Boundless (Unearthly) (3 page)

Outside we’re met by a scene that seems straight out of those bad acid trips you see in the movies: the Stanford marching band in what appears to be mostly their underwear and glow-in-the-dark necklaces and bracelets and stuff, rocking their respective instruments, trumpets blaring, drums beating, cymbals crashing, the school mascot in his big green pine tree costume zooming around like a crazy man, a bunch of half-dressed, partially glowing students jumping and bumping and whooping and laughing. It’s incredibly dark, like they’ve turned out the streetlights for the occasion, but I search for Angela and spot her looking supremely annoyed, standing next to two blond girls—her roommates, I assume. I weave my way over to them.

“Hi!” Angela yells. “You have bed hair.”

“This is insane!” I shout, combing through my hair with my fingers, with little success.

“What?” she screams.

“Insane!” I try again. It’s so unbelievably loud.

One of Angela’s roommates gapes and points behind me. I turn to see a guy wearing a Mexican-style wrestling mask that covers his entire face. A shiny gold wrestling mask. And nothing else.

“My eyes, my eyes!” Angela shrieks, and we all start giggling hysterically, and then the song is over, and we can hear again, and they’re telling us to run.

“Run, little freshmen, run!” they scream, and we do, like a herd of confused, stampeding cattle in the dark. When we finally stop, we’re at the next dorm over, and the band starts up again, and pretty soon another crowd of bleary and baffled freshmen begins to filter out of the doors.

I’ve lost Angela. I look around, but it’s too dark and the crowd is too big to find her. I make out one of her roommates standing a few feet away from me. I wave. She smiles and pushes her way over to me like she’s relieved to see a familiar face. We bob halfheartedly to the music for a few minutes before she leans over and yells next to my ear, “I’m Amy. You’re Angela’s friend from Wyoming?”

“Right. Clara. Where are you from?”

“Phoenix!” She hugs her sweatshirt tighter around her. “I’m cold!”

Suddenly we’re moving again. This time I make it a point to stay close to Amy. I try not to think about how this feels eerily similar to my vision in some ways, running around in the dark, not knowing where I’m going or what I’m going to end up doing. It’s supposed to be fun, I know, but I find this whole thing a bit creepy.

“Do you have any idea where we are?” I pant out to Amy the next time we stop.

“What?” She can’t hear me.

“Where are we?” I yell.

“Oh.” She shakes her head. “No clue. I’m guessing they’re going to make us run all the way across campus.”

I remember how on the tour they told us that Stanford has the largest campus of any university in the world aside from one in Russia.

It could be a long night.

There’s still no sign of Angela or the other roommate, who Amy tells me is named Robin, so Amy and I stick together and dance and laugh at Naked Guy and shout out a conversation the best we can. In the next half hour here’s what I find out about Amy: we were both raised with single mothers and little brothers, we’re both thrilled that tater tots are served at breakfast in the Roble dining hall every morning and horrified at how tiny and claustrophobic the shower stalls in the bathrooms are, and we both suffer from annoyingly unruly hair.

We could be friends, I realize. I could have made my first new friend at Stanford, just this easily. Maybe there’s something to this making-us-run thing.

“So what’s your major?” she asks as we’re jogging along.

“Undecided,” I answer.

She beams. “Me too!”

I’m liking her more and more. But then disaster strikes. As we come up on the next dorm, Amy stumbles and falls. Down to the pavement she goes, all flailing arms and legs. I do my best to make sure she doesn’t get trampled by the ever-growing stream of scrambling freshmen, then drop to the sidewalk next to her. It’s bad. I can tell just by looking at her white face and the way she’s clutching her ankle.

“I stepped wrong.” She groans. “God, this is embarrassing.”

“Can you stand up?” I ask.

She tries, and her face gets even whiter. She sits back down heavily.

“Okay, that’s a no,” I deduce. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back.”

I mill around looking for someone who seems even a little bit helpful and miraculously spot Pierce at the edge of the crowd. Time to put his “dorm doctor” skills to good use. I run over to him and touch him on the arm to get his attention. He smiles when he sees me.

“Having fun?” he yells.

“I need your help,” I yell.

“What?” he yells.

I end up taking him by the hand and dragging him over to Amy and pointing at her ankle, which is starting to swell. He spends several minutes kneeling beside her, gently holding her ankle between his hands. Turns out that he’s premed.

“It’s probably a sprain,” he concludes. “I’ll call someone to give you a ride back to Roble, and we’ll get it elevated and put some ice on it. Then you should go to Vaden—the student clinic—in the morning, get an X-ray. Just hang in there, all right?”

He walks off to find somewhere quieter to use his phone. The band finishes its song and moves on, leading the crowd away from us in a rumble of feet. Finally I can hear myself think.

Amy starts to cry.

“I’m so sorry,” I say, sitting down next to her.

“It doesn’t hurt that much,” she sniffles, wiping at her nose with the back of her sweatshirt. “I mean, it hurts—a lot, actually—but that’s not why I’m crying. I’m crying because I did something so totally stupid like wear flip-flops when they told us to put on shoes, and this is only the first week of school. I haven’t even started classes yet, and now I’m going to be hopping around on crutches, and everyone’s going to label me as that klutzy girl who hurt herself.”

“Nobody will think less of you. Seriously,” I say. “I bet there are plenty of injuries happening tonight. It’s all pretty crazy.”

She shakes her head, sending a tumble of wild blond curls over her shoulders. Her lip quivers. “This is not how I wanted to start things,” she chokes out, and buries her face in her hands.

I glance around. The group has moved far enough away that we can only faintly hear them. Pierce is standing next to the building with his back to us, talking into his cell. It’s dark. No one’s around.

I lay my hand gently on Amy’s ankle. She tenses, like even this light touch is hurting her, but doesn’t lift her head. Through my empathy I can feel the hurt in her, not only the way she’s mentally beating herself up over how she’s already ruined her reputation, but the physical part, too, the way the ligaments in her ankle are pulled away from the bone. It’s a bad injury, I know instantly. She could be on crutches all semester.

I could help her, I think.

I’ve healed people before. My mom after she was attacked by Samjeeza. Tucker after our post-prom car accident last year. But those times I had the full circle of glory around me, the whole shebang, light emanating from my hair, my body glowing like a lantern. I wonder if there’s a way to localize the glory to just, say, my hands, to channel it fast so that nobody will notice.

I clear my head, glad for the relative quiet, and focus my energy on my right hand. Just the fingers, I think. All I need is glory in my fingers. Just once. I concentrate on it so hard that a bead of sweat moves along my hairline and drips down onto the concrete, and after a few minutes the very tips of my fingers start to glow, dimly at first and then more brightly. I press my hand firmly to Amy’s ankle. Then I send the glory out of me like a trickle of light spreading from me to her, not too much or too fast but hopefully enough to do some good.

Amy sighs, then stops crying. I sit back, watching her. I can’t tell if what I did helped at all.

Pierce comes back over, looking apologetic. “I can’t find anyone to come get you. I’ll have to run and get my car, but it’s on the other side of campus, so it will take a while. How are you doing?”

“Better,” she says. “It doesn’t hurt as much as before.”

He kneels down next to her again and examines her ankle. “It looks better, actually, not as swollen. Maybe you just twisted it. Can you try to walk?”

She gets up and gingerly puts her weight on her injured foot. Pierce and I watch as she limps a few steps, then turns back to us. “It feels okay now,” she admits. “Oh my God, am I a drama queen or what?” She laughs, her voice full of relief.

“Let’s get you back to your room,” I stammer out quickly. “You still need to put some ice on that, right, Pierce?”

“Absolutely,” he says, and we get on either side of her and walk her slowly back to Roble.

“Thanks for helping me out tonight,” Amy says to me after she’s situated in her room with her foot wrapped tightly in an Ace bandage, propped on a stack of pillows with a bag of ice pressed to her ankle. “I don’t know what I would have done without you. You’re a lifesaver.”

“You’re welcome,” I say, and I can’t help a gloaty smile.

I did help her, I think later when I’ve gone back to my room. The sun is almost up, but Wan Chen isn’t back yet. I lie on my tiny twin bed and stare at the water damage on the ceiling panels. I want to sleep, but I’ve still got too much adrenaline in my system from using my power out in the open like that. But I did it.
I did it,
I keep thinking, over and over and over again. I healed that girl. And it felt amazing. It felt right.

Which gives me another crazy idea.

“I think I might want to go premed.”

Dr. Day, the academic adviser for Roble Hall, looks up from her computer. She has the grace not to look too surprised that I’ve burst into her office and informed her that I am contemplating becoming a doctor. She simply nods and takes a minute to pull up my schedule.

“If you’re considering premed, which is typically a straight biology or human biology major, we should get you enrolled in Chem 31X,” she says. “It’s a prerequisite for most of the other biology courses, and if you don’t take it this fall, you’ll have to wait until next fall to start the core classes you’ll need.”

“Okay,” I say. “I like chemistry. I took College Prep Chemistry last year.”

She looks at me from over the top of her glasses. “This course can be a little hard-core,” she warns me. “The class meets three times a week, and then there’s a biweekly discussion session led by a teaching assistant, plus another couple hours a week in the lab. The entire biology track can be fairly high intensity. Are you ready for that?”

“I can handle it,” I say, and an excited tremor passes through me, because I feel oddly sure about this. I think about how good it felt when Amy’s ankle was righting itself under my hand. Being a doctor would put me in contact with the people who need healing the most. I could help people. I could fix the broken things in this world.

I smile at Dr. Day, and she smiles back.

“This is what I want to do,” I tell her.

“All right, then,” she says. “Let’s get you started.”

Everybody takes the news that I’ve gone premed in a different way. Wan Chen, for instance, who’s premed herself, reacts like I’m suddenly competition. For a few days she doesn’t say more than two words to me, maneuvering around our tiny dorm room in chilled silence, until she realizes that we’re both in that insanely hard chemistry class and I’m pretty good at chemistry. Then she warms up to me fast. I hear her tell her mother on the phone in Mandarin that I’m a “nice girl, and very smart.” I make an effort not to smile when I hear her say it.

Angela instantly loves the idea of me as a doctor. “Very cool” are her exact words. “I believe we should use our gifts, you know, for good, not just sit on them unless we’re required to do some angel-related duty. If you can stomach all the blood and guts and gore—which I totally couldn’t, but kudos to you, if you can—then you should go for it.”

It’s Christian who doesn’t think it’s a good idea.

“A doctor,” he repeats when I tell him. “What brought this on?”

I explain about band run and Amy’s miraculously healed ankle and my subsequent aha moment. I expect him to be impressed. Excited for me. Approving. But he frowns.

“You don’t like it,” I observe. “Why?”

“It’s too risky.” He looks like he wants to say something else, but we’re standing on the crowded sidewalk outside the Stanford Bookstore, where I’ve bumped into him while coming out with my armload of poetry collections for my humanities class and a giant ten-pound textbook entitled
Chemistry: Science of Change
, which is what prompted this conversation.
You could get caught using glory,
he says in my head.

Relax,
I reply.
It’s not like I’m going to go around healing people right this minute. I’m looking into it as a possible career path, that’s all. No big deal.

But it feels like a big deal. It feels like my life finally has a—for lack of a better word—purpose, one that isn’t all about being an angel-blood but makes use of the angel-blood part of me, too. It feels right.

He sighs.

I get it,
he says.
I want to help people, too. But we have to lie low, Clara. You’re lucky that this girl you healed didn’t see what you did. How would you have explained that? What would you do if she was going around campus telling everybody about your magical glowing hands?

I don’t have an answer for him. My chin lifts.
But she didn’t notice. I’ll be careful. I would only use glory when I thought it was safe, and the other times, I’d use regular medical stuff. Which is why I want to become a doctor. I have the power to heal people, Christian. How can I not use it?

We stand there for a minute, locked in a silent argument about whether or not it’s worth the risk, until it becomes clear that neither of us is going to change our mind. “I have to go,” I say finally, trying not to pout. “I have a set of problems on quantum mechanics to work through, if you think that’s not too dangerous for me to tackle.”

“Clara …,” Christian starts. “I think it’s great that you found a direction to go in, but …”
All it would take is one slip,
he says.
The wrong person seeing you, one time, and then they could figure out what you are, and they’d come after you.