Jonah Havensby (31 page)

Just as it was with Devlin, it took Jonah a moment to move, but the first thing Jonah did when he moved was yell “Ow!” followed by “Ow! Ow! Ow!”

He grabbed his left hand in his right and squeezed it, then shook it out, then flexed it open and closed.

“Yeah,” Eric said. “Devlin said you’re going to have to work on that.”

“So you met him?!” Jonah said, rubbing his hand. “The Red Devil?”

“Yeah,” Eric answered. “But his name’s Devlin now. They all know they’re names now, apparently. How much do you remember?”

“I knew it was going to be him, even before I saw my hand? Did you see it?”

“Yeah, that was freaky. Then what?” Eric agreed.

“Then nothing. What happened after that?” Jonah asked.

Eric looked up and saw that the afternoon light had left the window. He already knew he was more than an hour from home. He took his phone out and saw that it was after six. “I’ll have to tell you on the ride back. Do you want to stay over?”

“Yeah, sure. If we can get away with it.” Jonah said.

Jonah unplugged the electric blanket, once again out of habit, and then thought about the lights. He didn’t know which plug went where in the generator and decided now was not the time to experiment. He had left everything on when he went to find Eric, so he thought it was probably safe overnight. He had no idea how long everything had been safely plugged in anyway.

“Then I guess we could tell your mom you’re staying at my place for the weekend?” Jonah said with a laugh as they headed for the door.

“That’s such a cool idea, dude.” Eric laughed along. “Except we’re totally bringing food. I don’t think they’ll deliver a pizza out here. Maybe we can have the Professor call and ask my mom.”

“Like my dad suddenly developed an accent?” Jonah scoffed, as Eric headed down the rope ladder.

“We could have Devlin do it. He’d totally do it.” Eric said.

“You’d know better than me,” Jonah mumbled, as he waited his turn.

XVIII

It was dark under the canopy of trees. Jonah wondered if they would be able to find their way out of the forest. As it turned out, now that he had made the journey out and back, he found it quite easy to follow the creek all the way back to the road.

Once they were back to the road, they discovered that the sun was still up, but it was setting low in the sky. Eric’s mobile phone beeped in his pocket. When he checked it, he saw that there were three missed calls from his mother. The phone reception in the woods must have been incredibly low and the calls had just come through now. He checked the messages his mother left, each one a little more angry than the last.

He dialed his house.

“Where have you been?” Mrs. MacIntyre boomed loud enough for Jonah to hear it.

“Sorry. We were at Jonah’s all afternoon,” Eric explained.

“And why haven’t you answered you phone, or even bothered to call your mother to tell her where you are?”

“Sorry, mom,” Eric said. “I didn’t even hear it.” That wasn’t necessarily a lie.

“Eric Michael MacIntyre, you know better than that!” Well, that meant she didn’t believe him.

“I’m really sorry, mom. We’re on our way back now.”

“We?” She asked.

“Jonah and me,” Eric answered. “Jonah’s going to stay over. I mean, if that’s okay?” Eric figured the statement was somewhere between asking for permission and forcing her into a position where the decision had already been made.

His mother made an exasperated hiss on the other side of the phone. “Just get home now,” she said, resigning the conversation.

“Can Jonah come?” Eric asked.

“Yes, but we’re going to have a talk when you get home,” she said. “This might be it for a while young man.”

“Alright, jeez,” he answered. “I’ll be home in a few. Bye.”

He hung up the phone without waiting for a response.

“Are you in trouble?” Jonah asked.

“Nothing a good talking to won’t fix,” Eric shrugged. “We should get there as fast as possible though.”

As fast as possible wasn’t going to be easy though.

Eric was planning on talking the whole way back and filling Jonah in on everything that happened, but the boys were so intent on getting Eric home, nothing at all was said save for a few recommendations on short cuts.

They rode at top speed, took alleys where they could, and ignored too many stoplights in Jonah’s opinion. In all, it still took them just over fifty minutes to get back. Mrs. MacIntyre was waiting on the porch and didn’t look too happy.

“Hi,” Eric said innocently as they leaned their bikes up against the picket fence.

“Dinner is on the table,” she said, and then opened the screen door to usher them into the house.

Dinner was meatloaf and green beans with butter. There were two plates already served waiting for them. Mrs. MacIntyre didn’t come into the kitchen, instead she went into the family room. Eric heard the rustle of the newspaper.

“She must be really mad,” Eric said quietly.

There wasn’t a lot of talking during dinner. Jonah figured Mrs. MacIntyre might overhear their conversation, but Eric looked a little lost in thought over just how much trouble he might be in.

The boys washed the dishes and cleared the table. Mrs. MacIntyre must have heard that dinner was over because she came into the kitchen just as the last plate was dried and put away.

“Jonah, can you go up to Eric’s room and give us a minute, please?” She asked, although it wasn’t much of a question.

He put his towel down on the counter and walked up to Eric’s room. He sat down at the computer and looked up the ‘Kat Skratch’ boards on the web, but he was more occupied with what might be going on downstairs.

It was his fault he had dragged Eric into all this and it was his fault he took Eric back to the tree-house. Eric really shouldn’t be in any trouble for it. He couldn’t exactly explain any of that to Mrs. MacIntyre without revealing the whole story. And he might make it worse. What if he did come to Eric’s defense and say it was his fault for keeping Eric out? Did that make him a bad influence? Would Mrs. MacIntyre decide it was a bad idea that they were hanging out together? Jonah had started to rely on telling Eric everything that was going on. Once he got all of it off his chest, it made him feel not so alone and freaked out. Could he go back to dealing with all of this on his own?

Eric appeared at the door ten minutes later.

“So?” Jonah said, spinning the desk chair to face the door.

Eric walked in and threw himself on the bed like an exhausted soldier coming back from interrogation.

“It wasn’t too bad. She just went on and on about rules and homework and responsibilities. Blah, blah, blah.”

“So should I leave?” Jonah asked.

“No. It’s not about you. It’s about ‘behaving responsibly’ and ‘asking permission”, he said in an annoyed high pitch. “But, I am actually grounded for three days, which is new. I’ve never been grounded before.”

“Which is weird, cuz I’ve kind of always been grounded.”

“Cool. Maybe you can give me some pointers,” Eric chuckled.

“Did she ask about my dad?” Jonah asked.

“She asked how he felt about you spending all of your time over here. I told him we asked when we were at your house and he said as long as it was okay with her. Then I told her we were going to sleep over at your place tomorrow. That’s when she lowered the boom and said that wasn’t going to happen for a while.”

“So she still doesn’t suspect that I’m a homeless bum?”

“No way,” Eric chuckled. “And you’re not a homeless bum anymore. You’re like…uh,” he searched for the words. “You’re like a tree-house bum now.”

“Thanks.” Jonah mumbled. “That’s better.”

“Speaking of,” Eric said as he got up and stuck his head out the door to make sure his mother was still downstairs. “You should hear what Devlin said.”

Eric closed the door part way in an effort to block some of their conversation if his mother should come up, but at least they’d see her if she did.

Eric told the whole story quietly, but in vivid detail. Jonah remembered seeing his hand turn red, but that was about it. Since his hand was red, he just assumed it was Devlin. He added that his hand did hurt when the changed started, but not nearly as much as his headaches; more like it had been pinched in a drawer. Eric passed along Devlin’s suggestion that he should practice more.

They spent a lot of time on the change itself. Eric thought it was totally gross, but left out the part that he was also scared to death while it was happening. Jonah threw too many questions at Eric before he could get most of the description of the change out.  Yes, he looked like a pile of wet sand with something going on underneath it. No, it wasn’t a little ball of sand, which meant some part of Jonah was still making the sand, or maybe he was all sand and his body was just mimicking being human. Jonah didn’t like that option.

“We can find out,” Eric said.

“How do we do that?” Jonah asked.

Eric went over to his desk and moved a pile of papers and books out of the way and found his microscope box. He took the microscope out of the box and plugged it into the wall and then connected it to the computer with another cord. He reached back in the box and pulled out a glass slide with a slide cover and put both on the desk. The last thing he pulled out was a sewing needle.

“And what exactly do you think you’re going to do with that?” Jonah asked.

“Don’t be a baby, it’s a needle.” Eric retorted.

“Uh-uh. No way,” Jonah said. “Is that thing even clean?”

“I can wash it if you’re going to be a baby about it,” Eric said, heading for the door. Jonah followed him to the bathroom. “Besides, it’s kind of a cool experiment. I mean, you want to know, don’t you?”

“I guess,” Jonah said, half-heartedly.

Eric pumped a large amount of soap from the dispenser at the bathroom sink onto the needle and washed it almost too thoroughly, like he might be doing surgery with it later. “Satisfied?” he asked on the way back to the room. Jonah shrugged.

“Gimme your finger,” Eric said, once they were back at the microscope.

Jonah cautiously extended his index finger and then turned his head away as he scrunched up his face.

Eric giggled. “It’s not even going to hurt, dork.” And then he jabbed Jonah’s finger with the needle.  There was a small prick, but that was it. It couldn’t possibly be described as pain.

Jonah looked back at his finger which now had a small bubble of blood at the tip.

Eric picked up the glass slide. “Pinch your finger a little bit.”

Jonah did and the small drop of blood fell onto the slide. Eric placed the slide cover over it and put it under the microscope. He sat down at the computer and opened up a program from his desktop. When it came up, there was already a picture there.

“See, those are my blood cells.” He said. They were perfectly round, red cells with small indentions in the center in a sea of red.

Eric stood up and looked through the microscope lens. He adjusted the dials and then readjusted them. Jonah had seen his father use the microscope in his lab, but he had never been allowed to touch it or look through it. Now Jonah wondered if he wasn’t allowed to look through it because he’d see that he was different.

Eric pushed a button on the side of the microscope and sat back down at the computer. “There,” he said.

An image started to form. It was blurry at first, but defined and redefined itself again and again, becoming clearer each time. At first it looked exactly like the pictures of Eric’s blood cells. There were definitely cells on a bed of red. But after a few minutes, it was clear that not all of them were like Eric’s.

Some looked perfectly normal, but the majority of what they saw had the same rounded cells, but the indentions in them had very thin strands crisscrossing the interior, making an intricate weave of different patterns. Other cells looked like they were in the process of becoming something in between. Some of the thin stands had broken and there was less of a pattern inside them.

They’d been staring at the picture, both of them silent. Neither one could tell how long it had been. Eric finally looked up at Jonah. “You okay?”

“Well, we already knew I was a freak. Now I guess I’m just officially a freak.” Jonah said, as he fell into a sitting position on the bed.

Just as soon as he did, Mrs. MacIntyre appeared in the doorway. So it appeared that Jonah bounced right back into a standing position, blocking the computer screen. Eric stood straight up as well, further blocking her view.

“What are you two doing?” She asked.

“Nothing,” Eric said. “Playing with the microscope.” He pointed at it.

“I’m going to make some popcorn and maybe watch a movie, if you guys would like to join.” She said.

“Chick flick,” Eric said under the guise of a sneeze in Jonah’s direction.

“What?” She asked, having fully heard him.

“Nothing.” Eric said quickly.

“You know, we can go for four days, if that’s what you’re in the mood for.”

Eric pulled his face into an overly-large smile and raised his eyebrows. “I simply said that I would love to join my favorite mother for popcorn and a movie because she’s one of my favorite people in the world.” He said through his smiling teeth. “Mean it, love you.” He added.

“Now that’s the baby boy I know and love.” She said right back to him.

He still had the same goofy smirk on his face as he crossed the room to the door. “Not a baby. Be down in five. Thank you. Love you, mother.” He said in rapid succession as he closed the door on her.

Jonah fell back on the bed again and breathed a sigh of relief.

Eric closed the program without saving the picture.

“That was close,” Jonah said.

“She wouldn’t even know what we were looking at,” Eric said.

“You can’t know that for sure. I mean, mom’s go to school too.”

“Yeah, but, like, a really long time ago.”

“Still, I don’t think we should chance that again.”

“Don’t worry,” Eric said. “I didn’t save the picture or anything.”

“You should have. Maybe you could sell it to the newspaper and make some money. Super alien freak headline.”