by Trisha Telep
I didn’t mean to say this last bit, it just kind of slipped out. In class, or walking the hallways, or hanging out with Ashley and Steven and the others in the parking lot after final bell, I would flash on Haiden’s eyes, his light golden skin, the shape of his shoulders. I would imagine his breath in my ear or on my neck. I remembered what it was like to stand close to him.
Every time I walked past the white house I went up to the door and looked in the windows. Everything was locked-down, shuttered, and silent. “It’s like it never happened,” I said to Josh, “except I can’t shake this conviction that it did, it really did, and Haiden is real. He’s not just a figment of my overheated imagination.”
I touched Josh’s hand. I remembered the blood-ceremony we did when we were kids, how serious we were. I laced my fingers through his and confessed, “I really want to see him again, but how can I even make that happen? I don’t know anything about him.”
And it was as if Josh’s voice spoke inside my head:
Do your homework, stupid.
That night I lit the candle and did the meditation exercise exactly as Haiden had shown me. I did it every day in the week following. On Saturday morning I woke up to the feeling of that invisible hand on my rib, gently tugging.
I knew where it wanted me to go, and who would be waiting for me there.
6
Haiden said, “Now I need to teach you how to see.”
When Haiden opened the door, the little dog ran into his arms again, and he picked her up and rubbed her behind the ears. It was as if they’d known each other forever. He smiled at me, and my heart did a quick little salsa in my chest. I wasn’t sure I could talk without stammering, so I just smiled and followed him into the sunken room with the table and the bowl of fruit.
We did the candle meditation exercise again. Haiden made a gesture with his hand and suddenly the room went dark, even though afternoon sunshine should have been leaking around the edges of the blinds. I said, “Do you use ... I mean is this...” I couldn’t believe I was even asking this. I took a breath and tried again. “This is about magic, right? You’re teaching me magic?”
“You could maybe call it that,” he said. He tipped his head at me, and his eyes crinkled at the corners. It was a look that made me feel warm inside. I had the feeling, again, that I had met him before. “I’m teaching you to see what most people can’t. Give me your hand.”
He had elegant hands with long tapered fingers. His skin was smooth and cool. “I want you to do this...” He swept my hand through the air. “...and I want you to clear your mind and concentrate on what you see.”
After about fifteen minutes of this, I said, “I don’t see anything.”
“Try again. Keep trying.”
“But this is stupid!”
“Sasha,” he said, “you have to be patient. I know it doesn’t feel like you’re getting anywhere, but your brain...” He touched my temple. “...is making new connections, laying down new neural circuitry. But it takes a bit of time and practice, practice, practice.”
“But what am I supposed to be looking for?”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll see.”
When I shot him a dubious look, he added, “You will.”
Then Paloma and I were on the street again, blinking in sudden light. I checked my watch. I had been with Haiden for what felt like hours, but only two minutes had passed.
7
I may not have known what I was looking for, but I looked for it that night and every night following. All I saw was my hand waving through the air. Maybe I was crazy. Every day I walked Paloma past the abandoned white house and knocked on the door and looked in the windows.
Haiden was nowhere around.
Then one afternoon when I was visiting Josh, I moved my hand across his. I saw golden trails of light stream from my fingertips, hover in the air for several seconds, then fade. My breath stopped.
I swept my hand through the air and the same golden light traced the passage of my fingers. I couldn’t believe it. “Look at that, Josh,” I cried out, “look at that!” Josh slept on, lost in his coma, as I played the light above him.
8
“It’s astral energy,” Haiden explained to me when I saw him at the house one day later.
“Astral energy?”
“Every living thing generates it. And once you can see that, you can see...” He thought for a moment, then said, “Watch.”
He closed his eyes and let his head hang. I had the urge to reach out and brush the dark hair from his forehead. As I watched, he seemed to ... divide. A second version of Haiden slipped out from the first, until it was standing beside him in the same pose, arms limp, head hanging. A feeling like cold electricity passed through me, and I could feel the prickling of goose bumps rising from my skin.
I couldn’t speak. The second version of Haiden had a shimmer to its body, reminding me of the surface of a sunlit lake.
It lifted its head and opened its eyes.
Then it was gone.
The real Haiden said, “You saw that, didn’t you?” There was a kind of urgency in his tone, as if nothing could be more important. “You saw that very clearly?”
My throat felt dry. I ran my tongue across my lips and said, “What ... what was that? What did you do?”
“That was my astral projection. My soul projection.”
“You looked like your own ghost.”
“Ghosts are a slightly different form of energy,” Haiden said, and I didn’t know what to say to that. I had never believed in ghosts, but the whole world was now slanting and tilting around me. If, in that moment, a portal opened in midair and a unicorn came dancing through it, I would not have been surprised. “Astral projection is the art of sending your soul from your body.”
“Will I be able to do that? Will you teach—”
“No,” Haiden said sharply, cutting the air with his hand. “It’s dangerous. Your body is left empty and vulnerable, and your soul could get lost and not be able to find its way back. The only time your soul should ever leave your body is when you die.”
“But you did it,” I said.
“Only for a moment. And I am...” Haiden smiled a little, turning his hands palms up. “I’m not a regular guy.”
I took a breath. “Then what are you?”
Haiden blinked a little, as if the question had taken him by surprise.
“There’s something different about you,” I said. Stating the obvious.
“There’s something different about you, too,” Haiden said. “That’s why I’m here. That’s why you’re here.”
“Do you do this all the time? I mean, do you just appear in random places and teach things like ... astral energy ... to teenage girls with dachshunds?”
“I don’t just appear in ‘random places.’ I came here specifically for you.”
“Why?”
“Because I need you.”
He put his hand on the back of my neck and gently drew me to him.
He kissed me, softly, on the lips.
Then he murmured, “Session’s over for today. Go home.”
9
It happened two days later. I walked Paloma up the hill to the stone lion that sat outside the mansion at the top part of our loop. I reached out to touch the lion’s paw the way I always did—
—when I saw the teenager suspended in the air.
His toes rested on the top of the fence. He seemed to be sitting, except there was nothing to sit on but air. He had blond curly hair and tanned skin, dressed in jeans and a blue hooded sweatshirt. Paloma whined and pulled back on the leash. I only stared, and kept staring.
“...Ricky? Is that you?”
He moved his head. I couldn’t tell if he’d heard me or not. But I was sure it was Ricky Newman, even though I hadn’t seen him since his family moved to Arizona in eighth grade. My mother and Ricky’s mother were good friends. They’d forced Ricky and me to play together as kids, although a real friendship between
us had never happened.
“Ricky?” I said again.
He stood up and walked along the fence like a gymnast on a balance beam. Then he drifted down through the air to the road. He turned his face to me, although I couldn’t tell if he was actually seeing me or not. I could only note his troubled expression.
The words rose up through my body, from some deep place of knowing that I didn’t consciously understand. “That way,” I said, and felt my arm lift, pointing to the right. “You need to go that way.” I was pointing off the road, into a cluster of hedges and bright bougainvillea.
An expression of peace settled over Ricky’s face, and he walked off in that direction. He didn’t leave any footprints in the gravel. He didn’t make any sound at all. Sunlight shafted over him—and then through him—and his form seemed to shimmer and dance as it dissolved into the hedges.
And then he was gone.
At dinner that night, my mother said, “Terrible news. Ricky Newman, remember him?”
I’d been pushing pieces of chicken around my plate. I had no appetite. At the mention of Ricky’s name I looked up and said, perhaps a little too sharply, “What happened to him?”
“He died,” my mother said. “Earlier today.”
“He died,” I said blankly.
I felt numb. There was the surreal, impossible knowledge that someone my own age had died, someone I’d known, but there was also the matter of Ricky’s astral projection, soul projection, or whatever it was that I had encountered earlier. My mind touched on the implications, and shied away. I wasn’t ready to go there.
“An asthma attack,” my mother went on. “He didn’t have his inhaler with him, and by the time...”
But I couldn’t listen to the rest. I was pulling on my leather jacket. “I have to go somewhere,” I muttered.
“Sasha—”
“I won’t be long.”
And I was out of there.
10
“Haiden!”
The white house seemed as abandoned as always, but this time I wasn’t having it.
“Haiden!” I banged on the door. I walked around and banged on the shuttered windows. “Haiden!” Where did he come from? Where did he go when our sessions were over? Who was he? Unanswered questions filled my mouth like ash.
“Sasha.”
I whirled.
“Sasha, stop yelling, you’ll disturb the neighborhood.”
He was standing beneath one of the palms, his face and body carved in shadow.
“I don’t care,” I said. “Something happened today ... and I need to know....” I could feel my voice falter. I cleared my throat and tried again. “I need answers.”
He tilted his head.
I told him what had happened with Ricky. “And then I found out that he died! Did I do that? Am I responsible for that in some way?” I was thinking about what he had told me the other day, about how easy it is for someone’s ... soul ... to get lost and never find its way back to its body. I had told Ricky what direction to go in, I had even pointed, as if I’d known anything at all about what I was doing.
Had he lost himself, had he ... died ... because of me?
Haiden seemed absorbed in his own thoughts. “So it’s already happening,” I heard him mutter. “I didn’t expect it this soon—”
“What’s happening?”
“Your gift has begun to truly manifest.” Haiden spread his hands. “Ricky was lost, Sasha. You showed him the direction he needed to travel to pass from this world into the next. This kind of thing will happen again. Other lost souls will find you—they’ll be drawn to you—and you will help them find their way.”
“That’s why you’ve been ... teaching me? That’s what you’ve been teaching me?”
Haiden nodded.
My knees felt watery. I stumbled. “You’ve been teaching me to communicate with the souls of dead people.” I sat down—“collapse” is probably the better word—on the doorstep.
“Not all of them are dead.” Before I could respond to that, he said quietly, “There’s more.” He sat on the step beside me. “In order to continue your education, I need you to come with me.”
“Come with you?”
“I live,” Haiden said, “in that other realm I once mentioned. Sometimes known as the Underworld. I kind of ... rule it, actually.”
And something clicked in my head. My voice dull with the shock of it. I said, “You mean ... Hades? You’re, like, that guy Hades?”
“That’s one of my names.”
“You’re the freaking god of the Underworld!”
“If I had a job title,” Haiden allowed, “that would probably be it.”
I could only stare at him. Is that why he had always seemed familiar to me? Memory seemed to be moving around, dislodging the blocked parts: I was a little girl, and he was a crossing guard with vivid blue eyes smiling at me as I trooped across the street. I was ten, and downtown with my mother, and he was a handsome stranger who asked us for the time. I was fourteen, and working at a fast food restaurant, and he was a customer ordering a cheeseburger and fries. And those were only the moments, the encounters, I could remember.
Suddenly I knew that he had always been there, in my life, crossing paths every now and again while I grew up, and he remained the same. He didn’t age. He was constant and unchanging. I was fifteen, and he was the good Samaritan who helped my friend’s hissing black cat out of a tree, even as it flattened against the branch and took swats at his head. “What’s your name?” I had asked in gratitude and now, clear as a streak of birdsong, in my memory I heard him say, “Haiden.”
“Sasha,” he was saying now, “I’ve made mistakes in the past that I would never make again. I want you ... I need you ... to come to my kingdom with me. To be at my side. To be my Queen. There are so many lost ones whom you could help, the same way you did Ricky—”
The words burst out of me. “Why can’t you help them?”
“Because you bring the two worlds together,” Haiden said, “in a way that I can’t. You are one of them—the lost—in a way that I will never be. Trust me, Sasha, I’ve gone over this in my head. I try to understand it all over again every time you and I go through this, life after life after life—”
“I have to go,” I said suddenly. “This is way too weird.”
“Sasha, I would never force you to do anything. If you come with me, it will be of your own free will.”
“I have to go.”
He didn’t reach out for me or stop me or follow me. I strode away from him, beneath the palms, down the curve of driveway, then ran the rest of the way home.
11
In the blur of days that passed I read up on Hades ... on Haiden. Except the patient, gentle, blue-eyed teacher I knew didn’t square up with the fearsome god of the myths. He seemed best known for the story involving Persephone, the young maiden he fell in love with and took to the Underworld. When she begged him to return to her own world, he let her go—except first, he gave her a pomegranate. She ate half of it, including the six seeds that would forever bind her to the Underworld—and to Hades—for six months of every year.
