by Hiatt, Bill
I didn’t like Vanora’s tone of voice. It was too intense, too fanatical. I didn’t much care for the gleam in her eyes either.
“I have wondered about that myself,” I admitted, “and Gwynn and Nurse Florence alluded to it while we are in Annwn. But supposing it is not a coincidence, what does it mean?”
“It can only mean one thing,” said Vanora, conviction like iron coming through in her voice. “Your mission on Earth is coming to an important point. Maybe not its conclusion, which would imply the end of the world, but at least something pivotal. Old allies are emerging to help you, and old enemies to oppose you. Ceridwen, Morgan, Alcina, King David, even the half-djinn child, Khalid, perhaps…in Santa Brígida. Hardly a place one would expect to find any of them, let alone all of them.”
“Ceridwen built Santa Brígida to lure my parents here, so she could try to take back the wisdom I accidentally took so long ago as Gwion Bach. You know that as well as I do. She pulled in Morgan as an ally. David and Alcina were awakened—”
“You were about to say by coincidence, weren’t you?” asked Vanora triumphantly. “Only you couldn’t say it, because you know how ridiculous it is.”
I had a hard time believing that God had somehow arranged my life in a different way than He presumably arranged everyone’s life, but I did thank Him nonetheless that the van was pulling up in front of my house, giving me the opportunity to escape from Vanora. I thanked her as fast as I could, and luckily the security man driving the Prius pulled in at just that moment, so I grabbed the remote from him, thanked him also, and hurried inside as fast as I could, consistent with being quiet.
I half expected to find my newly psychic mother sitting in the living room, waiting to confront me, but fortunately Nurse Florence’s spell had apparently held. By now it was nearly five o’clock in the morning, and I doubted I would get any sleep, but I slipped out of my clothes and into pajamas so Mom wouldn’t wonder why I had slept in my clothes. In the few minutes before my alarm went off, though, I lay down and actually did fall asleep, though it was no restful sleep.
I might have expected my exhaustion would plunge me into dreamless sleep, but instead I started having a very vivid dream. I was surrounded by mist thicker than Annwn’s, a mist that obscured almost everything. Out of that mist came a figure. I recognized him as Jimmie, Dan’s dead brother, but Jimmie had died at age nine, and the figure before me looked as Jimmie would have looked at age sixteen, like Dan, but certainly not identical to him, a little thinner and a little taller—more of a basketball build than a football one. Yet he also sometimes looked oddly like me, as if he were my brother, too. Well, we had been like brothers when he was alive, so my subconscious mind must have been working overtime to make that visual connection. However, that couldn’t explain why he sometimes looked like other brother figures: Stan, Gianni, even Khalid. For being an only child, I certainly had enough people who were like brothers to me. Only twenty-four hours ago, Dan would have been on that list too.
“Jimmie!” I shouted, running toward him. He hugged me warmly, but then he pulled back. I could tell he was upset, actually on the verge of tears. “Jimmie, what’s wrong?”
“Tal,” he said, his faltering voice sounding almost like Khalid’s. “I need to ask you to do something for me.”
“Anything, Jimmie, just name it.” Aside from Jimmie’s morphing physical appearance, this could have been a real conversation from when he was alive. I really would have done anything for him in those days or for Stan…or for Dan. Even in the dream, the thought of Dan cut through my heart like a chain saw.
“Tal, you have to forgive Dan.”
I took a step back from him, just as shocked as if he had slapped me across the face. “Jimmie, if you are asking me to forgive him, you know what he did.”
Jimmie nodded.
“How can I forgive that?”
“It was bad,” Jimmie agreed, “very bad. I know it was. But Tal, I need you to be there for him. I need it…because I can’t be.” His flesh suddenly lost all color, and in the dream, I remembered that he was dead. For a split second I actually wanted to be whatever kind of weird Celtic messiah Vanora thought I was so that I could sing life back into Jimmie, perhaps even erase the years since he had died, make everything different, everything better. Then I sat up in bed, the dream shattered by the alarm ringing in my ears, my whole body shaking.
Yeah, no doubt about it—today was going to be wonderful!
CHAPTER 14: YOU CAN’T TELL THE PLAYERS WITHOUT A SCORECARD
As had happened so many other times recently, I showered and got dressed mechanically, not really caring much what I put on, just wanting to get through the daily ritual without falling apart. I did glance in the mirror and made some effort to comb my hair, but I couldn’t do much about my red eyes and weary-looking face. Well, actually I suppose I could have done something, but who the hell cared what I looked like at this point?
The short answer to that question was my parents, as I should have predicted. Although somewhat distracted by an early morning news report about a UFO sighting late last night on Goleta Beach—oops, I guess the guys who had gone parking had noticed all the flashing lights from our swords and spells—their focus immediately shifted to me as soon as I came into the room.
“Tal, you look as if you haven’t slept. Anything wrong?” asked Dad. I could see memories of my near disintegration four years ago hovering right behind his eyes, shadowy now but ready to gain substance at the slightest hint of trouble. I hadn’t realized he was still that tense. Well, come to think of it, he hadn’t been. I guess I really looked that bad this morning.
“I had a lot of work last night, and after I finally did finish, I guess I was too wound up to sleep much. I’ll try to turn in much earlier tonight.”
I could see him relax a little, but Mom just looked more worried. I waited for her to start asking if I knew anyone named Vanora, or to tell me about a dream she had about a battle on Goleta Beach, but instead she said nothing—which actually ended up being worse. Even without reading her mind, I could tell she was afraid to say anything, probably because she knew it would sound crazy, and it was then that I realized one undeniable fact: I would have to tell her the truth, certainly not right now, with Dad listening, but some time soon. I could not let her continue to think she was losing her mind, and if the powers that be in Annwn didn’t like it, well, tough!
As soon as I thought that, though, I realized I did actually care about what Gwynn thought, not enough to let my mom go insane, but enough to at least give him a heads-up before I told her. I would see Nurse Florence today and ask her to get in touch with Gwynn for me, since the Order had the convenient privilege of being able to open a portal directly to wherever he was in Annwn.
Once breakfast was over, I said my good-byes quickly, being sure to give Mom the biggest hug I could. Then I was out the door. I didn’t have to wait for Stan this morning, since he was currently David and feigning illness at home, so I got to school a little earlier than normal. That didn’t really do me much good, since without Stan I didn’t really have anyone to talk to.
Let me rephrase: I didn’t have anyone to talk to that I actually wanted to talk to at this point. I really wanted to be alone with my thoughts, and there were a lot of people I didn’t want to interact with at all. I didn’t think Dan would try, but I didn’t really know what to say to Gordy or Carlos either. Shar I would have to apologize to over the way I had handled Khalid, so I added that to my to-do list. Eva? Well, I actually did want to talk to her, but I had no idea what to say. If only she had given me a little more of a clue about how she felt last night! Then again, I could hardly expect her to react that quickly to such an epic change in her life. Today? Well, today might be quite different. Did I dare to hope for more? Why not? She had loved me before. Now that she knew the truth, surely…surely she would love me again.
I suppose I was hanging around in the glassed-in foyer near the front entrance of the school hoping tha
t Eva would show up. Given my luck, though, it was only natural that it was Dan who showed up. I didn’t usually hang around up front, so he probably didn’t expect to see me—and he certainly didn’t want to. He looked very much as if he wanted Khalid’s ability to become invisible. Lacking that, he did the best he could to pass by as far on the other side of the foyer as he could without actually merging his body with the window glass on the other side. I wanted to shout at him, I wanted to punch him again, but life was complicated enough as it was, and Principal Simmons was standing nearby, so I settled for staring at him with utter contempt.
I should have remembered how delicate the social ecosystem of a high school is. A fairly large number of students had been milling around during our little drama. Little? Who am I kidding? In high school social terms, it rated somewhere in the same range as the sinking of the Titanic. I realized that the news would be all over the campus by third period. If that made life more difficult for Dan, good! Though not quite as satisfying as smearing him with honey and tying him to an anthill, it would give me some pleasure for him to be constantly confronted by the consequences of what he had done. However, I did worry a little bit about how the tensions on campus might affect Eva. Well, it was too late for me to worry about—what the hell?
Standing in the doorway was the image of sixteen-year-old Jimmie, looking at me intently, pleadingly, and pointing in the general direction Dan had gone.
Was I finally going insane for real, or was I now being haunted? Either one would be fully consistent with the way my life was going.
“Who’s that?” Nurse Florence had come up behind me without my realizing it, a measure of how preoccupied I was. Following her glance, I could see she was looking at Jimmie. Well, if she could see him too, that ruled out crazy and just left haunted. I wondered if Nurse Florence could do exorcisms.
“You may find this hard to swallow, but he’s a ghost. The ghost of Dan’s brother, to be precise.”
“Tal, we need to talk,” she thought back.
“Not now!” I replied, more harshly than I intended. “I’ll stop by later.”
Because, after all, a ghost roaming Santa Brígida High School is hardly the top problem either of us have. Hell, it isn’t even in the top five! I thought to myself.
I fully expected Nurse Florence to argue with me, but she let me go without another word…or thought.
On the way to my first class, I ran into Gordy, who was wearing a tank top that looked as if it was pretty well bending school rules to the breaking point.
“Really?” I said, tilting my head a little.
He shrugged. “Sun’s out, guns out!” he said, grinning a little. As he walked past, he patted me on the shoulder. “It’s going to be all right, Tal.” Then he was off down the hall.
I, however, stopped dead in my tracks. God, I was so far out of it that I hadn’t even realized it was a sunny day. The fog inside of me must have been blocking it out.
I spent the time until lunch only half paying attention in class at best, and I didn’t drop by Nurse Florence’s during nutrition as she probably expected. Between anticipation over my next meeting with Eva and the ghostly presence of Jimmie, who seemed determined to keep his eye on me until I did what he wanted, it was pretty hard to focus on anything else.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention the whispering, and the odd looks, puzzled yet intrigued. Everyone knew that Dan and I had been good friends, and after the non-scene in the foyer, an increasingly large number of people wondered what had happened, why there was so much tension between the two of us. Well, they were going to have to go on wondering. Much as I would have liked to destroy Dan’s reputation by telling everyone what he had done, I kept Eva in mind, and I kept my lips pressed tightly together.
When the clock had finally completed its tortuously slow crawl to lunch, I sought Eva out. She was with some friends, but I caught her eye, and she drifted in my general direction with affected casualness. When she got close enough, I could her face was paler than normal, her eyes red from sleeplessness. She tried to smile at me, but her face was just not quite up to it. With a growing sense of foreboding, I maneuvered her out into the quad, into the artificial mini-forest landscaped into the heart of the school. It being lunch, there were naturally others there, but I cast a don’t-notice-us kind of spell, and we became inconspicuous to everyone else. Actually, I put enough force into the spell to make us more like invisible and inaudible. I wasn’t taking any chances that this particular conversation would be interrupted.
“Eva,” I started unsteadily, “I’m sorry…”
“What are you sorry for, Tal?” she asked emotionlessly, and I suddenly realized I didn’t know. I was sorry Dan turned out to be a scumbag, but I shouldn’t be the one apologizing for that. What I was really sorry for, the only thing that I could imagine ever being that sorry for, was that I lost four years with Eva, but what was the use of being sorry for that now, and what could I have possibly done about that before now?
“I’m sorry this has been such a difficult time for you,” I finally managed, and that was true enough.
Eva smiled at that, but it was not the warm smile I remembered. “You have a gift for understatement, Tal. Really, though, I’m the one who should be sorry.”
“Why?” I prompted after about a minute. She turned away from me as if she could not bear to see me anymore, but I could interpret that kind of gesture in many different ways. What I wouldn’t give to know what she was thinking, but reading her mind under these circumstances was something I knew would be wrong.
“Even when I was twelve, I should have known better. Tal, even when I found out the truth about you a couple of months ago, it still didn’t dawn on me what Dan had done. I just assumed he had misunderstood somehow. At the very least, I should have made more of an effort to see what was going on for myself. I should have done…something. More, anyway.”
I took her gently by the shoulders and turned her back in my direction. “Dan had you believing that seeing you might make me worse. Who could blame you for trying to protect me? You have nothing, and I mean nothing, to feel sorry about.”
Taking a gamble, I leaned in for a kiss. In that moment I realized just how sunny the day was. In fact, the sunlight was brighter than anything I had seen outside of Annwn in the last four years, and suddenly the plants and trees were a brilliant green, again unlike anything I had seen outside of Annwn. Maybe, just maybe…
No—I lost the gamble. Eva pulled back. Her movement was subtle, gentle even, but I knew what it meant. How could I be so stupid? She must be at least as emotionally raw as I was. I needed to give her a little time to heal. I had just lost a friend; she had lost someone she thought was the love of her life. Still, the world was once again only as bright as normal.
“Tal, there has been so much misunderstanding between us, so much unasked, so much unspoken.” Eva did not turn away again, but she was no longer meeting my eyes. “If nothing else, we have to be honest with each other.”
“Of course! Eva, there is so much I want to tell you—”
“Wait!” She cut me off forcefully. “There is something I have to tell you first.”
“OK, ladies first!” I said, with a little bow. I couldn’t help but notice that Eva could still not meet my eyes.
“Tal, I know what you want.”
I could hear the sorrow in her voice, see it in her eyes. I didn’t need to read her mind to dread what was coming next.
“Eva, I love you!” I burst in, unable to contain myself. I guess I figured that’s what girls always complained guys weren’t willing to say. Surely if Eva knew how much I cared about her…
“I guessed you did. All this time, you did. What Dan did would not have hurt you so much if you didn’t. Even when you got Dan and me back together at the homecoming dance, even then. I was so blind not to see it!”
“Eva, no one could—”
“Please, Tal, please hear me out before this gets any worse.”
Wo
rse? What could get worse?
Yeah, I knew what was coming; I totally did. But I had sunk so deep in denial in the last couple of minutes that my heart refused to pay any attention to my mind.
“Eva, say whatever you want to say,” I replied slowly.
“Tal, I can’t go back to Dan now. Not after what he’s done.” She could see I wanted to respond, but her look stopped me. “When we were twelve, Tal, I thought I loved you.”
Thought?
“Before your…awakening, I guess you would call it, I thought you were the center of my world. I thought we would always be together. I was heartbroken when Dan convinced me that would never happen. Part of me wishes I could go back, back before any of that happened. I want to be twelve again, and with you.”
Again I wanted to interrupt, and again her eyes stopped me.
“Tal, I know it isn’t fair of me to say this now, especially after all you have been through—”
That cracking sound was the sound of my denial beginning to give way—
“—but I have to say it anyway. Tal, we were twelve! Maybe you were more mature than I was then. What I was feeling couldn’t really have been love.”
“It was!” I protested despite myself.
Eva smiled, but it was the saddest smile I had ever seen on her face. She reached over and took my hand. I could feel hers shaking in mine. Or was it mine shaking?
“Tal, you couldn’t read my mind then. How could you possibly know what I was feeling? If I really loved you, how could I have fallen in love with Dan? Don’t look at me like that! I don’t still love him…but Tal, I did—I really did. I wish I hadn’t! I wish I could look at you now, tell you I always loved you, and let you take me in your arms, help you to get past all the pain. And you know what else?”
God, what else could there be…after that?
“Even if I had really loved you then, even if I hadn’t loved Dan most of the last four years, I don’t love you right now, this minute. And I can’t make myself love you. I can’t turn on the emotion, just like flicking on a light switch. Even if the love was real then, I can’t just bring it back!”
