A Fistful of Sky (12 page)

“So we drew pictures with it to see what would happen. They came alive last night.” She shook her head. “Gyp, this doesn’t sound like a curse. It sounds more like playtime.”

“In retrospect,” I said. I yawned and looked around. “Where’s Flint? I thought he was going to watch with me.”

“Look.” She pointed to an outline in the dewed grass near where I had lain. “Maybe he got up earlier. Somebody made coffee before I got to the kitchen. It was really bad coffee, too.”

We both smiled. Flint’s kitchen skills were so bad they were legendary. I used to figure he was just doing it to get out of work. But he cooked the same—badly—whether he was alone in the house or there was someone around to notice.

“I threw it out and made a new pot. Would you like some?” Mama asked.

“Uh, sure.” Six a.m.! The middle of the night! I had my schedule set up the way I liked it: no classes before eleven in the morning, and my three-day-a-week schedule at the center was an evening shift, three to eight. And anyway, this was finals week, and I’d finished my finals. I didn’t even have to go to campus today. All I really wanted to do right now was

go back to sleep, but I knew I’d feel better if I got out of my crumpled day-old clothes, brushed my teeth, and showered before I did.

As I crawled to my feet, I realized that I never wanted to sleep on a lawn again, either. I had creaks and crooks in muscles I had never noticed before. I felt like a badly treated antique.

“You have the most interesting rash on your face,” Mama said.

“Thanks.”

“Is there more of your cursed chalk? I’ve been thinking about these gloves. If the chalk doesn’t come off, maybe I can fix them by sprinkling chalk all over them. I could pick colors that would match several outfits.”

“Those are my gloves, Mama.”

“Oh, you want them back? Really, are you ever going to wear them again?”

Would I ever put them on again, knowing that they tended to cling? I would be scared to wear them. On the other hand, they were the product of my first conscious act of power. On the third hand, when Mama really wanted something, it was hard to resist her. Sometimes she got things through sheer force of character, and sometimes she cheated and used hidden persuasions. She really liked my gloves.

“Uncle Tobias says I have to use my power every day or I’ll hurt myself,” I said. “Couldn’t I just, kind of, curse you a new pair of gloves?”

Her eyes glowed. “Oh! Let’s try it! Can you make them red to match my dress?”

“I’ll see.” How had I made my gloves? I held out my hand and Mama put the gloves into it. I rubbed one against my cheek. I had seen the gloves on my power self, and wished for my own pair. “I wish you had a pair of gloves like these, only the color and style you want,” I said. A snake of fire uncoiled inside me and struck. A flash shot from my chest and bathed Mama’s arms in red light. Then she was wearing red elbow-length gloves.

A faint tension in my shoulders that I hadn’t even noticed relaxed a fraction.

“Yes,” she whispered. She held her hands out in front of her and relished. “Ohhhh.” She brushed gloved fingertips down her cheek. “Smooth as water. So thin! I bet for sure they can pass the dime test.”

“The dime test?”

She blinked, realized I was still with her. “The true test of a good pair of gloves is whether you can pick up a dime while wearing them. This is fine,

fine work, Gyp.”

“Cool.” I stuffed my own gloves in my jacket pocket. One thing accomplished. Whether I ever wore them again, I got to keep my gloves. “Promise not to be mad that they’re cursed?”

“Cursed? They’re gorgeous. Just what I wanted! This power acts like wish power. Surely Tobias was teasing you, child.”

“I don’t think so.”

“How are they cursed?”

“Try to take them off.”

She tried to grasp the upper edge of one glove with the fingers of the other, but she couldn’t lift it. There was no dividing line between her skin and the glove. Maybe the glove was her skin?

“How clever of you,” she said, in that tone that meant the opposite.

“If they act like mine, maybe they’ll turn into real gloves after—hmm. When did I make them? Ten last night, and now it’s six? Say, eight hours? Or did mine get normal because you pulled on them?” Maybe they’d turned normal long ago and I had slept through it. “If you can’t wait that long, I’m sure you’ll figure something out. When you figure it out, would you let me know? I’m hoping people will have curse antidotes so I don’t have to be scared of using my power.”

“I will inform you.” For an instant she frowned, but then she got up and headed for the house. “Have to see what the total effect is,” she said.

I suspected she would head for the full-length mirror in the entry hallway, placed so everybody could check what they looked like before they went out to meet the world. Most of us didn’t use the mirror because we left by the backdoor, since we had to park our vehicles in hidden spots out back. Mama always consulted the mirror before she left the house. Her red Mercedes had its own spot out front to the right of the turnabout, masked by a pittosporum hedge that also hid the tarp tent that kept sun and rain off her car.

The car. Mama had given me a message about my car. I better move it before I did anything else.

No, wait. The shoebox full of chalk sat just the other side of the walkway. I picked it up and looked inside. In the pale morning light, the chalk colors glowed, enticed me to take them out and play with them. I shuddered. There were kids in this neighborhood who liked to draw monsters with sidewalk chalk, or giant warplanes having death duels with

spaceships.

I checked the path for stray ends of chalk and stowed all the bits I could find in the box, then took it inside. In my room I looked for a good place to hide it. Not that people came in and went through my things the way they used to. We all used to snoop through each other’s stuff when we were little, even though that went against the big fat rule about not invading each other’s space. If we told on each other, the person who had snooped had to stand in a corner for half an hour or more. Anybody who tattled got shunned for as long as the rest of us could remember. You had a choice of punishments: the ones Mama and Daddy administered, or the ones the other kids gave you. Sometimes Mama and Daddy punishments were easier to take. Sometimes it was worth the risk. After people went through transition, our inter-kid punishments got much more severe.

Worrying about snoops finding my chalk was silly. Everybody who might snoop had already tried out the chalk; I couldn’t imagine any of them—except maybe Flint—would want another test-draw. I put the box on a shelf in my closet and shut the door.

A strange little prickle of heat brushed my forehead as I faced the closet door.

I backed up and it went away.

Huh?

I took two steps toward the closet, and felt the tiniest flush on my face. I opened the door, and the heat increased. I walked up to the shelf so that my face was right near the box. Sunlight hot.

I backed away again, shut the door, walked all the way across the room.

The heat was gone.

I blew a breath up across my forehead, ruffling my bangs. Weird. Maybe I could sense things I had cursed? I dug the gloves out of my pocket and held them close to my face. Nothing. Scratch that theory.

Or maybe the gloves’ curse had run out.

I pulled the left glove on. It fit like itself. I waited a second, and pulled it off. Hah! No longer a trap! They were plain—well, cursed-chalk-speckled—gloves now.

Maybe I had a sense of my own curse energy? Whether it was active, where it was?

I went back to the closet to check. This time I held my hand out to the

box, and felt warmth in the tips of my fingers.

Okay. This could be a good thing. To really test it, though, I should see if I responded to other cursed things like this. I could curse something else and see what happened. Or check something I had already cursed. Right now, that meant Mama’s gloves. I wasn’t going to get anywhere near her until she figured out how to get the gloves off. She hadn’t seemed angry when she left me, but if she got frustrated, she—

Mama!

My car!

I ran down to the kitchen where I had left my pack last night, found the car keys in the outside pocket, went out the front door and moved my car to its hiding place under the fig tree.

Then I went back upstairs and finally brushed my teeth and took my shower, I set the alarm for later and collapsed across my bed.

Somebody knocked on my door a couple hours later. In my dream, I was carrying armloads of glassware. I kept dropping pieces, which shattered and sent chips up to nick me here and there. Small wounds scored my forearms and bare legs. The cuts didn’t hurt at first.

The realworld knocking startled me, and in the dream I dropped three vases and a big crystal punchbowl. The splashing crash of breaking glass excited me. A big shard flew up and cut my stomach. Red flowers of blood burst out of my stomach, inner fire leaking from me to take shape in the air in front of me as cool flowed in. The flowers hovered, held their shape. I liked looking at them and wondered if this was my arc.

Knock knock.

I struggled up from sleep, let go of my frozen dream life. “What?”

“Gyp?” Tobias said from outside the door.

“What time is it?” My voice came out scratchy, squashed by sleep.

“Eight-thirty.”

I groaned. What was with all these people who got up way too early?

After a minute during which I contemplated whether T wanted to move, I got up, threw a happi coat on over the 6X T-shirt I slept in, and went to open the door.

“Sorry I woke you,” said Uncle Tobias.

“Yeah, so why did you?”

“I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

“You couldn’t just come in and check?”

“Gypsum.” He used ice voice. There was frost in his eyes.

Without thinking, I straightened, woke up. I was not supposed to speak to my teacher and elder like this. “Sorry. Had a long weird night, and you woke me out of strange dreams.”

After a second, he smiled. “All right. I admit I was too curious to wait any longer. How did everything go?”

I opened my mouth, closed it. “Sorry, Uncle. For this I need coffee.”

On my way downstairs, I wondered what the rest of the day would be like. I had slept on the lawn, in a position that left me aching. Mama woke me at six. I slept for maybe an hour and a half, and Uncle Tobias woke me an hour before the alarm. I hated being awakened before the alarm! I hated sleeping in ridiculous positions so parts of myself fell further asleep because of lack of circulation. I hated having my sleep broken up into bitesize chunks. None of those things made me feel like I’d gotten any rest. Might as well have stayed up all night.

Or maybe after I talked to Tobias I could go back to sleep. It wasn’t like this was a regular school day. I didn’t have to go anywhere today, not even school, my second home. I’d gotten my two-year degree last spring; I stayed at City College because I had a job I liked there, and now I was taking classes for fun. This was sort of my year of goofing off, only, unlike Flint, I managed to make it look like I was doing something semi-important. Dad had encouraged me to get a bunch of college catalogs last spring, but I’d stacked them on my desk without looking at them until it was too late to register for any of the colleges.

Dad had mentioned the University of California at Santa Tekla once or twice. I’d been to the campus out there—it was where Dad and July worked. Plus, there were all kinds of film festivals connected to the film studies program, films which the general public could attend if they paid for tickets. Opal had started a tradition of taking us to foreign and/or obscure films out there while she still lived at home, and after she left, Jasper and I went out once in a while, and sometimes Cook the younger kids. But there was something about the campus that made me uncomfortable. If I was going to a four-year college, I wanted to go someplace else.

And yet, I wasn’t ready to leave home, IM already spent my high school

years somewhere else. While I was away, I had been so homesick … not for Mama, but for family, for being in the midst of all these people I knew and loved, and all this chaos of magic that I had never found anywhere else except with the rest of the family in L.A. But maybe I would be better off if I went away to college—

Well, no. Not right now. First I had to learn how to deal with this curse thing. For which I needed Tobias.

In the kitchen, Tobias poured me a big mug full of coffee and dumped in half-and-half and four spoons of sugar. “Talk.”

I stirred first, then sipped. I told him about the chalk, Beryl’s plant, Trina’s head, Flint’s cake, Mama’s gloves. I glanced down at my waist and realized that J had taken my chalk-splotch dress off before I showered. If it had been stick-to-me like the gloves, that part of the curse had worn off. I told Tobias about the probable timespan of my first curses: less than eight hours.

“Fascinating,” Tobias said. “You need to start a journal of your power use. You’ll want to note trends. The more you figure out about your power, the sooner you’ll be able to control it.” He went to the fridge and got out Flint’s cake.

“Oh, yum!” I got up, grabbed a knife, fork, and plate, lifted the plastic wrap off the cake, and sliced off a piece. “Cake for breakfast. A dream come true.”

“It didn’t make you sick?” he asked, even though I had told him that already. I had explained Flint’s theory of Flint Power plus Gyp Power.

“Just try it.” The cake tasted maybe better than it had the night before; but then, I liked a few things better when they were stale—cookies, for instance.

“Ah, well.” Tobias cut a piece for himself.

For a while we ate in companionable appreciation,

I finished my piece and sighed. I probably shouldn’t eat another. Dad hadn’t even tried it yet. Maybe Jasper and Beryl would want some, too, now that they had proof it didn’t hurt people.

On the other hand, when Flint woke up, he’d probably eat all the rest.

Before I could decide whether to grab more while I could, Tobias put the cake back in the fridge.