Exodus (5 page)

8

THE ZOO

The bear cub stood perfectly still on its haunches. Aria dangled a treat over its nose. Her classmates watched breathlessly while she stood just inches from the animal and waited.

A drop of sweat rolled down the middle of her back. The lights overhead blinded her to everything but the beast in front of her, breathing in great heaves. She couldn’t help but remember the bear from her dream, crashing down the hill toward her while she ran as fast as she could out of the park. She had really wondered if she was going to die.

The bear’s long tongue lapped Aria’s hand and claimed the snack. She jumped a little, then wiped her hand on her jeans, wrinkling her nose.

She exhaled.

              “Thank you, Aria! You’ve been a very brave volunteer!” said the zoo’s animal trainer, a blonde woman in tall boots and a green jacket. “Now, remember, this bear is tame and will be raised in captivity, but you don’t ever want to feed a bear in the wild.” She led the bear to the back of the stage, where it sat down and finished mauling the treat.

             
Don’t I know it,
thought Aria.

Aria’s classmates clapped and cheered. She hurried down the stairs to her seat in the auditorium.

              “Well that’s it, class,” Mrs. Benshaw told her students. She smoothed her wool skirt and tucked her wiry hair behind her ears. “Let’s move on to the next part of the zoo, then we’ll have lunch at the picnic tables.”

The students pushed through the glass doors at the side of the auditorium. Aria followed the group, turning to take one last look at the bear the trainer was leading away. It lumbered offstage and dissolved into the dark.

Aria sighed. Who knew what it all meant? But she did feel less afraid having faced one down, however small. She pushed the door open and walked outside onto a network of arbor-shaded paths.

The signpost outside the doors pointed to the left: “Bird House.”

Aria’s stomach churned. She fell farther and farther behind the group as they made their way to the thatched door of the bird house.

Aria’s classmates filed into the building and onto a narrow path that ran down the middle of the skylight-topped structure, between fenced-in trees. Blue and yellow birds perched in the branches, squawking and calling to each other.

Tara and Jenny pulled open the door and held it for Aria.

The bird house had no interior glass walls like the gorilla and tiger exhibits had to separate the visitors from the animals. Aria flinched when a bird dove down over the heads of her classmates inside, narrowly missing them. A warm breeze carried the smell of chalky excrement out to her.

Aria’s feet now refused to move. She looked down at the fading scars on her forearms and swallowed hard.

Jenny’s mom bumped into her.

              “Oops. Sorry, sweetie,” she said. “Are you ready to see the birds?”

             
Aria pursed her lips and looked hard at the open door.

             
“Oh, c’mon, Aria, they’re just birds!” Jenny said.

“Yeah, is this going to be a
thing
with you?” Tara asked with a fist on her hip.

Mrs. Benshaw was looking back to where they stood. She raised her eyebrows at Mrs. Stauffin, who sighed and said, “Are you hungry, Aria? I’m going to take her to the picnic area, Mrs. Benshaw. We’ll wait there for you.”

Mrs. Benshaw nodded and turned to count the rest of the kids. She grabbed Jimmy’s hand before he could grasp a purple finch that had landed on a branch next to him.

“First she cuts herself and now this,” she heard Tara grumbling. Tara let the door close on Jenny, who peered around it at Aria.

Aria couldn’t move. All she could do was look at the asphalt.

They think this is all my fault,
she thought.
They think I made it all up and did this to myself.

Jenny’s mom walked off to her gray minivan, and Aria stumbled after her. She scuffed her tennis shoes on the hot pavement while Mrs. Stauffin unpacked a large red cooler.

You’re only brave in your imagination,
she berated herself.
So much for facing down bears.

She trailed Mrs. Stauffin to the empty picnic tables, where she sat down on a sun-warmed bench and sucked on a juice box. The wind rustled through the bamboo shoots that separated the picnic area from the meercat exhibit.

Aria’s imagination drifted over the desert, dotted with a thousand meercat burrows. At least if she wanted to, she didn’t have to be here. She could be far away from bears and birds and people who didn’t understand, all the way across the desert sands. She flew across the yellow desert, under a burning sky.

Then, something changed. In her mind’s eye, Aria found herself kneeling on a sandy outcropping on a plateau overlooking an army of thousands of people, who looked up at her from a desert plain.

They stood in perfect battle formation, though they didn’t appear to be typical soldiers. The people were pale and thin. There were many young women as well as men, all wearing leather armor. Aria looked down to discover that she was wearing a leather dress and sandals.

The people stood together, waiting for Aria’s command.

On the horizon, a black mass of winged demons hovered in a stormy sky. They were poised in a loose formation several hundred demons deep. The creatures heading up the front line commanded chariots chained to double-headed black dogs, which snarled and clawed at the air below their six-toed feet.

Aria twirled a wooden staff in her hand. She watched them and waited.

Finally, a pair of hands reached out from behind Aria and placed a small circlet of gold vines on her head.

Aria stood up and thrust her staff into the air, unleashing her army like a flash flood. Her soldiers rushed forward into battle with a roar that swept from her feet to the horizon. The black cloud descended on them like a crashing midnight wave. And where they met, blinding light flashed like fireworks against the darkness.

“Ham or turkey, Aria?” Mrs. Stauffin sounded impatient. She must have already asked more than once.

“Turkey.”

“Honestly, I don’t know where you go sometimes, Aria. It’s like you don’t live in the here and now. What kind of future will you have if you don’t learn to deal with reality?”

Aria smiled, placed a few potato chips inside her sandwich, and took a crunchy bite. She looked over Mrs. Stauffin’s shoulder at the clear blue sky.

What kind of future, indeed?

She was starting to realize these visions and dreams were real on some level she didn’t understand. A battle. Between an army she led and masses of demons? Where was all of this headed, anyway?

Aria shivered. She felt as if she had opened a secret book of adventure stories in her own mind. But this was real. Somehow. Maybe that was why God had let her sustain real injuries from her dream. How could she have believed this otherwise? How would he have even gotten her attention? But what did it mean? She let her gaze rest on the bamboo trees again and returned to the battle. Something about this did demand her attention. Something about it was very urgent.

She had to talk to Mrs. Coghill.

9

ANOTHER CROW

Tara and Jenny were giggling again when Aria walked into her classroom on Monday. She passed the dioramas that lined the front of the room and walked back to her desk in the third row, leaning in to join in the conversation with her friends.

The other kids were already at their desks. It was a classroom rule that you had to sit down when you got to school, but they leaned as far out of their seats as they could while they talked and laughed.

Jimmy touched his desk with one foot and stretched his body toward the windows, trying to peer out into the dark sky. The clouds hung low but refused to let go of more than a few drops of rain. The little rain that had fallen the night before was only enough to dampen people’s gardens. The air was humid and still.

Jenny was holding a bag of corn chips, and Tara laughed every time she ate one. Jenny offered one to Aria as she sat down.

“You want a chip?”

Tara winked at Jenny. “A chip!” she said, and snorted.

Aria was tired of pretending she enjoyed these inside jokes.

“No thanks,” she said, turning away.

“Whatever,” Tara said. She gave Aria an odd smile and turned back to Jenny.

Aria’s cheeks and ears burned. She pretended there was something fascinating about the old-fashioned pencil sharpener screwed into the wall near the door and blinked away tears.

But just like the rain, her tears wouldn’t fall. She swallowed heavily.

I don’t belong here,
she realized.
Maybe I never did.

             
“Hey, Hitchcock!” Jimmy’s big friend Travis yelled across the classroom. Aria’s legs tensed. She was suddenly aware of how bright the overhead lights were and looked toward the clouds that hovered over the bushes outside.

             
Oh, please let me out.

             
Out of what? The thought surprised Aria.

Out of your own life?

“Had any more dreams?” Travis shouted to her.

She could tell he was grinning. Aria scraped her corduroys with a short fingernail.

“So, Jenny,” she started, turning back to her friends.

             
“Am I in them?” Travis crooned. He puckered up his lips in a smooch. “I have to warn you, though, I make a bad kisser… because I have a beak!”

He started to flap his arms and squawk like a chicken. He danced around his desk and blew kisses to Aria.

She cast him a furious look.

He grinned.

Behind Aria’s back, Tara snickered.

             
“All right, class, good morning!” Mrs. Benshaw walked into the room carrying a large stack of notebooks. They teetered in her arms. She navigated her way to her desk at the front of the room and managed to put the whole stack down without dropping it.

Mrs. Benshaw turned to face the class and in the process wiped the back of her skirt and yellow blouse on the blackboard, removing the previous day’s homework assignment.

Jenny giggled. Mrs. Benshaw’s backside was always covered in chalk.

             
“Okay,” their teacher said while Travis scrambled into his seat, “everybody get out your homework assignments, please. Remember we were practicing our grammar and creative writing skills? What did you write your story about?”

             
Aria fished her paper out from her backpack. She had written her story about a dream world where children could touch flowers to make them bloom in any color they imagined, even colors that hadn’t been invented yet. When the children’s flowers bloomed in matching colors, they could read each other’s thoughts and became friends for life.

I wish,
Aria thought.
None of my friends could ever read my mind. But maybe that’s just as well.

She placed her paper at the very center of her desk.

              “Oops, you forgot to put your name on your paper,” Mrs. Benshaw reminded her as she came by to pick up the assignments. “You can do it now. I’ll wait.”

             
She stood over Aria while she opened her desk to get a pen.

The smell of road kill hit them both like a smothering blanket.

A crow’s beady black eyes stared lifelessly up at Aria from atop her schoolbooks. The bird’s feathers were matted with dried blood. Its skinny legs stuck out at impossible angles from its belly.

Aria reeled backwards. Her desk slammed closed. She frantically wiped her hands on her shirt, tripped on her own feet and fell into Mrs. Benshaw, who stood behind her.

Mrs. Benshaw had seen the crow, too. She yelled in disgust as the rest of the class burst into laughter. The brown and white bunny in the cage at the back of the classroom ran to hide in its plastic hut.

Tara and Jenny were laughing along with everyone else.

“I—,” was all Aria could say.

Aria looked at Jenny. Jenny looked down at her lap.

Her other classmates still laughed.

How could they?
was all Aria could think.
How could they?

Before Mrs. Benshaw could do anything else, Aria ran out of the classroom and out the back of the school building, letting the heavy wood and glass doors slam behind her. Her chest ached, but she ran as fast as she could across the playground.

The sky was still heavy with rain that refused to fall. The swift smash of her shoes on the gravel was the only sound except for distant traffic and a few squirrels that chattered to each other over the schoolyard.

“Why?” she cried to the sky. Hot tears began to fall from her eyes, and they wouldn’t stop.

They all think I’m crazy,
she thought.
But I’m not! Something else is going on! Why am I the only one who sees it?

             
“If I’m not crazy, why won’t you tell me what is happening?” she yelled at the clouds. She began to run again, across the soccer field. Finally she stopped behind the blue shed by the gym.

“I want to understand you!” she cried.

“I want to hear your voice,” she said. She slid down the siding of the shed. “I want to know you.”

Please come back to me,
she groaned inwardly.
Please. You’re all I have—if I have anything at all.

That man she had seen in her vision. She couldn’t get him out of her mind now.

She hadn’t even realized she might be able to know God until that night at church. Everything had changed during the revival meeting when she lay crumpled on the floor, after the preacher’s prayer had dissolved her legs from under her. She had fallen in a heap under the pew to discover a new world inside her mind—or outside her body. She wasn’t sure.

She was still aware of the people dancing and praying around her—she could even smell her dad’s leather shoes by her head—but she was also aware of a reality unfolding inside of her.

The pianist from the worship team quoted Isaiah chapter 6 into her microphone: “I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.’”

Aria had found herself in a vision, walking up an aisle between pews filled with standing angels, in a gold temple lined with brass lamp stands. And up front—up front
he
was standing there. She couldn’t breathe, but she kept putting one foot in front of the other under the skirt of her white dress.

He had shoulder-length dark hair and a long silver-gray train attached to his purple robe. He was standing at the altar. Glory and honor swirled around him like a heavy wind.

He was waiting to get married.

He was waiting for her.

              Two figures caught Aria’s attention and pulled her back into the present. They were walking down the sidewalk across the road, on the other side of the schoolyard fence. One figure followed very closely behind the other, mirroring the first man’s movements.

The man in front had long hair and wore a long coat. He swung his arms as he walked. A paper bag in his hand was molded around a bottle that he took long swigs from every few steps. Aria knew that the bag meant he was drinking alcohol.

The second man—.

             
The second man wasn’t a man. It was a demon, which locked its black eyes on her and squinted under its hooded sweatshirt.

The creature stopped mimicking the drunken man’s gestures. Its wide, thin mouth spread into a grin. It picked at its jagged teeth with a small bone, then smacked its lips. Aria could just make out the outline of little webbed, skeletal wings under its sweatshirt.

Aria stood up.

“The Lord is my shepherd!” she shouted.

The creature stopped smiling. Its dark eyes narrowed, and it glared at her.

Aria kept her eyes on the demon. It made a quiet “brrrack?” noise through its teeth.

The long-haired man walked out of her sight down the sidewalk.

The demon took a step toward Aria.

Could this thing hurt her, she wondered? The red static thing had been in her house. She had woken up with cuts on her arms. Could these things cross over and attack her?

Aria started to back away.

But what kind of demon wears running shoes?
she wondered, incredulous.
What is
wrong
with me?

She stumbled and turned to run.

She nearly ran straight into Jenny, who was just coming around the corner.

“Oh, there you are, Aria. Mrs. Benshaw was looking for you. When we couldn’t find you—well… she called your mom.”

Jenny twisted the fingers of one hand in her other and smiled anxiously at Aria through her long, dark hair.

Aria groaned. “Like I need to get in any more trouble.” She turned to look across the street again. The demon was licking its lips and looking at Jenny.

“Don’t you even dare!” Aria shouted across the street, waving her fist.

“Um, okay,” Jenny said, following Aria’s gaze. “Look, I’m sorry about back there. I—I didn’t know,” she said.

“You still laughed along with everyone else,” Aria said, looking from Jenny to the demon.

Jenny peered across the street to try to spot what Aria was looking at.

“I know.”

“You always have to do what Tara is doing,” Aria said. “Why can’t you think for yourself?”

Jenny cringed.

“Maybe that’s because I know cool things to do,” Tara said, straightening the logo on the front of her shirt as she came around the corner, “and I don’t weird people out by claiming to be some dark prophet crazy person.”

“What are you even doing out here?” Aria yelled at her.

“It wasn’t my idea,” Tara said with a sneer. “Mrs. Benshaw said if Jenny wanted to come look for you we had to go in pairs... Bird Girl,” she added under her breath, allowing a smirk to cross her face.

“Did you put that crow in my desk?” Aria asked.

Tara put her hands on her hips.

“No,” she said after a pause, but Aria wondered if she just meant that Jimmy had done the actual deed. She sure was in on it. Aria could read it in her eyes.

She turned to check the street again, but the demon had disappeared.