Glimmer (27 page)

Authors: Phoebe Kitanidis

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Family, #Siblings, #Fantasy & Magic, #Social Issues, #General

BOOK: Glimmer

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When I swing the Mini in front of the state mental health facility, Marshall’s waiting for me out in the sunny cold. With a smile, he opens the passenger-side door and leans over to kiss me hello. He buries his hands in my spiky, short hair, still wet from the pool where I teach swim lessons every afternoon.

I kiss him back, then hand him something small covered in a denim-blue cloth napkin. “Here. It’s carrot-ginger this time.”

He unwraps a golden-topped muffin, still steaming from the oven, and takes a bite. “It’s good. Thanks for keeping it warm.”

Ever since Marshall started working part-time as an orderly and shift manager at Mollie’s, he’s become hyperattuned to making sure people feel appreciated for doing tasks and services that are sometimes thankless. Sometimes he grumbles about the way customers treat waiters, especially since these days Mollie’s isn’t just a hangout for locals but for kids in Green Vista and Eagle’s Point too. They still remember the days when Summer Falls was a well-funded, verdant garden, and their homes were poor and dry as dust, and many are still bitter about losing all those football and basketball and baseball games. That’s the dark side of memory. But this is a community that needs rebuilding, and rebuilding takes leadership. Marsh’s already been promoted in both his jobs, but he’s still getting used to the fact that strangers notice him whether he wants them to or not—they flag him down in fact and ask him for things, like extra ketchup or napkins or to clean up a spill. Sometimes a spill that’s done on purpose. Another dark side of memory. Vengeance.

Yesterday I parked in the visitor’s lot and went up to visit my father and Dan and the others, as I do several times a week. Dad’s doing better all the time, and now he always recognizes me. The younger patients, like Dan, are recovering fast. Last month Dan spoke his first word. It was
Pete.
We still don’t know what happened to him after he was taken away from the Ferris wheel accident. Dad himself hasn’t spoken yet, and sometimes his eyes still look vacant, but we have hope, now that the former asylum is a real, cutting-edge, working mental hospital. The old doctor quit and disappeared after a state investigation found him guilty of fraud and gross misuse of state funds.

It doesn’t hurt that Marshall uses his orderly job to practice healing magic on the patients he works with.

After work four days out of five, we take the bus to Green Valley Junior College, along with Jeremy, Carla, and Ruta, who’s working hard to get accepted to Colorado State in two years, where she plans to study neurobiology and find a cure for the victims of Summer Falls. Four days out of five.

But today is the fifth day.

When Preston House fell in on itself, the front parlor collapsed into the basement. Jeffry was downstairs, watching TV in the basement, when the ceiling opened up over his head and plaster rained down on him. What killed him, they say, was the pink high-backed chaise from the parlor that cracked his skull. Mom—who was outside, thankfully, watering her flowers when it happened—says she hopes he died instantly. But I like to think that in Jeffry’s last moments he experienced the type of acute mental clarity that only fear can bring.

Shelly says it’ll be a long time before I’m done working out my anger and confusion. She’s one of the counselors who set up a temporary practice downtown in Main Street Clinic. When the United States government first declared Summer Falls a disaster site, they sent emergency-aid workers to help rebuild our homes. What the aid workers discovered was widespread depression, odd memory problems, hallucinations, and mass hysteria. There were also injuries when people suddenly regained their worst memories. Sixteen people who were driving their cars crashed them. One ex mill worker is still in a coma after a bar fight, and an old man ran over his own foot with his lawnmower. The news camera crews that were already showing up to ogle the glacier that had suddenly doubled in size and grown to cover the old falls turned to us as a human-interest story. As the climate-change debate raged around us, we became a kind of natural curiosity for viewers, a symbol of American innocence cruelly smashed. CNN reporters shoved microphones in our faces and asked us to comment on how the tragedy had torn our community asunder. Yes, they used the word
asunder.
Millions of dollars poured in from text-fund lines. Eventually the government issued a grant paying for psychiatric counseling for every man, woman, and child in town.

Liz went to see a counselor too for a while, but then she got too busy running Two Bears Lodge. Our tourist industry dried up when the glacier doubled and the ghosts and heatnaps disappeared. Wilderness tourism popped up as the consolation prize, and my mother made a grab for it first. She opened Two Bears and runs it all by herself. She says she’s not ready to start dating and may never be. Marshall’s dad, Bill, says the same thing, though he’s been known to show up for dinner at Two Bears with his son and linger with the innkeeper over coffee. Since Eva’s death was finally ruled accidental, her life insurance paid out fifty thousand dollars. It’s what she would have earned had she succeeded in preserving Preston’s spell, and it’s enough that Bill can afford to work part-time in Summer Falls and be near his son.

In my bedroom at Two Bears Lodge, we change into our winter wilderness gear, starting with thermal underwear and ending with snowshoes and poles. Marshall grabs another muffin before we leave and insists I split it with him. Even with extra calories beforehand, the trek always leaves us exhausted, every muscle fiber singing with pain, collapsed in each other’s arms on the giant beanbag in front of the fireplace.

“You ready to face the cold again?” he asks.

“As much as I ever am. The others are on their way,” I add. “Carla just texted to say she and Jeremy might be a few minutes late.”

At first we had searched for the guardians. The legendary tribe that for thousands of years had hunted deer and fished near the waterfall, watching over the place of power before Preston arrived. But they were gone, disappeared.

It wasn’t that they had died out; one of the other orderlies at the asylum was descended from them. He was kind enough to give us names and phone numbers of others too, cousins and friends of his. But they turned out to be accountants and salespeople and car mechanics and, in one case, a Methodist priest. There was awkward silence or laughter on the phone when we tried to talk to them. None of them believed in, or had any skills or interest in, defending magical waterfalls. Outside of Preston’s museum, the world had moved on, for better or for worse.

That was when we realized that being part of the tribe had nothing to do with the past, with where someone’s ancestors came from and what they did. It had to do with responsibility in the here and now. We were the spirit’s protectors. We were the new tribe. That’s what we’d inherited, or won. Not the privilege to use this power for whatever we want but the privilege of keeping it safe. We don’t understand everything about the place of power. We know it’s too much—too great—for us to ever allow ourselves access to it, but it trusts us. We’re its caretakers. We’ll fight to the death to keep what happened here before from ever happening again.

Every time I see it, it still makes me feel a funny thrill. The majestic ice-capped mountain. The handrails gone. The trails gone. The wintry world I see around me is real in a way that the world I grew up in never was. Despite the frigid air, I can feel the warm presence of the water spirit all around us, building its strength after its long years of servitude.

In a hundred years, the glacier protecting the spirit will melt. Ninety-nine and a half now. Maybe by then, when our spell is faded, the world will be ready to handle more power. It won’t be our responsibility then, because we won’t try to live past our own time like the Prestons did. But right now it is our responsibility, and one we don’t ever intend to forget.

We snowshoe to where the mouth of the old falls used to be. Marshall and I smile at each other as a snowy fox crosses our path and skedaddles away.

“Still think we made the right choice?” he asks, reaching out for me. “I know it’s not the most glamorous life. It’s not California.”

“California was never real.” I lean into his arms. “It was a dream somebody else put in my head. This, here, with you . . . this finally feels like a place I belong. What about you? You’ve been to Paris, Africa, all around the world. You really think you’re going to be happy staying in one place?”

“I was never happy
before
I came here. Before Summer Falls, before you, I never had a home.”

I pull him close and gently press my cold lips against his, savoring his responding kiss and knowing that the warmth spreading through us both has nothing to do with magic spells.

I hear our friends in the distance, but they can wait.

Acknowledgments

A heartfelt thank-you to my editor, Kristin Daly Rens, whose notes are always spot-on and at the same time genuinely encouraging. What an amazing and rare combination of talents that is! Her insights forged
GLIMMER
into a stronger book and helped me grow as a writer.

As for my agent, Jim McCarthy, he continues to be the best partner in publishing I could imagine: supportive, knowledgeable, and awfully witty too. Some days I cannot believe my good luck in having the opportunity to work with him now on multiple books.

I want to give a shout-out to book bloggers Raila Soares and Kari Olsen, who tirelessly promote YA books in their spare time. Ladies, your dedication and professionalism are inspiring, and you’re permanently on my ARC send-to list.

And to my husband, Robert Brydon, I’ll just say this: happiness
is
being married to your best friend.

About the Author

PHOEBE KITANIDIS
is also the author of
WHISPER
. A former teacher and longtime contributor to
Discovery Girls
magazine, she now writes fiction full time. She can’t live without hot sauce, travel, Twitter, and the sound of rain falling on rooftops. She lives in Seattle, Washington, with her partner and a big gray cat.

Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

Also by Phoebe Kitanidis:

Whisper

Credits

Jacket art © 2012 by Gustavo Marx/MergeLeft Reps, Inc. and Kurt Iswarienko/trunkarchive.com
Jacket design by Alison Klapthor

Balzer + Bray is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Glimmer

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kitanidis, Phoebe.

Glimmer / Phoebe Kitanidis. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Summary: Told in their separate voices, two teenagers wake up in bed together with total amnesia and must work together to try to recover their memories about themselves and the eerie Colorado town in which they find themselves.

ISBN 978-0-06-179928-0

[1. Amnesia—Fiction. 2. Occultism—Fiction. 3. Magic—Fiction. 4. Ghosts—Fiction. 5. Supernatural—Fiction. 6. Colorado—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.K67123Gli 2012

[Fic]—dc23

2011024552

CIP

12 13 14 15 16 CG/RRDH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

FIRST EDITION

EPub Edition © MARCH 2012 ISBN: 9780062099280

About the Publisher

Australia

HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.