A Fistful of Sky (21 page)

I finished my shower, dried off, and put on deodorant, lotion, strategic baby powder, and some of Opal’s perfume. More new practices. I’d only ever used deodorant before. I donned my horrible cotton bra and panties and slipped Opal’s red dress on over my head. It floated down over me, a little too tight in the chest and stomach, but not impossible. I would work on reducing; a tight dress would give me added incentive. Who wanted to look bad?

I sat on the toilet and pulled on the pantyhose, slipped my feet into the tight shoes, then rose, put a hand-towel around my neck to protect my dress, and went to work on my hair and face. The hair was short and didn’t take long to dry and curl. The face. … I wished I had more to work with, but what could you do? At least I had found a poppy red lipstick to match the dress. I persevered.

Somebody pounded on the door. “What are you doing in there?” yelled Jasper.

“Getting dressed,” I said. I blotted my lips with toilet paper and took a good look at the final result.

Better. Much, much better.

“Well, wrap it up, will you? It never takes you this long in the bathroom!

We’re waiting!”

I dumped the happi coat and sleep shirt into the laundry hamper, put all the purloined makeup items in my section of the bathroom drawer, went to the door, and opened it.

Jasper backed away. “God! What happened to you?”

“Good morning. What do you mean, what happened to me?”

“You look so different. You get mugged by the Avon lady?”

I tried a smile. I tried ignoring what he had just said. Something surged under the surface of my mind, and for a bare instant I had an image of my face in clown makeup. A spurt of rage almost burned all the art off my face. Monumental calm smothered my anger before it could manifest. My mind settled. Forgive him, it whispered. lie’s young. He’ll learn to treat you with respect if you act as though you deserve it. “Excuse me.” I edged past him.

He grabbed my arm. “Hey, Gyp, wait. It was a joke. I mean, what did happen to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You look a lot different.”

“Better?” I said.

He studied me. His brow furrowed. “Different.”

“Oh, dear.” He was young. He didn’t know what looked good or bad. “Well, I had better get on with my day,” I said. I crossed the sitting room to my door.

“Gyp? Have you cursed anything yet today?”

“Excuse me, please.” I slipped into my room and shut the door.

My life was messy and disorganized. It needed some revision. Easy place to start? Eliminate the current wardrobe so I would need to buy all new. I opened my underwear drawer and almost gagged. So many plain, ugly, worn-out things. I picked up one pair of underwear with loose elastic, and said, “Damn.”

Nothing happened.

Try something easier. I tore a sheet of notepaper out of a notebook and damned it. Nothing. Odd. Even my biggest curses of yesterday hadn’t deprived me of damns. What had happened?

Someone knocked gently at my door. I opened the door and smiled at Uncle Tobias. Jasper stood across the sitting room.

“Good morning, Gypsum. How are you?”

“Fine, thanks. How are you?”

“Curious. May I ask you a few questions?”

“Please do.”

“What did you do when you woke up this morning?”

When I woke up? It seemed like hours had passed since then. In a way, a lifetime; I felt as though there was a sheet of opaque plastic between my earlier self and who I was now. I frowned and concentrated, dredged up a memory. “I—felt really tense, and knew I needed to use my power, so I went downstairs and zapped all the garbage.”

“Good idea. Then what?”

“It didn’t even take the edge off. Aunt Hermina was there. She was going to empty some trash. I zapped her trash too. Then… .” Something difficult about this part of the memory.

“Was she surprised?”

“Yes. She didn’t know I’d gone through transition.”

“Did you then curse anything?”

“Oh.” Curse-tracking clicked on. My mind flooded with information. “Indeed. She was mad at her computer so she said I could curse it, and I did.”

“What words did you use when you cursed the computer?” Tobias asked. That information, too, came clean and fast into my head and out of my mouth. ” ‘Be wise, be well, be kind, don’t hurt, just help, just work.’ “

Tobias drew in a deep breath, let it out through his nose. “How could it know to be wise?” he muttered, not really asking me. “How could it know what hurts, or what kindness is? What does a computer know of such things? Only what it’s been programmed to believe. Colored by curse energy. I wonder what you did to it. What happened next?”

“It wanted to help me, so it reprogrammed me.”

“Aha,” said Jasper.

“In what way?” asked Tobias.

“It gave me curse-tracking to keep a record of how I use my

energy—that’s why I can remember this so well. It gave me a new set of rules for how to eat, dress, and behave. It destroyed some of my inhibitions that it thought were useless. It installed a rhyming dictionary so I could come up with better spells. Then it put in a power shunt to siphon off my curse power into the computer so that I don’t have to figure out what to do with it, and so that the computer won’t come uncursed after six point seven hours.”

For a little while, no one said anything. Tobias’s breathing was louder than usual.

I tried to think about what I had just said. My mind kept sliding away from it. Jasper muttered something I couldn’t hear.

“It said that if it had done the last thing first, none of the rest would have been necessary,” I said. “But I guess… .”

“Does the power shunt work?” Tobias asked.

I nodded. “I don’t even have a damn left.”

“How do you feel?”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

He reached for my forehead. I backed up. No. Not another hand on my head!

“Stand still,” he said gently, but there were freezers in his voice. So I froze, just the way I would have in the old days. I had no defenses against my family anymore.

He touched my forehead with warm fingertips and said, “How do you feel?”

A great upwelling of rage flooded through me. I wanted to blast everything around me, including people and especially computers. I wanted to incinerate the dress I was wearing. I wanted to be giant and fat the way I had been yesterday so I could stomp on everything that bothered me. I wanted my short local nightmare to end.

“Ah,” said Tobias. He lifted his hand from my forehead. I felt peaceful and calm again. The only thing I wanted to destroy was my old wardrobe.

“Excuse me. What was that?” I asked.

“I wanted to see if the changes were deep or superficial. Definitely superficial.

“What does that mean?”

“You’re still alive under the surface, Gyp, which is good news.”

Mama came down into the sitting room. “Gyp! What have you done with your hair? Your clothes? Your face? You look wonderful!”

“Thank you,” I said.

“But surely you don’t own anything that colorful. Isn’t that one of Opal’s dresses?”

“She left it behind. I didn’t think she wanted it anymore.”

“But, child—what were you doing getting into Opal’s things?”

“Why shouldn’t I? She’s not here.”

Mama turned to Tobias.

“It’s a curse,” Tobias said.

“But she—finally, after all these years I’ve been begging her to do something about it—she’s finally taking care of her appearance.” She held her hands out to me as though to display me, like a model at a boatshow pointing out the virtues of a boat. I felt a glow of pleasure in my stomach. My mother had never done that for me before.

Tobias just smiled at her.

“So how do we get the curse off her?” Jasper asked.

“Do we have to?” asked Mama.

Tobias’s smile vanished. “Anise, is how your daughter looks more important to you than how she feels?”

“How do you feel, Gyp?” Mama asked me.

“Fine, thank you.”

Mama turned on Tobias. “She feels fine, and she looks great.”

“Thanks,” I murmured.

“Are you really this ready to accept the surface as truth, Anise? You used not to be so shallow.”

Mama’s eyes widened. White fire burned in them. She lifted a hand, and fire flared above her fingertips.

Tobias sketched a shield on his palm, but he kept it lowered. “Will you really try to burn me just for telling you a truth?”

Mama’s nostrils flared. A vein pulsed in her forehead. “You know that truth is my highest good.”

“Then look for it.”

She turned to me, her form all outlined in light. Today she wore a turquoise dress, turquoise necklace and earrings, and a big turquoise ring. She looked marvelous, as always. “Gypsum?”

“Mama.”

“What’s the truth of this situation?”

I searched for something to say. “All my clothes are horrible, Mama.”

“Even your favorite? That green corduroy jumper Luz made you that you wear over everything, blouses, T-shirts, even that awful tie-dye thing Uncle Douglas sent you?”

I cringed and put my hand over my face. I’d flipped past that dress earlier while searching my closet for anything to wear, felt a surge of disgust because I knew how much former me had loved that dress. “Hideous,” I whispered.

Mama pulled my hand away from my face, gripped my shoulders, and leaned closer to stare into my eyes. “Where are you?”

“Pardon me?”

She frowned, but only briefly. She rarely made expressions that didn’t look good on her face. “How would you like to go clothes shopping with me? Sky’s the limit. I would love to buy you a whole new wardrobe, as long as you listen to my taste in clothes. How about it?”

I hugged her, almost crying I felt so relieved and happy.

SHE sighed and gently pushed me away. “What do we do?” she asked Tobias.

“Normally, I would encourage Gyp to solve this herself, but she’s in an elegant trap I’m not sure she can work her way out of. The thing she cursed is stealing all her power before she can use it. And once her power has been channeled through another user, it is cleansed of its curse-charge and can be put to any use, witness the brownies she made with Flint. Also, there’s no obsolescence built into it; since the cursed thing worked this change on her with channeled power, it won’t wear off automatically.”

“What is that computer doing with her power?” Jasper asked. “Look what it already did. What’s it doing now?”

“You’re right. We should find out.”

“Muh—-” I had something to say, but I couldn’t get it out.

“What?” Tobias asked.

“Duh.”

He reached for my forehead, touched it. His touch loosened the hold all the new rules had on my brain. I fought my way through a thicket of delirious shopping thoughts. “Don’t let it touch you.” Fire burned my tongue as I said the words—not the fire of the forbidden, but the fire of my rage, crackling through me again because Tobias’s touch set me a little bit free. I pressed my hand over his on my forehead.

“I thought that thing you cursed up yesterday was scary,” Jasper muttered, “but it wasn’t as bad as this. It might have changed what you looked like, but it didn’t tell you how to think and feel and act.”

I pressed Tobias’s fingers against my forehead even tighter. “Altria,” I said.

Something shifted in the hallway. It took me a moment to figure out what. My shadow changed from a shadow to something with color and shape. It rose from the floor and plastered itself to my back; I felt as if I were wearing a thin, clinging veil. “Oh,” she whispered in my ear. “This is different.”

“What?” Tobias said. “What did you just do, Gyp?”

Mama started toward me. Tobias waved her back with his free hand. I held his other against my forehead still. I didn’t want the surface me back.

“But we’re so weak,” Altria murmured. “What happened?”

“Altria,” I said.

“Where’s all our lovely power?”

“Altria?” said Jasper.

I felt her move against the back of my head, a sideways slide of fabric over my shoulders and back.

“Jasper?” she said. Her voice was faint.

“Can you help Gyp?”

“I can try. I have no strength. There’s nothing here to draw on.”

“Today’s curse child is stealing all Gyp’s power, and turned her into a puppet.”

She shifted against my back. I felt warmth against the back of my head, and in some weird way, inside my head, a breeze blowing over my brain.

“Oh,” she whispered. “Nice design. Unpleasant execution.”

“Can you stop it?”

“This direct feed,” she whispered, too low for anybody but me to hear. She stroked my hair. “I want that. I want it too much. That would solve all my manifestation problems. I never thought of it, but now I’ve seen it, and I want it.”

“Altria?” Jasper said.

She kissed my shoulder, then spoke loud enough for him to hear. “I cannot stop it, Jasper. I don’t have the strength.”

“Take mine.”

I gasped.

Altria ran fingers like breeze over my shoulder. “Gyp? What do you want? Do you want me to stop what this thing is doing to you? Root its alterations out of your brain?”

“I do. But I don’t want to risk Jasper. You scared him yesterday. And what—what—would you turn into an energy vampire next?”

“Wouldn’t that be lovely?” She sighed, a warm exhalation against the back of my neck.

“No. I want some of my energy for myself.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

Oh, God. No. I wanted anything rather than to be the person I now was when Tobias wasn’t touching my forehead. “I would rather have you sucking energy off me than that thing.”

“You shouldn’t say that.”

“But it’s true.”

Insubstantial fingers stroked my cheek. “All right, then. I’ll do what I can. And I’ll leave you with some of your energy. Perhaps. Jasper?”

He came toward us.

“Do you offer me your power freely?” she asked.

“Jasper,” said Tobias.

“But what else can I do?” Jasper asked.

“We can try all kinds of other things. We haven’t even seen the thing we fear. We could face it, attack it directly, all together. We have considerable power. If this—shade can solve this problem, surely we can too.”