01 Unearthly

by Cynthia Hand

  “You might need to fly here,” Mom says a bit stiffly. “And you might want to try it out,” she adds to Jeffrey. “I bet you’d be a natural.”

  I can feel my face getting hot. Sure, Jeffrey will be a natural when I can’t even make it off the ground.

  “I want to see my room,” I say, and escape to the safety of the house.

  That afternoon we stand for the first time on the boardwalk of Broadway Avenue in Jackson, Wyoming. Even in January, there are plenty of tourists. Stagecoaches and horse-drawn carriages pass by every few minutes, along with a never-ending string of cars. I can’t help but scan for one particular silver truck: the mysterious Avalanche with the license plate 99CX.

  “Who knew there’d be so much traffic?” I remark as I watch the cars go by.

  “What would you do if you saw him right now?” Mom asks. She’s wearing a new straw cowboy hat that she was unable to resist in the first gift shop we went into. A cowboy hat. Personally I think she’s taking this Old West thing a bit too far.

  “She’d probably pass out,” says Jeffrey. He bats his eyelashes wildly and fans himself, then pretends to collapse against Mom. They both laugh.

  Jeffrey has already bought himself a T-shirt with a snowboarder on it and is deliberating on a real, honest-to-goodness snowboard he liked in a shopwindow. He’s been in a much better mood since we arrived at the house and he saw that all is not completely lost. He’s acting a lot like the old Jeffrey, the one who smiles and teases and occasionally speaks in full sentences.

  “You two are hilarious,” I say, rolling my eyes. I jog ahead toward a small park I notice on the other side of the street. The entrance is a huge arch made of elk antlers.

  “Let’s go this way,” I call back to Mom and Jeffrey. We hurry across the crosswalk right as the little orange hand starts to flash. Then we linger for a minute under the arch, gazing up at the latticework of antlers, which vaguely resemble bones. Overhead the sky darkens with clouds, and a cold wind picks up.

  “I smell barbecue,” says Jeffrey.

  “You’re just a giant stomach.”

  “Hey, can I help it if I have a faster metabolism than normal people? How about we eat there.” He points up the street where a line of people stand waiting to get into the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar.

  “Sure, and I’ll buy you a beer, too,” Mom says.

  “Really?”

  “No.”

  As they bicker about it, I’m struck with the sudden urge to document this moment, so I’ll be able to look back and say, this was the beginning. Part one of Clara’s purpose. My chest swells with emotion at the thought. A new beginning, for us all.

  “Excuse me, ma’am, would you mind taking our picture?” I ask a lady walking past. She nods and takes the camera from Mom. We strike a pose under the arch, Mom in the middle, Jeffrey and me on either side. We smile. The woman tries to snap a picture, but nothing happens. Mom steps over to show her how to work the flash.

  That’s when the sun comes out again. I suddenly become super aware of what’s going on around me, like it’s all slowing down for me to encounter piece by piece: the voices of the other people on the boardwalk, the flash of teeth when they speak, the rumble of engines and the tiny squeal of brakes as cars stop at the red light. My heart is beating like a slow, loud drum. My breath drags in and out of my lungs. I smell horse manure and rock salt, my own lavender shampoo, Mom’s splash of vanilla, Jeffrey’s manly deodorant, even the faint aroma of decay that still clings to the antlers above us. Classical music pours from underneath the glass doors of one of the art galleries. A dog barks in the distance. Somewhere a baby is crying. It feels like too much, like I’ll explode trying to take it all in. Everything’s too bright. There’s a small, dark bird perched in a tree in the park behind us, singing, fluffing its feathers against the cold. How can I see it, if it’s behind me? But I feel its sharp black eyes on me; I see it angle its head this way and that, watching me, watching, until suddenly it takes off from the tree and swirls up into the wide-open sky like a bit of smoke, disappearing into the sun.

  “Clara,” Jeffrey whispers urgently close to my ear. “Hey!”

  I jerk back to earth. Jackson Hole. Jeffrey. Mom. The lady with the camera. They’re all staring at me.

  “What’s going on?” I’m dazed, disconnected, like some part of me is still up in the sky with the bird.

  “Your hair’s, like, shining,” murmurs Jeffrey. He glances away like he’s embarrassed.

  I look down. Gasp. Shining is not the word. My hair is an iridescent silvery-gold riot of light and color. It blazes. It catches the light like a mirror reflecting the sun. I slide my hand down the warm, luminous strands, and my heart, which seemed to beat so slowly a few moments before, begins to thump painfully fast. What’s happening to me?

  “Mom?” I call weakly. I look up into her wide blue eyes. Then she turns toward the lady, all perfectly composed.

  “Isn’t it a beautiful day?” Mom says. “You know what they say: You don’t like the weather in Wyoming, wait ten minutes.”

  The lady nods distractedly, still staring at my supernaturally radiant hair like she’s trying to figure out a magician’s trick. Mom crosses to me and briskly gathers the length of my hair into her hand like a piece of rope. She shoves it into the collar of my hoodie and pulls the hood up over my head.

  “Just stay calm,” she whispers as she moves into place between Jeffrey and me. “All right. We’re ready now.”

  The lady blinks a few times, shakes her head like she’s trying to clear it. Now that my hair is covered, it’s like everything returns to normal, like nothing unusual has happened. Like we imagined it all. The lady lifts the camera.

  “Say cheese,” she instructs us.

  I do my best to smile.

  We end up at Mountain High Pizza Pie for dinner, because it’s the easiest, closest place. Jeffrey scarfs his pizza while Mom and I pick at ours. We don’t talk. I feel like I’ve been caught doing something terrible. Something shameful. I wear my hood over my hair the entire time, even in the car as we make our way slowly back to the house.

  When we get home Mom goes straight into her office and closes the door. Jeffrey and I, for lack of anything better to do, start to hook up the TV. He keeps looking over at me like I’m about to burst into flames.

  “Would you stop gawking?” I exclaim finally. “You’re freaking me out.”

  “That was weird, back there. What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything. It just happened.”

  Mom appears in the doorway with her coat on.

  “I have to go out,” she says. “Please don’t leave the house until I get back.” Then, before we can question her, she’s gone.

  “Perfect,” mutters Jeffrey.

  I toss him the remote and retreat upstairs to my room. I still have a lot of unpacking to do, but my mind keeps flashing back to that moment under the archway when it felt like the whole world was trying to crawl inside my head. And my hair! Unearthly. The look on the lady’s face when she saw me that way: puzzled at first, confused, then a little frightened, like I was some kind of alien creature who belonged in a lab with scientists looking at my dazzling hair under a microscope. Like I was a freak.

  I must have fallen asleep. The next thing I know Mom’s standing in the doorway to my bedroom. She tosses a box of Clairol hair dye on my bed. I pick it up.

  “Sedona Sunset?” I read. “You’re kidding me, right? Red?”

  “Auburn. Like mine.”

  “But why?” I ask.

  “Let’s fix your hair,” she says. “Then we’ll talk.”

  “It’s going to be this color for school!” I whine as she works the dye into my hair in the bathroom, me sitting on the closed toilet with an old towel around my shoulders.

  “I love your hair. I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t think it was important.” She steps back and examines my head for spots she might have missed. “There. All done. Now we have to wait for the color to
set.”

  “Okay, so you’re going to explain this to me now, right?”

  For all of five seconds she looks nervous. Then she sits down on the edge of the bathtub and folds her hands into her lap.

  “What happened today is normal,” she says. It reminds me of when she told me about my period, or how she approached the topic of sex, all clinical and rational and perfectly spelled out for me, like she’d been rehearsing the speech for years.

  “Um, hello, how was today normal?”

  “Okay, not normal,” she says quickly. “Normal for us. As your abilities begin to grow, your angelic side will start to manifest itself in more noticeable ways.”

  “My angelic side. Great. Like I don’t have enough to deal with.”

  “It’s not so bad,” Mom says. “You’ll learn to control it.”

  “I’ll learn to control my hair?”

  She laughs.

  “Yes, eventually, you’ll learn how to hide it, to tone it down so that it can’t be perceived by the human eye. But for now, dyeing seems the easiest way.”

  She always wears hats, I realize. At the beach. At the park. Almost any time we go out in public, she wears a hat. She owns dozens of hats and bandanas and scarves. I’d always assumed it was because she was old school.

  “So it happens to you?” I ask.

  She turns toward the door, smiling faintly.

  “Come in, Jeffrey.”

  Jeffrey slinks in from my room, where he’s been eavesdropping. The guilt on his face doesn’t last long. He shifts straight to rampant curiosity.

  “Will I get it, too?” he asks. “The hair thing?”

  “Yes,” she answers. “It happens to most of us. For me the first time was 1908, July, I believe. I was reading a book on a park bench. Then—” She lifts her fist up to the top of her head and opens her hand like a kind of explosion.

  I lean toward her eagerly. “And was it like everything slowed down, like you could hear and see things that you shouldn’t have been able to?”

  She turns to look at me. Her eyes are the deep indigo of the sky just after darkness falls, punctuated with tiny points of light as if she’s literally being lit up from within. I can see myself in them. I look worried.

  “Was that what it was like for you?” she asks. “Time slowed down?”

  I nod.

  She makes a thoughtful little hmm noise and lays her warm hand over mine. “Poor kid. No wonder you’re so shaken up.”

  “What did you do, when it happened with you?” Jeffrey asks.

  “I put on my hat. In those days, proper young ladies wore hats out of doors. And luckily, by the time that wasn’t true anymore, hair dye had been invented. I was a brunette for almost twenty years.” She wrinkles up her nose. “It didn’t suit me.”

  “But what is it?” I ask. “Why does it happen?”

  She pauses like she’s considering her words carefully. “It’s a part of glory breaking through.” She looks slightly uncomfortable, as if we can’t quite be trusted with this information. “Now, that’s enough class for today. If this kind of thing happens again, in public I mean, I find it works best to just act normally. Most of the time, people will convince themselves that they didn’t really see anything, that it was a trick of the light, an illusion. But it wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to wear a hat more often now, Jeffrey, to be safe.”

  “Okay,” he says with a smirk. He practically sleeps in his Giants cap.

  “And let’s try not to call attention to ourselves,” she continues, looking at him pointedly, clearly referring to the way he feels the need to be the best at everything: quarterback, pitcher, the all-star varsity kind of guy. “No showing off.”

  His jaw tightens.

  “Shouldn’t be a problem,” he says. “There’s nothing to go out for in January, is there? Wrestling tryouts were in November. Baseball’s not until spring.”

  “Maybe that’s for the best. It gives you some time to adjust before you pick up anything extracurricular.”

  “Right. For the best.” His face is a mask of sullenness again. Then he retreats to his room, slamming the door behind him.

  “Okay, so that’s settled,” Mom says, turning to me with a smile. “Let’s rinse.”

  My hair turns out orange. Like a peeled carrot. The moment I see it I seriously consider shaving my head.

  “We’ll fix it,” Mom promises, trying hard not to laugh. “First thing tomorrow. I swear.”

  “Good night.” I close the door in her face. Then I throw myself down on the bed and have a good long cry. So much for my shot at impressing Mystery Boy with his gorgeous wavy brown hair.

  After I calm down I lie in bed listening to the wind knock at my window. The woods outside seem huge and full of darkness. I can feel the mountains, their massive presence looming behind the house. There are things happening now that I can’t control—I’m changing, and I can’t go back to the way things were before.

  The vision comes to me then like a familiar friend, sweeping my bedroom away and depositing me in the middle of the smoky forest. The air is so hot, so dry and heavy, difficult to breathe. I see the silver Avalanche parked along the edge of the road. Automatically I turn toward the hills, orienting myself to where I know I will find the boy. I walk. I feel the sadness then, a grief like my heart’s being cut out, growing with every step I take. My eyes fill with useless tears. I blink them away and keep walking, determined to reach the boy, and when I see him, I stop for a minute and simply take him in. The sight of him standing there so unaware fills me with a mix of pain and yearning.

  I think, I’m here.

  Chapter 3

  I Survived the Black Plague

  The first thing that catches my eye as I drive into the parking lot of Jackson Hole High School is a large silver truck parked in the back of the lot. I squint to see the license plate.

  “Whoa!” yells Jeffrey as I nearly rear-end another much-older, much-rustier blue truck in front of me. “Learn to drive already!”

  “Sorry.” I try to wave apologetically to the guy driving the blue truck, but he yells something out his window that I’m pretty sure I don’t want to understand and screeches away across the parking lot. I park the Prius carefully in an empty space and sit for a minute, trying to get myself together.

  Jackson Hole High doesn’t resemble a school so much as a resort, a large brick building framed by a series of huge log beams along the front, kind of like pillars but with a more rustic feel. Like everything else in our new hometown, it’s postcard perfect, all shining windows and evenly spaced, white-trunked trees that are beautiful even without leaves, not to mention the gorgeous towering mountains in the background on three sides. Even the fluffy white clouds in the sky look deliberately placed.

  “Later,” says Jeffrey, jumping out of the car. He grabs his backpack and swaggers toward the front door of the school like he owns the place. A few girls in the parking lot turn to check him out. He flashes them an easy smile, which immediately starts up the whisper/giggle thing that always trailed him at our old school.

  “So much for not calling attention to ourselves,” I mutter. I apply another coat of lip gloss and inspect my reflection in the rearview mirror, cringing at my humiliating hair color. In spite of my mom’s and my best efforts over the past week, it’s still orange. We’ve tried everything, re-dyed it like five times, even tried to dye it jet-black, but the color always washes out to the same horrendous, eye-stabbing orange. It’s like some kind of cruel cosmic joke.

  “You can’t always rely on your looks, Clara,” Mom said after failed-attempt number five. Like she’s one to talk. Like she’s ever looked less than gorgeous a day in her life.

  “I’ve never relied on my looks, Mom.”

  “Sure you have,” she said a bit too cheerfully. “You aren’t vain about it, but still. You knew that when the other students at Mountain View High looked at you, they saw this pretty strawberry blonde.”

  “Yeah, so now I’m not stra
wberry blonde or pretty,” I said miserably. Yes, I was wallowing. But the hair is just so horrifically orange.

  Mom put a finger under my chin and forced my head up to look at her.

  “You could have neon green hair, and it wouldn’t take away how beautiful you are,” she said.

  “You’re my mother. You’re legally required to say that.”

  “Let’s try to remember that you’re not here to win a beauty pageant. You’re here for your purpose. Maybe this hair problem means that things aren’t going to be as easy for you here as they were in California. And maybe there’s a reason for that.”

  “Right. A very good reason, I’m sure.”

  “At least the dye will cover the bright stuff. So you won’t have to worry about keeping your hair covered.”

  “Yay for me.”

  “You’ll just have to make the best of it, Clara,” she said.

  So here I am, making the best of it, like I really have a choice. I get out of the car and sneak to the back of the parking lot to inspect the silver truck. AVALANCHE, it reads in silver letters across the back fender. License plate 99CX.

  He’s here. I force myself to breathe. He’s really here.

  Now there’s nothing left to do but walk into the school with my crazy, unruly, insanely bright-orange hair. I watch the other students stream into the building in their little groups, laughing and talking and goofing around. All total strangers, every single one of them. Except one. Although I’m a stranger to him. My hands are simultaneously sweaty and clammy. A flock of butterflies flaps around in my stomach. I’ve never been more nervous in my life.

  You’ve got this, Clara, I think. Next to your purpose, this school thing should be a snap.

  So I straighten my shoulders, trying for Jeffrey’s confidence, and head for the door.

  My first mistake, I realize almost immediately, was assuming that even with the designer exterior, this high school would be essentially like any other. Boy, was I ever wrong. The school is as high-end on the inside as it appears on the outside. Almost all of the classrooms have tall ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows with mountain views. The cafeteria is a cross between the inside of a ski lodge and an art museum. There are paintings, murals, and collages in practically every nook and cranny of the place. It even smells better than regular schools: pine and chalk and a fragrant mix of expensive perfumes. My old cinder-block school in California seems like a prison in comparison.