“This is not possible,” I said. I was crawling on all fours.
“This is not possible,” repeated my voice.
It felt like rediscovering the taste of a food I missed or a smell I liked. I didn’t want to move. Not because I was scared of the light, but because I didn’t want this magic to vanish. I never wanted it to end.
“You don’t need to cry,” my voice said. “It was a really old chair.”
“I … I have to try,” I said. I put one foot forward, and pushed myself up on my legs. I looked down at my feet. “I’m standing,” I whispered.
I could feel it, all the sensations of standing up.
“I’m standing!” I yelled at the light, and it immediately sucked me in.
10
DID YOU SEE HER?
“Harold!”
I opened my eyes. The dogs were barking like crazy, and Suzie was leaning over me, shaking me by the shoulders.
“Did she attack you?” she asked.
“Who?”
“Her! The zombie ghost lady. Did she attack you?”
“No,” I said, touching my face and then rubbing my eyes. “I don’t think so.” I looked up at the sky. The stars, the moon, the tombstones, the church: everything was back. I was lying on the grass, my wheelchair on its side next to me. My earphones were there beside the chair, too. I picked them up and dangled the cord right in front of my eyes.
“Hello,” I said to the cord.
“Did you knock your head or something?” Suzie asked, snatching the earphones. She set my chair back on its wheels. “Can you pull yourself up in it?”
I looked at my legs and tried as hard as I could to move them, but the magic was gone. “It was just a dream,” I said.
“It wasn’t a dream. I saw her, too. She came out of the light. She screamed at me. And then she was gone. I saw her.”
I grabbed the arms of the chair while she held it steady, then lifted myself up and set my bum on the seat before pulling on my legs. “You saw who? Your mother?”
“It wasn’t my mother. My mother was beautiful. This one was disgusting, like she was all dead and rotten and falling apart and just …” Suzie made a monstrous face, baring her teeth and curving her fingers into claws. “She was horrible! And she attacked me, like she wanted to get the Stone away from me. My mother would never attack me. She probably attacked you, too. You don’t remember, that’s all.”
She went behind the chair and started pushing, jostling so much I nearly fell out.
“Easy!” I shouted. “Let me do it.” I took charge of the chair and we left the cemetery under a concert of barking dogs.
“Tell me what happened on your side of the wall,” I said, once we were back on the road.
“Didn’t you see the lights? You must have seen the lights. They were flashing like lightning and they were coming from outside, from about where you were.”
“I saw a light,” I said. “It wasn’t flashing though.”
“It was flashing! I went to the window to try to see where it was coming from. That’s when she showed up. She was inside the church with me. Did you see her?”
“I saw something. But it wasn’t a person,” I said.
“She attacked me,” she repeated. “I jumped into the hole on the floor just before she could grab me or the Stone. I heard you scream. I thought she’d gotten you. I crawled out to help and found you on the ground all passed out.”
I was still lost in the memory of standing up. It had felt so good I wanted to cry. “We better not say anything about all this to Ilona or your father.”
“Agreed,” she said. “Ilona would never stop yapping about it if she found out what we did.”
“What you did!”
“Yeah, right,” she said and rolled her eyes. “You’re really bad at hiding things. It took me two seconds to find the Stone. We’re totally in this together.”
When we reached our houses, Suzie turned to run inside.
“Suzie!”
She stopped. “Yeah?”
“The Stone.”
“Oh.” She fished it out of her coat pocket and held it for a moment before reluctantly handing it over. I watched her run to her house. Then I took a good look at the Stone.
“Can you make me stand again?” I asked it. It didn’t answer. I dropped it on my lap and went home.
The Stone was on my desk and I was staring at it from the other side of the room. My bedside lamp lit our strange tête-à-tête with a soft orange glow. Come and play with me, the Stone of the Dead seemed to say.
“You’re evil, and I know it,” I said out loud.
It felt like the Stone was smiling at me, biding its time until I gave in and started turning the dials to see if it could deliver another miracle.
“I’m putting you back where you belong.” I nodded toward my underwear drawer. “So don’t try any funny business with me.”
I moved slowly toward the desk. I knew I was the one turning the wheels, but it felt like I was being pulled toward the Stone by an irresistible dark force.
I grabbed the Stone, breathing heavily, my fingers clutching the dials. I closed my eyes and pictured myself getting up out of my chair, pushing it away, and walking out of my room and into Mum’s to show her what a miracle looked like. I remembered the sensation of standing on my own legs in the cemetery right before the bright light sucked me in. It was the most marvelous feeling ever. I felt the dials twist slightly. My fingers had decided to activate the Stone while my brain was still resisting.
“It will bring her back. It will bring back the zombie ghost lady,” I said, using Suzie’s exact words, trying to scare myself out of doing what I knew I was going to do.
I turned the dials in opposite directions, again and again, feeling an intense sense of joy and relief each time. Guilt was gone. Fear wasn’t even a thing. The Stone was laughing now, and I felt like laughing with it.
“Make me walk,” I said. “Please!”
I kept turning the dials until they clicked and locked into place.
The orange glow of my lamp grew brighter as the bulb started a high-pitched hum. I tried to turn the dials again, but they were stuck. Now I knew that I had done something deeply wrong. I also knew it was too late.
The hum turned into a hiss, and the light got so bright I had to put my hand over my eyes.
“Oh, Harold,” I said. “What have you done now?”
I was clutching the Stone hard in one hand, my fingers cramping around it. I brought my other hand to my ear and closed my eyes as the hiss grew higher and higher until the sound became painful. And then, with a blop!, it stopped. I opened my eyes and lowered my hand. The lamp had become a miniature sun, bathing my room in a bright white light, exactly like the one in the cemetery. I decided this was my cue. I pushed myself up. The chair rolled back. I was standing in the middle of my room, holding the miraculous Stone of the Dead.
“Oh, crap, this feels good!” I whispered and ZOOM! The entire room expanded into nothingness, then came crashing back and settled into place. I wobbled and collapsed onto the floor like an overboiled noodle.
The Stone fell from my hand and rolled away. The glow of the lamp had returned to its familiar pale yellow, and my legs were numb again. The fantasy was over. I was back in reality. And reality sucked in all sorts of ways.
I lifted myself back into my chair and picked up the Stone. I knew that the attic lady could show up again, like she had every other time someone had played with the Stone, but I didn’t care. My skin was still buzzing with the memory of standing. I held the Stone up right in front of my eyes.
“You are AWESOME,” I told it. But it wasn’t radiating, or calling me, or smiling at me anymore. Now it felt dead and empty. I tried to turn it, but the dials wouldn’t budge, however hard I tried.
“Okay, I get it,” I said. “You need time to reload or something, right?” I went to my dresser, leaning down and picking up my Superman boxers on the way. I wrapped the Stone and buried it deep
in the drawer of T-shirts and underwear.
But I couldn’t keep my eyes off the half-open drawer.
The Stone inside it was the best thing ever. If it could make me stand, there could be a million other things it could do. It could give me superpowers for all I knew.
And my life would be the thrilling, high-velocity ride it was meant to be.
11
I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST NIGHT
I woke up feeling horribly sick and looking even worse.
“They force you to skip school. They drag you into traipsing all over town at night. And now, what? They give you a cold!” Mum was making an herbal concoction out of plants from our garden and tons of honey. She claimed it could cure death itself.
“The Goolz didn’t give me this.” I was staring blankly at my cereal, my head pounding and my stomach roiling with nausea, trying to pretend that the curse of the Stone was nothing more than a common cold.
I looked up and turned to the hall when someone knocked on the door.
Mum went to open it, and I caught a glimpse of Ilona on the porch.
“Harold is having breakfast,” Mum said, staying firmly in her way. “He’s under the weather. He might miss school today—this time for the right reasons.”
“I’ll just share a piece of toast with him,” Ilona said, slipping past her. “Cheer him up.”
“Hey!” Mum said. “He doesn’t need cheering up, he needs quiet.” She followed Ilona to the kitchen, both of them walking ridiculously fast, each trying to get to me first.
“Oh, we’ll be so quiet, Margaret,” Ilona said. She won the race and sat down beside me, giving Mum the smuggest gotcha smile ever.
Mum conceded defeat and went back to working on her healing mixture. She started stirring so hard that the liquid sloshed over the sides of the cup and dripped onto the counter.
“Anything you want to tell me?” Ilona asked, her smug smile gone.
I pretended to be too busy watching my cereal get soggy to look her in the eye. “We don’t have any toast. We’re into Froot Loops right now,” I said weakly.
“I need to get ready to meet a client,” Mum said, setting a cup of her magic potion beside me on the table. “Drink up. It tastes as bad as it smells, but it will make you feel better.”
Once Mum had gone upstairs, Ilona pushed the cup away, making a disgusted face. She leaned in close and punched my shoulder. “Besides your breakfast routine and your fart-smelling tea, anything else we need to talk about?”
“Depends what you already know,” I said.
“I saw you and Suzie coming back after the little brat was gone for an hour.” She looked over her shoulder, making sure Mum was still out of earshot. “And then I saw that eerie white light in your window. So naturally, I climbed up to your room to see what was going on. And there you were, in the middle of your room, staring at your dresser like you just discovered fire.” She leaned even closer. “Is that where you’re hiding the Stone? In a dresser drawer? Did you really think Suzie wouldn’t find it in there?”
I looked up from my cereal. “You were spying on me?”
“I was about to knock on the window and ask you what happened, but you started to get undressed.”
“You watched me undress?!”
“Cheese, no! I left. I’m not a perv and I’m not interested in the male anatomy. At all!”
“The male anatomy?” I repeated. “Can you even hear yourself?”
“Harold, the point is that I didn’t give you the Stone so you could use it. I gave it to you to hide it from Suzie.”
“She is good at finding things.”
“And you’re not good at hiding them,” she replied. “Seriously? In a dresser? In your room?”
I shrugged. “There was a ton of underwear over it. It was camouflaged.”
“Why didn’t you keep it on you as we agreed?”
I pushed the cup even further away. The smell was making my nausea unbearable.
“Suzie is boiling with fever, just like Dad was. And look at you. Have you seen your eyes? You’re turning into a corpse!” She put her hand on my forehead to check for a fever. Her hand felt good on my face, even though she was so mad at me. “You’re just like them, sick from using that Stone. You know how dangerous that is?”
“I’m fine,” I said, but I didn’t feel fine. I did indeed feel sort of corpsey.
Ilona took her hand away and crossed her arms tightly over her chest. “Why did you do it? Why did you activate the Stone when I told you not to?”
I was getting frustrated fast. I dropped my spoon onto the table and closed my eyes. Then I opened them and took a good long look at Ilona. “It does things that are unexpected. Things you wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
There was an intensity in her eyes that matched how I felt. As angry as she was, I knew she was the only person I could tell this to. Anybody else would think I was full-on crazy. “It made me stand. On my legs. Twice. When Suzie used it and then when I used it after that. The Stone can make me walk again.”
It took her a minute to process what I’d said, then she shook her head. “That’s impossible.”
“Exactly!” I barked back. “That’s what everybody’s been telling me all these years. It’s impossible. But the Stone, it doesn’t know that—it doesn’t care. All I have to do is turn it, and it will bring me anything I want.”
She stood up. “Harold, I want it back!”
“Did you hear anything I just told you?”
“Yes, and you need to stop using it. I don’t know what it did to you or why. But if you keep activating it, it will kill you.” Ilona’s voice was shaky. She wasn’t angry anymore. She was just plain sad, and that was worse. “I want it now.”
“It’s yours,” I said, but the words made my heart sink. “I’ll give it back to you if you want. But it’s better if I keep it safe here.”
“You’re not safe with it. It was a big mistake putting you in so much danger. I’m sorry.”
“I’m fine!” I slapped the table hard, causing my headache to go nuclear inside my skull. “And I don’t need your pity.” I pushed myself away from the table and went to the stairs. She followed me.
We went upstairs and Ilona carried my chair again, only this time it felt awkward. I was angry and lost and sick, and I could tell she felt sorry for me, which aggravated me even more.
We went into my room. The Stone was still in my drawer, wrapped in my Superman boxers. I went right to the dresser and grabbed it before she could. Part of it was showing through the layers of blue and red fabric.
“Give it to me, Harold.”
I couldn’t stop staring at it.
“No,” I said, my own voice sounding unfamiliar. I turned to face Ilona. “I’m keeping it. I need it.”
“Oh, Harold.”
I clung to it harder, knowing full well I was about to experience the full force of her grit.
She lunged forward, aiming for the Stone, and landed hard on my chest. My chair rolled all the way back against the wall. I tried to fight her off, but her hair was covering my face and her hands were moving fast, trying to get a grip on the Stone. The Superman boxers fell to the floor, the first casualty of the fight.
“No!” I shouted. I pushed her away, but I knew I was losing the battle.
When she straightened up, her hands were shaking, but she was holding the Stone.
“I’m sorry I pulled you into this,” she said. I glared at her.
She grabbed the boxers off the floor and wrapped them back around the Stone, then wiped her hand off on her coat. Mum chose that moment to stick her head in the room.
“All good in here?” she asked, her eyes on my underwear in Ilona’s hands.
“Yeah, we’re good,” Ilona said. Her cheeks were glowing red and her hair and clothes looked like she had just finished wrestling a monkey. I must have looked exactly the same. “We’re good, right?” Ilona asked me.
“Just leave,” I said, and s
he did, practically pushing Mum out of her way.
“What’s going on with you guys?” Mum asked once we heard Ilona slam the door downstairs.
“Nothing. Everything’s okay,” I said, sounding like everything was the opposite of okay.
“That girl just left with your underwear and you look like you’ve been through a tornado. There’s something going on.”
Mum stayed there staring at me, waiting for me to confess.
“It’s nothing,” I insisted, rearranging my hair and pajamas. “Can I be alone for a second so I can get dressed for school?”
“You don’t need to go to school. You’re sick.”
“I’m fine now,” I said. The idea of staying locked in and Stoneless was suffocating. I needed out fast. “It’s your fart-smelling tea,” I said, borrowing a phrase from Ilona. “It really disgusted the sickness away.”
She tried to touch my forehead like Ilona had, but I shoved her hand away.
“Mum! I just want to get out of these stupid pajamas without everybody staring at me and go to school. Okay?”
“Everybody?” Mum said. “I’m not everybody, and I’ve seen your skinny butt before.”
“Please,” I said, my frustration reaching new heights.
“If that girl hurts you in any way,” Mum said, “she’s going to have to deal with me. I’m scared of no Goolz!” and she left the room, closing my door behind her.
12
THE VANISHING
By the time I was ready for school, Ilona was outside waiting for me. I struggled to reach the road, still feeling desperately sick, fueled only by my anger about losing our wrestling match. And, even worse, the Stone.
“Can we be friends again?” she asked. I wheeled toward her, not sure if I should stop or just pass her by.
“If you don’t think we can be friends anymore,” she said, “I’ll leave you alone for the rest of eternity.”
I stopped short right in front of her. The thought of not being friends was even worse than losing the Stone. “Yeah, we’re still friends,” I said.
A Bad Night for Bullies Page 6
