Throat (6 page)

Oh my God …
I was moving. Really moving. Faster than I had ever run before. It was so easy. But I could instinctively feel it wasn’t a full sprint. I was still in a lower gear.

I pushed harder and could feel wind whistling past me now just as if I were sticking my head out the window of a moving car. Only unlike in the movies when someone is going terrifically fast, nothing was a blur. Everything was as rock steady as if I were standing still.

I felt my heart as I ran. It should have been racing like a high-performance engine, but I couldn’t even feel the beat at first. There it was, about like the pulse you would feel lying down, maybe sixty, seventy beats a minute. Up to then I had thought I was blazing. But now I realized I could go faster. Much faster.
Try it
.

I opened the throttle all the way, running as if I’d heard a baby crying in a burning building. It was like flying. It
was
flying, while still touching the earth. The black cloud above me burst and lightning shivered across the horizon like the glowing ends of a witch’s broom. Rain ricocheted against me—I was racing into the big fat drops so fast, they were bouncing off of me sideways like liquid bullets. It felt amazing, transcendent.

I would have lapped the fastest Olympic runner on the planet three, four, five times already. I was something beyond human, more than human.
I’m a god
.

I began screaming. I screamed over and over. At last I slowed,
finally stopping next to a giant spreading oak. I sat beneath it and watched the rain thunder down. Checked the time on my cell. I had been sprinting like that for more than thirty minutes.

The next morning I floated through school in a dreamlike state. In homeroom, kids moved around me sleepily, slinging their books down, talking about their weekends. The box on the wall blared the usual scratchy salute: “It’s a great day to be a Red Raider!” Followed by announcements I ignored. My body was in the room, but my spirit was still on that track, flying.

The truth is, I didn’t know if I even belonged there anymore.

What was I becoming? Would it end or just keep on going? I turned my hands up and looked at my palms. Not one crease out of place, everything just as I remembered. But I was something different and new. Maybe some kind of genetic anomaly? A new kind of human being, anyhow. I refused to consider any possibility beyond that.

After lunch we rehearsed a school lockdown, cutting the lights off and locking the classroom doors, pretending a shooter was on the loose in the halls.

We huddled in the dark. Only—
oh my God
—I could still see everyone by the ghostly bluish light their bodies were giving off.

I turned my head right and left in complete disbelief.

James Wharton was kissing D’Shika House and feeling her up. I could see D’Shika’s wet eyes blinking, their bodies moving. I could see kids waving their arms blindly, trying to poke other kids.

I felt uncomfortable watching what people do in the dark when they are certain no one can see them. Kids scratching in embarrassing places. Picking their noses. But the hardest thing to watch was the faces. Once I got used to the blue, I got to see each kid’s
secret face. What their public faces relaxed into in the safety of the dark. Some of the kids looked happy, well adjusted, sure. But the faces that haunted me were the others. Sad. Depressed. Frightened. Overwhelmingly tired.

My math teacher, Ms. Timms, who was new and young and hot, fresh out of college, and Ben Wheland were right next to each other, leaning against a table at the front of the room. Not touching. Not moving at all. But so very close, their hips were less than an inch apart.

One of the most interesting things about the lockdown was this: knowing that if someone really did attack the school, I could very easily walk out there and stop him.

No matter what weapons an intruder had, from pipe bombs to an M16—unless he had a gang of shooters with him, he would be completely helpless against me. I was just too fast. I could dodge around behind him, make it seem as if he were moving in slow motion. To the killer it would seem almost as if I had the ability to disappear in one place and reappear in another.

I could basically do anything I wanted to do.

“Emma. Emma!”

“Huh?”

The last class of the day, creative writing, and Ms. Walker was looking at me as if she was expecting something. She’d already accused me of trying to sleep behind my sunglasses.

“We’re selecting partners for the Argumentative Essay project. Like to join us?”

I sat up straighter in my chair. “Anybody is fine with me. Could I go see the nurse?”

“Is there something wrong?”

“I don’t know, I just need to see the nurse.”

Given my medical history, Ms. Walker was afraid to say no. She made out the pass and I left. I strolled past the nurse’s office and then right past the checkout office too. Out the front door.
A clean getaway
.

I spent the rest of the day walking aimlessly all over town, finally sitting on a bench outside the library. For a while I tried not to think about anything at all. Just absorbed my surroundings. The brick dentist office in the little house across the street. Broom sage blowing in the empty lot next door. The smell of french fry grease from the McDonald’s up the road. A ladybug crawling along my finger. The world seemed so incredibly alive. Alive in a way I had never imagined before. Beautiful. Interconnected.

Then I heard something … a kind of whirring, fluttering sound. I looked around trying to find the source. Then I saw it, a bird with blue-tipped wings, fifty yards away, landing in the top of a locust tree.

I can hear its wings flapping
.

Of course I thought about it. How there must be some connection between my accident in the Georgia mountains and what was happening to me now. If only I could remember …

That night Mom was working at the Blue Onion again and I had read to Manda and gotten her in bed. She wasn’t sleepy, though. Five minutes after I had her down, she charged up the hall to where I was sitting in the living room with my trig book, trying to care about homework. A nature show about vampire bats was on, but I wasn’t paying much attention to it.

“Can’t sleep,” Manda said.

“How come?”

She jumped into her favorite place, my lap. The trig book fell to the floor, closing itself. “I keep thinking about those pale green pants with nobody inside them,” Manda said. “What’s inside them, Emma? There has to be something inside them. Or they couldn’t move, could they?”

I let out a deep breath. “It’s just a story, Manda. You know what Dr. Seuss is like. Everything he writes is all made up and crazy.”

“But Horton is not made up. Horton is an elephant. Elephants are not made up. I’ve seen one at the zoo.”

“But a talking elephant? Who sits on an egg and hatches it?”

Manda looked at me as if I were slow. “That’s just for the story, silly. But the pants …”

“There’s nobody inside the pants.”

“Not a ghost?”

“It’s just drawn that way. The pants are supposed to be alive. They are alive, but that’s all they are. Pants. It’s supposed to be … a mystery. You’re not supposed to know how the pants work. That’s why the story is so good.”

“Like the secret you showed me?”

“What secret?”

“About your superpowers?”

I swore to myself. “Well, yeah, I guess so. That’s a mystery too, isn’t it? That’s why it has to be kept secret.” I put a finger to my lips.

She threw her arms around me and clung to my neck. When she spoke again, she was speaking very softly, just under my ear. “Fly me away, Emma. Fly me away from the pale green pants.”

I squeezed her hard. “I can’t fly. That’s silly.” Was it? I didn’t know. I had never tried.
Stop it
.

“But …”

I pulled her away and got up to take her back down the hall. But she wouldn’t let me go. “Let me watch something, Emma.”

“You need to be in bed.”

“Just a little bit, so I won’t think about the pants.”

So we settled down again and watched the nature show. Five vampire bats were hopping around a pig’s legs in the middle of the night. I never imagined they would move that way. There was something unsettling about the way they bounded around and around the pig. At last they climbed aboard, settling onto the pig’s back.

“Vampire bats have heat-seeking sensors in their noses,” the announcer said. “Let’s look at that in infrared so you can see exactly what the bats are searching for.”

The screen suddenly changed from normal nighttime hues to brilliant yellows, oranges, and reds with little dots of white in between, each about the size of a quarter.

“Those white spots are just what the bats are looking for, and their special noses lead them right to it: the most promising locations for easy blood,” the announcer explained.

The bats each found a white spot and dug in, lapping pig’s blood into their wedge-shaped mouths along a groove in their long tongues. Three bats were suddenly fighting over a particularly promising spot. “Like miners who have struck the mother lode,” the voice-over said. “Why doesn’t the pig wake up? Because the vampire bat’s teeth are razor sharp. So sharp, the pig doesn’t even feel it. Vampire bats will feast for as long as thirty minutes on one victim. By the time these bats are done, they each will have lapped up about half their weight in hot juicy pig blood.”

I began to feel sick. I didn’t know why. I’d never had a weak stomach before.

“Okay, that’s it,” I said to Manda.

“But it isn’t over!”

“You know what’s worse than pale green pants?” I said.

“What?”

“Momma if she comes home and catches you out of bed. Get.”

She scooted down the hall and I tucked her in. I put the Sneetches book back on the shelf so maybe she wouldn’t think about the pants so much. When I came back to the living room, I changed the channel. Five minutes later, I felt so sick, I climbed into bed.

I threw up three times before Mom got home. It had been years since I had had any kind of stomach bug. She blamed it on the
Italian dressing chicken breasts I had baked for supper, but Manda had eaten them too, and she was fine.

I was afraid it was something else. The worse the pain got, the more cursed I felt, connecting my sickness to the changes in me, as if my new gifts had somehow come with a terrible price.

I felt completely empty inside. I started shivering violently and Mom covered me with blankets. I drifted in and out of a feverish sleep. At one point I felt something on my leg, so I pulled the covers back and the old wound on my thigh was open and raw again, oozing pus and blood.

Then vampire bats were crawling all over me, hopping from my knees to my chest to the top of my head. I feebly tried to shake them off, but they didn’t seem to notice. Now six of them were feasting on the wound in my leg, like cows around a tiny pond. On TV they had said the pig couldn’t feel the bats feeding, but I could. I could feel every tearing little bite.

One of them sank its teeth into my scalp. I must have screamed, because Mom came running in after that.

“Emma! Are you okay?”

She swabbed my head with a damp cloth and said she was calling the doctor’s exchange. The doctor called back and told her to give me twice the recommended dosage of Tylenol. All we had was the liquid variety. I threw it up. It looked like fresh blood on the carpet.

Somewhere in the middle of the night my fever broke and Mom left me alone to sleep. When I woke again, the sheets were drenched and the room was strangely cool. I could see every inch of the space so clearly: my glass-topped bedside table, the oak dresser, stacks of clean clothes on a chair, my closet with the poster of David
Beckham in his white and yellow LA Galaxy uniform, the square panes of the window. Beyond that a light in the parking lot shone red through the thin white curtains. And I remembered.

A man is standing in the trees
.

A tall black figure. He was about thirty feet off the ground, his long legs spread from one slender branch to another. Branches seemingly too small to support his weight. His eyes were open and his arms were crossed in front of his chest like a corpse in a casket.

I stood there looking at him, feeling my blood turn to powder. I wanted to run. Ached to run. I even started moving my legs. Until the man appeared—just appeared—on the ground right in front of me.

I recoiled, dropping the flashlight, and reflexively threw up my hands for protection. The man towered over me. The light was between us, spraying up the tall man’s chest. He was wearing a dirty white linen shirt that looked old-fashioned and buttoned up the middle with what looked like little pieces of cork. Long creased pants and a wide buckled belt. A coat that came to his knees, something like a cowboy might wear in wintertime. He was dirty, but the coat made him look somehow elegant.
His face …

“Welcome,” he said.

I started running for the car, scrambling up the slope. The man in the coat just stayed where he was. I got to the top of the low hill, where I was close enough to temporarily blind myself in the headlights. I lunged toward the little stream—