Forever Freaky (18 page)

When he looked at me, his eyes were filled
with fear for the first time. Maybe, at long last, he was learning
my true nature and how that nature could never be changed by his
good intentions.

He turned and ran toward the school as larger
pieces of hail shattered on the pavement, bounced off the grass,
and cracked windshields in the parking lot.

“Run, Jack, run! Save yourself!” I shouted
after him, and then whispered to myself, “Because you sure can’t
save me.”

I turned away and continued to my car.
Somehow, the rain and hail weren’t touching me. It was as though I
was inside of a protective cocoon, and nothing on the outside could
touch me.

I found Amy leaning against my car, from
where she must have witnessed what had happened. She, too, appeared
to be bone dry, the rain falling all around her yet not touching
her. She looked up at the angry sky, and seemed mesmerized by the
dark roiling clouds. When she looked at me, her eyes were filled
with an evil glee.

“Well, welcome back, Jules,” she said
jovially. “Where have you been for all these years?”

The storm lasted for another fifteen minutes,
before it quickly faded away, returning the beautiful spring
day.

Oddly my old beast of a car was none the
worse for wear. It was the only car in the parking lot that was
undamaged by the hail. Amy and I sat in the front seat, and watched
as the storm wound down and vanished as though it had never
happened.

“That was very, very impressive,” Amy
commented.

I shrugged. “I was a little pissed.”

“A little pissed? What would happen if you
were a lot pissed?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I felt drained,
subdued. Maybe I felt a little guilty, too, that I had scared Jack
so badly. I had just wanted him to leave me alone.

“Feels good to get it out, doesn’t it?” Amy
asked.

“I suppose,” I murmured.

“This never happened before, did it?”

“No, nothing like this. I can usually keep
these things under control,” I said, still not certain I’d actually
caused the storm.

“Under control?” she said, looking at me as
though I was crazy. “Why would you even want to do that?”

I really didn’t feel like talking about it
anymore. I wished that none of it had ever happened. I turned the
ignition key, and my car rumbled to life.

“Your house?” I asked.

She didn’t answer right away. She seemed lost
in thought.

“Just start driving. I’ll let you know,” she
said, as though she needed more time to figure something out.

So I pulled out of the parking lot, and
started heading toward her house, not sure that was our
destination. Now and then I could feel her look at me, studying me
closely. Finally she said, with an air of resolve, “I want to show
you something.”

“Yeah?” I said, wondering.

She told me to turn off the main street we
were riding down, and then continued to give me instructions. After
a turn here and a turn there, it was clear that we weren’t going to
anywhere near her house. We passed through a couple bad
neighborhoods. The buildings were old and not being kept up. Some
front lawns were bare of grass. Some of the narrow frame
three-flats tilted to the side, as though threatening to fall over
at any second. Then were entered and area of larger industrial
buildings—warehouses, factories, an old tannery—many of which
seemed to be shut down. Their parking lots were deserted, and weeds
sprouted up through cracks in the ancient blacktop.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“You’ll see.”

She had me turn down a narrow side street
that separated two enormous buildings, both cold storage
warehouses. A rat the size of a cat darted across our path. It was
gone before I had the chance to hit the brakes. It was gone so fast
I wondered if it had actually been there.

“Was that a rat?” I asked.

“Sewer rat,” she said, still deep in thought.
“They get huge.”

“I wasn’t sure. It ran so fast. Sometimes I
see things that aren’t really there.”

“Oh, I know,” she said. “I know exactly what
you mean.”

She had me park in front of an old building
of dark reddish-brown bricks. The front windows were made of glass
blocks. Many of the blocks had been broken, probably by kids with
nothing better to do.

“This is it,” she said, and climbed out of
the car as I cut the engine.

I got out and followed her. We walked round
the side of the building, through a lot that was over-grown with
weeds.

“I found this place a couple months ago,” she
said over her shoulder.

“Why would you bother looking for it?” I
asked. The place was a dump, obviously abandoned, probably
condemned by the city.

“It’s somewhere to go,” she said, and led me
to the rear of the building.

There was a small loading dock, its door
boarded shut. Next to the dock there was a heavy steel entry door.
You could see that it had been secured with a hasp and a heavy
padlock, but somebody had ripped the hasp out of the door.

The door squeaked loudly when Amy pulled it
open. Before she walked inside, she paused and said to me, “Welcome
to my garden, where I plant and grow nightmares.”

I followed her inside. It took a moment for
my eyes to adjust to the dimness inside the building. The place was
a mess. It looked as though somebody had tried to gut the interior
and renovate it at the same time. The walls were mostly bare at the
back of the building, showing the backsides of the ugly reddish
brown bricks. Toward the front somebody had framed out the front
wall and started to hang drywall. Everywhere there were piles of
debris that had never been hauled away—old wooden slats, broken
pieces of timber, crumpled plaster, shattered glass, bend lengths
of lead pipes…. It was the kind of place you visited for a short
while, and then end up blowing black stuff out your nose for
days.

“What was this place?” I asked.

“Used to be some kind of workshop, I guess.
Then somebody started to convert it into something else. I guess
they ran out of money. If you look in one of the back corner,
there’s a huge stain on the floor. It looks like blood. Maybe
somebody got hurt and couldn’t finish. Who knows what they were
trying to do? Me? I think it would make a great underground club.
Put in a DJ booth, a dance floor, a fog machine. Have people
dancing around with glow sticks while other people do some rad
medieval shit, like sacrificing virgins. We’d be safe, right?”
added, somehow joking without any sign of humor.

She led me toward the front of the building,
where somebody had abandoned work long ago. An aluminum ladder
stood near the half-finished wall. There was a portable worktable,
too, and three metal folding chairs. In one corner there was a
large pile of scrap wood that looked charred, as if somebody had
tried to build a bon fire right there in the building.

“And what do you do here, exactly?” I
asked.

“Experiment, of course,” she said gravely,
studying me as though trying to gage my reaction. I might have
cringed slightly at the word ‘experiment,’ because that was exactly
what Jack had suggested to me, only for different reasons. “You
know what they say—practical makes perfect,” Amy continued, “Be all
that you can be, and all that.” She was getting extremely creepy
again, and it was easy to see why I had stabbed her with a pencil
that time. “You should practice, too. You should have been
practicing the whole time. What you did with the weather—wow, that
was awesome. But it was completely unfocused. It was just a bunch
of noise and wind. Unless you control it completely, it’s not very
practical.”

“Practical?” I wondered.

“You have to be able to strike somebody with
a lightning bolt, or crush somebody’s head open with a big hunk of
hail. Otherwise what good is it?”

“You mean use it to hurt people,” I said.

“Sure, what else?”

“Why?”

“Why? Are you soft in the head? You’re a
freak, Jules, like me. Whether or not you realize it, you’re at war
with the whole world. Anything you do is all right, because
everybody would do a lot worse to you if they understood exactly
what you are. That’s a good enough reason right there, if you even
need a reason, which, really, you don’t. You can do it just because
you can, or just because you want to see somebody suffer, somebody
who would make you suffer if they had the chance. So why give
anybody that chance. Now I want to show you something,” she said,
“something I never showed anybody.”

She walked over to one of the folding chairs,
and dragged it across the floor to the middle of the room. Then she
went to one of the debris piles, from which she retrieved a cinder
block. She carried it awkwardly and set it on the chair.

She stepped back about twenty feet from the
chair.

“Now watch what I’ve been practicing,” she
said. She turned to face the chair. She seemed to go into a trance,
staring at the cinder block for a long while, during which I became
certain she had gone totally bonkers. Nothing was happening,
nothing at all. Then the stale air around us grew warmer and
warmer, until it was nearly unbearable to breathe. Finally the
cinder block burst into flames.

Up until this moment I had doubts that Amy
had had anything at all to do with those guys who got burned.

Amy broke free of her trance and looked at
me.

“See?” she said, breathless as though she had
just run a long distance. “Cinder blocks aren’t supposed to burn,
right? Hah! Everything burns if it gets hot enough. Are you
impressed? Tell me you’re impressed,” she said, as if it were the
most important thing in the world.

I didn’t say anything. I was trying to figure
out how I could have been so stupid. I watched as the flames
engulfing the charred block quickly died away.

“Oh, and look at this,” Amy said, giddy from
sharing her secret. She held up her index finger, as though
pointing at the sagging ceiling, and a flame popped up from her
fingertip. The flame burned but didn’t burn her skin. She blew it
out as if it were a candle. “See? Perfectly safe—if you’re me. So
what do you think?”

“I think you torched that baseball player.” I
said.

A sick kind of bliss glimmered in her dark
eyes. “Yeah,” she said, and released a giggle—it actually sound
like tee-he-he.

“Why would you do that?” I asked.

“Why not? I needed to practice on a moving
target. I have plans—big plans. And now you can be part of them,
Jules,” she said. She seemed amused by my lack of enthusiasm. Then
her attitude suddenly changed, as though some switch was flipped in
her head. She eyed me suspiciously. “I hope sharing this little
secret with you wasn’t a mistake. Was it a mistake, Jules? I
thought we were on the same page here.”

But, really, we weren’t. There was a big
difference between talking about doing something and doing it, a
huge difference between not caring and pretending not to care. Amy,
it was now clear me, was what my parents feared that I was
becoming: a sociopath. She had crossed the line into a world that
was made of shades of gray. The only other color was red, and red
was blood, and the blood and misery of others were the only things
that could bring her joy.

“Come on, Jules, I trusted you with this,”
she said, pleading, still trying to entice me. In my head, I kept
hearing the words of that old school yard game: Red Rover, Red
Rover, let Julia come over. That dare and invitation playing over
and over in my mind in a maddening chorus of temptation. “Why don’t
you give it a try?” she said, motioning toward the cinder block,
which was no longer burning. “It’s not hard. I can show you how.”
When I didn’t respond, she snorted in disgust and said, “I suppose
this is the part where you stab me—again—or try to.”

“I’m going home now,” I said.

“Yeah, whatever.” She sounded like a used car
salesman who just realized he has just lost a sale.

“You want a lift?” I asked.

“No.”

“Sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. And Jules?… You better not
fuck with me. If you do, you’ll be sorry. I swear you will. Daddy
fireman will be making a couple extra calls, and you won’t like
what he finds burning.”

I turned and walked toward the rear of the
building.

“And tell your dog to stop sniffing around my
business, or else,” she yelled after me. “That was a fine little
show you two put on for me earlier. I should have guessed it. You
should win an award for that performance—you really should.”

The rusty steel door groaned loudly as I
shoved it open. I couldn’t escape fast enough.

I walked quickly round the side of the
building to get back to my car. Once inside behind the steering
wheel, I paused and tried to calm myself. My breath was short and
my pulse was racing. What an idiot! What had made me believe that
something like this wouldn’t happen? Of course, Amy torched those
guys, and now she knew her secret was revealed, which made her that
much more dangerous. She knew that Jack had been asking questions
around school, too, and she was so paranoid, she even believed Jack
and I had staged our argument earlier.

Never trust somebody who doesn’t trust
anybody.

Good going, Jules, really. Only you could go
looking for somebody who understands you, and end up endangering
the only people in the world who really care about you even though
they don’t understand you at all. My parents, Jack, and maybe
Melody—Amy wouldn’t hesitate to turn them to ashes, just to get
even with me. She wouldn’t think twice about that, because she had
no conscience, and she would get away with it, because nobody would
ever believe she could set people on fire just by wishing it to be
so. How, exactly, do you deal with somebody like that?

I slapped the steering wheel viciously. I
couldn’t recall a time I had ever been so mad at myself.