Luminous (9 page)

Turning discreetly away from the mirror, she shucked her clothes and her skin and left them in a pile on the bed. Bare-boned, Consuela headed for the door.

She stopped suddenly with an odd sense of foreboding.

She'd dreamed this—a series of dreams—but she couldn't hold on to the images, only the feelings. A wild, chaotic spinning sensation and the familiar smell of oil, orange peels, and smoke.

Consuela hesitated, then threw open the door . . .

There was nothing there. No hallway. No carpet. No family portrait. No walls. No floor. A misty, shifting nocolor cascaded, achingly slow, as if she had opened her bedroom door inside of a cloud. But it was thicker, with flashes of light and muffled rainbows in the gray. Consuela stared at the raw, fathomless Flow, too awed to scream. It was as if that necessary piece was back in her natural skin.

She considered the awfulness, feeling around for what to do next.

The void stayed outside her door. She seemed safe in her room. Safe, but trapped. If she was going to leave, she'd have to brave the nothingness. She had found Sissy by simply wanting to see her. V said that intention was key. There was only one way to find out and she wasn't eager to try it, but she didn't want to stay cooped up in her room either.

Consuela lifted her foot off the carpet, leaned into the first step purposefully, thinking of finding V . . .

Her foot came down. She felt the air whoosh apart. . . . and swirled into a wide, wooden temple painted a dull bronze, resplendent with an ancient gong. Consuela looked back. Her bedroom door wasn't there.
That wasn't so bad.
An unfamiliar silence pushed on her eardrums, an odd, smothering Zen. Even the air felt heavier here. She had no idea where she was, but it was nowhere she had been before. Consuela tiptoed to the base of an altar featuring a gorgeous Buddha lovingly nestled in a field of incense sticks. She explored an empty prayer room and stepped outside. She touched the smooth trunk pendulum of the giant gong, pulled back its creaking rope, and rang a single, full-throated note, scattering small birds out of the eaves. But no one came to greet her. Consuela took a deep breath and stepped purposefully . . .

. . . onto a rocky beach with no stone smaller than a baby's fist. Cold wind tugged at her hair and the sky was a washed-pale slate blue. A low-hanging lip of some forgotten cave beckoned and Consuela ducked inside. Kneeling down, she saw a natural pocket in the porous rock; sharp, black holes that looked like Swiss cheese. The nook held little-boy treasures—metal jacks, a ball of salty-dry twine, and a tiny toy car made of painted steel, missing one of the front tires and a passenger door. She laid them gently back in their hollowed-out notch and crawled out into the wind. Consuela scanned the beach, empty and vast; she seemed the only person in a world filled with no-longer people and their last memories.
No one's here.
She didn't mind exploring the Flow, but right now she had to find V.
Get out. Get home.
She tried to picture the idea, the “feeling” of V . . .

. . . and swirled onto a grass-lined sidewalk running along a chain-link fence. Across the street was an entrance to a redbrick high school, its glass doors shiny and wide. The school was empty, as were the streets and the concrete steps. She walked over to the lone figure propped up against a crab-apple tree. Wish didn't even turn to look.

“Hi,” Consuela said wearily. “Is V here?”

Wish squinted as if looking into the sun. “Nope. Just left.”

She felt better now that she was closer. “Which way?”

Wish shook his head. “You won't find him. He's in the Mirror Realm.”

“Oh, I'll find him.”

Wish snorted. “Not in the Mirror Realm.” He threw a pebble off to one side. It bounced into the street and lay still. “It's not part of the Flow.” Wish picked up another.

Consuela crossed her arms at the edge of the pavement, seething, desperate. The wind brushed the tree leaves. Another pebble danced across the road.

“You ever go to high school?” Wish asked.

She nodded, looking out across the street. “Sure,” she admitted in defeat. “I'm a junior at Jefferson. Getting ready for college applications.”

“Huh,” he muttered. “I didn't think you were a teenager. I mean, most of us are, but you seem, I don't know, timeless. Ageless.”

She laughed humorlessly, holding out her arms. “Yeah, well, looks can be deceiving.”

He glanced at her skeleton. “Yeah,” he said. “Guess so.”

Their silence fell flat. Wish began tapping, rattling the novelty pins on his sleeves.

She'd made him uncomfortable, which made her feel guilty. Consuela sighed, considering the thin, scraggly boy in the grass.

“Do you mind if I sit?” she asked.

Wish shrugged, knees bouncing. “It's a free country.”

It wasn't a yes or a no, but Consuela settled herself down. She read a blue button near his collar that said I DON'T CARE TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL HAVE ME AS A MEMBER.—GROUCHO MARX.

She tried to break the ice. “Nice pins.”

“Yeah?” Wish said, looking at the Marx quote. “They were a collection that kinda took over. You know how it is. Something to do.” He held up the pin by its backing: CRAZY IS AS CRAZY DOES.

Consuela rested her ulnas against her knees. “You think we're all crazy?”

“Well, I can't speak for you,” he said, “but being crazy would make a lot more sense than knowing that this was real. Still, when we're like this”—he pointed to himself and her—“we're not like that, you know?” Wish gestured vaguely at the high school. She could almost imagine the babble of petty talk, the bus exhaust, the lunchroom politics, the hallway runways, and the locker-room drama. The Flow was definitely different.

“I know.” She nodded. “We're more . . .” She struggled for a word, but failed to find a good one.

“Ourselves,” Wish supplied. “We're more ourselves and more than ourselves . . .” He jutted his chin. “This is more who we really are than when we were playing it safe, back there. Like this reality matters more than the real one. Know what I mean?”

“Sort of,” Consuela admitted, nodding. “Yeah.”

Wish's thin-lipped grin tugged at his crooked eyeteeth. “So this is really you?”

She didn't need to grin back. “Yes.”

“Sure. See? I'm really me when I can make folks' wishes come true. It's the best!” he said. “What do you do?”

Fly out of windows? Fall down the drain? Burn in buildings
?

“I save people from dying,” she said. “Before their time.”

Wish blew a raspberry, his fingers still tapping erratic, staccato rhythms on his arms. “Well, duh, yeah. We all do that. But I meant how?”

“Oh.” Consuela thought about it. “Um . . . I can take off my skin and make new ones out of things like air, water . . .”

“No shit?” Wish sat up. “Sorry. I mean, really? You don't normally look like this?”

Consuela laughed, surprised. “No! I have a face and hair and eyes and everything.”

“Huh.” He tugged absently at his ear and the tips of his hair. She wondered if he realized that he was doing it. “So what do you look normally like?”

She thought about embellishing a little, but why bother? Who did she have to impress?

“Short,” she admitted. “Round, dark. Brown hair, brown eyes, brown skin. I'm Mexican.”

“Really? You don't look it.” They both laughed at that. “I meant that you don't sound like it.”

Her mood shifted.

“Excuse me?” she said.

Wish immediately dropped his eyes and scratched a spot of acne on his cheek. “I meant you got no accent.”

Consuela didn't know what to think. No one had ever thought of her as anything but Mexican American. She'd never been mistaken for Caucasian, but without skin . . . skeletons all looked the same.
He thought I was white, like him. Big deal.
But that was supposed to be, what, a compliment? Or was it just something everybody assumed when they didn't know for sure—that people looked like them by default?

“I said I was Mexican,” she said. “Not that I was from Mexico.”

“Right,” he said quickly. “Sorry.”

A frigid silence fell under the crab-apple canopy. Wish shrank into a tight, miserable ball.

“Hell,” he muttered. “Some things don't change in either world. I can still piss people off right from the start,” he said. “Talent I've had since I was a kid. Sissy can still be popular and V can still be cool and Tender can still be a total head case, but someone you gotta have around . . .”

“Tender,” Consuela said. “What is it about this guy?” She turned, spinning on her coccyx. “Sissy seemed totally freaked out by him.”

“She should be,” Wish said simply. “You should be. I should be. Heck, I
am
and I'm, like, best friends with the guy.”

“Really?” Consuela said.

“Sure. I even made a wish for him once.” Wish unwound a little from his self-protective hunch. “Tender's been here years and years. There are all sorts of people who've come and gone, but Tender's role and what he does is something that has been part of the Flow for, like, ever. He
gets
things, right?” His eyes had a sort of wicked spark to them, like when kids tell each other gruesome secrets or ghost stories in the dark. “Sissy tell you what he does?”

“He eats pain,” she said back.

“Yeah, right. He digests it. Eats it right up,” Wish said. “He can take the darkness inside him and chew it up or spit it out. That's what Sissy doesn't get. That Tender's been here long enough that he knows the Flow inside and out. She thinks he's trash and that she's got his number, but she doesn't. Not really.” He sat back with a strange sort of pride in his voice. “That's why she has to listen to me. I know Tender best. He trusts me.”

“Do you trust him?” Consuela asked.

“Hell no, but I don't pity him, which he appreciates more than anything,” Wish said. “I don't spit on him either. Tender's got a short fuse when it comes to respect. He cares a lot about what he does—knows it's a tough-ugly job, but also dead necessary. Useful.” He gestured again at the two of them. “Folks like you and me? We're temps. Dime a dozen. But there's always been a guy like Tender in the Flow. Just like there's always been a Watcher like Sissy. Yin and yang. Either one of them goes, there'll be another one soon enough. There's got to be or the Flow doesn't. Isn't.” He drummed his fingers against his knee. “Some think the Watcher and Tender are the same person, the same soul, recycled, you know? Reborn and returning over and over.”

Consuela felt a ripple of nausea like goose bumps on her nonexistent skin.

“Sounds horrible,” she confessed.

Wish shrugged. “Tender seems to deal with it well enough,” he said. “He likes being a big guy. Like my mum says, ‘He wears it well.'”

Cradling her jaw, Consuela watched Wish unconsciously tapping his buttons and scabs. “So if I meet Tender . . .”

“
When
you meet Tender,” Wish corrected.

“. . .
when
I meet him,” Consuela allowed. “Anything I should keep in mind?”

Wish leaned back on his hands, his thin chest concave under his denim jacket. “Don't feel sad for him, or pity him, or piss him off. He's a real bastard, but that's how he's drawn,” he said. “You have to be tough to do what he does. He has to take it all in.” He ran a spindly hand over the patchy grass and the knobby trunk of the tree. He knocked on the wood. “Someone's got to feel it all, you know?”

Consuela placed a skeletal hand against the bark. Without skin, she might be powerful, even immortal, but she could hardly
feel
a thing. She looked at the school building, large, empty and lifeless, too distant and strangely difficult to recall what it might have been like before. She felt numb here, behind glass. Without her skin, she was dead to the world.

“Is it real?”

Wish snorted and jutted his chin at the school. “It may not be real, but it's a lot realer than that.”

Consuela stared at the high school, suddenly homesick. She felt tears on her cheekbones, dripping off of her chin—somehow, she could feel those.

“I want to go home,” she whispered.

“Hey, hey,” Wish said, a little alarmed. His hands moved like butterflies, unsure where to land. He placed a palm against her flat shoulder blade. Consuela leaned into his awkward, one-armed hug. He tried to sound soothing, “It's okay . . .”

“It's
not
okay!”

“No, you're right,” he said. “It's not okay.”

They sat under the crab-apple tree, the wind playing lazily with the thumbprint-shaped leaves while Consuela rattled against Wish's buttons as she cried. One caught in the curve of her eye socket as she wiped her face. It read I PLEAD CONTEMPORARY INSANITY. He removed his hand from her shoulder joint.

“I'm not supposed to be here,” she said.

“I know,” Wish said. “But it's not impossible to get back, you know? You hear things . . . if you listen for it.” He shrugged. Consuela suddenly understood that Wish liked it here, but was too embarrassed to admit it. She couldn't imagine preferring this crazy half-life to reality.
Family. Home.

“It's not impossible?” Consuela said. “Then why didn't Sissy . . . ?”

Wish evaded her eyes. “Maybe you should ask her.”

He said it like a hint. Consuela debated taking it.

“Maybe I should,” she said, and pushed herself up. His eyes followed her, surprised. She paused in a half crouch, a tangle of bones. “Thanks, Wish.”