Thresholds (6 page)

Maya loved the way Music Night used to be. Her friends from school always wanted to come over Saturday nights to join them, and Mom’s and Dad’s friends came too. People brought other instruments: mandolins, fiddles, banjos, harmonicas, accordions, even a string bass once in a while.

Stephanie had always come. She couldn’t play an instrument, but she had loved to sing.

Sometimes it got too crowded in their old living room, but that made it more fun. In summer, Music Night spilled out onto the porch.

In Oregon, so far, Candra wanted to ditch Music Night. She thought Music Night was dorky. The songs they played were too old and corny. Even though the Andersens had a much bigger living room now, they hadn’t had a Music Night in the new house yet.

Maybe Music Night was another thing they lost in the move, like Maya’s doll and Peter’s snakeskin collection.

Maya decided to draw a book to stand for her father. Sunday night was Read-Aloud Night. Dad had started it before Maya was born. He read from a book to them every Sunday night. When Maya first learned to read, she couldn’t wait a whole week to find out what happened next in
The Hobbit
, so she sneaked a look. When Dad read the part out loud that she had already read to herself, it lost a lot of shine. She had never looked ahead again.

Maya drew Dad’s book with the front edge showing, and behind it she put a shadow of Dad’s shape. She sketched in Mom’s piano, drew outlines of two hands across it, and colored in the piano around the hands. Sully cast a Peter-shaped shadow on the ground. Behind Candra’s camera she shaded in an outline of her sister, too.

Finally she put herself in the picture. A paintbrush, standing on end, one of those fat-tipped sable ones. She wished she had a color she could put on the tip of the brush, red or blue or green. Behind the brush she outlined the shadow of a girl.

She sat back, chewed her lip, looked at her picture. Should she put more in? Candra’s great telephone voice, and how she could ask questions so people always told her more than they meant to? Peter’s weird occasional psychic flashes and strange friendships? She had come outside one morning and found him sitting on the ground, feeding crumbs to birds. They were eating out of his hand. Wild birds. As soon as they noticed her, they flew away.

She looked at her picture and saw that it was balanced. Dark places and light places, the camera and the paintbrush between the book and the piano and slightly lower, then down in front Sully/Peter, sitting there looking up with his tongue lolling out in a dog smile, his boy shadow stretching off to the left and the dog dish representing Sully on the right.

Maya added some brown and gray shadows where they would do some good and then stopped. Good enough. She was done.

She capped her markers and sat back, smiling.

Ms. Jamila was standing behind her. She leaned forward, startling Maya. “This is very good,” she murmured, “but which hand do you usually draw with?”

Maya looked at her hands.

She had drawn the whole picture with her right hand, and she had random ink marks on her fingers to prove it.

She had messed up her first assignment.

“It’s okay,” Ms. Jamila said. She patted Maya’s shoulder. “I know the impulse is strong.” She went up and got another piece of paper. “Try something different this time, with your left hand, okay? Draw a picture of a garden you’ve never seen.”

Maya licked her lip. She nodded. She held her black marker in her left hand and started drawing.

Stupid left hand, so clumsy. Better make this simple. She drew black branches with black thorns on them, more and more, and when she had a big thicket of leafless sticker bushes, she drew a lacy black iron fence around the outside, all jagged because her left hand didn’t want to cooperate. She made its resistance part of the picture.

Yeah.

She finished by drawing one gray flower, its center shaped like a face, on top of a bush.

Then she checked out Benjamin’s picture.

Whoa.

Maya didn’t know what he had drawn, but there were lots of them. Swirls and loops, little tornadoes or hurricanes, but all of them had a clear spot in the middle, with loops all around, as if light glared from the center of every storm.

“Gosh,” Maya said, “how can you tell who’s who?” There must have been fifty of those gray, red, and brown things on the page.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Benjamin. “We’re more alike than we are different.”

That shocked her. She and Candra were always looking for ways to be different from each other, and Peter was totally different, too.

“Which one is you?” Maya asked.

Benjamin’s eyebrows rose. He scanned his page of storms and finally pointed to a small one near the bottom. It was gray and brown, with not much red in it.

“Huh,” she said.

Travis looked, too. He frowned. “Hey, Maya, let’s see yours.”

Ms. Jamila said, “All right, class, time’s about up! Five more minutes to finish what you’ve started, and then we’ll look at what we’ve produced.”

Maya slid her family picture out from under the sticker-garden picture and showed it to Travis and Benjamin.

“Wow,” said Travis.

“Ditto,” said Benjamin in a soft voice. “You’re the brush?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s very cool,” said Travis.

“Thanks.” Maya set the picture down again, feeling awkward. “You show me yours?”

He held his up.

She couldn’t tell what he had drawn. Three messes side by side was what it looked like. Lots of green and brown and gray loops, some awkward blobs stacked on top of each other. It looked like a left-handed picture, all right. Everything jerky and sprawling over the lines.

“Uh,” Maya said. She couldn’t think of a single complimentary thing to say, but she didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

“See? This is me.” Travis pointed to the mess on the right. “This is my dad.” The mess in the middle. “And this is Oma, my grandma.” The mess on the left. “Teacher said draw what we look like inside, so this is the guts, and here’s the stomach, and these spongy things are lungs, and I had to make the hearts green, and this gray thing on top is the brain, and—”

Maya threw a pen at him. It hit him in the chest. He tumbled back off his chair. “You wound me!” he said from the floor, where he had fallen artistically into a sprawl.

“Hey! Settle down back there!” Ms. Jamila came back to their table and said, “What’s the problem?”

Oh, no! What if she got detention her first day in school? In
art
class?

“Artistic differences,” Benjamin said.

Travis lurched to his feet. “Sorry. I was fooling around, teacher,” he said.

“It’s my fault. I threw a pen at him.” Maya couldn’t get Travis in trouble when it was really her fault. He had a reputation to live down already.

“Artistic differences?” Ms. Jamila asked Benjamin.

Benjamin pointed to Travis’s picture. “What he and his father and grandmother look like inside,” Benjamin said.

Ms. Jamila studied Travis’s picture, then laughed. “I understand,” she said after she managed to stop. “Maya, in my class, everybody gets the freedom to express themselves however they choose. We don’t criticize unless the artist asks for feedback. Everybody can praise anybody else’s work, though.” Her voice had risen to reach the whole room, and the other kids were listening. “Travis, why don’t you take your picture up front and show it to us? Everyone, remember. You can say good things about each other’s projects or say nothing at all; those are your options. Let’s go.”

One by one everybody took their pictures up front to show, and Maya got more insight into who she was going to school with.

Ms. Jamila called Maya up last.

Maya went up front. “I did the assignment wrong,” she said. “I forgot to draw with my left hand.” She held up her picture. She knew it was good. She felt blood burning in her cheeks.

Some people said
ahh
! One or two gasped.

“Wow,” said Guitar Hero Alex, “you draw like in comic books.”

“Thanks,” she said. “It’s my favorite thing. I’ve been practicing for years. That’s why this paintbrush is me.” She explained the rest of her family, and then the bell rang.

It was going to be okay. She was pretty sure.

 

 

 

Art was the last class of the day. Afterward, Travis walked her to the counselor’s office so she could pick up some forms and a school map. “I come here all the time,” he said.

“I don’t get that about you,” she said. “Why did you flunk?”

He shrugged and looked away. “It’s complicated. Later, dudette.”

“Okay. Thanks for your help.”

He shrugged again as he headed down the hall toward the front door, weaving between other homeward-headed students.

The corridors were empty when she left Mrs. Boleslav’s office. She wondered if she could find her locker on her own now that she had a map. If she went straight home, she’d just have to sit around and do homework, so why not explore?

She dug out the map and the piece of paper with her locker assignment on it. Corridor G, locker bank 2, #1512.

Corridor G. Sure. She scanned the walls to see if the corridors were labeled. Not as far as she could see.

She checked the first locker bank she came to. Numbers ran from 500 to 600. Which corridor was she in? Was corridor G even in the main building?

She walked down the hall and checked out another bank of lockers: 2700 to 2800. Sha, very helpful.

This was dumb. She could just ask Travis tomorrow. She turned to head for the exit and found herself face to face with the tall, freckled boy from that morning.

He looked even sicker than he had before. He stared at her, his nostrils flaring.

Then he grabbed her arm and dragged her into the nearest classroom.

“What? What do
you want?” she asked. They were in a science classroom. Sharp chemical smells. Lab tables, stools, Bunsen burners, test tubes. The squeak of mice running on wheels.

“I need your help.”

She tried to twist out of his grasp, but he was stronger than he looked. “Let go. What’s the matter with you? This isn’t funny.”

“No. Not funny. Please stand still.”

Fear pumped through her, prickled against the back of her neck, loosened her knees. She was alone in the middle of an empty school with some crazy, strong boy.

“What do you want? ” She tugged at her arm, tried to push him away. She couldn’t budge him.

Should she scratch him? Her fingernails weren’t very long. Maybe she should bite him. Or kick him. Dad had told her where to kick guys if they were threatening her.

“Let go,” she said again. She didn’t want to wait until it was too late to kick him if she had to, to protect herself. But she didn’t want to kick him if there was an easier way to get away.

He heaved a sigh. His breath smelled like he’d been throwing up. Air rasped in and out of him. His freckles stood out starkly against his milk-pale skin. He was sick and sweaty and still way stronger than she was.

“Please,” he said.

He let go of her and thumped down on a stool, covered his face with his hands. “Please,” he whispered.

She edged away and put a lab table between them. She wouldn’t let him catch her again. Her wrist was already bruised where he’d gripped it. Should she run?

Chikuvny
.

A controlled substance? Fairy dust? Something he knew about. Maybe he’d tell her more than Benjamin or Gwenda had.

“What do you want?” she asked for the third time.

“I need help. I need help of someone who comes from this Earth, someone knows where a portal is. Please. It’s not for me. Won’t you please help me?” His voice was full of despair.

“It depends on what you want me to do.”

He plunged his hand into his pocket. “Look,” he whispered.

In his cupped hand was something that looked like a small egg, only instead of a shell, it was covered in a thin, velvety skin. It glowed from inside, soft pastel colors, pink, green, yellow, blue, occasional streaks of silvery light. Some of it looked dark and sick, though.

She edged closer and leaned in to look. So beautiful. So damaged. She swallowed a rising sadness.

“Do you know this? Do you know this
sissimi
? How it is?” He had some kind of accent. She hadn’t noticed it before, and now that she did, she couldn’t figure out what kind it was, only that it was getting thicker. “That it’s a treasure, a precious,” he whispered. “A bond? A seer?”

“I don’t know.”

“Your hand.” He took her hand, lifted it to his nose, and sniffed. “But is fading,” he said, his voice heavy. “But so am I.”

“I don’t know what a
sissimi
is. I don’t know anything about a portal. I don’t know what
chikuvny
is.”

“You don’t know! You don’t know.” His dark blue eyes looked sad. He lowered his eyelids, then glanced up at her again. “I am sorry. I found the wrong person. I have been searching for days. I could not find any of the right people. But look. She is dying.”

They stared at the egg. As Maya watched, another patch of it dimmed.

“I am not from here. I don’t have the right—” He frowned. He pinched the skin of his arm. “The right. So I can’t give the
sissimi
what she needs. You could do that.”

“What? You want me to feed it?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“You could save her. You could keep her alive long enough to find a portal, and then she could get home. At her home they will know what to do. You understand?”

“No.”

“No,” he repeated. His shoulders sagged. “I stole her. The Krithi told me how. They said she would be my perfect friend. They told me what
sissimi
grow into. Companions. Collectors. Protectors. The Krithi said I could raise her here, far from her home. Then none of her masters can find me. I didn’t know she needs local host, or she doesn’t get the right—” He made a growling sound and shook his head. “Food, nutriment. I didn’t know,” he whispered.