Forever Freaky (19 page)

I started the car and did a U-turn to head
out of the isolated area of industrial decay and insanity. As I
drove I dug my cell phone out of my pocket, and tried to call Jack.
The phone rang and rang and finally went to voice mail. I dialed a
couple more times and got the same result. Great, I thought. Now he
decides to leave me alone.

Finally I left a message, not sure he would
even listen to it. “Jack, look, you need to call me, okay? It’s
important.”

I headed for home, driving back through the
shabby areas. By now all the schools were out for the day. The city
buses were filled with kids. Gang-bangers hung out on street
corners. These days kids were getting shot left and right in the
city. Accidentally bump into somebody in the lunch line, and get
shot on the way home. I never worried about any of that. What was
the worse anybody can do to you? Kill you? Not really: they can
only kill your body, while the rest of you, the most important part
of you, survives. So I did not fear death. Sometimes I thought I
feared everything but death. What I feared now more than anything
else was what Amy might decide in her demented mind to do.

I tried calling Jack again, but he still
wasn’t answering. So I left another message. “Listen, Jack, you
need to call me, really. I know you’re freaked out by what happened
earlier. I tried to warn you before. I’m like a surprise package,
and the surprise isn’t always nice. And you know how I hate being
touched. But never mind all that. I think we might have a problem,
a big problem. So be a good boy, and call me, okay?” I tried to
sound as sweet as I could, but I thought I fell short—I just was
never good at doing sweet.

As a drove along, I started to doubt Jack
would return my call. He’d always returned my calls quickly, but
now my cell phone lay silently on the passenger seat. He didn’t
trust me anymore, I was sure. He’d always been like some
good-natured floppy-eared dog—maybe a golden retriever—running
around, wanting nothing more than to make me happy. I had pushed
him away again and again, and in the end I kicked him—hard—and now
he didn’t want to have anything more to do with me. A couple months
ago, I would have been relieved to be rid of him, but at the moment
it was driving me crazy that he wasn’t calling back. It is strange,
and a bit insidious, how you can get used to having somebody
around, even somebody you find annoying most of the time.

Waiting at a red light, I tried leaving one
more message. “Jack, look, I’m sorry, okay? I’m not talking about
normal sorry, which doesn’t mean anything. I mean I really feel—oh,
what am I doing? Just call me, you moron,” I said. Trying to be
sincere was just too aggravating.

As I neared home, I began to hear distant
sirens. I didn’t think anything of it at first; it was a common
sound in the big city, plus the local firehouse was only a few
blocks from my house. But as I got closer and closer, it seemed
that I was homing in on the sirens.

With growing dread, I turned down my street.
I could see ahead, near my house, that a fire engine had the street
blocked and smoke was rising toward the clear sky. Whatever was
happening was happening close to home—really close. It can’t be, I
thought. This had to be some hideous coincidence. I had just left
Amy behind; there was no way she could have beaten me back
here.

Since I couldn’t drive through, I decided to
park and walk the rest of the way. The nearer I got to my house,
the more curious people wandered out of their homes to check out
what was happening.

The towering old maple tree near the curb in
front of my house was completely engulfed in flames. It didn’t seem
possible. Flames were swallowing the long branches covered with
spring leaves and arcs of water rose from hoses as firefighters
tried to extinguish the blaze. How did she do it? I wondered. She
couldn’t have beaten me back here. Then I realized the horrible
truth: not only could Amy will things to burn, she could project
that power over a distance. Great! Just marvelous! Could I have
picked a worse person to piss off?

As I approached my house, I saw my mom
standing on the front porch watching the firefighters work. Even at
a distance I could see her puzzle frown, as though she was
wondering, How can the tree be burning? It’s all green wood… I was
lucky not to be home when the fire started. I probably would have
got blamed. It was weird, right? I always got blamed for anything
weird that happened around the house.

Standing next to my mom, also studying the
strange spectacle, there was Jack. What was he doing here? I
wondered, suddenly annoyed. He couldn’t return my call, but instead
he just showed up at me house. I glowered up at him as I stepped up
to the front stairs, but he pretended not to notice.

My mom dropped her eyes from the burning
tree. She gave me one of her looks, the one that was like an inside
joke that wasn’t funny. She might as well have said, “Julie?” in a
way that suggested she believed I had something to do with her tree
being on fire.

“Hey,” I said to her, “don’t look at me. I
wasn’t even here.”

She looked away from me, and resumed watching
the firemen.

I walked up the stairs, and took Jack by the
arm. I didn’t grab it but pinched a bit of loose flesh. “We have to
talk… now,” I whispered. I led him down the stairs, across the
front lawn, and into the gangway between my house and the one next
door. The whole time I pinched him, pinched him hard, hoping I’d
leave a bruise, but he didn’t complain or say “ouch” or anything.
Maybe he didn’t have nerves under his skin, but probably he just
didn’t want to give me the satisfaction of hearing his pain. I
hated when somebody knew me, and obviously Jack knew me well enough
to know that I could be a little sadistic sometimes.

When we were halfway down the gangway, well
out of earshot from anybody, I released his arm and faced him.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded.

“I got your message,” he said, sounding
innocent. “It sounded like an emergency.”

“Why didn’t you just call back?”

“I couldn’t. After I retrieved the message,
my phone went dead. I was still on a bus—I couldn’t recharge it. So
I headed here instead of going home. Like I said, it sounded like
an emergency. What’s with you?”

I held out my hand. “Let me see your
phone.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so.”

He handed me his cell phone. I checked it to
make sure it was dead and he wasn’t lying. Maybe I was a little
paranoid; sometimes, like now, I got the feeling that everybody was
lying to me.

I gave him the phone back. “I left two other
messages,” I said, softening, lowering my guard a little. “After
you recharge the phone, you’re to erase them, without listening to
them. You understand?”

“Not at all.”

“Just do it.”

“Why?” I didn’t answer. What was I supposed
to say? I didn’t want him to hear those messages because I was
afraid that I might sound weak or desperate or that I cared that
I’d scared him earlier. “All right,” he said. “I won’t listen to
them. I don’t know why, but I won’t.”

“Promise?”

“Yeah, promise,” he sighed, and then asked,
“Are you going to tell me what’s with your tree?”

“Not here. Let’s go inside.”

I led him round to the back of the house, and
we entered through the kitchen door. We went up to my room. Once
inside, I pushed the window up and climbed out onto the roof. It
was something I’d usually do when I was alone, and wanted to feel
more alone. It was as though, suddenly, I had forgotten Jack was
with me. I suspected I was getting too use to having him around.
When I remembered he was there, I turned round and peered through
the window into my room. Jack was standing in the middle of my room
and staring at me.

“You coming?” I asked.

“On the roof?”

“There’s a good view of the fire.”

He just shrugged, and climbed out the window.
He didn’t climb through as easily as I had, but then I weighed
about ninety pounds and had had a lot of practice. Jack was taller,
heavier, and not at all graceful.

I sat on the roof and watched the arcs of
water coming up from the ground and washing through the upper
branches of the tree.

Jack finally made it through the window,
somehow managing not to break his neck in the process. He stepped
unsteadily down the slanting roof. When he sat next to me, he
sounded winded from the physical effort.

“Maybe you need to work out a little,” I
said.

“Oh, yeah, you’re in great shape, right?”

“One way or another, I’m doomed, remember?
What does it matter?”

He winced at the comment. “I wish you
wouldn’t say stuff like that.”

“Just being real,” I said, watching the water
filter through the burning leaves. They seemed to be defiant,
stubbornly burning under cascades of water. “I’m like a cancer ward
patient, withering away in bed, with tubes going into my rotting
body. You think Pilates is going to do me any good?”

He winced, as though my words stung, but
didn’t say anything.

For a while, we sat and watched as the fire
in the tree weakened and finally began to die. Now and then the
wind changed directions, and a fine spray of cold mist hit us.

“Hey,” I said, “I’m sorry I got mad at you
before.”

“My fault,” he said. “I shouldn’t have
grabbed you like that. I shouldn’t have touched you.”

“It’s all right.”

He put his hand on my shoulder. I looked over
at him.

“Jack, I meant it’s all right, never mind
that it happened. I didn’t mean it’s all right, go ahead and do it
again.”

He jerked his hand back as though afraid
something really bad was going to happen. I couldn’t help
laughing.

“What?” he asked, surprised that wasn’t
hostile, that he hadn’t pulled back a stump instead of his
hand.

“I can’t read you anymore,” I confessed.

“No?”

“No. You’re like my parents now.”

“I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

“Try not to feel anything,” I told him.
“Trust me—you’re better off.”

“Like you?” he asked. I stared at him for a
heartbeat or two, long enough for him to get uncomfortable. “Okay,
I withdraw the question.”

“Good idea,” I said.

“I didn’t hurt you, when I grabbed you, did
I?”

“No.”

“I was just trying to--”

“I know what you were trying to do,” I said.
“I’m weird not stupid. You were trying to protect me from Amy. I
just don’t understand why you’d want to bother. I’m just not worth
the trouble. I think it’s just that you’re fascinated with all this
supernatural stuff. If I wasn’t such a freak, you wouldn’t be
interested at all.”

“No, it’s more than that,” he protested.

“There is nothing more than that. You just
think there is,” I said. “I wish there was more.” I thought for a
moment. At times it was hard to determine how much you should say
to somebody. With each and every word you say you give away a piece
of yourself that can never be taken back. “You know, sometimes, I
wish I could be normal—with normal problems. Then things might be
different. I mean, you’re not so bad. Your wardrobe is a disaster.
And your hair—that whole grunge look thing isn’t even from this
century. But other than that you’re a pretty good guy.”

He chuckled. “Is this your way of saying you
actually do like me?” he asked.

“Yeah, but don’t get the wrong idea. I’ll
never go out with you. I can be cruel, but not cruel enough to do
that to you, or to anybody else. Look, this is my life: burning
trees and psycho pyromaniac bitches. And it’s not going to get any
better.”

By now the fire was extinguished. The tree
was a mottled mess of bright green and charred black. The fire
engine rumbled, idling as firemen prepared to return to the
station. Thankfully my dad had been assigned to a station on the
south side. How traumatic would it have been for him to have to
answer a call at his own address? Amy was a pyscho-bitch on
auto-pilot. She didn’t care what damage she did to people or their
feelings. Strangely this made me mad—strangely, because usually I
didn’t care about such things either. I thought myself different
somehow, so maybe I was a hypocrite. All right, I was just a
hypocrite.

“So you want to talk about it,” Jack asked,
as fire engine rumbled away.

“I was trying to avoid that,” I said, and
then told him everything that had happened. “It was like she was
all buddy-buddy, you know. And then one moment came where I
hesitated, where I showed that I didn’t think what she was doing
was just fine. Then she seemed to snap—some kind of switch flipped
in her head, and I was suddenly an enemy, a dangerous enemy because
I knew what she was up to.”

“Ergo, you have a burning tree in front of
your house.”

“Just as a warning. If she has the ability to
project this power over a long distance, she could have done worse.
I could have got nuked in my car driving home.”

“She’s crazy, you know,” Jack said.

“Duh.”

“But she did admit to you that she was the
one who started those jocks on fire, right?”

“Yeah, she seemed to find it pretty
amusing.”

“Did she say why she did it?” he asked.

“She needed practice on a moving target.”

“For real?”

“For real,” I said.

He shook his head, not knowing how to respond
to such insanity.

“You starting to lose your fascination with
the supernatural?” I asked. “Maybe you should take up stamp
collecting instead, huh?”

He snorted. “Actually I never read about
anything like this.”

“You think you’re going to find this shit in
a book? For that there has to be some kind of proof. This crazy
bitch can do whatever she wants, and she knows she can get away
with it. We know what she’s up to, and we couldn’t prove it.”