Forever Freaky (17 page)

After walking a couple blocks, I heard a
faraway whine that became shriller and shriller. I knew what it
was; a power transformer was about to blow. Sure enough, a moment
later, there was a boom, like a gunshot, and then the streetlights
flickered and went out and all the houses up and down the street
became dark.

I kept walking. Shadows stirred among shadows
and things whispered in the darkness. Twice I spotted glowing
figures venturing out of haunted houses, looking around in a
puzzled way, as though they couldn’t fully comprehend the storm or
the power outage.

By the time I reached the old Victorian, I
was drenched and chilled to the bone. I took shelter under the
limbs of the old oak tree on the front lawn. It was a horrible
place to stand in a storm—it was exactly the kind of tree that gets
struck by lightning—but hardly any of the rain reached me beneath
the thick gnarled branches. I pulled off my hood. Beneath it my
hair was damp and clung to the sides of my face. I leaned back on
the thick tree trunk and studied the Victorian. It was dark except
for one window on the second floor through which the dim light of
candles wavered. Each flash of lightning created an eerie snapshot
of the old building. The faded white paint was peeling off the
siding. The window boxes were empty. There was a broken chain on
the porch swing, and one end of it rested on the floor and made
scrapping sounds every time the wind gusted. A gaudy green and
orange curtain flapped in the upper window before the wavering
candlelight….

What am I doing here? I wondered. I didn’t
believe that I had planned to end up here. But, maybe, in the back
of my demented mind, it was exactly where I wished to be, where I
needed to be, at the moment—a place where I would never be judged
for what I was. I wondered if I was really so desperate to be
accepted? Well, maybe….

“Are you lost, freak?” At first I thought the
voice sounded in my mind, but it came from behind me, from behind
the tree trunk on which I leaned.

I was not startled—not many things took me by
surprise. I listened to the crackle of dry twigs as something crept
along the ground in the dark. Then a shadow emerged from behind me,
circling forward. It kept a wary distance from me; the last dealing
I had had with Amy was to stab her in the neck, which, apparently,
she hadn’t forgot.

“I said, ‘Are you lost, freak?’” she asked
impatiently. Lightning flashed, and I caught a glimpse of her evil
pixie face. “Well…?” She waited for an answer, and when it didn’t
come, she tried to probe my mind. But she had never been able to
read me, and that much hadn’t changed. My thoughts were shielded
from her. She wouldn’t have understood them at the moment, anyway--
my thoughts were so confused.

We stood there, in the darkness beneath the
tree, for what seemed like a long time. The rain pattered on the
ground, and thunder began to roar overhead.

Then, strangely, she burst out laughing. “I
always knew you’d come crawling back,” she said, deciding that was
why I was here.

“Did you?” I said.

“Of course. You don’t belong anywhere
else—you never did. You are destined to be here, just like you are
destined to be what you are. I wondered how long it would take you
to learn that. And what if I told you to get lost? What then?”

“You always have Jessica as your playmate,” I
said.

She snorted. “Jessica. What a joke! Oh, she’s
filled with hatred, and hatred has its charms. Other than that,
she’s nothing; she has no substance, she has no talent. Not like
you.” Lightning flashed, and I saw her face, her dreamy expression.
“Tell me, freak, can you still do it?”

“Do what?”

“That little trick of yours. You remember
that one summer, that storm… Can you still do it?”

“I think,” I said.

“Show me,” she commanded.

I walked out from under the sheltering tree
limbs. She followed me, still keeping her distance. We stood on the
front lawn and looked up at the dark sky. I had to squint as the
rain fell on my face. Then I pointed to one spot in the sky.
“There,” I said, and a few seconds later lightning flared where I
had pointed. I studied the sky awhile, and then indicated another
area, which soon erupted in long forks of light. Again and again,
wherever I pointed lightning bloomed out of the dark clouds.

Finally Amy laughed joyfully, clapping her
small hands like a little kid who has witnessed a magic trick.

“What a mind-freak,” she roared. She stared
up at the sky in that creepy, dreamy way of hers. “I remember the
first time you did that. I actually thought you were directing the
lightning, commanding it to go where you wanted it to go. It took
me a while to figure out you were just predicting. Oh, a good
enough trick, but hardly practical. What are you supposed to do
with it?—win a few bets? But what if you really could control it?
What if you could make lightning do your bidding? Now, that would
be awesome. Imagine what you could do with that? If there’s
something you don’t like, ZAP—it’s destroyed. Somebody bugging you,
ZAP—they never bug you again.”

I watched her as she spoke. It was clear that
she was totally serious. That had always been the really scary
thing about Amy: not that she said weird things, but that she meant
them.

She lowered her eyes from the sky to look at
me.

“That was an old trick, freak,” she said,
studying me warily. “What new tricks have you picked up?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Bullshit. It’s been four years. You must
have picked up something.”

“I was really never interested in that sort
of thing,” I told her.

“Not interested? How can you not be
interested? It’s a part of you, like your hands, like your legs.
How can you ignore your hands and legs? How can you stop them from
serving the function they were meant to serve?”

I shrugged.

“Pathetic, really pathetic, Jules,” she
muttered.

“And you?” I asked. “Are you still playing
with locks of hair and eye of newt?”

She grunted in disdain. “Witchcraft?
Witchcraft is nothing—nothing. It’s for talent-less hacks. If
you’re born with the gift, you don’t ever have to cast a spell. You
see what you want to see. You know what others don’t know. You will
things to happen. It’s that simple, if you have the right
powers.”

“Do you have the right powers?” I asked.

“I have what I need,” she said, and I noticed
that though she stood in the rain, she didn’t appear to be the
least bit wet. “I have what I need to endure life, to never lose. I
don’t need anything or anybody.” She looked at me with an
expression that was part contempt and part pity. “But not you,” she
continued. “You’re still in that gray area, aren’t you? You’re lost
in limbo, just hovering there, between the light and the darkness.
The light pushes you away, and yet you fight the pull of darkness.
Why do you put yourself through it? It’s not so awful, you know.
It’s simply accepting what you’re meant to be. Really, it’s not
like you ever had a choice. A duck is a duck. A frog is a frog. A
freak is a freak.”

I stared at her. I didn’t know what to say. I
couldn’t argue with her—I couldn’t say she was wrong about any of
it.

Finally she sighed. “Well, you want to come
inside?” she asked, not quite friendly but dropping the
psycho-bitch intensity. She sounded almost normal now. “You look
like a drowned rat. I have the house to myself. My father is out
drinking and my mother is out whoring. Or was that the other way
around?—I never can keep that quite straight with those people.
Anyway…” She looked at me, her eyes flickered something resembling
hope. Maybe she wasn’t so comfortable being alone after all.
Everybody needs a friend, right? She took a step closer to me, and
though she wasn’t very close, I could feel the chilly air grow
warm. “We could have fun, Jules, like before, only a thousand times
better,” she whispered the temptation. “We’re not little kids
anymore, Jules. Imagine what we can do now.”

Although she was somewhat maniacal, I
considered her offer. Could we actually be friends again? The idea
seemed insane. But, really, was it? At least she understood me, not
like dim-witted Melody, who understood nothing, or do-gooder Jack,
who was always trying to make me something I was not—a lab rat or a
saint.

So I went with her, into the house and out of
the rain, out of the rain for the first time in a long, long
while.

I never made excuses for the things I did,
and so I didn’t make excuses for befriending Amy again. It seemed
like a natural thing to do—birds of a feather flocking together,
right? It made perfect sense to me.

Jack, of course, had a different opinion.
When he discovered that I was going to Amy’s house after school
every day, he became utterly frantic. He just didn’t understand,
and how could he? He had a few friends, and he could relate to them
and they could relate to him. He took that for granted. He couldn’t
imagine what it would be like to be so different that you fail to
make connections with others on a very basic level. He was
incapable of seeing the world as I did. When he spoke of paranormal
things he’d read about, I could no more understand his enthusiasm
than he could understand the vague thrill that I had when I had a
vision of, say, a battlefield strewn with dead bodies frozen in
hideous positions. But Amy would know how it was, because she had a
point of reference, she had seen and felt similar things. “You just
have to stay cool. Control the thrill—don’t let the thrill control
you.” This was what my life had been lacking, the comfort of
knowing that I was not unique.

Still, I sat with Melody and Jack at lunch.
It wasn’t that I was telling them to get lost, although with each
passing day, I realized more and more how little I had in common
with them.

“I don’t see the big deal,” Melody said to
Jack one day. “If she wants to make friends with somebody, what do
you care? I know you don’t like Amy, but it’s not like anybody’s
forcing you to hang out with her. So what’s the problem?”

“She’s knows what the problem is,” Jack
grumbled, glowering at me across the lunch table.

“Jack, we’re not talking about this,” I
said.

We sat in edgy silence for a while. Nobody
was even eating their food.

Melody looked back and forth from me, across
from her, to Jack, at her side.

“You know, sometimes I get the feeling I
don’t know anything about what’s going on,” she commented.

“Believe me, you’re better off that way,” I
assured her.

The three of us fell into a long silence
again. Finally, my disgust growing, I shoved away from the table,
and walked outside.

For once Jack didn’t follow me like a lost
puppy. I was sure he was disappointed in me. I didn’t care one bit.
He had no right to be disappointed in me. He meant nothing to me,
and he never would. He had been a constant reminder of how
different I was from others, as though I really needed that. Our
becoming friends had been a fluke. Becoming more than friends,
which was what he wanted, was impossible. We didn’t even live in
the same world, but it was much more than that; it was also a
matter of fate. Some things are just never meant to be.

But Jack would never believe that. He thought
anything was possible. He was so stubborn and stupid, no matter
what I did, no matter what I said, he would always believe that
somehow I could be “fixed.” Even my mom knew better than to believe
that.

After my last class that day, I walked
outside toward the student parking lot. It was a beautiful spring
day. There were soft warm breezes and not a cloud in the sky.

Then I noticed that Jack was racing up the
path toward me. I huffed in disgust—like doesn’t this guy ever take
a hint?—but I didn’t try to evade him. I wasn’t the running type. I
let him catch up with me.

“What do you want, Jack?” I asked.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

“Well, let’s see, I’m done with school. I’m
walking to the parking lot. Uh, I guess I’m leaving.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I never know what you mean.”

“You’re going to her house again, aren’t
you?” he asked, as though he were actually jealous.

“So?”

“I don’t get you,” he complained.

“There’s a news flash,” I said. “Maybe you
should actually listen to me sometime. Maybe you would find a
clue.”

“She’s dangerous. You know what she did. So
how you could you possibly be all BFF with her?”

“It’s none of your concern,” I told him
coldly.

“None of my concern? How is this none of my
concern? I care about you.”

“Stop,” I said. “Nobody asked you to care. So
just stop.”

I turned and started to walk away, but then
Jack made a mistake—a really big mistake. He came up from behind me
and grabbed my arm to stop me. He knew better than to do that. He
knew I hated to be touched, and he knew why. How many times had I
told him? Rage ran through me like an electric current. I spun
round and jerked my arm back. Until that moment we probably looked
as though we were just a couple having a little quarrel. But then
the sky began to change. As if out of nowhere, dense dark clouds
quickly rolled across the sky, roiling, blocking out the sun. Winds
began to blow wildly, bending back tree limbs, whipping up dried
leaves and dirt and other debris. Lightning flashed, and thunder
roared. Rain began to fall hard in gray sheets.

Everybody on campus started to rush to the
safety of the school, panicked and confused by the sudden
storm.

Jack stood before me in a daze, not believing
what he was seeing. He couldn’t say anything. The storm had
effectively ended our argument.

“Leave me alone, Jack,” I told him, as it
started to hail. Tiny marble-sized balls of ice began to land on
the lawn and clack on the hoods and roofs of cars in the parking
lot. Larger pieces of hail were heading earthward. “Leave me alone
before I hurt you for real. This is the only warning you’re going
to get—the only kindness I’m capable of.”