Jaden Baker (66 page)

Libby fought a smile—she wasn’t fooled. He appreciated she didn’t comment on his obvious tactic, so he could keep his embarrassment to himself. Conventionality wasn’t something he was good at, but he tried. Libby sunk into him a little and leaned her head on his shoulder, looping her arms around him. Jaden smiled into the top of her head, breathing in the fresh, strawberry scent of her hair. Holding her was easy, natural.

There were many different people on the boat for Seattle. A little girl and her toddler sister walked hand-in-hand to the bow of the boat. Libby lift her head to watch them. The parents trailed behind, holding pink sweaters and coats in their hands. An older couple sat in the bench opposite them. The woman had short hair and tanned skin, and wore several gold bracelets on both arms. Her husband was taller by a head, and wore tinted glasses and a green and white horizontal stripped shirt. Once seated, they conversed in rapid French, speaking a little loudly, assuming no one understood them.

Libby sat up. “What do you think they’re saying?” she whispered in his ear.

“They’re commenting on the state of the bathrooms. She said there was too much trash,” he mumbled back.

Libby unwound her arms and stared at him. “You speak French?”

He nodded and listened to the couple, now discussing what exhibit to see first at the art museum. The wife was more animated than the husband, who nodded and grunted, keeping his eyes on Puget Sound.

“How can you speak French? You said you never finished fourth grade.”

“No, I never made it to fourth grade. The library has language books and CDs. So I learned French.”

She had that humorous smirk on her face, like she didn’t quite believe him. “Let’s hear it,” she said.

“Okay,” he said, and faced the couple in front of them, feeling brave, eager to impress her. “Excusez moi, je ne veux pas vous déranger mais ma copine ne croit pas que je parle Français. Pouvez- vous me parler juste un tout petit peu pour l’impressionner de mes habilités?”

The French couple turned their attention to him and smiled. This time the man spoke: “Oh bien sûre, nous serons enchantés. Elle est une belle fille quels jolis yeux bleus! Et vous, où avez vous appris le Français? Vous le parlez si bien”

Jaden answered: “Merci, je l’ai appris à la bibliothèque publique, où il y a de bonnes ressources. Oui elle est vraiment belle, je ne peux pas croire que je l’ai trouvé. Je l’ai cherché toute ma vie. Elle est trop bonne pour moi, gentille et elle prend soin de moi. Est-ce que vous visitez de la France ou bien du Canada?”

This time it was the wife who responded. “Mon mari et moi, nous visitons de la France. Mais pas de Paris comme tout le monde le pense. Nous sommes de Marseille. On est entrain de visiter des amis et on fait aussi un tour des sites. Est-ce que vous habitez à Seattle?”

Libby had a face of stunned surprise, she watched them speak with delight. That must have been good enough. He was happy to impress her.

“J’ai entendue que Marseille est merveilleuse, ça fait dix ans que je vis à Seattle, mais c’est juste la deuxième fois que je prends le bateau. De son regard je constate que Libby est vraiment impressionnée de mon Français. Merci de m’avoir parler.”

Both of them grinned and looked at Libby. The French woman replied: “Pas de problème. C’est vraiment gentil de voir son sourire.” Then she turned to Libby and spoke in a heavy accent. “Ee speeks well. Varee handsome,” she added. The two nodded again and waved as they left for the front deck. Jaden thought it was to give he and Libby privacy.

Libby blushed and beamed. “Wow,” she said. “That’s...” she blushed more, then turned away, her heart beating fast. “What did you say?” she asked.

“I asked them to talk to me, where they were from, that sort of thing. Nothing too complicated.”

“How would you say my name in French? Ah-LEEZ-eh-beth Zhames?”

He laughed. “Close. Zham.”

“ZHA-don BACH-air?”

He nodded. “Well, wrong emphasis. But close enough. Still sounds better than the English version. Tu essaies un peu trop fort, Elizabeth. Tu es drôle et belle.”

Libby giggled. “Now you’re just showing off. How many languages do you speak? Just the two I hope?”

“More. French and Spanish. Then German, Russian, and Italian. Russian was hard, I needed something easy.”

Libby shook her head. “That’s impossible. You can’t know seven languages.”

“I know English best,” he said. “Spanish was easy, and French not so hard. I got to practice German and Russian, mostly Russian, working by the docks. That’s how I got good. Whenever there was someone with a different language around, I listened, see how much I could translate. I don’t think I’m an expert in any of them, if it makes you feel better.”

“Well, it is an accomplishment,” she said, smiling. “I did something pretty amazing, too.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“I put my fitted sheet on my mattress correctly the first time,” she said, smirking. “It was amazing, I called people to share the good news.”

He grinned at her, laughing, and kissed her cheek.

“It was a one time miracle. I haven’t done it since,” she added. “It’s not quite as awesome as learning seven languages, but it’s close. Anyway, back to you. You learned everything from the library?”

“Not everything. Thrift stores. Salvation Army. People give away a lot of things they don’t want. I like languages,” he said.

“What else do you know?”

“Whatever I could get my hands on,” he said. In the beginning, when he was trying to figure out what to do with his life, where to go with his freedom, he found himself between stacks of books, wanting to know everything people his age already did, things they’d learned in school. He spent hours every day reading, hiding in a corner of the library, under a desk, pouring over history, breaking it up with literature, listening to language CDs. Day by day, he made up for lost education.

“You can get a GED,” she said. “Be whatever you want.”

What did he want to do? It was an easy question to answer, he wanted to build things. Over the past few years, carpentry had been his obsession: admiring furniture in shop windows, excited about power tools, or cutting wood in a home improvement warehouse, even the simple task of striking a hammer to a nail was satisfying. Building was rewarding. Maybe he could actually make it a career.

The ferry docked in Seattle. When they departed with the rest of the crowd, the closeness made it easy for Jaden to naturally take her hand. He couldn’t believe how easy it was for him to be with her, like he’d done it for years. Holding her was easy.

Being in and moving with a large crowd, that was still difficult. The hyperawareness blared loud in the midst of a mob. Holding Libby’s hand was like having his finger on a dial, keeping the volume low. If he focused on her, the rest of it faded to a indistinguishable drone of energy.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked, once they crossed a narrow pedestrian bridge into downtown.

She shrugged. “That’s up to you. Game’s not for a few hours.”

They walked along the streets until they came to a pub where many patrons were wearing neon green scarves, despite the warm weather. They discussed the when and how Jaden was going to reclaim his identity over a lunch of French fries and hamburgers. Libby favored a grand entrance. Jaden did not. He preferred a stealthier approach: learning all he could about the remaining people who knew of him, then quietly doing something about them.

The discussion continued after lunch, as they walked off their meal through downtown, Libby keeping a loose count of all the Starbucks she passed and how crazy people were to be addicted to caffeine.

“I forgot, you drink coffee,” she said.

“Occasionally. I’m not an addict.”

“That’s what addicts all say. They could quit anytime, they choose not to.”

“Makes a day go by faster,” he commented as they waited for a traffic signal.

“Yeah, more bathroom breaks.” She gripped his hand as they crossed the street and went down a small incline in the road.

That’s when it happened.

It started with goosebumps on the back of his neck, as if someone blew cold air on him. Faint shivers tingled down his chest, his arms, then to his feet as the volume dial turned low. He still heard everything, but the sound was muffled, like he wore earplugs.

Jaden looked at Libby, walking happily, her hand in his, eyes on her destination. She hadn’t noticed anything strange.

His feet pounded the pavement, but he didn’t feel them. The more they walked, the stranger the sensation.

He was being compressed, pushed on from all sides, like space was shrinking in on him. But he was out in the open, in a populated city with hundreds of people.

Jaden checked everyone in his vicinity. No one else noticed anything wrong.

A few minutes passed and the feeling intensified. It felt like someone pushed him, only not in a physical sense. Someone was mentally pushing him.

Libby frowned, and as he watched her lips move, the volume came back on.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

He didn’t know. This feeling of mental compression was worthy of concern, but he didn’t know where it came from. Even though he heard a little, he still felt the pressure on his mind. The hyperawareness he’d come to know well fluctuated, became more intense, then reverted to normal.

“Something’s wrong,” he said. As the words left his mouth he knew they were true. This was not normal. He’d never had this feeling before.

“Are you nervous?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “This is different.” Nervousness he knew. Emotions had nothing to do with this feeling. It was a presence.

Someone was here.

Jaden turned his head, looking for familiar faces. There were so many people it was hard to pick one from another. Jaden led Libby away from the Sounders fans, down a less populated, though crowded, street.

They approached a shop with angular glass fronts, and in the reflection Jaden saw a young woman some fifty feet behind him. She was blonde and wore sunglasses. Holding tight to Libby’s hand, Jaden turned to look at her.

He had never seen her before. She was close to his age, and as soon as his eyes met with hers, though they were hidden behind dark lenses, the feeling like he was being pressed and squeezed intensified—the deafness returned.

She was psychokinetic. She was like him.

The feeling was her, being around him, with the same hyperawareness he had. If he could feel all things, so could she. It was one of the rules of PK. Anything that could be moved, he could move. But, like tactile feeling, one could only affect things one could touch. With PK, he touched everything in a mental sense within a certain range. This woman, she was the same, groping everything around her, including him. They pushed each other.

“There’s a woman behind us,” Jaden said to Libby, winding his arm around her waist, holding her closer. “She’s psychokinetic just like me. Maybe stronger.” He kept walking, trying to think of where to go to keep Libby safe. “I don’t know who she is.”

Libby’s curiosity got the best of her, and she looked over her shoulder, then flipped back around.

“It’s Christine,” she said, her voice panicky. “Christine is following us.”

Before Jaden could ask who Christine was, Jaden grabbed Libby and dove into a corner of a building as a car hurtled toward them and crashed into a store front. Glass shattered and flew.

People screamed. The car had been thrown.

“Don’t let go of me!” Jaden said, and checked around the corner for Christine as a motorcycle pelted toward him. He saw this one coming, and deflected it away from them. It crashed on the truss above them, then slid, chrome scraping on asphalt.

Christine ran to the middle of the street to get a better angle on them. Jaden wouldn’t let Libby go, hoping her proximity to him would keep her safe. Christine was here to harm Libby, and he wasn’t sure how he knew that.

The glass around them shattered, splintering into thousands of pieces.

Jaden shielded Libby with his body. Hundreds of pieces shot at them as if thrown by a hurricane, bursting to dust when they got too close, sprinkling them like hail.

When he saw Libby’s face, he read her panic, and knew his face mirrored hers. Christine was stronger than he was.

Jaden picked up the discarded motorcycle and tried hitting her with it, but she grabbed it from him and tossed it into a building.

He observed his surroundings, found a hot dog cart. Jaden lifted it and flung it at Christine, at the same time she was trying to hit them with a dislodged fire hydrant.

The hydrant came within inches of them, and a water geyser temporarily obstructed his view of her. For a moment the pressure on his brain was gone. Had he hit her with the cart?

His grip slackened on Libby, he only held her with one hand as he tried seeing through the shooting water.

The feeling came back stronger. Fingers slipped through his hands.

Libby.

He wasn’t fast enough, he tried grabbing for her but Libby was wrenched from his hand, pulled from her midriff through the jet of water and out into the street.