Meeting (15 page)

Last year Stephanie had been a Rapunzel princess out of her tower, and Maya had been her ghostly friend and companion. Maya had covered her face with white grease paint and used dark greasepaint to make circles around her eyes, add hollows to her cheeks, and blacken her lips. She had found several lengths of pale gauzy material to drape over black jeans and a black shirt, and she had practiced ghost noises. Her mother helped her safety-pin the gauze to her other clothes so it stayed in place. She draped a big piece over her head.

Stephanie had had that crazy wig, curly blonde hair down to her ankles, and she wore a dress with lots of sequins that she and Maya had glued to it in a pattern Maya had designed. She put rhinestone star clips in her fake hair, and she carried a magic wand with a glowing crystal at the tip.

Her cheeks had looked gaunt. Princess makeup couldn’t disguise her weight loss. Steph smiled so much, and seemed so cheerful, that Maya could almost pretend the chemo didn’t make her too nauseated to eat for three days after each treatment. Maya sat with Steph in her bedroom after school on days when Steph was too sick to come to school and talked about what they had learned that day, and played cards with her, and drew her pictures, and Steph just made up stories and smiled, so Maya thought maybe things weren’t that bad. Steph went through periods between treatments where she seemed like her old self.

Last Halloween, they had started out strong, walking the same neighborhood they had toured every Halloween since they were three and clinging to their parents’ hands. They knew which houses were likely to give full-size candy bars, which ones gave you a toothbrush instead of a treat, which people were likely to dress up to answer the door for trick-or-treaters. Maya liked saving the best houses for last.

But that night, she and Stephanie had only gone two blocks when Stephanie faltered. “I’m sorry, my shady friend,” Stephanie had said. She stopped, holding onto the hood of a parked car. “I’m tired already. I know that’s not very princess-y of me.”

“We can’t stop now. The Halvorsons. The Flynns. The Harrises,” Maya said.

Stephanie was breathing loudly. “I’m sorry,” she said again. She turned away and leaned against the car, hanging onto the roof as though it were the only thing keeping her on her feet. “I’m sorry, Maya. Just now the magic left me.”

All that candy uncollected, Maya had thought, visions of Snickers and Milky Ways and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups dancing through her mind, and then she sighed. “Okay,” she said. “Can you make it home?”

Stephanie didn’t speak for a little while. The cool night was quiet except for her heavy breathing. Candles flickered in pumpkins on a nearby porch, and distant trick-or-treaters were running silhouettes under an orange streetlight down at the corner. Woodsmoke flavored the air.

“I think I better call Daddy,” Steph said, and got out her cell phone.

After the call, Maya put her arm around Stephanie’s waist and helped her over to the lawn in front of the Collins’ house. There was a bench there. Steph sat down, hugging her loot bag, her head down and the Rapunzel hair shielding her. Maya sat beside her and stared toward the street. When Steph started to sniffle, Maya took her hand. “It’s all right,” she whispered. “It’s all right. It’s all right.”

For the first time, Maya had asked herself,
What if she doesn’t get better?

Stephanie had lived until spring.

Rimi stroked Maya’s back as Maya sat with her pencil tip digging into the picture of Stephanie. Steph stared out of the page at Maya. She looked like she had before the cancer diagnosis, smiling and healthy, full of mischief.
Find your secret self
, she had said more than once, and Maya heard her saying it again.

Am I your secret self?
Rimi asked.

I don’t know how secret you are when a house full of people know about you
,
plus Peter
, thought Maya.
And anyway, you’re your own self.

My secret self keeps changing,
Maya thought.
Stephanie had lots of secret selves, and mine were always boring compared to hers. She thought up the best stories.

Stories are everywhere
, Rimi thought.
What story do you like right now?

I like the story of a girl meeting an alien and being best friends
, Maya thought. She felt a pang. Best friends. She and Steph had sworn they were forever friends. Steph wouldn’t have wanted Maya not to have any other friends, though. Magic users and aliens. If only Steph could have been here—

Maya straightened and laid her pencil on the table.
Let’s go to a store later and see what kind of secret selves they’re selling this year.
Usually Maya’s mother helped her assemble a costume, and she was sure they could do it again this year, but it was only four days until Halloween, and Mom hadn’t even mentioned it yet.

Maybe she was remembering last year and waiting for Maya to say something.

Columba sliced the loaf of banana bread onto a wooden board and set it on the table between Maya and where Dr. Porta was mixing up her concoction. “Sapphira, what on earth are you making?” she asked Dr. Porta.

Maya helped herself to three slices of bread. It was so moist it didn’t even leave crumbs, really. Anything that fell off, Maya could pick up by pressing her finger to it. Sweet, soft, and delicious, banana and cinnamon and ginger. “Oh, this is so good,” Maya said.

“Thanks, Maya. Columba, I’m working on a visibility potion,” said Dr. Porta. She took a pinch of something bright yellow-green from one of her pouches, rubbed it between finger and thumb, and dropped it into the mix. She stirred the mixture with the glass rod, then dug something that looked like clear jelly from a pocket of her satchel and droobled half a handful into the mix. Faint blue flames sprang up from the mixture, and a smell like lemons and burnt sugar came from it. Dr. Porta stirred harder. The flames winked out. “Okay,” she said.

“Are you sure that’s what you made?” Columba said. “I don’t remember doing it like that in class.”

“It’s my own recipe. Works better than the one we learned.” She dug a golden tablespoon from the satchel and dipped up a spoonful of the mixture. It looked like clear jelly with dark veins in it, and it smelled a little like lemon pie filling. “Here, Maya.”

“You first.” Maya scooted her chair away from Dr. Porta.

“Um?” Dr. Porta frowned at the wobbly jelly, then put it in her mouth. She pulled out the bare spoon and swallowed. A halo of gemlike golden lights flared around her. “Eh?” Dr. Porta reached for some of the blinking gleams. They darted away from her fingers while maintaining their connection with the other glittering beads of light that surrounded her like a vertical equator. “What on earth?”

Columba laughed just as the teakettle whistled. She took the kettle off the burner, emptied the teapot of the water that had warmed it, put several teabags with their strings twisted together into the pot, and poured hot water on them. Then she turned back to Dr. Porta, who was still chasing the lights. “Don’t you know your own signature?”

“This is my signature?”

“Or part of it, anyway.” Columba made a triangle with her fingers and thumbs and spoke a soft chant, then looked through her frame at Dr. Porta. “You’ve left out the other colors. Interesting.”

“Nola Columba, what are you doing?” Maya asked.

Columba turned toward Maya, still peering at the triangle she had made of index fingers and thumbs. “Whoa! Wow! That’s what Rimi looks like?”

“Huh?” Maya asked.

Columba dropped her hands. “It’s a viewing portal for seeing truths not apparent,” she said.

“Could you teach me that?”

Columba frowned. “It depends on what abilities you were born with,” she said. “Has Sarutha done a power inventory on you yet?”

“I don’t know. She asked me questions and wrote things down, but I’m not sure it was a power inventory.”

“Well, sooner or later, someone should do one. I’ll check with Sarutha. If she hasn’t done it, I will.”

“Columba, you try this stuff. I can’t do a viewing portal. This is the only way I know how to see someone else’s powers.” Dr. Porta spooned up more of her mixture. She extended it to Columba.

“What the heck.” Columba took the spoon and ate what was on it. “Wah! Nice flavor,” she said. Tiny angels of manycolored light flickered into sight around her. Or maybe they weren’t angels, but tiny glowing lilies, foxgloves, and upended irises, or just some other interesting shapes and colors. They spun and danced around Columba in all directions. Maya sketched as quickly as she could, challenging herself to draw what was in front of her instead of trying to make it conform to something she already knew. She didn’t understand what any of these things revealed about Columba, let alone what Dr. Porta’s surround of light beads meant, but someone might know. She wished she had brought her colored pencils. She was sure the colors carried information, too. She wrote in color names next to the shapes she sketched.

Columba poured three mugs of tea and set them on the table. Her flower-pixie shapes fluttered here and there as she did it, some of them lighting on the table or the teapot, some hovering, and some racing each other around Columba.

“So is this your signature?” Dr. Porta asked Columba.

Columba looked down through her triangled fingers and thumbs, sang a short song, and frowned. “Most of it. You’ve left off the shadow end.”

“Hmm. I need to tinker with the formula some more. But for now . . . Maya?” Dr. Porta offered her a spoonful of the jelly.

Here goes
, Maya thought, and ate it before Rimi could comment or object. The flavor was sharp and sweet, lemon with overtones of strawberry, something else she didn’t recognize, and just a hint of pepper. Rimi slipped a thread of herself into Maya’s mouth before Maya swallowed. As Maya swallowed she felt Rimi withdraw and sensed that Rimi had tasted the stuff, too, but in a different way.

Interesting
, Rimi thought.
New kind of power in it. I want.

Rimi appeared, forced out of shadow into bright color, a solid blanket of blue, silver, gray, and green wrapping around Maya, leaving only her face bare, with spikes and waves rising up here and there, and parts of her lapping across the floor in thin rivulets.

“
Kiri kara!
” Dr. Porta said. “So big and solid-looking! And spread out. Is she there like that all the time?”

Columba peered through triangle fingers, then lowered them, then lifted them to look again. “Yep, that’s what I just saw. Weird.”

“So big,” Dr. Porta repeated, staring at the floor, where Rimi rivers in blending shades of greens, grays, blues, and yellows snaked off in different directions. She leaned over and touched a rivulet near her foot. Her finger sank through it. “Hardly even a shiver,” she muttered, and leaned closer to look at the parts of Rimi draped over Maya’s back.

Maya hugged herself, feeling the snuggle of Rimi against her, as she almost always did. Then she spread her arms and looked down at herself, enveloped in layers of colorful Rimi. The visual representation gave Maya strange feelings. She had drawn pictures of how she imagined Rimi would look, and this Rimi was different, which made her wonder which Rimi was real. She closed her eyes, feeling the Rimi she always felt. It reassured her. She opened her eyes again and set her mind on memorize, but it was hard to memorize, the way Rimi kept shifting color and shape, and with so much of her behind Maya, or too close to see.

Dr. Porta pulled a digital camera from the satchel and shot picture after picture.

Maya stood and held her hands out, turned them up and down. Colors changed across Rimi’s prickly surface, and parts of her retracted and expanded, stretched and shrank. Violet flared, followed by orange and red, then different shades of green and blue and some brown. Rimi’s pseudopods reached out to the pale orchids in Columba’s living room and seemed to be sipping from them. Other extensions branched off to visit other flowers.

A slender Rimi tentacle slid across the table to the bowl containing Dr. Porta’s mixture, sneaking up to it on the side away from where Dr. Porta and Columba stood studying Maya and Rimi. Its tip slid up the side of the bowl and into the mixture. Maya felt Rimi tasting the mixture even more thoroughly than she had when it was in Maya’s mouth, sorting out individual ingredients and assigning them descriptors, code words that let her think about them in useful ways.
Song stuff
, Rimi thought.
Can’t unassemble or rebuild that part. Forgot to record it when she was doing it. I wonder if we can get her to make more so we can catch that part. Could you sing it? I don’t know. Your singing doesn’t seem to work the way the Janus House people’s singing does.

Could you make this?
Maya wondered.

Don’t know where some parts come from,
Rimi thought, withdrawing from the bowl.
Know their
scentastes
now, but not sure where to find them. Plus, song component is important.

Maya wondered what Rimi would do with the potion if she made more. She raised her arm and thought,
Can you make a hand without being attached to me?

The forest-and-olive-green part of Rimi circling Maya’s arm stretched out and made a hand of its own, with eight fingers and a big thumb. The fingers wiggled. The thumb flexed. The hand made a fist, then opened and waved at Maya. Maya laughed.
Can you pick stuff up with that?

Rimi reached out and picked up a sugar bowl from the kitchen counter beside Columba. “Whoa,” Columba said, while Dr. Porta kept shooting. Rimi brought the sugar bowl to the table and scooped a couple of spoonfuls of sugar into Maya’s tea.

“Whoa,” Columba said again. “That’s—”

“Wait a sec. She can lift things?” Dr. Porta said.

“Evidently,” said Columba.

“The equivalent of levitation. This means—” She shot a picture of the sugar bowl and Rimi’s spoon handling.