Rewrite Redemption (10 page)

Devon’s just rocking out with this stupid grin on his face. Then suddenly, he slips.

And the grin disappears.

Desperately, he flails, trying to regain balance. But those stupid boots are tangled in the Christmas lights. He falls backward, only he falls up, and out like a slow-motion back flip off the diving board. As he drops over the side of the house, I see his face.

He’s looking at me like what the…?

Then I look down and notice I’m holding the end of the string of lights he tripped over, and it’s pulled tight. And I hear the only sound in the dream…just a sickening crunch.

Then nothing.

But off in the distance, there was a muffled scream…low, guttural, and strained. And it took a moment before I realized—the scream was mine.

I bolted up, heart pounding, hoping beyond hope, that I didn’t wake my parents. I cracked my bedroom door and waited, listening hard—nothing. I’d lucked out; saved by the tranqs they took to make it through the night. The house was as quiet as a tomb.

I splashed water on my face and pulled on some sweats and a long sleeve tee. After the nightmare, my house was giving me the creeps. I had to get out of there. I needed to see some signs of life. I’d take anything, a kitchen light, a passing car, a dog barking—anything that showed there was life outside this mausoleum. Grabbing tunes and running shoes, I crept down the hall and out the back door. It was a dumb thing to do, but I did it anyway.

I was desperate.

The night was crisp and clear, and I told myself I needed a good run. I’d mapped her address out earlier that evening…a few miles away. What could it hurt to get a little closer? Maybe just close enough to feel the calm. I wasn’t doing so well without my redwood and I needed relief. Like an addict, I’d had a taste of the good stuff. And now, I wanted more.

Adjusting my earbuds, I broke into an easy jog to release the nightmare kinks. I cued up one of my favorite running tunes. I turned the volume up high. Stopping at a street corner, I did a few slow stretches, breathing deep, testing my reserve, testing my patience. I sent out my radar…still too far away.

So I broke in to a real run.

As feet pounded pavement, the nightmare terror drained out my pores, dissipating into the wind. I gave it everything I had, faster and faster, until I was flying down the middle of the street. My muscles burned, but I didn’t let up the pace. I wanted to pound the past into the cement. I wanted to stomp out the injustice of my wretched life.

I wanted to run and never stop running.

By the time I got to her street, my heart was thumping out of my chest. Searching for house numbers, I slowed to a walk, trying to cool down. Streetlights cast an amber glow on the pavement around me and in little spots every twenty yards or so. Down the block, the light of one illuminated the branches of a beautiful maple. I headed for that one. I was right.

Half way there—I
felt
it.

It washed over me like anesthesia, numbing the bad, and smoothing out the tangles of my mind. My heart slowed and my breathing normalized. My shoulders relaxed. And I would swear that the oxygen level in the air about doubled. I took a deep breath, and like a starving man to food, I followed the scent. 

The battered mailbox said, Jones.

The only light inside was the intermittent flicker of a TV in the front room. The house was quiet. I crept up the lawn, under the maple, keeping low. Lying back on the lush grass, I stretched out with my hands behind my head. And for the first time in a long while, I relaxed completely.

The tree itself was strong. I sensed its power in the roots buried deep beneath me. But the steady flow of calm came from somewhere in back. At that moment, I didn’t care where it came from. I didn’t question it. I just wanted to bathe in the energy and forget about my life for a while. I lay there soaking it up for over an hour, no music needed. Then I fell into the most peaceful sleep I’d had since the accident.

 “A.J., you okay?’ Lex asked, grabbing my pack and tossing it aside. She pulled me up off the floor and settled me on the sofa.

“I’m fine, boring trip, nothing happened,” I answered, shaking off the dizziness.

“Well, the
return
wasn’t boring, at least not for us,” said Ipod. “Guess what—”

“Ehhh! I said give her a minute.” Lex scowled at Ipod and handed me a glass of water.

Ipod sat ramrod straight, his face electric, as if he’d just hacked something monumental or hit level nine in Portal 2. He fiddled with his glasses and beamed at me expectantly. Something was up.

“What’s with him?” I asked Lex.

 “Jeez, Louise…what are you, five?” she asked Ipod. “You can’t wait two minutes? Okay, tell her already.”

“A.J., we
saw
you,” he blurted. “We saw you do it this time. It was so freaking tight—off the hinges! You just, well, materialized—a total beam-me-up-Scotty. We were waiting, tracking down info on the new guy, and we heard this shooshing sound—”

“Like a whoosh,” Lex interrupted, waving her hands trying to reproduce it. “Soft—”

”Yeah, really soft,” said Ipod, “if we’d had the TV on, we’d have missed it.”

“And it just whooshed…”

“Yeah, and so we turned around…”

“We turned around, and the air was all shimmery and…and you just—”

“You just freaking appeared out of nowhere,” Ipod finished. Then he bounced on the sofa into a standing position. “My mind is officially blown.”

I didn’t know what to think. I’d never morphed in in front of them before. It’s as if something senses if someone’s there. If they were home, I usually returned outside by the trunk. “This is big,” I said.

“Yeah, right?” agreed Ipod. He looked at Lex, who nodded. Then he bit his lip and looked right at me. “Okay…wait for it. We got it on my phone.” 

It took me a minute. “Shut. Up. Seriously?”

“Seriously,” Lex said, elbowing Ipod. “Hellooo…the phone?”

“Oh, right, right,” Ipod said, pulling it out of his pocket. “Luckily, I was holding it and…okay, there’s the corner you woke up in…empty…see? Okay…wait for it.”

He held it up and pressed play. The air in the corner seemed to shimmer. Then I just faded in slowly, curled up on the floor around my pack, looking like I was asleep. How surreal.

“I’ve been living this my entire life,” I said. “You’d think it wouldn’t be shocking. But it kinda is—you know—seeing it on video.”

“Exactly,” Lex said. “Ipod flipped out.”

“I did not. I was just—” Ipod began.

“You practically peed your pants,” Lex said, laughing.

“Yeah, right,” he said, dropping down on the sofa. “Just because some of us believe in science and are a
little
blown away when something defies it. I wonder why it never happened before, I mean in front of us. Something’s changed.” 

“No duh,” I said, “I don’t mind
you
seeing. But the change is disconcerting.” Suddenly, I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. The danger of popping in and out in front of people was my biggest fear. I didn’t mind Lex and Ipod. But if I disappeared in front of the
wrong
people, life as I knew it would be over.

I had this scary, reoccurring worry of being locked up in a government laboratory and experimented on by freako scientists. It haunted me whenever anything out of the ordinary happened with my strangeness. It really creeped me out. I walked out to the porch, trying to shake it from my mind.

And the moment I stepped out the door, I felt calmer almost instantly. The scary thought just faded away. It was as though there was something new in the night air, as if I was touching the energy I’d picked up at school. Not the intense hit, just the smooth, warm feeling. It shimmered over me. I sighed.

“You okay, A.J.?” Lex asked, following me out to the porch.

“Strangely so,” I said. “A minute ago, I was kinda freaked…you know about what happened. But the minute I came outside, my freak faded.” Maybe it was temporary, but at that moment I just wanted to chill and look at the stars.

“Hungry?” she asked, putting her hand on my shoulder.

“Starved,” I said.

“Cereal?”

“Perfect.”

She went inside and rifled in the cupboard. She came back and handed me a bowl. “Oh shit, I forgot the spoon.” She stuck her head back in the door. “Ipod, bring the notes and a spoon.” She turned to me and grinned. “We have info on the new guy.”

“Did you talk to him?” I asked.

“I went back to class after you left, but I didn’t speak to him or anything. I wanted to wait until we got info first. But I got another look at him. He’s totally hot.” She raised her eyebrows at me suggestively.

“Oh, yeah?” I said, “Elaborate.”

She grinned at my use of her word. “Buffed, but not a no-neck muscle jock, black hair, strong features, and these arched eyebrows. All the girls in class were whispering. He didn’t even notice.”

Before I could really process that, Ipod turned on the porch light and walked out with his laptop. He handed me a spoon. “His name is Constantine Evan DeMille,” he said, enunciating each syllable. “He’s seventeen and a senior. His family moved here from Seattle when his dad got a job at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He’s really interesting. I have lots of info on him, his resume…”

“Could care less about the dad,” said Lex, rolling her finger at Ipod.

“All right…give me a minute.” He scrolled down a few pages. “I was able to get his transcripts—”

“What did it cost you?” I asked.

“Two one-hour tutoring sessions before the physics test on Friday.”

“I appreciate it,” I said.

“No big,” he said, grinning. “You’ve saved my butt so many times. I’m just happy I can do something for you for a change.” He sat down on the arm of my deck chair. “He has high test scores and descent grades all through high school except for chemistry. He has a couple of AP classes and he scored an A in physics. I like that. Anyway, there wasn’t much in his file, but this was interesting. He was in a fight in ninth grade. I downloaded the report. It’s short. I’ll just read it. The names of the other boys are blacked out.

“
Blacked out and Blacked out had been beating up on Blacked out
and
Blacked out, who were half their sizes, as part of an ongoing money shakedown. DeMille stepped in and took on both boys at the same time, after pulling the smaller boys out of the way. The fight was witnessed by twenty-four classmates, all who testified to DeMille’s version of events. He has no previous record of trouble.

“Apparently, this made him some kind of local hero,” Ipod continued. “There was a story about it in the school blog. There’d been massive complaints about the bullies, but admin could never catch them in the act. The bullies were expelled, and Constantine got detention for a week—mandatory for fighting. Although it states very clearly that he was just protecting the younger students.”

“Brownie points for that,” I said. Whatever was up with this guy, he didn’t seem mean.

Ipod scrolled down his laptop. “Seattle driver’s license, one ticket—forty-six in a thirty-five. Six foot, one, 175 lbs. Tall. He was on the track team at school, apparently, the star.”

In spite of my loathing of P.E., I didn’t mind running. Running could be useful. I’d always thought it would be really exhilarating to just full out run like a wild stallion. “At least it’s not football,” I said.

“Really,” agreed Ipod, who didn’t like P.E. either. “Most of his online stuff is really generic and sparse…doesn’t seem like he’s into the ‘friend collecting’ thing. His online profile is heavily oriented towards snowboarding and music. He plays bass and maybe keyboards.”

“That’s cool,” Lex said.

“Anyway,” continued Ipod, “he has a sister, Claire—ten years old, not enrolled in school locally. There’s a brother, Devon, fifteen. The brother had a bad accident about six months ago, fell off a roof, smack onto a fence, and broke his back. He’s paralyzed—he’ll never walk again. There were a couple of articles about it in the school blog—one when it happened and one when he got out of the hospital almost six months later. He isn’t enrolled in school here, probably still recovering.”

“That’s sad,” I said.

“No doubt,” Lex said. “His home life has got to suck with something like that going on.”