A Fistful of Sky

A FISTFUL OF SKY

Nina Kiriki Hoffman

ACE BOOKS, NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2002 by Nina Kiriki Hoffman.

ISBN 0-441-00975-1 (alk. paper) I. Title

They open their wings, flash patterns and color, fly from flower to flower. I, with the dark brittles and many feet of the former form, inch along the ground.

Sometimes all I want is two armfuls of air, a fistful of sky.

Foreward

My mother suggested I mention that the LaZelle family is nothing like our family. Well, okay. We did line up like that at the buffet to get our dinner. And yeah, we lived in that house.

But that’s all.

No, really.

Honest.

To Ginjer.

To my family. You know who you’re not.

To Kris, my guardian and goddess.

Thanks to Swedish fiddle group Vasen, who, unknowing, provided the soundtrack.

IN my family, we used the word we all the time. Most of the time we meant the five of us, the children. We hated this TV show, loved that one. We adored cutthroat card games and fast chess, but pretended to hate team sports. We were going to the beach.

Which was not to say we didn’t form in-groups and out-groups among ourselves. But the power of we was stronger than anything we did to each other, especially when we were united against a common enemy. Often enough, the force we supported each other against was right in the house with us.

Even that could shift. When we were talking to strangers, we widened to include everybody who lived in our mansion with the pool, the guest house, and the fruit tree orchard in Bosquecito, a rich enclave just south of Santa Tekla, Southern California: we meant us kids, plus Mama, Daddy, GreatUncle Tobias and Great-Aunt Hermina.

We went to Los Angeles twice a year, once between Christmas and New Year’s, and the other time at Midsummer, to parties where even more of our family lived: Mama’s parents and aunts and uncles, her brothers and sisters, and so many cousins, removed or not, that we couldn’t remember all their names.

We didn’t tell outsiders what we were really like. We learned that particular brand of separation from the rest of the world before we could speak.

As for the other kind of separation, differentiating oneself as an individual, I hardly knew I was a separate person from my brothers and sisters until I was around seven, and I didn’t believe it until later, when I found out just how separate I was.

I was twelve when my older sister Opal went through transition.

At sixteen, Opal was almost as pretty as Mama, with the same full lips,

high cheekbones, and wide violet eyes. She had nice hair, too: long, wavy, and brown with gold streaks.

The rest of us were darker, both in looks and temperament.

Jasper, fourteen, teased Opal because she acted timid. She never dared a dare or took the lead in follow-the-leader. She didn’t like walking to the beach with us because the tunnel under the freeway was full of broken glass and spooky echoes. She couldn’t stand to get dirt under her fingernails. Caterpillars gave her nightmares, and snakes made her run the other way.

As for me, Gypsum, the middle sister, I didn’t take the lead, but I didn’t back down from much. I could run almost as fast and hit almost as hard as Jasper, and harder than Opal. Flint and Beryl, the younger kids, weren’t threats yet; they were still just bothers. Jasper and I had age, size, and strength on them, so we ignored them when we could. Flint had started to follow me and Jasper around, even though I beat him up. On the other hand, Beryl looked up to Opal, which annoyed me.

I remembered how Opal used to hug me when I was little, and comb my hair, help me dress, rock with me in the big rocking chair in Mama and Daddy’s room and sing to me, but that was when I was three and she was seven. It lasted until I was seven and she was eleven. Then I grew out of it.

Opal was a girl, and Jasper was a boy. I sure didn’t want to turn into what Opal was. I didn’t want to be her doll, either.

Transition was something every kid in our family went through if they were lucky.

Watching Opal go through it scared me. She had chills and fever and then chills again over the course of three days. She moaned and talked to people who weren’t visible.

Mama did most of the nursing. Daddy, the one who usually cared for us when we were sick if Opal didn’t, was an outsider, not a member of Mama’s family; he had no experience with this special kind of sickness.

I helped take care of Opal. I kept her covered with blankets instead of letting her shiver them off. I sat by her and gave her water when she would take it. I held her hand when she moaned and cried. Watching her eyes burn with fever in the dim light, I was scared. I didn’t want her to die.

The power came on Opal at midnight of the third day. I was asleep by her bed. I woke to find her hand gripping mine, and when I looked at her she smiled and blew me a kiss. I felt it melt into my cheek like sunlight.

After that, she was okay.

Her settling-in period was mild compared to some GreatUncle Tobias told us about. He was the family historian and our teacher in all the family things we couldn’t learn at school.

Opal only had little spurts and glories as she and her gift adjusted to each other, not the pyrotechnics and major risks and accidents some people had.

When she figured out how her gift worked, she used it on Jasper.

Jasper had been her chief tormentor the past few years, and often he had gotten me to help him. We’d dropped worms and ice cubes down the backs of her dresses, left a garter snake in her bed, scared screams out of her by jumping out of closets.

Opal wasn’t scared anymore.

Every time Jasper relaxed, Opal set invisible things in his path and tripped him. Even when she didn’t, she had him so spooked he tripped over nothing and banged himself up.

When Opal got stronger in her power, she took over Jasper’s legs and walked him places he had no interest in going, like into the pool. He never knew when she was going to attack.

Jasper made me stick with him, and the next time Opal took over his legs, he grabbed me and hung on. Opal wasn’t strong enough to control two people at once, and she wasn’t that mad at me, so after Jasper kicked me a few times while she was running his legs, she gave up torturing him.

After that we didn’t see Opal do anything interesting.

GreatUncle Tobias told us that once you got the power, you had to use it. People who didn’t use their power got twisted up inside and died. It had happened to GreatGreat-Aunt Meta, who got the power of curses instead of the more common wish power. She didn’t know anybody she wanted to curse. Unused curses had turned to cancer inside her.

“What do you think Opal’s doing with her powers, Gyp?” Jasper asked me one day when he and I were in our fort in the middle of the bamboo thicket near one edge of the family property. Our space in the middle of the tall canes stayed cool and quiet and private, no matter how hot the day was. The light shafting down was green, and the air smelled like sweet grass and damp earth. Any wind at all and the canes rubbed against each other, making a noise like squeaky hinges. Long pale leaves papered the floor. Little knobs of bamboo stuck up here and there from the ground.

We all used to hang out in the thicket, hiding from Mama and the neighbor kids, making plans and leading secret lives, but Opal had

changed even before transition. She never came here anymore.

“She must be doing something,” Jasper said. The green light in the thicket made his eyes look even greener than they usually did. He had elf eyebrows, dark, with sharp downward angles at the outer ends. “She’s not choking up like Uncle Tobias said she would if she wasn’t using her powers. What’s she doing?”

“You haven’t been watching hard enough.” I watched everything, particularly things I couldn’t understand. I liked puzzles. “She’s beautifying herself. She buys fashion magazines and studies them, then fixes her face different every day. She changes her eye and hair color too, but only a little, so Mama won’t get on her case.”

“Trust Opal to do something stupid with her gift!” said Jasper.

“You weren’t talking like that last month,” I said. Last month he kept walking into the pool against his will.

He gave me a look. I didn’t talk back to him very often.

“I want to watch her do it,” he said after a short silence that was supposed to teach me a lesson.

“All right.” I liked spying on people. I figured I would be an anthropologist when I grew up; they were the biggest snoops I ever heard of. “How?”

As the oldest, Opal had the best room; the rest of us had smaller rooms, narrow and dark, at the west end of the house. Opal’s room had big windows, but it was on the second story and not near enough a tree for us to climb up and see in.

It did have a glass door out to the widow’s walk. Maybe we could hide outside on the widow’s walk and watch through the door. But Mama’s study was at the other end of the widow’s walk, and she came out on it once in a while to center herself. Mama frowned on spying.

“Let’s hide in Opal’s closet,” said Jasper.

“Right before she has a date is the best time,” I said. At sixteen, Opal was dating more than I planned to in my entire life.

Jasper and I listened to Opal at supper that night. She told Daddy she was going out Friday from five to eleven. She used to ask his permission for things like that.

I decided I wouldn’t let transition take me that way, stop doing what Daddy said just because he couldn’t make me anymore. I would respect him after transition the way I did now, even though he had no wish power.

by four Friday afternoon, Jasper and I were in Opal’s closet. He was mad when I told him we had to be there a whole hour before the date. “Trust me,” I said. “She’s going to take an hour.” Luckily Opal had already laid the dress for the date across her bed. Luckily, Opal’s closet was a huge walk-in; there was room for us and her clothes and shoes.

Opal’s closet smelled like violet sachet. I found it stifling.

She came into the room about ten past four; by then, Jasper was already mad at me and pinching. I had to pinch him back to get his attention when Opal came in. He peered through the keyhole, which left me without much of a view. We had left the door open a crack. A sliver of light laid a stripe across Jasper and a finger on the edges of a couple of the dresses.

“Does she change her looks before or after she gets dressed?” Jasper whispered. I leaned forward and saw the light from the keyhole shining in his opalescent eye.

“Let me look,” I whispered. He frowned, but he moved. I watched Opal take off her school dress and slip into her date dress.

Then she sat at her mirror and picked up something from the vanity table.

“Oh!” I whispered. Something about her reflection—

“What’s she doing?” Jasper elbowed me aside and peered out the keyhole again.

Opal had asked for a dressing table complete with lighted mirror last year, and even though Mama and Daddy never gave us big presents for Christmas, Opal got her dressing table. Maybe that was another part of growing up, but I would have asked for a ten-speed bike.

“Hey,” Jasper said, almost talk instead of a whisper. He sat back on the shoes. I peeked through the keyhole.

I saw Opal’s face in the mirror, and already it looked less like her. She had wider cheekbones and a bigger mouth. She lifted a magazine and looked at a picture in it, then leaned toward her mirror and ran a thick brush over her face. In the wake of the brushstroke, she changed back to the original Opal.

Jasper tugged at my shoulder then, so I backed away and he got the keyhole the rest of the time. Opal made one trip to the closet for shoes, but she didn’t see us because the shoes were right in front of the door when it opened, and we weren’t.

when Opal left the room at ten minutes after five, Jasper and I looked at her special brush. “Hah,” said Jasper, picking it up, “you think—?” He reached out and brushed my cheeks with it. They turned bright, slick red, like a doll’s. “Trust that dumb Opal to put the power in a brush instead of keeping it inside herself.” Jasper painted my nose … green.

“Jasper Elliot LaZelle, you stop that!” I yelled, and jumped him. I grabbed the brush before he could stop me. I brushed brown streaks all over his face.

We had quite a tussle after that. He ended up with curly spiral horns, and I got black lips and purple eyeshadow up to my eyebrows. I was trying to give Jasper an extra eye when the brush stopped working.

We broke apart, staring at each other and breathing hard. Like one person we got to our feet and looked in Opal’s mirror.

“That dumb Opal,” said Jasper, tugging at his horns. “She never has enough power to finish what she starts.”

I rubbed my nose and cheeks, but the color was there to stay. I licked my lips. They remained black, even though they tasted normal. I wondered how long the effects would last. “What are we going to do?”