by J. L. Powers
Sarah’s sitting next to me, so close I can smell a faint fragrance of strawberry-scented soap and mint gum. I always try to position myself so that it seems natural when I sit next to her. Jeremy and Carlos stand beside us, holding onto straps for balance.
Their shadows swim beside them, closely attached, almost a second skin—the way shadows usually cling to the young and the healthy. Jeremy’s shadow is bunchy and colorful, a big bunch of balloons. Carlos’s is always active, darting here and there, like he’s playing soccer and dribbling a ball past defenders.
I watch Sarah’s face go green, then white, then yellow in the flashing lights. Today, her shadow is a brook of clear, cold water, running zigzag down a mountainside, pooling among rocks, singing to the forest. She looks up at Carlos as he recounts some triumph on the soccer field, laughing at the punch line, her face free and open with light.
I love looking at her.
I start to feel homesick, nostalgic even, for my friends. I’m both enjoying them and missing them at the same time. Jeremy and Sarah start laughing about the haunted house they rode together the last time we went to Coney Island, just before school started. It hits me that I won’t be with them again until Thanksgiving or maybe even Christmas, and whatever I might or might not say to Sarah about how I feel won’t matter. She’ll probably get together with Jeremy. The thought makes me queasy but it’s not like I’ll be here to stop it. They’ll be taking the same classes, studying together, hanging out on weekends.
I can’t help imagining them kissing behind the school and then, bam, Sarah’s in a wedding dress and Jeremy’s in a black tuxedo. I’m standing next to them, the best man, trying not to cry. They head off on a honeymoon, fifteen years old, driving away in Jeremy’s mother’s SUV, his blond head barely visible above the giant steering wheel, cans clanging behind them. I wave and cry and cry and then I’m forty-five and unmarried and thinking about the fact that all this happened because my stupid father made me go to boarding school.
Deep down, of course, I know it’s my own fault if Sarah ends up with Jeremy—or anybody else.
The train takes a right turn. Sarah’s hip touches my leg and rainbows flutter over my head. A burst of sunlight streams through her hair and little angels start singing arias while I fiddle with my shoelaces.
We clatter and rock in the tunnel. Carlos shouts over the rumble: “So when are you coming back to school, Adam?”
I squirm. Time for the big reveal. “I’m not. My stupid dad told me I have to go to some special school or something.”
“Does that mean you were expelled?” Carlos asks.
“We never went to talk to the principal. My dad just decided to send me somewhere else.” The great thing—possibly the only great thing—about those little incidents at school is that they make explaining the switch in schools easy.
“So what does ‘special school’ mean?” Jeremy starts to laugh. “Is it special or ‘special’?”
“But you can hang out with us on the weekends, right?” Sarah actually sounds hopeful. My heart lifts for just a second before it crashes. Little bits of it scatter like broken glass throughout the car.
The words catch in my throat: “It’s a boarding school.”
“You’re moving away?” Now she sounds dismayed. “When are you leaving?”
I shrug and try not to sound too miserable. “Tomorrow.”
In the silence, the train couplings creak loudly.
“And you were going to tell us when exactly?” Jeremy’s voice is loud with accusation.
Now I’m a bug pinned to the wall. “I’m sorry. It happened so suddenly. I’ve been trying to talk my dad out of this but he won’t budge.”
“At least we’ll see you on vacations,” Sarah says finally.
Yeah, I can catch up with them at Christmas, but everything will be different. I won’t know the inside jokes. They won’t know any of the friends I make at school or the things I experience there.
Maybe I should run away. I picture myself with a long beard and dirty clothes, a large backpack slung over my shoulder as I hold a tattered cardboard sign that reads, ANYWHERE BUT HERE, right thumb up as cars whiz by on the freeway. It almost sounds romantic until I think about walking for miles and miles, sleeping under a highway bridge in the cold, the smell of pee and the thump of car wheels keeping me awake.
I guess I’ll pass. I mean, I can’t even grow a man beard yet.
* * *
We have a great time at the beach and then everybody goes on carnival rides. Everybody but me. Yeah, okay, maybe I’m lame, but I’m terrified of scary rides. Talk crap all you want but I have my reasons. Good reasons.
I rode a roller coaster last year for the first time. I’d always avoided them before. As soon as we crested the top curve and started hurtling toward the ground, I saw Her. Waiting at the bottom. Empty eye sockets. No mouth. One claw reaching out for me. A split second more, She would have gotten me. But we started going up and She disappeared—only to reappear at the next plunge. In the cars in front of me, people’s shadows lifted like hair in the wind as the cars plunged in rapid descent and I could sense She was calling them too, only they were oblivious.
It’s so easy to die and people don’t seem to realize that. They don’t seem to care. It’s like they live their life ignoring the fact that they’re going to die. I just don’t understand how anybody, anybody in their right mind, can ignore this fact.
At least the Tilt-A-Whirl doesn’t involve falling, so Sarah and I ride it together—the endorphins making us all laughy and buddy-buddy. At one point, she actually puts her hand on my thigh as the ride whips us around. I practically have a heart attack.
“Sorry,” she says when the ride is over. “It’s silly, I know, but I get scared.”
I want to say something cool, something that will cement our friendship, take it in a different direction. But the only thing that falls out of my mouth is a frog-like croak.
She glances at me.
“Let’s go find the others,” I say, and then want to shoot myself in the head. Here’s my chance to be alone with her before I leave and I suggest . . . the opposite?
“Okay,” she says.
But when we turn around, a creepy guy dressed in a cape with stars and moons embroidered all over it and a hood shadowing his face is standing so close, we bump into him.
“May I reveal your fortunes, oh dreamers and sleepers?” he asks.
I don’t trust people until I can see their shadow. His is missing or hiding. “I don’t think so,” I reply.
“Are you certain? It’s free, absolutely free.”
“No thanks,” I mutter. My mouth’s dry. I don’t know why. I get a bad feeling. Get out now.
But just at that moment, Sarah takes my hand. She smiles at me and squeezes gently. “Let’s do it,” she says.
Sarah is holding my hand.
I look down at her brown fingers, laced with mine. “Okay,” I say.
“We’ll do it,” she says to the man in the hood.
“Oh, delightful, delightful!” he cries, oddly excited. “Nothing is going to give me greater pleasure today! Nothing!” He turns around and skips down the boardwalk. “Follow me, children! My crystal ball is over this way!”
“Maybe we’ll find out our true loves.” Sarah giggles, I’d like to think nervously.
“Maybe.” I try to sound nonchalant but my voice squeaks a little.
“Have you ever done this before?”
“Never,” I say, hands breaking out in a sweat. Am I lying? Does that encounter with the psychic count as getting my fortune told?
We follow the fortune-teller through the park to an old hippie VW van half-shrouded in a thick purple tent. He disappears inside, gesturing for us to follow. Sarah pulls the cloth back and allows me to go first. As soon as I enter, I start to back up, but she’s right behind me. We bump into each other and she pushes me forward, laughing. “Don’t chicken out now.”
The fortune-teller whips a
towel off a crystal ball with a flourish. Rubs his hands together. “Ah,” he says. “Ahhhhhhh.” He looks up at us. “Ahhhhhhh.”
I don’t even realize how much I’m fidgeting until Sarah squeezes my hand again.
“I don’t normally do this,” he says, a strange relish in his voice, a rising excitement. “I want you both to look into my crystal ball. When you are looking deep inside, at the mists and then at the clouds beyond and then the deep blue sky, let everything you’ve ever known in this life fall away.”
Nobody ever said fortune-tellers were normal. We both stare at the crystal ball. He’s right: deep within its swirling mists are clouds and a blue sky. I stare at it so intently that I begin to feel a little dizzy, a little sleepy. I jerk myself awake. But not for long. I feel myself swaying on my feet, a warm feeling flooding my body, Sarah’s hand entwined with mine. And I start to let go.
I find it absurdly easy to let go of the things in life. I tick them off one by one and then let them swirl away into the mists of the crystal ball. After all, there’s not much. My dad. My grandpa. My three friends. That’s it.
“Nice work, young man, you’re taking us there,” the fortune-teller murmurs.
I have enough left in me to wonder where “there” is, his voice floating toward me, the words resting gently on billowing clouds.
“Limbo is a dangerous place. What’s drawing you to it?”
I can’t look up from the crystal ball but his words register somewhere. “What?” Then the next thing I know, I’m staring at the cemetery, in horror. Rain drips off a tree and plasters my hair until it’s soaking wet. My shoes slurp juicily through mud.
I look instinctively for my dad, hoping he’s already here. But it’s the fortune-teller standing beside me, his hood off, and I recognize him now: the bookseller I thought Dad was going to kill to get a plagiarized copy of The Book of Light.
“You.” I back up. My feet slip in mud.
“Ha! Yes.” He’s dripping with both glee and sweat, drops rolling down his forehead, dark wet stains under his arms.
“You don’t want to be here with me.” I’m trying not to panic, looking to the left, to the right. Where is She?
He grins again. “I can’t believe it! You did it! You did it! You know how to get to Limbo and bring along somebody who’s still alive. Do you know what this means? You know how to get to Limbo. There are people who deal in these types of realities and they would kill to find you.”
“I’m serious.” My voice soars and cracks. “Get out of here before you get killed!”
He grabs my elbow. “I’m not going anywhere without you.”
A sudden wind shakes huge drops of water from the trees. They plop onto the muddy ground, soaking the tips of our shoes and splattering our shirts. The sky darkens, a cloud of black smoke curling out of the rusty metal bars covering the opening to a mausoleum.
“Shit!” I yell, and yank my arm out of the bookseller’s grasp. “Run!”
Too late. She’s here, stepping out of the black cloud of smoke, arms held out to embrace me. The bookseller screams as She reaches out a long finger and touches his shoulder. In one swift movement, She grabs the two of us and envelops us
and now we’re falling
and falling
the endless dark . . .
Her lips pull back, revealing the dark hole of Her mouth, the bookseller’s screams echoing in the long tunnel of my endless nightmare
Where is the light? Where’s my dad?
Dad, where are you?
Sarah? The thought momentarily jerks me out of my fear.
“Where’s Sarah?” I yell into the cold and dark.
The bookseller keeps screaming as though he’s lost all words.
The world freezes momentarily. I have to get out of here and not for my own sake, for Sarah’s, because I have to make sure she’s okay.
I yank the bookseller with me. My conscience won’t let me leave him here either.
Every other time, I’ve fallen endlessly until my dad comes to rescue me and then I wake up in my bed, or wherever I fell asleep, alone. This time I was wide awake when I came here. What does that mean?
I stumble. Reach for Sarah in my head. One thought. One name. Sarah.
Where are you, Sarah? Where are you, beautiful girl?
We hit the beach so hard, our legs stagger across the sand and plow through a pile of litter. Flat snow-cone cups, lollipop wrappers, and empty popcorn boxes fly toward the sky as we fall flat on our faces.
The bookseller’s face is gray. His mouth pops open as if he wants to say something but the only thing that comes out of his mouth are these gasping noises. “What the hell was that?” he finally wheezes.
I scramble to my feet and shake my finger at him. “You leave me alone. Or else.”
He turns over so he’s reclining on his elbows. He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes. Then his body begins to shake. Laughter starts in his nose and catches in his throat. “You don’t even know your own power.” His laugh crescendos, a wave breaking over the beach, and now I see his shadow, a ferret, digging with its front paws to create a dark hole in the ground so he can hide.
I kick sand in his face, hoping he’ll swallow some of it and choke, before turning and running toward his van, toward Sarah.
“You can’t save her,” he calls after me. “It’s already too late.”
I turn back to yell something but he’s on his knees, puking his guts out.
She’s inside the tent, lying on the asphalt, asleep or in a trance. She’s shivering and her lips are blue, like she’s been starved of oxygen.
I reach out and shake her gently. Caress her hair. Hold her face in my hands. “Sarah. Oh my god, Sarah!” I begin to rub her cold arms aggressively and shout, “Sarah! Wake up!”
When she doesn’t respond, I plug her nose and begin to blow air into her mouth. “Sarah! Wake up!” Breathe. One, two, three. Breathe. Boy, this is a shitty way to get your first kiss . . . not that this counts as a kiss or anything. One, two, three. Breathe.
She shudders, shivers, a bird, feathers ruffled in the wind. Opens her eyes. “What—? What’s going on? Adam?”
I jerk a hand across my face to wipe the tears away, grab her hand, and pull her out of the tent. “We have to get out of here!”
She follows me without question but as soon as we’re in the parking lot, she turns back, like Lot’s wife, the one who was turned to salt when she looked back at Sodom and Gomorrah. I’m afraid she’ll melt or freeze or something terrible. And then I’m the one practically turning to salt when I see the look of longing on her face.
“Why’d you take me away from that place?” Her shadow’s a lonely, lonely wind whistling through the treetops on a moonlit night.
Oh, Sarah. Oh, beautiful girl.
“When he put us in that trance . . . I saw my sister. She was . . . I don’t know, she looked different. But Adam, it was my sister. I mean, she had blond hair, not brown, and she was a lot taller, but it doesn’t matter—it was her. She was laughing. Playing the piano. She didn’t play the piano, we don’t even have a piano, but somehow—impossibly—she was playing the piano. Adam, do you know what that means?”
I don’t know what to say.
“It means . . . it means maybe she’s still alive, somewhere. Not on earth but somewhere else. She’s learning to play the piano. She’s . . . she’s not gone. At least, not forever, not the way I thought—”
“Sarah,” I interrupt.
“I just had this feeling that she’s not really dead. She’s just living in a new body. I wish you hadn’t taken me away from her, Adam.” She sounds frustrated. “I wish I’d had more time with her.”
“Sarah.” I take a deep breath. Don’t hate me, Sarah. Please don’t hate me. I open my mouth to tell her that whatever she saw, it probably wasn’t real. Or even if it was real, it probably wasn’t what it seems. It wasn’t good. Whatever that bookseller/fortune-teller is . . . is rotten. And wherever she went when we f
ell into that trance is a trap. She wasn’t even breathing when I found her. What if I’d come a minute later?
“What is it, Adam?” Trust and hope pooling in her eyes.
It breaks my heart to see how much she wants this to be true, whatever it is. And if it is true, what does that say about the place I go to when I dream?
Hell. I already know it’s real. I just don’t want it to be. Maybe her place is as real as mine. If so, she’s lucky. At least hers is happy.
“I’m glad what you saw made you happy,” I say, closing my mouth.
* * *
We track down the others. “Dude, how’d you get so dirty?” Jeremy glances from my mud-splattered shirt and shoes, then up at the bright sunny skies.
“Long story.” I don’t offer any more and they don’t ask. But Sarah prattles on and on all the way home. She even tells Carlos and Jeremy what she saw in the fortune-teller’s ball—she seems to think it was just a vision, not that she actually went somewhere, or almost died doing it—and they seem to be happy for her, happy in a way I can’t be. Me? I feel sick inside. Something’s really off, I just don’t know what. Still, I should have told her. I should have.
CHAPTER 9
When I get home, Dad tells me to go pack. He doesn’t say what to pack. Actually, that’s not completely true. He hands me The Book of Light, its cover with the horrible eye-like-a-sun symbol hidden under a brown paper bag book cover. “Pack this.”
I get a shivery, gross feeling as soon as the book touches my hand. Nevertheless, I flip it open. The inside cover page contains only a title, in Latin: A Summary of The Book of Light. It doesn’t list an author or a copyright or any publication information. I turn to the first page. Also Latin. Surprise, surprise. Finally those Latin classes Dad made me take will come in handy.
The words are printed in very tiny letters and crammed close together, beginning on one side of the page and extending all the way across with no margin, as though the printer was trying to fit as many words as possible on each page in order to save money.
