by Alisa Valdes
Travis laid his hands upon the weakest of the cows. Its sides fattened under his touch, its fur patched itself and thickened against the cold. When he’d finished with the animal, Travis focused his gaze on the land itself, and I watched in amazement as the snow began to melt beneath the bovines. The cows noticed, and stomped their feet and nodded their heads lightly, snorting their relief.
“I like burgers as much as the next guy, but I don’t want them to suffer,” he grumbled to me.
Travis tended to the others now, healing frostbitten legs and noses, fattening where starvation had set in.
“Okay,” Travis said, after he’d finished. “Time to get you back to Grandma.”
“They’ll only be slaughtered and eaten in the end,” I told him, feeling overwhelming sadness for the cows. “Why do you bother? Why can’t you save them from that?”
“Everyone has a fate,” he said. “Save them from the slaughter, and someone else starves. It’s a strange universe we live in, Shane, equal parts creation and destruction, all of it in some crazy balance I don’t understand either. Plus, death’s not the end. Every living thing has a soul. They’ll move on, to somewhere better.”
“Why can’t good stop evil completely?” I cried.
Travis held me around the waist with one hand, and stared into the distance. Again came the humming and again we moved through a twinkling storm. He did not answer me until we’d alighted once more, this time back at the memorial bench in the foothills near my house.
“I don’t know,” Travis told me, and I saw that his own eyes shimmered with tears. “I think sometimes that there’s more than one creator. Or there’s a Maker and a Destroyer. Like twins. Brothers.”
I shivered, and Randy’s face came to mind. I wondered if Travis thought the same. It seemed that Travis was considering his words more carefully, and at a deeper level, than he let on.
“Well, Shane, this is good-bye for now,” he said. “I’m gonna find Buddy. If you don’t feel me or see me for a bit, it’s because that’s where I am. Looking for him.”
“So I’ll see you again?”
He nodded, but winced, too.
“What if Victor tries to get me?” I asked.
“He won’t. It’s me he wants. If he thinks I’m not interested in you, he won’t bother you. That’s what I’m counting on.”
“I need you.”
“You’ll be okay. But you should be extra careful about your ex-boyfriend anyway.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“So go, do your thing, get good grades, go to Kelsey’s party. Oh—that reminds me. Shane, you need to act like they’re right. I mean, about the brain injury.”
I considered this. “Why?”
“To avoid losing anything else. Just act like they’re right, and stop talking about me to them.”
I nodded, weakly, feeling sick and sad. He was serious about leaving me. He really believed he was causing me too many problems. I had to think of a way to change his mind.
“Okay,” he said, like a magician on a stage, or an adult trying to distract a panicked child. “You ready to see something cool?”
I nodded stupidly.
“Ladies and gentlemen, here goes Travis’s great vanishing act, part two. Ready?”
“No, actually,” I said. “I’m not ready.”
He ignored me again and—smiling in a silly, over-the-top way, like a circus performer—was almost immediately swallowed by a sudden, gusting tornado of golden light. As quickly as the swirl of air had come, it disappeared, taking Travis with it.
I felt his absence like a cold, hard punch in the gut.
Chapter Eighteen
I spent the rest of the weekend sleeping and moping around, pretending to be “normal” again. On Monday my mother drove me to school because I was grounded from driving until further notice from my mother and the fleet of neurologists she was lining up to poke and prod me next week. Actually, she didn’t think I was well enough to take my finals at all, but I convinced her to let me try. The school had said they would allow retakes if my performance proved to be inconsistent with the semester. I sat there in the passenger seat trying to act like I believed I had brain damage. It was degrading, the whole situation—faking brain injury, but also being left at the lower school drop-off area at Coronado Prep, a part of the campus most upper-school kids had intentionally managed to avoid since they’d turned sixteen.
But whatever misery I felt on the walk of shame from the lower school curb was nothing compared to the awkward, uncomfortable glances I started collecting from my classmates when I walked onto the campus of the upper school. Everywhere I went, I’d wave or smile at people who had just last week been my friends or acquaintances, only to have them respond tepidly and pityingly, whispering as I passed by, averting their eyes, giggling uncomfortably about me, and, now and then, giving me a hello that dripped with fear and suspicion. Dread filled my bones as I began to suspect everyone knew about my newfound “brain injury” and its resultant “insanity.”
If I’d been naked in school, I could not have felt more self-conscious than I did now, as if everyone was watching me, mocking me in fascination, like I was some kind of local freak show attraction.
I was now an outcast.
I wasn’t sure which of the two people who knew about my “hallucinations” had blabbed all over school, Kelsey or Logan, but given the way he’d treated me the night I broke up with him, my money was on the latter.
To clear my head, I walked across one of Coronado Prep’s many landscaped quads, to the science complex. My father, who had gone to college back East, said the stately crimson brick buildings and towering trees on the grounds of my school reminded him of the way Ivy League schools looked in New England. It certainly required a lot of water to make anything in the desert look like a lush forest, and I figured a hefty chunk of our sizable tuition went to grounds maintenance and the water company.
I crunched across the snow with my head hung low. Discreetly, I opened a side door and slipped into the building, met by a soothing blast of heated air, in hopes of finding a warm place to hide before classes began. I couldn’t handle the uncomfortable stares anymore. I just wanted to take my tests, and go home.
My first final exam that day was in Mr. Hedges’s physics class. I was dying to ask him about parallel universes, and to tell him about what I’d experienced, but I didn’t know how to bring it up. Anyway, there were too many people around to do it right now.
Kelsey was already in her seat. Logan was nowhere to be seen, and for this I was grateful.
“Hi,” Kelsey said, looking guilty and sad.
I nodded in response, but didn’t look up or say anything.
“It wasn’t me,” Kelsey said, knowing exactly what I was thinking and feeling. “So you can stop with the silent treatment.”
I said nothing, and scrolled my laptop down in the review notes.
“It was Logan,” she whispered. “Okay?”
“Yeah?” I mumbled. “And who told Logan, I wonder?”
“Fine. That was me. And I’m sorry I told him anything. I thought he’d be cool. I was really worried about you. I thought it would help. It was a mistake and I’m sorry.”
I forced myself to fight back the tears.
“Shane, please don’t be mad at me.”
I looked at her now, and tried to remember that from her point of view, she was helping.
“Everyone hates me,” I said. “They’re all whispering.”
“They don’t hate you,” she said. “They just—Logan made a Facebook group about you and invited everyone to join it. They’ve all seen it by now. It was everywhere yesterday. Everyone was texting me about it. I didn’t want to upset you.”
“A Facebook group about me?” I asked, horrified.
“He called it ‘Let’s All Help Shane Clark,’ but it’s actually all about how you’re hallucinating and hearing voices, how you’ve lost it. He even found these photos he took on his camera-phone o
f you acting goofy, and put them up to make you look crazy.”
“Why would he do that?” I asked, feeling very exposed and paranoid now.
“Because he’s a jerk,” she said.
“I broke up with him Friday night, after you left.”
“That explains it then,” she said.
Mr. Hedges came in, and the bell rang. We got our exams and remained quiet for the rest of the hour. I was so upset my hand shook when I gripped my pencil. I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t losing my mind. I knew that what I’d experienced was real. Why couldn’t anyone believe me?
I felt incredibly isolated, and miserable, but tried my best to focus on the test. The first question was about electricity and magnetism, and the irony of that fact did not escape me. Until that moment, these had been esoteric scientific topics that had little or no real bearing on my emotional life. Not anymore. Now I knew that human beings had only scraped the surface of what was out there, and what was possible. I knew, more than anyone else in this room, that electricity and magnetism governed more than the physical universe. They also ruled the spiritual universe. The physical and the spiritual were one and the same, but no one in my world seemed to realize this yet. This was what I thought about as I took my AP physics exam. It didn’t matter that Travis wanted me to act normal; I was changed, and I’d never be “normal” again.
After I handed in my test, I asked Mr. Hedges if I could come by to talk to him about something later, and he said yes, giving me a copy of a handout that listed his office hours both at our school and at the university, where he kept a laboratory. I made a mental note to try to meet him at the university instead of here at Coronado Prep, so that no one would have any more reason to go around talking about me. I wanted to find Travis, and Mr. Hedges was the only person I could think of who might be able to help me do that.
The next period was study hall, which was held in the library. Kelsey was still trying to be nice to me. She didn’t look down on me, or laugh at me, like some of the other kids seemed to be doing. She genuinely loved me, even if she did think I was losing my grip on reality.
Together, we gathered our things, and began to walk across the campus toward the library, which was better endowed than many college facilities. I braced against the cold wind, and tried to get Kelsey onto a new topic, away from my “injuries.”
“What are you going to wear for the party?” I asked her, ignoring the group of girls who laughed at me from across a courtyard, and the other group of girls who gave me a fist pump and shouted, “Team Shane all the way!” while another group cried, “Team Logan!”
Great. I was a team now, all on my own.
“I’m not sure,” Kelsey said, rolling her eyes at my detractors. “I was hoping maybe we could hit the mall next weekend, or sometime over break. I bet a new outfit would help you feel better.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
“You should try blue,” she said, looking at me. “It’d be nice with your hair.”
I tried to act normal, but I was overcome with a powerful unease as a flock of crows alighted on a branch in a tree above us, one of them swooping almost close enough to make me duck.
Kelsey didn’t notice, and kept talking. “Or turquoise. It would really set off your eyes.”
“Shape-shifter,” I mused, looking up at the crow. It had green eyes, and watched me with a cold, hard intelligence. I hurried past it, no longer listening to Kelsey at all. Victor was here. He’d followed me. I needed to get inside.
“Shane? Did you hear me?” Kelsey asked as we arrived at the door to the library.
“Huh?” I asked, knowing that I must have looked panicked. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”
“I asked if you thought we should use white poinsettias on the porch or red ones.”
“Red,” I said, looking around nervously for the crow.
Kelsey was worried now. “Are you okay?” she asked me.
“Yeah,” I lied. I tried to smile like the old Shane. I didn’t know where she was anymore.
“Do you want me to call your mom?” she asked.
“What? No! Why?” I grabbed the handle to the door, and held it open for her to pass. She didn’t budge.
“You don’t seem like yourself. Maybe you should be home resting.”
“I’m fine.”
“I’m really sorry about all these idiots,” Kelsey said, as a couple of kids passed by whispering about me. “It must feel terrible.”
“I can handle it,” I said, thinking that the snickering classmates were the least of my worries.
Kelsey and I walked across the library. To my dismay, I saw Logan here, too, with his calculus class. He sat with a group of kids and they all looked at me when I walked in, and burst out laughing.
“Morons,” said Kelsey, putting a protective arm around me.
“What are they saying, you think?”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said.
I felt my eyes fill with tears. I tried to avoid everyone’s gaze as Kelsey and I settled in at a table near the windows that faced out onto the expansive playing fields.
“Are you still talking to him?”
“Who?”
“Travis,” she said.
I shrugged and avoided looking at her. I didn’t want to talk about it.
“Shane.” Still staring. “What are you hiding? You won’t even look at me.”
I finally met her eyes, and sighed, hoping she’d notice how weary and unhappy she was making me.
“I’m not talking to him anymore,” I said. “Happy?”
She frowned. “I’m not happy, no. I think it’s the best thing for you, but I know you think you care about him.”
I turned my eyes to the playing fields once more, hoping to calm my brain down enough to slip into a cozy denial, but this was not to be, because tied to one of the trees was a small black dog.
“Buddy!” I cried.
The rope was long and red, and stood out crisply against the white snow, as did the dog. My dog.
“Omigod,” I said, under my breath. My pulse did that thing it was getting so good at now, and began to hammer away inside of me.
Kelsey looked outside where I was looking, and asked, “Why is your dog on the playing field, Shane?” From her tone of voice, she seemed to think I’d put him there.
“I don’t know,” I said.
I scanned the field, looking for Travis. But I saw nothing. Just Buddy, the red rope, the trees, and the otherwise vacant snowy fields. Buddy, being his usual self and appearing unharmed, tugged at the rope and yapped at the flock of crows flying overhead.
Soon, the rope came loose from the tree, and Buddy got his wish for freedom. He scampered like a lunatic across the field, chasing the crows straight toward the road. The good news was that the road was far enough away that it would take Buddy a minute or two to get there. The bad news was that Buddy was inexplicably drawn to busy streets, and seemed to think that it was a Chihuahua’s macho duty in life to challenge moving cars to a duel, confident that he would always win. Given that he was roughly the same color as the blacktop, I was always rescuing him from being run over.
“Oh, no,” I said, in a panic.
Before I knew what I was doing, I was up out of my seat, shrugging back into my jacket and backpack, hightailing it toward the door, against every school rule, and with the eyes of a couple dozen newly minted enemies upon me.
“Shane!” cried Kelsey. “Get back here!”
I ignored her, and sprinted out the door, down the steps, and around the building, toward the playing fields. I ran and ran, and soon saw Buddy tripping along happily toward the road.
“Buddy!” I screamed, elated to see him again, but terrified he’d get hit by a car. “Stop! Stop!”
As usual, he turned to acknowledge that he’d heard my voice and command, and then quickly ignored me and kept running.
“No! Bad dog! Stay!”
Buddy stopped, but only to sniff a tumbleweed and pee on it. Then
he was off and trotting again.
“Stop right now!” I shrieked, sprinting faster. The cold air made me cough, but I kept running. When I got to within ten feet of him, Buddy seemed to realize that resistance was futile at last. He curled his body toward me, simpering, and dropped to his back, apologetic.
“Bad dog!” I said again as I reached him.
Buddy wagged his tail and flattened his ears against his head to let me know he meant it.
I scooped him up into my arms, and kissed him. “You bad, stupid, crazy little dog!” I kissed him again. “What is wrong with you?”
Buddy licked my chin, as though “loving Shane” was the correct answer. Perhaps it was.
“Where have you been?”
I was so happy to have him back, I almost couldn’t stand it. I cried and laughed, and snuggled and cuddled him. I was so involved with this emotional reunion that I almost didn’t notice Travis standing between a couple of evergreens at the far end of the field, watching. I was about to run to him, to ask him about Buddy and to thank him, but he shook his head, a somber and apologetic look in his eyes, and held a hand out to stop me.
I stopped, and stared in horror as he mouthed, “I love you,” and waved good-bye.
“No!” I screamed. I started running toward him. Devastatingly, he took a few paces back and away from me, toward a statue on the grounds that had been erected in memory of Coronado Prep’s founder.
A memorial.
Just like that, in a split second of swirling air, he was gone.
“No!” I sobbed, falling to my knees in the snow, sobbing because I knew what that look had meant. He was gone. He would never be back. I’d never smell him, touch him, or see him again. Overhead, high up in a tree, a crow let out a call that sounded very much like laughter.
I stayed hunched there, crying hysterically with Buddy in my lap, for a few minutes, until I heard footsteps coming up behind me. When I looked up, I saw the headmaster of the school barreling down on me, flanked by the school librarian and Kelsey.
“There she is,” Kelsey said, fear in her voice.
“Miss Clark,” said the headmaster. “Is everything all right?”
