G-157

by K. M. Malloy

  “It’s a really close game.”

  Her skin pulsed as Troy whispered in her ear. The fourth quarter was nearly over, and Aire wished they would play again. “I know. Seventeen to nineteen and it’s down to the wire,” she smiled.

  “Who do you want to win?”

  “I don’t care.” Aire leaned in to meet Troy’s lips, and the world vanished as they did. Nothing existed but the smell of soap on his cheeks and the taste of milkshake on his tongue. His rough hand softened as it reached up to brush her neck. She let out an inaudible groan above the sudden roar of the crowd, and hoped for just a few seconds more in the moment.

  Her seconds were not given. Melissa slapped her leg and laughed. “Did you see that?” she yelled above the cheering. “Berry made a shot from the half court line. His three pointer brought up the score twenty to nineteen. The hockey team won!”

  “That’s awesome,” Aire said, sneaking a glance at Troy. “I wanted them to win.”

  “I didn’t care who won,” Melissa laughed. “I just wanted an awesome game, and that’s what we got.”

  “We sure did,” Troy smiled. “Well, it’s almost nine. We should probably get going so we can make curfew.”

  “Ugh,” Aire groaned. “I think we should start a petition to extend curfew another hour. This whole ‘be in at nine’ thing isn’t working for me.”

  Troy laughed as he helped her up. “Well, aren’t you the little activist lately?” Aire shrugged and smiled back.

  The bleachers jarred under the weight of young bodies rushing down them to make it home on time. There was jostling and amicable shoving as the crowd playfully encouraged the slow movers in front of them to pick up the pace. The quartet made if off the bleachers and came to a stop on the concrete as they waited for the line to move forward through the opening in the chain link fence. Mick Hatfield and his brother Frank were making their last steps off the bleachers when Frank lost his balance and landed in an unbalanced, awkward position on the pavement, his left foot coming down hard onto Gary’s.

  Gary had grabbed the younger boy by the back of the neck and slammed him down onto the court. “Why don’t you watch where you’re going,” he spat as Frank looked up at him with stunned eyes.

  The crowd fell silent and turned to stare in shock at the sight. Jaws dropped as Gary landed a hard kick to the boy’s ribs. His foot began to line up with Frank’s face, a sinister sneer parting his lips as the terrified boy threw his hands up to protect himself. Troy shoved Gary back before his coiled leg could release in a full blown kick to Frank’s face.

  “Gary what’s your problem?”

  “My problem is that punk thinks he can push me around.”

  Troy looked down at Frank curled in the fetal position, holding his ribs and coughing. He turned back to Gary and lowered his voice.

  “Dude, it was an accident. Frank didn’t mean anything by it. Come on, man, this is the Frank whose tree house you helped build two summers ago. Do you really think he’d push you around on purpose?”

  All held their breath as they watched Gary fall silent and become so still not even his chest moved in respiration. Several moments passed before Gary’s entire upper body spasmed, and his blank eyes became enlivened. He looked down at Frank with the shock of realization of what he’d done.

  “Oh man, I am so sorry, Frank,” he said as he reached down to help the boy up. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I’m so sorry.”

  Frank smiled and kept a hand on his throbbing side as Gary took the other to help him up. “It’s okay, man. I know you didn’t mean it. It’s probably just a side effect from your concussion.”

  “Yeah,” Laurie Evans chimed in. “It’s probably from the concussion.” A harmony of agreements erupted from the crowd. They all knew the answer. The reaction was definitely a side effect from the concussion. No one would ever do anything like that on purpose. They were all happy with the answer, and even let out a small applause as Frank and Gary hugged.

  Aire was the only member of the crowd dissatisfied as she watched Doug Stevens give his third twitch of the night.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Saturday April 17, 2010

  Population: 358

  Stress strangled the days of the following week. Aire spent every free moment she had studying for her upcoming test. She’d wake up several times a night in a cold sweat, her chest heaving and her heart pounding from dreams of the African holding a test with a failing grade, warning her to beware the blue lion. She tossed and turned in the darkness, cursing herself for ever thinking she could be prepared in a week’s time for the most important test of her life, cursing the African for haunting her.

  At school she hid from Melissa and Troy during lunch and on her breaks so that she could study. During class she hardly paid attention while the teachers lectured. Instead she spent her class time delving into her weaker subjects, studying grammar rules and working through difficult mathematical equations. Her world was a blur of figures and facts and theories. The only distraction that fogged her mind was the increasing spread of strange behavior in her classmates.

  Gary had two more outbursts that week, once in the cafeteria when the lunch lady gave him orange juice instead of milk and he’d thrown the carton into her face. The other in the library when someone else had checked out a book he’d wanted to write his report on. He’d yelled in outrage at Ms. Stillwell for having given the item away and knocked the return cart over only to immediately apologize and clean up the pile of bound paper.

  Whatever was wrong with Gary was beginning to affect more of the others. Doug Stevens had shoved Cody Peters to the ground when Cody had blocked his shot during a field hockey game. Bowie Sandoval gave a lower classman a fat lip when he pushed him into a locker for walking too slow down the hall. Jessica Sampson hadn’t spoken for almost a week. Remy Mitchell was asked to leave school because she couldn’t stop laughing.

  The oddities of her classmates were the only equation she could not solve in her academic pursuits. A dozen classmates were showing strange behaviors, and at least ten more with severe behavioral changes had been recruited by the military in the last two weeks. Now nearly half the school was showing the same freeze and twitch motion that had begun with Gary. It wouldn’t be long until they too began lashing out at others around them, and Aire grew ever more fearful that whatever was going on would soon elevate to an uncontrollable level of violence. How violent it would become she didn’t want to think about, and why it was happening she could not understand.

  She wanted to talk to someone about it; to feel as though she was not the only one anxious about these events, but there was no one, no one in the sea of faces that she could turn to for any explanation or support. She distracted herself with her upcoming test instead. It was the only thing she had control over. She did her best to clear her mind of these thoughts as she studied the wrath of the Roman emperor Nero and pounded into her brain Galileo’s discovery of Jupiter’s four largest moons in 1610.

  Saturday morning she woke up in choking fear. She’d had the dream of the woods again. Something had happened, but what she could not remember. The African had been there in front of the creek, just as he had been every night since she first dreamt of him. Again what had once been the strange rice grain dissipated into the misty silver smoke swirling out of his hand into the midnight breeze. Again he had warned her of the blue lion, but there had been something else this time. His lips had moved into words she could not hear, his skin too dark to make out the letters forming on his lips from the blackness encumbering him.

  The sky was purple now with the sun just beginning to pull itself out of bed to light the land, and she lay awake in the fading shadows trying to remember what he had said. Soon a small chorus of birds began to chirp in the early morning, threatening to erupt into a full-fledged symphony outside her window.

  “The early bird gets the worm,” she muttered to herself when the sweat on her face had dried and her heart settled ba
ck into its steady rhythm. She forced herself to focus on the task of the day, and tossed the covers aside. She pulled on her slippers and wandered over to her bench seat along the window where she cracked a book open and began to study. It wasn’t until five o’clock that afternoon that she stopped to take a quick break before heading to the library.

  Mrs. Stillwell smiled when she arrived at the John’s Town public library twenty minutes before closing time.

  “Here,” she said as she handed Aire an apple and a block of cheese. “I figured you would have been studying all day and would need a snack.”

  Aire took the food and began to devour the tangy green apple. “Thank you. I forgot to eat today.”

  “I thought so. Take a seat.” She gestured to a table next to her office. “Your test will start at six o’clock sharp. Take this time to relax and focus your mind.”

  Aire nodded and sat down, chopping on her apple. Minutes stretched into hours as she waited for her test. She tapped her fingers on the table as her feet bounced up and down on the floor. She forced herself still and closed her eyes, sucking in several deep breaths to calm herself. She pictured the stars, the beautiful nebulae of the far reaches of the galaxy she’d seen in astronomy books. She was in space, her body weightless and graceful as the breathtaking rainbow of gases tickled her skin. It was calm here, in that reverie of color and silence and freedom, and she began to feel her shoulders relax just as Ms. Stillwell shuffled into the room.

  “The test is broken into four sections. You’ll have sixty minutes for each, no more no less. You can’t move onto the next section until the hour is complete. You’ll have a fifteen minute break between each section. Any questions?”

  Aire shook her head.

  Ms. Stillwell gave her several freshly sharpened pencils and blank pieces of paper. “Good. Are you ready?”

  “Yes.”

  The woman glanced at the clock, waiting until the second hand reached the top to signal six p.m. “You may begin,” she said, and placed the exam booklet in front of her.

  Aire took a deep breath, and opened the booklet.

  Her confidence took a tremendous leap upward as she breezed through the biology and English sections. History gave her some nail biting moments as she couldn’t remember the details surrounding the events of the Magna Carta, and guessed at random that the British were the first to industrialize regions of Africa (or was it the French?). By the end of the math section she wanted to cry as she’d never seen many of the problems and equations before.

  Her eyes were bloodshot and heavy when she’d finished, her mind feeling like a thick fog had rolled in and made her thoughts sticky. Ms. Stillwell yawned and stretched before coming to take the test from her.

  “Alright, time’s up. Please close your booklet.”

  Aire scribbled in her last answer before dropping her pencil and handing her packet to Ms. Stillwell. “When do I get my results?”

  “In two weeks. Not next Friday, but the Friday after you’ll see Mayor Jenkins in his office at three thirty.”

  “Two whole weeks?”

  Ms. Stillwell brushed a loose black strand of black hair from Aire’s cheek. “I have faith that you did excellent. You’ve studied so hard for this and you deserve a break. Besides,” she said, nudging her arm. “I know Troy has been missing you. Go home and get some rest.” The two turned the library office lights off and went out the front door.

  “Goodnight, Ms. Stillwell,” Aire said as she walked with the woman down the cracked stone steps. “Thank you so much for taking the time out to do this for me. I really do appreciate it. If you need anything, anything at all, you let me know first. I owe you big time for this.”

  “My pleasure, dear, my pleasure,” the woman smiled. “Actually, there is one thing you can do for me.”

  “Anything.”

  “Be fifteen. Have fun with your friends. Spend time with Troy. Go fishing with your brother. I want that more than anything.”

  Aire threw her arms around Ms. Stillwell’s tiny frame and hugged her close. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Have a good night, Aire.”

  “You too.”

  The two parted ways as Aire headed east on Main while Ms. Stillwell headed west.

  She’d never been out of the house so late before, and was surprised at how quiet John’s Town was when all the bustle of the day had calmed. No street lights were lit, and instead the rows of shops and small business buildings were illuminated in the gray light of the moon. The trees almost seemed to sparkle in the dancing light of the stars. The normally harsh blacktop street now seemed to glow in the dim light, making it appear as a straight, rippling river separating the buildings. The cracked sidewalks were cast in hazy luminescence, creating the illusion that she was walking on a cloud.

  Main Street meandered in a lazy curve and soon gave way to Buffalo Trail. Here it grew even darker as the trees thickened and the lamp lights became sparse torches in the darkness. In the distance she could hear the faint traces of the nocturnal creatures going about their evening business of grocery shopping through the vegetation for seeds and berries, and for the ones with fangs and claws, for mice and rabbits. To her it seemed this was the perfect time to be out and about. The quiet tranquility was just what she needed to clear her mind, and she decided to make it a point to sneak out and roam the empty streets at night to discover what the darkness had to offer. After all, Ms. Stillwell had told her to be fifteen, and breaking the rules seemed like something that fifteen year olds should do. She smiled at the wondrous thought of sneaking away into the night with Troy. It would be their delicious secret, a memory they would make together that would be theirs and theirs alone.

  She paused for a moment after passing a patch of blackberry bushes, the smile vanishing from her lips. A cold feeling washed over her when she felt eyes on her, watching her every move. She looked around, but there was nothing in the darkness, no boogie man waiting in the bushes or atop the trees and roofs. The African’s warning echoed in her mind as she studied her surroundings; beware the blue lion.

  A dog barked in the distance, answered by a chorus of howls from the surrounding neighborhood hounds. A squirrel scuttled along the grass and into some hedges. A fat green spider had descended from a tree branch and hung several inches from her face. She smacked it away and continued her walk home. She wrapped her arms tighter around her chest and her pace quickened, the sound of her own footsteps eerie in the dead neighborhood as she walked, unaware that Troy was watching her from the same bushed in which the Tillman twins had lurked.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Sunday April 18, 2010

  Population: 355

  Something was missing when Aire awoke the next morning. The sun still lit her room aglow in goldish yellow light through her white cheesecloth curtains. Birds sang in the oak outside her window. The traces of yells and laughter from a pickup football game drifted into her ears. It wasn’t until she pulled on her silk green robe and fuzzy slippers that she realized what it was; the house was missing the smell of pancakes. For as long as she could remember her mother made blueberry pancakes every Sunday morning. The absence of their aroma caused a sick feeling in her. What if the Army had taken her? A cold chill prickled her skin at the thought. She pulled her thick black hair into a pony and went downstairs, hoping with each step down the staircase that something trivial had happened and she’d find her mother whisking batter in the big blue bowl by the sink. Maybe she forgot to set her alarm and just woke up late. Maybe she just felt like sleeping in. The alarm? Maybe. Sleeping in? Not a chance with her early rising mother. She took a deep breath, and turned the corner into the kitchen.

  She felt bile begin to rise in her throat as she looked upon Mitch eating cereal and her father sipping coffee behind his newspaper.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “Sleeping.” Mitch slurped at his cereal, a red plastic watch from the cereal box snapped around his wrist.

  “Is she sick?”


  “Your mother is just tired, Aire,” her father said, still holding the paper in front of his face. “She just wanted a little extra rest today.”

  “Mom doesn’t get tired. She’s in here like clockwork at seven every morning even if she’s sick.”

  “You slept in today,” Mitch said as he raised his bowl to his lips to drink the remaining milk.

  “Yeah, but I was up late taking my SATs.”

  Her father’s hands clenched the paper tighter at the mention of the test. Her own fists clenched at the sight of his white knuckles slowly ripping a tear down the front page of the Gazette.

  “How did you do?” Mitch asked.

  “I think I did pretty good as a matter of fact.”

  “I think it’s all silly nonsense.” Her father’s voice was low, his fingers tearing the page even more.

  “Can’t you just support me? You’re my father and as far as I know fathers are supposed to be proud of their children and desire them to do well. And it’s pretty embarrassing when the mayor has to come to your house and tell your parents that their daughter deserves a chance to better her life.”