Chasing Wishes (16 page)

Suddenly, I can’t seem to get enough air. I’m getting dizzy and my pulse races faster and faster. No. It can’t possibly be. Could it?

He has Isaac’s eyes. He recognized what I said—after all these years, is
he
Isaac? But... but how?

Impossible thoughts spiral around and around inside my head, and then time suddenly catches up to me again. Terrence takes a bite of his slice and shakes his head.

"I’d rather you didn’t spill grease on the limo," he says, his mouth still full of food, "but the driver forgot napkins, so what’re you going to do? I’ll deal with it, Irene."

My heart sinks. That wasn’t his line. The spell is broken and the magical moment passed—he’s just Terrence, and I’m just an obsessive lunatic who can’t move on from her old boyfriend.

"Okay," I whisper. "I’ll be careful."

Time flies past as I go back for a second slice and Terrence for his fourth, and I still can’t get over what I just felt. The similarities are just so strong, his initial reaction to what I said so compelling...

I have to ask.

"Terrence?" I ask, my voice suddenly weak and nervous. I feel like I’m shouting at him, but what comes out is little more than a squeak.

"What’s up?" he answers, putting down his slice and almost looking straight at me. His gaze is aimed a little off to my left, but it’s close enough. I scoot to my left so I’m in his line of non-sight, and I immediately lose my nerve as I stare into his eyes.

I suddenly don’t want to know the answer.

I... I want him to be Isaac—I want so badly for it to be true, but I know it can’t be. Most of all, I don’t want to hear him say, "No, I’m not Isaac. Who’s that?"

I can almost hear his quizzical tone now. I can’t do it.

"Thanks for the pizza," I say, simultaneously relieved and ashamed of myself for not saying what I really meant to say.

"Hey, thanks for sitting through that awful meeting. The least I can do is feed you after all that crap," he answers, smiling that same, butterfly-inducing smile. I close my eyes and take a deep breath as my head starts to spin again.

Terrence might not be Isaac, but he’s so similar that it actually hurts.

He doesn’t say anything to me for the rest of the ride, but instead leans back and stares silently up at the ceiling. One tiny drop of pizza grease found its way onto his lapel, but it matches the black, fitted wool suit well enough that it’s nearly invisible. He’s so handsome that I can’t keep my eyes off of him. I’m the worst employee ever.

"What are you thinking about?" I ask, but he only shakes his head silently. I leave him to his thoughts and let my own occupy me.

The more time I spend with Terrence, the more I understand why he so desperately wanted me as his assistant. It must be terrible to be trapped inside your own head with no way to escape. I can’t give him back his sight, but I can at least let him see the world in a different light.

"The limo2emo, I&#’s flying down the highway," I whisper in his ear as I look out the window into the darkness. "The streetlights zip past, each a bright, orange flash in the night sky, one after the next after the next."

I lean in close to him and feel a strange shiver run through me as our shoulders touch. A flicker of a smile crosses his face, and feeling more confident, I continue the story.

"The bridge over the Mystic River is coming up... closer, closer, here it is. We’re going up and over the river now. The rippling water glows in the moonlight, whites and dark blues in a display of random beauty. Yellow and white lights flicker in the trees along the river—houses, businesses, the few cars still driving down the des
erted night streets. Everything’s serene and peaceful right now."

Sure, maybe I’m going a little over the top with my descriptions, but as Terrence’s mouth falls slightly open in awe and excitement, I know that the magic is working. With my words and his imagination, I can give him back his sight.

Words create worlds, and as Terrence sees the world he lost through my eyes for the rest of the ride home, I can’t help but feel that this is the greatest story I’ve ever told.

M
y stomach turns over as I see Sarah and Jacob leaning against the wall of lockers and pretending not to look at me. This has happened almost every day for the entire school year. They try to make me miserable every single day, and I’m sick of it.

Sarah’s doing her best as always to stretch the school’s dress code to its limits. She’s wearing a navy pleated skirt several inches too short with a white blouse two sizes too tight around the bust, and she’s wearing a black bra that shows straight through the thin fabric. To top it off, she’s clutching a purse that probably costs as much as my mother’s monthly rent. Jacob, meanwhile, has decided to eschew all sense of decency and is wearing a pink polo shirt with a popped collar and what looks like plaid board shorts. Wearing a shirt like that at my old school would have gotten him knifed in the bathroom by lunchtime.

I take a deep breath and keep walking. I have to get my books. I won’t let them bother me. I’ll just keep an eye on them and make sure they don’t get a chance to pull something.

Maybe I can go get a teacher to help me,
I think.

No... I have to deal with this myself. Dr. Stevens is the only teacher who ever takes my side anyway. The rest of them wouldn’t so much as bat an eye if I never came back to school again.

Sarah and Jacob stare silently at me as I open my locker, and the open door blocks my view of them. I can hear them whispering and snickering to each other. Are they trying to make me paranoid? Are they going to do something to me like they did with the bag of garbage last week?

... what’s that smell? It smells like a toilet inside my locker.

That’s when I notice the knotted plastic grocery bag lying at the bottom of my locker. It’s a bag of dog poop.

"Eew, what’s that smell?" cries out Sarah in her best theatrical effort to date. "Is that
you
, Nina? You smell like shit! Do you shower? Like, ever?"

My face starts to burn as cruel laughter sprea"c020, ds up and down the hall like a contagious disease, and I bury my head in the locker and pretend I’m still hunting for my books. The truth is that I have no idea what to say back to them. I have no idea what to do because I’d never even dream of doing something like this to anyone else. Who leaves a bag of poop in someone’s locker?

I want to kill both of them, but I know better than to try anything. There’s not a single person in this hallway who would stick up for me if I did. No matter what happens, every last person in this school points the finger at me. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the month I’ve been here, it’s that everything’s my fault, no matter who started it.

I catch a sudden movement out of the corner of my eye, and when I spin around, the boy who helped me last week—I think his name was Isaac—is standing beside me. He’s smiling as he looks down at the bag of crap inside my locker, but the look in his eyes tells me he’s not happy.

"Yo, Isaac," shouts Jacob from the other side of the door, clearly trying to be heard by everyone in the hall. "Does Nina need to shower more, or is that just how people like her naturally smell?"

I glare up at Isaac as I ball my hands into fists, clenching so tightly that my knuckles turn white. The anger burns brighter and hotter in me with each passing second. If Isaac says something, I’m going to lose it. I’m going to attack him and get myself thrown out—I just know it.

Don’t you dare be like them after helping me
! I silently scream at him.

He looks down at me, his smile never wavering for a second, and just when I think he’s going to say something awful and betray me, he instead winks at me.

"Dude, Jacob... you want to know what I think?" he calls back, pushing me aside and peeping at Jacob through the vent in my locker door with a maniacal grin.

Isaac waits for just long enough for Jacob to come closer, and then he swings the locker door open as hard as he can. It slams squarely into Jacob’s face, and I cringe as I hear something snap. Jacob slumps to the floor, swearing at the top of his lungs, and Sarah starts screaming.

"You weren’t here," says Isaac, looking down at me as a crowd of onlookers surrounds my locker. "Jacob and I had a fight and you don’t know a goddamned thing about it. Get to your first class. Now."

All I can do is stare back at him with my mouth hanging open in shock.

"Go!" he barks.

I grab my backpack and bolt down the hallway, stopping just long enough to catch a glimpse of Jacob huddled on the floor against the row of lockers. His face and shirt are covered in blood, and from the way he’s cradling his nose, I think Isaac might have broken it. He’s too busy trying to stop his
nosebleed to do anything to me right now, and I quickly shove through the gawking crowd of students and escape the scene of the fight.

Just before I duck into my classroom, I stop and look back over my shoulder. I’m just in time to watch as Isaac drops the doggy bag directly into Sarah’s expensive designer purse, closes my locker, and then wanders off in the other direction whistling a happy tune.

I shouldn’t be smiling at someone getting hurt like this, but right now, I just can’t help it.

Irene

I
walk Terrence to his laboratory every morning for the next week, but that’s all I see of him. He and Marcus have been working around the clock and they’ve left me to fend for myself.

This is the free time Terrence promised me, the time for me not to worry about assisting him—unless he calls me, of course. So far, the intercom and cell phone remain silent apart from bringing Terrence out for meals and guiding him upstairs at night. Even when I do get to see him, he's so busy dialing into telephone conferences with Verta that I can barely get a word in.

I spend the first and second days in glorious, long-overdue laziness—just lying beneath my bedroom’s tall bay window with a pile of books and watching the quickly changing autumn leaves. Something about the way the breeze rustles the branches makes me want to curl up and sleep here, like an old cat in its favorite square of warm sunlight.

Day three is wonderful as well, but by day four, my book pile is exhausted and a new feeling has replaced the beautiful serenity I’ve felt all week long.

Boredom.

Suddenly, I’m unpacking all my boxes, decorating my tiny room and hanging sunshine-yellow curtains over my adorable bay window. My room bursts into beautiful colors thanks to flowers from the back garden, and I’m surprised that there are any flowers left in the garden once I’ve finished filling every vase in the house.

I even taught Columbus how to properly heel on a leash after a mere twenty-two walks.

All that and it’s still only Friday morning of my first week. I sit on my bed, staring out at the leaves as the alarm clock ticks deafeningly on the bedside table. It’s so quiet that I can hear my pulse. God, I’m going to go insane if I don’t find a way to distract myself.

Cassie’s been busy at work, Terrence in his lab, and with the chef, Antonio, back from vacation this week, I can’t even entertain myself by cooking. He shoos me out of the kitchen every time I try to come in. Whatever he’s making smells delicious, but it’s not doing much to help my boredom.

I sigh and sit down on the red and black, faux-oriental throw rug in my bedroom next to the dog.

"So tell me, Columbus," I ask him as he snoozes on the floor with his big, dumb head on my lap, "what would
you
do if you suddenly had everything you needed? How would you entertain yourself?"

He of course says nothing, but instead pants happily with his eyes tightly shut as I scratch him behind his left ear. He’s so adorable I could almost puke.

"Oh who am I kidding," I tell him. "You’d keep right on sleeping just like this, wouldn’t you? You’d keep doing exactly what you’ve always done—exactly what makes you happy."

"...what makes you happy," I repeat, my voice dropping to barely above a whisper.

God, I’m such an idiot. Why did I have to talk to the dumbest dog alive to figure out the answer? This is the chance I’ve always wanted—the opportunity to do what makes me happy—and I’m sitting here squandering it on boredom.

I wriggle out from underneath the dog’s enormous head, leap to my feet, and fling the closet door open. Where is it? Where on earth did I... there it is!

I yank t"2e dog̵he pile of spare blankets off the only box I haven’t yet opened and rip off the packing tape. My microphone, headset, and filter sit on top, carefully wrapped in all the newspapers I could find at our old apartment, and the rest of the box is crammed full of all the CDs, labels, padded envelopes and various shades and weights of paper required for demo submissions.

It’s time to set up my recording studio again. I know that I’m good enough to land a voice-acting job, and this time there’s no cafeteria day job to stop me.