Awash in Talent (14 page)

I grabbed his arm as if I could go back in time and keep him from saying it. All these burgeoning emotions out there for all these strangers to see? I was blushing so hard, they skipped over me. So at least I didn’t have to think of anything to say. Thanks for being so sweet, Brian!

There was one last tradition before everyone could fill their plates and find a place to eat. Linda brought out a lovely glass dish layered with bananas Foster and set it before Brian’s dad at the head of the table. He waved his hands dramatically and sent a stream of smoke toward the dish, where it caught fire in as lovely a flambé as I’ve ever seen in movies.

Everyone applauded. Brian’s dad looked at me and said, “My manifestation happened at Mom’s rotisserie. I’m not sure she’s forgiven me for blackening the whole shipment of chickens.”

The older lady narrowed her eyes at him across the table, but laughed and added, “He initiated our Cajun line of products.”

Apparently, she’s the Linda Clare behind the rotisserie chickens sold in most stores across the eastern seaboard. I wouldn’t have put that together, even though that’s the kind of chicken we were eating earlier on the deck.

“Hey,” I said to Brian, “what’s your dad’s kryptonite? Isn’t he wearing a patch?”

“Nah,” he whispered, waving his hand. “We keep the paraphernalia around for the yearly inspections, but otherwise, my dad says he has it under control, and I believe him. We’ve never had anything bad happen. Over the summer he’s going to teach me to focus my intentions even better. He doesn’t believe in the easy policing they do at the PMA.”

If we hadn’t been so pressed by people around us, I think I would’ve fallen over. I got this sinking, swirling sensation. Brian’s dad’s confidence in his own control made me feel like I was totally out of control. I mean, who knew any pyro could be so normal? So free? It’s amazing to think the family sits there in the presence of a pyro with no patch on, no safety sack that I’m aware of, and not worried the way I am. It can’t be legal to live so uninhibited.

I thought about it the whole time everyone was eating and laughing and cleaning dishes and saying good-bye and leaving, but I still can’t put good words to it.

Now the house is back to its regular population, all asleep, and I’m scribbling away. I honestly feel like I belong here now. I can’t believe what a welcome they’ve given me. I’ve only been here a day and a half. I’ll have to marry Brian and come and live in this house with this wonderful family forever, controlling my pyrokinesis and honing my piano skills. And by the way, I do not, I absolutely do not, hope this journal goes up in flames anymore. Look at all the great stuff in it now!

Looking back over what I wrote or didn’t write about Uncle Jack in this journal, I realize if anyone ever saw this, they might think . . . It wasn’t like that, but it was horrible in its own way. Brian’s mom mentioned last night that it’s therapeutic to write about traumatic experiences, and it rang true for me. After all, I felt somewhat better after I wrote about my first day at the PMA, and maybe that little improvement made me a more attractive roommate to Jill. And after Jill became my buddy, I’ve been fine, pretty much. Nobody will ever see this, so why not?

It was about six months ago now, the morning after my manifestation. It’s pretty foggy for me with all the emotions, and the guilt, and the newness of not even fully understanding that I was a firestarter, but somehow, once they’d made sure no one needed to be arrested, the police decided it would be a good idea for Uncle Jack (what was he even doing there in the first place?) to drive me back to Grandma’s to stay while the adults figured things out. I was distraught, totally falling apart, and I had my face in my hands the whole time, catching my tears, so I didn’t see where we were going. It did seem like it was taking forever. I mean, Cranston isn’t far from Rhode Island Hospital, no matter which route you take.

When the car stopped, I looked up, and we weren’t at Grandma’s. We were in some part of Pawtucket—that much I recognized—in a typical neighborhood with multifamily homes and weedy sidewalks and fire hydrants with peeling paint. “Where are we?” I choked as Uncle Jack got out of the car.

He pointed at a house with fading blue paint, two front doors, and a six-step walkup and I got out of the car to get a better look.

“I wanted to show you my newest rental unit. You know, to distract you from your problems.”

“Huh?”

“I haven’t rented it out yet. Come on in. I’ll show you around.”

Even in my emotional state, this felt wrong. He was right, it was distracting me from my problems, but not in a good way. When I walked in the door on the left, which he opened for me, and I saw the cracked paint on the living room walls and half-demolished drywall in the hall, my neck started to hurt. I painfully turned toward Jack to see him handling the fireplace mantel as if he wanted to take off the decorative medallions that looked like they’d been there for three hundred years. When he saw me, he kind of held his arms out. I looked at him like he was crazy because I thought he might be.

“Do your stuff. Go on, it’s okay.”

“What?” I said, although I was forming an idea of what he meant, and my stomach clenched.

“People are at work, kids are at school. No one’s going to get hurt and no one will be around to report any fire that might suddenly ignite for some time.”

“You want me to set this place on fire for you?” I felt like all my blood had turned to bile.

“There’s lead in the paint and asbestos in the walls. I can’t make a profit if I have to fix it. You can sort of direct your . . . energy this way, toward the electrical system. I think it was installed in 1910.” He waved his arms toward the breaker box in the hallway, which was sprouting red, yellow, and blue wires.

Now that I think it over, you’d have to be pretty stupid to think this house was going to be a fast flip. At the time, I felt like I had slugs crawling all over my skin. I’d barely had time to fully comprehend that I was a firestarter, and now he wanted to make me an arsonist? I stood there, holding out my arms to catch myself in case I fainted.

My lack of response made him mad. “Sure, you burn up and almost kill my sister, but you won’t use your powers to help me out a little.”

My already clenched stomach did a flop when I thought of my mother again, between life and death. It made me want to make anyone happy, to redeem myself in any way possible, so I tried.

This is how I know I can’t make flames when I’m stressed out.

I’d only ever had the one incident, so I didn’t really know how it had even happened in the first place, much less how to make it happen again. He was asking too much of me. I was just a kid, and by the way, arson is illegal. Nothing was happening. But I tried. I imagined what I had been doing the afternoon before it happened. We were having so much fun, my mother and I, listening to crazy pop music from the 80s my mom knew all the words to and mixing up Dutch cocoa brownies in the kitchen to celebrate my first year of high school. Normal, un-Talented person high school, which we thought I was going to. If only.

The second time I remember seeing the Pyrokinesis Management Academy was when we were rushing my mother to the hospital.

December 2

After I did all that writing Thursday, everyone woke up from their nap ravenous, so we gathered in the kitchen and raided the leftovers. Brian’s mom and Grandma made turkey sandwiches, turkey hash, and even turkey burritos, and they’d already given away tons of leftovers to the relatives who’d gone home.

I’m back at school now, so I don’t have so much time to write, but I don’t want to forget all the fun we had Friday decorating the house for Christmas and Saturday out ice skating. Of the sisters, I liked Clare the best. Linda is older and plainly not Talented, but Clare is fun after she gets over her shyness and could yet sprout some amazing Talent. And of course there was more hot chocolate and roasted chicken and nice talks and meaningful looks and one more kiss each day, stolen when everyone was looking the other way for one reason or another.

Yesterday, Sunday morning, I was sorting out my bag, trying to make sure I wasn’t leaving anything at their house, when Brian came into the room with his laptop. “I need to talk to you about something.”

I froze up. For some reason I thought he was going to take it all back, tell me he didn’t really like me and that I imagined the kisses. But then he said, “Remember when we went to Moses Brown?”

“Who could forget?” I said.

He sat on the bed and opened the laptop. “The principal’s attitude and the beautiful buildings and equipment made me think about how the students are treated over there and how we’re treated at the PMA.”

“You mean, they’re considered human beings and we’re inmates?” I call ’em like I see ’em.

“Well, yes. I’m going to do something about it, or try. Are you in?”

I needed no more information. If it’s Brian’s idea, it must be good. “Heck yeah.”

“Sit down,” he invited. I did, and he called up a website that blew my mind.

As he clicked through, the pictures showed a gated campus not unlike Moses Brown, and happy students and unburned teachers, and fireworks! And labs where young men and women did some serious learning. And bonfires!

“What is this place?” I asked.

“This is the Boston Pyrokinesis and Latin Academy. My dad found it a while ago. It’s pretty prestigious, but look how they don’t treat the students like prisoners. I think we should apply for transfer spots in the sophomore class.”

I was practically drooling. They have arts programs, and the campus is two miles from Berklee College of Music. And how amazing would it be to live so much closer to Mom and Dad? We looked at the admission requirements and made a list and shook hands, promising to put the materials together and send in our applications for next school year. Then we kissed, and kissed some more, and I wasn’t so terrified of him being on the bed anymore.

Brian’s mom drove us back to the PMA and Jill was already here. She was telling me about her family’s adventures, and while she played some new music for me—Bjork and Antony and the Johnsons—I told her that Brian kissed me, and that’s all I said. I didn’t really notice if she was disappointed to not have had the chance to kiss Raúl because something else from the day at Moses Brown started to rattle around in my brain. That annoying girl with the aluminum weakness said she was an Other-Talented Healer. I remember it distinctly, but it’s tantalizing me, painfully, with the possibility of hope, because I’m not sure what it means. I’m going to find out.

December 3

It’s not so easy to find these things out. The school has some kind of lockdown on certain keywords in internet search engines. (All of them. I tried every one.) It’s as if the Boston Pyrokinesis and Latin Academy never existed, and the most I could find about the Moses Brown girl were alternative healing techniques, but that’s all hooey dreamed up by un-Talented people to soothe their anxieties. I know it’s a school-wide lockdown because I went ahead and told Jill about the Boston Pyrokinesis and Latin Academy and my general curiosity about the girl at Moses Brown, and we pored over her laptop for a couple of hours. Nothing. The more we searched fruitlessly, the more desperate I became. Finally, I started huffing and pacing the floor.

“Why do you really want to find out about Other-Talented Healing?” asked Jill, looking up from the uncooperative machine.

I wasn’t ready to tell her my fondest hope.

“You have someone you want to heal, don’t you? You don’t have any scars. Did someone else get hurt at your manifestation?”

I hated myself for being so obvious. She’d overheard plenty of my phone conversations with my dad, me always asking, “How’s Mom?” I had no choice but to admit it was true. “My mom is going to die if we can’t figure out something other than what they’ve tried so far, which is everything.”

Not even my dad had ever explained it like that, but my saying it lined all the facts up and I knew it was true.

“It looks like the school doesn’t want you to know whether we can help your mom,” said Jill.

Black horror opened up in my mind. What kind of ghoul would rather my mother died than let me find out how to help her? I started to cry. The urgency of the situation pressed in on me and I couldn’t breathe.

“Calm down.” Jill took my hands and looked into my eyes to ground me in the present moment. “Take a deep breath, Kelly. They don’t want us to find out, but I do. We’ll think of something.”

What? What will we think of? That’s the only thought in my brain now.

December 5

Brian’s dad told us what questions to prepare for the essay portion of the application, and we’ve been working on them in the long hours of boredom between classes, but I’ve been dragging through my classes because I don’t see how that can help when we’re trapped in here. I even cried in PE. No one said anything to me about it except Ms. Matheson. She asked me after class today if anything was wrong. I just stared at her, but I think she really is concerned about me and now I wonder if she can help.

Jill had a pretty good idea, and we told Brian and Raúl over lunch and before lunch period was even over, we were carrying it out. Raúl and Jill stood outside the back door to keep watch, pretending to smoke cigarettes in case they got caught—we can’t let anyone know we’re really after information in case the school is as evil as I think it is—and Brian and I ran toward Rhode Island Hospital, not too far from the PMA, but far enough that we thought the keyword ban wouldn’t reach.

But apparently it did reach. Brian whipped out his smartphone and looked for the BoPLA, as he calls it now, but nothing came up.

“Did we not see the entire website together that Sunday?” he said.

“Yes, we did. Are we crazy?” I asked. “Look for Other-Talented Healers now.”

The search engine showed, for the briefest instant, a list of links to names, and then abruptly the screen went red, as if a Christmas blanket had been thrown over it. Brian backed out and tried to go back in, but we didn’t even have a chance to see the list this time.