Strange Girl (35 page)

I never got a chance to ask her the answer to that riddle.

And I know the answer shouldn’t matter.

Yet it still bothers me.

I’ve never spoken to Bo since that night.

Hell, this is no way to finish a tale of Aja’s brief but beautiful life. She deserves so much more. I should be talking about how great she was. About how much I loved her. About how much she loved everyone. But that’s the problem with trying to describe a girl who kept saying she was no one.

In Advaita, the system of yoga that Janet believed best described Aja’s internal state, they often call the Big Person the Brahman. And they say the Brahman cannot be described by words, only by negation. “It’s not this. It’s not that.” I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but I’d have trouble hanging out with a master or teacher who answered every question I asked by saying, “That’s a good question, Fred. Unfortunately, there’s no answer to it.”

It’s time, I think, to throw negation out the window.

Granted, Aja was shrouded in mystery, but despite what I said earlier, I do believe she gave me and my friends a glimpse into the Big Person by the life she led. She was the only person I ever met who was a hundred percent genuine, absolutely sincere. She never once said something that didn’t sound true; and somehow, no matter what the situation, she always said the right thing. And she was the most humble human being I ever met.

The most caring, the most loving, simply the most. . . .

What guided her from behind the scenes may have been too vast for anyone to comprehend, but at least I got to enjoy her as a normal girlfriend. When I kissed her lips, I felt cherished. When we touched, I got aroused. And when we made love I felt as if I had died and gone to heaven. Yeah, sure, she may have been sent to earth by the angels but she was the most passionate female I ever met.

I was lucky she was my first love. Lucky and cursed. I mean, I was just looking for a girlfriend to have sex with and fate handed me a goddess with galaxies inside her. Talk about scoring. But the flip side is how do I replace her? As a one-man band traveling the fifty states, I’ve met all kinds of women. Occasionally, if she’s kind enough, cute enough, I may even feel a crush coming on. But then I wake up in the morning, after dreaming of you know who, I roll over in bed and open my eyes and reality hits home. And I’m back on the road again.

Only one in three hundred million people are struck by lightning twice in one life. I read that somewhere. Those are slim odds, and I know the chances of finding another Aja are just as remote. But I don’t worry about it, not like Janet, Mike, and Dale worry about me finding someone else to love.

They’re still my best friends. The passing years haven’t changed that. They care about me and I still care about them. And they fear I wander the country lost, always searching to heal the hole in my heart that Aja’s death caused. They don’t understand what her death meant. Back then, I was in such pain, even I didn’t understand. When she touched me, all I felt was an unlooked-for moment of relief. I hadn’t a clue that I was witnessing the last of her miracles.

I’d like to go step by step and explain exactly what happened.

Unfortunately, I don’t know what happened.

That’s what’s wrong with miracles. They make for great bedtime stories if you’re religious and they can still be impressive to watch even if you’re an atheist and can’t believe what your eyes are seeing. Just don’t try putting them under a microscope.

I should just say what happened that night.

Looking back on it from ten years later . . .

When Aja was dying and she touched my heart and said,
“It’s okay. You will be okay. I will be with you here. I will always be with you. I promise . . .”
I was never the same afterward.

I’m not saying she gave me a dose of universal bliss. I was in agony when she died and months later I was still in pain. But a part of me changed with her final touch—permanently, deep inside—and I think it was because she put a piece of herself inside of me.

If you don’t believe me I can’t say I blame you.

But what I can say is that as my grief passed I became more and more aware that Fred was not who I was; or rather, that Fred was not
all
I was. To put it another way—in the center of my heart a diamond that I never knew existed began to shine. English has no words for the gem but I’ve no doubt that one day her final gift will lead me to the Big Person.

That said, I know most people will think Aja changed me into a “believer.” That’s not true—what she did was much more sublime. She erased my “disbelief.”

It took me ten years but I finally felt it was time I wrote about Aja and fulfilled my purpose for being on earth. I say that as a joke, of course, but not totally. I’ve never forgotten that night she told me I was an angel and that I’d come to this world for a reason. Meeting her, falling in love with her, telling her story—these things have given my life more meaning than anything else, even my music.

To write Aja’s story, I finally came home to Elder. And I’ve written about her while sitting in just one spot—on the ground where the Carter Mansion used to stand, before Bart and I burned it down. I assumed before coming home that the area would still show signs of scorching. But such was not the case.

Now, either the ash from the mansion acted as some kind of superfertilizer or else Aja’s ashes had fairy dust in them. It’s hard to believe but the plot of land where the house stood is now covered with a surprising variety of trees: birch, oak, maple, elm, fir. None are fully matured but they’re still fairly tall, especially when you consider they’re only ten years old.

While writing this book, their leaves and branches were wide enough to provide me with plenty of shade from the hot sun. And I should mention a flower that’s growing wild over the plot of land. Daisies, there are daisies everywhere. Romantic fool that I am, I often think they’re just waiting for Aja to return to pluck them.

It’s interesting to contemplate that what remains of Aja’s physical body is here on this land. Perhaps that’s why, occasionally, when my mind is still, I’ll draw in a deep breath and feel I can smell her again. Not as she lay silent on her deathbed but as she smelled when she was alive in my arms. For an instant I imagine I hear her voice, a word or two, spoken in my ear. It’s then I realize how lucky I was that I knew her and that she was my girlfriend.

I know most will see these final words as the sentiments of a guy who continues to grieve over a long-lost love. I can’t lie, I still miss her. Yet I’ve finally realized that what she tried to tell me at the start, and at the end, is true. She really was beyond this changing world. She was forever. And even though I still long to hold her again, I know she is always with me.

Check Out Christoper Pike’s
Red Queen

ONCE I BELIEVED that I wanted nothing more than love. Someone who would care for me more than he cared for himself. A guy who would never betray me, never lie to me, and most of all never leave me. Yeah, that was what I desired most, what people usually call true love.

I don’t know if that has really changed.

Yet I have to wonder now if I want something else just as badly.

What is it? You must wonder . . .

Magic. I want my life filled with the mystery of magic.

Silly, huh? Most people would say there’s no such thing.

Then again, most people are not witches.

Not like me.

I discovered what I was when I was eighteen years old, two days after I graduated high school. Before then I was your typical teenager. I got up in the morning, went to school, stared at my ex-boyfriend across the campus courtyard and imagined what it would be like to have him back in my life, went to the local library and sorted books for four hours, went home, watched TV, read a little, lay in bed and thought some more about Jimmy Kelter, then fell asleep and dreamed.

But I feel, somewhere in my dreams, I sensed I was different from other girls my age. Often it seemed, as I wandered the twilight realms of my unconscious, that I existed in another world, a world like our own and yet different, too. A place where I had powers my normal, everyday self could hardly imagine.

I believe it was these dreams that made me crave that elusive thing that is as great as true love. It’s hard to be sure, I only know that I seldom awakened without feeling a terrible sense of loss. As though my very soul had been chopped into pieces and tossed back into the world. The sensation of being on the “outside” is difficult to describe. All I can say is that, deep inside, a part of me always hurt.

I used to tell myself it was because of Jimmy. He had dumped me, all of a sudden, for no reason. He had broken my heart, dug it out of my chest, and squashed it when he said I really like you, Jessie, we can still be friends, but I’ve got to go now. I blamed him for the pain. Yet it had been there before I had fallen in love with him, so there had to be another reason why it existed.

Now I know Jimmy was only a part of the equation.

But I get ahead of myself. Let me begin, somewhere near the beginning.

Like I said, I first became aware I was a witch the same weekend I graduated high school. At the time I lived in Apple Valley, which is off Interstate 15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. How that hick town got that name was beyond me. Apple Valley was smack in the middle of the desert. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said it’s easier to believe in witches than in apple trees growing in that godforsaken place.

Still, it was home, the only home I had known since I was six. That was when my father the doctor had decided that Nurse Betty—that was what my mom called her—was more sympathetic to his needs than my mother. From birth to six I lived in a mansion overlooking the Pacific, in a Malibu enclave loaded with movie stars and the studio executives who had made them famous. My mom, she must have had a lousy divorce lawyer, because even though she had worked her butt off to put my father through medical school and a six-year residency that trained him to be one of the finest heart surgeons on the West Coast, she was kicked out of the marriage with barely enough money to buy a two-bedroom home in Apple Valley. And with summer temperatures averaging above a hundred, real estate was never a hot item in our town.

I was lucky I had skin that gladly suffered the sun. It was soft, and I tanned deeply without peeling. My coloring probably helped. My family tree is mostly European, but there was an American Indian in the mix back before the Civil War.

Chief Proud Feather. You might wonder how I know his name, and that’s good—wonder away, you’ll find out, it’s part of my story. He was 100 percent Hopi, but since he was sort of a distant relative, he gave me only a small portion of my features. My hair is brown with a hint of red. At dawn and sunset it is more maroon than anything else. I have freckles and green eyes, but not the green of a true redhead. My freckles are few, often lost in my tan, and my eyes are so dark the green seems to come and go, depending on my mood.

There wasn’t much green where I grew up. The starved branches on the trees on our campus looked as if they were always reaching for the sky, praying for rain.

I was pretty; for that matter, I still am pretty. Understand, I turned eighteen a long time ago. Yet I still look much the same. I’m not immortal, I’m just very hard to kill. Of course, I could die tonight, who’s to say.

It was odd, as a bright and attractive senior in high school, I wasn’t especially popular. Apple Valley High was small—our graduating class barely topped two hundred. I knew all the seniors. I had memorized the first and last name of every cute boy in my class, but I was seldom asked out. I used to puzzle over that fact. I especially wondered why James Kelter had dumped me after only ten weeks of what, to me, had felt like the greatest relationship in the world. I was to find out when our class took that ill-fated trip to Las Vegas.

Our weekend in Sin City was supposed to be the equivalent of our Senior All-Night Party. I know, on the surface that sounds silly. A party usually lasts one night, and our parents believed we were spending the night at the local Hilton. However, the plan was for all two hundred of us to privately call our parents in the morning and say we had just been invited by friends to go camping in the mountains that separated our desert from the LA Basin.

The scheme was pitifully weak. Before the weekend was over, most of our parents would know we’d been nowhere near the mountains. That didn’t matter. In fact, that was the whole point of the trip. We had decided, as a class, to throw all caution to the wind and break all the rules.

The reason such a large group was able to come to such a wild decision was easy to understand if you considered our unusual location. Apple Valley was nothing more than a road stop stuck between the second largest city in the nation—LA—and its most fun city—Las Vegas. For most of our lives, especially on Friday and Saturday evenings, we watched as thousands of cars flew northeast along Interstate 15 toward good times, while we remained trapped in a fruit town that didn’t even have fruit trees.

So when the question arose of where we wanted to celebrate our graduation, all our years of frustration exploded. No one cared that you had to be twenty-one to gamble in the casinos. Not all of us were into gambling and those who were simply paid Ted Pollack to make them fake IDs.

Ted made my ID for free. He was an old friend. He lived a block over from my house. He had a terrible crush on me, one I wasn’t supposed to know about. Poor Ted, he confided everything in his heart to his sister, Pam, who kept secrets about as well as the fifty-year-old gray parrot that lived in their kitchen. It was dangerous to talk in front of that bird, just as it was the height of foolishness to confide in Pam.

I wasn’t sure why Ted cared so deeply about me. Of course, I didn’t understand why I cared so much about Jimmy. At eighteen I understood very little about love, and it’s a shame I wasn’t given a chance to know more about it before I was changed. That’s something I’ll always regret.