Impossible Things

by Robin Stevenson

  I picked up my pen and flipped to a new section of my notebook. In bold letters, I wrote: Who is Cassidy Silver?

  Ms. Allyson walked behind me and paused for a moment. “That,” she said in a low voice, “is a very good place to start.” She rested her hand briefly on my shoulder, and suddenly I missed my mom more than ever. Maybe tonight I’d try to talk to her. Maybe. I chewed on my pen for a moment; then I started to write.

  Cassidy Silver misses her mom. Cassidy Silver wonders how you talk to someone who doesn’t have time to listen. I thought about that for a moment. It wasn’t quite fair. Okay, sometimes she has time to listen, but how can I complain about my trivial little problems when she spends all day talking to people who have cancer or are suicidal or drug addicted or whatever? I always imagine she must be wondering how her kid ended up so self-centered and petty. I broke off. This wasn’t really about who I was. Or was it?

  Unlike her brilliant family, I wrote, Cassidy Silver has no amazing talents. I stared at the words for a moment and a slow smile spread across my face. I was going to learn telekinesis, and you couldn’t get much more amazing than that.

  Ten

  Ever since I’d had Victoria over to my place, she’d been saying she should invite me over to hers. A few days later, she finally did.

  “Mom and Dad want to meet you,” she said. She looked uncomfortable. “So, if you want to come over, you can. But you don’t have to. We could go to your place.”

  I was dying to go: I’d been practicing telekinesis every day, and I still hadn’t had any success. Maybe another lesson would help. Still, it sounded like she was only inviting me because her parents told her to. “Do you want me to come?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  I frowned. “Gosh, do you think you could sound a little less enthusiastic?”

  We were sitting at our desks in the back row, waiting for class to start. Victoria lowered her voice and leaned closer. “Sorry. I want to see you after school. It’s just… well, it’s kind of complicated. My parents don’t get along that well and they’re not a heap of fun to be around. Plus, they’ll ask you too many questions. They always do that.”

  “It’ll be just the four of us then?” I asked, remembering how she’d avoided Ben’s question about siblings.

  She nodded, looking surprised. “Of course. Who else would be there?”

  “I don’t know. Just wondering. Anyway, I would like to come, and don’t worry about your parents.” I made a face. “At least they’re both there.”

  Victoria lived farther from school than I did, and in the opposite direction—toward town rather than away from it. After school we cut through the yard toward the bus stop, pulling our hats down firmly over our ears as the cold wind whipped tiny flecks of icy snow against our faces. Ben had already left with Sydney. Apparently Sydney had been given a science kit for Christmas, and she and Ben were going to spend the rest of the day extracting DNA from a kiwi fruit.

  “So, you think we could work on the telekinesis thing again?” I asked.

  “Course we can.”

  “Cool. I was thinking, maybe if I—” I stopped dead. “Hey, there’s that guy again. See, by the bus stop?” I pointed. “He’s the one I told you about, remember? The guy who was here the other day?”

  Victoria grabbed my arm and pulled me behind a nearby Dumpster. “Shhh,” she whispered urgently.

  I remembered how strangely Victoria had reacted when I mentioned him before. “What is it? Do you know him?”

  “I don’t want him to see me, okay? So, let’s just wait here. Maybe he’ll leave.”

  I squatted behind the Dumpster and watched the man. He was talking with the kids who were waiting for their bus. Beside me, Victoria was so still I thought she must be holding her breath.

  “What’s wrong?” I whispered. “Who is he?”

  She shook her head and motioned to me to be quiet.

  I remembered Ben’s question again, and how Victoria had dropped the glass to avoid answering it. I bent even closer so that my mouth was right next to her ear. “Is he your brother?”

  Her eyes widened in surprise. Then she nodded silently. The school bus pulled into view, driving slowly on the icy road. I started to get up, but Victoria grabbed me and pulled me back down.

  “Come on,” I whispered. “We’ll miss the bus.”

  She looked all wobbly, like she might start to cry. “We’ll have to walk. I can’t let him see me.”

  I studied the guy. Her brother. It seemed so unlikely. He must be at least ten years older and he sure didn’t look like the kind of guy I’d want for a big brother. Obviously not the kind Victoria wanted either, judging by her reaction.

  The kids all trooped single file onto the bus, and the bus slowly pulled away, its wheels spinning slightly in the snow. Victoria’s brother headed down the sidewalk, away from the school. He had gone about half a block and was starting to disappear in the blowing snow when he ducked into a small red car parked by the curb. Then, skidding slightly, the car pulled out and disappeared around the corner.

  I turned to Victoria. Her face crumpled and she started crying: shoulder-shaking, breath-gasping sobs. I put my arm around her a bit awkwardly and gave her shoulders a squeeze. “Do you want to tell me what’s going on? How come you don’t want him to see you?”

  “Let’s wait here for a moment to be sure he’s gone, okay?” She managed to stop crying, gulped a bit and rubbed her eyes with her gray mittens. “Then I guess we’re going to have to walk home. It’s kind of a long way.”

  “Okay, fine. We’ll walk. I don’t care, as long as you fill me in.”

  Victoria sighed. “His name’s Rick. He’s my dad’s son from his first marriage—my half-brother.”

  “He’s a lot older than you.”

  “Ten years. He’s twenty-two.” She stood. “Let’s start walking. I’m freezing.”

  I straightened up gratefully and stomped my feet against the hard ground, trying to get the feeling back into my toes.

  Victoria kept talking, fast, as if she’d been bottling it all up for a long time. “Rick’s always had problems. By the time I started grade one, he’d dropped out of high school. He started getting in trouble, breaking into houses and stealing cars. Mom and Dad used to fight about it all the time.”

  “So he lived with you?”

  “Just weekends and holidays with us. He and my mom never got along.” She glanced sideways at me. “Dad blames himself. He thinks the divorce is why Rick’s so messed up.”

  Lots of kids have divorced parents, I thought. Mostly they didn’t steal cars or break into houses. “What do you think?” I asked, keeping my voice neutral.

  She pushed her hat down more firmly on her head and was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know why Rick does the stuff he does.” She shrugged. “He probably doesn’t even know.”

  “So why don’t you want to see him?”

  She wiped her eyes with the back of her mitten, shoved her hands deeper into her pockets and stared at the ground. “He knows about me being telekinetic,” she said, her voice low. “Back when I was a kid, he used to get me to do stuff for him. He’d make it like a game.”

  A shiver ran down my back. “What kind of stuff?”

  “Pretty harmless stuff at first. You know, playing jokes on people. Like he’d get me to make someone’s hat fall off over and over, or make their fly come unzipped. Rick would laugh his head off, and I guess I liked the attention.” She shrugged. “I was maybe five or six when it started, I don’t remember.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad.” Actually it sounded pretty funny. I thought of Amber and wished Victoria would still do tricks like that.

  “No, but then we started doing other things. He’d point out the wallet in someone’s back pocket and tell me to slide it out real slowly, so the guy wouldn’t even notice. I’d let it drop to the ground. We’d wait until the guy walked around the corner, and then Rick would pick it up.”

  “Stealing,
” I said flatly. “He used you to steal?”

  She nodded. “I didn’t even know it was wrong when we started, but by the time I was in third grade, we were stealing all kinds of stuff. Cameras, iPods, those charity cash boxes at grocery stores, women’s purses.” She looked sideways at me. “I knew it was wrong by then.”

  “But you kept doing it?”

  “I guess you probably think that’s awful.”

  I hesitated. “Couldn’t you have told your mom?”

  There was a long pause. “My mom isn’t always that easy to talk to,” she said at last. “And I didn’t want to get in trouble, you know? Like I said, I knew it was wrong.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I looked up to him, you know? He made everything fun.” Victoria’s mouth tightened. “Then we got caught,” she whispered. “I was eight. Rick was almost eighteen. He got charged with theft. My parents had a big fight. I could hear them from my room. And the next day they told Rick he couldn’t stay with us anymore.”

  “Good.”

  “Yeah, for a while it was good. We didn’t see much of him for a couple of years.” She bit her bottom lip and stared down at the ground. “I’ve never told anyone before.”

  “I’m glad you told me,” I said. “I’m glad you trust me.” I meant it, but as soon as I said the words I felt a tiny niggling doubt. She trusted me, but I didn’t quite trust her. I couldn’t shake this feeling there was something she wasn’t telling me. And I still wasn’t sure I believed in telekinesis.

  Eleven

  Victoria’s house was bigger and newer than mine: a square box with a double garage and a big evergreen tree on the front lawn. She let us into a glossy front hall—all glass-paneled doors and marble floors—and I tried not to stare. I untied my boots, slipped them off and lined them up neatly with the rows of shoes on the mat.

  “We’re still unpacking,” Victoria said apologetically, gesturing to the empty bookshelf in the huge living room and the piles of boxes lining one wall. “Come up to my room. It’s cozier.”

  I nodded. The living room wasn’t exactly inviting.

  Victoria’s bedroom was at the end of the upstairs hallway. She opened the door and stood back to let me go in first. I stepped inside and looked around.

  “What do you think?”

  The room was certainly smaller, but I wouldn’t have called it cozy. A neatly made-up bed, a dresser with a hairbrush lying on it, bare white walls. It had the same not-quite-lived-in look as the living room. I tried to keep my expression the same. “It’s nice,” I said. “I guess maybe you haven’t quite finished yet?”

  Victoria glanced around the room and shrugged. “We’ve moved three times in four years. It doesn’t seem worth going to a lot of trouble fixing up my room if we’re only going to leave anyway.”

  A new worry twisted in my stomach like a cold fist. “You won’t move again, will you? You won’t leave?”

  Victoria’s eyes were bloodshot and her nose was pink from crying. She tucked her hair behind her ears and said nothing.

  “You can’t move,” I said. “I don’t want to go back to having no one to hang out with.”

  “You’d have people to hang out with,” she said.

  I snorted. “Like who?”

  “Joe, for one.”

  “Joe! What are you talking about?”

  She giggled. “He likes you.”

  My cheeks were on fire. “He does not!”

  “When we had to do that debate thing, remember? The one about whether it’s better to live now—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I remember. So what?”

  She giggled again. “Joe was in my group, and he asked me about you. Well, he asked if I knew where you got that T-shirt you were wearing.”

  I sighed with relief. “That doesn’t mean he likes me.”

  “Sure it does.”

  “Victoria! Cut it out. It does not.” I remembered what we’d been talking about before she decided to totally embarrass me. “Anyway, I don’t want you to move.”

  “And I don’t want to move. I hate moving. But we always end up moving.” She took her glasses off and turned them around in her hands. Without them, her eyes looked bigger and bluer.

  “Why? How come you move so much?”

  “I don’t know. My parents always think that everything is better somewhere else. And when Rick starts hanging around, things always get messed up.” Victoria rubbed her hands across her eyes; then she put her glasses back on. “Usually Dad lends Rick money, and Mom gets mad. Last time we moved was because Dad kept missing work, trying to bail Rick out of some problem, so he got fired.”

  “Do you think they know Rick’s in town?”

  She groaned. “I don’t know. I don’t even want to think about it. They’re not fighting so much right now, but if he starts hanging around, they’ll start fighting again. They always do.”

  “Yeah, wow.” I stared at her, trying to imagine what that would be like. My parents drive me crazy sometimes but they don’t fight, ever. Or at least if they do, they never do it when Ben and I are around. “Are you going to tell them Rick’s here?” I asked.

  “I guess I have to,” Victoria said hesitantly. “Mom thinks he’s dangerous. Don’t you think I should tell them?”

  I shrugged, trying to look like I thought it was no big deal either way. “Sounds like it just causes problems.”

  “I couldn’t stand it if everything got all messed up and we ended up moving again,” she whispered. “I know he’s my brother and I guess this sounds awful, but I just want him to stay out of our lives. And I hate changing schools.” She looked up at me. “Especially now that I’ve found somebody to be my best friend.”

  Somebody, thumbuddy. I felt a twang of guilt. What if Rick really was dangerous? I was being about as good a friend to Victoria as Chiaki had been to me. I opened my mouth to say that maybe she should tell her mom after all, but before I could speak, Victoria shook her head. “No, I won’t tell them. It’s better not to say anything.” She looked at me with a forced smile. “So, now what?”

  There was a weird, hot, gnawing feeling in my belly. I ignored it and changed the subject. “Are you going to teach me how to start moving things or what?”

  First, Victoria made me do the exercise she had taught me before. I wasn’t too hopeful about it working. As I sat on Victoria’s bed and placed my hands together to begin gathering energy, I calculated that I’d probably practiced this exercise at least a hundred times since she’d showed it to me. Once or twice I’d thought that I might have felt something happening: a sensation of warmth between my hands, a subtle pressure. Way too subtle.

  “Okay,” said Victoria. “Can you feel the ball of energy between your hands?”

  “Umm, I think so? Maybe?”

  “Okay, now focus on that energy and bring your hands to your chest. Imagine that energy flowing into your body.”

  I felt a rush of warmth in my hands and opened my eyes, startled. “I felt it! Wow. Oh, wow, I think maybe I really felt something.”

  Victoria was smiling and nodding at me like crazy. “That’s great. That’s a good sign.” She placed her school binder, closed, on the bed in front of my crossed legs. On top of it, she laid a small white feather. “We’re going to start with something light. I want you to focus all of that energy on this feather. Imagine the energy flowing toward it. The energy is like an extension of you: you can direct it and use it like you would use your own hands… Keep breathing.”

  I let out my breath. I hadn’t realized I was holding it. Nothing was happening to the feather. I squinted at it. Maybe if I blew on it ever so slightly…I just wanted to see the stupid thing move. I sighed and tried to focus on the energy.

  After a few minutes, Victoria interrupted me. “That’s enough, Cassidy. It’s going to take time and practice, I guess.”

  “Can’t I try something else?”

  “You’ll give yourself a headache. Anyway, I just heard Mom come in.” She frowned. “
Don’t tell her about this, okay? She’d flip out.”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  “Seriously,” she said. “Promise me.”

  I nodded, surprised. “Okay. I promise.” A thought popped into my head—a nasty, disloyal thought—and I tried to push it away quickly. But it was too late. The thought wouldn’t leave, and I could tell already it was going to hang around and pollute everything with doubt and distrust and endless questions. What if Victoria wasn’t telekinetic at all? What if the real reason she didn’t want me to say anything was because her parents would laugh and wonder what I was talking about? What if this entire thing—Rick, the telekinesis, all of it—was just a big dramatic story?

  Twelve

  Victoria’s dad walked in the front door just as we arrived at the bottom of the stairs. He raised his eyebrows at me. “Hello. You must be Cassidy.”

  “Hi,” I said, feeling suddenly shy. Shyness isn’t a problem I usually have, but for some reason I was nervous about meeting Victoria’s parents.

  “We’ve heard lots about you,” he said.

  I nodded and looked away. I don’t know why people say that. It always makes me uncomfortable, knowing that people have been talking about me.

  Victoria’s mom appeared in the doorway. “Oh, perfect timing. Dinner’s just out of the oven.” She nodded at me as she ushered us all into the dining room. “Hello, Cassidy. Good to meet you.”

  At my house, we usually ate in the kitchen. Even when Dad was home and we had proper dinners instead of take-out, we just sat around the kitchen table. And we didn’t set the table, exactly. I mean, obviously we used plates and forks and all that, but we usually got our own utensils or else someone plunked a pile of cutlery and maybe a roll of paper towels on the table.