Shimmer: A Novel (20 page)

With her father asleep and her appetite stubbornly absent, Fallon forgot about her late dinner plans and simply put away the milk and frozen meals. For the next few minutes, she moved quietly through the house. She placed the empty beer bottles in the recyclables container, attached a freshness clip to the pretzel bag before stowing it in the cabinet, turned off the television, and covered her father with a lightweight blanket. She kissed his forehead gently and said, “Goodnight, Dad,” before turning off the lamp beside his chair.

She carried a stack of textbooks up to her bedroom, ostensibly to log some study time, but decided she desperately needed a shower. The hot water refreshed her spirit, if not her body. Evidenced by a chain of yawns, each more impressive than the last, exhaustion swept over her while she changed into her V-necked cotton pajama top and shorts.

Hoping for a second intellectual wind, she flipped through her assigned reading, but regardless of which subject she chose, she couldn’t focus. Her attention seemed to slide off one impenetrable page after another, absorbing nothing. Compared to what she had learned and experienced after school’s dismissal, nothing on the printed page seemed relevant. Trying to read couldn’t have been harder if she’d been looking through the wrong end of a telescope.

With her cheek pressed to a blurred and inscrutable page of academic insight, she began to fall asleep. Like a heat mirage, a final thought shimmered across her waning consciousness.
There’ll be hell to pay tomorrow.
Then her heart lurched in her chest with the sudden thought that that common expression had taken on new menace. In Hadenford, hell had transformed from unpleasant philosophical concept to terrifying, murderous reality.

As she sprawled across her bed, vulnerable to the night, a frightening idea crept up on her. Rather, the idea began to blossom inside her, a nocturnal plant expelling poisonous spores.
What about me?

During the Outsider attack in Chelsea’s house and its aftermath, Fallon hadn’t had much time to reflect on what Ambrose had described as her… paranormal abilities, her potential.
I haven’t transformed, which means I’ve always been what I am now.

A chill seeped into her bones as the insidious thought began to resolve long after her subconscious had made the fateful connection. What had Ambrose said?
“You have the potential to interact with our kind, to shift our boundaries. In essence, you may be an accelerant… a proximity booster.”

“What about Mom?” she whispered to herself.
What if I made her worse by making her better? If I boosted her abilities, simply by being near her…
“What if it’s my fault?” she whispered. “What if I drove her over the edge?”

Oh, God,
she thought in anguish.
Mom, was it me? Did I make your life intolerable? Oh, Mom, I’m so sorry!

Fallon pressed her face into her pillow to muffle her sobs. She had the horrible, hysterical notion that her crying would wake her father. She imagined him thundering up the stairs to her room to find out what was wrong, and she would blurt out a confession, “It’s my fault, Dad! I murdered, Mom.”

The surge of raw emotion drained away, succumbing to exhaustion, and her sobs became nagging hiccups, shameful echoes of the burst of fiery guilt she’d experienced.  She kept telling herself that she couldn’t know for certain. She might never know the truth. And Ambrose could be wrong about her abilities. Besides, he’d talked about potential, which meant something that might happen in the future, not something that had already happened.

Ambrose had said something else.
“We are what we are and what we may yet become, but not that which is not within our nature.”

Fallon’s mother was what she was, not what Fallon had made her. And Fallon’s nature, her abilities, derived from her mother, passed down as a genetic heritage.

What if I’ve always been a booster?
Fallon thought nervously. 
Mom could have been the only person I’d ever been around with abilities for me to boost?

Her mind battered at untenable arguments. She tortured herself with a tangle of indefensible logic, no matter which side of the question she addressed. In the end, she had a throbbing headache but no conclusions. “I’ll never know,” she whispered to herself. “How can I ever know?”

As a distraction from unproductive thoughts, she turned her attention to the jumble of reading assignments. Despite her nagging guilt and renewed fear, exhaustion soon won out. Amid her futile pile of textbooks, she drifted off to sleep, none the wiser.

Chapter 31

A sudden wave of nausea rolled through Logan Friday morning during his English lit class. Mrs. Claridge’s strident voice faded into the distant background as he tried to shake off the roiling sensation. He clutched the edges of his desk to steady himself, but his breathing had become shallow.

“I trust you’ve all done the reading,” Mrs. Claridge said, surveying the class from left to right and back again over low-slung eyeglasses. “Therefore, I wonder who among you would like to tell me the historical significance of Daniel DeFoe’s
Robinson Crusoe?
Hmm? Anyone?” She waited a long moment for the anticipated rise of a tentative hand or two, then frowned when none was forthcoming. “Let’s see then,” she said with a tone verging on wrathful menace. “Last time we left Mr. Walker on the brink of hell.” Scattered chuckling. “With, however, the promise to redeem himself in our eyes.”

Logan heard her speak his name but had already forgotten her question. Something about Robinson Crusoe, but what—?

“Stand please, Mr. Walker.”

Oh, that’s definitely not a good idea!

“Mr. Walker?”

With trembling arms, Logan pushed against the desktop to force himself to his feet, but the upright position made the nausea far worse. The floor beneath him seemed to sway this way and that, taunting his petty attempts to retain his balance. “Y—yes?”

“Your answer please?”

All Logan could remember was her mentioning
Robinson Crusoe.
“DeFoe,” he muttered. “Daniel DeFoe.”

“What about Mr. DeFoe?”

“He, um, wrote it, right?”

More derisive chuckling.

“Of course,” she said superciliously.

Logan started to sit again, gratefully, since his knees were buckling. To his right, an oblivious redhead doodled flowers and vines around the Renaissance Mall logo on a lavender Bridget Bane concert flyer. Two desks over, Fallon frowned at him, but he failed to grasp the significance of her subtle yet sympathetic head shake.

“Not so fast, Mr. Walker!” Mrs. Claridge said with a disapproving waggle of her index finger. “You haven’t answered my question.”

Again Logan tried to stand, but felt his legs swaying. “N—nurse,” he said.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand?”

“Need to see the nurse,” he said, forcing out each word between shallow breaths. “Don’t feel… so hot.”

“Mr. Walker, you have an alarming habit of wilting under the slightest scrutiny,” Mrs. Claridge said. “I believe I’d be doing you a great disservice if I didn’t insist that you persevere to the bitter end.”

“It’s not what—” Logan swallowed the thin line of bile that had climbed up his throat. “Please…”

“Let him go,” Fallon said. “Look at him? He’s sick.”

Several other voices murmured agreement.

“Oh, very well,” Mrs. Claridge said. “Go, if you must!”

Logan gathered his stack of textbooks and spiral-bound notebooks under his arm and staggered to the front of the room. The floor seemed to ripple ahead of him. He stumbled as another wave of nausea struck.
Too late,
he thought, pitching forward and dropping to one knee as he vomited the sum total of his breakfast into the round metal trashcan next to Claridge’s desk.

“Oh, good Lord,” Claridge squealed, bolting from her desk.

Scattered laughter at her startled reaction intermingled with sympathetic retching from a few others in the class with a prime view of the upheaval.

Logan felt a hand on his back, realized it was Fallon and, embarrassed, tried to wave her off while simultaneously succumbing to dry heaves. “I’m—okay,” he blurted as soon as he was able.

“Back to your seat, Ms. Maguire,” Claridge said.

Logan rose to his feet again, placing his hand on the edge of the teacher’s desk for support. His back to her, he said, “Sorry.”

“Yes, well off to the nurse with you then,” Mrs. Claridge said while maintaining her distance. “And take that wastebasket with you. Maybe the nurse will have some use for the… forensic evidence.”

“Right,” Logan muttered, grabbing the trashcan between thumb and forefinger.

“You’d do well to read up on Swift, Mr. Walker,” Mrs. Claridge called out to him as he walked through the doorway. “We’ll be discussing
Gulliver’s Travels
on Monday.”

Too embarrassed to glance at her or his classmates—though he would have liked one last reassuring glimpse of Fallon to gauge her reaction to his latest prescient episode—Logan hurried into the hall. With a silent apology, he placed the soiled trashcan in front of a janitorial closet and continued on his way. But not to the nurse’s office. He made a beeline to his locker.

Two hurried attempts failed to open his combination lock, so he forced himself to slow down and get it right the third time. He tossed his texts and notebooks into the main compartment of his backpack, then fished his cell phone out of the small front pocket.

Using the open banana-yellow locker door as a shield, lest the school potentates confiscate his phone, Logan speed-dialed his home number. “It’s Logan,” he whispered. “Been better. Lots better. Yes, something’s coming. Something big… and nasty.”

After disconnecting the call, Logan stuffed his backpack with everything he thought he’d need over the weekend, including the books for the classes he’d miss by leaving school early. He closed the locker door, spun the dial on the combination lock, turned around to face the empty hall and tried to take the first step out of the building. Instead he stumbled backward, striking the row of lockers before sliding down to the cold tile floor. He sat there, head bowed, forehead glistening with cold sweat, and trembled with the latest crashing wave of nausea.

He slipped into a dazed state, broken jarringly when the shrill buzzer announced the end of the class period. Moments later, as if herded through cattle chutes, the entire student body surged through classroom doorways to clog the hall with a mass of heedless, jostling humanity. Lest his denim-clad legs become organic speed bumps for his oblivious classmates, Logan drew his knees up to his chest and made himself as small as possible.

Moment later, a hand fell on his shoulder. Logan looked up as Fallon was crouched just above his eye level. “Lost?” she asked. “Nurse’s office is that way.”

“Ah,” Logan muttered. “Took a little detour.”

She clucked her tongue. “You don’t look so hot, mister.”

“Really?” Logan tried to sound surprised. “Cause I feel… superlative.”

“Superlative?”

“Because I’m a super hero,” he said. “Guess you didn’t know that.”

“No,” she said, frowning. “Guess not.”

“Yes, but apparently,” he said with a slight frown of his own, “my super power is vomiting.”

“As super powers go,” Fallon said, “not so cool.”

“No?”

“Afraid not,” she said. “But if you’re talking projectile vomiting, then that’s a cool super power.”

“Well, I
am
still in training.”

“C’mon, let me help you up, unmasked man,” she said, wrapping her right arm under his left.

Logan pushed back against the lockers for extra support as his rubbery legs strained to support him. By the time he was vertical he was out of breath. “Just call me,” he huffed, “Super Puker.”

Fallon barked a laugh, then immediately clapped a hand over her mouth in embarrassment. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t laughing at you, really.”

“Some folks call me Spew Boy.”

“Stop it,” she said, giving him a playful shove, then catching him by a clump of shirt when it looked like he might topple over.

“It’s okay,” Logan said as they stepped into the ebbing hallway traffic. “I’m immune to derision and most forms of public ridicule.”

“Suppose that comes in handy.”

“Ha, ha,” he said.

“Let’s get you to the nurse,” Fallon said, adding with a mischievous smile, “I’m sure she has mouthwash or some breath mints.”

“No nurse,” he said. “I’m outta here.”

Fallon stopped cold. “Oh—you’re leaving,” she said. “So this isn’t some sort of stomach bug. It’s…”

Logan nodded. “Worse than yesterday.”

“It’s just that I was hoping…”

“For normalcy?”

She nodded.

“Sorry. Ain’t gonna happen,” he said. “Not while I’m in town.”

“I wish I could turn back the clock,” she said.

“To before you knew me?”

“Not what I meant,” she said. “It’s not you.”

“Sure it is,” Logan said. “Some guys come with emotional baggage. I come with psychic baggage.”

She stared at him archly. “You really have to stop doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“Blaming yourself for every bad thing that happens,” she said. “Just because you can… do what you do, doesn’t mean what happens is your fault.”

Logan saw her lips twitch and wondered what was behind the tic. Odd, but he sensed she wasn’t talking about him so much as about herself. “Fallon…?”

“Just stop it, okay?” she said, almost angrily. “It’s not your responsibility. Screw metaphysics. You’re an effect, not a cause.”

“Would you say I’m a special effect?”

She laughed again, and her anger disappeared. “You should rest in the nurse’s office,” she said. “You shouldn’t walk out of here.”

“Won’t have to walk,” Logan said after glancing over her shoulder. “My ride’s here.”

Fallon turned around. “Oh! Liana.”

“Hello, Fallon,” Liana said as she approached them with sweeping strides that sent her white gown flowing around her legs. “Logan, you look dreadful.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Are you up for this?”

“Soon as I slip into my tights.”