The Candidates (16 page)

I should have been prepared, but the mention of “powers” sucked the air from my lungs. I struggled to think logically, which required ignoring the word I couldn’t quite process. “Jack,” I managed to say, “are you in trouble?”

He barked a laugh. “Besides with your boyfriend? No. I’m not in trouble.”

I couldn’t suppress a tiny shudder of pleasure at the thought of Cam being my boyfriend. “I didn’t mean at school. I meant, with the guy who loaned you his car, or whoever you’re living with.”

He shook his head. “It’s the Delcroix people. I know it is. They’ve been on my tail ever since I got to town. I try to lose them when I leave school, but they’re good at what they do. I don’t always see them until it’s too late. Like today.”

“Like Sunglasses Guy?”

Jack cocked his head. “Who the heck is Sunglasses Guy?”

I flushed. “The guy who was following you the day we first met.”

“Oh. Yeah, he was one of them.”

“I don’t believe they’re from Delcroix,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

Jack took a few steps toward me. “Dancia,” he said, “haven’t you figured it out by now? Delcroix’s not just some ordinary private school on a hill. They’re searching out kids like you and me. I don’t know what they want to do with us; I haven’t figured that out yet. But they don’t have any intention of letting us slip through their fingers. Ever since school started I’ve tried damn hard to lose myself in crowds, and it’s impossible. They’re always there.”

I focused on the front door, dreading what would come next. “What do you mean, kids like you and me?”

He knelt down in front of me and grabbed my hand. “It’s time to come clean. Tell the truth. Both of us. I can feel it whenever you get upset. Like that morning—I don’t know what you did to Sunglasses Guy, but you practically set my hair on end. And then in Mr. Fritz’s class. You wanted to do something then, I know you did. And you made yourself sick when you tried to stop it. And the wall. Do you really want to talk about the wall? Because I helped you there, and you know it. So we’re alike, you and I. We’re not normal. Neither of us. Let’s just admit it, okay?”

Tears flooded my eyes. Suddenly all I could think of was to run. I didn’t want to talk to Jack about powers, or Delcroix, or guys in tan Buicks. I just wanted to be left alone.

I jumped off the bench and ran toward the front door, fumbling with trembling hands for the key in my pocket. After several tries I managed to get it in the lock. Ignoring Jack’s insistent voice behind me, I threw open the door and tried to rush in, but something blocked my path. I threw up my hands but couldn’t find an edge.

Either air had turned solid, or there was something blocking the door.

Something invisible.

I SPUN
around. “Did you do this?” I slammed my fist into the invisible wall between me and my house. It rippled a little, like heat waves rolling off the blacktop in summer. “Is this how you use your power? To bully people? Let me go, Jack. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Jack leaned against the porch rail, his body once again a relaxed slouch. His voice was soft, coaxing. “How can you say that? I’m no bully.”

The wall didn’t move, so I hurried down the porch steps and started for the backyard. A tangle of emotions curdled my brain—shock, mostly, mixed with fury. But as my mind tried to sort through the tumult of feelings, my body took over. It had no doubt what it wanted to do. It wanted to run.

“Come on, why don’t you want to talk about it?” Jack called. “It’s not like it’s a secret anymore. At least, not from me. And I’ll be straight with you too. Don’t you want to know what really happened at the wall?”

“No.” I pushed open the gate in the chain-link fence. It swung into the mass of weeds that was our backyard. Jack followed, a few paces behind. A narrow, overgrown, concrete path led to the back step, and I started down it, only to have my foot smack into another barrier of solid air. I kicked it, which did nothing but leave me with a sore foot.

“Cut it out,” I yelled.

The familiar tingle started in my fingers. I knew what was happening, but for once I had no desire to stop it. I turned around and looked at Jack, smugly standing just inside the backyard, the open gate to his right. Usually in these situations I lashed out, the instinct overwhelming me before I had time to consider my options. But now, with an invisible wall in front of me and Jack’s smirk behind, I looked around with a calculating eye.

A second later, the gate swung back, catching Jack in the chest and pushing him out of the yard.

“Oof.” He stumbled backward. The barrier in front of me dissipated, and I rushed farther into the backyard. Jack rubbed his stomach and smiled weakly. “That was a good one. I should have seen that coming.”

“Leave me alone!”

Inside, I exulted. For once I had used my power on someone who had the ability to fight back, and it felt incredible. No guilt, no second-guessing. The crackling energy still rushed through me, and I relished the force of it. The awareness that usually left me terrified suddenly felt right—like I was in control of it, instead of the other way around.

Jack threw open the gate. “What’s wrong with you? I thought we were friends.”

“So? That doesn’t mean you can push me around whenever you want.”

“This is because of Prince Charming, isn’t it? What did he tell you about me?”

I scowled at him. “This is about you being a jerk. You can’t blame that on Cam.”

“I’m a jerk? All I want to do is talk. That’s all.” He raised his hands in a gesture of supplication. “Come on, you can’t stay mad at me, Danny. You know you can’t.”

I stared at him, and slowly my anger deflated. He was right. Besides, I wasn’t really mad at Jack. I was mad at life—at fate, I guess. You would think it would be a relief to find another person like me, but in that moment it just made it worse. Because if Jack was like me, then I was like Jack, and the two of us were somehow bound together.

And I was no longer going to be able to pretend that side of me didn’t exist.

“No more invisible walls?” I asked.

“No more flying gates?” he countered.

I pursed my lips. “Fine.”

I turned and stomped up the path to the back door, not looking to see if Jack followed.

With her usual crackerjack attention to detail, Grandma had left the door unlocked. Inside, the house was dark and cool, with the curtains drawn tightly in front of the large window that overlooked the street. I marched to the refrigerator, taking off my coat as I went.

“Do you want something to drink?” I said over my shoulder.

“Sure.”

As I jerked open the door of our ancient, dented fridge, I could feel Jack’s presence fill the room. Still twitching with the power, I had a hard time keeping my body from shaking. I grabbed two cans of pop and threw one at Jack. He caught it with a grin, and we went into the living room.

I sat down on Grandma’s armchair. Jack pulled off his jacket, assumed a comfortable position on the sofa, and threw his feet up on the coffee table.

“Grandma doesn’t like feet on the furniture,” I said.

He thumped his feet on the floor. “I wouldn’t want to make Grandma mad.” He opened his can and watched it fizz, then took a sip.

I clenched my fists, trying to decide whether I liked or hated him. It was a tough call. “So … what do you want to talk about?”

“What exactly can you do?” he asked, setting the soda down. “My power has to do with changing the properties of things. I can make air solid, or turn a solid into a liquid.” He smiled drily. “I’m not sure about all the ramifications of what I’m doing. I’ve studied a little chemistry on my own, just to make sure I don’t end up doing something dangerous, but I still don’t know how it all works.”

As much as I didn’t want to be having this conversation, I leaned forward, captured by what he had said so casually. “Could you … vaporize someone?” I asked.

“Probably. I haven’t tried. The idea freaks me out, to be honest. Things seem to keep their essence, they just change form. I’m not sure what that would do to a person.” He pointed to a tall wooden lamp with a broad white shade. “Watch this.”

It was like watching a candle melt on fast-forward. The gold knob on the top slumped and poured down. Then the white shade wilted, drew into itself, and turned into a thick gas that hovered a few feet in the air. Finally the wooden base liquefied, and the whole thing merged into a yellowish cloud.

“Wow,” I breathed. “You can do that whenever you want?”

“Sure.” He nodded and the lamp reassembled itself, base, shade, then bulb. “It’s not always the most useful thing in the world. It’s great for self-defense—I can turn the air solid and knock weapons out of people’s hands, or hold them in place if need be—but it doesn’t help pay the bills.”

I pictured the day Jack was late to school, when I’d tried to help him and then the security card turned into smoke. I knew he’d had something to do with it. “When did you start using it?”

“When I was a kid. Two or three maybe. My mom and dad lived together then. One time Dad tried to hit my mom, and I wrapped the air around him like a chain. He went crazy.” Jack’s body tightened as he spoke, and he began to thump one fist against his knee. “He drank a lot, so at first he thought he was imagining it. After a while he realized it was me, and, man, was he ever pissed. When I was four I told him if he ever hurt my mom again I’d make him disappear. I don’t think he really believed I could do it, but it freaked him out enough that he told us to leave.”

I rolled my pop can back and forth between my palms. “Did your mom know about it? About your powers?”

He laughed, an ugly, hurt sound that I think would have made me cry if I hadn’t been staring so hard at that can. “She thought I was some kind of freak. I think she would have turned me over to child services if she wasn’t scared they’d take her meth away or make her take care of me.”

“Why did your dad come after you if he had kicked you out?”

Jack took another drink of soda and contemplated the lamp for a minute before he continued. Under his gaze the bulb turned gassy, then solid, then gassy again. “I don’t really know. He always said he felt bad and wanted to make sure we were taken care of, but then my mom would say something to piss him off, and we’d be right back where we started. She moved to Portland to get away from him, but she was pretty much gone by then. Total meth-head. By the time I was ten I was on my own. I found other kids to hang out with, and I didn’t tell them about my powers. But I practiced them in secret, so I could get out of trouble.”

He balled the soda can in one hand, strode over to the kitchen, and pitched it toward the garbage. It hit the rim and bounced off. He picked it up with a wry smile. “Told you I wasn’t much of an athlete.” Once the can had made it into the garbage, he leaned against the doorway. “And what about you? When did you realize you had your power?”

“I don’t know.” I spoke slowly, unsure of how to explain what had been in my mind for so many years. This whole scene with Jack had become surreal, like it wasn’t really happening. Part of me suspected it was just a dream.

“I always thought it was a coincidence that the exact things I pictured in my mind actually happened. But then these weird things started happening. Things that weren’t impossible, but were unusual, hard to explain.” I described the incident at the water park, when I tipped the chair onto the bully, and the time I dropped a branch on the kids messing with Aileen.

“I finally realized that I was the one doing those things. They only happened around me, you know? And they were too odd, too unusual to be happening by chance. And I always got this feeling right before they happened … It was like …” I struggled to find the right words. “It was like I needed to do something; like an energy was building inside of me that I had to get rid of. It was almost like my body was channeling some kind of force. Something that was inside me but came from all around.”

I’d never tried to articulate it before, and saying the words out loud gave me the oddest feeling, as though a knot inside me had begun to unravel.

Jack sat back down on the sofa. “Your power is different than mine. I’m not sure what you’re doing, but it sounds amazing.”

“I suppose,” I said, “but it’s also dangerous. I always seem to end up hurting people. I put a guy in a coma when he threatened to kill my grandmother. Sunglasses Guy could have died if he hadn’t been wearing his seat belt. I try not to use it, because it scares me.
I
scare me.”

“Interesting.” He leaned back and threw his arms over his head. I was stuck for a minute by the odd comparison between how comfortable he looked and the way Cam and Mr. Judan had been so out of place in my living room. “Has it always been that way? I mean, when you were little, what did you do?”

I shrugged. “I don’t remember anything specific before the water park. Like I said, I thought they were coincidences, so I didn’t pay much attention. All the things I remember are bad.”

He thought for a minute. “I bet you used your power more when you were a kid, and it was only after you identified it that you started seeing all the things you say are bad. Thing is, they really aren’t bad. They’re just the other side of the coin. Saving people’s lives is good. Helping me escape from Sunglasses Guy was very good. Putting someone in a coma? Tough to say, I suppose, but it seems to me saving Grandma’s life was worth it. In any case, yours isn’t an evil power. It simply is what it is, neither good nor bad. It’s all in the way you use it.”

I pushed against the armrests and raised myself out of the chair. “Easy for you to say. You don’t send people to the hospital on a regular basis.”

“I also don’t go around saving people’s lives,” he said softly. “You take risks to protect other people. You just don’t want the responsibility that goes along with it.”

“Of course I don’t want the responsibility,” I cried. “I just want to be a normal teenager.”

“You think normal teenagers don’t have to make choices? You think their choices never hurt people? There’s a bit of evil in everyone, Dancia,” he said, seeming much older than fifteen. “No one’s pure. You’ve got a gift, and I think you’d be crazy not to use it. Just think of all the people you could help, if you only tried.”

I walked past him into the kitchen. There was a pile of dirty dishes in the sink. I dropped open the dishwasher door and started to load the cups, my body on autopilot while I stared through the kitchen window.

“You say that like it’s something I can control, but that’s just it. I can’t. When I’m mad or scared, my power takes over. It isn’t like yours.”

“I don’t believe that.” He came up beside me and leaned against the counter. “You did a pretty good job of slamming that gate on me. You call that an accident?”

“No, it’s not an accident. It’s …” What was it again? Somehow my own explanations didn’t make sense the way they usually did. “It’s a reflex.”

Jack snorted. “A reflex? I don’t think so. Your
reflex
seems a little too well thought out to me. I think you’ve been controlling your power all along. You keep it suppressed and hidden away until something big happens. Something you can’t ignore. And then you tell yourself it’s just an instinct so you don’t have to feel responsible for it.”

He was so close, my stomach tightened. I focused on his words, which had a painful sort of resonance. Could he possibly be right? “That can’t be true,” I said. “You don’t know how it feels. It’s like a tidal wave. How could I control that?”

He grabbed my hand and pulled me to face him. “Let’s try it,” he said, looking into my eyes. “Let’s see what you can do.”

I froze. My hands were wet and slippery from the dishes, and he felt warm and rough. I tried to free myself, but he wouldn’t loosen his grip.

“What are you doing, Jack?”

He chuckled. “I’m taking you outside, what do you think I’m doing?”

“But we aren’t moving,” I said in a strangled voice.

“Oh, right.” He still didn’t move.

My pulse fluttered like the wings of a hummingbird. Jack’s eyes locked on mine, and it was like that time on the porch, when I thought he was going to kiss me.

Then, for some unknown reason, I took a step forward, a step toward him. He laughed and dropped my hand, then picked up his coat and ran out the door, leaving me to stare at his back.

What had I been thinking? I couldn’t let Jack kiss me. I was into Cam. CAM. Not Jack, CAM.

Argg! I grabbed my coat and followed him.

We walked into the backyard. A few old cans and some plastic bottles that should have made it into the recycling bin littered the weedy grass. Near the back of our yard was an old stump that sat in the shade of a gnarled apple tree. Jack picked up a few of the cans and set them on the edge of the stump.

He walked over to me and crossed his arms. “Push them off.”