~~~
If only I could've spent it with them! With the sudden senselessness of sorrows on the earth, one of my friends was lost to me. As a boy was driving Emily home from a date one night, a drunk driver, running a red light, ran into the passenger's side of the boy's car and killed her at once.
I've never been brave in the face of bad news. As I'd cried out "Why?" as I was watching the Homeworld break up, so I cried out "Why?" when I learned of Emily's death. No one gave me a reason either time.
Mom's arms embraced me, then I was crying in a tangle of arms with Kendra and Millie, then I was looking at Emily's body in a box, then I was listening to others say what she'd meant to them, then I was stammering out what she'd meant to me, and then I was leaving her body behind in the box and listening for a voice that I'd never hear again.
Through many days to come, I sleepwalked. I did my schoolwork, took part in Girl Scout meetings, and went to church, but felt disconnected from all of those activities. I hung with Kendra and Millie, but we found little to say or do.
I went on missions for the Colonel. Cut off from my feelings, I accomplished the missions perfectly. Through the fog in which I moved, I thought to myself, Does being dead inside make me the perfect soldier?
I was saving the earth, though I myself was lost.
One night, as I was coming home from breaking into a warehouse and frying electronic devices about which I neither knew nor cared, I saw ahead of me a sprawling structure of chrome and glass standing under sodium lamps amid a parking lot. The structure proclaimed itself southern Illinois's biggest liquor outlet.
Stopping before it, I gazed through a picture window at rows and rows of beer, wine, and spirits. Did a place like this, I thought, sell the drunk the bottle that killed Emily?
The floodgates of my emotions opened, freeing rage. On it was borne my crystal-shaping gift, wilder and more powerful than I'd felt it. Above me, the sodium lamps burst and went out. In front of me, the picture window shattered and blew in. In the store, the bottles of beer, wine, and spirits shattered, too. A flame rose in a pool of liquor and at once engulfed the store's interior.
Panicked, I ran. After about a mile, I leapt onto a grocery store's roof and shivered awhile. When I heard sirens start to wail in the distance, I looked over the roof's parapet. The fire engines might as well have stayed home. Before the first engine came, the store's roof had fallen in in a shower of sparks.
When I got home, I set my clock-radio to alarm while I could catch the Colonel at work in the barn before breakfast. When he saw me enter the barn, he raised a brow. He didn't need say to me, The news must be bad if you're up early.
"Colonel, I accomplished the mission, but there was a complication afterwards."
When he nodded, I told him of my stopping before the liquor store, of my feeling rage over Emily's death, and of my releasing crystal-shaping gift and torching the place. "I'm sorry, sir. I acted with no plan --
To my astonishment, the Colonel took my left hand between his hands. "Belle, you wouldn't be human" -- he gave me a wry smile -- "if you didn't feel anger over your friend's needless death. You didn't know that your anger could affect your gift as it did. What you must do now is learn to control your anger. Given how it affects your gift, your anger can destroy -- or save. Make sure of your being the one who decides what it does."
The Colonel and I went in to breakfast. Buoyed by the Colonel's understanding and acceptance of me, I resolved to do henceforth only what he told me to.
My resolution, I broke that very night. As, pondering life without Emily, I sat on a rise above I-24, I saw a car racing east at what had to be a hundred and twenty miles an hour.
Catching up with the car and running beside it, I knocked hard on its driver's-side window. As the driver turned to me eyes that were mad moons of fright, I ripped off my mask and screamed at him, "Slow down! You'll kill someone."
Whether he tried to kill me or just lost control of his car, he hit me with its driver's side and flung me onto the median. More startled than hurt, I lay listening to his brakes squeal and watching him weave from lane to lane till he stopped on the shoulder about a mile down the road. He got out and stared back along the road awhile, and then got back into his car and drove on at a rate that I believed would not exceed the speed limit again that night.
I rose and trotted west towards home. On the way there, I pondered telling the Colonel what I'd done. After a time, though, I thought, The driver will never tell anyone what happened. Even if he does tell, who'll believe him?
Daughter of Orion Page 22
