greasy-spoon diner a couple blocks off campus. I didn't know what class Jack was cutting. I was cutting English. After what had happened, how could I go to English class and listen to people reciting creepy poems by Edger Allen Poe. To me, creepy wasn't only fiction.

"I'm just saying," Jack said carefully, "that you seem to lack focus. Maybe if you could focus on some purpose..."

"Wait a second," I said gravely. I reached out one hand and waggled my fingers in the air. "I'm looking at you, and I'm getting a message. I see a M. I see an O. I see an R... O...N. I see a MORON."

I burst out laughing again, as Jack gave me a sour look.

"Oh, come on," I said. "That was funny. You got me laughing—I'll give you that much. At the moment everything is not so bad. I'm cutting class. I'm sitting in this diner." I paused to look around at the place, at the scattering of customers sitting at other tables. "There isn't a single spirit in here. Wow, the food here must be awful—even the dead people won't come in." I pulled one of the menus out from behind the condiment holder, and started scanning the meals.

"I was being serious," Jack said.

"I know. That's what makes it so funny. Hey, are you buying?"

He nodded. He looked pretty glum.

"You should, really—since you made me cry. I think that should be a law: whenever somebody makes somebody else cry, they owe that person a free lunch. The world would be a better place."

I studied the menu. It seemed all the meals had meat. Dead cow. Slaughtered chicken. Mutilated pig.

"You find anything?" Jack asked.

"Everything has meat in it," I said, and explained to him briefly why I couldn't eat meat.

When the waitress came, I ordered a cheese omelet. Jack asked for just coffee.

He looked puzzled. "I don't get something. You can't eat meat, I understand that, but you can eat eggs. Eggs are future chickens, so how can you eat eggs?"

"If I eat eggs, I get visions of fluffy little chicks. That's not so bad. I figure what the hell, somebody's going to eat them, right?"

"I want to suggest something to you," he said.

"Go ahead," I sighed.

"I have to ask you first: are you reading my mind now? Because if you are, I'd be wasting my breath."

"No, I'm blocking you out—boy, am I blocking you out. And you'll probably be wasting your breath anyway. But go ahead. Suggest away."

"Maybe there's a reason that Mary Jo vanished," he said.

"Sure, she fell into an alternate reality."

"I mean a greater reason."

"Like?"

"You ever hear that saying: everything happens for a reason?"

"Yeah, but I never believed it. How could I? I constantly see things that make absolutely no sense. What reason could there be for that?"

"Well, what if Mary Jo vanished so that you could find her, so that you discover a practical use for your abilities."

I stared at him for a moment. "Now you're thinking there's a cosmic conspiracy to lead me to do what? Find missing persons?"

"You could do worse things in life," he said.

"Sorry, I just don't buy that," I said. "I guarantee you, if I find Mary Jo, it's going to be for purely selfish reasons. And I suppose I have to find her," I added dismally. Already that morning, Jerry had been harping that I didn't seem to be doing anything to retrieve Mary Jo.

"The girls' bathroom is still sealed off," Jack pointed out.

"I know."

"No way of getting in there during school hours. That's the bad part."

"The whole thing is the bad part," I said. "I don't want to go looking for this miserable tree-hugging bitch. By the way, what do you think is the good part?"

"Well, the cops have been going in and out of the bathroom, but none of them have disappeared."

"That's the good part?" I wondered; I loathed the police, especially detectives, anybody in an official capacity who might discover what I was. The idea of one or two cops going poof was a happy thought.

"Sure," Jack said. "If a couple cops vanished, it would be a real mess. The school would be overrun with federal authorities—the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and who knows who else? It would be Men-in-Black City if it looked like something really weird was going on. We would never stand a chance to get into the bathroom and check it out ourselves."

"And there's a chance now?" I asked.

"If we do it after school hours," he said.

"You're suggesting we break into the school at night."

"Too risky," he said. "The school has an alarm with perimeter sensors. All the windows and doors are wired. But it doesn't have interior motion detectors. So the best way to do it is to get locked in the school, find some hiding place and let the school shut down around us. That way we'd have the whole building to ourselves, after Carl the janitor leaves, which is no later than ten o'clock."

I stared at him. "You just figured all this out?"

"I think fast."

"And you're serious?"

"Yeah, definitely."

"Did you figure out exactly how we're supposed to get Mary Jo back?"

"I have some ideas," he said.

"Meaning, no."

"I figured we have to play that part by ear."

After thinking it all over for a moment, I said, "This sounds like a really bad idea."

"So you want to try it?"

"Yeah, for sure," I said, concluding that a bad idea is better than no idea at all.

"Tomorrow is Friday," he said. "I figure it would be good to do it tomorrow. When they lock down the school, everybody will be in a hurry to get home. There will be less of a chance of anybody catching us hiding. I'll tell my parents I'm staying over at a friend's house. What about your parents?"

"What Dad doesn't know won't hurt him. Mom pretty much lets me do whatever I want—she understands that I can see trouble coming from a long way off."

"So we're good?"

"Sounds like a plan," I said, trying to sound enthusiastic.

The waitress brought my omelet. As I ate it, I had flashes of fluffy yellow and white chicks. I tried to feel a sense of loss for them, but I couldn't feel anything.

*************

"The girl's been missing for nearly three days."

"I know, I know, I know," I said.

It was Friday morning, and I was eating breakfast alone—except for Jerry, of course.

Jerry was being wretched. I hadn't thought it was possible for a ghost to be so impatient. He'd burned my toast three times, before I finally had to make it myself.

Now I tried to eat my scrambled eggs and toast, while Jerry sat across from me, complaining that I was taking too long to find Mary Jo. He sat there in his uniform, looking like he belonged on a ghastly police-recruiting poster. Join the police force. Serve and protect. Get your brains blown out by an armed felon.

"Three days is a long time to be lost in an alternate reality. No telling how much damage might be done to the girl. In the meantime, there have been three more accidents here that should never have happened. Two more car accidents—minor fender benders—and a senior citizen fell off a stepladder and broke his leg while changing a light bulb," he said.

"I'm working on it. It's not that easy, you know?"

"What's the hold up?" he demanded.

"There are cops at the school every day. The bathroom is still off limits to students. But there is a plan," I said, and told him about Jack and about what we had planned for that evening.

He thought for a long time, and then he said, "You know, technically, you'd still be breaking and entering, and trespassing. Those are some very serious charges."

"You said I needed to find her. You didn't say anything about having to find her legally."

"I'm just saying, you'd be breaking the law."

"And how could I do it without breaking the law. I mean, I figure I have to get into the bathroom. I need to check it out. If I can't even check it out, there's no way I can find her. And how can I do that legally if it's still a crime scene? You can't make an omelet without cracking a couple eggs, you know."

He shrugged a thick shoulder. "I guess you're right. I just don't like the idea of you breaking the law."

"Think of it as the lesser of two evils. Maybe that will help."

"It doesn't. I feel that I am turning you into a juvenile delinquent."

"Jerry, please, just—just stop talking about it, okay?" I said. "You keep talking, and I'll forget the whole thing, I swear. I didn't want to do it from the beginning, anyway."

"All right," he said glumly.

He still sat there, but kept his mouth shut. I was able to eat in relative peace for a few minutes.

"So what about this guy? Jack—is that his name?" he asked.

"Jack Kilgore, yeah."

"You like him?"

"No, not at all," I said.

"But you told him about yourself, about what you can do."

"Everybody has a weak moment now and then."

"And you're letting him help you with finding Mary Jo."

"Jack is an idiot," I said. "He actually wants to help me. If he wants to be stupid, who am I to stop him?"

"And that's all?"

"Yeah."

"I don't believe you," he said.

"Can't you talk about the weather or something?" I asked.

"You have to like somebody."

"Who says?"

"Life must be so lonely for you."

"Lonely? What are you, kidding? I have annoying ghosts pestering me all the time."

He gave me a sad look, and shook his head. He stood up and drifted into the next room, finally leaving me to finish my breakfast in peace.

I got to school early, and sat in my car parked in the student lot. It was a gray day. The school looked like a castle beneath the sky of heavy dark clouds. The zero-period crowd was arriving by ones and twos, straying into the building. I could never understand why anybody would sign up for pre- and post-class activities. Weren't regular classes enough? Does the world real need over-achievers? People whose sole purpose in life seems to be to remind the rest of us that we are total losers? I would have been content to stay in bed under my blankets. I could have done that every day, but especially today.

It wasn't long before Jack arrived and was sitting in the passenger seat of my car. He was the first living being to ever get into the car with me. My parents wouldn't even ride with me; my driving was so bad because I was constantly distracted by some weird thing or other.

Jack started going over his master plan with me again. He'd brought a gym bag that contained a large flashlight, a hundred feet of rope, and a notebook filled with hand-written spells.

"I have to tell you," I said. "I've been thinking things over, and I'm pretty sure this is the stupidest plan anybody ever dreamed up."

Jack was irked. "So you don't want to go through with it?"

"I'm not sure."

"But I brought rope and everything," he whined.

"That's what I mean. Why do we need rope? So if the plan doesn't work, you can go and hang yourself?"

"Rope is a good idea," he said. "Rope always comes in handy."

"So does duct tape. You bring that with, too?"

"I can't believe you're telling me this now," he said, clearly disappointed. He was so dull he'd probably been looking forward to the whole event. He believed it would be fun. "Well, what do you want to do?"

"I was thinking that maybe I could slip into the bathroom between classes."

But he was already shaking his head.

"Too risky. Too many people around. If you get caught trying to get in during the day, that's it. We won't get another chance. Right now, they don't suspect there might be a reason for anybody to want to get into the bathroom. But if they ever thought there might be some reason, they'd probably leave somebody to guard the room at night."

"So this incredibly lame plan is all we have?"

"It's not that lame," he said. "It'll get us into the bathroom without anybody else around. Now, have you figured out a hiding place?"

I looked down at myself, and snorted. "Are you kidding? I can hide just about anywhere. I could probably stand in the middle of the hallway and turn sideways, and nobody would notice me."

He gave me a sour look. Obviously he didn't think I was taking this seriously—and in many ways I wasn't.

"All right," I sighed. "I was thinking the girls' locker room. There are about a million places to hide there. The lockers are too small, but there's a closet and air shafts, and other nooks and crannies."

"Good, that wouldn't be too far from my hiding place."

"Which is?"

"Under the bleachers in the main gym," he said.

"Uh, don't they roll those in at night?" I asked. They were the type of bleachers that collapse toward the wall when you press a button.

"No, the only time they do that is after a basketball game, so that they can clean the floor better."

"You're sure about that?"

"Yeah, I'm sure. I'm not going to climb under the bleachers if there's a chance of me getting crushed."

I thought about that for a second. "Maybe I just ought to hide under the bleachers with you," I suggested.

"No, it's better if we separate. If one of us gets caught, then the other can still get into the bathroom."

"Yeah, I suppose," I said, but still wondered. What if I was the one to get caught? Exactly what would Jack do once he got into the girls' room? I didn't even know what I'd do.

"Look, it's almost over," he said. "After tonight, no matter what happens, it's over. You find Mary Jo, or you try and can't find her. In either case, you're off the hook, right?"

It seemed right to agree with him. Still I had a nagging feeling this wasn't going to be so simple. I couldn't envision anything bad happening tonight. But my foresight wasn't always perfectly clear. Sometimes, the future was so clear it seemed like the past. At other times, the future was a vast muddle of possibilities. Right now all I was getting was muddle, and a bad feeling.

Later that day, after lunch and before English, I wandered up to the second floor so that I could pass the sealed girls' room. I was not a curious person by nature. How could I be? I already saw and knew way more than I ever wanted to know. But, now, briefly, curiosity caught hold of me.

I slowed as I approached the girls' room. Three strips of bright yellow crime-scene tape stretched across the doorjamb. The solid wooden door itself wasn't locked, because none of the bathroom doors in school had a lock. I had always supposed this was for safety reasons, so that nobody would accidentally get locked in the bathroom.

It would be an easy matter to get inside. Just turn the door handle, push the door inward, and then slip between the lower and middle strips of crime-scene tape, much as a wrestler steps through the ropes to enter a ring.

As I inched down the hallway, looking at the door out of the corner of my eye, I tried to probe the bathroom with my freak senses. I did this kind of thing all the time—especially when one or another of my classes was getting particularly boring and I wanted to see what was happening in the next classroom over. Now, I was stunned to discover that I couldn't read the interior of the girls' room. It was strange. At first I thought there was something wrong with me. I'd been doing this since I was six-years-old, and I had never, not even once, had a problem. But the inside of the girls' room remained as much a mystery to me as to any of the other kids walking down the hallway. In a very small way, I, for once, didn't feel like such a freak. I stopped in front of the door, and eyed it in wonder. My mind could see just behind the door— the pale tiles of small entrance hall, the doorway to the left leading into the bathroom—but that was all. I concentrated harder—which I never had to do—trying to see inside the bathroom itself, but it was as though somehow my senses were being prevented from seeing any further. Something was there, like a shield, and my mind probed it, like the fingers of a blind man, trying to feel its shape, its texture, its temperature. The harder I tried to probe it, the denser the shield became, and colder, finally becoming cold enough to give me a case of brain freeze, as though I had just gulped down a slushie on a hot summer day. And just as I had to reel in my senses, I heard the sound, a low rumbling noise that reminded me of the challenging growl of some wild animal.

Okay, that's new, I thought, and continued quickly down the hallway.

The idea that there might be some living thing in the bathroom freaked me out but also fascinated me. What exactly could it be? Jerry had said that some entity had slipped into our reality, but it didn't seem logical that the entity, once here, would choose to loiter in a bathroom. Jack, on the other hand, had not mentioned any entities; in his clue-less way, he talked of an aperture between realities, and seemed to believe rescuing Mary Jo was akin to rescuing somebody who had fallen down an old well. Now I was certain that both of them were wrong.

I wanted to find Jack, and fill him in on this new development. Maybe he would change his mind about proceeding with the plan. But, really, I barely knew the guy; I didn't know his class schedule, or where he might be found at the moment. So it would have to wait until the next time I would see him, tonight in the darkened interior of the school.

I wasn't afraid of the unknown. So the idea of entering a dark bathroom in which there might be some dangerous otherworldly creature didn't trouble me. I figured what was the worst that could happen? Some monster could kill me, but so what? I knew that only my body could be killed, while my spirit, the thing that was really me, would continue to live. The worse that could happen would be that I end up a spirit and have the chance to haunt somebody else the way spirits had haunted me since I was born.

After my last class, I stopped at my locker and dumped off my books. Usually I was fast to leave school, but today I lingered, waiting for the other kids to go home. It was maddening. I wasn't used to killing time, and a lot of kids didn't seem to want to leave. They loitered in the hallways, standing in twos or threes, talking as though they had all the time in the world. When they headed toward the exits, they moved slower than snails. I stood in front of my opened locker, pretending to straighten the things inside, until finally there were just a couple stragglers in the hallway.

I slammed shut my locker, and headed toward the gym.

I looked through the window of one of the gym doors. Inside half the overhead lights were off, and the basketball court lay silent in the dimness.

I pushed open the door and walked inside. The coaches' office was dark and seemed locked for the weekend. The soles of my shoes squeaked softly as I slowly made my way toward the locker rooms. I figured if anybody caught me now, I'd tell them I needed to check in the locker room, that I'd lost a ring or something. I could be a very convincing liar. Lying is easy if you know what is going through peoples' minds. You know what mood they are in. You know pretty much what they are willing to believe. But, now, lies were not needed; there was nobody around. All the coaches and gym teachers had fled the school for the weekend, as Jack had guessed.

I glanced at the bleachers. I didn't wonder if he was already hidden beneath them; I sensed he wasn't here yet. Probably he was somewhere in the school, still killing time.

I entered the locker room. The lights had been turned off, but still there was enough light so that I could see without bumping into lockers or tripping over benches. I wandered around, looking for a hiding place. I had thought I might be able to hide atop one of the sections of lockers, but now I saw that the lockers were not high enough; I would have been easily spotted up there. I found the mop closet locked. And all the vent covers were screwed tightly in place. I felt like an idiot. Here I was, a freak that could see into the future, and yet I had not thought to bring a screwdriver.

I sat on one of the benches that were bolted to the floor between the rows of lockers. I waited, but nobody wandered into the room. After a while, I figured I was safe where I was—I didn't have to squeeze into some tight place to hide. I relaxed, stretching out on the bench, my hands crossed on my stomach. I shut my eyes and listened. The only thing I could hear was the distant dripping of a single faucet in the shower room. Soon I fell asleep, so much more easily than I did when I was at home and lying in a soft warm bed.

When I awoke, the room was almost completely dark. I panicked. I wasn't sure how long I had sleep—maybe too long.

I jumped off the bench, and, feeling along the lockers and walls, I made my way back to the gym.

The lights were all off, and the gym was lost in darkness. I walked carefully along the length of the basketball court. When I reached the end of the bleachers, I peered under them, but I couldn't see Jack—everything under the bleachers was lost in inky darkness. I made a couple pssst sounds, just in case, he, too, had fallen asleep. But I got no response. It didn't make sense. He must be under there. I wasn't sure of the exact time, but it should have been more than enough for him to get to his hiding place.

Unless something went wrong.

"Jack," I called out, keeping my voice low.

But there was no answer. Great, I thought, sure that he wasn't there. I should have been relieved, but instead I resented the hell out of him. He'd talked me into this harebrained scheme and for one reason or another he bailed out on me. That should have been a good thing, except, alone or not, I didn't want to be doing this anyway. What was I? The guardian of all tree-hugging bitches?

I stooped over and started to duck walk under the bleachers. I made it halfway down the length of the bleachers, but never stumbled across any sleeping idiot. I found a spot where I could sit, resting my back against the wall, and wonder what to do. I had no watch, so I wasn't exactly sure of the time. It was late, but how late? Had everybody left the building? Was Carl the janitor still lurking around?

While I was trying to figure things out, I heard the gym door open and shut. The lights didn't go on, and a moment later, I heard stirring under the bleachers as Jack crawled toward me. He stopped about four or five feet away and then seemed to settled down to wait, completely unaware that I was nearby.

At first I sat there quietly, listening to his excited breathing and the rustling noise his gym bag made as he shifted it around. Who is this dude? I wondered, for about the thousandth time in the past two days. I avoided reading him, so he remained something of a mystery to me. Was he just some guy obsessed with the paranormal? Did he really have the hots for me? Or was it some combination of both? I wasn't sure I really wanted to know. In any case, he would lead to problems and/or disappointments.

Finally I said, "You're late."

Though I didn't speak loudly, he issued a startled yelp—a rather girlie-sounding startled yelp— and there was sudden movement followed by the loud thunk of skull hitting thick bleacher wood.

He seemed to settle back down again, uttering a low "Ouch." He was probably holding his head in the dark. For a second I genuinely felt sorry for him.

"You okay?" I asked.

"Why am I hitting my head whenever you're around?" he asked.

"You should take a hint—associating with me will only lead to pain."

"No, seriously, lie to me."

"Oh, in that case, it's probably because of my scintillating personality and the allure of my curve-less body."

He chuckled in a pained way.

"I thought you'd be in the locker room," he said.

"Yeah, that didn't work for me. What time is it, anyway?"

"A little before ten," he said.

"Where were you?"

"Drama club rehearsal ran a little long."

I rolled my eyes. "Drama club? Figures."

"What? You have something against drama?"

"Just about everything," I said. "Listen, can we do this thing, and then get out of here?"

"Not yet," he said. "Carl is still in the building. I saw him in the auditorium before I sneaked over here."

"Well, how long is he going stay?"

"I figure another half hour or so."

I sighed. "I feel like an idiot, sitting here."

"Hey, I'm sitting here, too."

"But it must be normal for you to feel like an idiot," I said, and instantly regretted it. "Sorry," I muttered.

We sat in the darkness, under the bleachers in the gym of a closed school. It was a stupid place to find myself. But it was sort of peaceful. Nobody was around, except for Jack, and, really, it was as though he wasn't even there, because he was keeping quiet and I was blocking out his thoughts.

I folded my arms in front of me, and shut my eyes. With any luck, I would doze off and the waiting wouldn't seem so long.

I heard Jack stir as he shifted his gym bag on the floor. He settled down right next to me, his shoulder bumping mine.

"Hey, don't touch me, seriously," I warned him.

"It was an accident."

"Then be careful. It's not a good thing to touch me."

"Why?"

"Because," I said, trying to be patient, "physical contact with anybody causes me to see things about them."

"I don't mind," he said dully.

"I know you don't mind. You ever think that maybe I do mind?" I thought I sounded a bit harsh, so I lighted me tone and said, "Look, touching is bad for me. I can block out people to a certain extent. Actually, I'm getting quite good at that— I have a fair degree of control. But if I have physical contact with another person, I have no control at all. I'm, like, forced to see things about them. Sometimes, it actually hurts."

"Hurts? You mean you feel pain?"

"Not physical pain. That wouldn't be so bad—that I could handle."

"So you can never touch anybody?" he asked, and I thought he finally might be realizing that having paranormal abilities wasn't such a great thing.

"No, never," I said.

"That doesn't seem fair."

"I'm used to the idea. I've known for some time that I'll never get married or have kids or any of the things other people take for granted."

"No kids? You serious?"

"Yeah, totally. I'm horrified at what happens if somebody brushes against me in a store. Sex?—my head would probably explode. So, no, no kids in my future."

Jack was quiet for a while, probably trying to process what I had told him.

"Well..." he said. "Exactly what happens?"

To me, this was a highly personal question. I should have been offended, but, really, this was just Jack, right? It seemed all right for him to ask, and for me to answer. "Nothing good," I said. "I pick up on peoples' memories mostly, their most intense memories, which are usually traumatic. I feel extreme grief or sorrow or fear. One time I was walking down the street and I bumped into this woman. She wasn't watching where she was going. Just that one brief contact... The woman's four-year-old son got hit by a car and killed a week earlier. I couldn't stop feeling the agony she felt. It wouldn't go away. I didn't know how to stop it. I almost..."

"Almost what?"

"Never mind," I said. "Just be careful not to touch me."

"What if somebody didn't have terrible memories?" Jack asked.

"Everybody has terrible memories."

"I don't."

"Believe me, you do—buried somewhere. What time is it, by the way?"

There was a flash of green light as he checked his wristwatch.

"Ten-fifteen."

"That's all."

"Yeah," he said, and was quiet for a long moment, before asking, "I was wondering..."

"Go ahead," I said. I wasn't reading his mind, and yet I knew what he was about to say. You couldn't explain something to him: you had to show him.

"What?"

"Take my hand," I said impatiently, "before I change my mind."

I held my hand out toward him, and he groped around in the dark until he found it.

"Are your hands always this cold?" he asked.

"I'm like walking death. Haven't you noticed? Now shut up," I said. His memories were already flashing through my mind. They seemed pretty harmless. Falling and skinning his knee... followed by crying. Six stitches on the inside of his upper right arm, after he'd tripped and put his arm through the window of his basement door. "I see that you've always been a klutz," I commented, and the images kept coming. His parents fighting over something, which caused him a moderate degree of anxiety, which I could now feel. "You stole money out of your mom's purse to buy a CD?"

"It was the new Avril," he said. "I had to have it."

"Hmmm. You weren't even that guilty."

"It was Avril," he said, as though that justified stealing.

"Okay, here we go—who is Caroline?"

"Freshman crush," he said with disdain.

"Boy, did she do a number on you! I feel like strangling her myself. She actually said you reminded her of her father? That is so cold!"

"But all in all, it's not so bad, is it?" he asked.

"Wait. Wait. Your grandfather died—that's getting pretty bad. You were very sad. You were close to your grandfather. He took you fishing. He took you to the Cubs game... a lot. And—Oh My God!" I cried, feeling a sick surge of adrenaline. My head buzzed. I could barely breathe, the panic I felt was so extreme. I jerked my hand out of his.

"What? What is it?" he asked.

"You saw your dog get hit by a car?"

"Yeah, but he was okay."

"But you didn't think he was okay when it happened."

"No, but the vet operated on him, and--"

"-- cut off his leg!" I finished for him.

"He's alive," Jack offered. "He hops around pretty good, too."

"You don't get the point, do you? You think your memories aren't so bad, but still you have a dead grandfather and a three-legged dog. That's enough to make my skin crawl."

He fell quiet for a moment, and then asked carefully, "You see anything else?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"You know."

"Yeah, I know," I said mildly. "I'm causing you a lot of angst. Right now, my hands are shaking because of your angst. I know you're not making it up or exaggerating, but I still find it hard to believe."

"I think maybe it was one of those love-at-first-sight things," he mumbled. It sounded like an apology.

"I don't believe in love-at-first-sight. I think you just have terrible taste in girls, or some kind of unusual mental condition. Just try to put it out of your mind. If it persists maybe your doctor can give you some kind of medication. It's never going to be possible," I said, and the added, as sort of an offering, "After we find this tree-hugger, we can be friends. I'm down with that. We can have lunch together, and hang out."

"What if I can't be your friend?" he asked.

"Then we have a problem. It's either friend or enemy. I've told you way too much. That's my fault, not yours, and I'm sorry for being so—weak."

"You just need somebody to talk to," he said.

"I don't need anybody," I said. "I just made a mistake by blabbing everything to you."

Just then the gym door creaked open, and the lights came on. Light filtered through the bleachers and cast stripes of shadows across us.

Jack appeared puzzled and panicky. He looked over at me, and I shrugged my shoulders.

I got on my knees, and peered over a thick length of wood. What I saw was grosser than most of the things that flashed through my mind. Carl, the janitor, was plodding across the basketball court. The guy weighed a good 350 pounds, and all he wore were white boxer shorts and a pair of flip-flops. His huge stomach hanged over the waistband of his shorts, and white curly hair covered the expanse of his chest. He waddled over to the sideline, and grabbed a basketball off the rack, and started dribbling it out onto the court.

I sat back down next to Jack.

"Marvelous," I said in a vicious whisper.

We both listened to the lonely thud-thud-thud of Carl dribbling.

"You got to be kidding," Jack whispered.

The basketball thunked as it bounced off the rim.

"Can't you do something?"

"Like what?" I asked.

"I don't know—like plant a suggestion in his mind to go home."

"I can't do that. I can only read what's already there. I'm not Obi Wan Kenobi, you know."

"Well, can you tell how long he's planning on staying?"

I concentrated for a few seconds, and then snorted softly. "The dude thinks in German."

"Figures."

"Well, he won't be too long. Did you ever take a good look at him? He'll get tired, right?"

"I sure hope so," Jack said.

We waited, and then mercifully, after about fifteen minutes, Carl called it quits. He returned the basketball to the rack, and headed for the door. The lights in the gym went out.

We were in the dark again, but something was wrong. There was a soft groaning all around us. The bleachers were slowly rolling in on us.

"He hit the switch!" Jack cried.

There wasn't enough time for us to scuttle along the wall to the end of the bleachers to escape.

For once my pitiful thinness came in handy. I was able to squeeze under one of the bleachers as they began to collapse. I rolled and bounced off a couple lower bleachers and landed hard on the floor. I got up, and I called out to Jack, "Where's the button?" Before he could respond, I picked the answer out of his mind, and started running through the darkness toward the door.

I felt over the wall next to the door. When I caught the light switch I flipped it and the light fixtures above flickered on.

I saw the two buttons, one red and the other black, just beneath the light switch. I quickly pressed the red button, and the bleachers creaked to a halt. They were almost completely closed. I pictured Jack behind them, crushed like a bug. I saw blood gushing out of his mouth and ears. I saw his head flattened like a pumpkin under a car tire. I pressed the black button, and the bleachers started to inch forward and expand until they were fully opened again.

For a moment everything froze. I couldn't read Jack, and thought for sure he was dead. I couldn't move my feet, to go and check if I was right.

Then he emerged from the far end of the bleachers. He was slightly hunched over, carrying his gym bag with one hand and holding his head with the other.

As he walked toward me I was furious. I wanted to punch and kick him. I hated so much that I had felt scared for him. I didn't want to feel anything for him.

When he stopped before me, he was still holding his head.

"Don't say it," he said.

"Hiding under the bleachers," I hissed. "What a dumb-ass idea."

"Can't we just get this over with," he said meekly.

"Yeah, definitely," I seethed, wishing my heart would stop hammering against the inside of my ribcage. "And after we're finished, I don't even know you. Got it?"

I turn round and stormed out of the gym and into the dark hallway.

We made our way up the dark stairwell to the second floor. Jack was behind me with the flashlight, and as we jogged up the stairs, the beam of light made creepy jiggling shadows all around us.

We came out on the main second floor hallway. Before we headed for the girls' room, we turned the other way and went to the end of the hall, where a large window overlooked the parking lot. We had to make sure Carl had left the building. We didn't need any more surprises.

When we reached the window, we saw Carl's beat-up red pick-up truck just as it started to rumble out of the dark lot. At least now we had the entire building to ourselves—just me, love-puppy Jack, and whatever creature lurked in the girls' room.

***************

Jack wanted to enter the room first. How gallant! Maybe he was trying to make up for being such a nitwit. I found the gesture more annoying than endearing. I wondered if he would be so eager if I had told him that I heard something growling in there earlier.

"Go right ahead," I said. I took the flashlight from him, so that he could open the door and slip between the two lengths of police tape. I really wanted something to be inside, something hideous and festering, to scare the beans out of him. Maybe that way he would finally get the message that this paranormal stuff wasn't as cool as he believed—that it could be downright dangerous. Maybe, then, too, he would think of me differently, and leave me alone. But all this was wishful thinking; Jack was, at best, a very slow learner.

Once inside, he stood with his back to the door, holding it open for me.

I rolled my eyes, and gave the flashlight back to him. I slipped between the police tape easily.

It was only after the door shut behind us that I noticed how chilly the air was in the bathroom. Jack was moving the flashlight back and forth. The beam of light swept over the sinks and stalls and pretty pink tiled walls. I felt dizzy as I watched the light playing over everything. Finally I reached over and flipped the light switch next to the interior doorway.

Jack shrieked and squinted when the bright light filled the room.

"Somebody will see," he complained.

"Nobody's here," I said.

"Somebody will see from outside."

"If they do, they'll just think somebody forgot to turn off the light."

Reluctantly, he turned off the flashlight, and returned it to his bag.

We both wandered around the room, checking things out. Everything looked pretty normal to me.

"Hey, why's the girls' room so much nicer than the guys' room?" Jack asked.

"Duh."

"What? I really want to know."

"If I have to explain that to you, then you're hopeless."

"Well, I guess I'm hopeless."

"My point exactly," I said, and then asked, "Does it seem cold in here to you?"

He considered it a second or two. "Maybe a little. It must be chilly outside by now."

"I think it's a bit more than that."

"Drops in room temperatures usually accompany the presence of a ghost," he stated.

I stopped in front of him. "You read that in a book."

He shrugged. "I heard that from a lot of sources."

"Well, it doesn't always work that way. Jerry shows up at home every single morning, and never once did I feel the slightest draft when he was around. Besides, this is different," I said, "This isn't cold spots. It's the whole room. The coldness seems evenly distributed from wall to wall. Do we know which stall Mary Jo was in when she vanished?"

"No," he said.

I crossed over to the first of the three stalls. I eyed it carefully. Everything looked safe, so I stepped inside. I felt the floor round the toilet base with the toe of my gym shoe, and the floor seemed solid enough. I leaned over and ran my hand over the wall behind the toilet. Other than feeling abnormally cool, the wall seemed all right. I repeated this process with the other two stalls, but discovered nothing that suggested it was possible a person could slip through to an alternate dimension or, for that matter, to any place else.

I stepped out of the third stall, and saw that Jack had been watching me closely the entire time.

"I don't get it," I said.

"Maybe the timing isn't right," he suggested. "It's not midnight yet."

I gave him a look. "Midnight? The witching hour? You're kidding me, right?"

"There is some truth to every myth."

I sighed. "Jack, really--"

"No, listen," he said, and seemed agitated. "I know you think I'm stupid, but I'm right about this. When did Mary Jo disappear?"

"Not at midnight—that's for sure."

"No, at lunch-time," he said. "Noon and midnight— different sides of the same coin."

I wagged my head. "I don't know about that."

"Did any of the cops go missing in here?" he asked, with greater confidence.

"No."

"When did the cops take their lunch breaks?"

"I see what you mean," I said, yet still I wasn't convinced.

Jack looked at his wristwatch, and said, "It's almost eleven-fifteen. So we wait an hour, and see what happens."

"Sure, why not," I said, but I couldn't shake the feeling this might end up being one huge waste of time.

Jack sat down on the hard floor, and tried to make himself comfortable, while I slowly paced the length of the room. A couple times I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror that stretched across the wall above the sinks. My hair looked stringier than usual, my face...paler, my eyes... wearier. I looked like a 98-pound corpse that had somehow crawled her way out of a grave. How could anybody possibly find me attractive? I hopped onto the counter, so that I didn't have to look at the mirror, sitting there with my feet dangling above the floor.

We waited, with neither of us saying a word. Since I'd met him, this was the longest I witnessed Jack not running his mouth. One part of me wanted to read his mind, but the other part didn't want to know anything. What if he was thinking something weird? What if that weird something had to do with me? What if I just got static, like you get when you tune into an open radio signal? No, I decided for sure; it was best not to know. You must never let yourself believe that somebody is thinking something that will make you happy.

The room was getting colder. At first I thought it was my imagination, but then goose-bumps started to rise on my bare arms. I hadn't been anticipating an Arctic blast. All I wore were jeans, gym shoes, and a light t-shirt. I never wore socks or a bra, because to me neither seemed to serve much of a purpose.

I hugged myself to try to stay warm, but it did no good. And my feet felt like two pieces of ice. So I slid off the counter and paced the floor again, hoping that would help keep me warm.

Jack watched me walk back and forth, sitting placidly on the floor with his legs crossed before him. He didn't seem the least bit bothered by the chill.

"Aren't you cold?" I asked.

"I have warm blood," he said.

"Lucky you."

I checked the stalls again. Everything was the same, except that a thin layer of ice had formed on the water in the toilet in the second stall. The wall in there felt somewhat colder than the walls in the other two stalls.

"I think she vanished from the middle stall," I said, and told him about the ice. "Do you know if anybody complained about it being cold in here?"

"No," he said. "I heard some of the girls said that it seemed too warm, but, you know, that was during the day."

I supposed that made sense, in a way. "What time is it?"

"Eleven-fifty," he said, after glancing at his watch.

If he was right about the whole midnight thing, something should happen soon.

I sat on the floor across from him. We stared at each other for a moment. He really wasn't such a bad guy. If I weren't such a freak, I might even consider dating him. I realized that every time I'd got mad at him, it was because of my issues, not his. He had only been trying to treat me as a normal human being. His mistake had simply been in not understanding how truly abnormal I was. As I thought about all this, I started to experience an unpleasant irritating feeling that I was pretty sure was guilt. It was not a feeling with which I was familiar, because, frankly, I was not a caring person. You have to care first to end up feeling guilty later.

"I have to be honest with you," I said.

"You're really madly in love with me, too, but afraid to admit it?"

"Uh—no, not even close. What I didn't tell you—and should have—was that earlier today I passed by and tried to get a read on the room, and, well, I heard something growling in here."

"Growling?"

"Yeah, like some kind of—I don't know—wild animal."

He blinked his eyes, and then stared at the floor thinking for a moment, before looking back up at me.

"And you're telling me this now?"

"To be fair to you, so you can leave before it's too late, just in case--" I shrugged—"Mary Jo actually got eaten by something."

He frowned. "You're making this up, right?" he asked.

I shook my head.

"Growling, really?" he asked.

"Feral growling," I said.

"And so," he said, still trying to figure things out, "you're telling me this and expecting me to run away."

"I'm not expecting anything. I'm just telling you, to be fair. So if you want to stay, stay. If you want to go, go. It doesn't matter to me either way."

"It doesn't matter if I leave you here alone?"

"No, why would it? I mean, I'm stuck with this weird stuff. I don't really have a choice. You do."

"I couldn't leave you here," he said. "What if you need my help?"

I laughed. "That's doubtful."

"Well, I'm staying," he said stubbornly.

"Then stay."

He glowered at me, as though I'd just played some practical joke on him.

A few minutes later I noticed that something was happening in the middle stall. The wall behind the toilet looked strange, shimmering as though invisible heat waves were coming off it.

Jack noticed it at the same time I did.

"It looks like a mirage," he said.

"Yeah, doesn't it?"

We both rose to our feet and stepped toward the stall to examine the phenomenon more closely.

An invisible layer of something that looked like clear gelatin was swirling and shimmering and slowly growing thicker, edging forward, enveloping the entire toilet and filling half the stall. The patterns of motion within the clear substance were mesmerizing. The shimmers, which had been yellowish, now became many colors—red, blue, pink, and purple, and a hundred other colors, some of which I had never imagined. The colors swirled around a small depression that was forming, growing wider and deeper. Then, little by little, as the depression grew, the colors faded to black and so did the clear substance that quickly started to resemble molten tar. Suddenly the depression flexed and transformed into a huge gaping mouth that twisted and emitted a loud wail.

Jack and I jumped back at the same time.

"You seeing what I'm seeing?" I asked, not looking at Jack, not tearing my eyes away from what was in the stall.

"A huge ugly mouth?" I heard him ask.

"Oh, good. It's not just me, then."

I looked over at Jack. His eyes seemed twice their normal size, and his skin was about as pale as mine.

"What do you think?" I asked.

"Uh, I don't know. Honestly, I'm fighting off the urge to run."

"Big help," I snorted. I studied the large dark maw. There were no visible teeth, which, I supposed, was a positive sign. "It doesn't look like it's going to come out of the stall."

"Not yet," he said.

"So any ideas, because I have nothing here."

Jack shrugged weakly. "It looks like a mouth, but really it's just a portal connecting one place to another. Why don't you try call to Mary Jo? Maybe she'll hear you?"

So I tried that, stepping up as close as I dared, calling out Mary Jo's name several times.

Nothing happened at first. Then the mouth became animated, looking as though it might be chewing an enormous wad of gum, and then, like somebody about to make a bubble, puckered up and blew an icy breath.

An object shot out of the mouth and clattered to the floor between Jack and me. We jumped to the side, not recognizing the object at first. When we did realize what it was, we gave each other a look that cried, What's with that?

On the floor at our feet, a tiny wind-up plastic duck waddled about aimlessly.

"I don't get it," Jack said dully.

I stooped down to pick up the duck. Its little legs were still pumping up and down, slowly losing strength until they stopped.

"A little kid's toy," I murmured.

"Probably fell through another aperture, some other place, some other time."

I squinted at him. "You mean this kind of thing might happen at the time?"

"Who knows?"

"Well, it would sure explain why I keep losing hair brushes."

Jack seemed emboldened at the harmlessness of the toy.

"Maybe I should try a spell," I said.

"Really, I don't think that's a good idea."

"Why not?"

"Because we don't know what we're dealing with here. I don't think trial-and-error is the way to go with this thing."

"Then what? Years of research?" he said. "This thing—whatever it is—isn't going to be here forever. One day it's going to stop appearing, and then there goes Mary Jo—forever. Look at that toy—you do know they were big in the 1970s."

I sighed. "All right—try a spell."

He retrieved the notebook from his gym bag. He flipped through the pages until he settled on something. Before he started to read, I came up from behind him and pushed him into position directly in front of the stall.

"There, perfect," I said. "Now when you read whatever it is you're going to read, don't even look over at me. I don't want there to be the chance of an accident. I have enough problems already, and I really don't need green skin and warts."

Jack recited something that sounded like a combination of Latin and gibberish. When he was finished, I leaned in to get a good look into the stall. The large mouth hovered there completely unchanged.

"Maybe try it again," I suggested. "This time try to sound a bit more in charge."

I gave him a good luck slap on the shoulder, and stepped aside.

Jack started to repeat the spell. He lowered his voice, and did managed to sound commanding.

I noticed that pink light was flaring around the mouth. The flares looked tiny bursts of aural light, and as Jack read, the color slowly changed from pink to a deep bloody red.

"Uh... Jack," I said. "I think you should stop."

But he was on a roll. He waved me off with his free hand.

"Seriously, I don't think it likes whatever you're saying."

But he wasn't listening.

The mouth began to twist and contort wildly, and then seemed to suck inward.

"Jack, stop! I'm not kidding. Something's wrong."

Just then the mouth expelled a large greenish glob of matter that struck Jack in the chest. It looked exactly as though he'd been hit by a huge slimy booger. Green goo covered the front of his shirt and dangled off his chin. He held his arms out to the side, like a scarecrow, and uttered a yelp of disgust.

"Why don't you ever listen to me?" I asked, but he didn't hear me. He raced over to the paper towel dispenser on the wall, and started cleaning off the gross gunk. All I could do was shake my head.

I went up to the stall and faced the mouth. It seemed calm again. By now I was sure that this was much more than just a portal to another place. It had to be a living thing; only living things give off an aura or aural lights. I wasn't sure, though, whether it was dangerous. I didn't think so. I figured if it was truly dangerous, it would have done more than just hock a loogie at Jack.

I tried to read it, but I got nothing. I stepped into the stall, and didn't feel at all unsafe. So I reached out to touch it.

It felt soft, doughy, and not quite as cold as the air around it. It didn't seem agitated by my touch, and so I let my hand linger there. I allowed my mind to drift, to reach out and make contact with whatever was in there or behind there or through there.

"What are you doing?" Jack screeched behind me.

I shushed him. I let my mind drift further than I had ever before allowed it to drift. I had always been afraid that it if I let go too much, I might never be able to reel my senses in and get them back under control. But now it seemed necessary to reach out far with my senses. This wasn't like reading a human being, who occupies a small space in the here and now. This thing was spread out over a vast distance, over space and time and dimension. Little by little, I felt I was contacting it, encompassing the enormity of it, with my freak senses. When I realized what it was, I couldn't help grinning. It was so delightful and pure and logical.

I withdrew my hand, and turned round to face Jack.

"I understand now," I said.

"What?"

"It's a little kid."

No sooner were the words out of my mouth than the room seemed to swirl around.

The next thing I knew I was laying on the cold floor. Jack was kneeling over me, holding a bloody wad of paper towel.

"You okay?" he asked anxiously.

My head was clear now, but I felt completely drained. I pushed myself up into sitting position, and it felt as though I weighed a thousand pounds.

"What happened?" I asked.

"You fainted."

"Did not. Only wimps faint."

Jack looked at me gravely.

"I think I should take you to the emergency room," he said.

"No, no emergency rooms," I said. "Are you kidding? Too much for me to see in emergency rooms—people who got decapitated in car accidents ten years ago, and such."

"You had a bad nose bleed," he said.

"It's all right. It happens sometimes," I told him.

"You looked like you were dead."

"You still think what I have is a gift?" I asked. "Hey, help me up, huh? I'll feel better once I'm on my feet."

"You're sure about that?" he asked, but put his arm round my back and helped me to stand.

I leaned against the metal frame of the door. My legs were rubbery, and I was short of breath.

I noticed that Jack was looking at me with great concern, and I told him to shut up before he had the chance to say something stupid.

"It's like a child, a bored little child," I said. "All it's doing is playing—well, that's what it thinks it's doing."

"Did you sense Mary Jo?" he asked.

"No, nothing. But I'm sure she's there...somewhere. It has her. It tried to play with her, the way it's playing with us now. It really doesn't mean any harm."

"Yeah, right," he snorted.

"It wants us to take her back," I said. "The best I can tell, it's playing Keep Away."

"Keep Away?" he asked, his voice rising an octave or so. "You got to be kidding."

I was starting to feel a little better. I walked across the room to the sinks, and checked myself out in the mirror. I looked worse than usual. There was some drying blood under my nose. "Hey, hand me a couple of those towels," I said.

I wet the towels with cool water and wiped my face.

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

"Sure, but make it fast. I don't think we have much time."

"Do you really like me?"

"You read my mind. You know."

"Just double-checking."

"Why?"

I glanced at him and grinned. He looked puzzled, but figured it out pretty fast.

"No!" he yelled.

Before he could stop me, I spun round, raced toward open stall, and made a flying leap into the huge gaping mouth that seemed content to swallow me.

*************

I was lost in inky darkness, and there was a loud humming in my ears. I was falling, and the feeling of falling was curious; it felt as though I was falling very fast, and yet, because of the absolute darkness around me, it appeared that I was hovering in space and not moving at all.

Then there were flashes of pale blue light all around, like claws of lightening, defining a tunnel that was invisible because everything was so black. The humming in my ears grew so loud I thought my eardrums might rupture. The pain was unbearable. I screamed but couldn't hear my screams because of the humming. Just as I thought for sure that I would pass out from the pain, I exploded into another place.

I landed with a sickening slap on a floor, and slid forward and my head struck a wall. I rolled onto my back, holding my head, my eyes shut tight in agony. Intense pain pulsed behind my eyes, but then slowly receded. After a moment I was able to sit up and look around. My eyes were blurry and I wasn't sure I was seeing right, because I found myself sitting on the floor in another bathroom. It looked exactly like the bathroom I had just left except for one thing: there were absolutely no colors. Everything was black and white and shades of gray. It was like suddenly finding yourself in an old movie. I shuddered to discover that I, too, was colorless. I looked down and saw that my blue jeans were dark gray, my arms and hands were so white they nearly glowed, my hair looked like strings of ash. I wondered if maybe something was wrong with my eyesight, but then decided that, no, this was just the way it was here.

Well, this must be the place, I decided.

I staggered to my feet. I went over to the mirror. I was stunned to see that I looked even worse in black-and-white than I did in color.

Okay, now where would a tree-hugger like Mary Jo go? I wondered. Three days had passed. It was too much to expect her to stay here in the bathroom.

I walked out into the hallway, which stretched gray and deserted in both directions. Everything was filled with a dim light, although none of the lights were on. Strangely, it did not seem like the middle of the night here, but nor did it seem like day.

I called out Mary Jo's name, loudly, but there was nothing. My voice did not even echo, but sounded flat and confined, as though it didn't carry more than a couple feet.

I walked down the hallway. The rubber soles of my shoes did not make their usual short squeaky sounds.

I searched the school for a while, the empty classrooms, the deserted gym, the abandoned main office.... It didn't take long before I started to kick myself mentally. Some plan, right? Just jump into the thing that looked like a big mouth, get spit into another reality, and then what? Search for weeks, months, or years to find a single lost girl? Brilliant, utterly brilliant!

I walked through an exit door and discovered that everything outside was just as gray and forsaken as inside the school. The parking lot was empty, and no cars moved down the street. The grass was a medium shade of gray. The leaves on the trees were a slightly lighter shade of gray. The sky was milky white and there didn't appear to be a sun. There didn't appear to be birds or squirrels, and the world was as silent as the inside of a locked closet. Man, I didn't know exactly where this place was, but they must not have got jack in the way of tourism.

I sat on one of the benches and tried to think things out. Mary Jo had been here for three days. So exactly where would a tree-hugger go in a place like this? Maybe she would try going home. That was what I would do—go home and try to find somebody. But what if she couldn't find anybody at home, or anyplace else? Where would she go, then? Really, she could be anywhere in the city by now, wandering around, looking for help that wasn't there.

Suddenly there was a low rumbling noise. At first I thought it was thunder, but then I felt the bench vibrating. The tremor grew stronger and stronger, until it nearly tossed me off the bench. Then it stopped just as abruptly as it had begun.

An earthquake? In Chicago? That would be rare, but then again this wasn't my Chicago.

I went back into the school with a sense of urgency. I needed to find out Mary Jo's home address, so I went to the main office. I sat at one of the desks, and tried to get into the computer system. But, maddeningly, I couldn't get the computer to power up. Everything was plugged in—there just wasn't any electric. On a hunch I checked all the desk drawers. They were empty—no forms, no staplers, no paper clips, nothing. Everything was a fake, as though it was never meant to be used.

I wandered out of the office, not sure what to do next. When I saw the drinking fountain in the hallway, I realized how thirsty I was. But the fountain probably didn't work. Nothing here seemed to work. Still I tried the fountain, and was surprised when an arc of water rose from the faucet. It sampled the water; it was cold and tasted normal, and I drank some more. When I finished, I was struck with a thought. Basic needs. Water is a basic need. Mary Jo would need water. She would need shelter, too, but here that would be no problem; this city, this entire world, seemed uninhibited, but there were thousands, maybe millions, of buildings. That left only food. The lunchroom, I thought, and started running down the hallway.

The large room was silent and sad. Row after row of tables at which nobody would ever sit to eat. Absent was the low hum of gossip, punctuated by the occasional catcall. There was no lunch line of kids jostling each other to see what was in the glass cases. There were no white-uniformed lunch ladies wearing hair-nets and doling out dubious dishes from the steam trays. But there was something, I noticed; the lingering aroma of food. Was it just my imagination? After I sniffed the air some more, I determined that it wasn't my imagination at all. I could smell—what?—buffalo wings, pasta sauce, maybe enchiladas. The smell of food was real, the realest thing I discovered so far in this place.

As I approached the lunch counter, I heard the clang of a folk or spoon hitting the floor. I stopped in my tracks, startled because I couldn't see anybody. But then Mary Jo popped up behind the steam tables.

She didn't notice me, but went about her business, which seemed to be searching through the shelves under the counter. She had that all-American look that lot of people like, but that tended to make me want to vomit. The bright blue eyes. High cheekbones. Toothy smiles. Pert nose. A light dusting of freckles across her face. Now as she stood there, looking down at the low shelves, she frowned—in an adorable sort of way, of course – and I wondered why did I want to rescue her again? This was a person who in a million years would never be my friend. She had as much reason to like me as I had to like her. Yet I could never leave her here, like this, all alone in a gray world.

I stepped up to the counter.

"Mary Jo?" I said.

She looked up at me. "Oh," she said, but wasn't startled; she seemed to take my sudden presence in stride. "You don't happen to know where they keep those little wet towel thingies, do you?"

"Uh, no," I said.

She shrugged in a perky way. "Oh, well, I guess they ran out."

She had a plate, which she started to pile up with food from the steam trays. There were chicken wings that looked charred black, and gray enchiladas covered with a light gray sauce. There was a tray that was filled with some kind of soup that looked like a mud puddle.

"I thought you were supposed to be a vegan or something," I said.

"I am," she said pleasantly. "But this doesn't count. How could it?" She looked up from her plate at me. It was as though she saw me for the first time. "Hey, I know you. You're that spooky girl, right?"

"I suppose," I said. I was wondering whether she had hit her head even harder than me when she slipped into this reality.

"Strange that you're here."

"I think so," I said. "But, really, we need to get out of here."

"But why?" she asked. "It seems that I've been running around all day, looking for people, and now I'm starved," she said, rolling her eyes. "Well, you know how it is. What are you anyway?—a starver or a barfer?"

"What?"

"Anorexia or bulimia. Or maybe both. Let me check out your teeth."

"My teeth?"

"Look, nothing counts here, right? So why don't you grab a plate and pig out. Might as well."

She took her plate and walked out from behind the counter. I followed her to one of the tables, where she sat and started to eat.

"We don't have time for this," I said, looking down at her.

"Sure we do," she said. She took a chicken wing and shoved it up toward my face. She tried to put it in my mouth, but I blocked her and grabbed it from her.

I wondered what was wrong with her. I was pretty sure this wasn't the way she normally acted. I remembered what Jerry had said about no telling what kind of damage might be caused to a person who stayed too long in an alternate reality.

Then the floor started to shake, as it had done when I was outside. A couple dishes fell somewhere and shattered. I decided to sit across from her before I was knocked off my feet. Through it all, Mary Jo kept eating, completely untroubled. When the earthquake stopped, she smiled at me, and said in a playful way, "Rumble, rumble."

"Let me ask you something," I said.

"You going to eat that chicken wing?"

"No."

"Then you can't ask."

"I don't eat meat," I said.

"Admirable. But I told you: it doesn't count here. It tastes like real food, but it isn't."

I looked at the chicken wing in my hand. I decided what the heck, and took a bit. Although it was black, it tasted like a regular hot wing. Not only that, I didn't get any flashes of the chicken as its head had been cut off, or any other grisly images that usually flashed through my mind whenever I ate meat.

I stared at Mary Jo, and, still chewing her food, she smiled.

"Good, isn't it?" she asked, and a fleck of meat flew from her mouth.

I reached over and grabbed her arm, much tighter than I intended. She yelped a complaint, but I held on. I wasn't getting anything from her, not a single thought or errant feeling. It freaked me out. I always got something from people, but now Mary Jo seemed as empty as a zombie.

"Something wrong?" she asked.

I shook my head, eyeing her warily.

"Then you think I could have my arm back?"

I let go and she resumed eating.

"Mary Jo," I said. "What do you think is happening?"

"Right now—I'm eating."

"I mean, where do you think you are?"

"That's obvious," she chortled.

"Tell me."

She shrugged her shoulder. "In a dream, of course."

"This isn't a dream."

"Of course, it is," she said, looking at me as though I were an imbecile. "Look around. Everything is in black-and-white. I dream in black-and-white. Most people do, you know. Dreaming in color is pretty rare—or so I've heard."

"And why would I be in your dream?" I asked.

She wagged a half-eaten chicken wing at me. "You know, I've been wondering that. I don't even know you, right? You'd think that my friends would be in a dream. But aside from you I haven't seen anybody—not a soul. It's sort of strange."

"Because it's not a dream."

"Then what is it? You tell me," she said, starting to lose patience.

"I don't know—not a dream, though." I wasn't about to tell her that we had ended up in an alternate reality. She'd never believe that.

"It has to be a dream. If it wasn't a dream, I'd be running around in a panic tearing my hair out."

"Why?" I asked cautiously.

"When I first found myself here, I went looking for somebody. Who wouldn't, right? A dream is a lonely place. But I looked and looked, but couldn't find anybody. What a dumb dream, right?

"So I walked home. It's not far—six, seven blocks. I found the house unlocked. My mom, who is almost always home, wasn't there. My grandpa, who has a small apartment in the basement, wasn't there, either. That was really strange; he's confined to a wheelchair, and never goes anywhere.

"So I decided to grab my bike and ride around. I could cover a lot more ground that way, right? I didn't see anybody anywhere. The whole city is, like, a ghost town. Then a tremor hit. It knocked me right off the bike. Well, I knew this is a dream. So I figured I was lying in bed sleeping at home and maybe my kid brother decided to jump on my bed. He does things like that—the little nuisance. Anyway, I didn't think much about the earthquake until I reached the lake. Boy, that was weird! The lake wasn't there. No kidding. Nothing was there. There was the beach, and then a drop-off to nothingness. Then when another tremor hit, I saw what was happening; the beach crumbled away and fell into the nothingness."

"Was that the first day you were here?" I asked, starting to feel a bit panicky myself.

"The first day?" she asked, frowning. "What are you talking about? I've only been here for, maybe, seven, eight hours."

So, on top of everything else, time didn't work the same here as I did in the real world. That plus the fact that this reality seemed to be collapsing into oblivion gave me a greater sense of urgency. I jumped up from my seat.

"We really need to go—now," I said.

Mary Jo seemed amused.

"Go? Go where?"

"Look, this 'dream' is vanishing."

"Yeah, I know, but so what? I figure when it's gone, that's when I'll wake up. Until then, I plan to finish lunch."

I grabbed her by her arm, and started pulling her out of her chair. She whined and shrieked, but finally allowed herself to be dragged away from the table. I started towing her toward the exit.

"I don't get it," she said, still chewing on food. "This is the weirdest damned dream I have ever had."

I kept pulling her, and didn't stop until we were back where she'd started, in the girls' bathroom.

"What are we doing here?" she demanded. "Ohmigod, this isn't getting creepy now, is it?"

"Just shut up, and do what I tell you."

"I knew it, I knew it," she moaned, in dread. "Don't touch me. I'm warning you—do not touch me."

I pushed in the door to the middle stall, and sure enough, the inside was half-filled with the black gelatinous substance.

Mary Jo stared into the stall. She no longer feared for her virtue, or whatever she had thought she was about to lose.

"What is that?" she asked, wrinkling her nose.

"It's hard to explain."

"It wasn't there before."

"It is now," I said, "and you need to jump into it."

"Jump in it?" she screeched.

"It's a dream. Who cares, right?"

"No way am I jumping in that. Not even in a dream."

Then the floor and walls started quaking, this time with greater intensity than before. It lasted longer, too, and didn't cease until the large mirror over the sinks shattered.

"We don't have time for this," I said. I grabbed her by the shoulder, spun her so that she faced the stall, and, as hard as I could, booted her in the butt.

She flew forward, and ended up sticking half in, half out of the black goo. She looked back at me, and cried, "This is so gross!" And then she was suddenly sucked in all the way, presumably heading back where she belonged.

I lingered there alone, in a world that wouldn't exist much longer. Except that it was vanishing, it might not have been a bad place for me; there were no ghosts to trouble me, no people with strange thoughts going through their heads, no future to see, no gory visions whenever I ate meat. It was a world where I could have been normal, only there was nobody with whom to share it. I suspected that maybe I had always been wrong; everybody needs people, even me.

When I looked back into the stall, I saw that there was about eight feet of rope coming out of the wall of black stuff. The roped wiggled impatiently on the floor, like some crazy snake.

"Pathetic," I murmured, shaking my head. "Truly pathetic."

Still I bent down and seized the end of the rope. I wrapped it around my waist and a moment later, a sharp jerk pulled me into the soft black wall and I was heading home.

*************

"What took you so long?" Jack demanded, standing over me.

I was lying on the floor again, holding my achy head, but at least this floor, and the wall that had just hit headfirst, was in my world.

"Just habitually tardy, I guess," I said, and got to my feet. My skull felt like an enormous throbbing balloon. I had matching lumps on the crown of my head. If I didn't watch it, I'd have to change my nickname from Freaky Jules to Knotty Cranium.

I saw that Mary Jo was laid out across the sinks on the counter. She looked dead.

"What did she do? Get knocked out?"

"She came through unconscious," Jack informed me. "She flew out of the aperture like a rag doll. She's breathing and everything—just totally out of it."

I stood there studying Mary Jo. "She's much less annoying when she's unconscious."

"So what happened?"

I shrugged. "I found her." I gave him a bare-bones account of what had happened, what it had been like. I saw no reason to give him every last detail; he was altogether too obsessed with weird stuff.

In return Jack informed me that it was now Saturday night, that, although it seemed to me only about an hour passed, I had been missing for nearly a full day. "It took more than an hour between the time Mary Jo returned and the time you popped back in," he said.

I grunted. "So time didn't work the same there."

"Apparently not," he said.

I studied him from head to foot. He looked like a wreck. He looked like how I felt.

"And you waited here?"

"What was I supposed to do? I couldn't leave you," he said. "I spent most of this morning ducking Creepy Carl. I guess Saturday is when he buffs the hallway floors," he added wryly.

"I can't believe you waited."

"You would have done the same for me," he said.

"You sure about that?" I really didn't think I would have, but it was nice to know he thought better of me.

We both stood there and looked at Mary Jo. She seemed so peaceful. Probably now she was actually dreaming.

"So what do we do?" Jack asked.

"We go home."

"We leave her here—like this."

"Sure. As soon as we open an exit door, the alarm will go off. So we prop the door open with something. The cops will check out the building, and, poof, they find her. A miracle, right?"

"But what if she tells the cops what happened?"

"Well, for one thing," I said patiently, "you don't have a thing to worry about. She never saw you, right? And what is she going to tell them about me? That I came to her in a dream and rescued her?"

He shook his head. "They'll send her to a shrink."

"Better her than me," I said.

Jack gathered up his rope, and stuffed it into his gym bag with his other things.

Before we left, we checked the bathroom again. The black matter in the toilet stall was gone, and everything looked normal, except for the sleeping girl lying on the sink counter and the remnants of a huge slimy booger splashed across the floor.

************

"You're going to love this!" Melody roared.

This was the first thing she said when I answered my cell phone. It was Sunday night, and I was still lying in my bed. I had slept on and off since I returned home in the small hours of the morning. My head ached. My knees hurt. My lower back was killing me. And I had had another nasty nosebleed that didn't quite want to stop. So I was in no mood for Melody's perkiness.

"Mel, can't it wait until tomorrow?" I asked.

"No, no, you have to hear this."

"Please," I begged.

"They found Mary Jo Mason."

"Yeah, I saw it on the news."

"But the news didn't give all the details," she insisted.

"No?" I was more than mildly interested in what had happened after Jack and I fled the school. How exactly had the cops found Mary Jo? What happened after they found her? Was she questioned, and if so, what did she say? All day I had been half-expecting the cops to knock on my door.

"I got it all from my mom," Melody said.

"Give it up, bitch," I told her.

"All right," she said. "The burglar alarm goes off last night at the school, right? So when the cops respond to the call, they find an open door. I think it was propped with an office chair or something. Anyway, they search the entire school for intruders, and they find Mary Jo."

"Really?" I said, faking surprise better than I thought I could.

"Straight up," Melody said.

"See. I told you—there was nothing to worry about."

"Wait. Wait. There's more."

"What?"

"They found her in the bathroom, the bathroom she disappeared from."

"Yeah?"

"She was sleeping on the counter."

"Really," I said. "Isn't that something?"

"But this is the best part, the part you're going to love. You know what the cops did after they found her?—Really, you're going love this."

"Why? What did they do?" I asked.

"They arrested her."

I sat bolt upright in bed. "They didn't."

"No kidding. Slapped hand-cuffs on her and dragged her away."

"Wow," I said. I felt a little like laughing, but then, instantly, I felt sorry for Mary Jo. She had been through an ordeal, whether or not she realized it.

"Well, she didn't have any identification with her, and she didn't look much like the picture her parents gave the cops when she went missing," Melody explained. "So, yeah, I guess they had to arrest her for trespassing. But after they found out who she was, they dropped the whole thing."

"You know what she told the cops?—I mean, about where she was for those three days."

"Oh, I don't know," she said, and I could picture Melody rolling her eyes. "She told the cops some crazy stuff. It sounds like she's in for some counseling."

"Well, at least they found her," I said.

"I suppose that's the most important thing."

"Yeah," I murmured, and couldn't think of anything else to say.

After I got off the phone with Melody, I lay there thinking for a long while. I wasn't sure how I felt about the whole thing. I'd found Mary Jo and brought her back and now she was safe at home with her family. Anybody else might have felt pride or satisfaction, but I didn't feel those things at all. Mainly I felt selfish. I didn't do anything for Mary Jo. I didn't do anything because I was a caring, concerned person. Whatever I did, I did for myself. That was how I was, and I really didn't believe I would ever change.

The one thing that kept returning to my mind was what it had been like in that other reality. There I could not read people. I could not see the future. I had no flashes of freaky insight. For a brief time, I knew what it would be like to be normal, and having experienced that, I decided I could never be that way. It didn't feel right, because it wasn't me. I was Freaky Jules, that was who I was meant to be, and for the first time I started to see that that was all right. After all, a lot of people are different, in some way and to some degree. There are a lot of freaks in this world, and one day, sooner or later, we are going to take over everything.

All the excitement surrounding Mary Jo died down in the following weeks.

Things went by to the same old routine, except now there was Jack. He started to join Melody and me for lunch every day. I didn't really need another friend, but I didn't mind. Some friendships begin with a secret, and once they begin they almost have to last—or else. I believed that Jack would always keep my secrets. Maybe someday I would finally break down and date him, but probably not.

One day I felt an anxiety attack coming on in the lunchroom again. I had to go outside. The days were getting sunnier and warmer. The grass was dark green and the breeze was soft and the air smelled sweet. Everything outside calmed me down. I sat on one of the benches and relaxed.

Awhile later, Jack sat on the opposite end of the bench. We sat there and didn't say anything to each other for a long time. It felt good to share silence with him.

Then he said, "I have three words for you."

"Jack, cut it out. We've already talked about this."

He looked confused at first, but then he got it. "Oh, no, not those three words. I wasn't thinking anything like that."

"What three words are you talking about?"

"Can you keep an open mind?" he asked.

"It's impossible for me not to."

"Okay, here it is," he said: "Spontaneous Human Combustion."

"What?" I stared at him in horror.

"I'm serious," he said. "There are some seriously weird things going on."

"No."

"Jules, really, you need to hear this...."

I was already on my feet walking away. I didn't look back. I walked faster and faster, but knowing Jack Kilgore, I realized I would never be able to walk away fast enough.

Freaky Jules

Pants on Fire

Adler Aardvarks' outfielder on fire.

The long-time rivalry between the Adler Aardvarks and the Medill Mavericks heated up this Friday evening—literally.

The Aardvarks held a one-run lead in the fourth inning, when a routine fly ball turned out to be anything but routine. As Aardvark center-fielder, senior Jeremy Bliss, ran to catch the ball, over two hundred horrified spectators watched as Bliss apparently burst into flames. Quick-acting teammates helped to put out the fire, but not before Bliss sustained second- and third-degree burns over forty percent of his body.

Bliss is currently in a hospital burn unit, where his condition is listed as serious.

Fire investigators are baffled as to the cause of this bizarre incident, which is strikingly similar to two occurrences last fall involving members of the Mount Olive football team.

"Athletes don't suddenly burst into flames for no reason," said Martin Durant, a fire department spokesman. "At this point, we are closely examining the uniform this young man was wearing."

The Aardvarks' uniforms were manufactured by the same Chinese company that produced the Mount Olive football team's jerseys.

"This is the only commonality found between these three unusual events," Durant went on. "We are awaiting test results on the chemical analysis of the uniforms, but that will take some time."

Meanwhile, we at the Adler Eagle wish Jeremy the speediest of recoveries.

***********

I didn't like baseball, or any sport for that matter. Sports, unlike me, belong to the normal world. Only normal people can gather enjoyment out of watching one guy trying to throw a ball past another guy who is trying to hit the ball with a piece of wood while all the other players wait around to see if the guy with the piece of wood actually hits the ball. That seemed to make sense to people, while I believed that baseball was the dumbest of activities.

I was never frustrated that I didn't understand normal things. I was not obsessed with trying to become normal. I knew that would never be possible. I would always be a vision-seeing, future-predicting, mind-reading freak. About the best I could hope for was to learn how to live with myself.

A few months ago, I discovered that there was a new addition to my paranormal abilities: telekinesis. I could turn light switches on and off with my mind. I could move around small objects. At first I was despondent that there was yet another weird thing for me to endure. I tried to ignore this latest ability, but during bored moments—and I had quite a few of those in the course of a day—I would amuse myself by twirling a pencil or levitating an eraser. I soon discovered that moving objects around with my mind required a great deal of focus, and while I focused on, say, arranging kitchen utensils neatly on a tabletop, my other freaky abilities became inert. I could not see random visions, most of which were dark and gory. I could not read minds and the sick thoughts people keep to themselves. It was a good trade-off, really; if I began to see or hear something disturbing, I just concentrated on moving something and all the bad things in my head went away—at least for a while. It was a great way to deal with stress.

One Saturday afternoon in early May, I found myself sitting at the kitchen table at home. I was balancing a pencil on the tip of my finger. I made the pencil slowly turn, which made a tickling feeling on my skin.

My mom sat across from me. She was still alarmed at my latest "gift." She was aware of my other abilities, of course, but really those she couldn't actually see. This was much more visual, and therefore much more disturbing.

"Do you have to do that?" she asked.

"It's very relaxing."

"I'm trying to talk to you."

"I'm listening," I said. "Just because I'm not looking at you, don't think I'm not hearing you."

Mom was trying to have one of her heart to heart talks with me. Every now and then she felt compelled to sit me down and encourage me to try to blend in better with my peers. It was her way of being supportive; she knew that my having strange abilities isolated me from other people. She was always afraid that I would end up being some kind of weirdo old lady who scared all the neighborhood kids—in other words, she didn't want me to turn into my grandmother. But even now, as she attempted to convince me I could be pretty much like everybody else if only I applied myself, she didn't see the irony.

"Mom, I'm moving a pencil with my mind," I said. "Exactly how much do you think I can blend?"

She sighed. "Julie, you're impossible, really."

"And yet here I am."

"Can we talk?"

"We are talking," I said.

"I mean, without the—whatever you call that."

"Telekinesis."

"Whatever. Can you put your hand down?"

I lowered my hand. The pencil remained suspended in the air, still turning slowly around.

She gawked at the pencil for a moment.

"Julie, really!"

I snatched the pencil from the air, and slapped it down on the tabletop.

"There! Better?" I asked, feeling a little hostile.

"Thank you." She took a couple seconds to compose herself, to pick up her train of thought. "Look, maybe I haven't been expressing myself so well. I understand that you will always be different from other people. There's nothing you can do about that. But you are still a human being."

"If you say so," I said.

"You are," she said. "Your dad and I have been talking."

"You need to stop that. The marriage will last longer."

"Julie, please."

I didn't stay anything. I figured it was best to let her say what she was going to say, and have it over with.

"We've been concerned with a few things about you. And this has nothing to do with your gifts. Your abilities," she amended after I'd rolled my eyes.

"Then what?"

"It's just that you're so—I don't know—emotionally detached."

"Yeah?" I said dully.

"I mean, look, I'm a nurse, right? I got into the field because, basically, I care about people. I have sympathy and understanding. Your dad, too. He's a fireman and, sure, that's a good job but you can't want to become a fireman without caring, without wanting to keep people safe. You see where I'm going with this."

"No, really, I don't," I said. "You and dad like your jobs?"

She sighed. She seemed uncertain what to say. Then she blurted out, "Julie, your dad wants you to see a psychiatrist."

I was horrified. "Uh-uh. No way."

"He thinks you may be sociopathic."

"What! No, I'm not.... What's sociopathic, anyway?"

"That's when a person has no feelings for others—no feelings at all. Some sociopaths end up, you know, killing people."

I stared at her. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I honestly didn't know what to say. My parents weren't really concerned that I wasn't quite normal; they actually feared I'd turn into a mass murderer or something.

"It's just that you never show us anything," she continued, uncomfortably. "You know, like kids usually show their parents."

"Oh, I see," I murmured. "Well, you know me: I'm not going to go around hugging everybody."

"I understand that," she said.

"I do love you guys," I said. "I just do it in my own way."

"Well, Dad doesn't understand why you are the way you are."

"Maybe you should explain it to him," I suggested.

She looked aghast. We had never told my dad about my abilities, so he couldn't possibly understand the affects that possessing them had on me.

"You can't be serious. He'd have you in a mental hospital in about two seconds. And I'd be right there with you. He'd never accept it—not in a million years. The guy doesn't even believe in ghosts," she added wryly.

I grinned. "I could prove it to him."

"Uh, no," she said. "No, we're not doing that."

"Well, then talk to him," I said. "Tell him something he will understand. Make him see that I can't be fixed. This is the way I am. I'm never going to be the perky, loving daughter that other people have. He got stuck with a freak."

"Oh, Julie," she murmured, but that was all she could say. She could never find the words to make things better for me, because there were no such words in any language.

I pushed away from the table. Before I left the room, I paused at the doorway for a long time. "Mom... I love you," I said, but the words didn't sound very convincing, not even to me.

***************

At school Monday all anybody could talk about was how some dude on the baseball team had burst into flames.

I sat across the lunchroom table from Melody, my best friend. She always got caught up in school gossip, every little tidbit that was floating around. She could go on for hours about how so-and-so had broken up with her boyfriend. Or how somebody got suspended for doing something stupid. It was hard to shut her up—she just babbled on and on. Today she was twice as bad, because of the guy on the baseball team who caught fire last Friday during a game.

"Can you imagine that!" she said, between bites of her pizza slice. "Suddenly, it's like, poof, you're burning. I wonder what that would be like."

"If you want, I'll find some lighter fluid and matches. We can experiment," I said.

But it was as though she couldn't even hear me. "I wonder if he felt it burning first, or did he see the flames first. Your dad's a fireman, right? What did he say about it? I mean, about what might cause something like that to happen."

Before I could answer, Jack Kilgore set his tray on the table.

"Spontaneous human combustion," he said, sitting next to Melody.

"Oh, hey, Jack," Melody said, running her fingers through her long hair. She had a crush on Jack for weeks now. It would have been nice if they could get together. At least that way Jack would leave me alone. Sadly he found Melody boring and shallow, which showed at least he had a good grip on reality as far as Melody was concerned.

"I said it weeks ago," Jack said to me, as though Melody wasn't even there, "after the first Mount Olive guy got torched."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," I droned. Since I met him, and told him my secrets, Jack's purpose in life seemed to be to convince me I should use my abilities to help people. And my dad thought I needed to see a psychiatrist?

"I saw a cable show on that—spontaneous—you know... what you mentioned," Melody said to Jack, playing up to him. "I was wondering why it was when people burn up like that they are always alone. It's always some old lady, sitting in her lounge chair, watching game shows. Or some old guy locked in the bathroom, getting ready to take a shower. Why doesn't a newscaster burst into flames on live television?"

"Hey, I'd like to see that," I put in.

"Or a baseball player in front of a couple hundred spectators?" Jack said.

"Exactly," Melody piped. "Oh, that really did happen, didn't it. You think it was that spontaneous human combustion?" she asked Jack.

"What do you think?" Jack asked me.

"Just leave me out of it, huh?" I was already stressing. I nibbled at my garden salad. The only other things on my tray were a hunk of corn bread and a large cube of green gelatin that was so solid it would probably bounce like a rubber ball. I started to play with the green cube, with my mind, pressing down on the top of it so that its sides bulged out and then letting go so that it went back to its original shape. I continued to do that, and I started to feel better. Not even Jack could bother me now.

"Jules, stop playing with your food," he said.

But I kept pressing down on the cube and letting go, press and release, press and release. Pretty soon I felt like giggling. It just seemed so funny—I didn't know why.

"Just don't try to con me into something," I told him.
"Come on, it's getting creepy," he said. "It looks like your Jell-O is breathing."

I stopped flexing my gelatin, and looked at him.

"We were talking about a guy who started on fire," Jack said.

"Which I really don't want to hear about it," I said.

"Jeremy's a major tool," Melody cut in. "Everybody hates the guy. His own teammates probably did something—maybe they soaked his jock strap in gasoline. But I don't even know if even he deserved something like that. Does anybody even care about how he's doing."

"He'll be fine. They have ways of treating serious burns," Jack said.

"They use maggots," I said.

Melody stared at me. "Maggots?"

"Yeah," I said. "They put maggots all over the dead skin, and the maggots crawl along and little... by... little... they nibble the dead skin until it's all gone."

Melody turned white. She got a panicky look on her face, clamped a hand over her mouth, and then got up and ran from the lunchroom.

I looked at Jack. "Did I say something?" I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders, and slid over to take Melody's seat, right across from me.

"I wasn't trying to con you," he said.

"Oh?"

"No."

"You talk about weird stuff, and start looking at me in a certain way. I get a little paranoid, I guess."

"Go ahead and play with your Jell-O, if that makes you feel better."

"No, I'm good," I said.

"I doubt you could do anything about spontaneous human combustion, anyway. Nobody knows what causes it, so how can anybody stop it from happening?"

"And given that it's happening only to jocks, who would want to stop it?"

"You really have a hateful side to you," he commented.

I grinned, and then tried to eat some more salad.

"Hey, you need to do something!"

I looked up, and saw that Jessica Harper was standing at the end of the table, looking down at me. Jessica was Adler's queen of mean. She was tall, slim, and blonde, but had the personality of a rabid pit bull. Right behind Jessica, her friend and number-one lackey Amy Nicci stood with her arms crossed, her dark eyes trying to bore holes through me.

Jack looked at me, like What's all this about?

"You hear me?" Jessica asked, when I didn't say anything.

"Yeah."

"You need to do something," she said.

"What's that?"

"You need to tell Eloise nobody likes her."

"I do? Why? Why don't you tell her."

Jessica rolled her eyes. "Well, I'm not going to tell her. I don't like her, right? I wouldn't be caught dead talking with that lump."

The girl she was talking about was Eloise Parker, who had transferred to Adler earlier this year. She was homely, hopelessly awkward, and weighed about two hundred pounds.

"Why does somebody have to tell her that?" Jack asked.

"Because she needs to know everybody hates her," Jessica said. To somebody like Jessica, that kind of thing was important.

I glanced over to where Eloise was sitting, a couple tables away. It was the only table in the lunchroom that had open seats. In fact Eloise was the only one sitting at the table, which was about eight feet long and could have seated several other people.

"Uh, I think she knows that," I said.

"But she needs to be told, so she knows for sure."

"And why me?"

She looked at me as though I were stupid. "Because if a weirdo like you tells her, she'll know how thoroughly despised she is."

Jack started to object, but I waved him off.

I looked from Jessica back to where Eloise sat, and then I pushed away from the table.

"You're not really doing this?" Jack asked.

I ignored him. I walked over to Eloise. She really was quite the mess. Her face was moon-shaped and constantly wore a dull expression. Her clothes looked like they had been bought at the thrift store. Her hair was nicely styled, but that only made the rest of her look worse.

As I approached her, Eloise looked up from her food. She seemed uncertain; it was as though she couldn't believe anybody would walk up to her table.

"Hey?" she said.

"You know everybody hates you," I told her.

She glanced down the vacant length of the table. "Gee, you think?" she said in a dead-pan way.

"I just wanted to tell you—in case you didn't realize."

"Jessica put you up to this, didn't she?" Eloise asked.

"Pretty much. I really don't think she speaks for everybody."

"She thinks she does. What's wrong with her, anyway?"

"Just a little evil, I suppose."

"Well, she needs to leave people alone."

"You want me to hurt her?" I asked.

She considered the offer for a moment, and then wagged her head. "Don't bother. She'll get what's coming to her someday. They all will. They all have a boat-load of bad karma coming."

"Well, if you change your mind..." I said.

I turned away and headed back to my table. I sat across from Jack again.

"Did you do it?" Jessica demanded.

"I told her."

"Good," she said smugly.

"I can't believe you did that," Jack said.

Jessica turned and started to leave, Amy right at her heels, like a faithful little puppy. As they walked away, I focused on Jessica's ankles, the way I had focused on my gelatin cube. A couple steps later, her feet tangled and she fell forward hard and ate floor. She released an agonized yelp, and everybody at the nearby tables started to laugh.

Amy leaned over her and helped her to stand, and as she did that, she glanced up and shot me a look of pure hatred. She put a protective arm round Jessica, who was holding her face and sobbing, and they walked away as everybody continued to laugh.

Jack, who had turned round to watch the spectacle, now turned back to me.

"You're incredible, you know," he said, disgusted.

"Hey, I didn't do anything. She tripped," I lied.

"Yeah, right," he snorted. "You're wasting what you have."

"Really, I need some air," I said, pushing my tray away. I couldn't stand to be judged by anybody, least of all by Jack.

I headed for the nearest exit, and sure enough, Jack got up and followed me.

Outside it was a warm spring day. The sun was bright and small wispy clouds scudded across the pale blue sky. There were a lot of kids outside. Some of them had laid beach towels out on the grass and were having picnics. Everybody knew that that was against school rules, but a lot of them were seniors who didn't care because they had less than a month left before graduation.

I walked along the path that wound through the campus, and Jack came up next to me.

"Did that make you feel better?" he asked.

"Loads," I said.

He shook his head.

"Hey, Jessica had it coming," I said. "I hate people like that. They just can't leave a person only—they just keep needling, and needling, and needling."

"Like I do to you?" he asked.

"It's not the same. She means something by it—you don't. You can't help yourself. You just want to keep dropping weird things on my doorstep, as though I don't have enough weird things to deal with already. You want to stand back and watch what happens, like I'm a lab rat or something."

"Hey, I don't do that," he complained.

"No? Well, it seems like it."

"I was just talking about a guy who started on fire."

"And spontaneous human combustion has absolutely nothing to do with me."

"If that's what it is," he said.

I looked over at him. "You mean you don't think it's that anymore?"

"I don't know," I said. "If there is such a thing, it's pretty rare. Here you have three different guys bursting into flames within a six-month period. All of them are athletes. That doesn't seem so random—that seems like a pattern."

"Like somebody is actually doing something to cause it?"

"If I had to guess, I'd say we had a pyrokineticist on our hands."

"A what?" I asked.

"A pyrokineticist," he said. "I made up the word, because there wasn't a word for it. It's somebody who can generate heat with their mind. Like you just did to Jessica, only with fire." He watched me closely, and then asked, "You can't do that, can you? I mean, think things on fire?"

"Not so far," I said.

"You sure?" he asked, as though he didn't quite believe me.

"If I could do that, you would have been well-done a while ago."

"Well, I think somebody's doing it. I just can't figure out why?"

"Set fire to a bunch of jocks? Oh, I don't know. I can think of a few reasons, like general principle."

"You really dislike everybody, do you?" he asked.

"Some more than others. Jocks are on top of the list."

"You sure you didn't do anything?"

"Positive," I said.

"Well, I'll get to the bottom of it," he said, sounding pretty determined.

"Out of curiosity— and just curiosity—if you find that somebody is responsible for burning these guys, exactly what do you plan to do? Go to the police?"

He shrugged. "I haven't given that much thought. I guess, if I find out who it is, I'll just confront them. I'll tell them they need to stop, before somebody actually dies."

"What if you end up like burnt toast?"

"Well, at least I tried. Somebody has to do something, right?"

"Ah-hah," I said softly, eyeing him. Now it was my turn to be suspicious. "Are you trying to manipulate me?"

"No, why? What do you mean?"

"So this isn't some back-door attempt to guilt-trip me into helping you?"

"Not at all," he said, and when he saw that I wasn't sure, he added, "If you don't believe me, read my mind."

"I don't want to read your mind. I'm afraid of what else I might find."

"Well, I'm not trying to con you or anything. I know how you are. You have no sympathy for anybody. You don't care about anybody, not even yourself. You can't help being the way you are. Nobody can."

He made me sound like a heartless bitch, and, really, in many ways, he was right. I always figured that my problems were worse than the problems of other people. I could never tolerate it when somebody moaned about aches and pains and boyfriend problems. What were those? Nothing. Try having visions of an airliner crash, with charred body parts strewn across an open field. Try hearing the perverted thoughts of a passing stranger. Try going to sleep at night while enormous eyeballs are staring down at you from the ceiling. I would trade all that for mundane problems any day of the week.

I wanted to tell Jack I wasn't that bad, but, honestly, I wasn't sure about that.

"Jules?" he said.

"Huh?"

"You drifted off. You weren't..."

"Oh, no, I was just thinking—my own thoughts," I assured him.

"Well, I have to get to class," he said, splitting away from me, heading for the front entrance to the school. "See you tomorrow?"

"Sure. And hey, don't get burned," I added, but the words sounded hollow, just like they sounded hollow that morning when I had tried to tell my mom I loved her.

After Jack was gone, I turned and went back down the path. When I passed the parking lot, I glanced up and saw the telephone and electric lines that looped down from a post toward the side of the school. Suddenly I had a flash of the same lines at a different time. The sky is filled with great gray clouds, and rain is falling hard, slanting down to the sodden ground. There is something hanging from the wire, dangling up there, engulfed in flames. The cold rain hits it and hisses, and the flames do not weaken but blaze hotter and brighter....

When I got home that day, I saw that the garage door was open. My dad was working on his pick-up truck. It was an older model Ford—actually it was older than me—and required regular attention. He was lying under the truck, his legs sticking out from the front of it, and I could hear him fiddling with something underneath.

I dreaded having to talk to him, because of what my mom had told me that morning—that he thought I needed to see a psychiatrist. But I reasoned I better nip that idea in the bud before it went too far. Somehow I had to convince him that I didn't need counseling, and I wasn't sure how to do that. There are probably a million ways you can prove to somebody that you do have issues, but how do you prove that you don't?

So I decidedto put up a perky front. Perky girls always seem to be accepted as well adjusted, although, personally, they always gave me the urge to vomit.

I walked into the garage, and said in a light, airy way, "Hey!"

I must have startled him, because a wrench clattered on the cement floor.

"Julie, is that you?" he called from under the truck.

"Yeah," I chirped.

"You almost gave me a heart attack," he complained. "What are you doing home from school?"

"Uh, because school is finished."

"Oh, it is that late?"

"Yeah."

"Did you eat lunch today?"

"Yeah," I said, my perky façade sustaining a crack; he was always harping about my weight and how I was too thin.

I stepped over to the workbench, and jumped up to sit on it. My feet dangled over the oil-stained floor. If I was going to carry on a conversation with a couple legs sticking out from under a truck, I wanted to be comfortable at least.

"What did you eat? Not much, huh?"

"I ate plenty," I said.

"What's plenty? Two, three bites?"

"Plenty is plenty."

"You eat any meat?"

"No, I did not."

"You need your protein."

"Vegetables have protein."

"It's not the same," he said.

By now my perky façade had completely crumbled, and I was my grumpy old self. Apparently I couldn't even pretend to be normal.

"Dad, please, I'm tired of hearing about it," I said.

"Well, then do something to put on a few pounds."

"I'm up to ninety-nine pounds, and that's normal for somebody five-foot-one."

A large grimy hand popped out from under the side of the truck. Its thumb was pointed upward.

"Number one, I doubt that you weight ninety-nine pounds, and number two--" The index finger of the grimy hand went up—"you're at least five-foot-four."

"Well, I am eating. I don't know what else to do. This is just the way I am."

"Maybe if you tried lifting weights," I said.

I wasn't sure I'd heard right. "What?"

"Lifting weights. I have enough equipment in the basement. You'll pack on some muscle."

I grimaced at the thought. My dad was such a regular guy. He did guy things: worked on cars, lifted weights, blow his nose without using a Kleenex. He saw the world in such simple terms. If you're too thin, eat more. If eating more doesn't work, then lift weights. Every possible problem had a simple answer. But the simple answer in my case eluded him: I was thin because that was how I was meant to be.

"Dad, lifting weights, really?"

"Sure," he said. "Lots of girls lift weights these days."

"It's just not me," I told him.

"You have to do something."

"How about being myself," I said, but he didn't seem to hear me.

I listened to him grunt. He must have been trying to get off an especially stubborn bolt. Finally he gave up and wiggled out from under the truck. He stood up and dusted off the front of his pants. Even grimy and oily, he was a very handsome guy. Evidently I hadn't inherited many of his genes. In the way of looks, the only thing I had got from my dad was the cleft in his chin. It made him appear manly, while on me it just looked like a pit in my face that didn't belong there.

He looked at me with somber eyes, and said, "Mrs. Stock called today."

"Why?" Mrs. Stock was my counselor at school, and, really, there was no reason for her to call my parents.

"She was wondering if everything was all right. Is everything all right?"

"Yeah, sure, fine. I have no idea why she would call."

"She said you haven't seen her in a while."

"That's a good thing, right?"

"Maybe you should stop in on her," he said. Really, the man was quite impossible at times.

"What's the point?" I asked.

"There doesn't have to be a point. You can stop by and say hello."

"Whatever," I said. I had no intention of seeing Mrs. Stock. She would always think that something was wrong, even if I told her everything was fine. Counselors are funny that way.

"See that you do," he said.

Now that I was completely annoyed, I jumped down from the workbench. I started to head toward the house, but something caused me to linger, an antsy feeling that I'd forgot something.

"Oh," I said, turning back toward him. "You hear about the guy who caught fire?"

"You mean at the ball game," he said, using a dirty cloth to try to clean his hands.

"Yeah."

"Yeah, I heard. Why?"

"What do you think of that?" I asked.

He shrugged. "There has to be a reasonable explanation."

"You think it might be—what do they call it—spontaneous human combustion?"

He smiled at me indulgently. "That wouldn't be my first guess. I've been a firefighter for nearly twenty years, and I never once saw a case of spontaneous human combustion. I don't believe there is such a thing. I think some people fall asleep smoking a cigarette, and somehow they ignite themselves. Either they spilled something flammable on their clothes earlier, or something. People simply don't start on fire for no reason—there's always a reason."

"But how can guy start on fire while he's playing in a baseball game?" I asked.

"Maybe—I don't know—I'm sure it's some kind of fluke that doesn't have a thing to do with spontaneous human combustion. Why all the interest?"

"It's just that everybody was talking about it at school," I said. "Oh, you better answer your phone," I added, a couple seconds before his cell phone actually started to ring.

He dug the phone out of his pocket, and then gave me an odd look.

I thought, Oops, and decided to retreat into the house.

***************

Mom was in the kitchen making dinner, which looked like it would be some kind of casserole deal I definitely wouldn't be able to eat.

I flopped down on one of the chairs at the table.

I must have looked despondent, because she said, "Don't worry. I'm making you a fruit salad. No meat, no bad visions."

"Sometimes, I'm so stupid," I said.

She frowned. "Why would you say that?"

I told her about my dad and his cell phone call.

"You have to be more careful," she said gravely.

"It slipped out, before I could stop it. It was like a reflex."

"What did he say?"

"Nothing. He just gave me a weird look."

She wagged her head.

"Honestly," I said, "I think, deep down, I want him to know."

She sat down next to me. Great concern was etched on her face.

"That can never happen. You have to keep working around him."

"I've been doing that forever. It gets harder and harder all the time."

"I know," she said.

"Why does he have to be such a straight edge? Why can't he be more like--" I almost said Jack, which would have been a big mistake; Mom didn't know that I'd shared my secrets with Jack, or Melody—she thought she was the only living person who knew about my abilities. "Why can't he be more open-minded?" I amended.

"It's just not him," she said. She bit her lower lip, as though she considering something intensely. "There's something I never told you, but maybe it's time you know.

"First I want you to know that your father is a good man. Never doubt that for a second.

"This happened a couple months before you were born. It was a joyous time. Your dad and I were young, and you were on your way. You were supposed to be the first; we were going to have three kids, two girls and one boy—well, that was the plan, anyway," she added wistfully.

"Your grandmother was visiting one day," she continued. "She and your dad got along pretty well—there was never that son-in-law/mother-in-law animosity.

"So we were sitting around and talking. Mostly it was baby this and baby that. Then the subject came up of whether you would be a boy or girl. I'd gone in for an ultrasound, but your dad and I choose not to know what you would be. We wanted to be surprised. But now, with the due date coming up fast, we were getting more and more curious. Plus your dad was complaining that we'd have to wait until after you were born for him to know whether to paint your room blue or pink. You know how your dad hates to do anything last minute.

"So your grandmother offered to do a reading on you."

I gawked at her. "She didn't," I said.

"I'm afraid so," she sighed.

"What happened?"

"Well, she said you'd be a girl. So problem solved with the painting—pink room. But you know how these things work. It never stops there. It takes on a life of its own—that was what your grandmother always said. She told us there would be... complications, and that afterward I wouldn't be able to have other children. Complications? There's an understatement; both of us nearly died. You ended up in an intensive-care nursery for a couple weeks. Anyway, you know about that part.

"Dad was mad. I don't know what he thought—probably that grandma was making a really, really bad joke. Then when it came true..." She rolled her eyes, remembering. "I don't know. He just never looked at her the same. He started calling her a witch. I really think he believes she caused it all to happen. He won't talk about it, and if you bring it up, he pretends not to know what you're talking about.

"That's why he can never know about you," she concluded. "It was never that he doesn't believe in that sort of thing. He believes, but he thinks it's evil. If he knew what you can do, he wouldn't be able to live with it—I really think it would kill him."

"Oh," I murmured. I didn't know what more to say. I was stunned, thinking that my dad might actually consider me evil. That had never crossed my mind. How can anybody think you're evil just for being what you are? I'd always imagined that if I told him, he'd accept me for what I was, like a father accepts a child with some disease. Maybe he would even think it was cool that I could do the things I could do....

"I have homework to do," I said dully, and got up to leave the room.

"Julie?" I heard my mom say behind me, but I just kept walking.

I locked myself in my bedroom, and flopped down on my bed. I stared at the ceiling, wishing I could fall asleep. My life was always better when I slept, but I was cursed with severe insomnia. I was lucky to get two hours sleep each night, and I walked through the day like a zombie.

So I lay there, and began wondering, for the millionth time, What exactly am I? Could it be that my dad would have been right? Was I some evil thing, human but not quite completely human? Would my abilities destroy me and destroy those close to me? Maybe I had always sensed that this was true. Maybe this was why I had chosen to have as few friends as possible.

It was maddening not to know for sure. What was I? Born to destroy, born to heal, or born to be in some freak show? The more I wondered, the more agitated I became.

I jumped out of bed, and stripped off all my clothes.

There was a full-length mirror attached to the back of my bedroom door. I would always hang a bathrobe over the mirror, so that I couldn't accidentally catch a glimpse of myself. My dresser mirror, too, was mostly covered, with articles and pictures that I'd clipped out of magazines. I usually hated to look at myself so much, but now I needed to see everything.

I tore the bathrobe off the hook on the back of the door and exposed the mirror. I saw myself standing there naked. I looked like a stick figure with a big dark mop of crazy hair on its head. My skin was very pale and you could see fine tracings of blue veins beneath. My bones stuck out all over— ribs, collar bones, knees. The points of my hipbones protruded so badly they looked like sharp weapons. My breasts were nearly non-existent, and if you looked closely, you could actually see my heart beating under my ribs.

Looking at myself, I fought off the urge of gag. I looked so horrible, like something that had staggered out of an alien death camp.

But could I actually be evil? Nothing ever hurt me. You could call me names, and I felt nothing. You could threaten me, and I felt nothing. I felt neither sadness nor joy, nor hate, nor love. Inside I was as unfeeling as a dried out husk. But now the fear that I might be evil touched a nerve that I never realized existed, and all I knew was terror.

I huddled on the floor at the foot of my bed. I hugged my legs against my chest, and cried and cried. Through my tears I saw things floating around the room. Books, pencils, pens, stuffed animals, CD cases, the pillows from my bed—all swirling around in circles in the air. The blanket on my bed flapped as though in a strong wind. The mouse of my computer hovered over my desk, wagging back and forth on its cord, like a hawk trying to break free from the tether the hawk-keeper had tied around its leg. The harder I cried, the faster, the more frantically everything flew around my room.

I tried to regain control of myself, but couldn't. Maybe I was finally losing it, as I had always feared I would.

I was in a crisis, but who was I supposed to call? A witch doctor? My mom would sure be no big help, and my dad—well, forget that.

I cried out in my mind for Jerry, the house spirit, but he would not manifest himself. I wasn't sure why. Maybe he couldn't, because there was too much psychic energy whirling round the room.

The terror was growing in me, as was my desperation. I crawled across the floor to where my jeans lay, and I dug my cell phone out of the back pocket. My hand was so shaky that I had a hard time punching in the numbers. I kept getting the numbers wrong, and had to go back and change them. Finally I got the phone number right and pressed the SEND button.

When Jack answered the phone, all I could say was, "I need help." It came out in an agonized whimper.

"Jules? Is that you? Where are you?" he asked.

"My room. Please come, please!" I begged.

"What's wrong?"

"Please!"

I thought the phone went dead. It was hard to tell. Everything was flying around so fast now. My books sounded like a thousand eagles flapping their wings, wheeling around just over my head.

As if the objects swirling around the room weren't bad enough, things started to flash through my head. Somewhere hoards of protesters were throwing rocks at lines of policemen, as clouds of tear gas rose from the street... A school bus filled with children skidded off an icy road and rolled down a snow-covered embankment.... Some burning thing was hanging from the wire and the rain was making it burn brighter and brighter.... Jack was running down a street, trying to catch a bus... My father was leaving, backing down the driveway, heading to his friend's garage to finish fixing the truck.... My mom was in the kitchen loading the dishwasher.... The Cubs beat the Giants 4 to 3 in extra innings.... Warren J. Baxter, a retired accountant from Naples, Florida, won $153 million dollars in a mega-lottery.... An ancient woman was using a walker to inch her way down the hallway of a nursing home. She was calling for her lost dog, Buddy, who died twenty years ago.... Something still burned on the wire.... They all must burn, a pale-lipped mouth murmured in the darkness.... Jack was sitting on a bus....

I felt that I was losing myself. Everything flickered faster and faster through my mind. I saw and heard thousands of things, and the more I saw and heard, the less there was of me, as though I was being devoured by my visions.

It became harder and harder to focus on single scenes. Everything blended together in a mad stream of colors and sounds. Every now and then I could pick out a single word, a cry, a faint heartbeat. Images sped by in a blur of bright lights.

I sat on the floor and waited and tried not to lose my mind. I couldn't have said how much time passed, but then I caught a glimpse in my mind of Jack walking up the front stairs of my house. I was too stressed to be relieved. I was too consumed with everything that was rushing through my head to wonder what help Jack could be to me anyway.

He stabbed the doorbell, and my mom went to answer the door.

He told her he was here to see me.

She was puzzled. I never have friends over to the house.

Oh, just let him in! my mind screamed, and the words somehow reached her mind. She had a panicky look on her face.

Julie, is that you? she thought.

Yeah, just let him in. Send him up to my room.

How are you doing that?

Oh, I don't know. Please, his name is Jack—send him up here. I need his help with something.

I don't understand this at all.

I'll explain later.

Jack was watching her with concern, wondering why she was standing in the doorway and spacing out. He asked if she was okay.

I guess she wants you to go up to her room, she told him, and at long last let him in the house.

When she started to show him where my room was, I thought, Just tell him where it is, okay?

Is something going on I should know about? She thought.

You definitely don't want to know, I thought, watching a stuffed pink elephant fly past my face.

All righty, then, she thought, and gave Jack directions up to my room, before retreating to the kitchen.

I had stopped crying. I felt somewhat better, knowing that Jack was here. Sure, it was just Jack, but it was better than being alone.

I got up from the floor, and was at the door when he knocked.

I opened the door an inch and peeked out to make absolutely sure my mom hadn't followed him up.

"Jules, you okay?" he asked, guarded, not knowing what to expect.

I rolled my eyes. I stayed behind the door and stepped back to open it so that he could come inside.

He spotted all the objects flying around the room, gaping up at the ceiling in wonder. As he walked into the room, he said, "That's a lot of psycho kinetic energy."

"Gee, you think?" I asked.

I shut the door, and watched him wander about the room, studying everything that was flying around. He had to duck when one of my books— it looked like Catch-22—swooped down toward his head.

"How did this--?" he started to asked, turning to look at me. Then his face turned pale. "Oh, wow, you're naked," he said dimly.

"Hunh?" I didn't think I'd heard right, over the roar of sounds in my head. Then I looked down to see that I'd been so distracted by everything that I'd forgot to put on some clothes. "Just—just turn round, will you?" I said, although it was too late. I felt feeble. I couldn't raise my hostility to the level the situation demanded.

I went to my dresser. I found a pair of cut-off jeans and a plain white t-shirt, and I put them on while Jack looked the other way.

"It's all right," I said after I was dressed. I walked up to him, and giving him the best evil eye I could manage, warned him, "You didn't see anything, understand?"

"Not a thing," he said.

"It's just that with all this, and what's going through my head—you know, I'm not focusing very well, and I forgot I wasn't dressed, and, well, you know--" I forced myself to stop, because I realized I had started babbling. I hated people who babble.

"No, I understand," Jack said reasonably, too reasonably.

"So what do you think?" I asked.

"You could stand to put on a few pounds."

"I'm not talking about that, you nitwit. I mean all this," I growled, motioning to everything that was flying around over our heads.

"Oh, well, when did it start?" he asked, but I had a hard time hearing him.

"Hunh? You have to speak up. I got all this noise in my head. People are singing the nation anthem now. It sounds weird, though—I think it's the Canadian national anthem. Must be a hockey game."

"It's not even hockey season," he said.

"Then it must be a future hockey game. Whatever."

"There any chance you can see what teams, and the final score?"

I groaned. I sat on the floor with my back against the footboard of my bed. I buried my face in my hands.

Jack sat in front of me.

"When did all this start?" he asked.

"Oh, I don't know," I whined. By now it seemed to be going on for hours.

"Something must have triggered it."

"Yeah, my dad," I said

"What did he do?"

"He didn't do anything. My mom told me something about him, and—I don't know—I guess it upset me." I told him the short version of the story about my grandmother.

"Oh," Jack said knowingly, when I was finished. "So you're afraid you might be evil."

"No, I'm not—well, I don't know, maybe the thought crossed my mind once or twice. And then hearing that story about my dad..."

"Jules, you're not evil," he said.

"How do you know that?"

He shrugged. "I just do."

"Whatever. You have any idea how to stop it? I mean, did you ever read anything about something like this?"

"Not really. I think you just need to calm down, is all."

"Calm down? That's it? All right, I'm officially screwed."

"Try taking deep breaths."

"Try kissing my butt," I told him. "I'm not having a baby, you know."

"Then how about this? Take hold of my hand," he said, reaching toward me.

"Uh-uh. No way. I have enough shit going through my head already. I don't need your lame thoughts, too."

He sighed. "Will you just trust me? I do a lot of meditation. Maybe it will rub off."

"That may be the dumbest idea you ever had," I said.

But he kept holding his hand out. Finally, I figured I had to try something; I couldn't go through life with things flying around over my head like a bunch of vultures. So I grabbed his hand.

The first thing I sensed was that Jack was extremely calm inside. Little by little, that calmness passed from him to me, as though he was lending it to me, and I began to feel better. Then, suddenly, everything that was flying fell to the floor, and the noise fled my mind.

"See?" he said.

I slowly released his hand.

"You don't worry much, do you?" I asked.

"What's the point?" He appraised the room. It looked as though a tornado had gone through it. "Looks more like my room now," he said, grinning.

I got up and started picking up things and putting them back where they belonged.

"You really should listen to me, you know?" Jack said.

"What? You read a few books, and you know everything?"

"It's just common sense. You need to experiment."

"I'm not a lab rat," I muttered.

"You need to let go, so that you can learn exactly how much you can do. Otherwise, how are you ever going to be able to control it? What if something like this happens at school? What then?"

"This was just a fluke. It won't happen again, because I won't let it happen again."

"Just like that?"

"Just like that," I said.

"So you're never going to get upset again?"

"Nope."

"Ever?"

"Never," I said, and stopped straightening the room. I sat on the floor again. "Jack, you just don't get it. I don't have normal feelings. I'm, like, a sociopath."

"A sociopath? Really? Where do you get this stuff?"

"That's the way I am. You think that somewhere deep inside me there's something normal going on. If I just focused my abilities on helping people, I'll turn into little Miss Sunshine. I'm telling you—it's not going to happen. We already went down that road once. I helped you find Mary Jo Mason. That was weeks ago. Have I changed any? No. Actually, I still wish that I left the miserable bitch where I found her.

"It's like this," I said, trying to be patient, because I really wanted him to understand. "You ran over here to help me, right? And I thank you for doing that—I really do. But I'm just saying words. I don't feel thankful. See what I mean? I'm not who you think I am. I'm all weird on the outside, and all cold on the inside, and nothing's going to change that.

"Now you did do me a favor, and I'll return the favor, because that's fair. So if you want me to help you figure out who's torching these jocks, I'll help. But don't believe that's it's going to fix me, because it won't."

"I told you: I don't want your help with that," he said stiffly.

"But you didn't mean it."

"I meant it," he said. "If I'm right about things, you could get hurt. I wouldn't want that to happen. You might not have feelings but other people do."

"I understand that. And I'm sorry."

"Which means that you're not sorry at all," he said glumly.

"There you go—I think you're finally getting it," I said. "You know, I've been flashing on something that might help with your little mystery. It's just an image. I keep seeing something hanging from some wires—you know, the wires running into the school. I can't make out what it is, but it's burning. Does that make any sense to you?"

He thought about it for a moment. "Does it look like some kind of clothing?" he asked.

"Maybe."

"Then it makes perfect sense."

"It does? How? Not that I really care."

"Sure," he said, as though it was perfectly obvious. "It's 'Liar, Liar.'"

I frowned. "What?"

"You know: 'Liar, liar, pants on fire, hanging from the telephone wire.'"

"I didn't think of that. I suppose it could be a pair of pants. So—what?—these three jocks lied to somebody?"

"This is actually pretty helpful," Jack said, sounding somewhat upbeat. "It's suggestive."

"A girl's doing it."

"Exactly," he said. "Probably somebody who transferred from Mount Olive to Adler sometime this year. Well, it's a lead, anyway. I don't know how I'm going to follow up on it. I mean, there are over 3500 students at Adler. What am I supposed to do? Take a poll?"

"Tell me something," I said. "Why do you even care? I mean, a bunch of jocks get char-broiled—so what?"

"If somebody is doing that to them—well, doesn't that strike you as being a little—I don't know—wrong. You do understand the difference between right and wrong."

"I understand it," I said. "I don't always feel it. But you didn't answer my question—why is it any of your business?"

He shrugged. "I guess I'm a hopeless do-gooder."

"Well, I can believe the hopeless part." I thought about things for a moment. He had run over to help me, so I figured I owed him one. I hated owing anybody anything. "I'll get you the list of student transfers," I said.

"You will? How?"

"Please, don't ask," I said. "If I have to explain it all, I'm going to end up changing my mind."

"All right, but you're not going to do anything illegal, are you?"

"Define illegal," I said.

Before Jack left, I told him I needed some story to tell my mom. I could explain it all to her by telling the truth, of course, but that would probably send the woman straight into therapy. Sometimes it is kinder just to lie.

"Don't worry about it. I'm a great liar," he assured me.

"Yeah?"

"The best," he said. "Just follow my lead."

So we down to the kitchen, where my mom was just popping her casserole into the oven, and Jack explained to her how I'd called him to help me with a paper I wanted to write for Physics on Fractal Theory. He was a pretty smooth talker—I had to give him that much.

My mom stood there and listened. She looked back and forth from Jack to me. She seemed very amused. Maybe because I actually had somebody over to the house. Or maybe that it was a guy, which, to her, would seem like an encouraging development. But probably because she realized that Jack was totally full of shit.

When she was able to edge in a word, she asked, "Uh, Julie, don't you take Physics next year?"

But Jack was undeterred. "Well, Fractal Theory is kind of complicated. If she wants to do a paper on it next year, she'd almost have to start working on it now."

"I see," she said knowingly. She still appeared highly amused. "Jack, would you like to stay for dinner?"

Before I could jump in, Jack said, "Oh, I'd love to, but really I need to head home. My parents both work late and my grandmother lives in an in-law in the basement. And, well, she's mostly confined to a wheelchair now. So I kind of like to look in on her to make sure she's all right."

"Well, that's sweet," my mom said pleasantly. "Isn't that nice, Julie?"

"Oh, just peachy," I said, wishing they would just stop talking. I kept picturing them with their mouths stitched shut with large ugly stitches, but then I figured I better stop thinking that because it might really happen. I grabbed Jack by the arm, and told my mom, "He really does have to go."

"Well, maybe some other time," my mom told Jack, as I started to tow him out of the kitchen and toward the front door.

When we reached the living room, Jack said, "I think that went well, right?"

I spun him round to face me.

"Oh, that went wonderfully well, except for one thing: my mother isn't an imbecile!"

"What?"

"Whoever said you were a good liar?"

"You don't think she believed it?"

"Your grandmother's in a wheelchair?" I snorted. "You don't think that was a bit much?"

He stared at me. "That part was the truth."

"Oh," I said dully. "Sorry."

"And we both know what that means," he sighed.

"Just go home, Jack," I said, not harshly. "I have some damage control to do."

After I let him out the front door, I returned to the kitchen.

My mom was sitting at the table. She was still attractive; she didn't look old enough to have a kid my age. She seemed thoughtful, chewing at her lower lip the way she always did whenever she tried to ferret out the solution to a hard problem.

When I walked into the room, she looked up at me. Again she seemed highly entertained.

"Fractal Theory?" she asked.

I shrugged, and sat across from her.

"Well, he seems like a very nice young man," she said. "And you already have him lying for you."

"Mom, please."

She chuckled. "No, really, I should thank you."

"What for?"

"I've been worried about you for years. But this is the first time you've ever given me something normal to worry about."

"What? It's nothing like that. Jack is just--"

"A friend?"

"Not even," I said. "He's more like—I don't know—a pet turtle."

"It's nothing to be ashamed of, you know. You're not nine years old."

"Mom, I'm telling you, it's not like that. You know how I am about guys—I just can't deal with them that way. We talked about all this."

"Fractal Theory," she snorted. "I have a theory, too, about you. You want to hear it?"

"Not really."

But she said anyway, "I think you use your abilities as a big fat excuse not to show your feelings. You don't want anybody to know how much you really do feel."

"Nice theory, Mom. Nice, but wrong. Have you been reading psychology books again?"

"You're almost seventeen, Julie," she said. "You can't go on this way. Everything bad that's happening with you, and that will happen with you—you're doing it all to yourself."

On the other side of the room, the oven door opened, and the metal rack slid out.

"Check your casserole," I told her, and then got up to go to my room.

The next day I skipped U.S. History so that I could see Mrs. Stock.

I hated counselors. They had been passing judgment on me for my entire life. I believed they make more problems than they solve, with their probing questions, which I never answered, and useless advice, which I never took. I was certain that most of them needed to be in counseling themselves. In middle school, one counselor actually tried to get me to tell my problems to a chair. I hadn't been able to tell if this was some therapeutic technique or if she just wanted to see if I'd do it so that she could note in my permanent file that I liked to talk to furniture.

Mrs. Stock had been my counselor since I started at Adler. She was a middle-aged woman with manly short salt-and-pepper hair. She was short and wide—actually students called her Mrs. Stocky behind her back—and whenever she dressed in red I would wonder whether a dog had ever mistook her for a fire plug.

I walked into the main office. The people who worked behind the counter sat at desks or wandered about like zombies. Nobody noticed me. I stood there scanning the large room for moveable objects. Fluorescent light fixtures hanged down from the high ceiling. There was a water cooler on the back wall between two windows. I figured I didn't need much more than the water cooler and a couple of the light fixtures. What I had planned might actually turn out to be fun.

I walked up to the counter. It took a moment for one of the women to notice me and ask what I needed.

I said I wanted to see Mrs. Stock, and she told me that Mrs. Stock was available and that I should just go right in.

I went over to the line of inter offices until I found the right door. It was open and I could see Mrs. Stock sitting behind her desk. She had her elbows on the edge of the desktop, and she was holding her head as though she had a headache.

When I walked into the small window-less room, she looked up. It was as though I caught her having a human moment. She seemed embarrassed, but only for a second, and then she put on a chipper face.

"Julia," she chirped—counselors often chirped, I'd noticed. "Come in. Come in. Shut the door."

After I closed the door, I sat on the well-worn chair in front of the desk. I was effectively trapped now. It was like being inside a police holding room: no windows in the door or walls. Usually I found that unnerving. Today I found it useful.

"So what brings you down today?" she asked brightly, as though it cheered her up that I might have some awful problem.

"You called my house," I said. It was clearly an accusation.

"That I did. That I did," she said. "I haven't seen you in so long. I was wondering how you were doing."

I sat there and stared at her.

"How are you doing?" she finally asked.

"I was doing fine," I said.

"Oh, and what happened?"

"And then you called my house."

She laughed a big jolly laugh. "I always liked that about you—that sense of humor." Honestly, I could barely comprehend the woman; I didn't think I was the least bit funny. "So nothing going on?"

I shook my head slowly.

"Well, I have had the most horrendous week," she said, and proceeded to tell me her problems. The woman obviously had vision issues; to her, it must have looked as though I cared. She told me how one day she went to her garage only to discover the garage door lying atop her car. And then her beloved tabby cat, Homer, ran away and couldn't be found anywhere. She had been frantic, scouring the neighborhood, looking in dumpsters and up trees. All her cats—seven of them—were like her children, and when one of them was missing, it was like losing a small child, only the police wouldn't do a thing because they didn't give a flying fig about a cat.... She went on and on about her lost cat. I decided I better do what I had come to do before a blood vessel ruptured in my brain. I let my mind drift until I could see the inside of the main office. It was still hushed, with people doing their jobs in a daze. I concentrated on the water cooler first. It was heavy and hard to move with my mind. It took a moment for me to get it rocking back and forth, and then, finally, it tipped over and crashed to the floor.

Mrs. Stock stopped her cat story. "What in the world was that?" she wondered, alarm etched across her broad face.

I shrugged a shoulder.

Then there were other crashes, glass breaking, high-pitched screams.

Mrs. Stock jumped up from her chair. "I'll be right back." She rushed from the room, shutting the door behind her. "What in God's green earth!" I heard her cry beyond the door.

I went round the desk and sat in her chair. She had logged onto her computer, so at least I would have no password problem. I attacked the keyboard, clacking away frantically, searching for the student records. I found them easy enough, but I had a hard time figuring out how to search the database. Why did they have to make all these programs different? I kept glancing at the door, expecting Mrs. Stock to plow into the room at any second. I finally found the search perimeters, and keyed in 'Mount Olive.' A list of about twenty-five names appeared on the screen, quite a few more than I'd expected.

Then the doorknob started to turn. I focused on the door just in time to stop Mrs. Stock from entering the room and catching me. The doorknob jiggled.

"Oh, for the love of... Now what?" I heard her mutter on the other side of the door. The knob kept jiggling in an agitated way. "Julia...Julia... Did you lock the door?"

I walked out from behind the desk. "Uh, no," I said. "Must be stuck."

"This is ridiculous," she grumbled. The knob was turning back and forth frantically now, and I could hear the wood creak, as she must have been pushing against the door with her full weight. "Are you okay?" she asked.

"Yeah, fine.... I'm in my happy place," I added, and immediately felt like slitting my throat for saying those words.

I went back behind the desk. I had to get the list fast, but there were too many names to jot down on a piece of paper.

"I'm going to have to call Maintenance," Mrs. Stock called through the door.

"Do what you have to," I said, trying to figure out how to work her printer.

"You're not having an anxiety attack, are you?" she asked.

"Will you just shut up!" I yelled.

"Try to stay calm. I'll get in there soon enough," she promised.

I clicked the PRINT button, and the printer, which was set on a side table, spit out a sheet with the names. I grabbed the sheet, folded it into a small square, and stuffed it in my back pocket. After returning her computer to its desktop, I went round the desk, sat back in my seat, and released the pressure my mind had been holding against the door.

Mrs. Stock had already given up on the door, which remained closed for a few minutes while I sat there like an idiot waiting for somebody to notice that they could now open it freely. Finally I got up and opened the door myself.

I found Mrs. Stock in the main office, gawking up at the light fixtures, which didn't look so good. Three of them were dangling from only one of their two chains. Their long fluorescent bulbs were missing, and a small spray of sparks was raining down from a torn live wire. Tiny shards of glass covered the tiled floor in front of the counter, and there was a small flood of water behind the counter.

I walked up next to Mrs. Stock. "Bummer," I said.

I didn't wait for her reaction, or for her to ask how I'd escaped her office. I walked out into the hallway and went about my business.

At lunch I sat with Jack and Melody, as usual, but nobody was talking. Melody sat next to Jack. She was picking at her food, brooding, probably trying to figure out how to get Jack interested in her. Up until now, every trick she knew had failed her.

Jack glanced at me now and then. He seemed reluctant to speak.

I didn't want to eat, and although I wasn't suffering an anxiety attack, I felt like fleeing the building. I had an antsy sensation, as though something was nibbling at my edges. If I weren't sure I didn't have one, I would have suspected my conscience was bothering me.

"You all right?" Jack asked me.

"I'm fine," I said curtly. I found his concern more annoying than usual.

I dug the folded list out of my back pocket, and slid it across the table at him.

"Oh, you got it," he said, somewhat surprised, unfolding the printer paper. "I heard there was some kind of— disturbance in the main office this morning."

"What is that?" Melody asked, and when neither Jack nor I said anything, she said, "Obviously none of my business."

"It would only make your brain hurt," I told her, and then to Jack I said, "We're even, right?"

"Sure."

"Good, I have to get out of here," I said, pushing away from the table. As I turned to head out of the crowded lunchroom, I caught Melody giving Jack a puzzled look, like What's with her?

Outside the sky was overcast and a chilly breeze blew across the campus. I found a quiet spot on one of the wooden benches. I sat sideways facing toward the busy street, with my feet on the bench, and I hugged my knees toward me as though trying to make myself into a small ball. I wished for some alone time, but knew Jack would be there soon. He couldn't help himself. Apparently I was fascinating to him.

Sure enough, a few minutes later, he sat next to me. I tried not to look at him, although he was right there in front of me.

"You all right?" he asked.

"You asked that before. I told you."

"Just double-checking."

"No need to."

"It's just that you seem mad."

I grunted. "I'm always mad."

"No, you're always hostile. There's a difference."

"Jack—just stop talking."

"I thought, maybe, because of..." He waved the list he held in one hand.

"I agreed to get it for you. It was no big deal."

"Did you look at this?" he asked.

"No."

"An interesting name popped up on it," he said, and when I didn't respond, he said, "Eloise Parker."

"Will you just drop it?" I said. "Let the world figure out its own problems."

"When does that ever happen?" he asked, and I couldn't disagree with him. He gave me a strange look. "What's bugging you anyway?"

"Nothing," I lied. "You were saying about Eloise."

"Everybody hates her. She knows that—thanks to Jessica."

"It's not Eloise."

"It has to be," he insisted.

"That wouldn't make any sense. I talked to her. I didn't read her but I caught a sense of her. She would never do a thing. She would let the world take care of its own problems. Besides, why would she attack just jocks? Why not attack Jessica?"

He saw the sense in this. He shook his head and studied the sheet. "I don't get it, then. There are only four students who transferred to Adler from Mount Olive this year. Eloise seems the most likely."

"Jack, did you ever consider the possibility that the right name isn't on the list? How about the possibility that nobody is starting anybody on fire?"

"You mean it's all a series of flukes?"

"Yeah, why not?" I asked. "Sometimes life is just weird, and there's no explanation for it."

"But you flashed on those burning pants," he reminded me.

"I have flashes on a lot of things," I said. "They don't all mean something. Jack, just forget about these things. I have to put up with stuff like this. You don't. I really don't think it's healthy for you. You get obsessed. You start seeing things that aren't there."

"You think that's what I'm doing?"

"Yeah—well, I don't know. I just think you need to leave this thing alone."

As I tried to ignore him, I felt him studying me closely.

"Is there something you're not telling me?" he asked.

I hesitated a bit too long, before I said, "No."

"Jules?"

"You're impossible," I hissed. "Don't you have any common sense? Didn't your parents ever teach you not to touch fire? You need to tear that list up. You need to walk away from this little mystery."

"I don't think I can," he said.

"You have to," I said. "You want to go home one day and find your house on fire?"

"You do know what's going on, don't you?"

"It's something you can't stop—no matter what you do."

"So I'm supposed just look the other way?"

"Exactly."

He thought about that for a moment. "Maybe you're right."

"Of course, I'm right," I said. "So you'll stop poking around?"

"Sure," he said, but I didn't believe him. He was just humoring me.

"Just go to your next class," I sighed. "Go and be normal, okay?"

"You going?" he asked.

"I think I'm going to get an early dismal. My stomach's bothering me a little," I lied.

"Oh." He studied me. "Call you tonight?"

"Sure," I said.

I didn't bother going to the office to ask for an E.D. I didn't care if I got into trouble for that. I just needed to get away from the school.

After Jack left, I wandered over to the student parking lot. I climbed into my old Chevy Nova and drove away.

Fine drizzle was falling by the time I got home. The streets were getting wet and slick. The drizzle whispered through the new leaves of the towering trees that lined the block on which I lived. I found the house dark and empty. Dad was at the firehouse, I knew, and my mom had probably volunteered to work a second shift at the hospital. It was for the best; I really didn't feel like being around anybody.

I let myself into the house and went up to my room. I changed into a pair of shorts and a black t-shirt. I tried to lie down in bed in my dim room, but couldn't get comfortable. My mattress felt lumpy and the air in my room smelled stale. So I got up, opened my window, and climbed out onto the small slanting roof at the front of the house. I would do that sometimes, when I wanted to feel like the only person in the universe. Sometimes I needed to feel that alone and free from the burden of other people. I'd sit on the brown shingles and watch the birds fly past. Sometimes, I thought, if there was any happiness in the world for me, I would find it sitting alone out on that roof.

The roof was wet now, but I didn't care. I sat and let the cool drizzle fall down on me. I hugged my knees and the rough shingles bite the bottoms of my bare feet. I watched the occasional car that cruised down the street, its tires making sopping sounds as they rolled over the wet asphalt. No birds flew around today.

Then I heard a sigh. It came out of thin air. A moment later, Jerry was sitting next to me. Jerry was the house spirit, a former cop killed in the line of duty while protecting his canine partner, Sarge. He still wore his uniform and the ugly bullet hole in his forehead.

"I used to love the rain," he said wistfully. "The coolness and fresh air that comes with it. It always amazes me—the things I miss the most are always the little things."

I grunted. I had learned long ago not to comment on anything a spirit says to you; if you do, they just keep talking more and more.

"So the facts in evidence," he continued. "It is a school day. It is raining. And you are home sitting on your roof. Hmmm. This can't be good."

"I just wanted to be alone," I said, hoping he would take the hint.

"Trust me: it's not way to go through life...or death. What's the matter?"

"Same old thing," I said. "I'm always surrounded by weirdness. Sometimes I wonder if I attract it. I wonder if it will always be this way, forever weird."

"Some people are born to weirdness," Jerry said, "and others have weirdness thrust upon them."

I stared at him "That's an awful saying."

"Whatever the case, I'm sure you'll figure it all out," he said.

"What makes you say that?"

"I know you," he said.

"No, you don't—nobody does."

"It's easier to believe that, isn't it?" he said. "Just like it's easier to pretend you don't have feelings."

"I don't. Really. And stop reading my mom's books over her shoulder."

As if he hadn't heard me, he forged on, "And then something happens to remind you that you do have feelings, and the next thing you know you're sitting up on the roof in the rain and thinking about running away, as though that ever solved anything."

I glared at him.

He shrugged his thick shoulders. "It's hard to hide things from a spirit. Now, you want to talk about it?"

"It's Jack," I grumbled.

"That kid? What about him?"

"He's an idiot," I said. "He just won't leave things alone." Jerry sat there, waiting for more, so, as briefly as possible, I told him what had been happening.

"Pyrokinesis? You're kidding."

"No," I said.

"What will they think up next?"

"Jack needs to leave this alone. I know how he is. Even if he says he'll stay out of it, he'll keep digging around. He's stubborn. He'll end up getting hurt."

"And you wouldn't want that."

"Of course not."

"Because you care about him."

"Duh," I said glumly.

"It's not the end of the world, you know. You can pretend all you want that you don't care about anybody, but that doesn't stop the truth from being the truth." Jerry paused to look over the street; a squad car was cruising past. I thought I heard him sigh. "As much as I hate to admit it," he continued, "your Jack is right. Nobody can be allowed to go around setting people on fire."

"And how do you stop somebody like that, exactly?" I asked.

"That is the problem," Jerry said gravely. "The authorities would never believe it—no physical evidence of arson. If you knew who's doing it, you could try reasoning with them, although a person who would set people on fire isn't likely to be the reasonable type. So what are you planning to do?"

"Running away to join some freak show," I said.

"You won't. You're not the running type."

"Isn't that a shame?" I asked.

"You'll work your way through the problem. You always do. Well, I have to get going."

"Hey? Where have you been lately, anyway?" I asked, before he faded out on me. "I haven't seen you around the house."

"I've been spending more time with Sarge," he said. "They had to retire him, you know. A couple years after I died, he got hit by a car while running down a suspect. He has bad arthritis in his hips now. Some days he can barely walk. It's sad.... Actually I might need your help with him one day."

"Sure," I said, wondering what good I could possibly do for an aging German Shepherd.

"Good luck with that problem," he said, beginning to fade away. "I have faith in you, kid."

"Why was that, again?" I asked.

But he was already gone and I was once more sitting alone out in the rain.

**************

Later I went down to the kitchen and made myself a salad. I choked down most of it, as the room grew darker and darker.

Outside the window black clouds rolled in, until it was dark as night, and the drizzle turned to hard rain that pattered heavily on the glass. I could hear the sound of thunder starting in the distance.

I dug my cell phone out of my pocket a moment before it rang.

"Speak," I said to Jack.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Sitting in a dark house, listening to thunder."

"Sounds like fun. Feeling any better?"

"Yeah, yeah, I think I am," I said, and, oddly, it was true. "Look, Jack, I have to say something to you. I'm not sure how."

"Just say it," he said.

"You were right; these guys starting on fire was no fluke."

"I never thought it was."

"But you can't get involved," I said.

"Why not? Somebody has to stop it, right?"

"Maybe, but not you. Let's just say that this is a freak issue, and you're not a freak."

There was a long pause at the other end of the line. "What are you saying?" he asked. "You telling me you know what's going on?"

"I don't know, because I choose not to know. But I do suspect," I said. It was one of those moments I wondered whether telling the truth was a good or bad thing. "All right," I blurted out. "I'm a big fat liar, okay? Maybe my pants should be on fire. I think I know what's going on. There was another name on your short list. Amy Nicci."

"Yeah, I saw. Who is she anyway? I couldn't place her."

"Amy—Mean Jessica's friend Amy."

"Oh, her? Short dark hair, dark eyes."

"I went to middle school with her," I confessed.

"You did?"

"Yeah."

"You were friends," he concluded.

"I wouldn't say that. It wasn't that simple. Let's say that I realized she was different and she realized I was different. That was the basis for something that was like friendship, but, trust me, it wasn't really friendship."

"This didn't end well, did it?" Jack asked carefully.

I snorted. "Not at all."

"What happened?"

"I stabbed her in the neck with a pencil. A number two pencil, if I remember right."

"Any particularly reason?"

"She gave me the creeps."

"She gave you the creeps?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, but what's her deal exactly?"

"She thinks she's a witch."

"A witch? Really?"

"Oh, she's not—that's just what she always thought," I explained. "You know how I hate all these things I can do? Well, she wasn't like that. She has abilities, too. She loved it, all of it. She totally embraced what she was, and still wanted to be more."

I heard him sigh. "Now she can set people on fire."

"Apparently," I said. I listened to the silence; I thought that maybe we had got disconnected. "You see why I never wanted to experiment with my abilities?"

"But you're different," he insisted. "Something like this could never happen to you."

"And you know this how?" I asked.

"I just know. You could never hurt anybody."

I chuckled darkly. "Never count on that—never. Sometimes my mind drifts. I think crazy things, and sometimes those things don't seem so crazy."

"Jules, you're all right," Jack said through the static of our connection.

"If you say so..."

"But what about Amy?"

"Nothing," I said.

"Nothing? That's it? Just let her do whatever she wants, no matter who gets hurt?"

"How would you stop her anyway? Are you fireproof or something?" I asked. "No, you have to stop poking around. You're asking questions at school, too, aren't you? That definitely has to stop. It's a big school, but sooner or later, that's going to get back to her. Right now she thinks she can get away with anything. It's safer to let her go on thinking that."

"So, we do nothing?" he said, his voice sounding lost. He was one of those people who think there isn't anything that can't be fixed. He never learned that some things, and some people, are broken and there is nothing anybody can do to repair them.

"For now, until I can figure out what to do with her."

"And what if she attacks somebody else in the meantime?"

"We can't do anything about that," I said. "I don't think that's the real problem, anyway."

"What do you mean?"

"This whole targeting jocks—I doesn't quite make sense. Oh, sure, maybe these three guys lied to her, or did something else to piss her off. But, really, it's not her style—it's not how her mind works. If anything, this was more like practice."

"Practice?" He sounded alarmed. "Practice for what?"

"Amy was more into—what would you call it?—mass destruction."

"Mass destruction?" he said dully.

"You know, killing a lot of people."

"I know what mass destruction is. Are you kidding me? Is this just something you're making up so that I'll leave it alone?"

"No, really, I'm not, Jack. She used to tell me her fantasies: throwing hand grenades in the lunchroom, poisoning the school's water supply, fire-bombing the main office—that kind of thing. Like I said, she gave me the creeps."

"You think she was serious? A lot of people just talk."

"I thought she meant every word of it " I said. "I even stopped using the drinking fountains at school."

"And you never told anybody this?"

"Why? Everybody knew there was a problem with Amy. It was no secret. She was sent down to her counselor more times than I was."

"And nobody did anything?" he asked.

"What could they do? She talked crazy, she acted crazy, but she never actually did anything crazy."

"Until now, until she knew that she could get away with it."

"That would be my guess," I said. "She's not stupid, you know. Just stay away from her, all right?" I said, getting tired of talking about Amy.

After I got off the phone, I sat in the darkened kitchen for a long time, wondering why Amy was my problem anyway, and deciding it was something with which I was stuck, like a lot of other things in my life. It was, as I told Jack, a freak issue, and I was the only other freak available.

***************

When my mom came home, she was soaking wet. She went upstairs, changed into some dry clothes, and then returned to the kitchen and asked me about twenty times if I wanted her to make me something to eat. I really didn't need this type of harassment right now. She was nagging me about my diet, and I was worried about figuring out how to stop a human flame-thrower from going Carrie on everybody's ass. Clearly we didn't live in the same world.

"I told you—I had a salad," I said.

But it was, like, How big of a salad? What kind of vegetables? Did I at least have some shredded cheese on it? How about salad dressing?...

"Mom, please! I ate, all right?"

"It's just that we had this teen-aged girl admitted today. She weight only eighty-three pounds--"

"Oh, God, not again," I said. Every time the hospital got a patient with anorexia or bulimia, my mom got frantic. "I told you about a million times—I'm not anorexic. I eat. I eat. I eat. How many times do I have to say it? I don't think I'm too fat. I think I'm pitiful skinny. I don't know why I can't put on weight."

"Well, you better do something," she howled, "before it's too late."

"I don't need this—I really don't."

I ran upstairs to my room, and locked myself inside. I left the light off and paced the floor in the gloom. It was bad enough that I constantly fought being that part of me that was a freak. But why couldn't I even be the rest of me, the superficial part, the naturally scrawny kid? Was there no part of me that was acceptable? To myself, I was a freak, and that wasn't all right with me. To my parents, I was too thin and cold, and that wasn't all right with them. To kids at school, I was too weird, and that wasn't all right with them. I just couldn't make anybody happy. What was I supposed to do? If I were a building with too many defects, they could tear me down and rebuild. It was no wonder that I had gravitated toward Amy Nicci at one time. We had much in common; we belonged nowhere and we satisfied nobody.

I stopped at the window and looked outside. The rain was falling hard, slanting down from the dark gray sky. The branches of all the trees bent in the wind, and new leaves were ripped away and flew around in a mad frenzy.

I turned on the light and changed my clothes. I put on a pair of jeans and my Doc Martens boots. I threw on a black hooded sweatshirt.

I went downstairs. When my mom saw how I was dressed, she looked stunned.

"Where are you going?" she wondered.

"For a walk," I muttered.

"In a storm?"

But I just walked past her through the kitchen toward the back door.

"There's a tornado warning!" she shrieked after me.

"Tornadoes avoid me—like everything else," I said, before I went through the back door and stepped out into the storm; I figured if she and my dad wanted to send me to a psychiatrist, I'd give them a good reason. Other than that I wasn't thinking anything at all. There is no greater freedom than the freedom you experience when you stop thinking. I had no idea what I was doing but I was doing it, and that was good.

***************

I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt over my head, and walked down the street through the cold rain. Now and then, lightning flashed in large claws across the sky. Gusts of wind rose and whipped me pretty hard, but I kept walking. I didn't care that I was cold. I didn't care that soon I'd be soaking wet. I didn't care if I ended up dying of pneumonia. I just needed to be alone out in the storm. Maybe I was always there, figuratively—the storm that rages between totally normal and totally abnormal; I was unable to reach normal and unwilling to commit to abnormal. Maybe the storm was my home, the only home I could ever know.

After walking a couple blocks, I heard a faraway whine that became shriller and shriller. I knew what it was; a power transformer was about to blow. Sure enough, a moment later, there was a boom, like a gunshot, and then the streetlights flickered and went out and all the houses up and down the street became dark.

I kept walking. Shadows stirred among shadows and things whispered in the darkness. Twice I spotted glowing figures venturing out of haunted houses, looking around in a puzzled way, as though they couldn't fully comprehend the storm or the power outage.

By the time I reached the old Victorian, I was drenched and chilled to the bone. I took shelter under the limbs of the old oak tree on the front lawn. It was a horrible place to stand in a storm—it was exactly the kind of tree that gets struck by lightning—but hardly any of the rain reached me beneath the thick gnarled branches. I pulled off my hood. Beneath it my hair was damp and clung to the sides of my face. I leaned back on the thick tree trunk and studied the Victorian. It was dark except for one window on the second floor through which the dim light of candles wavered. Each flash of lightning created an eerie snapshot of the old building. The faded white paint was peeling off the siding. The window boxes were empty. There was a broken chain on the porch swing, and one end of it rested on the floor and made scrapping sounds every time the wind gusted. A gaudy green and orange curtain flapped in the upper window before the wavering candlelight....

What am I doing here? I wondered. I didn't believe that I had planned to end up here. But, maybe, in the back of my demented mind, it was exactly where I wished to be, where I needed to be, at the moment—a place where I would never be judged for what I was. I wondered if I was really so desperate to be accepted? Well, maybe....

"Are you lost, freak?" At first I thought the voice sounded in my mind, but it came from behind me, from behind the tree trunk on which I leaned.

I was not startled—not many things took me by surprise. I listened to the crackle of dry twigs as something crept along the ground in the dark. Then a shadow emerged from behind me, circling forward. It kept a wary distance from me; the last dealing I had had with Amy was to stab her in the neck, which, apparently, she hadn't forgot.

"I said, 'Are you lost, freak?'" she asked impatiently. Lightning flashed, and I caught a glimpse of her evil pixie face. "Well...?" She waited for an answer, and when it didn't come, she tried to probe my mind. But she had never been able to read me, and that much hadn't changed. My thoughts were shielded from her. She wouldn't have understood them at the moment, anyway-- my thoughts were so confused.

We stood there, in the darkness beneath the tree, for what seemed like a long time. The rain pattered on the ground, and thunder began to roar overhead.

Then, strangely, she burst out laughing. "I always knew you'd come crawling back," she said, deciding that was why I was here.

"Did you?" I said.

"Of course. You don't belong anywhere else—you never did. You are destined to be here, just like you are destined to be what you are. I wondered how long it would take you to learn that. And what if I told you to get lost? What then?"

"You always have Jessica as your playmate," I said.

She snorted. "Jessica. What a joke! Oh, she's filled with hatred, and hatred has its charms. Other than that, she's nothing; she has no substance, she has no talent. Not like you." Lightning flashed, and I saw her face, her dreamy expression. "Tell me, freak, can you still do it?"

"Do what?"

"That little trick of yours. You remember that one summer, that storm... Can you still do it?"

"I think," I said.

"Show me," she commanded.

I walked out from under the sheltering tree limbs. She followed me, still keeping her distance. We stood on the front lawn and looked up at the dark sky. I had to squint as the rain fell on my face. Then I pointed to one spot in the sky. "There," I said, and a few seconds later lightning flared where I had pointed. I studied the sky awhile, and then indicated another area, which soon erupted in long forks of light. Again and again, wherever I pointed lightning bloomed out of the dark clouds.

Finally Amy laughed joyfully, clapping her small hands like a little kid who has witnessed a magic trick.

"What a mind-freak," she roared. She stared up at the sky in that creepy, dreamy way of hers. "I remember the first time you did that. I actually thought you were directing the lightning, commanding it to go where you wanted it to go. It took me a while to figure out you were just predicting. Oh, a good enough trick, but hardly practical. What are you supposed to do with it?—win a few bets? But what if you really could control it? What if you could make lightning do your bidding? Now, that would be awesome. Imagine what you could do with that? If there's something you don't like, ZAP—it's destroyed. Somebody bugging you, ZAP—they never bug you again."

I watched her as she spoke. It was clear that she was totally serious. That had always been the really scary thing about Amy: not that she said weird things, but that she meant them.

She lowered her eyes from the sky to look at me.

"That was an old trick, freak," she said, studying me warily. "What new tricks have you picked up?"

I shrugged my shoulders.

"Bullshit. It's been four years. You must have picked up something."

"I was really never interested in that sort of thing," I told her.

"Not interested? How can you not be interested? It's a part of you, like your hands, like your legs. How can you ignore your hands and legs? How can you stop them from serving the function they were meant to serve?"

I shrugged.

"Pathetic, really pathetic, Jules," she muttered.

"And you?" I asked. "Are you still playing with locks of hair and eye of newt?"

She grunted in disdain. "Witchcraft? Witchcraft is nothing—nothing. It's for talent-less hacks. If you're born with the gift, you don't ever have to cast a spell. You see what you want to see. You know what others don't know. You will things to happen. It's that simple, if you have the right powers."

"Do you have the right powers?" I asked.

"I have what I need," she said, and I noticed that though she stood in the rain, she didn't appear to be the least bit wet. "I have what I need to endure life, to never lose. I don't need anything or anybody." She looked at me with an expression that was part contempt and part pity. "But not you," she continued. "You're still in that gray area, aren't you? You're lost in limbo, just hovering there, between the light and the darkness. The light pushes you away, and yet you fight the pull of darkness. Why do you put yourself through it? It's not so awful, you know. It's simply accepting what you're meant to be. Really, it's not like you ever had a choice. A duck is a duck. A frog is a frog. A freak is a freak."

I stared at her. I didn't know what to say. I couldn't argue with her—I couldn't say she was wrong about any of it.

Finally she sighed. "Well, you want to come inside?" she asked, not quite friendly but dropping the psycho-bitch intensity. She sounded almost normal now. "You look like a drowned rat. I have the house to myself. My father is out drinking and my mother is out whoring. Or was that the other way around?—I never can keep that quite straight with those people. Anyway..." She looked at me, her eyes flickered something resembling hope. Maybe she wasn't so comfortable being alone after all. Everybody needs a friend, right? She took a step closer to me, and though she wasn't very close, I could feel the chilly air grow warm. "We could have fun, Jules, like before, only a thousand times better," she whispered the temptation. "We're not little kids anymore, Jules. Imagine what we can do now."

Although she was somewhat maniacal, I considered her offer. Could we actually be friends again? The idea seemed insane. But, really, was it? At least she understood me, not like dim-witted Melody, who understood nothing, or do-gooder Jack, who was always trying to make me something I was not—a lab rat or a saint.

So I went with her, into the house and out of the rain, out of the rain for the first time in a long, long while.

I never made excuses for the things I did, and so I didn't make excuses for befriending Amy again. It seemed like a natural thing to do—birds of a feather flocking together, right? It made perfect sense to me.

Jack, of course, had a different opinion. When he discovered that I was going to Amy's house after school every day, he became utterly frantic. He just didn't understand, and how could he? He had a few friends, and he could relate to them and they could relate to him. He took that for granted. He couldn't imagine what it would be like to be so different that you fail to make connections with others on a very basic level. He was incapable of seeing the world as I did. When he spoke of paranormal things he'd read about, I could no more understand his enthusiasm than he could understand the vague thrill that I had when I had a vision of, say, a battlefield strewn with dead bodies frozen in hideous positions. But Amy would know how it was, because she had a point of reference, she had seen and felt similar things. "You just have to stay cool. Control the thrill—don't let the thrill control you." This was what my life had been lacking, the comfort of knowing that I was not unique.

Still, I sat with Melody and Jack at lunch. It wasn't that I was telling them to get lost, although with each passing day, I realized more and more how little I had in common with them.

"I don't see the big deal," Melody said to Jack one day. "If she wants to make friends with somebody, what do you care? I know you don't like Amy, but it's not like anybody's forcing you to hang out with her. So what's the problem?"

"She's knows what the problem is," Jack grumbled, glowering at me across the lunch table.

"Jack, we're not talking about this," I said.

We sat in edgy silence for a while. Nobody was even eating their food.

Melody looked back and forth from me, across from her, to Jack, at her side.

"You know, sometimes I get the feeling I don't know anything about what's going on," she commented.

"Believe me, you're better off that way," I assured her.

The three of us fell into a long silence again. Finally, my disgust growing, I shoved away from the table, and walked outside.

For once Jack didn't follow me like a lost puppy. I was sure he was disappointed in me. I didn't care one bit. He had no right to be disappointed in me. He meant nothing to me, and he never would. He had been a constant reminder of how different I was from others, as though I really needed that. Our becoming friends had been a fluke. Becoming more than friends, which was what he wanted, was impossible. We didn't even live in the same world, but it was much more than that; it was also a matter of fate. Some things are just never meant to be.

But Jack would never believe that. He thought anything was possible. He was so stubborn and stupid, no matter what I did, no matter what I said, he would always believe that somehow I could be "fixed." Even my mom knew better than to believe that.

After my last class that day, I walked outside toward the student parking lot. It was a beautiful spring day. There were soft warm breezes and not a cloud in the sky.

Then I noticed that Jack was racing up the path toward me. I huffed in disgust—like doesn't this guy ever take a hint?—but I didn't try to evade him. I wasn't the running type. I let him catch up with me.

"What do you want, Jack?" I asked.

"What are you doing?" he demanded.

"Well, let's see, I'm done with school. I'm walking to the parking lot. Uh, I guess I'm leaving."

"You know what I mean."

"I never know what you mean."

"You're going to her house again, aren't you?" he asked, as though he were actually jealous.

"So?"

"I don't get you," he complained.

"There's a news flash," I said. "Maybe you should actually listen to me sometime. Maybe you would find a clue."

"She's dangerous. You know what she did. So how you could you possibly be all BFF with her?"

"It's none of your concern," I told him coldly.

"None of my concern? How is this none of my concern? I care about you."

"Stop," I said. "Nobody asked you to care. So just stop."

I turned and started to walk away, but then Jack made a mistake—a really big mistake. He came up from behind me and grabbed my arm to stop me. He knew better than to do that. He knew I hated to be touched, and he knew why. How many times had I told him? Rage ran through me like an electric current. I spun round and jerked my arm back. Until that moment we probably looked as though we were just a couple having a little quarrel. But then the sky began to change. As if out of nowhere, dense dark clouds quickly rolled across the sky, roiling, blocking out the sun. Winds began to blow wildly, bending back tree limbs, whipping up dried leaves and dirt and other debris. Lightning flashed, and thunder roared. Rain began to fall hard in gray sheets.

Everybody on campus started to rush to the safety of the school, panicked and confused by the sudden storm.

Jack stood before me in a daze, not believing what he was seeing. He couldn't say anything. The storm had effectively ended our argument.

"Leave me alone, Jack," I told him, as it started to hail. Tiny marble-sized balls of ice began to land on the lawn and clack on the hoods and roofs of cars in the parking lot. Larger pieces of hail were heading earthward. "Leave me alone before I hurt you for real. This is the only warning you're going to get—the only kindness I'm capable of."

When he looked at me, his eyes were filled with fear for the first time. Maybe, at long last, he was learning my true nature and how that nature could never be changed by his good intentions.

He turned and ran toward the school as larger pieces of hail shattered on the pavement, bounced off the grass, and cracked windshields in the parking lot.

"Run, Jack, run! Save yourself!" I shouted after him, and then whispered to myself, "Because you sure can't save me."

I turned away and continued to my car. Somehow, the rain and hail weren't touching me. It was as though I was inside of a protective cocoon, and nothing on the outside could touch me.

I found Amy leaning against my car, from where she must have witnessed what had happened. She, too, appeared to be bone dry, the rain falling all around her yet not touching her. She looked up at the angry sky, and seemed mesmerized by the dark roiling clouds. When she looked at me, her eyes were filled with an evil glee.

"Well, welcome back, Jules," she said jovially. "Where have you been for all these years?"

The storm lasted for another fifteen minutes, before it quickly faded away, returning the beautiful spring day.

Oddly my old beast of a car was none the worse for wear. It was the only car in the parking lot that was undamaged by the hail. Amy and I sat in the front seat, and watched as the storm wound down and vanished as though it had never happened.

"That was very, very impressive," Amy commented.

I shrugged. "I was a little pissed."

"A little pissed? What would happen if you were a lot pissed?"

"I don't know," I said. I felt drained, subdued. Maybe I felt a little guilty, too, that I had scared Jack so badly. I had just wanted him to leave me alone.

"Feels good to get it out, doesn't it?" Amy asked.

"I suppose," I murmured.

"This never happened before, did it?"

"No, nothing like this. I can usually keep these things under control," I said, still not certain I'd actually caused the storm.

"Under control?" she said, looking at me as though I was crazy. "Why would you even want to do that?"

I really didn't feel like talking about it anymore. I wished that none of it had ever happened. I turned the ignition key, and my car rumbled to life.

"Your house?" I asked.

She didn't answer right away. She seemed lost in thought.

"Just start driving. I'll let you know," she said, as though she needed more time to figure something out.

So I pulled out of the parking lot, and started heading toward her house, not sure that was our destination. Now and then I could feel her look at me, studying me closely. Finally she said, with an air of resolve, "I want to show you something."

"Yeah?" I said, wondering.

She told me to turn off the main street we were riding down, and then continued to give me instructions. After a turn here and a turn there, it was clear that we weren't going to anywhere near her house. We passed through a couple bad neighborhoods. The buildings were old and not being kept up. Some front lawns were bare of grass. Some of the narrow frame three-flats tilted to the side, as though threatening to fall over at any second. Then were entered and area of larger industrial buildings—warehouses, factories, an old tannery—many of which seemed to be shut down. Their parking lots were deserted, and weeds sprouted up through cracks in the ancient blacktop.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"You'll see."

She had me turn down a narrow side street that separated two enormous buildings, both cold storage warehouses. A rat the size of a cat darted across our path. It was gone before I had the chance to hit the brakes. It was gone so fast I wondered if it had actually been there.

"Was that a rat?" I asked.

"Sewer rat," she said, still deep in thought. "They get huge."

"I wasn't sure. It ran so fast. Sometimes I see things that aren't really there."

"Oh, I know," she said. "I know exactly what you mean."

She had me park in front of an old building of dark reddish-brown bricks. The front windows were made of glass blocks. Many of the blocks had been broken, probably by kids with nothing better to do.

"This is it," she said, and climbed out of the car as I cut the engine.

I got out and followed her. We walked round the side of the building, through a lot that was over-grown with weeds.

"I found this place a couple months ago," she said over her shoulder.

"Why would you bother looking for it?" I asked. The place was a dump, obviously abandoned, probably condemned by the city.

"It's somewhere to go," she said, and led me to the rear of the building.

There was a small loading dock, its door boarded shut. Next to the dock there was a heavy steel entry door. You could see that it had been secured with a hasp and a heavy padlock, but somebody had ripped the hasp out of the door.

The door squeaked loudly when Amy pulled it open. Before she walked inside, she paused and said to me, "Welcome to my garden, where I plant and grow nightmares."

I followed her inside. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dimness inside the building. The place was a mess. It looked as though somebody had tried to gut the interior and renovate it at the same time. The walls were mostly bare at the back of the building, showing the backsides of the ugly reddish brown bricks. Toward the front somebody had framed out the front wall and started to hang drywall. Everywhere there were piles of debris that had never been hauled away—old wooden slats, broken pieces of timber, crumpled plaster, shattered glass, bend lengths of lead pipes.... It was the kind of place you visited for a short while, and then end up blowing black stuff out your nose for days.

"What was this place?" I asked.

"Used to be some kind of workshop, I guess. Then somebody started to convert it into something else. I guess they ran out of money. If you look in one of the back corner, there's a huge stain on the floor. It looks like blood. Maybe somebody got hurt and couldn't finish. Who knows what they were trying to do? Me? I think it would make a great underground club. Put in a DJ booth, a dance floor, a fog machine. Have people dancing around with glow sticks while other people do some rad medieval shit, like sacrificing virgins. We'd be safe, right?" added, somehow joking without any sign of humor.

She led me toward the front of the building, where somebody had abandoned work long ago. An aluminum ladder stood near the half-finished wall. There was a portable worktable, too, and three metal folding chairs. In one corner there was a large pile of scrap wood that looked charred, as if somebody had tried to build a bon fire right there in the building.

"And what do you do here, exactly?" I asked.

"Experiment, of course," she said gravely, studying me as though trying to gage my reaction. I might have cringed slightly at the word 'experiment,' because that was exactly what Jack had suggested to me, only for different reasons. "You know what they say—practical makes perfect," Amy continued, "Be all that you can be, and all that." She was getting extremely creepy again, and it was easy to see why I had stabbed her with a pencil that time. "You should practice, too. You should have been practicing the whole time. What you did with the weather—wow, that was awesome. But it was completely unfocused. It was just a bunch of noise and wind. Unless you control it completely, it's not very practical."

"Practical?" I wondered.

"You have to be able to strike somebody with a lightning bolt, or crush somebody's head open with a big hunk of hail. Otherwise what good is it?"

"You mean use it to hurt people," I said.

"Sure, what else?"

"Why?"

"Why? Are you soft in the head? You're a freak, Jules, like me. Whether or not you realize it, you're at war with the whole world. Anything you do is all right, because everybody would do a lot worse to you if they understood exactly what you are. That's a good enough reason right there, if you even need a reason, which, really, you don't. You can do it just because you can, or just because you want to see somebody suffer, somebody who would make you suffer if they had the chance. So why give anybody that chance. Now I want to show you something," she said, "something I never showed anybody."

She walked over to one of the folding chairs, and dragged it across the floor to the middle of the room. Then she went to one of the debris piles, from which she retrieved a cinder block. She carried it awkwardly and set it on the chair.

She stepped back about twenty feet from the chair.

"Now watch what I've been practicing," she said. She turned to face the chair. She seemed to go into a trance, staring at the cinder block for a long while, during which I became certain she had gone totally bonkers. Nothing was happening, nothing at all. Then the stale air around us grew warmer and warmer, until it was nearly unbearable to breathe. Finally the cinder block burst into flames.

Up until this moment I had doubts that Amy had had anything at all to do with those guys who got burned.

Amy broke free of her trance and looked at me.

"See?" she said, breathless as though she had just run a long distance. "Cinder blocks aren't supposed to burn, right? Hah! Everything burns if it gets hot enough. Are you impressed? Tell me you're impressed," she said, as if it were the most important thing in the world.

I didn't say anything. I was trying to figure out how I could have been so stupid. I watched as the flames engulfing the charred block quickly died away.

"Oh, and look at this," Amy said, giddy from sharing her secret. She held up her index finger, as though pointing at the sagging ceiling, and a flame popped up from her fingertip. The flame burned but didn't burn her skin. She blew it out as if it were a candle. "See? Perfectly safe—if you're me. So what do you think?"

"I think you torched that baseball player." I said.

A sick kind of bliss glimmered in her dark eyes. "Yeah," she said, and released a giggle—it actually sound like tee-he-he.

"Why would you do that?" I asked.

"Why not? I needed to practice on a moving target. I have plans—big plans. And now you can be part of them, Jules," she said. She seemed amused by my lack of enthusiasm. Then her attitude suddenly changed, as though some switch was flipped in her head. She eyed me suspiciously. "I hope sharing this little secret with you wasn't a mistake. Was it a mistake, Jules? I thought we were on the same page here."

But, really, we weren't. There was a big difference between talking about doing something and doing it, a huge difference between not caring and pretending not to care. Amy, it was now clear me, was what my parents feared that I was becoming: a sociopath. She had crossed the line into a world that was made of shades of gray. The only other color was red, and red was blood, and the blood and misery of others were the only things that could bring her joy.

"Come on, Jules, I trusted you with this," she said, pleading, still trying to entice me. In my head, I kept hearing the words of that old school yard game: Red Rover, Red Rover, let Julia come over. That dare and invitation playing over and over in my mind in a maddening chorus of temptation. "Why don't you give it a try?" she said, motioning toward the cinder block, which was no longer burning. "It's not hard. I can show you how." When I didn't respond, she snorted in disgust and said, "I suppose this is the part where you stab me—again—or try to."

"I'm going home now," I said.

"Yeah, whatever." She sounded like a used car salesman who just realized he has just lost a sale.

"You want a lift?" I asked.

"No."

"Sure?"

"Yeah, I'm sure. And Jules?... You better not fuck with me. If you do, you'll be sorry. I swear you will. Daddy fireman will be making a couple extra calls, and you won't like what he finds burning."

I turned and walked toward the rear of the building.

"And tell your dog to stop sniffing around my business, or else," she yelled after me. "That was a fine little show you two put on for me earlier. I should have guessed it. You should win an award for that performance—you really should."

The rusty steel door groaned loudly as I shoved it open. I couldn't escape fast enough.

I walked quickly round the side of the building to get back to my car. Once inside behind the steering wheel, I paused and tried to calm myself. My breath was short and my pulse was racing. What an idiot! What had made me believe that something like this wouldn't happen? Of course, Amy torched those guys, and now she knew her secret was revealed, which made her that much more dangerous. She knew that Jack had been asking questions around school, too, and she was so paranoid, she even believed Jack and I had staged our argument earlier.

Never trust somebody who doesn't trust anybody.

Good going, Jules, really. Only you could go looking for somebody who understands you, and end up endangering the only people in the world who really care about you even though they don't understand you at all. My parents, Jack, and maybe Melody—Amy wouldn't hesitate to turn them to ashes, just to get even with me. She wouldn't think twice about that, because she had no conscience, and she would get away with it, because nobody would ever believe she could set people on fire just by wishing it to be so. How, exactly, do you deal with somebody like that?

I slapped the steering wheel viciously. I couldn't recall a time I had ever been so mad at myself.

I started the car and did a U-turn to head out of the isolated area of industrial decay and insanity. As I drove I dug my cell phone out of my pocket, and tried to call Jack. The phone rang and rang and finally went to voice mail. I dialed a couple more times and got the same result. Great, I thought. Now he decides to leave me alone.

Finally I left a message, not sure he would even listen to it. "Jack, look, you need to call me, okay? It's important."

I headed for home, driving back through the shabby areas. By now all the schools were out for the day. The city buses were filled with kids. Gang-bangers hung out on street corners. These days kids were getting shot left and right in the city. Accidentally bump into somebody in the lunch line, and get shot on the way home. I never worried about any of that. What was the worse anybody can do to you? Kill you? Not really: they can only kill your body, while the rest of you, the most important part of you, survives. So I did not fear death. Sometimes I thought I feared everything but death. What I feared now more than anything else was what Amy might decide in her demented mind to do.

I tried calling Jack again, but he still wasn't answering. So I left another message. "Listen, Jack, you need to call me, really. I know you're freaked out by what happened earlier. I tried to warn you before. I'm like a surprise package, and the surprise isn't always nice. And you know how I hate being touched. But never mind all that. I think we might have a problem, a big problem. So be a good boy, and call me, okay?" I tried to sound as sweet as I could, but I thought I fell short—I just was never good at doing sweet.

As a drove along, I started to doubt Jack would return my call. He'd always returned my calls quickly, but now my cell phone lay silently on the passenger seat. He didn't trust me anymore, I was sure. He'd always been like some good-natured floppy-eared dog—maybe a golden retriever—running around, wanting nothing more than to make me happy. I had pushed him away again and again, and in the end I kicked him—hard—and now he didn't want to have anything more to do with me. A couple months ago, I would have been relieved to be rid of him, but at the moment it was driving me crazy that he wasn't calling back. It is strange, and a bit insidious, how you can get used to having somebody around, even somebody you find annoying most of the time.

Waiting at a red light, I tried leaving one more message. "Jack, look, I'm sorry, okay? I'm not talking about normal sorry, which doesn't mean anything. I mean I really feel—oh, what am I doing? Just call me, you moron," I said. Trying to be sincere was just too aggravating.

As I neared home, I began to hear distant sirens. I didn't think anything of it at first; it was a common sound in the big city, plus the local firehouse was only a few blocks from my house. But as I got closer and closer, it seemed that I was homing in on the sirens.

With growing dread, I turned down my street. I could see ahead, near my house, that a fire engine had the street blocked and smoke was rising toward the clear sky. Whatever was happening was happening close to home—really close. It can't be, I thought. This had to be some hideous coincidence. I had just left Amy behind; there was no way she could have beaten me back here.

Since I couldn't drive through, I decided to park and walk the rest of the way. The nearer I got to my house, the more curious people wandered out of their homes to check out what was happening.

The towering old maple tree near the curb in front of my house was completely engulfed in flames. It didn't seem possible. Flames were swallowing the long branches covered with spring leaves and arcs of water rose from hoses as firefighters tried to extinguish the blaze. How did she do it? I wondered. She couldn't have beaten me back here. Then I realized the horrible truth: not only could Amy will things to burn, she could project that power over a distance. Great! Just marvelous! Could I have picked a worse person to piss off?

As I approached my house, I saw my mom standing on the front porch watching the firefighters work. Even at a distance I could see her puzzle frown, as though she was wondering, How can the tree be burning? It's all green wood... I was lucky not to be home when the fire started. I probably would have got blamed. It was weird, right? I always got blamed for anything weird that happened around the house.

Standing next to my mom, also studying the strange spectacle, there was Jack. What was he doing here? I wondered, suddenly annoyed. He couldn't return my call, but instead he just showed up at me house. I glowered up at him as I stepped up to the front stairs, but he pretended not to notice.

My mom dropped her eyes from the burning tree. She gave me one of her looks, the one that was like an inside joke that wasn't funny. She might as well have said, "Julie?" in a way that suggested she believed I had something to do with her tree being on fire.

"Hey," I said to her, "don't look at me. I wasn't even here."

She looked away from me, and resumed watching the firemen.

I walked up the stairs, and took Jack by the arm. I didn't grab it but pinched a bit of loose flesh. "We have to talk... now," I whispered. I led him down the stairs, across the front lawn, and into the gangway between my house and the one next door. The whole time I pinched him, pinched him hard, hoping I'd leave a bruise, but he didn't complain or say "ouch" or anything. Maybe he didn't have nerves under his skin, but probably he just didn't want to give me the satisfaction of hearing his pain. I hated when somebody knew me, and obviously Jack knew me well enough to know that I could be a little sadistic sometimes.

When we were halfway down the gangway, well out of earshot from anybody, I released his arm and faced him.

"What are you doing here?" I demanded.

"I got your message," he said, sounding innocent. "It sounded like an emergency."

"Why didn't you just call back?"

"I couldn't. After I retrieved the message, my phone went dead. I was still on a bus—I couldn't recharge it. So I headed here instead of going home. Like I said, it sounded like an emergency. What's with you?"

I held out my hand. "Let me see your phone."

"Why?"

"Because I said so."

He handed me his cell phone. I checked it to make sure it was dead and he wasn't lying. Maybe I was a little paranoid; sometimes, like now, I got the feeling that everybody was lying to me.

I gave him the phone back. "I left two other messages," I said, softening, lowering my guard a little. "After you recharge the phone, you're to erase them, without listening to them. You understand?"

"Not at all."

"Just do it."

"Why?" I didn't answer. What was I supposed to say? I didn't want him to hear those messages because I was afraid that I might sound weak or desperate or that I cared that I'd scared him earlier. "All right," he said. "I won't listen to them. I don't know why, but I won't."

"Promise?"

"Yeah, promise," he sighed, and then asked, "Are you going to tell me what's with your tree?"

"Not here. Let's go inside."

I led him round to the back of the house, and we entered through the kitchen door. We went up to my room. Once inside, I pushed the window up and climbed out onto the roof. It was something I'd usually do when I was alone, and wanted to feel more alone. It was as though, suddenly, I had forgotten Jack was with me. I suspected I was getting too use to having him around. When I remembered he was there, I turned round and peered through the window into my room. Jack was standing in the middle of my room and staring at me.

"You coming?" I asked.

"On the roof?"

"There's a good view of the fire."

He just shrugged, and climbed out the window. He didn't climb through as easily as I had, but then I weighed about ninety pounds and had had a lot of practice. Jack was taller, heavier, and not at all graceful.

I sat on the roof and watched the arcs of water coming up from the ground and washing through the upper branches of the tree.

Jack finally made it through the window, somehow managing not to break his neck in the process. He stepped unsteadily down the slanting roof. When he sat next to me, he sounded winded from the physical effort.

"Maybe you need to work out a little," I said.

"Oh, yeah, you're in great shape, right?"

"One way or another, I'm doomed, remember? What does it matter?"

He winced at the comment. "I wish you wouldn't say stuff like that."

"Just being real," I said, watching the water filter through the burning leaves. They seemed to be defiant, stubbornly burning under cascades of water. "I'm like a cancer ward patient, withering away in bed, with tubes going into my rotting body. You think Pilates is going to do me any good?"

He winced, as though my words stung, but didn't say anything.

For a while, we sat and watched as the fire in the tree weakened and finally began to die. Now and then the wind changed directions, and a fine spray of cold mist hit us.

"Hey," I said, "I'm sorry I got mad at you before."

"My fault," he said. "I shouldn't have grabbed you like that. I shouldn't have touched you."

"It's all right."

He put his hand on my shoulder. I looked over at him.

"Jack, I meant it's all right, never mind that it happened. I didn't mean it's all right, go ahead and do it again."

He jerked his hand back as though afraid something really bad was going to happen. I couldn't help laughing.

"What?" he asked, surprised that wasn't hostile, that he hadn't pulled back a stump instead of his hand.

"I can't read you anymore," I confessed.

"No?"

"No. You're like my parents now."

"I'm not sure how I feel about that."

"Try not to feel anything," I told him. "Trust me—you're better off."

"Like you?" he asked. I stared at him for a heartbeat or two, long enough for him to get uncomfortable. "Okay, I withdraw the question."

"Good idea," I said.

"I didn't hurt you, when I grabbed you, did I?"

"No."

"I was just trying to--"

"I know what you were trying to do," I said. "I'm weird not stupid. You were trying to protect me from Amy. I just don't understand why you'd want to bother. I'm just not worth the trouble. I think it's just that you're fascinated with all this supernatural stuff. If I wasn't such a freak, you wouldn't be interested at all."

"No, it's more than that," he protested.

"There is nothing more than that. You just think there is," I said. "I wish there was more." I thought for a moment. At times it was hard to determine how much you should say to somebody. With each and every word you say you give away a piece of yourself that can never be taken back. "You know, sometimes, I wish I could be normal—with normal problems. Then things might be different. I mean, you're not so bad. Your wardrobe is a disaster. And your hair—that whole grunge look thing isn't even from this century. But other than that you're a pretty good guy."

He chuckled. "Is this your way of saying you actually do like me?" he asked.

"Yeah, but don't get the wrong idea. I'll never go out with you. I can be cruel, but not cruel enough to do that to you, or to anybody else. Look, this is my life: burning trees and psycho pyromaniac bitches. And it's not going to get any better."

By now the fire was extinguished. The tree was a mottled mess of bright green and charred black. The fire engine rumbled, idling as firemen prepared to return to the station. Thankfully my dad had been assigned to a station on the south side. How traumatic would it have been for him to have to answer a call at his own address? Amy was a pyscho-bitch on auto-pilot. She didn't care what damage she did to people or their feelings. Strangely this made me mad—strangely, because usually I didn't care about such things either. I thought myself different somehow, so maybe I was a hypocrite. All right, I was just a hypocrite.

"So you want to talk about it," Jack asked, as fire engine rumbled away.

"I was trying to avoid that," I said, and then told him everything that had happened. "It was like she was all buddy-buddy, you know. And then one moment came where I hesitated, where I showed that I didn't think what she was doing was just fine. Then she seemed to snap—some kind of switch flipped in her head, and I was suddenly an enemy, a dangerous enemy because I knew what she was up to."

"Ergo, you have a burning tree in front of your house."

"Just as a warning. If she has the ability to project this power over a long distance, she could have done worse. I could have got nuked in my car driving home."

"She's crazy, you know," Jack said.

"Duh."

"But she did admit to you that she was the one who started those jocks on fire, right?"

"Yeah, she seemed to find it pretty amusing."

"Did she say why she did it?" he asked.

"She needed practice on a moving target."

"For real?"

"For real," I said.

He shook his head, not knowing how to respond to such insanity.

"You starting to lose your fascination with the supernatural?" I asked. "Maybe you should take up stamp collecting instead, huh?"

He snorted. "Actually I never read about anything like this."

"You think you're going to find this shit in a book? For that there has to be some kind of proof. This crazy bitch can do whatever she wants, and she knows she can get away with it. We know what she's up to, and we couldn't prove it."

"Any idea what these big plans of hers are?" Jack asked.

"She didn't say exactly. She just said she wanted me to be a part of them. I tell you one thing: it's going to be huge—I mean, like something that will make all the papers and the nightly news. Maybe she'll hit the prom."

"The prom was last Saturday," he pointed out.

"Oh, well, I don't pay much attention to that type of thing," I said, feeling stupid. "It's not my thing. Can you see me at a prom, in a dress, with a corsage on my pencil-like wrist?" He didn't say anything, but appeared to be trying to visualize it. "Don't bother," I told him. "Your imagination isn't good enough. Nobody's is.... So if not the prom, then what?"

"An event that involves a lot of people. Graduation ceremonies?"

I frowned. It didn't sound right. "I don't know," I said. "That's just the seniors, and their families. It doesn't much involve the junior class."

"Does it have to? She's crazy, right?"

"Even crazy people aren't totally random. I think she might find it very satisfying to scorch her classmates in particular. And that would tend to leave graduation out."

"Then what?"

We looked at each other for a moment, and then it was as though we had the same idea at the same time.

"The barbecue," I said.

"Has to be," Jack said. "There's nothing else."

At the end of every school year, there was a barbecue that was held a large recreational area in one of the forest preserves just outside the city. It was a tradition that started years ago. It was mainly intended for the graduating class, but really everybody came—juniors, sophomores, and even freshmen were tolerated. It was held the afternoon of the Saturday before the last day of school. Hundreds of students showed up and poured into the large picnic area. Dead meat was grilled and eaten. Drinks were drunk, and not just soda and bottle juice and water. It was the last time seniors got to act like totally idiots until they went to college, where they could act like total idiots every weekend. The festivities lasted until the park area was closed down, at eleven at night. Then the forest preserve police, a division of the county cops, would move in and clear the area. Usually there would still be a least a hundred kids or so left, most of them drunk as skunks and rowdy as hell. They could have been arrested for underage drinking and other violations, of course, but because the skimpy squad of cops was greatly outnumbered hardly everybody ever ended up in handcuffs. It seemed more important to get them away from county-patrolled land, where they became the problem of city and suburban cops. Oddly, through year after year of this ritual of reckless behavior, nobody had ended up dead or seriously injured.

"It's perfect," I said, "perfect for a fiery massacre."

"Hundreds of people, like sitting ducks," Jack murmured.

"She could hide in the woods."

"Nobody would know what hit them. Everybody running around on fire."

"There wouldn't be enough ambulances."

"And nobody would ever figure it out."

"It would be—epic," I said, studying the treetop beyond the roof. Some leaves, burned black, fell away from branches and fluttered toward the ground.

"So what do we do?" I heard Jack ask.

I looked at him. "What?"

"What do we do?" He was totally serious, as though there were dozens of options.

I shrugged.

"There has to be something," he said.

"Like what?"

"Maybe you can make it rain on her," he said.

"I'm trying not to think about that."

"It was pretty trippy. You ever have any clue you could do something like that?"

"Did I really do that? I was hoping it was some weird coincidence."

"Not much chance of that. You got mad at me, and it started storming. No, that was you all right."

"Just what I need—another weird ability."

"But maybe this is a good thing," he said.

"Oh, Jack, you're not going to try to convince me there's a bright side to this, are you?"

"Well, maybe it is. Look, why couldn't you rain on her? Fire and water—maybe you can put her out."

I had to laugh at that. "Do you think it could be so simple? These things are never that simple." I told him about how Amy looked when I met her in the parking lot, how the rain never touched her but cascaded away from her as though she were surrounded by some invisible cocoon.

"So she's immune to you," he said. "Well, what about you?"

"What about me?"

"Could you be immune to her?"

"You mean, like, she wouldn't be able to light me on fire?"

"Yeah."

"I don't know," I said. "I don't think I want to find out, either."

"There has to be some way to stop her," he insisted. "You probably understand her better than anybody else. Maybe you can get into her head."

"Yeah, right. That's just what I need. If you haven't noticed, I'm not doing too well inside my own head."

He thought for a moment. I found it irritating that he never gave up on things.

"Something you just said," he forged onward. "She would hide in the woods. How do you know that? I mean, if she could set your tree on fire from miles away..."

"That was just a warning," I said, getting wearier by the second. "This other thing is the main event. She would want to see everybody burning. She would want to hear them screaming in pain and terror."

"But why?"

I sighed. "Oh, I don't know. Because she's evil, because she can make it happen, because she had a bad childhood.... I don't want to talk about this anymore," I said, and pushed myself up to my feet. I walked up the slant of the roof to the window, and climbed back into my bedroom.

I kicked off my shoes. I was lying in bed when Jack fell through the window and landed on the floor in a tangled mess of arms and legs. At another time I might have laughed, watching him tumble to the floor, but not now.

"Graceful, Jack, graceful," I commented dully, lying on my side and watching him get to his knees.

He crawled over to the side of the bed. Somehow he looked more attractive crawling.

"You okay?" he said.

"I'm never okay," I said. "You can take that as a given."

"This stuff bothers you, doesn't it?" he asked.

"No, you bother me."

He tipped his head like a confused dog.

I sighed. "I wish you really knew me, knew what goes on in my mind. Then I wouldn't have to explain so much.

"This 'stuff' doesn't bother me, not at all. The idea of somebody wanting to hurt a lot of people probably seems insane to you. It's Amy's fantasy, and she wants to make it real. I know that, because it's been my fantasy, too."

"Hurting people?" he asked, clearly not believing me.

"Yeah, hurting people. I'm not any different from Amy that way."

"I don't believe that," he said.

"Why not?" I wondered. "Do you even listen to me when I talk? I've always tried to be honest with you, mainly because I hoped the truth would scare you off. I can't figure out why that's not working."

"Maybe because you're not that bad," he suggested. "You just think you are. You're afraid you are. I know that you're not."

"If I were you, I wouldn't bet my life on that," I said. "You should leave now. I want to be alone."

He got to his feet, and paused to look down at me. His eyes were filled with something with which I wasn't familiar, something that made me uncomfortable—compassion.

"Go, Jack," I said.

"What about Amy?"

"The picnic is a week from Saturday. We have eight days to figure out what to do... if anything."

"If anything?"

"Yeah."

"Are you suggesting not doing anything?"

"Who said doing something is the right thing to do."

"You mean just let a lot of people get hurt, maybe killed?"

"It happens, right?" I said. "There are accidents. There are tragedies. People get hurt and people die. Destiny can also be dark. Who are we to interfere with destiny? Some people are just doomed—it's as simple as that. Now, please, go home. I need to get some sleep. You know how it is with me—if I don't take sleep when I can get it--"

"—you don't get it," he said morosely.

"Good boy," I said, fighting off a yawn.

"Call you later?"

"Yeah, later, tonight, after the vampires come out. I'm surprised you don't want me to do something about them, too."

"Maybe in time," he said, joking—I hoped he was joking, anyway.

And then he was gone and I was asleep.

I seldom remembered my dreams. The ones I did remember were really normal. I never had what could be described as nightmares. There was never blood or gore or strange murderous creatures. I never dreamt of my hands turning into claws, or any of that psychotic stuff, either. My dreams were filled with commonplace events that never occurred in reality. I dreamt my parents took me to amusement parks, and I actually had fun riding on bizarrely large rides: a Ferris wheel fifty stories high, a carousel that couldn't fit in a football field, a roller coaster that seemed to climb up to heaven before dropping back to earth.... I had blue eyes and blond hair. I had dimples and a sweet smile. I was Jules but not Jules; I was what I might have been in a different life, a life free of the bizarre. I knew what it was like to feel things that others felt every day but took for granted. I felt love and joy, and everything else I never felt in the waking world.

Sometimes I had vivid dreams, the kind that reflected things that would happen. I had one of these after Jack had left my room that day, a short snippet of some future insanity.

... I am running through twilit woods. The trees around me are huge and surreal under the moonlight that spills through the leaf-less branches above. The ground is clammy under my gym shoes, which make frantic sticky sounds as I weave a mindless path through the thick tree trunks.

Something dead is chasing me, some snarling mass of darkness so close behind me I dare not pause to turn round and see its face. I know I cannot run forever but I have no other choice. I have to run and run and run just to stay alive. For a second I think it has fallen back a little, maybe enough for me to turn and fight, maybe enough for me to focus my mind on it and drive it away. Should I do it? Should I try? Or should I just die?

My instincts tell me to give up—they always do. But there is something else inside me, barely there, something like hope, something like love, faraway voices in my mind, whispering "Fight, fight, fight, survive, survive, survive," without giving me any reason, any future purposes, any promises. Like a fool, I listen to them; I turn and face my foe, my destroyer. I catch a glimpse of its red eyes, its long fangs, as it pounces on my so swiftly I cannot draw a breath to scream before its teeth tear into the flesh of my face, before its crushing weight drives me to the ground, from which I will never rise...

Gasping, I sat up in bed in the dark room, knowing now what I had always wondered: how I would die? It was weird, and somehow comforting, to know for sure. Some large evil thing would kill me some day. I would not crack, and slit my own wrists. My body would not fade away, worn down by the powers inside me. And I would not die by fire, Amy's or anybody else's.

I flipped the switch with my mind, and light flooded my room. I squinted and looked around my room. Everything within it seemed less real than what I had just witnessed in my dream. My black cat alarm clock said it was 10:53 in glowing orange numbers. There was a plate of diced fruit and a can of Coke on my night stand. Oddly this was how I received most of my dinners, my mom sneaking into my room while I slept and depositing a plate on my night stand. I hanged my legs over the side of the bed, and started to pick at the fruit, which, like, the Coke, was warm.

My phone beeped and I dug it out of my pocket. Jack had called three times, and left one voice message.

"I've been thinking about things," he said, not sounding so sure. "Let's forget this whole thing, okay? I wish I never brought it up. I don't want anything to happen to you."

I snorted. Jack's timing was horrible. Now he wanted to leave it all alone. Why couldn't he have left it alone at the beginning? Then it would have been easy to look the other way. Now it was impossible, because it had become personal. Threats had been made. My tree—not that I even liked the big ugly thing—had burned. And now I had to prove, if only to myself, that I was not exactly like Amy.

I took a swig of warm soda, and called him back. He sounded drowsy.

"Just let them burn," he said.

"Sorry, can't do that."

"What?" He sounded more panicked than surprised.

"I can't just let some crazy bitch burn up a bunch of people."

"But you said you could," he protested.

"Well, I changed my mind—I can do that, you know."

"So what are you planning on doing?" he asked uneasily.

"I'm going to fuck her up."

The next day, Friday, I didn't go to school. I didn't want to chance running into Amy. It was like the beginning of a chess game played between two extremely paranoid people. Opening move: Amy had offered to include me in her grisly plans. My move: I had dissed her. Her next move: she had threatened me. My next move was pending. I figured I'd let her hang there, wondering. Had she gone too far? What would I do now? Come right back at her? Or would I wait? What would I come back at her with? She had seen me control the weather, and she had to be concerned about that. Maybe I had been lying. Maybe I had been practicing this freaky stuff as much as she had over the past few years. Maybe I could bean her in the head with a hunk of hail from a hundred miles away. I wanted to keep her wondering, growing more and more paranoid. Maybe, in the end, she would get so paranoid she would be afraid to do anything.

When my mom came home, she discovered me lying in bed in my room when I should be in school. I told her that I was sick, and for a full hour she grilled me as to the nature of my illness.

"Well, sick how?" she asked.

"You know, just sick."

"In what way?"

"I don't know," I told her. "I'm not a doctor."

"Well, what exactly is bothering you? Is it your stomach?"

"Yeah, my stomach."

"You have a headache?"

"Yeah, that too."

"When was the last time you ate?"

"Why does it always come back to that? Can't I just be sick?"

"There has to be a cause. Does it have to do with the tree burning?"

"Why would it have anything to do with that?"

"You tell me," she said. "Do you feel upset?"

"A little."

"You feel irritable?"

"Yeah."

"When did that start?"

"When you started asking me twenty million questions. Mom, I'm sick and you're interrogating me. Please! You think that'll make me feel better."

"I just want to make sure it's nothing serious," she said.

"It's not."

But she kept asking if I had this symptom or that symptom. That was the problem with having a nurse as a mother: she knew a lot of medical conditions and had a vast imagination. I grew weary from answering questions. I actually started to feel sick for real. I started agreeing with whatever she said. Yeah, I felt feverish. Yeah, I had a pain in my lower back. Yeah, my throat was sore. By the time she left my room, she was probably convinced that I had malaria or Rocky Mountain spotted fever or something.

Saturday afternoon I drove over to Jack's house. I had never been there before. He lived in a large brick bungalow, and when I pulled up to the curb, he was sitting on the cement front stairs. He looked tired, as though he hadn't slept. There were tiny pouches beneath his eyes, and his hair was messier than usual. He got up slowly from the stairs and led me through the gangway to the back yard, where an old woman sat in a wheelchair on the patio. Her face was as wrinkled as an rotting peach, and she didn't seem to be enjoying the sunny afternoon. She just stared straight ahead at some fixed point that only she could see.

"That's Gramms," Jack said, paused at the back stairs. "It's a bitch getting her up the stairs from the basement apartment, but she likes sitting outside when the weather is nice."

"Yeah, I can see that," I said. Really, I didn't think the woman even realized she was outside.

"Do me a favor. If it starts raining, remind me she's out here. Last summer I forgot, and my mom had a hissy fit."

"Sure thing."

The old woman stirred. She craned her neck as though she heard faraway voices. Her beady eyes drifted toward where Jack and I stood.

"Hey, Gramms," Jack called out loudly, waving at her although she was only about ten feet away. She looked vaguely puzzled, as if she didn't quite recognize Jack.

"Sometimes, she doesn't know what's going on," Jack whispered to me, and then shouted toward the old woman, "Gramms, this is Jules. Say hello."

The beady eyes shifted toward me, locked onto me, and after a couple seconds became as hard and dark as tiny hunks of coal. She raised her hand and pointed a crooked finger at me.

"Witch!" she cried in a surprisingly strong voice. "Witch!"

"Do I need this?" I asked Jack.

"Sorry."

"Witch!...Witch!...Witch!" the old woman screeched.

"There's definitely a quality-of-life issue here," I commented.

Jack quickly led me up the back stairs and into the house, as his grandmother continued to cry witch after us.

We entered a family room that had recently been built onto the back of the house. It had a cathedral ceiling, from which hung a huge fan. A large bay window overlooked the small backyard. A plasma television screen was mounted on one wall. There was a sofa but no other furniture, just a lot of floor space covered with tan carpeting. A doorway to the left opened on the kitchen.

I walked around, checking out the place.

"Love what your parents did with this room," I said. "It's nice and...cold."

"They had it built on a few years ago. They're still trying to catch up on furnishings," he added, vaguely embarrassed.

I stood at the window and looked down at the patio. The old woman had calmed down. Again she was staring off into space, as though seeing her prize-winning azaleas, which probably died about fifty years ago.

"So, what were you planning?" Jack asked.

"Well, you don't have a swimming pool. I doubt the basement stairs would be enough of a fall."

"What?" Then he realized I was talking about his grandmother. "Jules," he said in a chiding tone.

"Really, that woman is a poster child for euthanasia," I said.

"She's old. She can't help that."

"My point exactly." I turned to look at him. He looked nervous. "I was just kidding," I said. "I do that sometimes. I know it doesn't sound like I'm kidding, but, really, I'm laughing inside. I'm sure your grandmother is a wonderful person. It's not her fault she sees the real me, although technically I'm not a witch. You know what they say: old people, children, pets—they see things everybody else misses."

"I was asking about Amy," he said, obviously wanting to change the subject. "What are you going to do?"

I shrugged. I wandered to the sofa, and flopped down on the soft cushions. I hooked a leg over the arm, which at home drove my mom nuts. It was quite comfortable.

"Really, Jack, what do you want from me?" I asked, looking up at him, feeling exposed but not in a bad way. "You want me to save the world? I can't do that. Nobody can. The world is doomed. So, aside from that, what do you want from me?"

"I just like you," he said.

"That doesn't answer my question. I know you like me, but what do you want from me?"

"The usual things, I guess."

"You want me to like you back?" I asked.

"Sure."

"All right, I confess, I like you back. Half the time I'm mad as hell at you, but I still do like you. I have to hand it to it; you stuck in there, you followed me around like a lost puppy, you never gave up. Somewhere along the way, I got used to you. And now I like you. So now what? You want to hang out together? You want us to go places? You want us to hold hands and get kissy-faced? Jack, I don't think I have a lot to offer in this area. Still, if that's what you want, I might be willing to try. But you have to understand something. I can't have you dragging me into this weird shit all the time. I just can't deal with it—I don't want to deal with it. If I could, I'd run away from myself. So if you really want to be my boyfriend, try starting by being my friend."

He sat down next to me.

"I never meant to--" he started awkwardly.

"I know," I said.

"Sometimes I just get carried away with things."

"Sometimes?"

"All right, most of the time. I just don't think."

"Well, start," I told him. "Now, I think I've said too much about all that—I'm starting to feel stupid. So back to the Amy problem," I said, and then added with emphasis, "which is going to be the last problem you drag me into, right?"

He chuckled. "I promise."

"Okay, now what to do with Amy."

"You think of anything?"

"I figure there are two ways to deal with her: the easy way and the hard way."

"What's the easy way?" he wondered.

"You won't like the easy way."

"Tell me anyway."

"It's pretty obvious, really. We know that she's fireproof and waterproof, but she's not bulletproof. So I find a gun and blow her brains out. End of story, right?"

Jack was horrified. "You're not serious."

"Sure, I'm serious. It's the quickest way to solve the problem. It wouldn't bother me. Remember, I don't have much of a conscience."

"But I do."

"Which is why I said you wouldn't like the simple way."

"Well, what's the hard way?" he asked, eyeing me suspiciously.

"That's where I try to stop her by other means," I said.

"How would that work, exactly?"

"Exactly? I don't know. I can cause things to happen, but I never practiced. That would be the big problem: I don't know what I'm doing, and she does."

Jack frowned. "You could get hurt."

"Possibly."

"You could die."

"No, I won't. I already know how I'm going to die; I'm not going to burn up."

"I'm afraid to ask."

"Something's going to kill me," I offered.

"Something?"

"Some kind of animal."

He leaned back on the sofa, and released a slow weary breath.

"Do you know when?" he asked.

"No, just that it will happen. It's actually kind of comforting, knowing. At least I won't wither away in some hospital bed."

"But this could be years from now," he said.

"Sure, it can—it probably will be. My point is that I'm absolutely certain Amy won't kill me. And that's a good thing to know. I figure I go to the forest preserve before the party starts. I lurk around in the woods and wait for her to show up. I'm sure she'll be hiding in the woods, because, well, that's what I would do. I'd want to be close enough to witness the pain and suffering I'm causing, otherwise, what the point?"

"And when she shows up...?" he asked.

I shrugged. "I guess I play it by ear. Maybe something will occur to me."

"That's your plan?"

"Yeah."

"It's not much of a plan."

"You could always go out and find me a gun," I reminded him.

"Isn't there a third option?" he asked. "Something where you don't risk getting hurt or becoming a murderer."

"Hey, you tell me what that is. I'm all ears. Amy is just a nightmare. There's not a lot to work with—you can't reason with her, and stopping her is going to be hard. I'm telling you, it's easiest just to shoot the bitch. But you don't what me to do that. I understand why. You're worried about my soul, and I appreciate that. You always seem to be worrying about things I'm not sure I actually have."

"Well, what about practicing?" he asked. He just didn't know when to quit.

"Practicing? Really? Practicing what?"

"I don't know. Maybe there's something you can do to protect yourself. Maybe your can create some kind—I don't know—shield."

"A shield?"

"Yeah, sure, why not?"

"Jack, I'm a lot of things, but I'm not the U.S.S. Enterprise," I said. "As for practicing, it took me two weeks to learn how to twirl a pencil on my fingertip, and the only reason I learned that was to drive my mom crazy. There just isn't enough time to learn to control what I have."

He sat there and thought about things. From his expression it was clear he didn't like any of it. Who would?

"And what do I do?" he asked.

"You do nothing."

"You can't expect me—"

"Yeah, I can," I said, raising my voice. "I expect you to listen to me. You made me like you, when I didn't want to like you. You make me care, when I didn't want to care about anybody or anything. A couple months ago, I couldn't imagine ever talking to somebody the way I'm talking to you now. You even got me thinking stupid things, like maybe—ah, just forget it. That's not important. But you are not to do anything. You're not to be anywhere near to that place, you understand?"

"Sure, I understand," he said meekly. He looked at me. He didn't seem to know what to say. I could see something welling up in him, begging to come out.

I rolled my eyes. "Okay, go ahead," I said.

He reached over and gave my shoulder an affectionate squeeze and then rested his hand there. It didn't feel bad. I couldn't read his mind, and that still mystified me. He was like a cipher, but at this point in my life ciphers were good things. After the moment passed, I said, "Okay, okay, enough of that. No point in getting sappy."

He removed his hand.

"So we have an agreement on this?" I asked him.

"Yeah."

"Say it."

"I won't go near the picnic."

"And?"

"And I won't ever involve you in weird stuff again."

"Okay, then," I said. "Now that that is settled, I should go home."

"Already?" He looked disappointed.

"Well, yeah. What?—you want me to hang out for a while?"

"It would be nice," he said.

"Jack, if you haven't noticed, I'm not very sociable. I don't play video games. I don't like watching movies. Honestly, I don't I think I know how to hang out. It would be something I'd have to work at."

"Well, what did you do when you were at Amy's house?"

"Nothing you'd be interested in, I'm sure," I said.

"We could just talk," he said.

"Talk about what? The weather?" I asked. "You know it's all going to come back to the weird, the bizarre and the insane. It always does. There's no escaping that. Sometimes I think that's all I'll ever be about, and if you take that away, there wouldn't be much left over. See what I mean about not having anything to offer?" It felt as though the walls of the room were closing in on me. I stood up from the sofa, and looked down at him. He seemed so glum. I managed to reach out and run a finger through his nightmare hair. "You really ought to do something about that. Maybe a buzzcut, huh? I really have to go," I added, finding it hard to breathe.

Jack stood and led me outside, where a chorus of one old woman cried witch after me as I left.

***************

The following week at school was uneventful. Mostly I sat in hushed classrooms and took finals, listening to soft groans, muted coughs, and the scratching of number two pencils on test sheets as classmates struggled to remember answers. I always did fairly well on tests, despite, and maybe because of, the fact that I didn't care how I did.

I wasn't surprised that I didn't run into Amy. She wasn't in any of my classes, and at lunch she was conspicuously absent. I knew she was in school, though; I could feel her presence. She was like a pot of water left heating up on the stove—eventually I had to do something with her.

Jack, Melody and I had lunch each day as usual, although Jack grew quieter and glummer as the weekend neared. I suspected he was not dealing well with the promise I'd forced him to make; it was killing him that I didn't want him with me in the woods when I confronted Amy. He didn't want to be left out. I was sure he was thinking about breaking the promise. A couple times I reminded him that we had a deal, which confused Melody, who didn't have a clue what I was talking about. She just stared at me and then at Jack. All that she could gather was that Jack and I were keeping secrets, and it was apparent that she didn't like that one bit.

On Friday, Jack didn't say anything at all. He sat, he ate, and when he was finished, he got up and walked away without a word, leaving Melody and me alone.

"What was that all about?" she asked, almost demanded.

"Nothing," I said.

"What going on?"

"Nothing."

"Yeah, right," she said, and there was venom in her words. I never thought that she was capable of such an attitude. It just didn't fit her; she reminded me of a seething bunny rabbit. She kept looking at me as though it was painful to see me.

"What?" I asked.

"You're screwing him, aren't you?"

"Huh?" Honestly, it was the last thing I expected to hear—also, the last thing I needed at the moment. "No."

"Oh, whatever," she spat out.

"It's not like that," I said. "You know me. That kind of thing just isn't meant to happen." I watched her for a moment; she seemed totally devastated. I was not good at being nurturing, but I tried. "I regret that he doesn't like you," I said, which came out sounding stiff and insincere.

She pursed her lips. "I just don't see the attraction. You're so wrong for him."

"I'm wrong for anybody," I said.

"You know, I saw him first," she complained. This wasn't true, but I didn't correct her.

"I wish he did like you."

"You're just saying that."

"No, it would make my life easier," I said.

She studied me a few seconds. "Yeah, I suppose it would. I just don't understand why he doesn't like me. I'm likable, right?"

"Infinitely," I lied.

"Then why? Maybe I'm not weird enough, huh?" she asked. "Is there any way I can be weirder?"

"Believe me, you're getting there. Wanting to be weird is the first step to becoming weird."

Melody grabbed her lunch tray and stood.

"It's doesn't matter. Really, who cares, anyway?" she asked, before she walked away.

As I sat alone, I looked across the crowded lunchroom and caught sight of Eloise Parker, who was also sitting alone. I guessed we had something in common, some natural repellent that drove people away. Maybe that was a good thing.

Saturday morning was sunny and warm, and it was hard to believe that dark deeds would be done soon.

My mom was at work, tending to the sick and dying. Better them than me, I figured.

My dad was home, though, up early and getting things done. He mowed the lawn, way too early to suit some of our neighbors, who probably rose sleepy-eyed from their bed at the buzzing racket of a lawn mower, whining, Doesn't somebody know it's Saturday?... But my dad was so used to a 24/7 schedule he never seemed aware of the time. He wasn't rude; he was just a fireman.

After he had finished the lawn, he tried to involve me in domestic chores. That was always a big mistake. I just wasn't the domestic type.

"You wanna take a try at weeding the garden?" he asked, standing in the kitchen as I choked down my breakfast. He was already dirty and sweaty and living proof that yard work couldn't possibly be a good thing.

"I don't think so," I said, definitely a future condo owner.

"It'll do you some good," he said. "Get out in the sun. Soak in some vitamin D. Maybe get a little tan. You always look so—pasty."

"I don't know. I just don't know anything about planting and stuff like that."

"I'm talking about weeding. It's simple. You just pull the weeds."

"Wouldn't that be de-weeding?" I asked.

He stared at me. A shadow seemed to fall across his face. Maybe the shadow was the realization he was not talking to somebody normal, somebody who understood and cared about normal things like how their lawn and garden looked.

"Well...uh... never mind," he said, his disappointment seeping into his words. "I suppose you'll be spending the day in your room, staring at the walls or something."

"Actually, I was going to a barbecue," I said.

"A barbecue?"

"It's the end-of-school thing they have ever year," I explained.

At first he seemed puzzled. A barbecue? That was normal, right? Dead meat sizzling on a grill. People gathering together to talk and drink and eat dead meat. Sure, that was normal—really normal. He looked almost joyous at this development, as though he were about to run out of the house and shout so all the neighbors could hear: My weirdo daughter is finally doing something normal!... What would he think if he knew the real reason I was going?

"No, that's cool," he said. "A barbecue, huh? Well, sure, why not?" He actually sounded proud. He turned and left the kitchen, heading back out to the yard.

About a minute later, he returned and poked his head though the doorway. "There going to be boys at this barbecue?" he asked.

"I suppose."

"Well, just don't get pregnant," he warned, and then vanished again.

I shook my head. No wonder I was such a freak.

***************

Home-made advertisements for the barbecue had circulated around school for about a week. They were printed on pink copy paper. The writing was in big bold letters.

### Party

### Saturday 1pm until ?????

### You know where

### (and if you don't know, you're a douchebag and nobody wants you there anyway)

I arrived at the forest preserve at about noon. I parked in the lot, which was empty except for a few cars. I sat behind the wheel and checked out the recreational area. It was a large kidney-shaped grassy area cut into woods. The area was completely surrounded by the woods except for the parking lot, which was visible from the main road. There were picnic tables here and there, along with wooden shelters under which you could plant a grill and barbecue your heart out. There was plenty of open area for running and tossing around softballs and Frisbees. I saw big problems with the place. Tactically it was a nightmare; everybody within the area would be open to attack from anywhere along the tree line, and there were hundreds of yards of tree line and acres of woods in which Amy could hide. How could I possibly find her, in the dark woods, in time to stop her? It seemed impossible. It would take a horde of freaks like me, each one positioned at intervals just inside the woods so that one or another of them could get to her quickly. And even then actually stopping her would be a huge problem. I seriously considered just going home. What was the point? What business was it of mine, anyway? Did I even know these people who would get hurt? Did I owe them anything? But some nagging little voice in my mind told me I must try. Maybe it was the shadow of a conscience, or maybe it was a small, demented entity, remnant of a past or future schizophrenia, that refused to accept my true nature. Whatever it was, I listened to it more and more lately, no matter how foolish I ended up feeling. So, yeah, I would try—I would try, I would fail, and I would wonder why I had even bothered.

I got out of the car. I walked toward the tree line and entered the woods. To me, who never communed well with nature, it was a totally alien environment. The air here was cool and damp. There was the skittering of invisible tiny creatures moving on the ground over dead leaves and twigs and tree roots that had broken through the clammy earth. There was the rustling of birds hopping from branch to branch overhead, and the incessant chirping of uncertain songs.

I walked parallel to the tree line, about fifty to sixty feet within the woods, so that I could look left and see bits and pieces of the grassy area past straight and slanting tree trunks. It was insanity. There was no path here. The ground was uneven. The ground was slimy. I had to step over large rocks and deadfall. I had to push past doomed saplings that couldn't grow much in the shadows of towering trees. I should have brought a machete. I should be wearing hiking boots and a long-sleeved shirt. I was pathetic, truly pathetic. What had I been thinking? After a half an hour, I had covered about five hundred feet. My lungs burned and I could barely breathe. My knees and elbows hurt from the times I'd slipped and fallen. My ankles hurt from the times I'd slipped and almost fallen. And I was fairly certain that I had trudged through a sizable patch of poison ivy, and now I was waiting for something to start itching.

I found a thick tree and sat on the ground and leaned back against its trunk. It took a while for me to catch my breath. I felt feverish, as though I needed to sweat but my body couldn't spare the water. I never realized I was so physically unfit.

I sat there for a long time. An occasional shout from the clearing told me that people were starting to arrive. They were setting up grills. They were carrying coolers filled with ice, cans of soda and beer, and hunks of dead meat. This was ridiculous. How could I protect them? I wasn't even sure I could protect myself.

Then I heard a rustling sound nearby. Something large was moving among the trees deeper in the woods, slowly coming up behind me. That bastard Jack, I thought at first. I knew it—I knew he wouldn't stay away. What was I going to do with this guy? He just didn't listen. Although I was irritated, I was relieved, too, that I didn't have to be alone.

But it wasn't Jack. A moment later, coming up from the side of the tree on which I rested, a deer wandered out toward the clearing. I watched it walk past me, venturing closer to the edge of the clearing. Its tail was white and white smudgy spots dappled its tawny sides. It must have smelled humans, heard their strange catcalls, and got curious. It stood there staring through the trees, and then, its curiosity satisfied, it turned round to go back. That was when it spotted me. It stopped dead in its tracks and stared at me with big brown eyes. It didn't seem at all startled.

"Yeah, I'm here, stupid," I said.

The deer kept staring at me.

"Get! Skat! Shoo!" I yelled, but it held its ground. I was puzzled. Do deer act this way? Aren't they supposed to run away and hide? "You know what I am?" I asked it. "I'm a freak. I can concentrate and blow your brains out thought your ears. Your eyes will pop out of their sockets and roll on the ground like a couple marbles. What's the matter with you, thing?"

The deer didn't move. Now it looked at me with sadness in its eyes. Apparently I was so lame I couldn't even scare wild prey. Finally, when it was good and ready, it wandered away, going deeper into the woods.

I sat there for a long time, maybe three hours, waiting, listening as more people arrived into the clearing. I decided to get up and check it out. I felt sore and stiff when I straightened up and crept closer to the party. I peered round a tree truck to see that there were about 150 people, some gathered round the shelters, some sitting at picnic tables, some sitting on the short prairie grass. The air was filled with the odor of lighter fluid and charcoal briquettes. Somebody had brought a boom box, which was spewing out some techno junk. This was so no good. I was sure that as evening approached there would be about three times as many people, all herded into a confined space, all coming to a barbecue and not realizing they were the ones that would end up on a grill. Some dark part of my mind made me giggle at that thought. Stop it, Jules, I had to tell myself. It's not funny.

I studied the layout of the area. Where would Amy hide? Where would she attack from? I wasn't sure. I had no flashes of the future to help me, either; paranormal abilities can be so unreliable. I had to take my best guess and hope that it was good enough. I noticed that the entrance to the clearing formed a bottleneck. That was where I would hide: in the woods on one or the other side of the bottleneck. That way she could cut off the escape of people fleeing to the safety of their cars.

I started to work my way back toward the parking lot. I found another tree against which I could sit and wait. It was a fifty-fifty guess; of course, Amy could choose the opposite side of the bottleneck. It was better, really, because it was nearer the road, to where she could easily escape and pretend that she didn't have anything to do with what happened in the clearing. But where I was felt right. The woods were deep behind me, and at night Amy would feel safe in the darkness in the woods as she savored the distance screams of her burning victims.

I would wait here. She would come. And what would happen, would happen.

Somewhere along the line I fell asleep. My sleeping habits were so strange. At home, in a comfortable bed, I barely slept two hours a night. I would stare at the dark ceiling until four o'clock in the morning. Or I would fall asleep earlier and then waken every fifteen to twenty minutes until dawn. But in unfamiliar places I slept more soundly. Here, in the woods, sitting at the base of a tree, my arms wrapped around my bent legs, my head resting on my knees, I found a peaceful slumber somehow.

When I woke, I saw that it was night. Where I was in the woods wasn't completely dark; moonlight filtered through the canopy of tree branches above, and cast an eerie pale light on everything around me. I panicked, wondering if, maybe, I was too late. Then I heard the voices issuing from the clearing, the happy buzz of small talk. I got up and ventured to the tree line. I saw how the crowds had swollen. They were shadows crawling among shadows. More people had arrived with grills and coolers. Some were clumped together round the picnic tables, and others round the barbecue grills. A few couples had separated to lonely spots in the clearing where they could lie on their backs on blankets and stare up at the stars that were sprinkled across the inky sky. Columns of gray smoke rose from the grills above the trees, filling the air with the cloying aroma of sizzling meat. There was a mishmash of music coming from a half dozen boom boxes—country stumbling over techno, pop plowed under by punk, and somewhere in the middle of it all Vivaldi played like the only voice of reason in a mental ward that had been overrun with un-medicated inmates.

I crept back into the woods, and sat against my tree, and waited. I looked but couldn't see anything in the dim light around me. I listened but couldn't hear anything stir. After a while, I wondered, for a millisecond, if maybe I'd been wrong; maybe Amy wouldn't show up, maybe this event hadn't been the target of her plan at all, maybe she was somewhere else, torching a wedding reception or a movie theater or a bowling alley.

But then her voice came from out of the darkness behind me.

"So you figured it out, freak," she said. Her voice sounded like a whisper in the woods, and for a second I couldn't tell if it was real or something I was imagining.

I stood slowly. I couldn't hear anything, not the snap of a dry twig or the rustle of a dead leaf. I waited and listened.

"Have you regained your sanity? Or do I have to kill you with the rest?"

She was somewhere deeper in the woods, not far away but just inside the darkness my eyes couldn't penetrate.

"Have you come to help or come to hinder?"

"You know that already," I said, quietly moving deeper into the woods, trying to home in on her voice.

"I do," she said, almost sadly. "I hoped it might be otherwise, yet I still don't care either way. Isn't that strange: to have hope and still not care?"

"Might be because you're a little brain-whacked," I said.

She barked a laugh. "You calling me brain-whacked? What does that mean coming from you?" she wondered. "You're the one who's lost your grip on reality. Those people out there—you think they're your friends? They're not. They could never be your friends. If they knew what you are, they'd burn you at the stake or put you in a canvas sack with some rocks and throw you in the lake."

"Nobody's a witch," I said, reaching out with my mind, beckoning clouds and rain.

"That's what they would think, though," she said, and I remembered Jack's grandmother pointing her crooked finger at me. "They're all enemies, mine and yours. They're stupid, weak, and useless. Just listen to them out there. Wailing like morons. Crawling across the dead earth like maggots. They're a colony of ants, and I'm a magnifying glass."

"That isn't going to happen," I said.

"Like hell it isn't."

Thick black clouds had appeared out of nothing, and were rolling in from the west. Distant thunder sounded.

"No," Amy gasped.

"You're going to have to take a rain check," I said.

"No, no, no," she screeched, like a wounded animal. There was the sound of frantic movement in the darkness, as though a crazed bobcat was bouncing off trees. "No!"

A fireball erupted from the shadows. Glowing orange and yellow, about the size of a basketball, it streaked at me. I hit the ground, just in time to feel its searing heat pass over my back. It struck a tree behind me, and exploded in a hail of golden sparks and a billow of white smoke. Tiny licks of flames clung to the singed tree bark.

I rolled to the side, and took cover behind another tree.

Thunder sounded again, this time much closer. I heard some guy in the clearing cry, "Aw, dude, this sucks!"

I pressed up against the tree for protection, thinking, Dude, no kidding this sucks.

And then another fireball struck and exploded on the opposite side of the tree that was my shield. Sparks and embers sprayed past me on either side of the tree. Somehow a couple red-hot embers landed on my arm and burned my bare skin. I shook them off fast, but the pain was so intense that all I could see in my mind was a flash of white. My focus on the sky was broken, and I knew right away that the dark clouds that had been rolling in were now dissipating back into the nothingness from which they had risen.

I just couldn't do it—I couldn't concentrate on the sky to make it rain and dodge fireballs at the same time.

Squatting behind the tree, holding my burnt arm, I wondered what to do. Amy seemed to know where I was, even though I hid in the shadows, but I had no clue where she was or from which direction she might attack me. How was that possible? Nobody's night-vision was that good, not even a freak's. Then I thought I had the answer: maybe, just maybe, she couldn't see me any better than I could see her. Maybe she was focusing on me, the idea of me, and her fiery wrath would find me no matter where I hid in the darkness. Quickly I tried that myself; I saw her in my mind, and I willed her to stumble and fall.

About three seconds later, I heard, not far away, the rustling crash of a body hitting the ground, and an agonized grunt, as though somebody had been socked in the stomach. I took the opportunity to move deeper in the woods, my hands out in front of me, groping in the dark for another tree.

Behind me, I heard Amy scream, "Bitch! Is that the best you have? Is that really the best you have?"

Then another fireball was whizzing at me, lighting up the darkness, showing that I was standing in a small open area too far away from the nearest tree. My feet couldn't move fast enough. My body couldn't fall to the ground fast enough. Only my mind was fast enough to save me from becoming a human torch. There was a low-hanging tree branch that the fireball was about to pass beneath before it struck me. My mind was able to tug the branch lower, into the path of the fireball, and the fireball exploded on the branch and showered me with embers and sparks that felt like hot needles stabbing into the skin of my arms and face. I might have actually cried out in pain, which I never did, because, really, pain never seemed that bad. I fell to the ground. I could no longer see darkness, only the afterglow of the explosion, as though I had just looked into an immense flash bulb going off. I crawled on the ground blindly, groping for some kind of cover, willing my eyes to clear up, thinking, Jack, you dumbbell, you should have just let me shoot her! My fingers found thick tree roots erupting from the ground. I followed the roots to another tree trunk, behind which I hunkered down, blinking my eyes, still trying to clear my vision.

I tried not to move. I tried not to breathe. I waited.

Finally Amy called out in the darkness, "Hey, Jules." She didn't sound the least bit mad; oddly, she sounded calm, chatty, as though about to ask if I enjoyed a field trip. "Jules, are you dead?"

I started to stew inside. I hated dumb questions, and that was about the dumbest question I had ever heard. She had never had the ability to see and hear spirits, so how did she expect to hear my answer if I was dead?

My vision was clear now, for all the good it did me; instead of seeing a glowing spot, all I saw was darkness.

Anger was quickly welling up in me. I was tired, I was sore, I was burnt, and I didn't want to be here in the first place. I felt myself losing control of that monstrous thing inside me, as I did whenever I lost my temper.

"It's time for you to go home," I called out to her.

"Oh, so you are alive," she said, surprised. "What was that? Go home? Are you kidding me?"

"No sense of humor, remember?"

She tittered her demented titter.

"Run, before it's too late," I warned her.

But she thought I was the funniest thing in the world.

"Run!"

Then it got away from me, the big dark it inside that had been slipping away from me. I didn't have to focus. I didn't have to do anything. It was a shadowy monster with a mind of its own.

In quick succession, I heard a muted boom, a startled squeak like a mouse being crushed underfoot, and the patter of tiny objects striking tree leaves like a million raindrops. Then I heard the creaking moan of a falling tree.

"Run!" I yelled, stepping out from my hiding place. "Run!"

There was another boom, another spray of splinters, and another tree came crashing down.

I started walking back toward the clearing, following the sound of frantic footfalls and snapping twigs. I reached the area in the woods where moonlight broke through and spilled in a weird way over the trees and rough ground. I watched as Amy tried to escape, taking quick, uncertain steps. The bottom part of a tree trunk that she was passing exploded, and she lost her footing and fell. The rest of the tree seemed to hang in the air for a second, defying gravity, before it tipped and fell, crashing through the branches of other trees and then landing where Amy lay on the ground. I gasped in horror, and the monster fled into some dark recess in my mind, where it belonged. Was she dead? I wondered, not sure now whether that would be good or bad. I approached the fallen tree, and shoved aside branches, searching underneath, until I saw her. Her pixie face, framed by smaller branches, was distorted with terror. Her eyeballs were jittery, and her chin trembled.

"Oh, you're alive," I said, sounding a bit disappointed.

She squirmed, trying to free herself.

"Can't you move?" I asked.

"No—no—no," she stammered.

"Are you sure you can't move?" I asked playfully.

Her eyes grew even wider.

"Hmmm," I said. "Then we have an interesting situation, don't we?"

She started shaking her head viciously.

"I really should kill you... but you'd probably haunt the crap out of me. So that's not happening." I paused to think things over, and something occurred to me. "Let me try something else, something a million times worse than death."

I reached down and put my finger against her forehead. She scrunched up her face as though my finger was a gun and I was about to pull the trigger. Then I pressed my finger harder against her skin and gave it a cruel twist before I pulled it away.

"Okay, that ought to do just fine," I said, as though I had just finished a job well done.

"Huh?" Amy said, totally confused. "What? What did you do?"

"I'm in your head now," I lied.

"No," she whined in horror; she was so paranoid, she'd probably believe just about anything. Soon she would start imagining that she heard my voice in her head. I was pretty sure this would work, although I still wondered if I should just kill her, which would definitely work.

I said, "If you ever try anything like this again, I'll know—I'll know and I'll come after you. And next time it will be worse, much worse."

"No, no, you can't."

"Can and did."

"Take it back. Take it back. Take it back right now!" she screeched.

"Go home and be normal," I told her.

I left her there, hidden beneath the fallen tree. I figured she'd weasel her way out sooner or later.

I walked through the woods toward the parking lot, relieved that it was over. I swore that never again would I get caught up in weird stuff—never.

As I walked an unmarked path, I thought how strange the trees here looked, with moonlight seeping down upon them. They looked so otherworldly, yet so—familiar. I was so startled at that thought that I stopped to look around. Everything looked familiar: a large crooked tree ahead of me, with a thick low-hanging branch that would be perfect for a swing; next to the tree, there was a huge gray rock that showed a patch of moss near the ground; at my feet, three white pebbles pressed into the clay formed a perfect triangle. What the hell? I wondered. Had I actually been her before? It didn't seem likely. It must just be déjà vu, which I experienced from time to time, but nothing this vivid. Then I knew, was absolutely certain, that on my next step, I would turn my ankle and fall. I put my foot forward, concentrating hard—I will not fall; I will not fall—and when I took that step, my ankle turned and I fell anyway. I sat on the cold clammy ground, bewildered. That shouldn't have happened. I knew that I would fall, I tried not to fall, and yet I still fell. It was fate, and if fate says you're falling, prepare to suck ground.

As soon as I was back on my feet, I heard a crunching sound coming from deep in the woods. The sound, too, seemed familiar, the sound of something large and ominous stealing through the darkness.

I took a couple uncertain steps, looking over my shoulder toward the darkest part of the woods. Then I realized: my dream. In that split second, I wondered, If one of my dreams was coming true, why couldn't it be the one with the Ferris wheel? And I started to run.

Something was pursuing me, crashing through the brush, getting closer. I zigzagged through trees, running pretty well on the uneven ground, yet whatever was chasing me was gaining ground. I heard its horrible panting breath. It was too close. I was certain if I stopped and turned, it would be on me before I could even figure out what it was. Still I didn't have much of a choice. If I kept running, it would catch up and pounce on my back. I had to turn and try to face it, so that I could focus on it and drive it away with my mind. I had to do that soon.

I stopped suddenly, my feet slipping on the damp leaves that covered the ground. I turned, but it was already too late. It had already planted its hind paws, ready to leap on me. All I saw in that second were its glowing red eyes and yellow fangs that were oddly long, like the fangs in sketches of a saber tooth tiger. I fell back on the cold ground and watched as it jumped toward me.

Then I glimpsed something small flash through the dimness, striking the side of the beast with a tiny pop that sent a splash of liquid through the air. The thing let out a painful yelp. White smoke bloomed out of the matted fur of its side, and in mid-air, it seemed to crumple. It landed short of where I lay. It dodged to the side and retreated back into the darkness of the deep woods.

I push myself up and sat there, staring at the shadows into which the creature escaped.

Then, when I heard something stir to the other side of me, I jumped to my feet. Now what? I wondered, until I could discern a most harmless figure approaching me, bouncing in one hand something round—a water balloon?

"Hey," Jack said.

I was instantly furious. "You promised not to come here."

"Yeah, well, you're welcome."

"You promised." Okay, I was an ungrateful bitch; I didn't know exactly what had just happened, but I knew he had saved me from something terrible.

He shrugged. "I lied. You know about lying."

I couldn't argue with that. I let the subject drop.

"What was that thing?" I asked.

"No wolves around here," he said. "Way too big for a coyote. Its eyes were glowing. If I had to guess, I'd say it was a hellhound."

"A hellhound?" I could hardly believe that.

"I'm just guessing."

"You think it was something Amy conjured up?"

"I'm thinking no."

"And you hit it with what? A water balloon?" I asked.

"Filled with holy water, of course."

I stared a question at him.

"I got it from Saint Vincent's," he explained. "I figured it might work on Amy."

"You stole holy water from a church?" I asked, astounded. Maybe there was hope for him after all.

"It's not stealing. They want people to take it," he said. "Really, they do."

"Ah hah. Well, if you get struck by lightning, it won't be by me."

We walked back to the clearing and stopped just outside the tree line, and checked out the party. Food was still grilling. Music was still playing. Couples still gazed up at the stars. It was amazing. In the woods, not far away, fireballs had flown, trees had exploded and fallen, a hellhound had attacked, and nobody had noticed a thing.

"They are so oblivious," I commented.

"Most people are. They only see what's in front of their noses. Right now, they're just trying to have fun," he said.

"They're idiots."

"And you saved them."

I snorted. "Don't remind me."

"It's not a bad thing, you know."

"I don't understand bad or good," I confessed. "Things always seem so jumbled."

"That's the way life is for everybody, not just for you."

"Next thing I know, you'll be trying to tell me I'm normal."

"You're more normal than you realize."

"Yeah, right," I grunted.

For a moment, we looked across the clearing. Pretty soon the cops would come and clear everybody out. And afterward, this party would be a memory. And what exactly were memories, but a whole lot of nothing? Really, I didn't understand why anybody bothered.

"You want to go down there?" Jack asked.

I frowned at him. "Why would I want to do that?"

"Come on."

"I can't."

"Why?"

"I'm tired. I'm dirty. I smell bad. Aside from that, I just don't much like people. Actually I'd rather go back into the woods and play fetch with the hellhound. If you want to stay, then stay. Me—I'm going home and trying to forget this night ever happened."

Jack walked me back to my car. He watched me climb behind the wheel, and slam shut the door. When I rolled down the window, he leaned over and asked, "You sure you don't want to try?"

"Jack, really, what's the point?"

He sighed. He reached into the car and set the water balloon on the dashboard.

"What's that for?" I asked.

"Just in case," he said.

I watched him walked away, heading toward the people clustered in the clearing.

After he was gone, I sat there for a long time. For a brief moment, I felt like following him. Maybe if I tried something different, my life would become different. Honestly, I didn't know what I wanted, but I was sure I didn't want a freak show of a life.

Then I noticed two glowing eyes peering at me from within the woods, as though reminding me something that I had always know: Life is never about what you want; Life is about what it wants for you.

