by Tom Upton
“You know what I mean.”
“I never know what you mean.”
“You’re going to her house again, aren’t you?” he asked, as though he were actually jealous.
“So?”
“I don’t get you,” he complained.
“There’s a news flash,” I said. “Maybe you should actually listen to me sometime. Maybe you would find a clue.”
“She’s dangerous. You know what she did. So how you could you possibly be all BFF with her?”
“It’s none of your concern,” I told him coldly.
“None of my concern? How is this none of my concern? I care about you.”
“Stop,” I said. “Nobody asked you to care. So just stop.”
I turned and started to walk away, but then Jack made a mistake—a really big mistake. He came up from behind me and grabbed my arm to stop me. He knew better than to do that. He knew I hated to be touched, and he knew why. How many times had I told him? Rage ran through me like an electric current. I spun round and jerked my arm back. Until that moment we probably looked as though we were just a couple having a little quarrel. But then the sky began to change. As if out of nowhere, dense dark clouds quickly rolled across the sky, roiling, blocking out the sun. Winds began to blow wildly, bending back tree limbs, whipping up dried leaves and dirt and other debris. Lightning flashed, and thunder roared. Rain began to fall hard in gray sheets.
Everybody on campus started to rush to the safety of the school, panicked and confused by the sudden storm.
Jack stood before me in a daze, not believing what he was seeing. He couldn’t say anything. The storm had effectively ended our argument.
“Leave me alone, Jack,” I told him, as it started to hail. Tiny marble-sized balls of ice began to land on the lawn and clack on the hoods and roofs of cars in the parking lot. Larger pieces of hail were heading earthward. “Leave me alone before I hurt you for real. This is the only warning you’re going to get—the only kindness I’m capable of.”
When he looked at me, his eyes were filled with fear for the first time. Maybe, at long last, he was learning my true nature and how that nature could never be changed by his good intentions.
He turned and ran toward the school as larger pieces of hail shattered on the pavement, bounced off the grass, and cracked windshields in the parking lot.
“Run, Jack, run! Save yourself!” I shouted after him, and then whispered to myself, “Because you sure can’t save me.”
I turned away and continued to my car. Somehow, the rain and hail weren’t touching me. It was as though I was inside of a protective cocoon, and nothing on the outside could touch me.
I found Amy leaning against my car, from where she must have witnessed what had happened. She, too, appeared to be bone dry, the rain falling all around her yet not touching her. She looked up at the angry sky, and seemed mesmerized by the dark roiling clouds. When she looked at me, her eyes were filled with an evil glee.
“Well, welcome back, Jules,” she said jovially. “Where have you been for all these years?”
The storm lasted for another fifteen minutes, before it quickly faded away, returning the beautiful spring day.
Oddly my old beast of a car was none the worse for wear. It was the only car in the parking lot that was undamaged by the hail. Amy and I sat in the front seat, and watched as the storm wound down and vanished as though it had never happened.
“That was very, very impressive,” Amy commented.
I shrugged. “I was a little pissed.”
“A little pissed? What would happen if you were a lot pissed?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I felt drained, subdued. Maybe I felt a little guilty, too, that I had scared Jack so badly. I had just wanted him to leave me alone.
“Feels good to get it out, doesn’t it?” Amy asked.
“I suppose,” I murmured.
“This never happened before, did it?”
“No, nothing like this. I can usually keep these things under control,” I said, still not certain I’d actually caused the storm.
“Under control?” she said, looking at me as though I was crazy. “Why would you even want to do that?”
I really didn’t feel like talking about it anymore. I wished that none of it had ever happened. I turned the ignition key, and my car rumbled to life.
“Your house?” I asked.
She didn’t answer right away. She seemed lost in thought.
“Just start driving. I’ll let you know,” she said, as though she needed more time to figure something out.
So I pulled out of the parking lot, and started heading toward her house, not sure that was our destination. Now and then I could feel her look at me, studying me closely. Finally she said, with an air of resolve, “I want to show you something.”
“Yeah?” I said, wondering.
She told me to turn off the main street we were riding down, and then continued to give me instructions. After a turn here and a turn there, it was clear that we weren’t going to anywhere near her house. We passed through a couple bad neighborhoods. The buildings were old and not being kept up. Some front lawns were bare of grass. Some of the narrow frame three-flats tilted to the side, as though threatening to fall over at any second. Then were entered and area of larger industrial buildings—warehouses, factories, an old tannery—many of which seemed to be shut down. Their parking lots were deserted, and weeds sprouted up through cracks in the ancient blacktop.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“You’ll see.”
She had me turn down a narrow side street that separated two enormous buildings, both cold storage warehouses. A rat the size of a cat darted across our path. It was gone before I had the chance to hit the brakes. It was gone so fast I wondered if it had actually been there.
“Was that a rat?” I asked.
“Sewer rat,” she said, still deep in thought. “They get huge.”
“I wasn’t sure. It ran so fast. Sometimes I see things that aren’t really there.”
“Oh, I know,” she said. “I know exactly what you mean.”
She had me park in front of an old building of dark reddish-brown bricks. The front windows were made of glass blocks. Many of the blocks had been broken, probably by kids with nothing better to do.
“This is it,” she said, and climbed out of the car as I cut the engine.
I got out and followed her. We walked round the side of the building, through a lot that was over-grown with weeds.
“I found this place a couple months ago,” she said over her shoulder.
“Why would you bother looking for it?” I asked. The place was a dump, obviously abandoned, probably condemned by the city.
“It’s somewhere to go,” she said, and led me to the rear of the building.
There was a small loading dock, its door boarded shut. Next to the dock there was a heavy steel entry door. You could see that it had been secured with a hasp and a heavy padlock, but somebody had ripped the hasp out of the door.
The door squeaked loudly when Amy pulled it open. Before she walked inside, she paused and said to me, “Welcome to my garden, where I plant and grow nightmares.”
I followed her inside. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dimness inside the building. The place was a mess. It looked as though somebody had tried to gut the interior and renovate it at the same time. The walls were mostly bare at the back of the building, showing the backsides of the ugly reddish brown bricks. Toward the front somebody had framed out the front wall and started to hang drywall. Everywhere there were piles of debris that had never been hauled away—old wooden slats, broken pieces of timber, crumpled plaster, shattered glass, bend lengths of lead pipes…. It was the kind of place you visited for a short while, and then end up blowing black stuff out your nose for days.
“What was this place?” I asked.
“Used to be some kind of workshop, I guess. Then somebody started to convert it into something e
lse. I guess they ran out of money. If you look in one of the back corner, there’s a huge stain on the floor. It looks like blood. Maybe somebody got hurt and couldn’t finish. Who knows what they were trying to do? Me? I think it would make a great underground club. Put in a DJ booth, a dance floor, a fog machine. Have people dancing around with glow sticks while other people do some rad medieval shit, like sacrificing virgins. We’d be safe, right?” added, somehow joking without any sign of humor.
She led me toward the front of the building, where somebody had abandoned work long ago. An aluminum ladder stood near the half-finished wall. There was a portable worktable, too, and three metal folding chairs. In one corner there was a large pile of scrap wood that looked charred, as if somebody had tried to build a bon fire right there in the building.
“And what do you do here, exactly?” I asked.
“Experiment, of course,” she said gravely, studying me as though trying to gage my reaction. I might have cringed slightly at the word ‘experiment,’ because that was exactly what Jack had suggested to me, only for different reasons. “You know what they say—practical makes perfect,” Amy continued, “Be all that you can be, and all that.” She was getting extremely creepy again, and it was easy to see why I had stabbed her with a pencil that time. “You should practice, too. You should have been practicing the whole time. What you did with the weather—wow, that was awesome. But it was completely unfocused. It was just a bunch of noise and wind. Unless you control it completely, it’s not very practical.”
“Practical?” I wondered.
“You have to be able to strike somebody with a lightning bolt, or crush somebody’s head open with a big hunk of hail. Otherwise what good is it?”
“You mean use it to hurt people,” I said.
“Sure, what else?”
“Why?”
“Why? Are you soft in the head? You’re a freak, Jules, like me. Whether or not you realize it, you’re at war with the whole world. Anything you do is all right, because everybody would do a lot worse to you if they understood exactly what you are. That’s a good enough reason right there, if you even need a reason, which, really, you don’t. You can do it just because you can, or just because you want to see somebody suffer, somebody who would make you suffer if they had the chance. So why give anybody that chance. Now I want to show you something,” she said, “something I never showed anybody.”
She walked over to one of the folding chairs, and dragged it across the floor to the middle of the room. Then she went to one of the debris piles, from which she retrieved a cinder block. She carried it awkwardly and set it on the chair.
She stepped back about twenty feet from the chair.
“Now watch what I’ve been practicing,” she said. She turned to face the chair. She seemed to go into a trance, staring at the cinder block for a long while, during which I became certain she had gone totally bonkers. Nothing was happening, nothing at all. Then the stale air around us grew warmer and warmer, until it was nearly unbearable to breathe. Finally the cinder block burst into flames.
Up until this moment I had doubts that Amy had had anything at all to do with those guys who got burned.
Amy broke free of her trance and looked at me.
“See?” she said, breathless as though she had just run a long distance. “Cinder blocks aren’t supposed to burn, right? Hah! Everything burns if it gets hot enough. Are you impressed? Tell me you’re impressed,” she said, as if it were the most important thing in the world.
I didn’t say anything. I was trying to figure out how I could have been so stupid. I watched as the flames engulfing the charred block quickly died away.
“Oh, and look at this,” Amy said, giddy from sharing her secret. She held up her index finger, as though pointing at the sagging ceiling, and a flame popped up from her fingertip. The flame burned but didn’t burn her skin. She blew it out as if it were a candle. “See? Perfectly safe—if you’re me. So what do you think?”
“I think you torched that baseball player.” I said.
A sick kind of bliss glimmered in her dark eyes. “Yeah,” she said, and released a giggle—it actually sound like tee-he-he.
“Why would you do that?” I asked.
“Why not? I needed to practice on a moving target. I have plans—big plans. And now you can be part of them, Jules,” she said. She seemed amused by my lack of enthusiasm. Then her attitude suddenly changed, as though some switch was flipped in her head. She eyed me suspiciously. “I hope sharing this little secret with you wasn’t a mistake. Was it a mistake, Jules? I thought we were on the same page here.”
But, really, we weren’t. There was a big difference between talking about doing something and doing it, a huge difference between not caring and pretending not to care. Amy, it was now clear me, was what my parents feared that I was becoming: a sociopath. She had crossed the line into a world that was made of shades of gray. The only other color was red, and red was blood, and the blood and misery of others were the only things that could bring her joy.
“Come on, Jules, I trusted you with this,” she said, pleading, still trying to entice me. In my head, I kept hearing the words of that old school yard game: Red Rover, Red Rover, let Julia come over. That dare and invitation playing over and over in my mind in a maddening chorus of temptation. “Why don’t you give it a try?” she said, motioning toward the cinder block, which was no longer burning. “It’s not hard. I can show you how.” When I didn’t respond, she snorted in disgust and said, “I suppose this is the part where you stab me—again—or try to.”
“I’m going home now,” I said.
“Yeah, whatever.” She sounded like a used car salesman who just realized he has just lost a sale.
“You want a lift?” I asked.
“No.”
“Sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. And Jules?… You better not fuck with me. If you do, you’ll be sorry. I swear you will. Daddy fireman will be making a couple extra calls, and you won’t like what he finds burning.”
I turned and walked toward the rear of the building.
“And tell your dog to stop sniffing around my business, or else,” she yelled after me. “That was a fine little show you two put on for me earlier. I should have guessed it. You should win an award for that performance—you really should.”
The rusty steel door groaned loudly as I shoved it open. I couldn’t escape fast enough.
I walked quickly round the side of the building to get back to my car. Once inside behind the steering wheel, I paused and tried to calm myself. My breath was short and my pulse was racing. What an idiot! What had made me believe that something like this wouldn’t happen? Of course, Amy torched those guys, and now she knew her secret was revealed, which made her that much more dangerous. She knew that Jack had been asking questions around school, too, and she was so paranoid, she even believed Jack and I had staged our argument earlier.
Never trust somebody who doesn’t trust anybody.
Good going, Jules, really. Only you could go looking for somebody who understands you, and end up endangering the only people in the world who really care about you even though they don’t understand you at all. My parents, Jack, and maybe Melody—Amy wouldn’t hesitate to turn them to ashes, just to get even with me. She wouldn’t think twice about that, because she had no conscience, and she would get away with it, because nobody would ever believe she could set people on fire just by wishing it to be so. How, exactly, do you deal with somebody like that?
I slapped the steering wheel viciously. I couldn’t recall a time I had ever been so mad at myself.
I started the car and did a U-turn to head out of the isolated area of industrial decay and insanity. As I drove I dug my cell phone out of my pocket, and tried to call Jack. The phone rang and rang and finally went to voice mail. I dialed a couple more times and got the same result. Great, I thought. Now he decides to leave me alone.
Finally I left a message, not sure he would even li
sten to it. “Jack, look, you need to call me, okay? It’s important.”
I headed for home, driving back through the shabby areas. By now all the schools were out for the day. The city buses were filled with kids. Gang-bangers hung out on street corners. These days kids were getting shot left and right in the city. Accidentally bump into somebody in the lunch line, and get shot on the way home. I never worried about any of that. What was the worse anybody can do to you? Kill you? Not really: they can only kill your body, while the rest of you, the most important part of you, survives. So I did not fear death. Sometimes I thought I feared everything but death. What I feared now more than anything else was what Amy might decide in her demented mind to do.
I tried calling Jack again, but he still wasn’t answering. So I left another message. “Listen, Jack, you need to call me, really. I know you’re freaked out by what happened earlier. I tried to warn you before. I’m like a surprise package, and the surprise isn’t always nice. And you know how I hate being touched. But never mind all that. I think we might have a problem, a big problem. So be a good boy, and call me, okay?” I tried to sound as sweet as I could, but I thought I fell short—I just was never good at doing sweet.
As a drove along, I started to doubt Jack would return my call. He’d always returned my calls quickly, but now my cell phone lay silently on the passenger seat. He didn’t trust me anymore, I was sure. He’d always been like some good-natured floppy-eared dog—maybe a golden retriever—running around, wanting nothing more than to make me happy. I had pushed him away again and again, and in the end I kicked him—hard—and now he didn’t want to have anything more to do with me. A couple months ago, I would have been relieved to be rid of him, but at the moment it was driving me crazy that he wasn’t calling back. It is strange, and a bit insidious, how you can get used to having somebody around, even somebody you find annoying most of the time.
Waiting at a red light, I tried leaving one more message. “Jack, look, I’m sorry, okay? I’m not talking about normal sorry, which doesn’t mean anything. I mean I really feel—oh, what am I doing? Just call me, you moron,” I said. Trying to be sincere was just too aggravating.
