by Diane Farr
We were almost out of the meadow when I thought of something. “Hey. If you don’t know anything about my birth, how come you know when my birthday is?”
We had reached the drainage ditch that runs between the field and the road. Lance, with his gazelle-like grace, was up onto the blacktop in two leaping strides. He turned to give me a hand so I could follow. To my surprise, he was grinning. “I keep forgetting how ignorant you are,” he said. He hauled me up onto the road. “Your birthday is the same as mine.”
“You’re kidding,” I said—although I knew he wasn’t.
“Every spellspinner is born on July 7,” he said. “Seventh day of the seventh month. After seven months in the womb. Sevens are very big with us.”
I thought back over a few things he had told me. “Forty-nine spellspinners,” I said slowly. “Seven times seven. “
”Uh-huh.”
Weird.
We headed, by unspoken consent, up the road toward the Chapmans’ farm. As if that’s a destination. The thing is, it was the opposite direction of Norland’s Nursery. Neither of us felt like walking into Nonny’s orbit.
Just the motion of walking helped me get a grip (as Lance would say). And while we walked, Lance talked. And when we got to the Chapman farm, we found another bit of what he calls ‘natural’ water—another part of the same creek that runs through our property—and he taught me the safest way to skatch to a public place ... which is to visit it through watersight first and find an empty spot.
Watersight is a wicked useful tool. Dangerous, because you are two places at once, but useful.
We found a still pool of water near an isolated bend of the creek (and believe me, that wasn’t easy), and hunkered down. “I picked the last place,” said Lance. “Your turn.”
“Really? Wow.” I thought for a minute. It was embarrassing to realize how few places I’ve been. “Wherever I take us, it won’t be as cool as Spellhaven.”
“Never mind. Let’s stick to Cherry Glen. It’s the only place we’ve both been. Remember, I have to be able to skatch with you after we check it out.”
“Unless I ditch you.”
Something unpleasant flickered in the back of his eyes. “You won’t do that.”
“Hey, I was kidding.” Sort of. I quickly changed the subject. “So where have we both been? Shall we go to the mall again?”
“Too crowded. What about the library?”
The Cherry Glen library is small, but cool. Historic. It’s the pride of our town square, but it didn’t seem like Lance’s kind of place. “You’ve been there?”
That phantom grin of his flashed at me. “There’s a lot about me you don’t know.”
That’s for sure. So anyway, we leaned into each other, stared at the water, and I took him to the library. Like skatching, it was easy. Nothing to it. Makes me wonder why Meg and I never stumbled across this stuff in all our experiments.
But I don’t want to think about Meg. It makes me feel sad. And, let’s face it, guilty.
We materialized ... if you can call it that ... in the fiction section. I was standing in the narrow aisle between the tall racks of books, but since Lance was beside me, he first appeared in the bookrack next to me. He stepped out like a ghost walking through a wall. I stared at him.
“We can do that?” I whispered, amazed. “Walk through solid objects?”
“You don’t have to whisper,” he said. “The sticks can’t hear us. Your voice is back at the Chapman place.”
“Oh.”
“And yeah, when you’re using watersight you have no substance. Or very little. Here, try it.” He grabbed my hand and forced it in among the books. I could feel neither Lance’s hand nor the books.
“Wow.” I entertained myself for a few seconds, swishing my arm through the books. It was wicked cool to see my arm—or at least the outline of my arm—disappearing and reappearing. After a couple of passes, though, it seemed to me that I could feel the books after all. Not as books, but as a sort of hot, prickly sensation.
Lance picked up my thought. “Right,” he said. “This is why you can’t just hang out inside a wall or something. Eventually it gets uncomfortable.”
“Bummer. That means you can spy on sticks, but not on other spellspinners.” I can’t believe I’ve started thinking of people as sticks. Lance is a terrible influence on me. “I mean, spellspinners can see each other, right? Like I can see you? So if we can’t use watersight to hide in solid objects, we’re busted.”
“Such a fast learner,” he murmured. And get this: he reached out and ran his hand over my head and down my hair, following it all the way down my back. Neither of us felt a thing, but it still struck me as ... inappropriate. I guess that’s the word I’m looking for. (Since I wouldn’t want to come right out and say it was sexy.)
Just then, a fat woman in a sundress came around the corner and walked right through us. I gasped and grabbed at Lance; I couldn’t help it. But if I were seeking comfort, there was none to be had in touching Lance. I couldn’t feel him any more than I could feel the lady. Less, in fact. I experienced the woman’s passing through me as a blast of heat. Lance, I couldn’t feel at all.
“Agh,” I said, when I could speak again. “I don’t like this.”
Lance was laughing at me. “You’ll get used to it.”
I stared at the woman. She had stopped a couple of yards past us, and was scanning the shelves, muttering to herself. It was obvious she had no clue we were there. It was totally creepy.
“Hello,” I shouted. She never batted an eye.
“Come on,” said Lance. “We’re wasting time.”
But I couldn’t take my eyes off the fat lady. “She walked right through us. Didn’t she feel anything?” It seemed impossible.
“Sometimes the sticks can sense our presence. But not often. Did she feel like heat to you? We might have felt like cold, to her. If she felt us at all, she probably thought we were the air conditioning.”
So I’d been reduced to a blast of cold air. The whole concept is unsettling, IMHO. Maybe it’s just me, but when I go somewhere, I like to have my body along. To keep me company.
Anyhow, we found a completely deserted place in the periodicals section. And we didn’t even have to go back and fetch our bodies. We just skatched, right then and there. It was tricky, but I got it on the second try. We were there as holograms, or whatever the heck we were ... and then one, two, three ... we just skatched the rest of us to join our holographic selves.
Okay, okay, I suppose we weren’t really holograms. But that’s how it felt to me.
The oddest thing was the physical transition. Using watersight, we were standing up and walking around. Or floating around. Or something. But our bodies, back on the Chapman property, were hunkered down, staring into a puddle. So when we skatched, our bodies arrived hunkered down. It wasn’t the most graceful arrival. In fact, I sort of fell over and landed on my face.
I was so glad to be all in one piece again, I didn’t even care.
Oh, and I learned another thing about skatching. (I learned so much today that I hope I’m remembering this right.) You can skatch to a place you’ve sort of been. Honolulu is still not on my list of possibilities, unfortunately, but that’s because I haven’t been anywhere close enough to have seen it with my own eyes.
This is way complicated, and I want to write it down to make sure I remember it.
Okay.
You don’t have to skatch to the exact physical coordinates where you have, at one time, stood. “Close enough” is close enough, IF you skatch with someone who has been there, AND it’s a place you’ve seen. With your own eyes, not a picture of it or something. So these are the conditions: (a) one of you has been in the exact spot, and (b) the other one has been close enough to at least see it, and (c) the two of you are touching when you skatch. Example: Lance had been to the mall but not necessarily to the hallway with the fountain. But I held his hand and took him there, because I had been there and he had been
close enough—he had seen the hall. Plus he hadn’t been to the periodicals section of the library, but I had. And I could grab his hand and take him there because he had walked around inside the library, so he had seen it.
I’m filing all this away for future reference.
First things first. We were hungry. And after the morning I’d had, I needed a break. So Lance treated me to lunch, just like he said he would. And he took me to the nicest restaurant in town. Of course, Cherry Glen isn’t San Francisco. There’s only Foster’s Freeze and Mellon’s. But he took me to Mellon’s.
We had a table in the window and I must say, it was a very pleasant experience. Surreal, but pleasant. It was the only place we went today where we looked dressed for the occasion.
Mellon’s is the kind of place where Lance really shines. Most of the boys I’ve met wouldn’t have a clue. Lance knows when to pull your chair out and which fork to use and how to order in French.
Why is that sexy?? I couldn’t tell you. But it is.
For a while, there, it felt like a date.
I am not cool with that. And yet ... I have to admit, I enjoyed it.
I swear, I am so mixed up.
Lance not only paid for lunch, he left a big tip. I didn’t ask him where he got the money. I was afraid I wouldn’t like the answer.
We spent the hot part of the day in the cool of the library. They have these long, wooden tables in the non-fiction section where people can study the big reference books that they don’t let you check out. The books aren’t in demand these days, because everybody does research on the internet. So we were pretty much by ourselves. We perched on chairs and leaned over the tables and kept our voices low, and people left us alone.
I never learned so much in one afternoon before. Not even at the library.
I didn’t take notes, but I guess what I’m writing now is my notes. Such as they are.
Lance says that the reason why spellspinners don’t have a written history is that we’ve always been leery about writing stuff down. You know what? I’m not going to worry about it. Getting in trouble with the Council for keeping a diary is the least of my problems. My very existence, apparently, is trouble enough. Again, according to Lance.
I wish I knew how far to trust him.
The Council, apparently, is always comprised of the seven oldest spellspinners. As if just being old conferred some kind of wisdom or something. From what I’m picking up, Lance has way too much respect for the Council. It’s almost like he’s afraid of them.
I told him I was just going to lie low, and wait for the next group of seven to take over. He got all exasperated with me, but this Council sounds like a bunch of crusty old busybodies. How is it my fault that I exist?! And honestly, what do they care if a spellspinner writes stuff down?
Not that I told Lance I keep a diary. I hid that particular tidbit from him, so there.
There’s a lot of stuff he shares readily, like he really is here to teach me. But there’s stuff he hides from me, too. And I have the impression that the stuff he’s not telling me is important stuff. Too bad I don’t know what it is. I just know he’s hiding it, and it’s important.
He’ll drop these annoying little hints, then clam up. Or I’ll catch glimpses of things in the back of his mind, pictures that disappear before I can get them into focus. I’ll pick up fleeting thoughts he’s having, but he blocks me before I can make sense of them.
And, oh yeah, there’s the anger thing. I mean, I know why I get pissed at him. He wants to control me. And he’s here to change my life which, thank you very much, was humming along just fine until he got here. And he’s using my best friend to manipulate me!! So I have all sorts of excellent reasons to be good and mad at him. But what’s the deal with his anger??
I guess I can see that if you take a whole summer off from whatever it is you normally do, just to do a favor for a complete stranger—a totally huge favor, like introduce them to their destiny—it might tick you off if they were ungrateful. Resistant, even.
Okay, whiny. I’ll even give him that much: whiny.
But the anger that I sense in him is way deep, much stronger and scarier than can be justified. Seriously. It’s totally out of proportion.
There’s something going on with him that I don’t know about.
There are a lot of things going on with him that I don’t know about.
Bottom line, I’m left with this Bad Feeling about him. I’m sure he hoped that by the end of today, I’d be ready to follow him anywhere. Yeah, right. That is so not happening.
Especially since he got me into major trouble with Nonny.
To be fair, it wasn’t really his fault. It was actually my fault. But it was because of him, so that gives me one more reason to not trust him. Basically, my brain went into overload, spending too many hours with Lance. I mean, come on. Watersight and skatching and touring Spellhaven and lunch at Mellon’s and hours of studying and tons of emotions, not all of them pleasant—plus the constant tug-of-war between Lance’s mind and my own, each of us battling to keep the other one out while gleaning as much information as we can for ourselves—it’s downright exhausting. Some little detail was bound to slip through the cracks.
The little detail turned out to be Nonny.
I was so engrossed in my spellspinner lessons that I failed to watch the time. What I finally noticed was that my brain was fried to the point where I couldn’t take in any more information. And, come to think of it, ‘fried’ sounded good. Because I was hungry again.
Oops.
I sat up straight on my chair with a kind of gasp. “What time is it?”
Lance glanced at the wall. (In other words, I had no excuse. There was a clock practically right in front of me.) “Almost six.”
“Holy cow. I gotta go home.” And then, of course, I remembered that I had my phone with me. And that I had promised Nonny I was going to check in with her. And, uh, I hadn’t.
Double oops.
I dragged it out of my pocket, hitting the speed dial as I sprinted for the door. Lance was right on my heels. I shoved through the heavy glass doors to the library and outside, where the signal should have been strong. But my phone was dead as a rock.
And then I remembered that it wasn’t even turned on. That it had been off, in fact, all day. Because I hadn’t wanted to hear from Meg—which is sad in and of itself. But I’m so used to my phone being on all the time, I hadn’t even thought about it.
I said a bad word and punched the power button. When I saw all the missed calls lining up on my little screen, I didn’t even bother to check the voicemail. Too late for that. I phoned home.
Nonny picked up on the second ring. “There you are.” Her voice hit just the right note between relief and fury.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m really sorry, Nonny—”
“Where are you?” The relief, unfortunately, was gone. Leaving the furious part.
“I’m at the library.”
“The library?? How on earth did you get all the way downtown?”
Ouch. I hadn’t thought of that. “Um,” I said. My eyes hunted wildly for Lance, and found him leaning against the nearest column. The library has a stone portico lined with columns. He was watching me with his arms folded across his chest. And he was amused. The creep. He could hear Nonny, of course. She wasn’t exactly whispering.
“Zara. Answer me. Are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine. Honest. I just lost track of time, that’s all. And I didn’t realize my phone was turned off. I’m sorry. I’ll be home in three minutes, I swear.”
“Three minutes? I thought you said you were at the library?”
“Uh—yeah, I did.” Across the portico from me, Lance was starting to laugh. I gritted my teeth. “Listen, you’re starting to break up.” Lie. “I’ll be home any minute now, okay? I’m, uh, almost there.” Lie. “And I’m really sorry, Nonny.”
I snapped my phone shut and punched Lance’s arm. “Don’t you dare laugh at me. Ju
st because your family doesn’t give a rat’s ass. Mine does. That’s normal.”
“Normal for sticks.” His lip curled with contempt. “All the things stick families worry about with a teenage girl? They’re never going to happen to you. You should do your Nonny a favor, Zara, and tell her.”
“I’d rather she worry than know the truth. In fact, she’d rather worry than know the truth. Now get me home.”
He arched an eyebrow at me. “How?”
“What do you mean, ‘how’? Are you testing me? Okay, fine. I’ll skatch by myself.”
“Wait a second. You’re too impulsive.” He straightened up and looked around. There were people on the sidewalk. Cars drove past. A couple of kids came out of the library. I heard him in my mind: The public library is too public.
“Okay,” I muttered. “But let’s go. I promised Nonny.”
“Think it through, that’s all I’m saying. You rush things. It’s not safe.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and sauntered down the shallow steps that lead from the library portico to the walkway, with me tagging along like a baby duck. We went around the corner of the building and, I kid you not, he led me to the dumpsters.
The dumpsters! This, from the classy guy who ordered my lunch in French.
It was a good idea, though, because the library had built this tidy little wall around the dumpsters to hide their ugliness from the street. We nipped behind the wall and presto, we had privacy.
“Now, think,” said Lance. “We can’t scout it out with watersight before we skatch, because we don’t have a creek handy. So we’ll have to take our chances. Where can we go?”
He was thinking of my house. I was surprised, to tell you the truth, how nice it looked in Lance’s mind. I guess it is a pretty cool house. I’m fond of it myself.
Anyway, I concentrated, mentally ticking off the places where Lance had already been, trying to come up with someplace safe. Someplace we could just pop like a couple of Jack-in-the-boxes without being seen. The porch? Too visible. Kitchen? Heck no. Back stoop? I don’t think so.
