“Any markings?” he asked me, his voice deep and husky.
“Markings?”
“Tattoos,” Theowulf offered from beside him.
“No.”
“Any scars?”
“No.”
He looked down his nose at me, gathering his hands behind his back. “Half human.”
“Yes.”
“That was not a question. Speak when you’re spoken to.”
“Sorry.” I bowed my head for a second, remembering then to maintain eye contact. And to only speak when spoken to.
“You’re a fiery one, aren’t you?” he asked me, the same almost-smile appearing that showed on his son’s face earlier.
“I—”
“Put her on the list,” he told his son, cutting me off.
I heard a sudden roar of whispers and judgmental sneers from behind me, making the skin on the back of my neck crawl.
“When will we hear back from you?” the Elder Aerik asked, offering me a reassuring smile from beneath his long gray beard.
“I will inform you of my decision later tonight.” Luther stepped away, and I almost leapt for joy, instead deciding to get a better look at him. In that expensive dark blue suit and his shiny shoes, he didn’t really fit this small town scene. It was as if that private house in the hills never left the century he was born in. And the way he angled his chin when he looked down at a person, any person, it was as if he didn’t have the time for them or maybe expected them to say something stupid that he’d have to correct. Despite that, I thought I might like to be married to him. It certainly wouldn’t be the worst fate. And as that thought filled up my head, I saw Alex running across my cerebral cortex, chasing a runaway bubble. I laughed, deciding suddenly, oddly, strangely, wonderfully, that I was desperate to get home and tell him about today.
***
When I got home, I went straight out the back gate to stand in the swing and look up at Alex’s house, hoping he might see me and come ask me inside. I didn’t feel right just going on up and knocking on his door. After all, we’d only been friends now for one night.
I swung for ages and ages, my feet on the wooden seat, hands curled around the ropes, watching the sun get higher in the sky at first until I heard the distant bell tower announce that it was two in the afternoon. So I swung some more until I heard it say three. Then I saw a dog. She bounded toward me with a big smile on her face and jumped up to throw me off the swing.
I landed hard in the grass, coughing on the wet kisses she plastered all over my face. “Sheesh, Sacha. If you wanted a turn on the swing, you could’ve asked.”
Alex stood above me, laughing. “Looks like I’m not your only new friend.”
“Looks like,” I said, gently pushing her off so I could see him. The sun backed onto his curls, giving them a kind of orange glow and showing all the fine hairs around his jaw. He was in clothes today—plain jeans and a blue T-shirt—and he was wearing a nice deodorant that made me think of my first crush.
“Are you busy now?” he asked.
“No.”
“Want to come meet someone special?”
“Sure.” I hopped up, dusting the grass off my red coat and my knees. “Who?”
“George, of course,” he said, and started walking toward his garden gate.
I followed, taking Sacha’s leash and then releasing her once we were indoors. Alex took it off her and mounted it on a hook, while Sacha darted off to the end of the hall and nosed a door open. The sunlight from that room spilled out into the odd darkness that never seemed to leave this space, as though it had been lost in time, Tiffany lamps and all.
For a moment, as we followed Sacha through the door, the bright sun put a glow into my eyes, so I didn’t clearly see the man at the table in the center. I saw only shelves of books and games, set against walls that had been splashed with a trillion colors, and a TV playing the news in the corner. Then I saw the wheelchair.
“Red,” Alex said proudly, pulling it out from the table and wheeling it around. “This is George.”
George looked like Alex, but slightly older. His hair was darker, like the woman in the pictures in the hall, and his eyes were deeper set, but he was more good looking than Alex. He couldn’t control the muscles in his face or hands all that well, his tongue coming out a bit as he tried to smile, but I knew he was offering me his greeting.
“Hello George.” I shook his twisted, contorted hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”
George’s eyes moved onto Alex and he breathed heavily for a moment, rocking a little.
“He says it’s nice to meet you too, and…” Alex looked at George when he made a few grunts and hums. “Don’t make me say it.”
George’s mouth moved wider and a line of dribble went down his chin. Alex moved quickly to mop it up with the end of his sleeve.
“What else did he say?” I asked.
“He says it’s nice to see me bringing a girl home for once.”
“Oh?” I looked at George then back at Alex. “So you usually bring boys home then?”
I wasn’t sure, but I figured the sound George made then was laughter.
“Funny.” Alex turned George’s chair around and pushed him back into the large white table. “I can see you two will get along just fine.”
As Alex sat down with George, I took a slow stroll around the room, my hands gathered behind my back, eyes admiring all the colorful drawings in frames on the walls and the general bright, happy feel of the space. “Who did these?”
“Both of us—when we were kids.”
“Hm.” I nodded in consideration, moving on to the next picture. The unusual tones of a conversation held mostly by one person filled the room out over the newscast from the TV, and I just listened a little as I explored the space, getting a better sense of this odd boy I met last night. He seemed to have had such a normal childhood, according to the games and toys and pictures all around. What changed since then that made him so different to anyone I’d ever met?
I stopped by a smelly birdcage that housed a pretty green parrot, and peered at a stick figure drawing of a boy above it. His obvious curly hair marked him as Alex, who stood beside a stick figure of a taller boy named ‘Jorge’, also labeled as ‘best brover ever’.
I smiled, pointing to it. “This is you two?”
“Yes. I drew that for George for his birthday.”
“How long ago?”
“Last year,” he said, and I laughed.
The bird squawked then, making me jump involuntarily. “Hello there.” I put my finger to a small gap in the cage and she shuffled along her wooden perch and bent to press the tip of her beak to my nail. “And who is this?”
“That’s Mom.”
“Mom?”
“Yes.” Alex looked up from whatever he was working on with George. “She landed on my dad’s shoulder at the funeral—the only bright color in all the black—and we’ve had her ever since.”
Wow. I wish that had happened at my dad’s funeral. But if it had, I wouldn’t lock the bird up. It would be too special. “Why does he keep her in a cage?”
“So he doesn’t lose her again.”
“That’s sad.” I tapped the cage and walked away. “How did she die?”
“She didn’t,” he said simply. “She turned into a bird.”
I sighed. It was hard knowing the right way to phrase a question with Alex sometimes, and I did wonder if maybe he was half as mad as his father. “Why did she turn into a bird?”
“She was like your dad. A cruel beast came in one night and started feeding off her body. She tried to fight it, but the doctors were on the beast’s side. They gave her medicine that made her weak, and she went to sleep in a long box. Then she came back as a bird.”
I stared at him, wondering if he truly believed that. “How old were you when she became a bird?”
“Ten.” He opened a thick book with no pictures to the place it had been marked, and showed his brother. “Dad told us a
bout the magical land she came from. It helped.”
I nodded, hugging my knees as I sat on a chair on the other side of George. I understood Alex’s story world—why he created it—but I also wondered if he understood that it was just a story.
“Red?” Alex said. When I looked up from my knees he smiled. “I know she’s not really a bird. And I’m sure my father knows that too—deep down inside.”
I smiled back.
“I thought you of all people would understand that,” he added.
“Why me especially?”
“Because of the wolves.”
My forehead moved into a frown of confusion, but he looked away, a little disappointed in me I think. “How do you know it’s not her?” I asked.
“Huh?”
Even George’s eyes moved onto me then.
“You just said you know the bird isn’t her. But how do you know?” I repeated. “Birds don’t randomly go around landing on people’s shoulders at funerals. Maybe it is her—her spirit, at least.”
Alex smiled, his eyes small and his mouth closed. “I have to admit, it was a pretty strange thing.”
“Well…” I glanced back at the green feathered beauty, the way she looked decisively at me, her curious eyes taking everything in. “She is a very strange bird.”
“Everything in this house is strange.”
“Or mad,” I joked.
“Not George,” Alex insisted with a bright face. “He’s brilliant. So brilliant that his human mind couldn’t contain the intelligence and he had to hide inside of himself.” He put the book down, much to George’s disgust. “Look at this.”
I knelt up on the chair, leaning over George a little. Alex brought a piece of paper toward him and picked up a pen, writing down four numbers with plus signs between them, all apparently equaling 555. George didn’t even look at the page, and I started to question Alex’s sanity in both thinking George could do math, and thinking that math added up.
“How do four fives equal five hundred and fifty-five?” I asked. “That equals twenty, at best.”
“Watch,” he said to me, leaning a little closer too. “Georgey. Can you tell me, Georgey, drawing only one line, how this can equal five hundred and fifty-five?”
George didn’t have the coordination to take the pen without a lot of help; his hands were curled over and brought up to his chin, but after Alex extended his arm and put the pen in the curl of his hand, he could make himself lean toward the paper. Using a breathy noise in the back of his throat to give him more power, he scribbled a messy and squiggly line down from the top of the plus sign to the edge of it, making a four right between two fives, and my eyes widened, doing the math: 5 + 5 + 5 + 5 did not equal 555. But 5 + 545 + 5 did!
My brightened eyes landed on Alex. “He’s a genius!”
“You haven’t seen anything yet. You only think that’s good because you saw the George that the rest of the world sees. You didn’t expect anything of him. But he is so much smarter than that one puzzle.”
“You’re smarter than me, George!”
George laughed, his tongue coming out as he did. He rocked back and forth for a moment, and I decided that I liked him. I liked how he moved and smiled as a pure expression of joy, without self-consciousness. There was honesty in it, in his body language and even in his voice, that I hadn’t seen in anyone else before.
“I think we should be friends, George,” I said. “If you’ll have me.”
George reached out with a curled hand, and it took him a bit, but he eventually patted my arm with the back of his wrist.
“Come on.” Alex stood up. “Let’s take Sacha outside and play catch. It’s George’s favorite game.”
“Can he throw a ball?” I asked, taking the handles of his wheelchair.
“No,” Alex whispered just to me, “but we let him think he can.”
I laughed. “It’s okay, George. I can’t really throw a ball either.”
George became distressed about something, making an “Er” sound as he motioned for Alex to come closer.
Leaning down, his ear to George’s face, Alex nodded, as if he could understand the grunting. “Teach?” He stood up again. “You want to teach Red how to throw a ball?”
George nodded his whole body, relaxing back in his chair again after.
“I’d like that,” I said. And I liked George. And Alex. And their world. As we walked down the hall I smiled to myself, but it slipped away quickly when I realized that, if I was chosen as the new female alpha, I wouldn’t ever see George and Alex again. When I thought of Alex, I saw a bright circle of light, like sitting on a rain-soaked road under a midday sun. It was glaring even in the dreary grayness of autumn. But when I thought about Luther and Theowulf and that secretive old mansion, I saw a dark circle of red with black edges. It made me sad. Were I to stay here, I just kind of knew we’d be those friends that talk about everything and hang out every weekend, which would be so awesome—to have a good friend like that—and that made my possible marriage a more looming prospect than an exciting one.
“Something wrong, Red?” Alex asked, taking George’s chair to get it over the doorway and down the steps backward.
“Does George know about wolves?”
“Do you mean werewolves? Like you.”
“Yes. But… well, we hate being called that.”
“Did you, George? Did you know Red is a wolf?” Alex asked playfully. “Since she doesn’t like to be called a werewolf.”
George didn’t answer. He lowered his hand as Sacha came forward and licked it, seeming to comfort him as the chair jostled about down the garden path. I wondered about him—about how he would be if he hadn’t gone inside of himself. Then I wondered how he got inside of himself. I wondered that more than I wanted to tell Alex about Luther, so I asked, “Was he born like this?”
“Who?”
“George, of course,” I said. “Was he born this way?”
“Born brilliant?” Alex said. “Yes.”
I sighed internally. How to phrase a question for Alex? “Was he born… inside of himself?”
“No.” Alex pushed the chair over the bumpy path, the weeds and grasses making it treacherous, until we finally reached the shady green tree where I met Alex last night. He produced a red ball, placing it in George’s hand.
For a while, I thought he would leave it at that—that maybe I should never have asked—but after a few throws, where George dropped the ball to the ground and Alex tossed a second one he had hidden in his pocket for the dog to chase, he took me by the arm and told George we’d be back in a moment.
“Where are we going?”
“Out of earshot,” he said, stopping us by the gate to his yard.
I leaned against it, and Alex did too, hands in pockets, looking sadly at the mushy grass under our feet. Back under the tree, Sacha stood protectively at George’s side.
“What’s wrong?” I probed.
“There’s reality and then there’s the fiction we make for ourselves.”
“And?”
“And I like my fictional world better.” He looked over at his brother. “I’m like you, Red. I make up stories to explain away my pain—his pain.”
“Pain?”
Alex sighed, his long lashes covering his eyes for a moment. “George was in an accident a week before he was set to leave for college.”
My eyes went wider and my cheeks softer as realization spread over them like a shadow over a hot sun: College. Brother. The shirt he was wearing when we first met.
“So he never made it to college?” I said.
“Not in this version of the story. But in here—” he ran a fingertip in a circle around his heart, “—me and George have hundreds of worlds where we live.”
I smiled, exhaling. “Do you have a favorite?”
“I don’t. I like them all. But his favorite is the one where Mom came from—the one with the strange birds.”
“Strange birds?”
“There�
��s one tree in the middle of a lake that might even be a sea, and there, in that world, people do nothing but swim all day. The only creatures that don’t are the strange birds. They’re normal to us, because we know what they are in this world, right? But in that world, no one has ever seen a bird, and so a cawing crow and bright parrot are wondrous creatures that reach heights the people there can only imagine. There’s no school, and so no one needs to be smart or clever. There’s only water and colorful fish, and the strange birds.”
“Can people fly? If they wanted to?”
“I know one can.” He stood from his lean on the gate. “But everyone could if they wanted, I guess, and that’s what’s great about that world. There aren’t any limitations except those we put on ourselves.”
“And George? Can he swim there, or is he in a chair?”
“Not just swim. He’s the one that can fly. If he wants.”
“But out here…”
“Out here…” Alex toed the ground, cutting a line in the grass. “Out here he’s lost everything, and I have to step away from the story world sometimes to care for him in the ways he can’t for himself, and then it hurts.”
“Why does it hurt?”
“Because it’s… awful. And I’m glad it isn’t me. And then I feel bad for thinking that.”
Red: The Untold Story Page 3
