Thirteen Days to Midnight

by Patrick Carman

  We looked up to see the group of kids down the way staring at us, slack-jawed.

  “She’s fine,” Milo called out, trying to cover. “Wasn’t as bad as it looked.”

  The kids started mumbling among themselves as I held Oh’s head in my hands, searching for signs of madness.

  “Are you absolutely sure you’re okay?” It had been violent and not the least bit fun to watch someone get smashed in the head with a speeding baseball.

  “If anything I feel even better than I did before we started. It was exhilarating.”

  I thought about the absurdity of both what she had said and what we were doing.

  Oh took out her pink argyle notebook and began writing.

  “We know you can still give it to someone else,” she began, scribbling words I couldn’t see as she explained, “and it was powerful enough to keep me from getting hurt even with a blow to the head.”

  “Girl, you’d be dead if it weren’t for Jacob,” said Milo, sounding moody. “And we don’t know what’s going to happen when you give it back.”

  “Sure we do,” I said. “I took it back last time and she was fine. It’ll be fine again.”

  “Yeah, but we can’t know for sure it will keep working. You don’t know—”

  “I do know,” I said. I heard the embarrassment in my own voice and saw that they knew, too.

  “You took it back already, didn’t you?” asked Oh, her eyes widening with surprise. I felt bad for jumping the gun, but it was like a little pet, this power I had. When I gave it away, it clawed to get back inside me.

  “I didn’t see any reason to wait once I pulled you to safety. I should have said something. Sorry.”

  “No, it’s okay,” said Oh. “It’s great actually. We know it works.”

  “What are you writing down?” asked Milo.

  “I’ve got a chart here with a column for each of us so we can keep track of everything we’re doing individually. As far as I can tell it looks like this so far: Milo has avoided two minor injuries, one to his face and one to his thumb. Jacob has avoided death once, with the lamp at the store, and fire seems to have no effect on him. Me, I’ve been hit in the head hard enough to kill me and I feel fine, plus I was hit in the chest with a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball, also fine. And I did a face-plant on my longboard, no damage.”

  “God, I sound like a wimp,” said Milo. “The next one is on me and that’s final.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” said Oh, checking her watch and returning the pad to her pocket. She sounded thrilled to keep going—too thrilled, it seemed to me.

  As it turned out, she was at the exhilarating start of a deadly habit that would eventually eat us alive.

  When we left the batting cages, Milo was hungry and wanted to hit a taco van for buck-fifty burritos, but me and Oh, we just wanted to drift through the neighborhood and talk about nothing in particular.

  “Dudes, I gotta eat. How much you got?” Milo had asked.

  I gave Milo my last dollar, which he put together with change from under his seat, and he took off on his own for afternoon sustenance.

  Five minutes later I was alone with Oh in the endless maze of ranch-style houses, a canopy of damp tree limbs overhead that made the world feel heavy and private. We were on our own for the first time since we’d met.

  “This is nice.” Oh was gliding along the sidewalk on her longboard, holding on to my shoulder as I pulled her.

  “You mean me pulling you or you and me alone?”

  “Both,” she answered, giving her board a kick and rolling out past me under the trees. Her long hair blew back in waves under her red cap. Oh turned and reached back toward me with her hand, the one with the pink cast, as she slowed down.

  I smiled, relieved. “Be careful on that thing,” I said, walking faster to catch up. When I got close enough so she could touch me, she moved up on the nose of the board and grabbed my hand.

  “Let’s ride together. You do the kicking.”

  I put one foot on the board, not a car in sight, a long stretch of sidewalk in front of us. There was a vision in my head of crashing and falling on top of her, rolling around on the grass in front of someone’s house. Not the worst way to take a spill.

  “Let’s do this,” I said, grabbing her around the waist and shoving off with three big kicks on the pavement. We were sailing. She laughed and grabbed my hands, wobbling on the board as she pulled me closer. When we slowed to a reasonably safe speed she turned in my direction.

  This time, when she leaned in, she really did kiss me for the first time. No one was steering the ship we were on. It was a dangerous first kiss, an electric, adrenaline-inducing high I wished could stay with me for the rest of my life.

  “Tell me more about Mr. Fielding,” she said, our lips coming apart as the board slowed to a stop and I stepped off.

  It felt almost like a trick. I kiss you, tell me your secrets. What could I tell her that wouldn’t give too much away, remind me of how guilty I felt, or leave me choking back tears because I missed him so much?

  “He had some money,” I said, thinking this might be easiest. “Enough to keep me at Holy Cross. And he knew Father Tim for a while, like way before I met either one of them.”

  “What was his house like?”

  This was actually a very perceptive question, because I’d lived there for a while but never talked about it, and I’d only been back there once since the accident.

  “Well, for starters, it was small. Two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room. He lived simply. Kind of beyond simple, if you want to know the truth. He preferred the outdoors and I know he traveled a lot before I came along. Plus he had this place at the coast where he kept a lot of his things. It’s funny you mention it, because I went back to the house a few days after the accident, and I was reminded of how empty it was. Kind of mysterious, that part. It’s hard to explain, but I kind of felt like he carried his whole self around with him. When he was with me, he was really with me, especially when we went out to breakfast together.”

  “What did you guys talk about when you went to breakfast?”

  “I don’t know, all kinds of stuff. We read the paper, took bites off each other’s plates, talked about books, especially sci-fi and stuff like that. He knew a lot about history, kind of like Mr. Coffin. He was into escape artists, illusionists, stuff like that. We just, I don’t know, talked about whatever came up.”

  Oh closed her eyes, holding my shoulder again and gliding along on her board.

  “Sounds nice.”

  “How about you? You talk to your dad much?”

  Oh opened her eyes and started to say something but stopped, and I decided not to push her about things with her parents. I got the feeling she didn’t like talking about how it felt being from a broken family. Still, I felt a little robbed, like I’d given away too much without any payback.

  “Come on!” she yelled back at me, smiling. “Let’s do that kissing thing on the board again.”

  She didn’t have to ask me twice.

  TEN

  DAYS TO

  MIDNIGHT

  THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11TH

  I had just asked Oh out on a date in the lamest of all possible ways, and it didn’t go quite as I’d planned.

  Me: There’s something I want to show you.

  Oh: Don’t be gross.

  Me: The coast isn’t gross.

  Oh: I don’t get it.

  Me: Will you go to the coast with me?

  Oh: When?

  Not a no. A good sign.

  Me: Saturday.

  Oh: Can’t this weekend. have to stay with my dad. he pays for school, I visit. that’s our deal.

  Me: Saturday after?

  Oh: Hang on.

  Seven minutes passed, but it seemed like seven hundred. I thought about how little I knew about Oh’s past. Obviously I’d been too caught up in my infatuation to even ask if her parents were married or not. How did she even afford to attend Holy Cross?

  Oh: M
om said OK. how are we getting there?

  Me: Got it covered.

  Oh: Take Milo? is he driving?

  Ugh. Take Milo? What the heck for? I didn’t know how to respond, so I didn’t respond at all.

  Five minutes later:

  Oh: We don’t have to take him if you don’t want to.

  Oh: Does what you need to show me have to do with you know what?

  Me: Yes.

  Oh: Then I take it back. we need to take Milo with us.

  Me: OK.

  Two minutes of dead air.

  Oh: Is this a date?

  Me: Guess so.

  Oh: So you want to date me.

  Me: You kissed me first.

  Oh: You make me feel safe.

  Another two minutes of dead air, and then Oh sent me a question I couldn’t answer.

  Oh: What are you going to show me?

  I ignored the message and rolled out of bed to a symphony of three retired priests getting ready for the day—hacking up phlegm, farting, blowing their noses in the shower. Ten days in the church house had helped me realize there was at least one consequence to never getting married: a high risk of becoming oblivious to your own gargantuan annoyances.

  My turn came up in the shower, and I double-checked for hairs and snot before stepping in and letting the warm water rush over my head. I thought about everything we’d done. We’d already tested fire, falling, sharp objects, electric shock, and being leveled with a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball. Oh insisted we needed to try at least two more things before we could be certain of what I could do with the power, but first we had to get through another day at Holy Cross.

  At least Ethan wouldn’t be there to bug us. I figured that out the moment I stepped on campus because it was all anyone was talking about. There was a rumor floating around that his dad had called Father Tim and “ripped him a new one,” as Nick put it.

  I drifted through the morning classes with Mr. Beck and Miss Pines, thinking mostly about the fact that my first real date with Oh was going to include my best friend. It was sure to be awkward, especially since I’m almost positive he had been making a play for her before I entered the picture.

  But I suppose Oh had a point. There was something I knew about—or at least thought I knew, if dreams and half-remembered memories were any indication—that they both deserved to know. I wasn’t even sure what it was, only that it was there.

  Seven days ago, a full week after Mr. Fielding’s death, I lurched awake in the church house. I don’t think I’d had so much a dream as a broken memory of a brief conversation between me and Mr. Fielding. I played it back, alone there in the dark.

  “If something happens to me and you don’t know what to do, come back here, okay?”

  I was like, okay, what for?

  He’d looked in a certain direction, in a certain place, my eager eyes following his, and then he’d completely changed course.

  “Let’s go get some chowder and walk on the beach. It’s a hell of a day out there.”

  After our initiation at the batting cages, the testing didn’t bother us so much. It was like playing a violent video game or watching a war movie. After a while none of it seemed real anymore. It was shocking how quickly we became desensitized. Like nothing we were doing would have any consequences.

  “We have to figure out if you can give it to anyone you want, not just people you like,” said Milo as the three of us sat eating in the courtyard. “And whether it can be passed on from there. So, like, can you give it to me and then can I give it to someone else?”

  “You’re assuming I like you,” I answered dryly.

  Milo was eating a bowl of cold mac and cheese left over from the night before. For some reason he found it necessary to jam the metal fork into my arm, where it stuck in my skin. I started screaming like a stuck pig and Milo freaked out, apologizing as he pulled the fork out. When he realized I’d only been kidding, he wrestled me to the ground and dug his chin into my chest. Even in my indestructible state, he was impossible to beat in a wrestling match.

  “Will you two quit screwing around? Milo is right,” said Oh. We both looked up, hair disheveled and dirt on our jackets like two grade-school kids having it out over a donut. “We could test it right now, if you want.”

  Oh had that mischievous, smoky-eyed look on her face as she bit into an apple. Milo and I returned to the stone bench to hear her latest plan.

  “We haven’t found anything like Kryptonite yet, nothing that you can’t overcome when you’ve got it. As long as you’re covered, it appears that nothing can harm you. We haven’t tested drowning or a really far fall yet, but other than that it’s looking like a person really is impossible to injure when they have it.”

  “We haven’t tried shooting each other,” said Milo.

  “Thank you for that unfortunate reminder,” Oh re-sponded.

  “Actually, I can verify the gun thing,” I admitted sheepishly.

  Both Oh and Milo stared at me with jaw-dropping expressions. They were, I think, stunned into silence.

  “It takes a surprising amount of nerve to shoot yourself in the foot. I almost couldn’t do it.”

  “Oh my God, Jacob, tell me,” Oh demanded, leaning in closer.

  I explained that the priests kept a grand total of one gun on the church house grounds, an old shotgun they used “on rare occasion” to scare off crows when they got too thick.

  “Priests make their own rules,” said Milo. “You guys ever notice that?”

  “I got up really early this morning, like before dawn, and stood barefooted in the back forty. Like I said, I almost couldn’t go through with it.”

  “But you did.” Oh was mesmerized; she was enjoying this a little more than I was comfortable with.

  “Two of the old guys came out and I said I’d scared off a whole slew of crows, but dang, they were mad. Mostly because I woke them up.”

  “So how did it feel? Can I see?” asked Oh. Milo just sat there shaking his head.

  “I can’t believe you shot yourself in the foot.”

  After I peeled off my shoe and my sock and showed them both that my foot was unharmed, Milo asked what it had felt like.

  “Not much, a little pressure maybe.”

  “Unbelievable,” Oh concluded.

  “What about a chainsaw?” Milo asked, leaning back as I put my sock back on.

  “You’re a sick puppy,” Oh scolded.

  “No, seriously though. If I tried to cut my arm off with a chainsaw, what would happen?”

  “I don’t think that’s different enough from Oh’s crash on the board. The pavement pretty much acted like a chainsaw would on her skin. Her skin should have shredded, but nothing happened.”

  “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”

  “Okay, one more, just indulge me.” Milo had obviously given this a lot of thought.

  “What about getting sick? If Jacob kept the power and never gave it away, could he get, like, cancer? Could he even get a cold?”

  “I don’t know how we’d figure that one out,” I said. “Some of this stuff we’re going to have to decide for ourselves or just cross the bridges when we come to them.”

  “Let’s just hope we never cross a bridge and find a guy with a chainsaw waiting for us on the other side,” said Oh, shaking her head. “Let’s focus on something we can actually test.”

  She tapped her pencil in the pink diamond notebook, then took the same pencil and stuck it inside her cast, itching a piece of skin I couldn’t see.

  “Is that thing even doing any good?” asked Milo. Since the spill on the longboard, the cast looked a lot less sturdy.

  “It’s keeping you from sticking me in the arm with a fork,” she said. “Just shut up for one second and listen to me.”

  “Okay, okay—I’m all ears.”

  Oh rolled her eyes and went back to her list as Milo took a bite of cold mac and cheese.

  “You do realize that fork was in my arm,” I said.
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  “Jacob,” said Oh. “Zip it.”

  I nodded. “Zipping it, no problem.”

  “It also looks like only one person can have it at a time, but one thing we don’t know is whether or not Jacob has to be present in order to pass the power to someone else. That’s a big one, especially if we’re going to help as many people as possible.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Milo. “Who said anything about helping people?”

  Oh kept itching the inside of her cast with the pencil as she went on.

  “I know, it’s a real thrill trying to kill each other, I get it,” she said. “But don’t you think we need to put it to practical use at some point? I bet that’s what Mr. Fielding did. I bet he was this mild-mannered, outdoorsy guy by day, but actually used this power to save a lot of people.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, the runner inside me lurching away from the kind of responsibility Oh was hinting at. “I never imagined him doing anything like that. I’m pretty sure I would have sensed that something odd was going on.” I paused. “I guess we did end up talking about comic books and superheroes a few times. And he had this weird fascination with magicians I’d never even heard of. The Fire King, Harry Kellar, Alexander Herrmann, strange dudes who did even stranger stuff.”

  “Did you ever think this power you have might be somehow connected to magic? I mean, we don’t have a lot to go on here. You should think about stuff like that.”

  I shrugged. Magic wasn’t real, it was an illusion, and Mr. Fielding’s interest in it was never anything serious. What we were experiencing was like the opposite of magic, not an illusion at all, but real power from a real source.

  “Just tell me this much,” she prodded. “Is there anything you can think of that might get one of us hurt? Some sort of rule we don’t know about?”

  “I don’t know about any rules,” I said.

  Oh categorized my answer as “not very helpful,” but she smiled delightfully from the corner of her mouth, shaking her head and looking at me with those beautiful eyes.

  “I can’t believe you shot yourself in the foot.”

  I shrugged. “I’m not always a clear thinker before dawn.”