The 6th Power (11 page)

Instead, I laid back down. It felt like inevitability was crushing me into my mattress. There was no way I could stop Chet. He’d flipped his lid. I’d pushed him too far. Now Hannah was going to pay the price. Chet was right, this was all my fault.

Don’t know how many hours I spent wallowing. Certainly didn’t sleep, despite my exhaustion. The problem of what to do just kept bouncing around the confines of my head. I could beg, throw myself at Chet’s feet and plead with him. He’d probably love that, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. Chet didn’t want my surrender. He wanted me broken. He wanted…

I sat up. For once, my memory kicked in on its own and I remembered something that Chet had wanted when we were in Mr. Magellan’s yard. He had wanted to know…

Wow. Would that even work?

Dad left at his normal time, and Mom and Kiki were still sleeping. Less than a minute later, Chet silently opened my door. I could tell that he was surprised to find me dressed and sitting on my bed, waiting for him. Without a word, I got up and led my brothers downstairs and out the back door.

I hustled towards the field. Chet took an extra step to catch up with me, but before he could say anything, I pointed and said, “It’s the quickest route to the park.”

The look on his face was a combination of surprise and suspicion. I would have thought that was pretty cool, if I wasn’t so utterly scared out of my mind.

The only problem with my plan was that I no longer had the enhanced memory, so finding what I was looking for was not going to be easy. Fortunately, not all of the grass I’d pushed over the day before had sprung back up in the night. I managed to follow the path back to what I thought was the general area and then I stopped.

The twins almost bumped into me, but I ignored them for the moment. Somewhere around me was a little square of white. The question was not whether I could find but, but whether the twins would give me time to do so.

“What are you doing?” Chet asked.

Ok. Here we go.

I looked at the twins. Chet still looked wary. Robert was a step behind him, his eyes also on the ground, not looking at me. Huh.

I took a deep breath and said, “I’m answering your question, Chet.”

He took a step forward, his hand flexing. I knew that, in a moment, he’d grab my wrist and start pulling me towards the park. I had to give him something else to focus on.

“When we were in Mr. Magellan’s yard the other day?” I said, looking down at the ground again. “You remember what happened, don’t you?”

Chet took another step, closing the gap. Careful.

“You asked me how I did all that…” I waggled my fingers, doing the air-quotes, “stuff?”

Chet stopped. Robert stared at me.

“You know,” I continued, “flushing the toilet while you were in the shower. Making you spit out your orange juice. And we both know that it wasn’t flu or food poisoning that caused you to blow chunks all over Mr. Magellan’s yard.” I kept looking around, but I saw out of the corner of my eye that Chet was squeezing his fists, his arms bulging.

“All right,” he said, his voice surprisingly calm, “tell me. How did you do it?”

“Well,” I said, then stopped. There it was. The envelope, lying there in the grass. I almost cackled, until I realized that Robert was practically standing on top of it.

Chet noticed me looking at his twin and said, “Well, what?”

I had planned on stalling long enough to find the pill, take it, and get out of there. I figured that if I acted confident enough, Chet would be too surprised to stop me. Now, though, both he and Robert were between me and the pill. That made things more complicated.

Think, think, think. Couldn’t bully my way past them. Had to get them to let me do what I wanted to do. Wouldn’t work on Chet. But Robert? There was something different about him. He wasn’t acting like the henchman anymore. He was acting like he didn’t even want to be here. Maybe I could work with that.

I cleared my throat and said, “Well, Robert helped me.”

“What?” It was practically a shriek, loud enough that we all flinched. Robert couldn’t have sounded guiltier if he had tried.

“Come on, Robert,” I said, putting on a look of innocence that I’d learned from Chet. “This was all your idea. You said you were tired of Chet bossing you around all the time. You said you wanted to take him down a peg. Remember?”

Robert spluttered, his hands out of his pockets and waving, as if trying to ward me off. Chet looked back and forth at the two of us, his face expressionless.

“You held the door open while I flushed the toilet,” I said, taking a step towards him. “You gave me the stuff to slip into Chet’s juice. I know that it wasn’t supposed to make him that sick, but…”

“Shut up!” Robert barked. “You’re… you’re lying!”

I took another step forward and, when Robert stepped back in response, I pointed at the envelope. “See! The pill you gave me, the one I crushed up and put into Chet’s glass, you pulled it out of that envelope.”

All eyes focused on the bit of white lying in the sea of waving green. I took another step and reached for it, but unfortunately, Chet was quicker. He scooped up the envelope and shook the last of Mr. Magellan’s pills into the palm of his hand. I resisted the urge to make a grab for it. Chet showed the pill to Robert with a raised eyebrow.

“I’ve never seen that before,” Robert spluttered while continuing to back away.

“Stay where you are!” Chet thundered. He turned back to me. “You say this little thing is what made me sick?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “Not sure where Robert got it, but that’s what did it.”

“Prove it.”

You’ve got to be kidding me. Keep cool. “How?” I said.

Chet held the pill out to me. “Take it.”

Keep cool! Instead of snatching it, I pulled back. “No way! I don’t want to end up in the hospital like you!”

All of the years of torture meant that Chet knew me, knew my pressure points, how to make me squirm. But it also meant that I knew him, and I knew that my defiance would push him to act. He grabbed me by the shoulder and clapped his other hand, the one holding the pill, over my mouth again. “Take it or I will break your jaw and shove it down your throat!”

Well, if you insist. With a fake shudder, I opened my mouth and the pill fell under my tongue. My eyes rolled back as it dissolved and, despite my fears about Mr. Magellan and what was really in the little herbal supplements, I couldn’t deny how awesome it was to feel that tingling in my brain, to feel it open up, giving me access to everything that had ever happened to me.

But I still wasn’t out of the woods, so I faked a gag and doubled over, clutching my stomach. Chet, probably remembering his own explosion, let go of me and stepped back.

Bingo. I started thinking about comic book characters.

There were so many to choose from with this power, but I focused on just one. The last son of a dead planet, a planet whose gravity was much stronger than that of Earth, so that when he was sent here by his parents, he found he was able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

The warmth, the understanding, the power spread through me.

I suddenly stood up straight and could not have kept the grin off of my face if I’d tried. I pointed at Robert and said, “Sorry about that. I know how frustrating it is when someone tells a lie that gets you into trouble.”

Didn’t think my brother could look more surprised. Boy, was I wrong. Chet, on the other hand, just frowned at me as his wheels started to turn.

I clapped my hands together and said, “Well, this has been fun, but I’ve got to get going.”

“What was that?” Chet barked. “You were lying to me?” He stalked forward and I tensed. This wouldn’t work if he got his hands on me again.

“You’re not going anywhere,” he spat. “I’m gonna drag you to your little girlfriend and I’m going to hurt her and…”

“No, Chet,” I said quietly, my smile gone. “You’re not.”

The red was spreading from the root of his hair, down his face and into the bulk of his neck. His nostrils flared, and the memory came forcibly of a cartoon bull that was gearing itself up to take a run at Bugs Bunny. “Why not?” Chet whispered as he reached out.

The hand was coming for me, but I couldn’t help it. I took the time to scream the four words right in his face.

“Up, up and away!”

Then I leapt into the sky.

Chapter 15

I
was weightless.

I was light.

I was that pull you feel when the merry-go-round is about to throw you off. I was the world blurring around you when the rollercoaster crests the hill and starts heading down, that empty-stomach-this-is-awesome-I’m-gonna-die-feeling you get as your arms go up in the air and the floor drops out from beneath you. I was speed. I was power. I was freedom.

I was flying.

Ever since I started reading comic books, I’d dreamed of putting on a power ring or slipping on a suit of armor or saying a magic word and streaking up into the air, away from everything and everyone that was bothering me.

And it was exactly as awesome as I always knew it would be.

I rocketed straight up, not knowing how high or how fast. Part of me was utterly terrified that the power would suddenly turn off, and I would go falling, and I would go splat. The rest of me told that part of my brain to shut up, and then it laughed and howled. 

I thought about going higher and it happened. I thought about going faster and I’m pretty sure that I did, though it was hard to tell because there was nothing but blue sky all around me and blue is a lousy frame of reference. I finally leveled off when it occurred to me to worry about leaving the Earth’s atmosphere.

Hovering in place, I looked down at the ground far below my tennis shoes, and nearly freaked out. My brain was shrieking again, telling me that it was a very bad thing for it to be up so high. I told my brain, repeatedly, to relax, that everything was just fine. The wind, probably a jet stream, kept tugging at me, trying to whisk me off to Europe or Africa.

Coralberry was below me. Way below me. It was just a gray square-ish blob surrounded by fields of green and a blue smudge of a lake. Somewhere down in that gray blob was the little brown box that was my house, and there were two little specks nearby. I wondered whether Chet and Robert were still in the field, staring up at the sky, trying to figure out where I’d gone, and laughter just busted out of me and was swept away.

Didn’t last long, though, as I thought things through. No, of course Chet wouldn’t be waiting around for me to come down. Sure, he’d have stood there for a minute or two with his mouth open, but then he’d…

Stupid, stupid, stupid! How long had I been just floating around, like nothing was going on in the world if I wasn’t in it? What if he already had her?

I reached out towards Coralberry and the rest of my body followed. My brain started making a fuss again as the town rushed up to meet me, and this time I thought that my brain might have a point because the world was just so big and it was coming so fast and was this what a butterfly feels like right before it hits the windshield?

Couldn’t help it. Had to throw on the brakes a few times just to assure myself that I could stop, that I wasn’t just falling to my death. But, of course, that just took more time. Things finally changed from gray blob to Coralberry, and when I could pick out landmarks, I adjusted my descent and aimed for the big park.

Hannah was there, thank-goodness alone, practicing her free throws. No sign of the twins. Realized that I hadn’t breathed in a while, so I gulped some air as I flew around, looking for a place to land where I wouldn’t be seen. As I did, I glanced over at Coralberry Comics and Collectibles.

There was a light on in the office above the shop.

Screech! Hover! Stare! I couldn’t see anyone in there, but was definitely illumination. Had the light been on other day and I just couldn’t tell because of the sun shining against the windows? I didn’t think so. I started drifting over to the shop, thankful that things were dead at that time of morning and nobody was likely to see me.

Then I heard Hannah dribbling her basketball.

I sighed, closing my eyes. It would only take me a second to swoop over to Mr. Magellan’s window to see if he really was there, but Chet could show up at any second. I had to warn Hannah, tell her to go home and stay there for the next few days until things blew over. And I needed to do it now.

There was a large pine tree near the basketball courts that the town decorated each year at Christmas time. I used it for cover as I swooped in and floated down to the ground. When my feet touched, I about started bawling. Standing was just awful. Gravity was the worst. It only took two seconds for me to miss flying more than I’d ever missed anything in my life, even more than chocolate-covered crullers.

Hannah turned around as I approached. She didn’t smile, but at least she wasn’t glowering at me. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I said, managing a wave. How exactly did one start a conversation with someone about how one’s brother was coming to hurt them?
You remember Chet, don’t you? Well, he’s going through a bit of a psychopathic phase and it would be awesome if you could just stay out of his way for the rest of your life. Okey dokey?

Hannah cocked her head and squinted at me. “What did you do to your hair?”

I felt my head. My hair had gone all fluffy and kind of swished back from my forehead.

“You look like that minister on the cable access show on Saturday nights,” Hannah said, touching my bangs. Our fingers got tangled and I yanked my hand away. She actually smiled at that.

I managed to croak out, “It, uh, must have been the wind.”

Hannah looked up at the tree and saw that the branches were still. “What wind?”

I shook my head. We were getting off topic. “No, listen,” I said, “you have to leave.”

Her eyebrow did that Spock-thing. “Uh, I was here first. You leave.”

“No! That’s not what I mean. It’s Chet. He’s, uh…”

She snorted, turned and drained a three-pointer. Despite the stress of the moment, I was impressed. “This is a public place,” she said. “He won’t do anything here.”