Jennifer Scales and the Ancient Furnace (2 page)

It was her eyes, probably. Sometimes boys stared at her eyes. They were a shining gray—almost silver—and seemed to cast their own light. Her father had similar eyes, and grown women stared at
him
as much as gangly boys stared at
her
. The idea of her dad as a babe magnet grossed her out, but her mom never seemed to notice.

“My!” Jennifer said, spreading out the delivered feast. Lemon chicken and pork spareribs for her, beef lo mein and potstickers for her mother, white rice, about a thousand tiny soy sauce packets, and factory-wrapped fortune cookies for both of them. “What a delicious meal, Mother. How do you find the time?”

“Very funny.” Elizabeth smirked. “You know perfectly well neither of us wants me to cook.”

Jennifer grinned back, glad of the momentary connection. “True, true. Hey, some stuff you cook is really great. For example, your eggs. And your, uh, soup. Your soup is the best.”

“I’ll tell the Campbell’s Corporation you said so.” Elizabeth was really smiling, now. It didn’t happen often, and Jennifer observed how young her mother looked.

She usually preferred not to notice. She had once overheard a couple of boys in her eighth-grade class who had been to her house. The way they talked about her mother made Jennifer uncomfortable, to say the least.

Height seemed to be the draw. Height made legs longer, inexplicably made shoulder-length honey-blonde hair shinier, even cheekbones higher. It somehow made emerald eyes sharper, and smoothed out the pronounced curves from bearing a child. And this tall frame moved with a sort of direct grace that didn’t remind Jennifer so much of a medical doctor as a gymnast.

By comparison, Jennifer felt inadequate. While her mother’s height made her beautiful, Jennifer’s made her feel like a misfit. The only place she felt at home was on the soccer field, where everybody was yards away from each other and nobody had time to compare your body to everyone else’s. In the crowded hallways of Winoka High, in front of every boy and girl she knew (and many she didn’t), her height and eyes stood out, her loud laugh stood out, and the silver streaks that had just shown up in her blonde hair this year
definitely
stood out.

The hair really bothered her. While her father had pointed out that the emerging color matched her eyes, she could not stand that her hair had begun to turn “old-lady gray” before she even turned fourteen. First she had tried dye, but the silver strands never seemed to hold the color. Then she considered wigs, but she felt ridiculous the first time she tried one on in a store—and of course, she knew a wig would never work on a soccer field. Nowadays, she just wore simple hats whenever she could. Threads of silver always seemed to wriggle out from under the brim.

Sometimes, when she looked in the mirror, Jennifer thought she looked like an older version of her mother.

The aroma of the lemon chicken chased away uncomfortable thoughts, and she began to eat.

“Your dad’s coming home tonight,” Elizabeth offered between bites of lo mein.

“Really.” The mention of her father irritated Jennifer. “Seems soon.”

“It’s been five days,” her mother pointed out.

“Like clockwork, I guess.”

“Perhaps you could show him that soccer trick.”

Jennifer let her fork fall loudly. “If he wanted to see it, he could have been at the game.”

“You know he goes when he can.”

“I know he goes on another business trip to nowhere, once or twice a month, and I never know if he’s going to be there or not.”

“It’s his job.”

“I thought being my father was also his job. It was the championship game.”

“He didn’t have a choice.”

“Sure he did. Every time he flies off on another trip, he has to move his own feet and step onto a plane.”

There was a pause. “It’s not like that.”

Jennifer pushed away the chicken. “I hate that you think it’s no big deal.”

Elizabeth pushed her own meal away. “Jennifer, honestly. When he’s around, all you do is tell him how irritating he is. Then he leaves, and you complain that he’s not around.”

“I’m sorry I can’t be a rational, emotionless robot like you, Mom. Cripes. Why can’t
you
be the one that leaves every couple weeks?”

Jennifer immediately saw from her mother’s startled reaction that she had crossed over several lines way too fast. She hadn’t meant the conversation to go like this. It had seemed so pleasant just a minute ago.

Before she could muster the will to apologize, her mother was up from the dinner table and dumping the rest of her dinner into the dog dish. Phoebe, a collie-shepherd mix with enormous black, pointed ears, came racing out of the living room at the sound of food hitting her bowl. Just like that, Phoebe was in the kitchen and her mother wasn’t.

By the time Jonathan Scales got home that evening, his daughter had immersed herself in charcoal sketches. Piles of chalky black-and-white drafts of angels, dragons, and faeries littered the floor of Jennifer’s bedroom. As he edged open the door, he pushed some aside.

“Hey, ace. Drawing up a storm? How’d the game go?”

Jennifer fixed her eyes on his. “For someone who claims to be my father, you do an amazing impersonation of someone who doesn’t know
anything
about
anyone
else around here.”

Jonathan sighed and closed the door.

***

Later that night, Jennifer and her mother were talking over leftovers. They were both smiling this time, but then suddenly Jennifer changed. She could feel her skin
moving
, and her face stretching. Glancing down at her hands, Jennifer saw the backs of them turn electric blue, and her fingernails grow rapidly and thicken. When she looked back up, her mother was staring at her—not with surprise or fear, but with calm hatred. The older woman’s features were dark and horrible. Her mortal enemy.

With lightning reflexes, she surged over the kitchen table, opened her jaws, and bit her mother’s head cleanly off with a bloody snap.

Then she woke up.

“So perhaps you could explain why you did that,” her father said. They were all in the kitchen the next morning, Saturday, eating breakfast. A chill autumn wind swung through the half-open window above the sink.

Jennifer had not said a word all morning. She was staring at her mother, who was sitting exactly where she had been during dinner, and in her dream. Elizabeth looked nothing like the vision of hatred and danger from the dream. Instead, she was pale, with her hair in a tortured mess.

Jennifer stole a look at her hands.

Still pink. And the fingernails were still short.

She tried to calm down. Her bad dream meant nothing beyond some guilt.

Speaking of which.

“Jennifer?” Her father’s irritation caught her attention.

“I’m sorry,” she offered kindly enough to her mother. “I lost my temper last night.”

There was no anger in Elizabeth’s eyes, just a hollow kind of sadness pulling lines of age tighter under the brows. Jennifer felt a knot tighten at the bottom of her throat. She chewed her tongue nervously.

“Really, Mom … I’m sorry.”

Her eyes did not change. “You should show your father how you won the game yesterday.”

Jennifer wondered at the change of subject but was glad enough of it. If her mother wanted to sweep this under the rug, fine. She shrugged and shoved her chair back. “Let’s go outside, Dad.”

“Hold on.” For a moment, Jennifer was certain that he would not honor the get-out-of-argument-free pass his wife had just offered. But instead of frowning, he pointed thoughtfully at the bowl of oranges on the table. “Toss me a couple of those oranges.”

Jennifer picked two—she was sure he couldn’t be thinking what
she
thought he might be thinking, was he?—and lobbed them to her father. Then she backed up into the open space by the patio door. The kitchen was large, but she had never really thought about jumping and flipping in here. The tile felt suddenly cold and slippery under her bare feet. “Right here?”

“Yep. Your target is the TV.”

With the patio door to her back, she turned her head left and looked through the large archway into the family room. The black screen of the forty-inch television at the far end reflected her surprised expression. “Dad, this is weird. Why don’t we just—”

“We can do it right here and forget about the awful things you said to your mother last night. Or we can go outside, which will be the last time you feel the sun shine on your face until next spring.” Her father said this in a perfectly pleasant, uniquely terrifying tone.

“Right.” She cleared her throat and crouched down a bit onto the balls of her feet. “Oranges away.”

He shifted one orange into his left hand and lobbed it gently underhand, over the table, and a bit too high.

Jennifer shifted her weight to her left foot, skipped a quarter step back, and sprang. The kitchen pitched about her—there was that old water stain in the corner of the ceiling—and she twisted in time to slam her foot into the orange, hurtling it into the living room. She heard a dull thud and landed firmly with her toes back on the tiles.

The fruit had impaled itself on the upper left corner of the mahogany television frame. Juice and seeds were dribbling down onto the eggshell carpet.

“Off the bar,” her father said with a smile. “Close, but no goal. Try again.”

This was silly. Jennifer looked to her mother for help. There was none there. “Fine. Keep ‘em coming, as fast as you like. I’ll kick the whole bowl of Florida goodness into the television, if that’s what you want.”

“Yes, you will. Make sure you get each one.”

Another orange went into the air. Jennifer watched it as it came in a bit lower than the first, and to her left. She quickly adjusted and flipped into the air again.

Halfway through the flip, she saw to her annoyance that her father had thrown another orange up after the first. She completed the kick and landed, then darted two steps forward to manage this new target. From the living room, she could hear the smash of glass as the first missile met its mark.

Undistracted, she twirled up to the second and … saw a third orange, which her father apparently had sent after the second one.
Jerk
, she hissed to herself, and resolved to send the second orange into a different piece of expensive entertainment equipment.
The stereo system would do nicely
. With a clean
thwack
her long foot sent the citrus rocket cruising higher than the last one.

She came down in plenty of time to adjust to the third, which was lower and close to her original position.
Testing me
, she guessed, and therefore decided upon the lamp on the end table to the left of the living room couch.

A moment later, she was back on her feet. The living room was a disaster—a shattered lamp, a cracked digital display on the stereo amplifier, and a television set that desperately needed a new cathode tube. The cloying odor of oranges filled the air.

She surveyed the devastation with satisfaction, and then looked at her parents. They had the oddest faces.

“What?” she asked, a bit crossly. “You told me to kick the darn oranges, so I kicked them. I’m sorry I hit the other stuff, but what was with throwing three oranges one right after the other like that?”

“Your father did throw three oranges…” admitted her mother, in a very slow and measured tone.

Jennifer looked at her father. Jonathan Scales did not say a word. She had almost never seen him this afraid, not like this, not since she chased a kickball into the street in front of a car when she was eight.

Her mother went on. “…But he didn’t throw the oranges one at a time. He threw them all at once.”

They all stared at each other for a few seconds. When her father finally said something, it was not at all what Jennifer expected.

“It’s coming faster than we thought,” he whispered, more to himself than anyone else.

After being exiled gently but firmly to her room, Jennifer could not hear much of the conversation that followed downstairs. But that didn’t stop her from trying.

Coming faster
? What’s
coming faster
?
The oranges
?

She heard snippets and phrases—“rapid change” and “crescent moon” came up—but her parents were not careless enough to speak above harsh whispers.

After a few minutes of this, she began to feel resentful. Why were they talking about her, without her in the room, when they knew she was just upstairs? Wasn’t this about her? Wasn’t this
her
life?

A rap at her window startled her. She guessed who it was before she turned to look; only Susan was both daring and nimble enough to climb the slippery trellis on the outside wall. Indeed it was her best friend’s cascading black hair, bright blue eyes, and genuine smile on the other side of the glass. Jennifer crossed her room and lifted the lower pane.

“Hey, Flipper! Bounce any balls off your tail, lately?”

“Ha-ha. I have laughed. What are you doing here?” Jennifer was relieved to hear her friend making light of the kick everyone had found so strange yesterday.

“Bunch of us are going out to Terry’s farm today, do up a bonfire, roast some apples and stuff. You coming?”

Jennifer’s shoulders sagged. “I don’t know. Mom and Dad are freaking out on me; I’ll probably be stuck here for a while. How long will you be?”

“Just a few hours. We might go to the movies after, though.” Some brown curls lifted gently by the breeze floated through the window as Susan tilted her head. “Your parents are freaking out, huh? About that kick?”

“I suppose.”

“What, they think you’re on drugs?”

“I don’t think so.” Jennifer sat down on her bed. “They’re whispering weird stuff about something coming.”

Her friend giggled. “Puberty?”

“Ugh, grow up! No, something else. I have no idea. I’ve never seen them like this. Normally, they don’t seem to care
what
I do.”

Susan was suddenly thoughtful. “Um, you’re not
actually
…? I mean, you’re weren’t
on
anything during the…”