The Fading (6 page)

‘Noel? Noel? Hey, are you okay, man?’ Trevor was saying.

Noel came back to them, remembered where he was and what was about to happen. It was seconds away, he was sure.

Think of something
, his mind cried.
Get out of here now! It’s going to ruin everything! They can’t see you, they can’t see it happen!

The thing that used to be Dimples was less than fifty feet away now. Walking faster, pulling at the folds of his jacket, yanking
the cloth straight as his eyes got larger and larger. Its stumpy black dress shoes were shiny against the gravel but made
no sound and left no divots in the gravel.

Don’t lose it.

That’s what his mom had said when she handed him the ball this morning. And that was his answer now. He knew what to do.

The thing that used to be Dimples was perhaps twenty feet away.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ he barked at all of them. ‘We’ll play a game of five hundred. But we’re going to play it one time and
one throw only. I’m gonna chuck it, and the one who catches this ball gets to keep it. Now line up!’

At least half of them did not believe him and just stood there, scowling. But when Noel trotted back a few paces, the other
half of them guessed he was serious enough and took off running right at Dimples, who stopped, shifted right, then left, confused
in the flurry of running boys. But by then Noel wasn’t watching them, he was running, looping out of the pocket.

He ran backwards, almost daring the sad face to come after him. When he could wait no more, he came to a gravel-plowing halt,
found the puffy laces, cocked his arm, and with every fiber of muscle he could summon launched the ball into the sky. Every
single boy, the ones who were playing and the ones who were just bored, the ones who wanted so badly to be the new owner of
this new Nerf football and the ones who just wanted to stand back and watch as the fight broke out, turned their faces to
watch the Nerf fly at a forty-five-degree angle. It was a prize now, not just a game, and Noel was no longer a part of it.

He was free.

The Nerf sailed high and true, shrinking to a pill as it traced a fine arc some fifty yards downfield. If Coach K had been
there to see it, he would have placed a phone
call to his friend Bud Jarvis over at Centennial Middle and told him he had a prodigy quarterback coming his way in two years.

The ball was still spiraling tightly when Noel turned his back on them and ran in the opposite direction, toward the bike
racks near the front of the school. He ran as hard and as fast as he could. His lungs throbbed and his thighs burned. He dared
not look back, because whatever happened next he did not want to know. He ran and ran, the only sounds his chuffing breath
and the intermittent crunch of his feet in the gravel. He counted five and then five more huge strides before chancing a look
down. Below his scissoring vanished legs the gravel continued to crunch and spread in clean little pots, but the boy who reshaped
the ground as he ran was no longer here.

Far behind him came the shouts and cries of boys clamoring for a ball. And somewhere between where they played and where Noel
Shaker was headed, from something much older than all of them, something ageless and corrupt, came the howl of a jackal with
an empty belly.

He slowed in the teachers’ parking lot as a cramp (probably from the extra baked cheese sandwich) turned vicious under his
ribs. Looking back to make sure no one was following him (and, really, how could they? but he had to look anyway), he slipped
between a blue Mustang and a battered white Jeep with a black cloth top. He crouched, peering through car windows to make
sure the oddly changing version of Dimples hadn’t tracked him. So far the coast was clear, but he couldn’t stay here for ever.
He needed a plan, but it was hard to plan anything when you didn’t know when and where you would blink back into existence.

Most of the other episodes had ranged from thirty seconds to ten minutes. But it was hard to be sure, because the time he
spent missing was so distorted by fear and confusion that each minute felt like an hour. Noel wished he had kept notes. There
was no schedule he could follow, but on the whole they seemed to be lasting longer. Maybe the older he got, the longer they
would last.

If that were true, this one might last anywhere from
twenty minutes to an hour. He thought again of the multiplication tables he had learned this year, the way small numbers bounced
off each other and grew fright-eningly fast into big numbers. What if his problem was like that? Twenty seconds tripling into
a minute, three minutes, nine, nine times nine was eighty-one minutes, and some day maybe eighty-one minutes times eighty-one
minutes … but he didn’t want to carry the math that far right now. He didn’t want to think about how one of these times it
might never let him go.

He couldn’t go back to class today. He never wanted to go to school again. He wanted to go home and lock himself in his room.
But what would he tell his parents? What if someone in the school was calling them right now? Maybe he would just run away.
From school. From home. From everything and everyone. Visions of an adult life filled his head. He would take a cab downtown,
to the mall, order a steak with fries for dinner, check into a fancy hotel. He would stay up till ten, go to the arcade for
hours, then skip school tomorrow and the next day and …

Money. If he was going to have to survive on his own, he would need lots of it. Suddenly the myriad ways in which money seemed
like the thing that would save him were too vast to count. Where could he find some money right now?

Actually … close. Closer than he’d ever realized.

He raised himself up from between the cars and, still feeling a little nauseated, headed back toward the school.

*

Mr Hendren’s School Supply & Toy Shoppe wasn’t a real store, only a closet in Mr Hendren’s sixth-grader classroom with a fold-up
counter, its door decorated and shelves stocked to look like a store. For sale to all students who came during store hours
(10 a.m.–noon, closed for lunch, 1–3 p.m.), with their teachers’ permission in the form of a yellow hall pass, were all kinds
of useful things: pencils (both regular and mechanical, with lead refills), erasable pens that most of the other teachers
had banned, rulers, notebook paper, Elmer’s glue, twenty-four-count boxes of crayons, and other school supplies ranging from
ten cents to a buck fifty. There was even a little toy cash register with working buttons and number signs that popped up
inside the glass cover and a spring-loaded drawer.

Mr Hendren had created the store to teach his students about math, retail inventory, customer service and a few other basic
business concepts. As the store thrived and his students began to jockey for the envious role of store sales clerk, Mr Hendren
expanded his inventory to include a few simple toys to be given out as rewards for excellent scores on tests, best behaved
student of the week, and eventually for general sale to any kid who wanted them, further boosting his profits (all of which
were rolled into a kitty for the end of the school year pizza and soda party).

Noel had been here on various missions to replace a broken pencil or refill his TrapperKeeper, but, strangely, the sight of
all the toys did not stir his interest the way they had so many times before, when he couldn’t afford
them. He saw now that most were trinkets, the kind of junk you got out of the gumball machines at the grocery store. Plastic
finger puppets, cheap yo-yos, miniature NFL football helmets, crappy rings and necklaces for the girls, all stuff Noel had
somehow outgrown this year.

There’s only a few minutes of recess left. Grab the money and go, hurry!

Only now, staring at the little cash register, did he realize he had nowhere to hide the money. He couldn’t carry it … or
could he? The truth was he didn’t know what would happen because he’d never tried taking something with him into one of his
spells.

The closest he’d ever come was two summers ago in his backyard tree house, where he’d hoarded his Hot Wheels and a good length
of track. He’d built a ramp down, across the yard, to launch his cars into the sandbox where he had dug a pit and filled it
with water for the alligators which would chew the imaginary driver to pieces. He’d been sitting Indian style at the top of
the ramp, the purple Corvette with orange flames running up the hood resting on his palm, when he blinked out. The ’Vette
was suspended in the tree house’s hot and faintly sour wood summer air. He’d picked up another Hot Wheels, and then another,
gliding them, hypnotized by his ability to make the cars fly. By the time he remembered to put one in his pocket and see if
it too disappeared, it was too late. The five- or six-minute spell had elapsed.

Nor had it occurred to Noel that day, at age seven, to ask how the thing that changed him changed his
clothes, too. Only a few weeks later, watching Grover on Sesame Street change into Super Grover, with his cape and metal helmet,
did he consider the ways in which a costume changed you. Like how the cape and helmet seemed to be all Grover needed to become
Super Grover.

Since then, the closest he’d come to understanding his rare and unpredictable visitor was to think of it as a kind of bubble
that concealed everything it contained. The question now was a simple but baffling one: how large was the bubble?

And as crucial – how much could it hide?

Large enough to hide a Nerf football? No, that wouldn’t have worked. The Nerf was too big to fit in your pocket. But what
about something smaller? Say, for instance, a folded wad of dollar bills and a handful of change? After all, his jeans pockets
were hidden inside his jeans, and now his jeans were hidden inside the bubble with him.

Mr Hendren and his class would be back any minute, as soon as the bell rang. This was his big chance. The lights were off
and even if he had been normal, no one would see him do it. The toy cash register had a broken drawer. Noel knew this because
he had seen it and because there was a thick rubber band holding it closed now. He unsnapped the band and the spring-loaded
drawer banged out at him like a square tongue. Inside the drawer was a cigar box with a smiling woman in a slim blue dress
on the lid. Under her was a nice sheaf of paper money. Ones and fives mostly, but at least half an
inch of them, plus about thirty quarters and some smaller coins. No time to count it, but it looked like at least thirty bucks,
maybe forty. A fortune.

Noel reached for the drawer as if it were one of the bright red coils on his mom’s electric stove. For a moment he was disoriented
by the darkened classroom and the clumsiness that came with not being able to visually orient his hands and arms in relation
to physical objects. Then his fingers grazed the bills and his tummy fluttered and his face flushed with hot shame.

It’s stealing
.

When he’d been hiding in the teachers’ parking lot, the idea of raiding Mr Hendren’s School Supply & Toy Shoppe hadn’t seem
like stealing at all. He deserved a way out of this mess and the whole school seemed to be standing against him. But now,
on the verge of doing it, he felt like Dean and his parents and Principal Lare-Mo and all of them were watching over his shoulder.

But.
So what if it’s stealing? Wasn’t there something in the Bible about how it was okay to steal bread if you were starving? Didn’t
Jesus want you to steal if it meant saving you from dying? Well, I may not be starving after eating those two baked cheese
sandwiches, but I need help and there’s no one here who can help me.

I need help. I need help so bad …

‘Somehow I knew you’d find your way in here,’ a scratchy old voice said, managing to come from behind him and from within
the closet at the same time. ‘Just like I found my way into you.’

Noel backed into a box of supplies and cried out as he
stumbled to the floor. He whined in fear of the punishment he would now receive and a few hot drops of urine leaked into his
underwear. When a minute passed in quiet, Noel got up and took two tentative steps out of the closet, his eyes darting across
the rows of empty desks and dusty chalkboards. The darkened classroom was empty.

‘You have a problem,’ the scratchy voice continued, from nowhere and everywhere. ‘You can’t use a phone to call a cab, not
to mention pay the driver. Whattya think the suckhead’s gonna do when an invisible boy hops in and tells him to beat it to
North Boulder Park?’

Noel’s lips began to tremble. That weird person in the playground might have been Dimples, but this wasn’t Dimples’s voice.
He didn’t know who this voice belonged to, even though it did sound a little familiar, kind of like it belonged to a thug
on TV. Fresh hot tears burned down both cheeks.

‘Aw, now, don’t be a baby,’ the man said, and there was a creak, as if he had just sat down on one of the desks. Noel looked
to Mr Hendren’s chair and he was pretty sure it was leaning back now in a way it hadn’t been before. Also, the air around
the chair was darker, as if a special shadow was hanging all over it. ‘We can find a way out of this, Noelski. You did the
right thing getting away when yous did. They wouldn’t understand your powers. Know why? Because they ain’t special like you.
They ain’t got no powers and they’re frickin’ dumb as stumps, ’cause they can’t do the things you and I can do or see the
things you and I see. Ya see?’

Noel was a long way from being able to respond, but his tears stopped when the speaker said the word ‘powers’. Noel had never
thought of it that way, like something a superhero owned, and it sounded a lot better than a bubble or a freak condition.

The shadows were fuller now, with the suggestion of big belly, thick chest. Above the wide shoulders, the outline of a smaller
head sitting next to, or part of, a larger head made Noel think of Mr Potato Head and maybe his little brother.

His visitor sighed. ‘You don’t remember me, do you, kid?’

‘No.’