When Friendship Followed Me Home (17 page)

52

HALLEY'S STARDUST AND RAINBOW SNOW

Mercurious and I finished up our last rehearsal Friday afternoon in his workshop in the church basement. “Ready?” he said.

“I'm a little freaked, but I think I got it.”

“A little freaked is good. We just need to fix you up with one last thing.” He gave me a sparkly purple sweat suit.

We got there right as the museum closed, and the party started right after that. The guests packed into the Hall of Ocean Life. We'd set up the show the night before, and now all we could do was wait until after dinner, when Mercurious would pull off his grandest illusion yet.

The kid whose bar mitzvah it was came over and introduced himself and gave me the same gift bag his friends were getting. It had all the stuff I loved: vintage comics, a chronograph watch with a flashlight and about ten pounds of candy. He took me over to the buffet to make sure I ate. “I was really nervous to meet your dad,” he said.

I didn't bother to correct him about the fact that Mercurious wasn't my dad. He was, well, Mercurious. “Why?”

“Ben, dude, he's totally famous. You're gonna be a magician too, right? You get to be at a party every night.”

It really was an awesome party. Think of being able to run around the Museum of Natural History while eating mini pizzas and shooting your friends with laser guns. Then it was showtime
.

The lights went down and I went to my spot in the video projection booth. Mercurious went out into the middle of the hall and the place went silent. “Jon, would you come up here? I'd like to introduce you to your guardian angel.”

“I didn't know I had one,” the bar mitzvah boy said.

“We all do. As you begin your journey into this next magical phase of your life, know that you always have someone looking out for you.” Mercurious tapped Jon's shoulder, and Halley appeared, a miniature version of her, the way she looked almost a year ago, the first time I met her, at the library, when she was helping out behind the counter, and she rolled her eyes when I gave her
I, Robot
to check out for me. Here though, now, in the museum, her long, light brown hair was pulled back into a braided bun, with silver cords woven through. She wore a rainbow-colored gown with angel's wings.

Mercurious made Jon hold out his hand, and Halley fluttered down into his palm. She raised her own palm and blew stardust into Jon's face. She vanished and reappeared
life-size on top of the ninety-four-foot model of the blue whale. She knelt down from the whale's fin and blew stardust. It rained from the ceiling onto the guests. It was snowing silver and pink and gold and emerald, and I remembered the time my mom wanted to go to the beach during a snowstorm. We bundled up and drank hot chocolate from a thermos, and the strangest thing happened. It was still snowing, but the sun came out, just for a minute, just long enough to turn the flakes every color of the rainbow.

Somebody called out to me from far away, like the voice was coming through radio static, and it was. It was Mercurious.
“Ben, can you hear me?”
He was on the private channel of our walkie-talkies.

“Ten-four, Mercurious.”

“I just wanted to let you know that I think your mom's watching, and she's proud of you. We all are. Thank you, son. I really needed you here with me tonight.”
And I saw through the stardust that down on the floor, he was looking up at Halley's ghost, and the tear tracks were zigzags on his cheeks. I tried not to get too freaked out. I mean, if Mercurious was worried, then there definitely was a reason to worry now.

• • •

We finished loading up the projectors into Mercurious's SUV. “Put out your palm,” he said. He put five hundred-dollar bills into it. “That's crazy,” I said.

“That's your share.”

“But all I did was play around on the iPad.” It was like a video game. I moved Halley's image here and there and made sure the video projectors went on and off at the right times. “I had too much fun to make this much money.”

“Ben, that's how it's supposed to be.”

“Two questions. First, can you put this into my college fund?”

“I like the way you think. What else?”

“When can we do the next one?”

• • •

Flip met us at the door. Mrs. Lorentz wasn't far behind. She'd been crying but now she was smiling. “How'd it go?” she said.

“Awesome,” I said. “How's Halley?”

“Awesome. Truly. Halley is absolutely amazing.” She was talking to Mercurious when she said that last part. Mercurious frowned. “Go in and say hi, Ben,” Mrs. Lorentz said. “She's been waiting up for you. She'll want to hear all about tonight.”

Flip led me into her room and hopped onto her bed and yawned.

“How'd I do?” she said. “All the boys said I was hot, right? Let's see the gift bag.” She chucked the comics and grabbed the flashlight watch and put it on. “While you were out making me fly around the Museum of Natural History, I figured out the next chapter of
The Magic Box
.”

“Okay?”

“So as the Golden Tower of Light coasts into Mundum Nostrum, a series of miniature asteroids comes out of nowhere.”

“They always do. Better activate the laser shields.”

“Unfortunately, the laser shields aren't going to be enough this time. These asteroids are tiny but insidiously lethal. They snuck completely undetected into the ship's orbit and they're moving too fast. Think of a bag of frozen peas traveling at supersonic speed. They blow right through the laser shields and explode when they hit the Golden Tower of Light. The back of the ship is gone, completely shorn away. Now, in the
front
of the ship, Rayburn is tucked safely into his sleeping pod. Flip is tucked safely into the backpack on our hero Bruce's back. Bruce is secured to the ship by a golden tendril of light. Helen, on the other hand, was floating free in zero gravity when the asteroids hit. She's being sucked out of the ship, into the vacuum of space. So is the magic box. Helen grabs it and jams it into a crack in the fuselage just before she flies outward into the perfect infinity of the stars.”

“Bruce goes with her—”

“No, Bruce stays with the ship.”

“Absolutely
not.
Unacceptable. Bruce follows Helen—”

“Bruce has to bring the magic box to Tess. He has to deliver the Greatest Treasure and save the people of Mundum Nostrum. He has to keep on keeping on.”

“But what if he doesn't want to, not without Helen?”

“He forces himself to realize how strong he is, how
awesome. He's a traveler, like Tess always told him he was. That's what he's born to do. Halley will always be with Ben and Flip anyway. Helen, I mean. Helen will always be with them.”

“How? Just explain to me how the frick Halley is with them when they're stuck on Mundum Nostrum and Halley's . . . just . . .
not.
”

She held my hand. “I can't do it again, Ben. I can't be sick like that anymore. Me and Mom were on the phone with the doctors all night. This new drug they were thinking of is totally experimental. It has a twenty percent chance of giving me another three months. There's a fifty percent chance it will kill me in three days. There's a hundred percent chance it will make me sicker than I've ever felt in my life.”

“What about other stuff, like surgery?”

“Not an option. Ben, they found it in my blood vessels. It's only a matter of time before it spreads everywhere.”

“I don't know what to say.”

“I don't either, really.” She brushed the hair out of my eyes. “It's the weirdest thing. I mean, I knew back in the winter, after they took out the tumor, that the kind I have is the worst kind. But I really thought I was gonna beat it. The five-year survival rate in children under fourteen is thirty percent. Almost one in three. I thought I was going to be the one. I was so sure, I even started to feel bad about it. About being the one who lives when the other two would have to
die. You ever wonder that? Why somebody has to die? Why we all do? It just seems so crazy.” Flip pawed her to pet him. She did. “The doctor said now that I won't be on chemotherapy, I'll actually feel a little better for a little while. I'm not giving up, Ben Coffin, and you can't either. I don't know how many days I have left—fifty, thirty, seventy—but we're going to fight to be happy every minute we get to spend with each other. The happier we are now, the happier we'll always be when you remember me. I need you to have my back on this one.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, I do.”

“Promise?”

“Swear.” We locked pinkies.

“Good,” she said. At first I thought it was weird, her being so calm after just finding out she was going to die sooner rather than later. But then I saw it wasn't calmness. She was just plain tired. Her eyelids were heavy and dark. She looked beat-up. “You look like you want to ask me something,” she said.

I wanted to ask her lots of things. Like, Who could I be mad at? Seriously, why couldn't the cancer have an inventor, some psycho villain along the lines of Darth Sidious, somebody I could track down and beat the crud out of before I stabbed him in the heart with my laser sword, except how can you do that when the traitor doesn't have a heart? My
biggest question was, Why couldn't it be me instead of her? “The magic box,” I said. “Once and for all, what's inside?”

She mussed my hair a little, and just after she'd fixed it too. “I promise I won't leave you hanging. You'll find out soon enough.”

53

MRS. SALVADOR AND PEACOCK FEATHERS

Halley never really bounced back from being tired from the chemotherapy. She slept a lot, but she wasn't nauseous anymore, and she said she wasn't in pain—most of the time. By the middle of October, though, they gave her pills to help her hurt less. Mrs. Lorentz made me and Mercurious stick to our schedules, and for me that meant school, homework, my coupon deliveries, Read to Rufus, and keeping up with Aunt Jeanie, which, to be honest, was the hardest thing. Or the second-hardest thing.

Mrs. Lorentz took a leave of absence from the library to take care of Halley. A nurse came for a few hours a day to help out too. She was super nice, Mrs. Salvador, and she loved to read to Halley. She was going for a degree in literature at the City College of New York, and that's why the agency paired her with us. Halley loved the way she read
Feathers.
She acted out the parts and did voices and stuff.

When Halley was sleeping, Mrs. Salvador and I talked. “How do you stand it?” I said. “Having to say good-bye to one patient, and then starting all over again?”

“It's a gift each time I meet someone new,” she said. Flip took a break from cuddle duty to be with us and climbed into Mrs. Salvador's lap. He rolled belly up for a scratch and wagged his tail and yipped until she gave him what he wanted. “And anyway, they never really say good-bye. Right Flip?”

• • •

The third weekend of October Mercurious and I were on a long line at Costco with a cart full of stuff for Halley, ginger ale and bright plants for her windowsill. She liked to sit with her sketchbook and look out at the beach and Luna Park. We had other stuff in the cart too, lots of paper towels and sani wipes and yes, diapers. An old man on the next line had the same ones in his cart, and he looked like us, sort of like he couldn't believe any of this was actually happening.

“How did you guys meet?” I said to Mercurious.

“Penny and I? We were in the same library sciences program.”

“What made you switch to magic?”

“I guess I never thought of it as a switch. You ever think about going into it? Library science? I think you'd be great at it. You're analytical and you have a huge heart.”

Talking about what I wanted to do when I grew up felt
weird when my best friend was never going to grow up. “I'd like to be you,” I said.

“A party magician?” he said doubtfully.

“A great guy.”

“Ben, you're something else,” he said, which is exactly what my mom used to say except she'd never tell me exactly what that something else was.

When we got back, Halley was feeling pretty good. She was sitting up at the window with Flip and bossing us around about where she wanted the flowers. We moved the model of Luna Park into her room. There wasn't much left to do before it'd be finished. We had to put in a walkway, so the people could get into the golden tower. Mercurious wanted to hang a few planets over it too, and a handful of stars. Mrs. Lorentz stuck fake peacock feathers into Halley's rainbow cap.

That night on my way to the kitchen for a midnight peanut butter and jelly and milk I found Mrs. Lorentz and Mercurious passed out on the couch with a photo album. They'd left the window open a crack and I could smell the ocean. They looked cold, so I put a blanket on them.

54

FRIENDS AND KITES

The texts and calls got to be too much, so she set aside a day to let everybody visit. She posted a sign on her door:
NO CRYING. YES LAUGHING.
Practically everybody got it backward.

They knew she had that sweet tooth, and they brought her cakes, cookies, and barrels of gummy bears, none of which she could eat because she'd pretty much stopped eating. They brought her stuffed animals, which Flip collected in a corner of her room, like they were his harem. Chucky brought flowers. “You think these are good enough? They're only from the deli. I wanted to get twelve but I was starving and if I didn't get a meatball parm I seriously would have died of starvation. I only had enough money left for like six.”

“What are they?”

“Posies. Or maybe pansies, I don't know. Do I look like a horticulturalist?”

“You look like you're about to cry. Chucky, you better not.”

“I
won't,
Coffin. Chill.”

I brought him in. Halley said to Chucky, “You forgot your pocket protector.”

“I try not to wear it at non-school events, except in extraordinary circumstances.”

“Those being?”

“For instance if I'm somewhere that requires multiple pens. Sometimes I go to autograph shows, and the superhero or whoever steals your Bic. You were the first girl who didn't call me a dork.” He cried. He gave her the flowers.

“Poppies,” she said. She cried. “Chucky, can you give Ben and me a minute?”

He sobbed his way out.

“Get everybody out,” she said. “I'm sorry, but I can't stand it. I'll say my good-byes on Facebook. I only want to be with you and Flip from here on in, Mom and Mercurious. And the Read to Rufus kids. I'm saying those good-byes in person, if it's the last thing I do.”

• • •

“What's the difference, Mom? I mean, we're really worried about my cold getting worse at this point?”

“Let's try again,” Mrs. Salvador said. She put the digital thermometer into Halley's ear.

It was one of those perfect October afternoons, deep blue sky and a beach wind that puffed up the ocean into whitecaps. The kites were all over the sky. Halley wanted to go out and watch.

Mrs. Salvador checked the thermometer. She frowned.

“Can't do it, Halles,” her mom said. “I don't want to be the bad guy.”

“Then don't be.”

“You go outside on a day like today and it might be your last day.”

“So? Why do you have to be such a freaking psycho about every little thing?”

“You know what? I'm sick of your nastiness to me. Go to your room until you remember how to talk to me.”

“Fine.” She went and shut the door as hard as she could, and we could still hear her crying and screaming “I hate you” over and over on the other side of it. Then Mrs. Lorentz started crying and Mrs. Salvador said, “Okay. Okay. Everybody breathe now.”

“Ben?” Halley said from behind her door. “Ben!”

I went in. She was on her bed, facing the wall. Flip was dragging a stuffed animal across the floor to her. She reached back for me to grab her hand. “Promise me I'll get to be outside one last time.”

“Promise.”

“I guess having cancer doesn't make me immune from being a jerk now and again. Tell Mom I know I'm being an idiot.”