by Amy Ignatow
“She’s just passionate,” Jay said with a dismissive wave of his hand, letting go of Nick. Nick blinked out of sight and reappeared a few inches to his left. Jay quickly grabbed Nick’s arm again. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, sure.” They walked down the street for a minute, and Nick gradually realized that Martina was still with them. “We should probably get back to my house,” Nick said. He looked at Martina. “Would you like to come with us?” he asked.
“Of course she would,” Jay said, “she’s with us now.” Martina smiled, as if hanging out with Nick and Jay were some sort of prize.
They made it back to Nick’s house without any more accidental teleporting. Nick could see his mother through the kitchen window, standing in front of the fridge, looking a little frantic. That probably meant that they were going to have takeout for dinner again. “Are you going to tell her?” Jay asked.
“I honestly hadn’t thought about it,” Nick admitted. “Do you think she’ll freak out?”
Jay thought for a moment. “Angela is a strong and independent woman who has been through a lot. But she will absolutely freak out.” He turned to Martina. “Will you tell your parents?”
“I don’t tell them anything now,” she said.
“You’re mysterious.” Jay sagely nodded his head. “That’s definitely the superhero way.”
What would Nick’s mother say? What would she do? She’d probably take him to a doctor to find out what was wrong with him. Would he have to go to a hospital again? Probably. They’d probably hook him up to all sorts of machines and poke him with needles, because disappearing and reappearing was not in any way normal. Nick really didn’t want to go back to the hospital. “Maybe I’ll hold off on telling her for a bit until I have a better idea about what’s going on,” he said.
“Want me to stay over for dinner?” Jay asked.
“Yeah,” Nick said. “Chinese or pizza?” He looked at Martina, who still wasn’t going anywhere. “Would you like to stay for dinner as well?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Do you have to call your parents?”
“No.”
They went inside, and almost immediately Nick’s mom grabbed both him and Jay and hugged them so violently that their heads smacked together. “I’m sorry!” she said, still holding them so tightly that Nick felt that his ribs might crack.
“Mom,” Nick gasped, “it’s nice to see you, too . . .”
“WHERE WERE YOU TWO?” she bellowed as she let go of the boys. “Do you have any idea what’s been happening?” Nick’s mother looked over to where Martina was quietly standing. “Hello?”
“Mom, this is our friend Martina—”
Mrs. Gross was already hugging Martina, who for the first time since Cookie had grabbed her in the field looked genuinely shocked.
“Do your parents know you’re here?” Mrs. Gross asked.
Martina, whose eyes had turned a vibrant green, shook her head.
“Take this,” Nick’s mom said, putting her cell phone into Martina’s hand. “Call your parents to let them know you’re safe.” She whirled around and looked at Jay. “You’re next.”
Martina was speaking quietly on the phone and it took Nick a moment to realize that he couldn’t understand a word she was saying. His mom and Jay were also looking at her with fascination. “I think it’s Russian,” Jay whispered so that Martina wouldn’t be distracted (even though his whispering was as loud as Nick’s regular talking voice). Martina got off the phone and handed it to Jay.
“Spasiba!” he declared.
Martina giggled. “Pozhaluysta.” Nick looked at her quizzically. “It means ‘You’re welcome,’” she explained as Jay left a message on his mother’s voicemail.
“Hallo, Mother! It is I, your son, Jay Hieronymous Carpenter! I am at young Nicholas Gross’s familial abode, where I will most likely be dining tonight!” He shot a look to Nick’s mom, who rolled her eyes and nodded. “Good night!”
“Mom, why did they have to call their parents?” Nick asked.
Nick’s mother ran her fingers through her hair, which seemed to have more and more gray strands in it every day. “Come, come look,” she said, leading them down the short flight of stairs to the den. The television was on and the local news anchor was talking excitedly. “It’s a special report,” Nick’s mom told them. “I was watching a cooking show . . .”
“You were going to cook something?” Nick asked.
“You be quiet. I was watching a cooking show and this”—she gestured to the anchorman—“started. That was an hour and a half ago. This has been going on for an hour and a half!” She turned to Nick. “When you didn’t come home immediately I was so scared. We’re going to look into getting you a cell phone.”
“Excellent. Can I have one, too?” Jay asked.
There was footage from a security camera of the school’s parking lot, and Nick watched as a car exploded. The newscaster had clearly been replaying the footage over and over again.
Nick’s mom turned to him. “There have been four car explosions so far. One by the school, one by the hospital, one next to the William Blake Mall, and another near the old bridge, and part of the forest near the school is on fire. Why didn’t you two come straight home once the school was evacuated?”
“I’m sorry, Mom.” Nick felt terrible. “We just thought it was a fire drill, and then we were sent home,” he said, very quickly choosing to never, ever tell her that he’d witnessed two of the explosions firsthand. “Has anyone been hurt?”
“No, thank goodness, at least not as far as I know. Where were you?”
Nick found himself completely unprepared to answer her question with even a halfway decent lie. “Umm . . . walking around.”
“Walking around?”
“I lost my backpack when we were evacuating,” Martina said. Sometimes it was strange to hear her speak. It was kind of easy to forget that she was there. Nick was dismayed to see that her eyes had turned a deep gray and desperately hoped that his mother wouldn’t notice. “And then Jay and Nick were helping me find it.”
“You know me!” Jay bleated. “Always there to help a damsel in distress.”
“Yes, I know you.” Nick’s mom let out a deep breath and looked curiously at Martina, who smiled. “I’ll get the take-out menu.”
They sat down and watched the footage for the next hour until it became clear that the newscasters had nothing new to show. “I want you to stay inside,” Nick’s mom said as she shut off the television. Jay led Martina up to Nick’s room. Nick trudged behind, frantically wondering how much dirty laundry was on his floor. He never much thought about the state of his room until some random girl was suddenly in it, which up to this point in his life had been NEVER.
“You should call Daniesha,” Jay said as the door shut. “Mr. Friend is out there blowing up everything in his way, and according to the calculations I just made, he’s probably looking for you.”
“What makes you think that?”
“We’re all looking for each other,” Martina said. She sat down on the floor, took out her sketchbook, and began to draw. She was very strange, but at least she didn’t require a lot of attention or effort.
“Exactly,” Jay said admiringly. “Everyone who was in the accident has been drawn to each other. You are linked.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not true,” Nick said, flopping down on his bed. “Besides, I don’t have her phone number. Or a phone,” he added lamely.
“We need to go out and find her,” Jay said.
“Good luck getting out of this house,” Nick countered. “Cookie is probably at home, just like us, safe and sound.”
Cookie hadn’t made it too far before her head began to pound again. She sat down on a bench near the train station. The streets were oddly quiet for that time of day. At least there was that.
She looked at her phone. Izaak, Addison, Claire, and Emma were sending text after text about the car explosion, and the fire in the tre
es, and apparently there had been some more car explosions? It was difficult to decipher exactly what was going on from all the messages—Cookie’s phone was buzzing non-stop. She felt a strong urge to shut it off entirely, but no, who did that? That would be crazy. She was a normal girl. She had friends. She was not crazy.
TURN RIGHT ON MAPLE! TWO BLOCKS, LEFT ON CEDAR LANE!!! The words felt like they were splitting her head open, and less than a minute later she heard sirens. A fire truck with flashing lights came barreling around the corner. It went two blocks and then made the left onto Cedar Lane.
She looked at the street sign on the corner. MAPLE ROAD. Cookie took off running toward Cedar Lane.
Cookie saw the smoke before she turned the corner. Another car was on fire, and the firefighters were working to put it out. A policewoman approached her and asked if she lived on the block. Cookie said no.
“Go home,” said the policewoman. “There’s a lot of weird stuff happening and it’s better if everyone just stays inside their houses until we sort it all out, okay?”
Cookie turned and walked away, the smell of burnt rubber making her gag. Was it really that much safer inside? Houses seemed pretty flammable. She made it back to Maple and sat down on the side of the road, breathing deeply and willing herself not to throw up.
Cookie had known that the fire engine was coming because she had heard the driver figuring out the directions. Even if he’d been shouting them she shouldn’t have been able to hear him from that far away and over the siren, so she had to have heard his thoughts, just like she’d heard Mr. Friend trying to get out of the school.
What other thoughts would she be able to hear? For a moment Cookie wondered if she could find out what Izaak really thought about Addison, and then shuddered at the idea. Her stepsister had once warned her never to look in her stepbrother’s room, because teenage boys were all disgusting and the less you knew about them the better. Cookie wasn’t particularly close with her stepsiblings (they were much older and both in college), but that had always seemed like sound advice.
What if she could read her mother’s mind? Or her stepfather’s? Cookie had never given too much thought to what her mother and George were thinking, and didn’t particularly feel like starting now. What if she heard something terrible that she’d never be able to unhear? Cookie began to wonder if she would ever be able to go home again.
No. NO. This wasn’t right. She was Cookie Parker and she wasn’t supposed to be afraid of anything. Yet there she was, paralyzed, without any idea of what to do next. Get a grip, Cookie, she told herself and took a deep breath. She had to figure out what she was going to do before her mother started calling.
They had always been close. Around the time that Cookie’s mom had been about to graduate from college, she became pregnant. Carmen Parker had refused to marry Cookie’s biological father, even though he’d made the offer. She had turned him down because she was not going to get married to anyone out of obligation. After graduation, Cookie’s biological father had moved to California, and every year he sent her a stuffed animal on her birthday. Sometimes she wondered if she’d still be getting stuffed animals when she was in college.
Cookie’s mother decided to go it alone, and named her only daughter after her brother—Cookie’s uncle Danny—who had died in Iraq, and up until Cookie was five, it had been just the two of them. Carmen would go to work and take Cookie to the day care at her office. Cookie remembered her mother sneaking in to see her in the middle of the day. But Carmen didn’t like the elementary school in their Philly neighborhood, so she took an accounting job in Muellersville.
The family they left behind in Philadelphia thought they were crazy for moving. “Why in the world are you moving all the way out there?” Cookie remembered her grandmother asking. “There’s nothing out there but cows and Amish people.” She hadn’t been wrong. Muellersville was surrounded by farms with silos and barns and cows and cows and cows. A lot of the kids at school whose parents didn’t work for Auxano lived on those farms, and Cookie had heard stories of those kids getting up at 4:30 every morning to do farm stuff. Cookie was never completely sure what “farm stuff” was (because, like she’d ever talk to the farm kids . . . please) but getting up at 4:30 A.M. was pretty unthinkable, so she got where her grandmother was coming from.
But her mother had insisted. The schools were better, the homes were cheaper, and Auxano was offering her a steady job with a good salary, so they moved away from their family and other black people, and everyone and everything familiar. After a few years, Cookie’s mom had met George MacKessy, and the next thing Cookie knew it wasn’t just the two of them anymore.
Not that there was anything wrong with her stepdad. He was fine. Super nice to Cookie’s mom, and his two grown kids, London and Dallas (his ex-wife must have really liked place names), were decent and welcoming. But Cookie had been used to having her mother all to herself, and all of a sudden George was around all the time, and even if he wasn’t around, her mom told him everything that Cookie told her, so it was like he was around all the time anyway. Cookie used to tell her mom everything, but that hadn’t happened in a long while.
Cookie had no plans to tell her mother about Nick’s and Martina’s new . . . abilities. The others hadn’t really discussed it, but the way that they’d all kind of wordlessly agreed to sneak around made it pretty clear that, at least for now, they were keeping it between just them. Oh, and Farshad. And Jay. Ugh.
The Shrimp, his best friend, Terror Boy, and . . . Weird Girl. She definitely needed a better nickname. If ever there was a club that Cookie did not want to be a part of, there it was. And yet, as she sat there, Cookie realized that all she wanted to do was find them and tell them what she’d heard and seen. Pathetic.
Farshad could hear a man’s voice talking frantically to his mother, and it didn’t sound pleasant.
“You don’t understand, Mrs. Rajavi, I need to speak to your son.”
“That’s Dr. Rajavi,” Farshad heard his mother say. He smiled. His mother had worked very hard to earn her doctorate, and she never let anyone forget it.
“Mr. Rajavi—” The voice was getting louder. It sounded familiar.
“I am also Dr. Rajavi,” Farshad’s father said. His parents loved this routine. Dr. Rajavi? Which Dr. Rajavi? We are both Dr. Rajavi! Do you mean the Dr. Rajavi that can cook well? We can both cook well! The Dr. Rajavi who is very attractive? Why, we’re both very attractive! The Dr. Rajavi who enjoys musical theater? That’s both of us, too! This is so confusing! How will we ever figure out to whom you intend to speak? They’d been doing it for years, and Farshad suspected that people were only amused by it because jolly brown people with weird accents are funny.
The voice didn’t seem amused. “Dr. Rajavi, it is imperative that I speak to your son right now!” The familiar voice was shaky and pleading. Farshad popped his head through the hallway door to see who it was.
Mr. Friend was standing at the front door. He was wearing a full-length coat and looked sweaty and unshaven. Farshad felt afraid.
“Farshad Rajavi!” the man yelled. Farshad’s mom moved instinctively in front of Farshad. “I have to talk to you. I have to. I’ve been looking for you all day. Please listen to me.”
“What is this about?” Farshad’s mother looked at Farshad.
“I have no idea,” Farshad said. But from what Nick and the others had told him, Mr. Friend was dangerous. The fires. The explosions he had seen on television. He had to get Mr. Friend out of the house. “Maybe I should just go and talk to him.”
“Excuse me?” his mother asked him in rapid-fire Farsi. “You are going nowhere with this dirty, crazy man.”
“Sir,” Farshad’s father said, “our son has been through a traumatic accident and needs his rest. You should go.”
“I know!” Mr. Friend shouted. “I know! I was in the accident, too! I need to talk to him! Farshad—”
“Go to your room right now!” his mother ordered, and Farshad obliged, slo
wly making his way up the stairs.
“No. NO. YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND. HE’S IN TERRIBLE DANGER. WE’RE ALL IN TERRIBLE DANGER—”
“SIR!” Farshad’s father bellowed. “You are becoming unhinged! Please leave my house!”
“I will call police officers!” his mother yelled.
“PLEASE. NO, YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND. IT’S HAPPENING AGAIN. YOUR SON IS IN DANGER—”
Farshad heard a popping sound, and suddenly his mother was screaming. He rushed to the kitchen to see his parents using dish towels to furiously beat out a small fire that had started on the counter—it looked as though his mother’s slow cooker had exploded. Chickpeas and bits of apricots were everywhere.
“Lock up the house!” his father yelled, and before Farshad shut the front door, he saw Mr. Friend limping down the street, his long overcoat opened to reveal that he was still wearing a hospital gown.
The Drs. Rajavi quickly put out the fire and called the police. Farshad went back to his room and reopened his father’s laptop, taking great care not to use his thumbs.
Nick stared at the email for a minute before showing it to Jay and Martina.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Mr. Friend was just at my house and is clearly disturbed.
I don’t think we’re safe. Can we meet?
Farshad
Nick had spoken with Farshad twice in the past twenty-four hours, and both times the guy had been pretty rude. Why would he want to help them now? What had happened?
“That’s a short email,” Jay observed, getting excited. “Do you think he was writing it under duress? Maybe Mr. Friend was standing over him, dictating what to write. Maybe it’s a trap!”
Nick frowned. “Why would Mr. Friend tell him to write that he was ‘clearly disturbed’? That makes no sense.”
