Wind Catche

by Jeff Altabef

  People change. Sometimes they change over the course of a lifetime, and other times change happens swiftly because of a single momentous event. I’m not the same person I was just a few days ago. Too much has happened, too many lies revealed. Truths, solid and real, have crumbled away before me and left behind falsehoods, shadows, and a future as uncertain as a prisoner on death row waiting for a pardon.

  The pendant Sicheii gave me flops out from underneath my shirt. It was supposed to protect me. I grip it until my knuckles turn white.

  Knock! Knock! Knock!

  “Juliet, we’ve got to talk, Love. We need to come up with a story for the police.”

  Just a few days ago, I was an average teenaged girl who looked forward to her sixteenth birthday, hoping for a little freedom and a chance to get a driver’s license.

  Being average is a joke. I will never be average. I was never average....

  A few days earlier...

  Moms invented mornings to torture their daughters. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Nothing worth doing needs to start at seven in the morning. Weekends are awesome mostly because I can sleep late and linger in bed until eleven or later. Most days, I’d like to sleep until afternoon, but Mom never lets me stay in bed past twelve. She thinks I’m wasting my life away. Still, this is a school day and sleeping late is not an option.

  “Wake up, sweetheart.”

  The words drift toward me, alien at first until my sleepy brain puts them in the correct order and makes sense of them. Realization dawns on me. I stuff my head under my pillow and seek safety, hoping to shield myself from this awful affront.

  Mom’s voice turns stormy. “Wake up!” Sweetheart vanishes as she wraps razor-sharp barbed wire around her words.

  I moan, roll over, and peek at the alarm clock. The fuzzy orange numbers read 5:30. She has to be kidding. It’s inhumane to wake up this early.

  Argh!

  I jam my head back under the pillow and wish it were larger and soundproof.

  When can I go back to sleep?

  Light floods the room when Mom flips the switch. Suddenly, I remember why she’s waking me up. She needs to catch an early flight for business, so she woke me earlier than usual to make sure I would be ready to take the bus.

  “Don’t make me take extreme measures.” Her voice is serious and rich with tension. It’s her no-nonsense voice, the one she often uses for work calls.

  I’ve missed more than my share of school busses over the years, so she’s quick to ratchet up her terrorist-like tactics to extreme measures. Usually they start when she rips off my sheets and twice have escalated to ice cubes down my shirt. She’s serious, so I groan something unintelligible, push my pillow to one side and crack open my eyes, which is practically heroic under the circumstances.

  She’s already dressed and hovers beside the bed in a plain white silk blouse, gray slacks and hands clutched to her hips. I promise to get up, but the words get tangled up with sleep and are practically unrecognizable. Still, it placates her enough that she stalks out of my room after tossing out a final warning about me falling back to sleep.

  For a second, sleep pulls at me. I start to doze off when I remember the last ice incident. Not pleasant, and Mom’s anxiety over her business trip will only make this one worse.

  I open my eyes with an impressive amount of willpower, stagger to my feet, bump into the bedpost, stub my toes hard against the doorframe, see stars, clutch my damaged foot, and hop into the bathroom. Luckily, there are no serious injuries—nothing but a red bruise—so I turn the water on in the shower.

  Hair still wet, I search for my school uniform under a pile of clean clothes that never made it into the dresser. Despite my best intentions, they never do.

  A light buzzing sound hums in my head as I yank out a fresh Bartens shirt. I do my best to ignore the noise. It just started one day. At first, it sounded like static, but since then it has grown louder and has begun to sound like voices. I think the voices want to tell me things, possibly important messages, but they make no sense.

  It’s annoying. No one else knows about them. Mom would definitely overreact if she found out. My plan is to ignore them. It might not be the best plan, but it’s better than seeing Dr. Schmidt, our family physician, and being attacked by the Old Spice cloud that hovers around him. Hopefully, the voices will either tell me something important or go away on their own, so I shake my head and busy myself with getting dressed.

  When I go downstairs, no one specific thing seems out of place, but the air is heavy, as if tension is spinning away from Mom in precise circles. She’s headed out of town for two days to a convention in Scottsdale. She works as a lawyer who helps rich people avoid paying taxes. I’m sure there’s much more to her job than that, but the details are a blur. She’s great at what she does, but spends way too much time at work and should, in my opinion, have more fun and find a nice guy. I tried to set her up with a teacher from my old school two years ago, but that went nowhere.

  She rests one hand on the black granite island in the kitchen with a mug of hot coffee perched in front of her. Her day never starts without two cups, always black. A crossword puzzle rests next to her mug. She never has problems with them, but this time she’s only finished two thirds of it, and her letters look like they were carved into the paper with a chisel.

  Her pretty oval face is tense with lines around the edges of her eyes and lips. She twirls her long black hair in tight circles, a sure sign she’s worried about something. My internal alarm goes to yellow alert. This is the first time she’s leaving me alone. I’m almost sixteen. What could happen in a few days?

  “What do you want for breakfast?” Her eyes flicker to the time on the kitchen wall clock.

  “I’ll have some peanut butter and apples.” I start to head for the refrigerator.

  “Sit. I’ll grab it for you.” She swings the refrigerator door open and grabs an apple and a jar of peanut butter.

  She hasn’t made me breakfast in years. Yellow alert turns orange. I eye her suspiciously when she places the plate in front of me.

  More hair twirling and another glance at the clock. Orange turns a light shade of red! “Mom, relax. Everything is going to be fine while you’re away. Two days is not a long time. The house won’t be destroyed.”

  She smiles thinly. “About that, sweetheart.” She pauses.

  It might be early, but self-preservation kicks in. The return of sweetheart is ominous, and that pause means trouble. Something is wrong.

  I narrow my eyes. “What did you do? You didn’t hire a college kid like last time.” I cross my arms over my chest. “That was a disaster. She had friends over until two in the morning. They smoked and ate all the food.”

  “No, Juliet.” She averts her eyes and stares down at her coffee mug as if she’s found a miniature boat floating in her morning drink and it’s the most interesting thing in the world.

  My heart thumps. This is going to be bad. My alert turns deep red.

  “Your grandfather is coming over to spend a few days while I’m gone. He’ll be here by the time you return from school.”

  My stomach lurches. The buzzing in my head turns into a loud screech that makes me wince. “Not Sicheii! The college student would be better.” I rise from my seat. I’m tall for my age, but she’s still an inch taller. She glares down at me, ready for the fight, her eyes hot and her face flushed with color.

  “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me!”

  “Juliet Wildfire Stone, there’s nothing wrong with your grandfather! You can spend a few days alone with him, and it won’t be the end of the world. He loves you and that’s final.”

  I cringe when she uses my full name. An out of control wildfire dominated the news the day after my birth, so “Wildfire” became my middle name. I shudder to think what would have happened if there was a garbage strike. Only a few people even know about it.

  “Sicheii’s weird. He’s so....”

  “Native American.�
� She clutches her hands against her hips. “I don’t understand how this happened. You were such good friends when you were younger. He taught you how to rock climb and swim. You used to spend so much time together.”

  “That was years ago. Before we moved here and you made me switch to Bartens.”

  “What does Bartens have to do with your grandfather?” She scrunches up her nose and squints her eyes. It’s the same look she gets when she tries to help me with my algebra homework. Usually I feel sorry for her when she gets like that, but not now.

  “Really, Mom?” I say through clenched teeth. Can she be this clueless? My trouble with Sicheii has everything to do with my new exclusive private school. I don’t care if his beliefs are old fashioned. Old doesn’t make them wrong. But they pull me in the opposite directions of Bartens. He doesn’t care about Ivy League colleges, or fancy vacations, or high paying jobs. Not like they do at my new school. Sometimes I feel like a rubber band, pulled in two different directions. At some point, the band snaps.

  I can’t explain this to Mom now, especially because I’m pissed, so I take the easy way out. “I’m the only one with Native American blood in the whole place. It’s impossible for me to fit in. Why did we have to move here in the first place and leave my old school? I hate Bartens. Home schooling would be better.”

  She rolls her eyes in that annoying dismissive way she does that drives me crazy. “We moved two years ago, and you’re not the only one with Indian blood at Bartens. Besides, it’s a much better school than your last one. There were too many undesirables at your last school.”

  Undesirables is her code word for my friends.

  “You just need to become more involved. Why don’t you play lacrosse? You’re a terrific lacrosse player. The school team could certainly use you.”

  “You don’t get it! I’d be the crazy half-blood Indian girl playing lacrosse. They’d never let me hear the end of it. You don’t understand how hard it is for me over there. Everybody is so... white and rich.”

  Mom’s face softens. Her skin loses a little of its angry red hue, returning to her natural copper color and her brown eyes widen. Under normal circumstances, her eyes are large and beautiful, but when she gets all motherly and widens them, they take over her face until it is impossible not to become lost in the rich, coffee colored swirls. I’ll never be as beautiful as she is. My nose is longish and pointy, and my eyes aren’t nearly as wide as hers.

  “How many Native American partners do you think there are at Dormit and Will?”

  I turn my back on her. It’s so annoying when she gets like this—all factual and logical and right.

  She’s trying to trap me, but I won’t fall for it. I return to my best argument with my back still turned to her. “Why can’t you trust me? I’m old enough to be on my own for two days. I don’t need Sicheii doing his weird stuff around here.” Panic strikes. I spin in a tight circle and lean against the table with both hands. “He’s not going to pick me up at school, is he?” Air sticks in my throat.

  “No, Jules, he’ll just be at the house. None of your friends at school will even know he’s here.” She manages a weak smile.

  I can breathe again. “I don’t have any friends at Bartens except Katie.” I look away, my head hung low.

  “What about Tiffany and Ashley and what’s her name?”

  My jaw drops. Could it be that she hasn’t listened to a word I’ve said over the past two years? “Do you mean Morgan?”

  “Yes, that’s her name. They seem nice.”

  She must be kidding. Bartens teams up each new student with a mentor. In my case, it was Morgan—the super popular, Barbie look alike, head cheerleader with a giant trust fund who wants plastic surgery on her perfectly fine nose for her sixteenth birthday. She invited me to a party during my first month at school where she made it clear that I wasn’t her kind of girl. To her, Native Americans had no place at Bartens.

  No one spoke to me at that party except Katie, which put her on the outs with the popular crowd almost immediately. But that wasn’t the worst part. The party had a Native American theme, including a viewing of Pocahontas in the giant-sized media room. Pocahontas! I hate that movie. It’s the white man’s version of the perfect hot Native American girl.

  I stayed all night and even choked down some of the tepee shaped cake they wheeled in on a cart with “welcome” written across it. They weren’t going to get the satisfaction of running me off, even if that was the longest night of my life.

  “Mom, those girls are like a pack of super mean spoiled sharks. They’re the last girls I’d be friends with.” How could she be so clueless? Besides, it might sound lame, but I was looking forward to two days of freedom. I didn’t have any particular plans except for catching up on a few television shows and maybe having Troy over.

  Mom’s lips purse in that way she does when she feels sorry for me, and then a horn honks from the driveway. “I’m sure there are other girls who would make better friends at the school. You just need to be more outgoing.” She checks the clock on the wall. It’s 6:15, and she sighs. “I’ve got to go. We’ll come up with a strategy about Bartens when I come home.”

  She loves strategy sessions. They never work.

  She bends down to kiss me, but I strategically step back out of reach. She scowls at me instead. “Do what your grandfather says. Be respectful.” She walks to the front door where her Tumi carry on bag waits.

  “I’ll call you later.” She opens the door. “Love you.”

  She waits for me to say I love her back, but I’m still angry and won’t do it. She shuts the door, strolls down the walkway, and slips into the silver sedan that waits for her without looking back. The sun is out, and the day promises to be steamy. As the car motors away, my anger increases in intensity.

  I’m old enough to take care of myself! Sicheii will be a disaster. He doesn’t need to watch after me.

  The edge of my iPhone digs into my leg. I’m dressed in the Bartens uniform—blue slacks and a white collared shirt with the stupid logo on the chest. It makes me angrier. I reach into my pocket, remove my phone, and speed-dial Troy.

  By the time the phone rings twice, I’m about to hang up when a sleepy voice answers, “Hey.”

  I hesitate, but there’s no backing out now. “Want to cut today? It’s too sunny to go to school.”

  “It’s six in the morning.”

  “Pick me up in two hours. We can go to Slippery River and hang out.”

  Troy hates school so he’ll be happy to spend the day at the river.

  “Okay, I’ll pick you up,” he says, his voice still gravelly.

  I hang up and stuff my phone back into my pocket. I’ve never cut school before and instantly regret my decision. Still, she should have trusted me. She forced me to do it. I stomp my right foot and pain stabs my heel.

  It’s a searing pain in the shape of a small star.

  Troy sees the world in black and white. Sometimes his certainty makes me jealous. My world seems filled with grays—some dark and others light, but rarely any certainty.

  Both of his parents are Native American, and he looks the part with caramel skin and long, straight, raven-colored hair twisted in a braid that falls past his shoulder blades. He’s never cut his hair. One time, I grabbed a pair of scissors and threatened to lop off his braid. He got angry. He believes long hair is a sign of power and spiritual strength. He’ll never let anyone touch it.

  Even though he knows the password to enter our gated community, the security guard calls to confirm he’s a wanted guest. He’ll be pissed. He takes slights like that worse than I do, so I wait for him on the edge of the driveway and worry our day will start off on a bad note.

  I hear his bike, a 1980 Honda CX motorcycle painted in the original royal blue, before it rolls into view. He found it at a junkyard and worked on it for six months until he got it back on the road. Now the bike runs better than it did when new, but it’s loud. He likes it that way.

  He pulls t
he bike three quarters of the way up my driveway, and the tires stick to the hot pavement. He kicks down the kickstand, pulls off his helmet, and slides from the seat. Faded blue jeans cling to his legs and an extra-large, plain white t-shirt fits tightly against his chest and shoulders. Troy is big. He doesn’t have a sculpted physique like you’d find on workout shows, but muscles grow on his body like powdered sugar accumulates on funnel cake.

  “Outstanding security guard you’ve got. Does he treat all your guests the same way, or only the brown ones?” Fire blazes behind his eyes.

  I smirk in hopes of dousing the flames. “Only the ugly ones with loud bikes.” Troy is definitely not ugly, and he knows it. His chiseled jaw and deep set, almond colored eyes give him a pensive expression, as if he’s really listening. Girls love him.

  “Right.” His tone is chilly, but the edges of his lips turn up and form the beginning of a smile so I know we’re out of the woods.

  My neighbor, Mrs. Jones, pulls back her living room curtains and stares at us through her front window. She’s the neighborhood gossip and one nasty drunk. She’s probably fifty years old, but looks like a hundred. Too many drinks and too much sun have sucked the joy and life from her. Rumor has it she was Miss Arizona twenty-eight years ago. It’s hard to see her in the pictures on the web, but it’s possible. I had hoped to sneak out without her knowing, but Troy’s bike is too loud and she has a sixth sense for snooping.

  She wasn’t happy when we moved in—a single mother, and even worse, a single Native American mother and her teenaged daughter. But for the last two years, we’ve given her nothing to gossip about. Now a sharp guilt pang stabs me in the ribs. She’ll tell everyone about her truant teenaged neighbor and her wild looking friend. She’ll say she knew we were no good all along, that we were trouble, that our kind can’t be trusted.

  Why should I care what she does? But heat flushes my cheeks anyway.

  Troy follows my eyes and glances over in Mrs. Jones’s direction. Her stare deepens into a glare. She clutches a phone in her right hand and a glass that’s probably filled with something a lot stronger than orange juice in the other.