For I Could Lift My Finger and Black Out the Sun (10 page)

3

I didn’t see Bobby for a while after that, and he offered no explanation why. Still, I thought I knew.

Up until that moment, while we had used our minds to both push and repel — to attack and defend — our bodies had only been used one way. When we slammed that hammer down to hit our hand, our hand moved out of the way in self-defense. But I’d just done something new.

Even though I was stopping Bobby’s charge with my hand, I had turned myself, for the first time, into a
weapon
.

Bobby was jealous.

* * *

Mom and Dad (Andrea and Phil, remember?) were huddled in conversation a few weeks before my fourteenth birthday. As usual, being a kid, I had no idea what they were talking about, or that it might in any way impact me. But it did.

“John, come here,” my dad said as I was taking my dishes to the sink after dinner one night. Holly sat next to my parents, all of them still at the dinner table. “We want to tell you something we think you’re going to like,” Dad announced with a broad smile, taking his glasses off to wipe them clean on his shirt.

“What’s up?” I asked, standing beside the table impatiently.

“Son, we’re going to take a trip. A vacation. In just a couple weeks.”

I took in the information with no response. I was a kid, and didn’t know anything about vacations. Hell, as much as I complained about school, pretty much my entire life was a vacation. This just meant doing the same stuff somewhere different. I shrugged. “Okay,” I said.

“Well,” Dad said, spinning around his laptop so I could see the screen. “I think you’re going to be really happy when you hear
where
we’re going!” Dad sounded excited. I was no dummy. I was old enough to realize that if my parents were excited about something, there was a 97.8519% chance that I would find it hideously boring and lame. In fact, that figure may have been on the low side.

Still, I humored him. “Where?”

“We’re going to go to Playa Beach! Whaddaya say, bud? Excited?” My dad held his arms wide, awaiting some kind of tearful bear hug.

“Is that the beach up north? Isn’t it cold there?”

“Yes, it’s up north. And no, it’s only cold in the wintertime. We’re going in the summer, of course. We’re going to be there for your big fourteenth birthday!” Still, Dad waited for some big reaction.

I blinked once. Twice. “Uh… Okay, good. Sounds fun,” I said calmly, then turned and began walking away.

“John,” Dad called behind me. “That’s it?
Sounds fun
? Come on, son, I think you’re gonna have a blast. Playa Beach has the boardwalk, rides, all kinds of fried foods that are bad for you, but that your mom will still let you eat…” Mom protested slightly at that. “And of course the beach and the ocean.”

“I don’t get it,” I said, blinking.

“Get what? It’s vacation, son.” Dad was frustrated by my lack of elation.

“No, I get that. It’s the name. ‘Playa Beach.’ Doesn’t that mean ‘Beach Beach?’”

Dad rolled his eyes at me. “Um. I guess. So?”

“Well, that’s weird, isn’t it?”

Mom turned her back. I think she was either highly annoyed with me or possibly laughing a bit at my questions. Dad huffed out a response. “No, I don’t think so. The area around Playa Beach has been popular with Spanish people for many years.”

“
Spanish
people? People from Spain? Or people who speak Spanish but come from many places? Latinos?” Dad just blinked. There was no point in continuing. I shook my head and changed the subject. “Um, sure Dad, like I said, sounds fun.” I turned and headed for my room.

But not before I saw Dad and Mom trade an exasperated glance.

* * *

I got ready for bed, teeth brushed, pajamas on (I had taken to wearing a t-shirt and shorts to bed, pretty much same sloppy look as my daytime attire during the summer, but we can just call them pajamas for simplicity). Mom and Dad each came to wish me goodnight. Afterward, I could hear them talking downstairs.

“Geez, I would’ve thought he’d be thrilled about Playa Beach!” Dad said, voice carrying up the stairs.

“He was, honey. You know he’s getting to that age…” Mom sounded tired.

“I mean, none of us get enough time to just have fun. This is important,” Dad said. “This could really make a difference in his life.” They had sensed something bad had happened to me, even though they didn’t know a thing about the self-storage building. They’d heard about Walter Ivory, but of course they had no idea I’d been there. Thankfully. Walter was so universally disliked that no one thought twice about how he had accidentally gotten himself killed. He was hiding from the law after all.

“We’ll have fun,” Mom offered, sounding a little patronizing.

Dad heard the tone. “We really will,” he said, defensively. “This trip could be a game changer.”

I thought Dad was giving the trip way too much weight. But in reality, it was a sort of game changer. Just not the way Dad meant.

As I drifted off to sleep, the house shook back and forth slightly, making things clatter and jangle.

“Must be an aftershock,” I heard Dad say.

4

The earthquakes were really unexpected. My parents said they could only recall one other quake happening in our area in their lifetimes. Suddenly we’d had two more, one after the other. Or maybe one and one aftershock. Did it matter? Mom said even the experts weren’t sure. But for a few days, our town, which they said was the approximate epicenter, made the national TV news.

For the first time, but definitely not the last.

The quakes themselves were hardly noticeable. Very light. Like a 2.4 on the Richter scale (which Bobby always mistakenly called the Litmus test). Maybe more or less. Honestly, I wasn’t paying much attention to it all. I had thorns inside me. I’d been threatened with death by a man who’d likely been driven crazy by those same thorns. I’d helped break that man’s mind and watched him die. I could make my body into a weapon, albeit accidentally. So you can see I had other things to think about.

A few days after the second quake, I was sitting in front of the television with Mom and Holly. I was zoned out in thought, so it barely registered when Mom suddenly jumped off the couch.

“Phil! I need you! Help!” she shouted, fear in her voice.

From the other room, I heard my dad’s muffled reply. “What is it?” Quick footsteps told me Dad was taking her seriously, rushing in. I snapped back to reality.

“Holly!” Mom went to my sister, who sat shaking slightly in her chair. “Phil, she’s having another seizure.”

Dad knelt beside Holly, taking her by the wrist. I stood and watched, but there was nothing I could do. Nothing Mom or Dad could do either, really, except make sure Holly didn’t hurt herself. After a moment, she became still, sitting with her eyes closed. My parents waited a few moments longer, until they felt reassured that it truly was over, then let out small sighs of relief.

The four of us were motionless. The whole world was motionless, it seemed.

Then Holly opened her eyes, staring ahead but not seeing. Why did I feel she was looking right at me?

At that moment, another earthquake shook the house.

5

“Do you think she can sense them coming?” Mom asked.

Dad looked up absently from his newspaper, folded in quarters to read some article, a white mug of coffee proclaiming him to be SUPER DAD! in the other hand. “Huh?” he said.

Mom sat in front of Holly, feeding her spoonfuls of her favorite breakfast, bananas mashed with oatmeal. I always figured it was the brown sugar on top that really made Holly like it. “Do you think that Holly can sense them coming?” When Dad still seemed confused, Mom added in a low whisper, “The earthquakes?” She twisted her hand back and forth to indicate a rocking motion, as if Dad didn’t remember what an earthquake was.

Dad set the paper down and looked up thoughtfully. “Never considered that. But... maybe?” It definitely came out as a question.

I paused over my scrambled eggs, fork halfway to my mouth. I guess I sat agape like that for too long. “John,” Mom said in that tone that’s meant to tell you to watch what you’re about to do, but that kids never heed. I shook my head a bit to refocus, and a bite of egg dropped into my lap and onto my clothes. Of course, I wasn’t using a napkin. “John! Come on. How many times do I have to tell you to put your napkin in your lap? And eat over your plate?” I behaved as if I’d most certainly never heard these instructions before, huffing as I straightened my posture and dropping the paper napkin haphazardly onto my lap.

It was more than a week later that Holly had another brief seizure. Minutes after, the house shook again.

* * *

Bobby and I hung out a few times before my family went to Playa Beach. Sure, he was still miffed at me for the whole hand-as-a-weapon episode, but we were kids and we were friends, so things blew over quickly. I told him about Holly’s seizures seeming to predict the earthquakes. His helpful suggestion was to get her on TV like a weather forecaster. I could just see it:
And now we send it over to Holly Black with your AccuQuake forecast. Any seizures, Holly?

Bobby didn’t bring up my little microscope experiments, or what happened when he tried to hit me. But he was back to pushing the limits of what he could do, only worse, if you can believe it. He kept talking about getting a gun, which I still thought was an insane idea.

But of course, we lived in America. So eventually Bobby was able to get his hands on a gun. Not surprisingly, it was quite easy.

Step one: Find someone in your family, or even just your close surroundings, who owns — and this is important — more than one gun. Go talk to them. You’ll never get them to give you their last gun. Never their only gun. But people who have more than one gun like to give them out in a spirit of magnanimous celebration, sort of like shoot-’em-up Halloween.

Step two: Be a kid. Bobby had that covered.

Step three: Express a wholesome and upstanding interest in having your own gun. That’s right! Don’t hide your desires or try to lie. Get right out there and say you like guns and you want one of your own. This is considered rational teenage behavior, at least in certain parts of the country. Try it!

Step four: As soon as you’re done promising your parent/uncle/grandfather/niece/great-aunt/stepbrother/nanny/postman/pastor/cousin-in-law/local gunophile that you’ll be careful — run off and don’t be careful. After all, you can rest assured, it’s what they did, and they lived!

I should mention that we needed a new hangout. After what happened to Walter Ivory, it would’ve been in poor form to go back to the self-storage place. I kinda missed the dogs, though.

The problem was, where the hell were we going to go to shoot off a gun? Bobby’s Uncle Pete, once approached using the four-step method, was thrilled to provide a “loaner pistol,” and so Bobby was quite anxious to find a firing range. Since I wasn’t very keen on the idea, I didn’t try terribly hard to solve the problem. Bobby, on the other hand, was dedicated.

Not far from the self-storage building, there was a lumber yard. That wasn’t the place Bobby chose, but it was close. The important thing was that the yard was almost always noisy. Behind it there were three nondescript rows of warehouse bays. Not old, drafty brick warehouses with metal-dinosaur machinery gathering cobwebs inside, like you might see in a movie. These were just rectangular expanses of cinder block and cement, each with a large roll-up door on the front and a single metal walk-in door on the back.

The first row of bays, closest to the lumber yard, was completely abandoned. Well, I shouldn’t call it
abandoned
, since in reality it was simply
unwanted
. Signs were plastered on the doors of each bay: For Lease. For Sale. There didn’t seem to be many takers.

Two or three of the bays in the other rows were occupied by carpet cleaners or print shops or caterers or something, but it didn’t matter. At the end of the first row, Bobby jimmied the lock on Bay 6. He proudly showed me around, like he owned the place.

Inside was a rectangle of grey. I could still hear the whining saws and clatter of other sounds coming from the lumber yard, although they were muted. Looking here and there, I saw drips of something staining the cinder-block walls and making dark little puddles on the cement floor. In the front of the bay, to one side of the large roll-up door, a block of space had been walled off to make a sort of office. There were no windows of any sort in the bay and the power was off, so we had to prop open the back door to get some light. The office was empty, an almost completely dark, square space, shorter than the bay and carpeted with some sort of rough industrial fabric. I imagined some businessman tucked behind a desk in the corner, spending years of his life toiling away. It made me not want to grow up.

“Let’s do it, Johnny!” Bobby proclaimed, pulling Uncle Pete’s small pistol from his backpack. I rolled my eyes. “Let’s start by having you shoot me in the leg. That way, if anything goes wrong, I won’t die.” He held out the gun. I was pretty sure a person could die from any sort of gunshot wound, but I kept quiet.

Taking it gingerly, like it might go off at any second, I asked, “Is it loaded?”

“Nah, Johnny, I’m not stupid. Didn’t want the damn thing going off in my backpack.”

I fiddled with the gun until I found out how the clip slid out. It was empty as promised. “Where’re the bullets?”

Bobby reached into his front pants pocket and his grin disappeared. “Oh
shit
,” he said, franticly patting his shirt and pants. I couldn’t help but laugh, and Bobby shot me an angry look. Then he reached into a back pocket and sighed. With a flourish, he pulled out four small, shiny bullets. He took the clip from me and started to slide them into place.

“Uh, just one, please,” I said. “To start.” Bobby shrugged and passed back the clip holding a single bullet. I jammed it into place. My memory of every shooter video game I’d ever played was pretty clear, so instinctively I worked the slide catch to load the gun.

Suddenly I was nervous. The gun was loaded and ready. I couldn’t say the same for myself. I looked at Bobby and could tell he was nervous, too. But he wasn’t daunted. He leaned over and patted his left calf. “Okay, shoot me right here,” he said with a weak smile.

I raised the gun to aim at his leg. The pistol was small but heavy. Maybe heavier in my mind than its true weight. It felt dangerous and important and powerful and terrifying, all at the same time.

And then too many things happened, too quickly.

Outside, there was a loud clang, an explosion of shouting. I looked back toward the open door, expecting to see someone, but no one was there. My arm was still raised, and involuntarily I tensed in fear. And my finger squeezed the trigger just enough that the gun fired.

Directly into Bobby’s belly.