Forever Freaky (12 page)

As I approached her, Eloise looked up from
her food. She seemed uncertain; it was as though she couldn’t
believe anybody would walk up to her table.

“Hey?” she said.

“You know everybody hates you,” I told
her.

She glanced down the vacant length of the
table. “Gee, you think?” she said in a dead-pan way.

“I just wanted to tell you—in case you didn’t
realize.”

“Jessica put you up to this, didn’t she?”
Eloise asked.

“Pretty much. I really don’t think she speaks
for everybody.”

“She thinks she does. What’s wrong with her,
anyway?”

“Just a little evil, I suppose.”

“Well, she needs to leave people alone.”

“You want me to hurt her?” I asked.

She considered the offer for a moment, and
then wagged her head. “Don’t bother. She’ll get what’s coming to
her someday. They all will. They all have a boat-load of bad karma
coming.”

“Well, if you change your mind…” I said.

I turned away and headed back to my table. I
sat across from Jack again.

“Did you do it?” Jessica demanded.

“I told her.”

“Good,” she said smugly.

“I can’t believe you did that,” Jack
said.

Jessica turned and started to leave, Amy
right at her heels, like a faithful little puppy. As they walked
away, I focused on Jessica’s ankles, the way I had focused on my
gelatin cube. A couple steps later, her feet tangled and she fell
forward hard and ate floor. She released an agonized yelp, and
everybody at the nearby tables started to laugh.

Amy leaned over her and helped her to stand,
and as she did that, she glanced up and shot me a look of pure
hatred. She put a protective arm round Jessica, who was holding her
face and sobbing, and they walked away as everybody continued to
laugh.

Jack, who had turned round to watch the
spectacle, now turned back to me.

“You’re incredible, you know,” he said,
disgusted.

“Hey, I didn’t do anything. She tripped,” I
lied.

“Yeah, right,” he snorted. “You’re wasting
what you have.”

“Really, I need some air,” I said, pushing my
tray away. I couldn’t stand to be judged by anybody, least of all
by Jack.

I headed for the nearest exit, and sure
enough, Jack got up and followed me.

Outside it was a warm spring day. The sun was
bright and small wispy clouds scudded across the pale blue sky.
There were a lot of kids outside. Some of them had laid beach
towels out on the grass and were having picnics. Everybody knew
that that was against school rules, but a lot of them were seniors
who didn’t care because they had less than a month left before
graduation.

I walked along the path that wound through
the campus, and Jack came up next to me.

“Did that make you feel better?” he
asked.

“Loads,” I said.

He shook his head.

“Hey, Jessica had it coming,” I said. “I hate
people like that. They just can’t leave a person only—they just
keep needling, and needling, and needling.”

“Like I do to you?” he asked.

“It’s not the same. She means something by
it—you don’t. You can’t help yourself. You just want to keep
dropping weird things on my doorstep, as though I don’t have enough
weird things to deal with already. You want to stand back and watch
what happens, like I’m a lab rat or something.”

“Hey, I don’t do that,” he complained.

“No? Well, it seems like it.”

“I was just talking about a guy who started
on fire.”

“And spontaneous human combustion has
absolutely nothing to do with me.”

“If that’s what it is,” he said.

I looked over at him. “You mean you don’t
think it’s that anymore?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “If there is such a
thing, it’s pretty rare. Here you have three different guys
bursting into flames within a six-month period. All of them are
athletes. That doesn’t seem so random—that seems like a
pattern.”

“Like somebody is actually doing something to
cause it?”

“If I had to guess, I’d say we had a
pyrokineticist on our hands.”

“A what?” I asked.

“A pyrokineticist,” he said. “I made up the
word, because there wasn’t a word for it. It’s somebody who can
generate heat with their mind. Like you just did to Jessica, only
with fire.” He watched me closely, and then asked, “You can’t do
that, can you? I mean, think things on fire?”

“Not so far,” I said.

“You sure?” he asked, as though he didn’t
quite believe me.

“If I could do that, you would have been
well-done a while ago.”

“Well, I think somebody’s doing it. I just
can’t figure out why?”

“Set fire to a bunch of jocks? Oh, I don’t
know. I can think of a few reasons, like general principle.”

“You really dislike everybody, do you?” he
asked.

“Some more than others. Jocks are on top of
the list.”

“You sure you didn’t do anything?”

“Positive,” I said.

“Well, I’ll get to the bottom of it,” he
said, sounding pretty determined.

“Out of curiosity— and just curiosity—if you
find that somebody is responsible for burning these guys, exactly
what do you plan to do? Go to the police?”

He shrugged. “I haven’t given that much
thought. I guess, if I find out who it is, I’ll just confront them.
I’ll tell them they need to stop, before somebody actually
dies.”

“What if you end up like burnt toast?”

“Well, at least I tried. Somebody has to do
something, right?”

“Ah-hah,” I said softly, eyeing him. Now it
was my turn to be suspicious. “Are you trying to manipulate
me?”

“No, why? What do you mean?”

“So this isn’t some back-door attempt to
guilt-trip me into helping you?”

“Not at all,” he said, and when he saw that I
wasn’t sure, he added, “If you don’t believe me, read my mind.”

“I don’t want to read your mind. I’m afraid
of what else I might find.”

“Well, I’m not trying to con you or anything.
I know how you are. You have no sympathy for anybody. You don’t
care about anybody, not even yourself. You can’t help being the way
you are. Nobody can.”

He made me sound like a heartless bitch, and,
really, in many ways, he was right. I always figured that my
problems were worse than the problems of other people. I could
never tolerate it when somebody moaned about aches and pains and
boyfriend problems. What were those? Nothing. Try having visions of
an airliner crash, with charred body parts strewn across an open
field. Try hearing the perverted thoughts of a passing stranger.
Try going to sleep at night while enormous eyeballs are staring
down at you from the ceiling. I would trade all that for mundane
problems any day of the week.

I wanted to tell Jack I wasn’t that bad, but,
honestly, I wasn’t sure about that.

“Jules?” he said.

“Huh?”

“You drifted off. You weren’t…”

“Oh, no, I was just thinking—my own
thoughts,” I assured him.

“Well, I have to get to class,” he said,
splitting away from me, heading for the front entrance to the
school. “See you tomorrow?”

“Sure. And hey, don’t get burned,” I added,
but the words sounded hollow, just like they sounded hollow that
morning when I had tried to tell my mom I loved her.

After Jack was gone, I turned and went back
down the path. When I passed the parking lot, I glanced up and saw
the telephone and electric lines that looped down from a post
toward the side of the school. Suddenly I had a flash of the same
lines at a different time. The sky is filled with great gray
clouds, and rain is falling hard, slanting down to the sodden
ground. There is something hanging from the wire, dangling up
there, engulfed in flames. The cold rain hits it and hisses, and
the flames do not weaken but blaze hotter and brighter….

When I got home that day, I saw that the
garage door was open. My dad was working on his pick-up truck. It
was an older model Ford—actually it was older than me—and required
regular attention. He was lying under the truck, his legs sticking
out from the front of it, and I could hear him fiddling with
something underneath.

I dreaded having to talk to him, because of
what my mom had told me that morning—that he thought I needed to
see a psychiatrist. But I reasoned I better nip that idea in the
bud before it went too far. Somehow I had to convince him that I
didn’t need counseling, and I wasn’t sure how to do that. There are
probably a million ways you can prove to somebody that you do have
issues, but how do you prove that you don’t?

So I decidedto put up a perky front. Perky
girls always seem to be accepted as well adjusted, although,
personally, they always gave me the urge to vomit.

I walked into the garage, and said in a
light, airy way, “Hey!”

I must have startled him, because a wrench
clattered on the cement floor.

“Julie, is that you?” he called from under
the truck.

“Yeah,” I chirped.

“You almost gave me a heart attack,” he
complained. “What are you doing home from school?”

“Uh, because school is finished.”

“Oh, it is that late?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you eat lunch today?”

“Yeah,” I said, my perky façade sustaining a
crack; he was always harping about my weight and how I was too
thin.

I stepped over to the workbench, and jumped
up to sit on it. My feet dangled over the oil-stained floor. If I
was going to carry on a conversation with a couple legs sticking
out from under a truck, I wanted to be comfortable at least.

“What did you eat? Not much, huh?”

“I ate plenty,” I said.

“What’s plenty? Two, three bites?”

“Plenty is plenty.”

“You eat any meat?”

“No, I did not.”

“You need your protein.”

“Vegetables have protein.”

“It’s not the same,” he said.

By now my perky façade had completely
crumbled, and I was my grumpy old self. Apparently I couldn’t even
pretend to be normal.

“Dad, please, I’m tired of hearing about it,”
I said.

“Well, then do something to put on a few
pounds.”

“I’m up to ninety-nine pounds, and that’s
normal for somebody five-foot-one.”

A large grimy hand popped out from under the
side of the truck. Its thumb was pointed upward.

“Number one, I doubt that you weight
ninety-nine pounds, and number two--” The index finger of the grimy
hand went up—“you’re at least five-foot-four.”

“Well, I am eating. I don’t know what else to
do. This is just the way I am.”

“Maybe if you tried lifting weights,” I
said.

I wasn’t sure I’d heard right. “What?”

“Lifting weights. I have enough equipment in
the basement. You’ll pack on some muscle.”

I grimaced at the thought. My dad was such a
regular guy. He did guy things: worked on cars, lifted weights,
blow his nose without using a Kleenex. He saw the world in such
simple terms. If you’re too thin, eat more. If eating more doesn’t
work, then lift weights. Every possible problem had a simple
answer. But the simple answer in my case eluded him: I was thin
because that was how I was meant to be.

“Dad, lifting weights, really?”

“Sure,” he said. “Lots of girls lift weights
these days.”

“It’s just not me,” I told him.

“You have to do something.”

“How about being myself,” I said, but he
didn’t seem to hear me.

I listened to him grunt. He must have been
trying to get off an especially stubborn bolt. Finally he gave up
and wiggled out from under the truck. He stood up and dusted off
the front of his pants. Even grimy and oily, he was a very handsome
guy. Evidently I hadn’t inherited many of his genes. In the way of
looks, the only thing I had got from my dad was the cleft in his
chin. It made him appear manly, while on me it just looked like a
pit in my face that didn’t belong there.

He looked at me with somber eyes, and said,
“Mrs. Stock called today.”

“Why?” Mrs. Stock was my counselor at school,
and, really, there was no reason for her to call my parents.

“She was wondering if everything was all
right. Is everything all right?”

“Yeah, sure, fine. I have no idea why she
would call.”

“She said you haven’t seen her in a
while.”

“That’s a good thing, right?”

“Maybe you should stop in on her,” he said.
Really, the man was quite impossible at times.

“What’s the point?” I asked.

“There doesn’t have to be a point. You can
stop by and say hello.”

“Whatever,” I said. I had no intention of
seeing Mrs. Stock. She would always think that something was wrong,
even if I told her everything was fine. Counselors are funny that
way.

“See that you do,” he said.

Now that I was completely annoyed, I jumped
down from the workbench. I started to head toward the house, but
something caused me to linger, an antsy feeling that I’d forgot
something.

“Oh,” I said, turning back toward him. “You
hear about the guy who caught fire?”

“You mean at the ball game,” he said, using a
dirty cloth to try to clean his hands.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, I heard. Why?”

“What do you think of that?” I asked.

He shrugged. “There has to be a reasonable
explanation.”

“You think it might be—what do they call
it—spontaneous human combustion?”

He smiled at me indulgently. “That wouldn’t
be my first guess. I’ve been a firefighter for nearly twenty years,
and I never once saw a case of spontaneous human combustion. I
don’t believe there is such a thing. I think some people fall
asleep smoking a cigarette, and somehow they ignite themselves.
Either they spilled something flammable on their clothes earlier,
or something. People simply don’t start on fire for no
reason—there’s always a reason.”