Throat (5 page)

The specialist smiled, but his brow was furrowed at the same time, giving him a pained expression. I didn’t like this. I was starting to get pictures in my head of me stuck in front of hundreds of eye freaks in white coats shining things in my eyes, lecturing. Stretching my eyelids back while I sat on a cold steel table in nothing but one of those backwards hospital gowns.

“Let’s go,” I said to Mom. “I want to go.”

Mom looked embarrassed. “But the doctor—he’s not finished, Emma. He wants to run more tests.…”

The specialist started to speak, but I was already up and moving to the door. I left without ever looking at his face again.

*    *    *

“Why do you always have to be so much trouble about things like this? I get so tired of it,” Mom said.

I tore into another slice of pepperoni. God, I was so hungry these days. We were sitting at one end of the food court surrounded by moms who were hustling their kids around the play equipment. The tables were about half full. I liked the feeling of anonymity my sunglasses gave me. I could stare at people without them knowing.

“You think this is my fault, don’t you,” I said, tearing off another bite.

“Well, I wonder why? It was you who lost your temper. It was you who stole the car. Crashed it in a ditch.” Her voice started to break. “What do you want me to say? And now this.” She waved her arms around. “You’re going blind.”

“I’m not going blind, Mom. How good can a specialist be who has an office at the mall? It’ll be okay. I bet it’s already starting to go away.”

“You’re lying. You know I can always tell when you’re lying.”

“Not possible. I don’t lie.”

“So why did you just say that?”

I sighed. “Because I know this is scaring you. I don’t want you to be scared. I’m not scared. I just want my shorts back.” I was tired of wearing jeans. I would wear shorts year-round if I could get away with it. But nobody was seeing that bandage on my leg until the stitches were out. I turned my head away, indicating the conversation was over.

I never held things back. But I was holding something back now. Something I had seen when the lights were off and I was watching my mother’s face.
Blue
. She had been giving off a faint bluish glow in the dark. So had the specialist.

*    *    *

“You’re doing it again,” Manda said, yanking on my arm. “Hey. Emma. Stop, wake up!” She snapped her fingers.

I was looking at something outside the window, a tree framed by the light. Only I didn’t see it as a tree anymore. It had gone out of focus. Now I saw it as a shape. Saw a light inside it. My mouth was hanging open. My eyes had this comfortable feeling. It felt as if they were getting rounder and rounder, wider and wider, expanding. And the longer I stared, the more comfortable my eyes felt, until that feeling of complete and total comfort spread through my whole body. As if what I was seeing was going so deep inside me, made me feel so good, I could look at that tree that was no longer a tree the rest of my life.

“Emma!” Manda screamed.

“Huh?” I blinked. Shook my head. The comfortableness of the tree and the light was gone.

“You were doing it again.”

She meant I had had a seizure. If I lost consciousness for a brief little moment of time, say thirty seconds, it was an absence seizure. What doctors used to call a
petit mal
. Otherwise, it was a simple partial, which is similar, but you’re aware the whole time. Sometimes it was a little hard to tell them apart.

What I thought of as my “small” seizures were generally pretty mild. When I came out of one, it was like my life had jumped over a minute of time, completely skipped it, before settling back into its groove. Those little blips of time were lost forever.

Sometimes I had several small seizures a day. Other times I didn’t have any for a week or more. Most of the time I wasn’t aware I was going through it, unless Mom or Manda or somebody else brought it to my attention.

I took Dilantin, which was supposed to cover the “big” seizures,
the tonic-clonics, which it did for the most part, with obvious breakdowns like the soccer tournament. We tried Depakote and then Zarontin for the small ones, but nothing seemed to make them go away completely. And the sleepiness from the extra drugs was wiping me out in school, so we stopped them. Besides, I was lucky that the small ones were generally pretty harmless. Only something about this one didn’t feel quite so benign.

“Do I look crazy to you?” I said to Manda.

“Only one million percent,” she said. She dipped her finger in the peanut butter jar for another lick.

“Don’t do that. You really shouldn’t do that.”

“I don’t care, Emma, it’s so good.”

I didn’t say anything. For some reason my seizure had gotten me thinking about what I had seen in the eye specialist’s office. The way my mom had been glowing blue in the dark. Was this some weird new offshoot of my epilepsy? What was happening to me?

“Emma? Are you listening?” Manda yelled. “I said, did you know I can count to a billion? Emma!”

“What? Um, oh, you can?”

“One, two, three, four, five, a billion,” Manda said, and collapsed into giggles on the living room floor.

I was thinking that I could try it again right now. Take my little sister in the back bedroom, close the curtains, cut out the lights, and see. See if it happened with Manda too. But I didn’t. I don’t think I wanted to see.

The next change came all at once. I told Mom I was trashing my crutches, no matter what the doctor said. I had been walking around the apartment just fine and was sick of dragging the things to school. She knew it was useless to try to force me, so instead she turned the situation on its head.

“Okay, if you’re all healed up, tomorrow is garbage day, right?”

“But my poor leg,” I said.

Mom smiled sweetly. “Besides, you can take Manda to the playground. She’s been cooped up all afternoon.”

I grumbled and grabbed my sister and we headed across the Autumn Creste complex to the Dumpsters. She held my hand the whole way, skipping and practically jerking my arm out of its socket. Manda spent eighty-eight percent of her waking life either dancing or singing or both.

I got her started on the swings, then headed over to the Dumpster to jettison the bag of kitchen crap only to notice that some doofus or, more likely, team of doofi had blocked the Dumpster door with a huge yellow refrigerator.

I knew the Dumpsters had tops that opened so they could be raised and emptied into a truck, but the Dumpsters at the Creste were old. Iron Age old, complete with lids so rusty they looked like they were welded shut. I thought I would give it a try anyway. Maybe I could get it open a crack, enough to slip the bag in. I found the cleanest-looking grungy spot along the rim of the lid and heaved with my left hand … only, it didn’t just open a crack, it kept going. Flipped all the way over and slammed against the back of the Dumpster like a bomb.

“Holy …”

One of the kids over at the swings finished the thought for me. All of them were watching. I looked suspiciously at my hand.
Huh?

I took my shades off, kept my eyes closed against the light, and mopped my brow. Put them back on and opened and closed my fingers. Something … 
something moved inside me
.

I didn’t know any other way to put it. It was as if there was a new kind of energy there—an energy that was suddenly loosened
to where it flowed freely down my arms and legs and back. I had the sense that if I flexed my calf muscles and jumped, I could fly to the top of one of the apartment buildings.

I looked at the refrigerator.
No way
. But why not? I stooped next to it, stuck the fingers of one hand underneath, and gripped the bottom edge. Stood very rapidly …

The yellow refrigerator came completely off the ground. I watched in shock as the metal trim at the bottom came level with my eyes, then the whole thing kept going higher and higher as it left my hand. It all felt so effortless. The refrigerator tumbled in midair a moment, then gravity caught up and it came crashing down on its side.

The sound boomed off the nearest buildings. The kids at the swings came running over, shrieking and laughing, all wanting to touch me, calling me superhero names like Spider-Man and the Hulk. Manda was right in the middle of them.

“Emma! Emma! You’re Superman!”

“No, shhh, no, I’m not!” I said. “It was just really light. I didn’t do anything.”

“Emma! You’re a superhero!”

They begged me to do it again. I shook my head over and over. Thankfully, none of them was older than five or six. Nobody would believe them if they told anybody what I’d done. I thought it again.

What’s happening to me?

I was stunned and more than a little afraid. It was almost as if … as if I were turning into something new.
Some new kind of human
.

But what kind? I didn’t know.

One thing that hadn’t changed: my impulsive nature. Why couldn’t I have waited until after dark to have tested my strength?

But it had been impossible to ignore once I had felt it—that power—inside me. The moment it had surged through me, I didn’t give a rip who was watching.
Who cares?
I would have thought if someone had tried to warn me not to do it.
What? You think you can stop me?

I took Manda’s hand and hustled her back to the apartment with her complaining the whole way. I stopped when we got to our steps. “You can’t tell Mom about this,” I said. “You just can’t.”

“Why?” Manda said. “She has to know. She has to know you’re Superman, Emma.”

“I’m not Superman, Manda. I’m not.”

“Supergirl, then.”

“No.”

“Superwoman.”

“No, I’m nothing. I mean, I’m just strong, really, really strong. This has to be a secret, do you understand? A secret just between me and you. If you tell anyone, even if it’s just Mom, she’ll get really scared and other people will find out. And then …” I wasn’t sure what I could say to convince her. Then I had an idea. “The bad guys will get me, Manda. Do you see what I’m saying? You don’t want that to happen, okay? The bad guys would get you too. And Mom.”

“Oh! Like Peter Parker.”

“Yeah, just like Peter Parker. Nobody else can know or—”

“Or the bad guys, they will come and hurt us.”

“Right. Okay. Talk about something else when we see Mom. Anything else.”

“Okay.”

My head was bursting with thoughts, so many I couldn’t keep up with them all. The most disturbing was this: while it was happening, what I was doing didn’t feel disturbing at all. Lifting that
refrigerator didn’t feel strange. It felt natural.
The most natural thing in the world
.

The next morning I begged out of school and nagged my mother until she drove me to one of those doc-in-the-box places to get the stitches removed.

“But it’s more than a week early!” Mom kept saying all the way there.

“I know, but it feels fine,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her what I already suspected.

I looked at the doctor’s name tag:
OLOKOWANDI
.

“And may I have your name, miss? Call me Dr. Olo,” he said when I climbed up on the paper. He was a dazzlingly handsome black guy with the most striking smile I had ever seen. Though right now he was looking kind of perplexed.

Dr. Olo had just taken the bandage off my leg and run his finger along the top of my thigh. Where the sick-looking wound had been, there was a slight ridge of flesh about three or four inches long—and nothing else. The skin was perfect, otherwise.

“I don’t mean to … say this,” Dr. Olo said. It sounded like an accusation. “There are no sutures. You took them out, didn’t you? You are a strong girl to take them out yourself. Or did your father or mother do it for you?”

My face must have told him that wasn’t the case. His expression changed. “Take your finger, there.”

Dr. Olo guided my hand over the same ridge of flesh he had just touched. It was smooth, but …

“See how hard it feels? That is the scar tissue. If someone did not remove the stitches, I would say it is almost as if they have been … reabsorbed.” He shook his head wonderingly. “The only
thing I would know to do, Miss Emma, is to take a scalpel, so …” He pointed the tip of his fingernail against the raised place, drew it along like a knife. “… And see what we will see is beneath.” Dr. Olo laughed heartily. “Of course, I am making a joke. There is really nothing to be done. You are healed! It is a miracle! Please have a glorious day.”

When my mom saw me back in the waiting room, she asked, “How did it go?”

“Butter,” I said. And we left.

The next impossibly weird thing came later that day. It had rained all day, so I knew the soccer fields would be closed, which was good because I wanted to test my leg with nobody watching.

Besides, I just needed to get away, do something physical. Running had always been my therapy, ever since the curse had come on the scene. Running helped me to think, settled me out when I was feeling over-amped and crazy.

I would have loved to run on the grass, but the fields were damp and spongy from the storm. So the asphalt jogging trail it was. A fresh mass of black clouds was threatening in the west and the light of the day was already failing. Well, failing for everyone else.

It had been more than a week since I had really put the hammer down, so I went through a light stretching routine. Then I was off.

Supreme
.

The word popped into my head as I rounded the first long curve in the running trail. I was moving uphill and already gaining speed. My injured leg didn’t hurt at all. But that wasn’t really accurate. It was more than just a lack of pain. I had never felt anything like this, anything this good.

I felt fantastic every time I ran. In spite of my size, I was built for
speed. But this … I glanced around me. The glowering clouds were starting to spit rain. Nobody in sight.

Push it
.

I lengthened my stride, intending to kick like I would for a sprint, the kind of flat-out running a person can only hold for a few seconds.

Something inside me kicked back.