Rippler (3 page)

3:29 AM.

But everyone else from my team had looked really concerned at the river, too. It was a natural response.

4:09 AM.

What am I doing wondering if Will likes me? Do I not have enough on my plate at the
moment?

At 4:32 AM, I staggered outside to sit on the deck. The pool waterfall was turned off and all was quiet. Overhead, the stars glistened and shimmered, impossibly numerous against a raven-black sky. Panic slowly receded.

But by breakfast, I didn’t look so good, and Sylvia noticed.

"You want to cut today? I can call Coach," she offered. “We want you ready for school next week.”

"No.” I was desperate to see Will. "I want to run."

Will knocked at the door, and we were off.

"Wow, you look awful,” Will said as we headed up the driveway.

I didn’t respond.

"Hmm. Awkward," said Will.

"No, it's okay. I'm sure I look like a zombie. I had trouble sleeping."

“So, your folks, did you talk to them?” he asked.

“No. If I had, I’d be in some medical office right now, getting my blood drawn or my brain scanned or something.”

Will nodded. “I’m glad you’re not telling; my sister’s too paranoid about some things, but I don’t think this is one of them.”

“Did you tell her about me?”

“I thought about it. I stayed up ‘til past two trying to decide.”

“And?”

“I’m not going to. I’m sure she’d make us move. It’s just how she is, ever since . . .” He left the thought unfinished, but I knew what he meant. Sometimes you just didn’t want to speak your losses aloud.

Scaring up pairs of redwing blackbirds, we thumped along our quiet highway, running in perfect step with one another. The rhythm comforted me.

“Thanks for responding last night,” I said. “To my questions.”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry it took so long. I was pulling stuff together for you, and trying to keep off Mick’s radar, and I didn’t notice your text ‘til late.”

“I was just relieved to hear I’m not going to die from this . . . thing.”

Will grinned. “That’s good news, huh?”

“So what do you know about controlling what I do? School’s starting and all.”

Will nodded, taking a swallow from his Camelbak. “I’ve been trying to figure out how it is you rippled without meaning to. That’s a little strange, from what I’ve read.”

“Strange can’t be good,” I said.

“Well, I don’t know. You said you’ve only disappeared a handful of times?”

“Yeah. Three times this summer. Before that, there’s one other time I’m sure of when I was seven.”

“What happened? Where were you?” asked Will.

“I was at a zoo with my grandma so I wouldn’t ask questions about the cremation. I

remember watching polar bears swimming. You could see them in this peaceful room below ground where my grandma had wheeled me in a stroller.

“I didn’t know whether I was watching something real or a movie, but it didn’t matter.

That mass of white fur, those dark eyes flying toward the glass, toward me, and then spiraling backwards and away—I don’t remember any other sounds or people. Nothing but those silent bears sailing towards me and away from me. I remember feeling warm and calm for the first time since the accident.

“I didn’t notice the voices right off. But when the bears left the pool, suddenly it was noisy and people were calling my name. I twisted in my stroller to try to find my grandma and this woman looked at me like she was shocked to see me in the stroller. She asked if I was Samantha and she ran and got my grandma, who’d been far up the stairs away from me. And Grandma was really upset and crying and she told me to never run off like that again which didn’t make sense to me, but I kept my mouth shut because she looked so unhappy. I didn’t explain that I hadn’t left the stroller. I didn’t ask her why she had left me alone in the polar bear room. And I didn’t understand the event. ‘Til now.”

Will took another sip and gestured that I should do the same.

It felt hot already and the water soothed my dry throat.

“Sam, I want to ask you something kind of personal,” Will said. “You don’t have to

answer.”

I nodded, rubbing sweat from my forehead.

“After your mom and your friend were killed in that accident, were you depressed for a long time, maybe until just recently?”

I flushed. The question hit close to home. I didn’t answer right away, just breathed in the scent of bear clover, strong already in the August heat, like artichoke and fresh-cut wood.

When I spoke, my voice was husky with emotion.

“I pulled inside myself for a long time. You wouldn’t know this because you didn’t grow up around here, but I stopped talking to anyone for a couple of years. I got called shy or stuck-up, and those were the nice things kids had to say about me.” I paused. The next part was harder to admit. “Gwyn Li was my friend, but then she moved to L.A. and lived there ‘til just last year, when she and her mom moved back and opened the bakery. She didn’t know about my . . . my weird years, so we just picked back up being friends. Then you came along this summer and now I have two friends.”

“Geez, Sam. That’s a long time to be alone.”

I nodded and we ran in silence for a minute before I felt ready to say more.

“These last few months, I’ve finally felt happy again,” I said. “I’d forgotten what it felt like, waking up and being excited about getting on with my day. I mean, running has always helped with the depression, but only when I’m running, you know?”

“Sure,” said Will. “I think I understand why you started rippling this summer.”

“Because I’m happy?”

“More or less,” Will replied. “Wow, we’re making good time.”

I hadn’t been paying attention, but Will was right. Murietta Park was coming up on our right: we’d reached Main Street already. We rounded past a hundred year old stand of willows. I held my hand out and ran it through the leafy branches.

“You do that every day,” said Will.

I smiled. “Every time. Ever since I was—I don’t know, actually. I’ve always done it. The leaves feel like dry water when you do it at a run.”

“
Dry
water?” He raised an eyebrow.

I smiled and nodded. “If you could imagine water running over your hands and it was dry, that’s what it would feel like.”

Will shook his head, grinning.

I was bummed we’d have to stop talking in the next few minutes. I wanted to cram in more questions. “So yesterday you said I had a special form of genetic disorder?”

“Oh, right. So, usually, someone with this abnormality in their genes develops Helmann’s Disease, which causes sporadic full-body numbness.”

The hairs on my arms prickled as I remembered something. “Will, I had a great-grandma who used to go all numb—to where she couldn’t feel anything. They called it a type of leprosy. But she would go months without any symptoms, and she never did any damage to herself like lepers do.”

Will nodded. “People with this chromosome often get told they have leprosy. Or it gets mixed up with psychosomatic numbness. But the symptoms of Helmann’s Disease are pretty distinct once you get seen by a doctor. With Helmann’s, you have to be totally chilled, happy basically, and then
whole body
numbness sets in. The ‘happy’ factor is one of main things a doctor looks for to make sure it’s Helmann’s Disease. That’s what the genes do
normally
, okay? Your body has taken the disease and done it one better: you don’t just go numb, you lose your physical being.”

“When I get too . . . happy?” I asked.

“When your serotonin levels spike.”

The track loomed ahead. I could see a few team members filling water bottles.

“So how come I don’t vanish when we’re running together?”

I felt my face turning red because of all that could be inferred from my question, but Will just answered it straight-faced. “You’re using too much of your body’s available energy when you run. It takes energy to ripple, and there’s not enough left, I’d guess.”

I nodded as we pulled into the school parking lot. “So if I start to feel too happy, just take off running?”

Will guffawed. “You could try that.”

We’d reached the track, which meant no further discussion for now, but we asked Coach to run us together. Coach liked to mix up men and women by pairs for Monday’s timed runs, claiming it made the boys run harder (so a girl didn’t beat them,) and it made the girls realize what they were capable of.

Half an hour later, after warm-up laps and a talk about staying hydrated, Coach released us onto the 7K, my favorite trail, even in the August heat.

I began rattling off questions as soon as we got out of earshot. It was harder to talk on a timed run, but I needed answers more than I needed a personal best. “Do I have Helmann’s Disease, too?”

“You can’t have both,” panted Will. “Mick says one or the other shows up, but not both.”

“And it’s rare?”

“Helmann’s is rare, rippling is ultra-rare.”

“And my version is called Rippler’s Syndrome.”

Will nodded. We had to stop talking as we climbed through a shady mix of blue oak and digger pines. The digger pines weren’t impressive like the nearby giant sequoias tourists flocked to see each summer, but I loved their ghostly-gray needles and charcoaled-bark. Mom had called them survivors; they defied the blistering summers that withered our foothill grasses and California golden poppies.

We reached the long flat stretch that ran across the side of the hill and Will spoke again.

“Of course, officially, no one is studying Rippler’s Syndrome at the moment. It’s just a name Mick and Pfeffer used. You won’t find anything if you look online.”

“So who named it? Are they dead?”

Will looked embarrassed. “I named it.”

“Oh. Cool.”

We curved around a small bend and Las Abuelitas winked at us through a stand of dead pines burned out ten years ago. The skeletal shapes left behind were creepy, even in daylight.

The trail narrowed after the burnt stretch to where only one person could run. I let Will go in front.

We now had a flat mile-and-a-half where talking would be easier.

“How common is this gene?” I asked.

“Mick could give you a scientific answer. All I know is it’s rare.”

Will was panting pretty hard from the last uphill stretch; my questions were short. Some of his answers were long.

“It’s really, really rare,” he continued. “But obviously not so off-the-charts rare that no one ever studies it. I mean, they invented a drug right after World War II that subdues the
numb-ness
form—Helmann’s.” He frowned and took a long pull of water. “I think I mentioned my dad has the disorder.”

I nodded.

“His drug habit started because he didn’t want to take his Neuroprine prescription.”

“Does he ripple?”

“No. Thank God. He only experiences numbness—regular Helmann’s.”

“What a name, huh? Hell-man’s?”

“Named after a scientist. He deserved the name,” Will said, breathing hard. “He ran a science lab in Nazi Germany, and he wasn’t known for his humane treatment of the patients he studied. After the war ended, he was accused of experimenting on children, but he either killed himself or escaped, so he wasn’t tried.”

“And what about a prescription? For me, I mean? Would it help?”

Will shook his head. “I honestly don’t know if it would help with Ripplers or not. But, Sam, getting a prescription for that drug—it’s like putting a big bull’s-eye on your forehead.

‘Hello, here I am, I’ve got the gene for Helmann’s and possibly Ripplers.’ Mick’s professor theorized that the person or group killing Rippler’s carriers uses prescription records to locate their targets.”

“Got it,” I said, a shiver running along the back of my neck. “No meds.”

“There’s other reasons to avoid Neuroprine,” said Will. “It causes some pretty

undesirable side-effects.”

“Don’t worry. You had me at, ‘they’ll find you and kill you.’” I chewed my lower lip. A prescription that took away the vanishing
would
have been awfully nice. “How sure are you I can learn to control this?”

“I’m sure,” said Will. “I pulled some materials together for you. A lot of it is pretty dry reading, but there’s evidence that people who ripple learn to control it. You just haven’t had much experience yet.”

I nodded. “Due to my extended residency in the Pit of Despair.”

Will looked at me funny. “You don’t have to make a joke out of it. There’s nothing

embarrassing about depression.”

I felt tears stinging my eyes. I blinked them back. “Thanks,” was all I said.

“We’d better pick it up on the stretch downhill,” said Will. “I can hear Carly and Nathan catching up to us.”

“Okay,” I said, pushing myself.

“Want to go to the Las ABC after? To look stuff over?” asked Will.

The Las Abuelitas Bakery Café had booths with high sides and lots of privacy. And every good thing made of butter and sugar.

“I’d love to,” I said. It was practically a date. We approached another narrow stretch and I shouldered my way in front, thundering across a single-file wooden bridge.

“No fair!” said Will.

I laughed, my legs pumping crazy-fast.

Coach was shaking his head and glaring as we pulled past him, completing the 7K. “Not good enough, Ms. Ruiz, Mr. Baker.”

Coach gave the two of us trash detail after practice for twenty minutes, which meant all the warm water was gone by the time I got to the lockers. That was okay; I was hot. I was thirsty, which meant I was already dehydrated. I felt exhausted, but my heart sang. Will had my back and things were going to be fine.

Chapter Three

LITTLE BLACK BOOK

I looked through rippled glass set into the river-rock wall of Las ABC, the place Gwyn’s mom opened last year. Will grabbed the front door, which held a massive oval of beveled glass set in an oak frame, hand-carved and probably paid for in gold-dust from Bella Fria Creek back during the California Gold Rush. We slipped inside.

It smelled intoxicating—like Sylvia’s kitchen at Christmas: brown sugar, butter, and cinnamon. On the bakery-case bottom row sat thick-frosted brownies, layer cakes, and a berry pie—probably
syllaberry
, the drought-tolerant hybrid my dad invented. The middle row displayed cookies, all at a kid’s eye level. Monster cookies with M&Ms. Snickerdoodles.