Krymzyn (The Journals of Krymzyn Book 1) (7 page)

“Keepers,” Sash says, “with two of our children.”

The Keepers stop halfway up the hill, but the children keep sprinting towards us. The girl’s stride is long and sleek, her speed stunning as she races up the hill. Her face reminds me of my sister at that age as I get a closer look. The boy is wilder, with less control in his young gait, although it’s strong and steady. Fierce determination flows from their amber eyes.

“I thought everyone spends Communal alone,” I say.

“Not the children,” Sash replies.

They stop a few feet in front of us and both quickly bow. Sash nods her head, and I smile to them. They stare at me with a mixture of curiosity and distrust.

“The Teller is well balanced,” Sash says to the children. “There’s no need for fear.”

“In my world,” I say, “I compete in something we call cross-country, a race of speed across hills. Both of you would be
champions
.
”

“
Champions
?” the girl asks after the word dissipates.

“Winners of the race,” I answer. “Those who finish first.”

“I believe Chase the Teller is praising your speed,” Sash explains.

“Yes,” I say, smiling. “That’s exactly what Chase the Teller is doing.”

Both kids bow to me in obvious gratitude, glance at one another, and suddenly fling their bodies to the ground. They cross their arms over their chests, stiffen their legs, and roll away down the hill. I’m surprised by the lack of smiles on their faces or laughter filling the air, just the continued look of determination. It’s a test to them, not a whimsy as it would be on Earth.

The girl is the first to reach a flat area partially down the side of the steep hill. She leaps to her feet and bolts towards the Keepers with no stagger at all from dizziness. The boy sprawls onto the flat ground, catching himself with fingers dug into the grass just before he slides off the ledge to another steep part of the hill. He pulls himself forward, springs into a crouch, narrows his eyes, and sprints after the girl. When both children reach the Keepers, the four walk down the hill away from us.

“I believe Tela, the girl,” Sash says to me, “will be a Traveler when her purpose is revealed. She has great speed and a strong mind.”

“Traveler?” I ask.

“Travelers are the fastest of all in Krymzyn. They take things across the Delta and travel between the Delta and the Mount.”

“What about the boy?”

“He’s quite brave,” she answers. “Cavu is a bit reckless, but he already demonstrates mature respect for our trees. He has a tremendous desire to protect the Delta. I believe he’ll be a Watcher, although I don’t know for certain yet.”

I study Sash’s face and eyes. “Do you know things before they happen?” I ask, pretty sure I already know the answer to the question.

“Some things,” she says. When she looks down at the bottom of the hill again, a shadow of sadness falls over her face. “I’m shown visions. They’re like glimpses from waking dreams. While Tela rolled down the hill, I saw streaks of blue in her hair—the color of a Traveler. I know when Darkness is near. I can feel it inside me. Sometimes, I see something directly in front of me that will soon happen as though it’s happening in that instant, and I can change the outcome before it actually occurs.”

“Do other people here see these things?”

“No,” she says, shaking her head. “Only me.”

“Is it hard on you?” I ask, reacting to the pain evident on her face.

Turning her face to me, she seems surprised by my question. “You’re the only person to ever ask me that.”

“I don’t mean to be
nosy
—too personal,” I say.

“I don’t mind,” she replies. “It feels right to talk to you about these things. It’s not what I’m shown that hurts me. It’s what I’m not shown—things I could have changed. I don’t always understand the emotions I feel from your world, and that’s even more difficult. I don’t even have names to go with some of those feelings. They can be overwhelming at times. No one here understands them, so it helps me when you’re here.”

We hold each other with our eyes for several seconds. I suddenly feel closer to her than I’ve felt to anyone in my life. She’s reaching inside me again. I want to take her in my arms and hold her, comfort her, and share the feelings I have for her. But she’s already told me that physical contact doesn’t exist here.

“I’d like to
kiss
you,” I say.

“What’s
kiss
?” she asks.

I immediately decide that a verbal explanation can’t begin to do justice to the meaning of the word or the way it feels. As I think about it, I decide that it may just sound pointless to her. But I don’t want to let this moment pass, so I slowly move my face to hers and gently kiss her lips. She doesn’t return my kiss, but she also doesn’t pull away. When I lean back, her face wrinkles with confusion.

“Why did you do that?” she asks.

“That’s a
kiss
,” I say.

“What’s the purpose of a
kiss
?”

“It’s like when I touched your hand. It’s another way two people nurture one another where I come from, but it shows you like them more than just as a friend.”

“It seems strange,” she muses. “Is that to show how you feel about me?”

“It’s to share how we feel about each other. But if you don’t feel that way, I won’t do it again.”

Her face inches forward, slowly closing half the distance between us. She stops and stares into my eyes. I move the other half, softly pressing my lips against hers. Sash awkwardly returns a brief kiss this time, and then we kiss again. I open my mouth slightly and slide my tongue between her lips. She hesitates, unsure, but does the same, and our tongues gently intertwine.

As our kiss ends, I wrap my arms around her and hold her close to me. She hesitates again, obviously not knowing what a hug is, but then she slips her hands around my waist. We clutch each other tightly until I feel a deep sorrow come over me. I pull away to look into her amber eyes.

“Sash,” I say, shaking my head, “I don’t think I’m coming back to Krymzyn again.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The reason I come here is a growth inside my head. It’s called a
tumor
.” I point to the spot on the back of my head. “That’s why you knew I was in pain when I was younger. Right now, in my world, some people are about to take the
tumor
out of my head. When it’s gone, I won’t come back. I want to come back and see you and spend time with you, but I can’t control that.”

The amber from her eyes streams into mine. I feel her completely inside me, sharing my own sadness. She leans to me and gently kisses my lips.

“Chase,” she whispers, “you will return.”

When her lips touch mine again, I feel dizzy. My head starts to spin, my hands tremble against her body, and I close my eyes. Darkness from inside consumes my vision.

I must have drawn twenty pictures of Sash and twenty landscapes of the view from the Tall Hill while propped up in my hospital bed during the days of recovery. My mom never left my side, just like after the surgery when I was twelve. My dad and sister spent every minute they could with me. Connor and his family visited every day I stayed in the hospital.

Despite the biopsy revealing a benign tumor, my doctor recommended chemotherapy just in case there were undetectable traces of the growth left that could lead to cancer. After the surgical wounds healed, three weeks of radiation treatments were immediately followed by the start of chemo.

When each of my chemo treatments ended, I stayed in the hospital for a few hours of monitoring prior to being released. I was wheeled into a common room filled with toys, video games, and DVDs in the children’s cancer wing. After my second treatment, I saw a boy, maybe eleven years old, with sandy hair and green eyes, sitting alone in a wheelchair. The back of his head was shaved, and he stared despondently at the floor.

“Hey, I’m Chase,” I said after getting out of my chair and walking over to him.

“I’m Davis,” he said quietly, looking up at me.

“Are you here alone?”

“My mom had to pick up my little brother,” he replied.

“Me too,” I said. “My mom had to get my sister. What are you here for?”

“I had a brain tumor,” he answered, “and I have cancer.” The despair in his voice betrayed the brave expression on his face.

“That sucks,” I said, resting a hand on his shoulder. “I’m really sorry.”

“You have it too?” he asked, sounding like he was afraid of my answer.

“I had a benign tumor in my head. My second one in five years.”

“I’m really glad you don’t have cancer,” he replied.

“Thank you. Me too. Hey, feel like playing?” I asked, motioning my head to the video game box.

“Sure,” he answered with a smile, so I wheeled him over to the monitor and set up the game.

I’d planned on letting him win, but that strategy quickly proved to be unnecessary as he thoroughly kicked my ass over several rounds of a fantasy warrior battle. Little things like brain cancer and chemo couldn’t stop the flurry of his fingers moving from button to button on the controller and his expert steering of the miniature joystick.

“Do you want to see something cool?” I asked when I’d had enough of his virtual thrashing.

“Sure,” he replied.

I walked to where my backpack was lying on the ground, took out my sketch pad, and returned to the seat beside his wheelchair.

“Did you ever have hallucinations before they removed your tumor?” I asked Davis.

“No, not really.”

“Did you have seizures?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’d get a really bad headache and see, like, bright lights.”

“Did you have other hallucinations?” I asked.

“No, why?”

I opened my drawing tablet and held it in front of him. “This is where I went and what I saw during my seizures.”

His eyes widened and his mouth opened with amazement. A smile of wonder gradually took over his face as I turned the pages of my sketch pad. I explained each full-color drawing of the Krymzyn landscape, the Disciples, sustaining trees in motion, the waterfall inside a cavern, and pages and pages of Sash. He jerked backwards at one sketch, shivering slightly as the smile left his face—a reaction to the detailed depiction of a Murkovin.

“Those are incredible!” he exclaimed when we finished looking through the tablet. “That should be, like, a video game or something.”

“Thanks,” I said. “It’s really cool when I go there.”

“But it’s just a hallucination?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s real. I know it’s real.”

I didn’t show him one drawing that was buried on the last page. It just felt too personal to me. I often looked at the close-up portrait of Sash when I was alone. Her facial expression was exactly the same one she’d had after disclosing she’d seen me in her Vision of the Future. At the bottom of the page, I didn’t write the last three words she’d spoken to me before I’d left. Instead, I drew a question mark.

What I always wondered when I looked at that question mark, knowing that she knew things about the future, was
When would I return?
A week? A month? Ten years? I had no way of knowing and never had a chance to ask her. The only thing I knew was that a brain tumor was somehow the trigger to send me there. Unless a new tumor developed, I didn’t think I’d go back.

As clumps of our hair fell out in the weeks that followed, Davis and I shaved the rest of our heads together. The backs of our skulls were already bare from our surgeries. We spent hours playing video games after our treatments, and I taught him how to really draw.

I learned that he stayed in the hospital twenty-four hours a day while they tried to eradicate the aggressive cancer spreading through his brain. His parents and little brother spent as much time as they could with him, but he still had hours of solitude each day. I began going to the hospital most afternoons when school let out, even after my round of chemo treatments were completed.

My driver’s license had been suspended because of the seizures and surgery. On days my mom couldn’t take me to the hospital to visit Davis, I walked to a bus stop, transferred to the subway, and then walked the rest of the way.

When weekends came, I’d sometimes spend an entire day with him, taking walks outside, tossing a ball around when he felt up to it, or just playing games. Even when his family was there, they didn’t mind my presence. They knew that my own medical history, surviving a tumor when I was his age, created a sense of security in Davis.

Whenever we were alone, he asked me to tell him stories about Krymzyn. We’d look through my drawings while I shared most of what happened to me there. My short-term memory was sporadic at best, a frightening by-product of chemotherapy that lingered for many months. I started writing down every detail of my experiences in that world, starting with my first trip there when I was twelve. The journal served as my reminder, a way to refresh my mind, in case I ever did return.

*             *             *

“Hey, guys,” I called out to a group of kids from my school. Connor and I were hanging out at the mall on the first Sunday after school had let out for the summer.

“Hi, Chase,” a girl named Stephanie replied. “Hi, Connor.”

Trim with blond hair and blue eyes, she was the consummate California girl. Stephanie was at the mall with a group of her friends, a mix of guys and girls from our school. We all stopped in front of each other and quickly said hello. I knew most of them pretty well, and while I’d describe them as friends, they weren’t close friends.

“How are you feeling?” Stephanie asked me. The pity in her eyes was obvious. Her reserved body language made her look uncomfortable standing beside me or, I don’t know, maybe that was just my imagination.

“I’m doing great,” I said enthusiastically.

She quickly scanned my body, her eyes starting at my feet and rising up to my face. Dressed in cargo shorts and a T-shirt, both baggy due to my weight loss, I know I looked like the walking dead. My healthy tan was gone, my muscles had suffered severe atrophy, and coarse, brown hair was just beginning to grow from my bald head. Like menacing racing stripes, two distinct surgical scars lined the back of my skull.

“I’m really glad to hear that,” she replied. “You look like you’re doing better.” She didn’t sound very convincing.

“What are you guys up to?” Connor asked the group.

“We just saw a movie,” Stephanie said. “Now we’re going to Justin’s to go swimming. What about you?”

“We’re headed to see a movie,” Connor answered.

Another group of kids about our age weaved through the bag-laden shoppers strolling by us. They weren’t from our school and we didn’t know them. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a few of them staring at me. When I snapped my head towards them, they looked away.

“We have to get going,” Stephanie said. “We’re kind of in a hurry. You guys have fun.”

We all exchanged good-byes before Stephanie and her friends turned and walked through the crowded mall. Stephanie turned her head over her shoulder, looking straight into Connor’s eyes.

“A few of us are going to the beach on Thursday. If you want to go, just text me.”

Connor didn’t answer as she looked away. I clenched my jaw to keep my own face blank, but the sting of rejection burned my eyes.

“They’re assholes,” Connor said, resting his hand on my shoulder. “You don’t need them.”

“It’s just so weird,” I complained. “She used to flirt with me all the time. Now it’s like she and her friends think if they’re anywhere near me, they’ll get cancer or something.”

“You know who your real friends are,” he replied firmly.

He was right. The track team had all been incredibly supportive of me. I’d gone to every meet through the spring to cheer all of them on. It was the only real activity I’d felt up to, other than visiting Davis. The team never once distanced themselves from me or looked at me with pity in their eyes.

Connor and I had a small group of close friends that had been together for years. Many of them had gone to the same K–8 school we had attended and were now at the same high school. They did everything they could to support and encourage me, but they also tried to make sure I felt as normal as possible. The last thing I wanted was for people to feel sorry for me, making me feel different, and pity sure wouldn’t help my psychological recovery. But I’d seen and felt plenty of the distant treatment that Stephanie and her friends threw my way.

“I guess I do,” I said. “It just gets to me sometimes. Like I don’t already have enough to deal with?”

“You can’t let it bother you,” he insisted. “Your real friends always have your back.”

“Thanks, Connor.”

We slapped our right hands together, gripped them firmly, and pulled each other into a tight hug.

*             *             *

The next Saturday morning, exactly four months after my surgery, I was getting dressed in my room when I heard the phone ring. My mom was about to drive me to the hospital to spend the day with Davis and his parents. His prognosis hadn’t changed much over the months that had passed since I’d first met him.

The door to my bedroom swung open a minute later, revealing my mom’s face. Her eyes were red and tears stained her cheeks. I didn’t need to hear the words that were going to come out of her mouth. I knew what she was about to say.

“Davis is gone,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. “Last night in his sleep.”

She walked to me and reached out her arms. I sank into them as my stomach knotted and tears clouded my eyes. With my face buried in her neck, I was unable to contain the waves of excruciating sorrow and grief.

I carried a thin twelve-by-sixteen-inch brown cardboard box in my hand when we went to his funeral. I’d barely slept for the past four days, working on the painting well into the early morning hours. I’d had just enough time to dry mount, matte, and frame the picture before we left home for the service. The close-up portrait of Davis—a beaming smile on his face, sparkle of life in his green eyes, and a full head of sandy-blond hair—was exactly how I wanted to remember him.

At the cemetery, his mom, dad, and little brother stood across the grave from me and my family. The casket had already been lowered into the hole in the ground, a pyramid of flowers at the head. A large circle of people watched as a handful of dirt was tossed into the grave.

I looked at his mother. Light glistened on a single tear that fell off her face from the streams running down her cheeks. As though the world slammed into slow motion, my eyes followed the tear for what felt like thirty seconds, until it splashed on a blade of grass at her feet. A flash of crimson glowed around the green edges, but I knew that was just my imagination. I walked around the grave, slipped the frame from the box, and handed the painting to his father.

“I want you to have this,” I said. “This is how he always looked to me.”

The family all smiled at the painting while tears continued to fall from their eyes. His mother reached her arms around me and held me close, her chest heaving against mine.

“I hope you know how much he cherished the time you spent with him,” she whispered hoarsely in my ear.

“I did too,” I said. “Every second.”

I didn’t tell her that I’d learned a lot about life from that really cool, incredibly brave little eleven-year-old. Like that sometimes wonderful things happen to assholes who don’t deserve it, while shitty, horrendous things happen to really good people. No matter how you want to spin it, no matter what God you do or don’t believe in, the reality is that life isn’t fair and never will be. That’s just the way it is, and all you can do is suck it up and accept it and go on with your life. But that doesn’t mean it won’t hurt sometimes.