by Hiatt, Bill
We had a wide repertoire, but rock/Celtic fusion was our trademark, and for the homecoming dance I thought the costumes from when we first started calling ourselves the Bards would be a nice touch. They weren’t really medieval, but they did have a kind of Renaissance Faire look from a distance. The guys wore black pants with white period shirts (you know, the ones with the “pluffy” long sleeves and a V-neck collar), and medallions with greenish stones that the V-neck showed off. Our one girl, Carla Rinaldi, necessary both for the female vocals in duets and to keep us from being called a boy band, wore a long, flowing black gown and a medallion that matched ours. Well, the gown was supposed to be flowing, anyway, but Carla had a great talent for finding outfits that were revealingly tight but somehow not tight enough to get her busted for dress code violations at school.
Okay, so Stan had told me those costumes made us look a little like Celtic hippies, but hell, I liked them, and they didn’t seem to hurt our popularity any.
More than once during setup, Carla caught my eye and smiled. I wondered in passing whether she was interested in me. We had a common interest in music, and our voices worked well together. Carla wore her silky black hair long, the way I liked it, and had strikingly blue eyes. Her face seemed somehow classical, as if she had been the model for some Roman statue of Venus. Her dress more than hinted at the inviting body beneath it. At the risk of sounding like a dog again, her breasts would have been described by Gordy Hayes as exactly the right size—a measurement I think he based on the size on his own hands, which were certainly bigger than mine.
On a physical level she was one of the most appealing girls I knew. Indeed, only Nurse Florence, not age appropriate, and Eva, forever lost to me, made me feel more like I should stop wasting time doing what I was doing and jump into bed. Perhaps, sometime, if only as a way of getting over Eva…
No, I would really be a dog if I did that, but I resolved to think more seriously about Carla later. Sooner or later, surely my obsession with Eva would fade, and I would be ready for an actual relationship with someone I could actually have. Wow, what a concept!
Putting Carla out of my mind with an effort, I finished setting up just before the gym starting filling with students, flush with their team’s victory and their various hormones, needing to unleash some energy. We gave them more rock and less Celtic tonight, and they loved it. I poured all the unbridled joy I could into the music, into the magic, and even I felt better than normal.
About midway through the dance, I decided to test Stan’s theory. I could feel the music in the very beating of my heart. I could feel the magic crackling in every nerve. I could feel the support of the rest of the band. There would never be a better moment to see what I could do. I did my best to visualize the magic like a series of guitar strings connecting me to the dancing students in front of us. (Stan had actually said conduits, but the image of pipes stretching out in every direction just didn’t do anything for me.) Anyway, the magic flowed liquidly over the strings and dripped down into the students like a gentle, glowing rain. Okay, so far, so good. I had always had to visualize the effect I wanted to make on an audience, but I had never before made the interaction seem so physical. Next step, I imagined thoughts like evaporating water steaming up from the students, collecting on the strings, flowing back toward me.
To my amazement, I began to pick up random thoughts that could only be coming from the students in front of me. At first, I couldn’t make them coherent or attach them to a source, but my mind adapted quickly to the new input, and in just minutes I was able to understand what the nearby students were thinking, at least on the surface.
It shouldn’t have surprised me that a number of them were thinking about sex, and with such intensity I started blushing vicariously and had to pull back a little. Then I found myself able to filter out the raw, hormonal vibes and begin to sense other things.
I could feel dreams of a state championship from some of the players, feel them as if they were my dreams. I could feel one student’s anxiety about an upcoming calculus test—muted now by the upbeat magic—and another’s plan to cheat on the same test. Coach Miller quivered on the edge of asking Nurse Florence out. Ms. Simmons had gotten over thinking she was losing her grip and was enjoying our music far more than I might have expected. On and on, jumping from mind to mind as easily as I might have glanced through a stack of papers. If I focused more intently on one, I discovered I could read more deeply. If I focused in a different way, visualizing my own consciousness sailing down the strings and into someone else, I discovered that I could see through the eyes of another person the way I had always been able to see through the eyes of an animal.
These new skills would naturally need more practice, but they opened a myriad of new possibilities, as well as the certainty that I could now “download” Stan’s ability to visualize the workings of modern technology. Once I had done that, I could probably learn to influence technology in much the same way I had been able to manipulate nature, much as Stan had suggested so long ago and Nurse Florence much more recently.
I let go of the image of the strings, and the chatter of thoughts around me faded as I put my exclusive focus again on the music.
I had read a little bit on the Internet about how some people thought music was a greater high than sex. I couldn’t quite go that far, but there was no question my brain was sailing on a warm sea of endorphins that seemed to stretch out infinitely in all directions. The magic was part of it, but I knew I could reach that feeling on music alone. And I didn’t need to be a mind reader to notice the other band members were in a comparable place.
The music possessed me so fully that our next break caught me by surprise, but I realized as soon as I stopped singing and playing that I could use one. Performing was strenuous to begin with for those of us that really merged with the music, and the outflow of magic from me also took its toll. Still, though I was tired, it was a good kind of tired. I was beginning to feel that life might just work out, after all.
During the break I worked my way over to Nurse Florence. Coach Miller hadn’t yet quite reached the asking-out stage and didn’t welcome my appearance, but otherwise he was having such a great night that it was hard for him to begrudge me a couple of minutes with her.
We stood near the exit, our conversation effectively covered by the murmurs of a hundred other conversations in the gym.
“I can do it!” I said, excitedly but quietly. “I can read minds. I can do other stuff, too—lots of things I never imagined. Hell, Taliesin 1 himself never even imagined them.”
“That’s great,” replied Nurse Florence with a smile. “But don’t get too cocky—Carrie Winn obviously developed mind reading at some past point. Still, the odds will be more even now. Speaking of which, some of my…associates…are flying in from Wales. In a plane,” she clarified in response to my raised eyebrow. “Some time I’ll tell you about my organization. Anyway, for now I think we can match her in magic firepower. If you can neutralize her tech and security advantages, we might just be able to defeat her.”
“I’ll get right on it. Stan and I will work tomorrow.”
“One more thing,” she added, scanning the crowd. I jumped a little from the realization that, without trying, I had picked up Coach Miller’s impatience, perhaps because he was looking right at me, but still, that was another unexpected surprise. I had thought my telepathy would be limited to moments when I was actively visualizing what I wanted, but perhaps not. After all, I had sometimes picked up hints from nature before without actively seeking them. Wow! What might I be able to accomplish with practice?
“If you could pick someone to wield another magic sword, who would you pick?” Now, that was a question I had not seen coming.
“We have another magic sword?”
“We do now. It’s a ‘loaner,’ if you will, but it will come in handy on Samhain if we have to fight, as I very much suspect we will.”
“It’s coming in with your associates?”
“Even with magic, heightened airport security would mean manipulating a large number of people in a short period of time. No, we have ways of transporting small objects across great distances. The sword is already here, ready for someone to practice with. The question is, who?”
I knew some guys at the fencing club, naturally, and others I had met in competition, but I wasn’t really friends with any of them. I wouldn’t be sure which ones I could trust. Well, now I guess I could read their minds and figure it out, but I doubted I could afford the time. Then a better idea occurred to me.
“Shar,” I said, half to myself. “His specialty is boxing, but I know he did some fencing back east, at least enough for me to assume he can handle a blade.”
“Shahriyar,” she said thoughtfully. “Yes, he does seem to be someone with character. I’ll dream walk him tonight and recruit him if he is as good as he seems to be.”
“One thing,” I said quickly, knowing our break was almost over and feeling Coach Miller’s eyes on me again. “Don’t ‘recruit’ him the way you did with Dan.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at all the trouble Dan has because of the way he can only access his memories about…things part of the time. I want Shar to know everything all the time.”
Nurse Florence started to shake her head. “Bad enough that we still have six students who saw you in Annwn, even if they have probably talked themselves into thinking the whole experience was an illusion. We can’t…well, wait, as long as part of Shahriyar’s tynged involves not revealing what he knows, except under very specific conditions, your suggestion might work,” she concluded grudgingly.
“Okay, then. Oh, something else,” I added, knowing I was about to press my luck in a major way—but you know how much I like to do that. “We need someone to protect Stan and someone to protect Eva the way Dan protects me.”
“Anything else? Want me to spin a little straw into gold for you?” As much as Nurse Florence didn’t appreciate my sarcasm, she didn’t seem to mind using it herself.
“I know I’m asking a lot, but what I want does make sense. Ms. Winn knows I care about Stan because I used her help to find him that time he ran away. And she pulled my feelings for Eva right out of my head. Would she hesitate to use those feelings against me, if she needed to?”
“I doubt it, but from what I gather, she has invited several students on Samhain. Are you willing to stand by calmly and let her kill someone other than Stan or Eva? I’m guessing not, and I can’t protect every single student who might show up individually. And something tells me you wouldn’t want to explain to Dan why you had Eva bodyguarded.”
She had me there, of course, but I persisted. She could, after all, bind whoever Eva’s defender was not to tell Dan—no need for the subject to come up at all.
By now Coach Miller’s gaze was burning right through me.
“Oh, all right; I’ll see what I can do. Do you have anyone specific in mind?”
“Gordy Hayes for Stan.” Nurse Florence looked at me as if I had totally lost my mind.
“Tal, he’s, well, I don’t like to say this of a student, but he isn’t anyone’s idea of brilliant.”
“He’s fiercely loyal to Stan, the only guy willing to defy Dan on Stan’s behalf before the boxing match. And he’s like three hundred pounds of pure muscle. He doesn’t need to provide new chess strategies for Stan; he just needs to keep him safe, and that we both know he can do.”
“Well, I’ll dream walk him, too. And for Eva?”
“I don’t know for sure. A girl would be logical, but I don’t know of any with combat experience.”
“I know of a couple with martial arts background. Let me do some research. Now I’ve got to go.”
I could feel Coach Miller moving in our direction, and anyway Jackson was trying to catch my eye. Time to get back to the stage.
However, before the band could begin to play again, there was the little matter of announcing the homecoming court.
I should mention that this particular ritual was a little different at Santa Brígida High School than at other schools I’m familiar with. Typically, a big fuss gets made over a certain number of nominees, they get shown off in some kind of parade prior to the game, and then the winners of a student vote are crowned early in the dance. At Santa Brígida, probably because someone thought too much emphasis on the homecoming court might pull the spotlight too far away from the all-important football team, there are no nominees announced in advance. Students wrote names on a blank piece of paper, and the winners were announced at about the mid-point in the dance—which was now, apparently. Ms. Simmons, looking unusually festive in a light blue outfit, was already at the microphone by the time I had worked my way back up to the stage.
The first four announcements (freshman and sophomore prince and princess) were received with polite applause, not a surprise considering that most of the people who came to homecoming tended to be juniors and seniors.
“And this year’s winner for junior prince is…Taliesin Weaver.” I could hardly have been more surprised if lightning had struck me inside the gym. The sincere enthusiasm of the applause also caught me off guard, though, thinking back on it, I guess it shouldn’t have. Dan aside, I was in the good graces of the football team, with its numerous allies, and the band had a real fan base. Still, this particular “honor” blind-sided me completely.
I stepped forward to receive the paper crown and plastic scepter. Surely these rituals were designed by women. I’d never met a guy who liked them. I even blushed a little, but to some extent the continuing applause restored my good spirits. The crown and scepter might be fake, but the friendship I felt in the room was not.
Ms. Simmons raised her hand for silence and proceeded to the announcement of the junior princess. Yup, definitely a matriarchal ritual, with each guy basically the consort of the female winner, who was always announced second.
“This year’s junior princess is…Eva O’Reilly.”
Crap! Couldn’t I get through one night without the universe finding some way to kick me in the crotch?
It took every ounce of willpower for me not to run screaming from the gym. I realized, though, that this was definitely a time to play it cool. After all, only Stan and Nurse Florence knew why this situation was so supremely awkward for me. Even Eva herself had no idea, I was sure. Just get through the fifteen minutes of fame, I told myself, just get through it, and life will go back to normal.
Eva was moving toward the stage, hotness incarnate, as always, but not looking especially happy. Of course, she couldn’t have been paired with Dan, who was a senior, but I knew without trying to read her mind that that was what she wanted. I knew, and unfortunately for her, so did most other people in the room, that her efforts to reconcile with Dan had failed.
Eva stoically accepted her crown and stood next to me. Her signature jasmine perfume made me dizzy, but I shook the feeling off.
“This is just embarrassing,” she whispered to me.
“Just look impassive, and no one will know how uncomfortable you are.” Hell, I should know.
The universe was not quite done with us, however. I should have foreseen Dan’s election as homecoming king, which brought him sullenly to the stage, right next to Eva. I don’t think anyone anticipated Mary Stewart’s election as homecoming queen. Sweet girl, and pretty in her own way, but certainly not particularly popular. For the most part, she immersed herself in her art, and didn’t really seem to care much about social standing. I guess I had watched too many Stephen King movies when I was younger; honestly, I was just waiting for the pig blood to start raining down on us. Unbelievably, Mary actually looked more uncomfortable than Eva, as Mary stood there on the other side of a
particularly stone-faced Dan. The freshmen and sophomores seemed to be enjoying each other, but I imagine we upperclassmen were about the grimmest homecoming court on record.
After the “coronation” the mismatched court was urged in the general direction of the dance floor for their one obligatory dance. I was really beginning to see the wisdom of schools that had the homecoming nominees run as couples. Dan and Mary, who had never danced before in their lives and were not great dancers to begin with, looked like puppets handled by a relatively amateurish puppeteer. Not to brag, but I had great rhythm since my awakening, and Eva had a little dance training from the musicals, so we had no difficulty that way. In fact, we looked good enough together to be problematic; our seemingly choreographed dance was too poignant a reminder for me of what might have been.
Dan was staring over Mary’s shoulder directly at Eva. I hadn’t tried this without music—and only once with—but I decided to see what I could pick up. I visualized the string between us, I visualized his thoughts flowing toward me along it…
