I said, “Yes.” My voice came out all shaky and warbling like a baby bird. I had shrunk in size. I was nothing but a flightless, featherless creature, blind and struggling to survive.
Mr. Taylor said, “And yet you included them in your article about the UFO Festival. Let me give you some advice. It will be harsh advice; but if you ever plan to become a journalist, you’ll find it valuable. It will be emblazoned on your mind forever. It should keep you from stepping foot in places where you don’t belong and publishing conspiracy theories as though they’re true. Right now, you’re young, insignificant as far as the real world goes. You’re nothing but the cheapest kind of fraud, not a true journalist at all. Those photos you published of the raccoon with nail polish on its claws and the other animals with human eyes? Manipulating photos is no better than writing fake stories for celebrity rags.”
He stepped so close, I could smell his horrible breath. It took all my willpower to keep from planting my hand over my nose. It smelled like dead, rancid meat. Like the time my mother forgot she had shoved raw hamburger meat to the back of the fridge and left it there until the stink nearly asphyxiated her when she opened the door.
He pointed a finger at me, raising it up and down like a dagger. I knew he wanted to jab me in the chest, but was trying his best not to leave physical marks. He said, “You’re new in town. You’re young. You’re naïve. You can’t just write articles about upstanding citizens and accuse them of things you know nothing about.”
I racked my brain. What had I accused anyone of? I mostly poked fun at the way people believed in aliens from outer space and being abducted by them. Yeah, I reported on the weird situation in the tent, Bobby Huffman and whether or not his death was a suicide, the tattered clothes left behind where a UFO had been reported. But...
Oh my God. I got it. There must be a thread connecting all those things. Bobby Huffman had been murdered, I was more sure of it than ever before. And Mr. Taylor knew who did it.
I backed off completely. I offered mea culpas all over the place. I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it. I tried to convey how the UFO Festival had a circus atmosphere, that’s all.”
He leaned in closer. Words came out of his foul mouth dripping in savagery. “Bobby Huffman was not a circus animal. You remember that. He committed suicide because of something that troubled him. Don’t you ever forget that.”
I felt there was a veiled threat in everything he was saying, but I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant. And I wasn’t going to ask.
He smiled, revealing scummy yellow razor-sharp incisors. He said, “You can go now.”
I gathered up my things as fast as I could.
He jabbed at my arm. My heart pounded. Turned out he was just handing me a Late Excuse for my next class.
I snatched it from his hand and said, “Thank you.”
Then I headed straight to the Girls Room to cry. It was empty. I locked myself in a stall and wept on a toilet seat. My life was garbage. Nothing made sense. Everything choked me and trapped me. I’d written the best article ever in my entire life and gotten punished for it. I was trash. I’d never be anything but trouble in someone’s life. I was born that way. The die was cast. Nothing would ever change.
Well, at least not until Ms. Bell’s class.
Coming in late, I tried to hand her the excuse note quickly and get to my seat. Soaked in spots where I had clutched it in my sweating palm, the note stuck to my hand, then fluttered to the ground like a dead leaf falling from a tree. I was so embarrassed, I just wanted to die. I bent over to pick it up and spilled my colored pencils all over the floor. They went skittering away like cockroaches when you turn the lights on.
Ms. Bell asked someone in the front row to pick everything up for me. She said, “Class, I want you to congratulate the person responsible for revitalizing our school newspaper. Here she is: our very own Shade!” I did not like that. The best way to ferret out kids who used to bully me and tell them, Hey get back to work, slackers! was to hold me up as a role model. They’d be back to bullying me in no time flat. There were a few things they hated even more than homework: weakness, kids who were different, and teacher’s pets. Oh my God, teacher’s pets were like enemy aliens. If you were a teacher’s pet, you might as well have lizard skin, bug eyes and a UFO responsible for swooping down and setting a farmer’s field on fire. You’d be just as popular.
She continued, “Our newspaper’s now available online. I’m a little old-fashioned. I didn’t realize what going online could do for our school. Apparently, people are allowed to leave comments on our newspaper articles. Shade’s article has already received hundreds of comments—and not all of them from our students. People all around town are reading the paper and discussing it.”
Wow, all around town, huh? Did that include the shacks out in the desert?
The next thing she said finally impressed me. “We’re going to do something different today. Instead of our regular work, I’m going to let each of you come up here to the brand new classroom computer Principal Marquez has given us to read the newspaper and, hopefully, post comments on some of the articles.” Hold the phones! We’d just entered the twenty-first century so fast, you might experience whiplash or a boom loud enough to rock your eardrums as we break through the sound barrier. She continued, “Our newspaper has a brand new title: Flying Saucer Times. Much more intriguing than our old name, right? And even more intriguing ... Thanks to Shade, as of today, our Newspaper Club also has an online forum. I’m new to these, but I spent some time looking over the discussion topics when it went live this morning and I like it. Check it out. It’s called The Flying Saucer. The artwork decorating the site is also Shade’s. Feel free to visit the site in class today and add to the discussions. I’m not giving you any homework tonight, so that you can follow up on this at home. We only have a limited amount of time in class; I’m not even sure you’ll all get a chance on the computer here today. If you don’t own a computer, you can access the forum through a library computer or through your cell phone.”
I felt incredibly uncomfortable being the center of attention until two things happened. First, Ms. Bell handed out cupcakes with little flying saucer candies on top to celebrate the newspaper and forum. Second, she gave us free time to read anything we wanted until our time on the computer. Kids liked that so much, a few stopped by to congratulate me on their way up to her desk.
After school, the roller coaster I’d been on all day dropped down another steep hill. As the school bus pulled away from the curb, I knew I was in trouble. A couple of rough guys with a reputation for doing nasty things changed seats to sit both in front of me and in back of me. The first time one of them pulled my hair, I hoped it was an accident. The second time was much harder. There was no doubt it was on purpose. He grabbed most of my hair and yanked my head back until my eyes were locked on his. Sneering, he said, “Hey, little crime solver, don’t think you can open up shop in this town. We know you got to be Little Miss Famous back in your old town, but don’t start snooping around here.”
I just about peed my pants. I knew we’d covered up my involvement in the capture of the guy out in the cave when Kai got total credit for it. What else had I done?
I soon found out.
I could see up the nose of the guy pulling my hair. It was as disgusting as the flecks of ketchup in his mustache. He said, “We saw your article in the school paper. You think you’re all smart and funny talkin’ about the UFO Festival like it’s a circus and all. But that kid, Bobby Huffman, who got killed ... He’s my cousin and you ain’t got no place postin’ his picture on the Internet and writin’ about him. That’s copyright infringement and my family ain’t gonna stand for nothin’ like that. Capiche?”
Despite my terror, I thought: what a baboon. The only way I’d be able to violate copyright infringement would be by copying something Bobby had written. The only way to sue me for the article might be defamation of character, but I hadn’t even defamed Bobby. I
diot.
I just said, “Capiche.”
He let go of my hair.
The guy sitting next to him tried talking quietly, kind of under his breath; but I overheard him. I have ears like a fox. “You said Bobby got killed?”
Tough guy said, “No, I said died, as in committed suicide.”
His buddy said, “No, you said he got killed. Dumb, really dumb thing to say.”
Tough guy said, “Don’t worry about it. I miss Bobby as much as you do.”
When the bus stopped, I practically ran down the aisle and hopped off the steps.
Planning to walk over to Kai’s house to see if she was outside, I heard footsteps behind me. That wasn’t unusual. There were lots of kids in the trailer park and a whole lot of them rode home on the bus.
Quickly, however, most of the footsteps ran off in another direction. A few followed me around the side of my house that’s only visible from the desert, not from the trailer park. I jerked my head around to see who was behind me.
Someone grabbed me by the back of my collar and yanked so hard, I started choking. The next thing I knew, I was on the ground getting kicked in my side and punched in the face. I never won these kinds of situations. I had no fighting skills whatsoever.
Adrenalin flooded my system. I just kind of went crazy. I kicked my feet and swung my fists. Someone tried to grab my hands, but I flailed them all around until it was too hard to grasp them.
The pain in my side was horrendous. I felt something warm dripping down my nose into my mouth. I tasted blood.
Finally, one of the guys said, “OK, let’s go. She’s learned her lesson.”
As they headed off deeper into the trailer park, I realized one of them lived in my neighborhood. That must be why the bus driver let them all on our bus.
Involuntarily, my body started shaking. I couldn’t control it.
I stood up slowly, pain searing my side. Moaning in agony as I lifted my backpack off the ground, I shambled off to get inside.
As soon as I opened my front door, the roller coaster started its final descent, tires screeching against the metal track.
Kai was sitting at our kitchen table, holding my mother’s hand. They both had coffee cups in front of them. There was an ash tray filled with cigarette butts in front of my mom. She looked horrible. Big circles under her eyes and greasy hair that stuck out in a million different directions. She was wearing an ugly nightgown—a rainbow-and-roses design or something; hard to tell, it was so faded—that had so many red wine stains on the front, it looked like she’d been shot.
Kai and my mom looked up when I came in.
My mom said, “Oh, hi, Shade. I didn’t expect you home so soon. Didn’t you have Newspaper Club today?”
I stared at Kai. What the hell was she doing having coffee with my mom? I confided so much in her. Was she just running over here while I was at school and spilling everything to my mom?
Traitor.
My mouth hurt. I started worrying I’d lost a tooth. I rushed off to the bathroom, shouting over my shoulder in the most annoyed tone possible, “No, I didn’t have club today. Our newspaper got published today. Not that you’d ever notice, though. Our forum went up online, too.”
I locked myself in the bathroom. My reflection in the mirror terrified me. My right eye was swollen, almost completely shut. An angry red-and-purple blotch marked the cheekbone underneath it. I felt pain everywhere: on my face, inside my mouth, in my stomach. I forced my mouth to open against the searing pain. I felt all my teeth with my fingers. Thank God, they were all intact and nothing was loose. I lifted up my shirt. My stomach and side were splotched with bruises. Every time I took a breath, pain stabbed me like a knife.
Oh, hi, Shade ... I didn’t expect you home so soon? Seriously? What mother in the entire world says that to a daughter who comes home looking like this? What about, Oh my God, Shade, what happened to you? You look terrible. Let’s get you to the hospital!
And what about Kai, sitting there without even getting up to help me?
Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!
I wanted to scream. To break things. To smash the bathroom mirror into a bazillion little pieces. The pain stopped me. To scream or move more than a tiny bit at a time would kill me.
There was a knock on the bathroom door.
I shouted, “Go away!”
Kai spoke through the door. “Shade, I need to talk to you. You won’t believe what happened.”
I swung the door open, excruciating pain screaming through my body. Teeth clenched, I said in as loud a voice as I could manage, something that came out more like a growling whisper, “Did you see me? Did you even freaking see me when I came in the house? I’m hurt really bad. I don’t really care what happened. And why are you sitting in my house having coffee with my mother? Shouldn’t you be home learning whatever you call schoolwork?”
I saw the hurt in Kai’s eyes. I knew she felt inferior for not going to school and learning what everyone else was learning.
She recovered and said, “Shade, I can heal you.”
She reached out her arms to embrace me. I fell into them, desperate to escape the agony I was in.
Warmth spread throughout my body, concentrating like a heating pad in the places I’d been injured. It started healing me. I could feel it. My stomach stopped aching. As the agony in my mouth went away, I unclenched my jaw.
Finally, I felt back to normal. I looked in the mirror. My eye was no longer swollen and the bruise on my cheek was completely gone. I lifted up my shirt. All the bruises on my stomach and side had disappeared.
I sat down on the edge of the tub and wept. I said, “I can’t take it anymore. I write an article and start a forum, have half a day of happiness over it, and I get beat up. Happiness is a dangerous thing for me. I’m not supposed to have that. It’s not part of my destiny.”
Kai sat down beside me and put an arm around me. She said, “That’s a lot of bull. No one’s destiny includes all good things or all bad things. Life is both. If you get out there and take risks—like you did with the newspaper article—some bad stuff might happen. What’s the alternative? You play everything safe and become a shrinking violet?”
I smiled in spite of everything. I felt so incredibly well and whole and healthy. I said, “So what did you need to tell me so badly?”
Kai said, “I healed your mom.”
Say what? I replied, “I didn’t know she was sick.”
Kai explained, “I healed her addictions. She’s better now.”
I pulled out of Kai’s embrace and moved a few inches away. I stared at her. Finally, I said, “Look, Kai, I know you think you’re a great healer and all, but I’ve seen my mom ‘get better’ so many times I can’t even count.” I used my fingers to put air quotes around get better. “It never lasts long. And by never, I mean never. She always goes back to her old ways faster than you can say messed up. You shouldn’t have invaded my privacy by coming over here and talking to my mom. You crossed boundaries, Kai. You should have asked me first.”
Kai’s eyes filled with tears. She said, “I saw your mom outside, Shade. I didn’t just barge on over here. Something was wrong with her. She fell and went unconscious. What did you want me to do? Leave her there until I had your permission to help?”
I’m sure my face turned bright red. A mix of emotions flooded through me. I just said, “Oh.” That was a brilliant response: Oh. Just, Oh. I honestly couldn’t think of anything else to say. My mind had fixated on Kai being a traitor. I was used to betrayal. My mind was comfortable with that. I’d been betrayed since the day I was born—by my mom, by a steady stream of father figures leaving me, including my real dad, by personal failures and kids hating on me and beating me up. Loyalty was the exceptional thing in my life, something that popped up way too rarely on my personal radar. I had to switch gears. To realize that my mom had been unconscious and Kai had saved her. To wonder why she’d been unconscious. Had she overdosed, or was it something else?
I knew I had to talk to my mom, but I was too embarrassed and weirded out to do it with Kai around. It would be too incredibly awkward. I said, “I had no idea. Well, thanks for doing that. I guess I should talk to my mom, but I should probably do it alone. Do you mind?”
Kai shook her head no. She stood up and said, “The funeral’s tomorrow.”
What did that mean? She was taking back her healing and my mom would be dead? What?
I was probably staring at Kai in some really weird way. She said, “The funeral for my aunt. You said you’d be there.”
Geez. I had some serious trust issues. Of course, her aunt’s funeral. I said, “I’m so sorry, Kai. I forgot after hearing that my mom had been unconscious. What time? I have school and club tomorrow.”
Kai said, “No problem. It’s at night. Want to meet at my house at 7:00?”
I said, “Sure, 7:00’s good.”
Kai left the bathroom. I threw cold water on my face and listened for the sound of the front door slamming. It took a while. She stopped to talk to my mom—stuff about eating well, getting enough sleep, taking care of herself. Kai said, “If you need to talk, ask Shade to get ahold of me, OK?”
My mom said, “OK.”
I liked that Kai respected me enough to go through me first the next time she talked to my mom. I needed a buffer zone between my mom and the people I was close to in order to feel safe in the world. I just did. My mom was like an invasive army, bombing all the safety nets in my life to smithereens. I needed the buffer zone.
After I heard the front door close, I gathered my wits. Then I walked out to the kitchen, feeling awkward and scared and generally messed up in my head.
My mom was sitting there, sipping coffee. She said, “I’m sorry, Shade.”
I said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s OK. I heard Kai helped you.”
She said, “Yes. I don’t know what she did or what happened; but she found me unconscious. I barely remember getting that way. I took too much ... Well, I mixed pills and alcohol...”
Pills? Really, pills? Was it just pills? More like heroin or cocaine, I’d bet good money on it. I said it out loud, minus the sarcasm: “Pills?”
Shade and the Skinwalkers Page 14
