Breath (5 page)

“That’s all, huh?”

“I need something creative to round it out.”

“I don’t know. I think your ability to rationalize anything is pretty creative . . .”

She threw another M&M at him, and he grinned.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll tell Deb that you want to paint part of the wall. No extra colors required.”

As he got Suzie set up with a roller, she asked, “Hear anything from Carnegie Mellon yet?”

He shrugged. “You know how it goes. I’m doing the hurry-up-and-wait thing.”

“Thought you applied early admission.”

He had. He’d even received the acceptance letter, but he hadn’t said anything about it to anyone—not to his parents, not to his friends, and definitely not to Riley.

And he certainly hadn’t told anyone what he’d done after he’d gotten the letter.

He was just waiting on one thing, and then he wouldn’t have to keep his secret any longer.

He could hardly wait to tell Riley.

Just as he was going to say that he was positive good news was coming, his phone let out a harsh beep.

“Earth to Zan.”

A hand waved in front of his face, and he blinked at Suzie, who was holding a dripping roller. She’d finished painting her section of backdrop—all one color, and relatively smooth strokes. She was looking at him oddly, like he had drool leaking out of the corner of his mouth.

He said, “Sorry, what?”

“I
said,
are you and Riley going to Marcie’s thing on Saturday, but maybe you should stay home and catch up on your sleep, based on how you just zoned out on me.”

“Yeah, we’re going to the party,” he said absently as he pulled out his phone. There was a new text message. Odd—he could have sworn he had it set to Vibrate, the way he always did at school. He must have accidentally hit the switch that put it back on Sound.

“Xander? You’re acting all weird . . .”

“Hang on, Riley texted me.”

“You get reception in school?” Suzie humphed. “I get no signal until I’m outside.”

“Just lucky, I guess.” He read Riley’s one-word message, and then he sprouted a grin.

STANFORD!!!

Riley must have gotten the acceptance letter today. Xander’s grin broadened. That meant he had to wait only a little bit longer.

And maybe, just maybe, at the party on Saturday, he’d be able to share his great news with Riley and the others.

“Someone looks happy.”

“Oh yeah,” he said, texting back a quick congratulations to Riley. “It’s all good.” He hit Send, then pulled out his lucky penny and flipped it. “Heads!”

And it was heads.

“All hail the lucky penny,” said Suzie.

“All hail,” Xander agreed, flipping it once more.

Heads.

Still grinning, Xander put his phone into his back pocket. Yes, it was all good. With luck, everything would be even better soon, real soon. And he had luck. He squeezed his penny and tucked it into his front pocket, and for the rest of Art Squad that afternoon, he pretended to listen to Suzie babble about her college plans as he daydreamed about telling Riley his secret.

He had to wait a little longer, that was all.

No worries. As he’d said to himself again and again before he’d had the courage to ask Riley out six months ago, he had time.

He was out of time. Literally. He was in the Slate between time and space, standing on the edge of all things and no things as history and potential sparked like fireflies at midnight. It was breathtaking. Or it would have been, if he had actually been breathing.

In the Slate, he never breathed.

He ignored the definitive yesterdays and focused on the probable tomorrows. Normally, he reviewed the past with the same playful curiosity with which he observed the possible, and there were times when he came between that he watched the befores and afters simultaneously. Those were the times when he visited the Slate out of whimsy.

But not now; now he was far too pensive to be playful. Work was getting to him again.

That happened more and more lately. In the last thousand years, humanity had exploded all over the world; in the past ten years alone, another billion people crawled along the planet.

So many people. So many lives.

They took so much out of him.

It was enough to make him lose his sense of humor.

Before entering the Slate, he had taken two humans, Holly Owens (27) and George Greene (29). They had been lovers, and they’d done the clichéd leap off a seaside cliff in Cape Cod, momentarily obscuring the scenic view with their desperate attempt to make a statement about life in general and their love in particular.

“We’ll be together forever,” George had promised Holly. “This world has nothing for us. Come on—you and me, in the next world. Let’s do this!”

They did it. And they quickly discovered that promises made while living mean exactly zilch once dead.

He had been waiting as they picked themselves up from the bottom of the cliff, and he told them about the future they had just aborted. George would have gone on to become a defense attorney who got an innocent man off death row, and Holly would have opened a women’s shelter, affecting countless lives. When they realized what they had just thrown away, George wept bitterly over the unfairness of it all, and Holly begged for a second chance.

Suicides always thought it was about
them.

So he’d taken George and Holly, and after they had moved on, he’d found himself in a funk. Or, more accurately, he’d found the dead dolphins as he and his steed walked along the Cape Cod beach and he realized he was in a funk. Eighty-one of the mammals, dying or already dead, littered the shore.

Whoops.

His steed scolded him as he took the dolphins, and then the dolphins scolded him before they moved on. He’d put up with it—the dolphins were understandably annoyed, and his steed had never been one to let silence reign—and he’d decided that he’d had enough. More than a hundred thousand people died every day, as humans told time; he deserved a break.

And so, he had finally retreated to the Slate. It was his place, where he could slip his skin and be himself, where he could remember and reflect, where he could ponder and plan. It wasn’t home—no, never that, never again—but it was a place of hope.

Especially now, when it was coming soon. Coming fast.

Because his time was approaching quickly, he had retreated to the Slate to seek a glimpse of a specific possibility, the one that would be enough to clear his head and return his focus to the big picture. A gleam of promise, a hint of
maybe
—that would do.

For as long as he could remember, that one particular glimpse had always been enough to keep him going.

Now, in the Slate, futures beckoned and he followed. The most likely paths were first, as always, followed by the ones slightly less probable. And so on. And so on, again, and again, until he was traveling down paths so unlikely they were constructed from little more than fancy.

And for the first time ever, the hint of
maybe
that he needed wasn’t there.

He frowned, and he began again.

This time, he didn’t simply follow the paths but searched them instead, seeking the one thing that had kept him going for countless millennia. As he searched, he rationalized, in the way of humans: He had simply missed that one possibility, that was all. This particular tomorrow had always been faint, and he had been so distracted lately—of course he had overlooked it.

Even one such as he could make mistakes. Just ask the dolphins.

When this second search turned up nothing, he searched a third time. And then a fourth.

Still nothing.

Perhaps he hadn’t made a mistake at all.

Now he was experiencing something else in the way of humans: a growing sense of emptiness, as if he were slowly being hollowed out. It was the subtle shift from optimism to pessimism, the turn of the glass from half-full to half-empty.

It was the birth of despair.

***

He stepped out of the Slate and back into time and space.

“He returns,” his steed nickered fondly. “Good holiday?”

“It was fine.”

The steed snorted. “I can tell by how tan and relaxed you are.”

“I said it was fine.” He patted the steed’s neck. “Come. There’s work to be done.”

“War’s doing a flyby over the Middle East. Want to join her?”

“Maybe later.”

He reached down for the saddlebag that just appeared—along with the saddle—and opened it. From within, he removed a fiery red plume. It had belonged to the previous incarnation of War: Joan, the Maid of Orléans. He held the feather for a moment, remembering her passion, remembering the ferocity that had shone in her eyes. From the moment that he’d offered her the mantle of the Red Rider, she had fervently believed that her purpose was to be his handmaiden. She belonged by his side, she had proclaimed, when he would eventually lead the Horsemen to the Last Battle.

She would be his sword arm when he finally destroyed the world.

He had been fascinated by her conviction. Her belief had made her strong—first in life, and then after.

Even so, now she was dead.

He, too, had a belief, one that had both grounded him and buoyed him. Now that belief was as dead as Joan’s War, yet here he remained—for the first time ever without hope.

Even hope died, but that didn’t make hope his to take.

Distracted, distraught, he climbed atop his steed and went out unto the world.

Behind him, a cold wind began to blow.

Everyone had shown up for the party. No surprise there; Marcie’s shindigs were famous for being parent-free and alcohol-heavy. As Riley had said on the way, Marcie’s parents were either incredibly cool or incredibly oblivious.

Xander, who was on his fifth beer, voted for incredibly cool.

The party blared around him, with music blasting from hidden speakers and people resorting to screams to be heard. As a result, the volume was just under migraine-inducing. Xander barely noticed. He’d begun drinking to toast Riley’s acceptance to Stanford, then kept right on drinking.

He still hadn’t told Riley what he’d done—he hadn’t told anyone yet—but he knew he would have to, and soon. But soon wasn’t now. Thus, the drinking. That and, hey, free beer! Whoever said you can’t get something for nothing had never been to a Marcie party. He took another pull from his beer and stared up at a nude blue woman.

He and Riley and Ted had arrived at Marcie’s some time ago—it had taken them a little while longer to get there, because it had been crazy windy outside, which had made driving quite the challenge—and had done the initial circuit of the house together, after a pit stop in the kitchen to grab a couple of drinks. Ted quickly peeled off to join a larger group. Riley soon found the track team, and Xander hung out with them for a few minutes before his inner social butterfly needed to take wing. He made his way through the house again, alone this time as he sought his friends.

There was Deb and other fellow art geeks, which soon morphed into the thespian crowd, where Ted was well on his way to getting smashed. They had invented a drinking game that had something to do with show tunes—Ted warbled that he was the model of a modern high school twelfth grader—so Xander stayed until the chorus, then excused himself and found Suzie. She was with a handful of others who dominated the high end of the GPA spectrum, and they were talking passionately about their local U.S. senators. When Xander found himself nodding along without understanding a thing, he grinned, shook his head, and moved on.

Izzy was entrenched with the varsity soccer girls and guys, so Xander joined the conversation about who was going to make it to the World Cup. Not like he really cared—he could never bring himself to tell Izzy that he didn’t really like soccer, even if it was called “football” in some places—but he could fake his enthusiasm with the best of them. Soon Xander’s beer was empty, so he wandered into the kitchen to toss the old bottle and get a new one.

Fresh drink in hand, he meandered his way around the house again, slower, fascinated by the sheer size of the huge split-level home that clearly belonged on the set of some popular television show (complete with about a hundred people acting as extras; Marcie’s parties were always a hit). He took in the furniture tastefully arranged just so, the sculptures and vases proudly displayed on shelves, and he decided, as he drank, that homes were really nothing more than backdrops to people’s lives—they set the scene, gave a hint of what to expect, but nothing more. Nothing revealing.

And then he found the blue nudes.

There was plenty of art decorating the walls, mostly original works by artists he didn’t recognize. But what had arrested his attention were two pictures framed side by side in a small room. He probably shouldn’t have opened the closed door, but the drinking had made him bold, and he wanted to find a little quiet. The room was probably a home office, based on the furniture: a large desk with a massive computer monitor, a high-backed chair with wheels, overstuffed bookcases, grim curtains shrouding the windows.

And on the wall opposite the bookcases were two prints of famous paintings, one by Matisse and one by Picasso. Xander had studied them in his art elective junior year, and as he stared up at the pictures, he found himself dumbstruck.

Matisse’s blue nude showed a clearly female shape sitting on the floor with one hand clasped behind her head, one leg wrapped around the other. There was no face, no details, just the outline of a woman, and yet that lack of detail was what made the pose so mesmerizing—she was on the cusp of springing, of raging, of doing
something,
but what that action was didn’t matter, because she would never do it. Faceless, featureless, she was forever caught in the moment before, coiled. Trapped.

Next to the Matisse, Picasso’s blue nude showed a woman from behind, closed in on herself and hugging one of her knees. Everything about her, from the set of her shoulders to the curve of her back, gave voice to her grief; that the painting was entirely in shades of blue made the effect more profound. Xander didn’t have to see her face to know, to feel, that she was sad. Tension radiated from the Matisse print, but Picasso’s nude emanated waves of sorrow.