Homecoming (2 page)

“They'd better not mess with Homecoming,” the girl said in a huff. “If I don't get my tiara, I'm gonna be pissed.”

“You don't even know if you're gonna win,” Derek snorted. “My money's on Alissa.”

They were coming closer. I pressed myself up against the tree bark, nudging myself into a hollow.

“Oh, I'll win. You're still picking me up, right Caleb?”

Derek passed right by me. “He can't. He's got to pick up his little boyfriend.”

“Who?” the girl demanded, sounding entirely too annoyed.

“The blind kid,” Caleb said dismissively. “Derek thinks he's funny all of a sudden.”

“Caleb's got all sorts of weird ideas about him, Kari. Better watch yourself. Getting dumped for a freak? Not a good look.”

“You thought the kid shot meth
in his eyeballs
! And I'm the one with weird ideas?”

I heard grunts, swearing, and sounds of struggle. After a minute or so, there were snorts of laughter, and the roughhousing stopped. I leaned my head back against the tree, exhaling towards the sky.

“The fuck are
you
doing here?” I opened my eyes to see Kari staring daggers at me from only a few feet away. I hadn't heard her approach. And if she was here, that meant the others weren't far behind.

I couldn't help but flinch at her caustic tone. Damn.
This wouldn't have happened if I could have made myself invisible
, I bemoaned in my head.

I did the only thing I could think of. I ran.

¤ ¤ ¤

“It's Russian,” I argued. “It's not that big of a deal.”

“It's Old East Slavic, and it's a very big deal,” my uncle replied.

“I don't even know what that means!”

John squinted at me, shaking his head in either annoyance or regret. “You've had all week to translate it. What's going on? Your head's all over the place.”

“Maybe my head would be right here if you'd let it go to the Homecoming game.”

He stared, and for once I couldn't glimmer out what he was feeling. John's face was like the perfect kind of mood ring. Twitching muscles around his mouth meant he was trying not to smile and failing. Squinting was irritation. Pursed lips indicated consideration. His face was like a Magic 8 ball that I didn't dare to shake.
Forehead hazy, try again later.

“It's just for a couple of hours,” I tried. And then, “you're always trying to get me to take more of an interest in sports!”

“Too dangerous,” he said, his voice clipped. “Too many people. Too many chances for something to go wrong.”

“Then come with me.” I tried. I could see some hesitation. John didn't like people, but he liked sports. Sundays during football season our house was almost unlivable—especially since he hooted and hollered with the television.

The line between his eyebrows appeared. Crap, too far. That line was as blatant as a stop sign. Once it appeared, there was only one thing to do. Halt. Step no further. This argument has been lost.

“It'll be fun,” I added, unable to help myself. But the potential and the consideration I'd seen forming behind his eyes shut down, and his mouth tightened into a hard, defensive line.

“Back to the lesson.”

And that was that. Magic lessons with Uncle John ran the gamut. Sometimes, it was “Come on, Braden, you can levitate the dining room table.” And other times it was, “Dodge these fireballs, Braden.” There was no telling what a lesson would be like, at any given time.

Except one telling feature: Whenever we had lessons outside, as we were right now, it usually meant something dangerous. Uncle John didn't take much risk with the house, and with the frequency with which my magic went wrong—coming out too strong or too fast—being in the middle of the woods was just a safety measure.

Today, we were in one of the fields that John had spent an entire summer clearing out. Every so often, he'd start going off on a tangent about the “mystical properties of places” and “the geometry of the earth.” Stuff that sounded like a bunch of old-man mumbo-jumbo he probably learned about from watching
Jeopardy
.

“When are you going to teach me something cool? Like binding circles. Those look like fun.” With the right bit of magic, you could trap anyone in a binding circle. Hours, maybe even days.

“That's exactly why you're not ready to learn about them. Maybe when you're a little older,” Uncle John said with a trace of a smile. “So … do you know what you're doing today?”

I looked around the clearing. There weren't any practice dummies, scarecrows dressed up in John's old jeans and flannel shirts, so that meant this wasn't target practice. He hadn't brought out the kiddie pool, so there wasn't going to be any disastrous attempts at walking on water. John's smirk was widening. I didn't like it. He enjoyed torturing me way too much. I'm pretty sure he needed medication.

It wasn't until I heard the rumble above me that I bothered to look up. I groaned … exactly one and a half seconds before the sky above opened and a monsoon fell onto me. One second, I was dry and a little too hot and bored. Definitely bored. The next I was instantly drenched as a deluge of water poured down onto me, and looked anywhere for escape.

The rain fell like a curtain around me, but the rest of the clearing was still completely dry. Uncle John had whipped up a mini storm. I was almost impressed.

That's when things got weird. I ran to my left, where the rain clearly wasn't falling, but the rain didn't stop. I darted right, but the rain kept pouring down on me. Wherever I went, the rain followed. I had my own little black rain cloud.

I ran for cover, hoping that a few seconds under the tree canopy would give me enough time to figure out what the lesson here was, but even that was no good.

There's nothing worse than getting drenched while wearing glasses because my first instinct was to wipe at my eyes, clear the water from them. But there were big, black sunglasses in my way. I couldn't take them off, not when we were in the middle of the field at noon.

This was the lesson. A really,
really
annoying one. And the minute I figured out how he'd done it, I was returning the favor. Only I wouldn't do it in the middle of a field on a hot summer day. I'd wait until he was asleep, in the middle of the night, and then I'd unleash a storm in his bedroom.

I tried pushing the storm away, tried drawing all the moisture out of the clouds and into my hands. I even tried transmuting the elements, changing water into air, but all that did was stir up a mist that had me sputtering. Every spell I tried slid right through the rain cloud.

The temperature had easily dropped thirty degrees, and water was
pouring
off of me. I now knew what it felt like to be a faucet, and it was not fun. “I already showered today!” I shouted, having to spit water out of my mouth several times to do so.

John pulled open a lawn chair and settled in. I almost walked over to him in spite, but knowing him, he had some sort of fail-safe in place so he wouldn't get wet.

“This is
definitely
child abuse.” My teeth chattered, the cold starting to get to me.

“Start thinking outside the box,” he chided, watching me with a casual, if not bored, look. “This shouldn't be so difficult. You're not paying attention.”

“Sorry, I start to lose focus when you throw me into the middle of a freaking
hurricane
,” I snapped back.

The only response I got was a huff of air and a roll of his eyes. Maybe he thought if he acted like a teenager, I would relate. Uncle John just didn't get it.

I tried to think of what he'd done. Maybe there was some sort of trace on me, pinning the storm cloud over my head? But a normal cloud would have run out of moisture after just a few minutes, and this one was going strong. Maybe even stronger than before. It was hard to tell. I squinted upwards. I didn't think a trace would fit on a cloud—it was too … vapory.

My clothes were hanging heavy against my skin, something that I'd always hated. It was unnatural, feeling your clothes on every inch of your skin. John said I was like some sort of cat who hated to be wet. I just didn't like being uncomfortable.

No, it's not some sort of tracking spell. There's got to be something more to this. Some reason why John looks so smug.
Sometimes the lessons were designed to make me feel like an idiot. He said he liked throwing me off balance. I think he just liked proving that he knew more than I did.

“Feels pretty cold, doesn't it?” he called out.

I was about to respond when I stopped. He was baiting me. And it wasn't just that he was baiting me, he was toying with me.
Pay attention. Feels pretty cold.
I was freezing, that much was true. And then I started to focus on what was going on.

I could feel the weight of water dragging me down. I could feel the temperature drop and the arctic chill in the air. Every spell I tried to use to divert the storm hadn't worked, passing right through the cloud like …

That was it! Like it wasn't really there. That's when the rest of it came into focus: I was drenched in rain, but I couldn't feel it against my skin. Rain was streaming down my body, but I only noticed because of my clothes, my hair, and my glasses. I couldn't feel the rain; it didn't have any substance.

It was an illusion, and a good one at that. With an illusion, you had to add them in layer by layer, sense by sense. The sound of the rain was one, the smell of it and the taste in my mouth. The feel of my clothes hanging heavy against my frame. But he hadn't made the spell tactile. It was an illusion.

I stretched out with my magic, feeling around me. There it was, like a platter of magical seven-layer nachos. Piece by piece, I pulled the spell apart, inhaling rain when I tore away the smell and sinking down when I tore at the heaviness of the water.

And then it was done, and the rain was gone. My clothes were dry—they'd never been wet in the first place. I took a deep breath. “You want to tell me what that was about?”

“You have to know how to see what's really going on,” John said, his tone too smooth to be completely genuine. There was a hard look to his eyes, one I didn't see very often. Anger, maybe. Or annoyance.

I grimaced.

I loved my uncle, hand to God. But sometimes, it was like there was something bubbling under the surface. I don't know if maybe he was more jealous than proud, or he resented having to teach me at all. The moments never lasted long, and he denied them if I asked, but there was something there. Something he didn't want me to see.

Maybe he thinks I'm not learning fast enough, or I don't try.
And this little bit of torture somehow made up the difference. I could barely figure out his moods on a good day. But since I'd passed his test …

“Does this mean I can go to the football game?” I asked hopefully.

He shook his head.

I really should have seen that coming.

¤ ¤ ¤

Sneaking out on Friday night was easier than I thought it would be. I'd laid low for the past two days, dropping the subject of the game entirely. I'd already long since decided that I was going to sneak out. The trick was to figure out a way to keep John occupied so he wouldn't notice I was gone.

I didn't even need to bother. On Thursday, a package showed up with the mail. I was at the table working on copying the last bits of the translation down (who really cared about third-century Babylonian crystal magic, anyway?) when he unwrapped the cardboard box to reveal a whole new shipment of books. New books meant he'd be distracted for days.

John was obsessed with old texts—grimoires of spells that hadn't been touched in hundreds of years. He thought there was something to be learned from picking apart the building blocks of magic, where it'd come from. And I was never really sure where he got the money for these auctions, because we lived in the sticks and our house was nothing to write home about.

Just more of John's secrets.

Secrets that made it easy for me to sneak out of the house, though. I made a show of heading up to my room, turned on my mini stereo, and climbed out the window.

What did people even wear to a football game? Should I wear the school colors? Was that the smart thing to do?
It probably would have helped if I'd known the school colors, but another loss of being homeschooled. I'd never needed to know.

One thing I grabbed before running out was one of the garnet stones that John had picked up at some sort of gem expo. I didn't even know they had such things, but if he wanted to go to them in his spare time, then I wasn't going to ask. And he, gratefully, didn't tell.

I didn't use a lot of gemstones in my magic. Using tools is easier, and both John and I work a little more ... fluidly. Magic is a power source and a current. You grabbed it, wrestled it into shape, and achieved the desired effect.

Garnets were used in old magic. They were thought to strengthen the souls of the living, increasing their vitality as well as increasing a person's natural charisma. That was what I was going for tonight. Well, not the vitality so much. But the charisma? Definitely.

In magic, gems and crystals acted like a battery. Pour a little magic inside, fill the stone up, and it would run for hours. My hope was that, for at least a few hours, people wouldn't see the freak. They'd just see me. A more interesting, compelling me. But me.

It was a bit of a hike into the town—about a half an hour until I made it into town and then I just followed the line of traffic. Mr. Collins had been right, everyone was going to the game. Or at least it seemed that way from the street.

Approaching the football field was like culture shock.
So many people
. Most of the time, it was just John and I. Even during the inevitable hospital stays when one of my episodes got really bad, there were only ever a few dozen people around at a given time. This was hundreds—hundreds!—all cramped together in bleachers and loitering on the ground next to the field.