Beheld

by Alex Flinn

  It was Sommer Hernandez who reminded me I’d agreed to do the Mr. Lion King contest for homecoming.

  At first, I’d planned on begging off. I didn’t run with Sydnie’s crowd anymore, and they were the ones who’d put me up to it. Plus, the contest had a talent component, which sounded like a lot of work.

  Not that the word talent was, strictly speaking, accurate. Last year, Stephen Richardson played his stomach.

  I told Matt this, and he said, “But you do have a talent.”

  That’s when I realized it might be an opportunity.

  I told Sommer that I absolutely would like to be part of the grand tradition of the Mr. Lion King contest.

  Then I got to work.

  I didn’t tell Amanda about it. She’d think it was dumb. It was dumb. I didn’t tell many people about it. Strictly on a need-to-know basis.

  I did tell Matt.

  The night of the “pageant,” I was sixth out of eight contestants, a pretty respectable placement since they seemed to have put it in reverse order of coolness. Only two seniors were after me. I sat out in the audience with Amanda, watching the first of the talents, Garrett Greenstein, giving a karate demonstration. We were in the front row, which was good because we had a good view, but bad if Garrett happened to fly out into the theater.

  “Okay, okay, guys,” he said. “These are the basic karate stances. Kiba dachi.” He stood with his legs apart. “Kokutsu dachi.” He leaned most of his weight on his back leg. Then he shifted. “Zenkutsu dachi.”

  “Wow,” Amanda whispered. “What would make someone agree to do this—blackmail?”

  “Maybe he wants to impress a girl. That’s what motivates a lot of human conduct.”

  “Here’s some strikes,” Garrett said and started hitting and kicking.

  “I hope someone’s filming this for YouTube,” Amanda said.

  “Yeah.” I was getting a little worried.

  For his big finale, Garrett kicked a board. It didn’t budge, and Garrett tumbled back.

  “Wait! Wait! Do-over!” He rubbed his legs, then tried again.

  This time, it worked. The crowd went wild. Okay, they stopped laughing and clapped politely, especially Garrett’s friends. Which was more than they’d done when he fell on his ass.

  “Good job, Garrett,” Alex Pacheco, who was announcing the show, said. “And now, Josh Wilson!”

  “Hello, everyone!” Josh was on the football team, varsity, even though he was only a freshman. Huge cheers.

  “I’ll be doing a dramatic reading”—he held up his phone—“of Kanye West’s tweets.”

  He scrolled through them, reading, “I’m so lucky.” He scrolled some more. “Dreams are worth more than money.”

  “Hey,” I whispered to Amanda, “I’ll be back. I told Andrew I’d help him with something for his act.”

  Onstage, Josh read, “I’m so lucky.”

  “Okay.” Amanda was staring at the stage, where Josh was reading, “I want to steer clear of opportunities and focus on dreams.”

  The next act was Harrison Garcia in a wig and grass skirt. Two more before me. I might regret this.

  But I’d definitely regret it if I didn’t do it.

  When I got backstage, Amanda had texted me:

  You’re missing the best part

  I texted back:

  The best part is coming

  I hoped that was true.

  Don’t leave

  I texted that as the next act started. It would so suck if she got mad at me for leaving her alone and ditched.

  Finally, it was my turn.

  “Contestant number six,” Alex announced. “Chris Burke.”

  I came onstage. I didn’t have a costume or anything, just jeans and a T-shirt. I’d spent all my energy on the other elements of the act. I looked out into the audience, and for a moment, the lights hit my eyes, and I couldn’t see anything. Then I did see, and it was so much worse. I’d done all sorts of scary things in my life, from oral presentations in class to starting in football to just showing up every day as a short, fat kid. But this was the bravest thing I’d ever done. If it didn’t work, I’d be totally humiliated.

  I found Amanda in the audience. Sure enough, she was half standing, like she’d been about to leave, but now she was rooted to the spot. I met her eyes, saw her mouth, “What the—?”

  I took the mic from Alex. “So I’m Chris.”

  People cheered, which was encouraging.

  “And I’m gonna sing. I wanted to dedicate this to a girl.” I couldn’t look at Amanda. “She’s my best friend, and she’s the most badass girl I know.”

  Even though I was trying not to look, I saw Amanda do a facepalm in the audience.

  Possibly bad, but it was too late. The music was starting up.

  I’d thought about using karaoke, but then I’d have had to be onstage alone. So I decided to go all in, and I asked Matt’s garage-band guys to play. I’d had to promise to do a gig with them on a date of their choosing. Between practicing with them, writing lyrics, and making a slide show, I’d barely slept in two weeks.

  Behind me, Matt was strumming his guitar. I couldn’t look at Amanda. She’d know the Boston song as soon as she heard the first notes.

  I hadn’t changed the beginning, so I started with the first line:

  Babe, tomorrow’s so far away

  There’s something I just have to say

  Then I went into my version.

  If I say where I’m at

  Would you hit me with a bat?

  Or would you let me

  Tell you I love you?

  I pressed the button to start the slide show with photos of me and Amanda, Amanda and me in baseball uniforms and zombie costumes, at fifth grade awards, the eighth grade dance. I looked at the screen while I sang. In the audience, people were clapping along.

  I’m gonna make myself a fool

  In front of the whole school, Amanda

  I wanna be more than your friend

  Cause I hope it never ends, Amanda.

  Just as a photo of her and me holding hands on a field trip to the zoo flashed on, I decided to sneak a glance down, just to make sure she hadn’t left.

  She hadn’t left. She was smiling. But she still had her face in her hand. Was she laughing at me?

  Or was she crying?

  I sang:

  I’m gonna take a chance

  And ask you to the dance Amanda

  I love you!

  She was shaking her head, like in disbelief. At least, that’s what I hoped it was. We were at the little musical interlude part where I didn’t have anything to do but look into her eyes. But I was scared. What was she thinking?

  At that point, I realized almost everyone else was looking at her too. God, she’d kill me.

  Finally, the music part was over, and I sang:

  You and I

  We’ve been together through the years.

  Softball, football, and baseball,

  Through the laughter and the tears.

  You can tell I’m really trying

  Because I’ve got to admit I’m dying.

  I hope you’ll answer

  Because Saturday will be too late.

  Out in the audience, Amanda was nodding yes.

  Yes? I mouthed.

  She put her hands over her heart and mouthed, yes. “Yes!”

  Matt had been right about the big gesture. It had worked.

  I finished the song with a dramatic “I’m in love with you!” The crowd was going crazy. I called her onstage.

  She gestured no. I should come down.

  I did. People cheered even more. I heard a girl tell her friend I was “the cutest thing ever.”

  Then I found her, and the world blurred. She said, “Shit, you really went to a lot of trouble to prove me wrong.”

  “I really did.”

  She was too beautiful not to kiss, but this time, I knew she wouldn’t want to hit me. I put my arms around her and kissed her, k
issed her like I’d been wanting for months, maybe years.

  Which I did all through David Castillo’s tap dance routine and Jacob’s rap about the school. Then it was time for me to go back onstage for the interview portion.

  I don’t remember what the question was, so I’m pretty sure I was incoherent.

  I won anyway.

  19

  Kendra

  One Night Later

  “Do you think the cheerleaders actually know what’s going on in the game?” I asked my friend Amanda as we watched the homecoming matchup between the Lions and the Tigers (oh my!). “Or do they just wait until the crowd cheers and act excited?”

  “Probably a little of each,” she said. “I mean, Sydnie . . .” She pointed to a girl who’d just done about twenty-five backflips. “Her brain’s probably too scrambled to keep track of what’s going on on the field, but some of them are pretty smart.”

  As if to prove it, the squad all started cheering just as the wide receiver caught a tough pass for first down. I noticed the name on the back of his jersey. BRANDON.

  Brandon?

  “Who’s that guy?” I asked Amanda. “I never saw him before.”

  “Yeah, it’s weird,” she said, pumping her fists. “He’s new. One day last week, he was just at practice. No one remembered him from before, but he had a jersey and he was on the roster, and since Spencer broke his leg last month, they were happy to have him.”

  A strange thing, to be certain. But I was no stranger to strangeness.

  “He just . . . appeared?”

  “Yeah. He’s really good.”

  “He is.” It couldn’t be him. Brandon was a common enough name. No, not really. “What’s his first name?” The team was lining up again.

  Amanda shrugged. “I don’t remember. John, maybe?” She was watching the game—watching her boyfriend—and wanted me to shut up.

  I couldn’t stop watching the player. Brandon. So was everyone else when he ran the next pass in for a touchdown. The graceful way he caught the ball, the way he ran, all of his movements were so familiar.

  So familiar.

  Nonsense! I had never seen James play football! There was no football in seventeenth-century Salem! However, I dimly recalled having seen him play at lacrosse, a game that did exist then. He was a Shakespeare sonnet at that.

  My eyes followed him as he high-fived his teammates, then took off his helmet to drink blue Gatorade.

  His hair was bright auburn.

  I fidgeted in my seat, clenching my fists, waiting for the game to be over so I could see him, though it might only lead to bitter disappointment. “I’m going to sit closer,” I told Amanda as the fourth quarter began.

  “Okay. I never knew you liked football that much.” She followed my eyes. “Ohhhh, that new guy’s kind of hot, huh?”

  “Kind of.” I moved closer. The helmet was back on, but his movements, even the size and shape of his hands were what I had been seeking, seeking for so long.

  Could it be him?

  Finally, it was over. Of course, there were many girls wanting to congratulate the football hero, hoping to meet this new boy. I was in a crowd of them when suddenly I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  “Excuse me,” a voice said. “I’m looking for . . . is there a girl named Kendra here? Sort of strange and wonderful? Pretty, but rather old?”

  His very voice. I felt a bit hot, but it must have been the crowd streaming out. I always feel a bit claustrophobic in crowds. I felt my throat tighten and tears come to my eyes.

  I turned. “I’m Kendra,” I said, then stepped back.

  It was him. It was James.

  My heart was a ball of rubber in my throat. I was choking. Finally, I got out, “I thought you were dead.”

  “I thought I was too. I stopped getting your letters, and I thought I’d die from that. I started taking greater and greater risks.”

  “I wrote every day.”

  “I know. I found out, eventually. But that was after my plane was shot down in the battle of Normandy.”

  But he was immortal. “How—?”

  “I wasn’t killed, obviously, but I was unconscious, burned, disfigured.”

  I looked at his perfect face, his perfect, perfect face.

  “They took me to a hospital,” he said.

  “Hey, James,” a blond girl said. “Great game!”

  “Back off,” I told her. “He’s mine.”

  She muttered an unkind word under her breath, but James sort of smiled at her. “It’s true.” He looked at me. “Do you want to go someplace else?”

  “I want to know where you’ve been the last sixty years—sooner, rather than later.”

  “I couldn’t find you, Kendra! The mirror disappeared in the wreck, and when I finally got back to London, you were gone. I asked all around.”

  And he had not shown up in my mirror either. I had experienced this with it. Often, someone was missing, and I seemed not to be able to find them. I had tried it with kidnap victims, missing persons. Sometimes, as with Grace’s brother, Jack, I could find them, but other times, it seemed beyond my magic. James must have been “missing” at the time I looked for him, his whereabouts unknown to the British government. And I hadn’t tried after that, assuming him dead.

  It was just starting to sink in to me that I was truly seeing James, talking to James, for the first time in so many years. I held my icy hands to his cheek. “Are you real?”

  He grasped my elbows and lifted me toward him. “I’m real.” He was sweaty and smelled it, which made him all the more real. He kissed me.

  “You two have gotten acquainted, I see!” a voice said. It was Amanda.

  “Oh yes.” I felt my face grow hot. I was blushing as I had not since I was a girl the first time. I turned away so they could not see me shaking with unshed tears. “James is an old friend, from Boston. That’s why I was asking about him.”

  “Very cool,” Amanda said. To James, she said, “You should take Kendra to the dance tomorrow.”

  “I should,” he agreed, adding, “I should also probably take a shower,” after Amanda and Chris left.

  “But I don’t want to let you out of my sight,” I said. “How did you find me? It’s not just a coincidence, is it?” I wanted to touch him, hold him, keep holding him so he couldn’t leave again.

  “Hardly. I found you the way everyone finds everyone—on Facebook.”

  I laughed. “Only old people use Facebook now.”

  “No one’s much older than you.”

  It was true. I’d made a Facebook profile only recently. I finally realized that here in Miami, no one cared if I was a witch. There were people calling themselves witches who weren’t even witches and plenty of voodoo ceremonies involving dead chickens in the woods. Probably no one would even believe me if I said I was one.

  “I didn’t think they’d let a person list 1652 as a birth year,” he said. “That was a dead giveaway.”

  “I may have used some magic for that.”

  “And you listed this school. So I came here. I’ve been looking for you for a few days now.”

  “Sixty years and a few days.”

  “Maybe three hundred years and a few days.”

  “And now you’ve found me.”

  “And I’ll never leave,” he said.

  “Never? No more wars? There’s always a war somewhere.”

  “I’m too old. I’ve done my part.” He took me in his arms. “I used to fight because I had nothing else to live for. Now I have you, finally.”

  “Finally!” I pulled him close.

  I took James home with me that night. After three hundred years, I decided I was allowed to do that. And that Monday, we were married, secretly, at the courthouse. We had to ditch school, but it was okay. I’d been to school before, ten or twenty times.

  Still, we decided to stay in high school a while longer. And then, maybe someday, we’d go to college. Take five years, maybe ten. It didn’t really matter. We had forever.


  The End

  Historical Note on Beheld

  Kendra, James, and most of the people they encounter are fictional, but several of the people in the stories (and everyone else in the first one) are real—though there is no evidence they had magical experience.

  The Salem Witch Trials have always interested me since I played Martha Corey in an eighth grade play, Reunion on Gallows Hill, and Ruth Putnam in the opera version of The Crucible in college. Both appear in this story, and both were real people, though Arthur Miller renamed Ruth Putnam. Her real name was Ann, and she was one of the principal witnesses in the Salem Witch Trials, sending many women, including Martha Corey, to their deaths at the scaffold.

  Ann interested me because she was the only one of the various “crying out girls” who ever apologized to the families of the women she’d hurt. The text of her apology is included after this note, and it made me feel that, somehow, she was swept up in something she didn’t entirely understand. She was twelve at the time. Thus, this is a peer pressure story of sorts, with grave consequences as some peer pressure stories have. Ann’s real story played out as Tituba said it would in my story. Her parents died when she was nineteen, and she was left to raise her siblings. She never married and died at thirty-seven. There is no evidence that her father could morph into a wolf, though.

  Prince Karl Theodor of Bavaria was a real person. There is no evidence that he was a cad or was involved in any gold-spinning activities. He married twice and fathered three children. He was a second son and, thus, not heir to the throne.

  The baby hatch or “foundling wheel,” which Rumpelstiltskin describes to Cornelia, was also a real thing. In that way, a young woman could leave an unwanted baby so that it would be taken in. In modern times, all fifty states and numerous other countries have “safe-haven laws,” which allow young women to leave unwanted babies less than thirty days old in a safe place, often a fire station. Many of the older foundlings died, but this is not the case in modern times.

  The HMT Lancastria sank in 1940 with at least four thousand fatalities. It was the greatest British maritime disaster in history, worse than the Titanic and Lusitania combined. However, it was largely kept secret and out of the presses because the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, ordered a media blackout, fearing the effect on morale of the British citizens if they knew about the tragedy. This distressed many survivors. A memorial to the ship was placed in Scotland in 2015.