Living with Your Past Selves (Spell Weaver) (13 page)

“Stop!” I commanded in Welsh, again with as much mystic punch as possible, but split three ways, the effect was less than impressive.

I tried to sing, but Shahriyar punched me in the face, splitting my lower lip.

How could he have known that he needed to stop me from singing? Something did not seem quite right. Dan melting down at the same time one of his friends just by coincidence showed an uncanny knowledge of how to disable me? I would have to be a fanatical believer in coincidence to assume all of this happened naturally, but I didn’t really have time to worry about that until later.

“I said hold him, not hit him!” barked Dan irritably. I couldn’t tell if the blow had flipped into Voice mode or whether Dan was becoming a bit more rational.

“Okay, okay,” said Shahriyar. “He’s tricky, is all. I wanted to make sure he wouldn’t try anything else.” Blood dribbled from my injured lip and speckled my gray gym shirt.

Dan turned back to Stan, who had started crying. “Man up, Schoenbaum! Sooner you do, the sooner this will be over. That is, if you can man up. I’m beginning to think it isn’t in you.”

Stan looked over at me, took in how much I was bleeding, and started crying harder. Whatever will power he had to resist Dan dissolved in those tears, and I feared he might crumble completely. My heart was bleeding more than my lip.

“Okay,” he whispered hoarsely. “Okay, I did it. I kissed Eva. It just sort of…happened. I didn’t mean it.”

Dan punched Stan in the face, and Stan crumpled up in the corner.

“Oh, sorry,” said Dan mockingly. “That just sort of…happened.” I struggled against my captors, again frustrated by the fact that I could get away from them, but probably not without hurting them pretty badly. I couldn’t even use magic, since Shahriyar had unaccountably clamped his hand over my mouth.

“Make him tell the whole story, Dan. That’s just the beginning,” pointed out Eric.

As soon as I realized Stan smelled of jasmine perfume, I realized that he must have been a little too close to Eva, but I had imagined a hug, maybe a single kiss, maybe even just Stan trying to cheer Eva up. Stan was the kind of guy who might do that without realizing how it would look to other people. The truth, as Dan ripped it out of Stan word by word, turned out to be much worse. Eric and Shahriyar had walked out to the woods during lunch and had stumbled upon what looked like Eva and Stan about to have sex. At least, that was how the guys interpreted what they saw: a long, passionate embrace, Stan shirtless, Eva without her blouse on. The guys put some distance between themselves and the illicit couple, then made enough noise to get them to stop, after which they hurried back to tell Dan, to whom they, like every other football player, were unswervingly loyal.

I felt as if someone had just caved in my skull with a heavy, medieval mace. My image of an innocent misunderstanding disintegrated, and in its place was some damn, steamy, soft-core porn. If I had been shocked by Dan’s earlier fit of temper, now I was even more shocked by Eva and Stan…especially Stan. Stan was nothing if not a good friend; now he was friends with Dan and yet had stabbed him in the back at the first opportunity. And Eva, the girl who filled my imagination day and night—she had fought with Dan, yes, but to betray him so dramatically when they were still technically a couple? I could never have imagined that, not even in my worst nightmare. And Stan admitted it, admitted it all, or else I would have sworn Eric and Shar were lying.

Despite the fact that my emotions were a pile of glass shards cutting my innards to bits, I did not completely lose the capacity for rational thought. Dan, Shar, Eric, Eva, Stan—every one of them either did something that pressed coincidence to the breaking point or behaved uncharacteristically. I had already wondered about Dan, though having heard the whole story, I could almost understand his agitation, if not his violence. But as far as Stan and Eva were concerned, hardly anybody hung out in the woods during school. They were technically off-campus, and there were penalties for leaving campus. So why take a random walk out that way? And, even assuming Eva and Stan were both one step below scum, to go out into the woods with the intention of having sex? The local neighborhood treated the woods as kind of a park. Someone could easily have stumbled upon them, just as Eric and Shar had. And I still couldn’t figure out how Shar knew exactly how to disable magic he didn’t know existed.

I would have pondered further, but at that point Coach Miller made a belated entrance. I had to give him a lot of credit. He sized up the situation immediately, and took an incredibly hard line with Dan, despite Dan’s undisputed football star status.

“What were you thinking, Stevens? This kid’s half your size! And what’s up over here? Two against one? Fighting is bad enough, but this wasn’t even a fair fight.” Dan tried to explain, but the coach cut him off immediately. “I don’t care what Schoenbaum did or didn’t do. Football is about discipline. It is about self-control. It is not about giving in to your emotions like this. Anyone who doesn’t understand that does not belong on this team. Is that understood?” Dan, Eric, and Shar all nodded sullenly.

Coach Miller was ready to pull all three out of the homecoming game, but Stan pulled himself together enough to plead for them to be allowed to play. I could tell the coach didn’t think much of Stan— coaches often don’t really understand guys who cry—but Stan was the victim, after all, and he gave Miller a reason to do what he probably wanted to do anyway—play his star whenever possible. So he settled for detention for all three—after football season—and then walked us down to the nurse’s office to get patched up, embarrassingly babysitting us outside while Nurse Florence worked on each of us one by one. Eric and Shar didn’t really need the nurse, though Shar did get my blood washed off his hand, and then Dan, who had somehow cut his fist, got bandaged, after which an assistant coach whisked them back to the weight room—but not before Dan had had a chance to glare at me, remind me I had gotten him to be friends with Stan in the first place, and tell me that I could no longer be friends with both of them—I would have to choose. The nurse spent much longer on Stan—ice packs on the face, perhaps—and when he emerged, the coach sent him home; it was unspoken, but clear, that he would no longer be welcome at workouts.

With Stan on his way, the nurse gestured for the coach to come over, giving me a chance to use some of my best eavesdropping skills.

“I’m not happy with this, Carl,” said Nurse Florence. “It’s a miracle Stan wasn’t more seriously injured. Thank God you came in when you did.”

“What do you want me to do, Viviane?” asked Coach Miller. “The boy admitted to practically having sex with Stevens’s girlfriend. Of course, Stevens should not have roughed him up like that, but I have to admit, in high school I might very well have done the same thing in the same circumstances.”

“He should be benched next game, and you know it! He should be suspended for fighting!”

“And I was going to, but the Schoenbaum boy begged me not to, and frankly that was wise on his part. If Dan gets benched, and we lose, everybody will be on Schoenbaum’s case about it. Besides, if we had thrown the book at Stevens, what about Schoenbaum? Off campus without a pass, and engaging in sexual conduct. We don’t tolerate fighting on campus, but the last I heard, we don’t tolerate sex either. I think the boy is already embarrassed enough without a suspension to explain to his parents.”

Nurse Florence sighed. “Well, you have a point there, I suppose. But Carl, you better make sure Dan Stevens never does anything like this again—and you’d better make sure the rest of the team leaves Stan alone.”

“I will, but I doubt that’s going to be much of a problem. Truth to tell, some of them wouldn’t still be on the team without his tutoring, and they know it. Once Dan cools down, I think the rest of the team will let go of it easily enough.”

After a little more discussion, the coach stepped back, and Nurse Florence called me in. I was so numb and exhausted that her presence failed to have the stimulating effect on me it usually did. However, it took her awhile to get my lip cleaned up properly, and during that time she got me talking. I never realized how good a listener she was, how much she could put someone at ease. Anyway, I told her about my view of the day’s events, naturally leaving out the magic part.

“The thing I don’t understand, though, is why Dan is trying to get me to choose between him and Stan. Why does he really care anyway? I don’t think he and I are that close.”

Nurse Florence looked at me quizzically. “You really don’t remember that you and Dan were good friends once?”

“We played AYSO soccer together, sure, and we were good friends, almost as close as Stan and I, but he kind of dumped me when I was hospitalized for a while.”

Nurse Florence sighed again. “Do you remember his little brother, Jimmie?”

The mention of Jimmie cut me. I tried not to think about him, usually.

“Yeah, Jimmie was my age. We were great friends. He died in a car crash when we were both about nine, and Dan was ten.”

“Can you imagine how hard that must have been for Dan?” asked Nurse Florence gently.

“Yeah, I’m sure it must have been rough. It was hard on me, and I wasn’t Jimmie’s brother.” Actually, I didn’t have to imagine what Dan went through. We were still friends then, and I saw what he went through, a quiet kind of hell, but hell nonetheless.

“Well, when people suffer loss, they sometimes unconsciously try to fill that void by attaching themselves to someone similar.”

“Are you saying that Dan thought of me as a replacement for Jimmie?”

“Not necessarily consciously, but yes. To him you became like the little brother he no longer had, a process made all the easier by the fact that you were already his friend.”

“How could you possibly know that?” I asked incredulously. “I don’t think you were even in town back then.”

“One hears things,” said Nurse Florence vaguely. “But I got most of the details from Dan himself. I’ve had to do a lot of patching up for him in the last four years, and over time, he’s said a lot of things that might surprise you. For instance, when you were hospitalized, he didn’t visit because the situation reminded him too much of Jimmie’s last hours, not because he didn’t care. He wanted to, very much, he really did; he just couldn’t. He was too afraid of losing you the same way he lost Jimmie. Afterward, when you came out of the hospital, he expected things to go back to normal, but instead you dropped out of everything, like soccer, that the two of you used to do together. More than anything else, he feared losing you, just like Jimmie, and that, in a way, is exactly what happened.”

Lightbulb moment.
“You mean, that’s why he’s been such a jerk to me until just recently?”

“Exactly. Because he thought you, well, this isn’t a word he would use, but he thought you rejected him. He thought you didn’t care, and being a young boy in our society, instead of just talking to you and trying to understand what had happened, he had to pretend not to care. You were probably preoccupied. You didn’t know what he was thinking, and by the time you had a handle on your own situation, it was too late. He had already slipped into the pattern of being a jerk to you. Many people deal with pain that way. They lash out at the person they blame.”

I don’t want to paint myself as a complete male chauvinist, but like a lot of guys, I didn’t necessarily expect epically hot women to be as sharp-witted as Nurse Florence.

“Then, for some reason, Dan tried again with you this year, you responded, and he began to think of you as like a little brother again. That’s why he wants you to choose between him and Stan. Ironically, that’s also what he is afraid of—that you will side with Stan, effectively rejecting him again.”

This conversation was turning out to be better than a whole month in therapy. The only problem with it was that it was too good. Maybe I didn’t know Dan as well as I thought, but I knew him well enough to know he would never open up that much to the school nurse. And then there was the unlikelihood of a school employee giving me so much information about another student. Surely Nurse Florence had crossed the confidentiality line at least a little. Even in a day loaded with more coincidences than a bad soap opera, I couldn’t swallow that many improbabilities. Clearly, some of the pieces of this puzzle were missing.

“What’s wrong, Tal?” I guess my doubt must have showed on my face.

“I’m sorry, Nurse Florence, but I can’t see how you can know Dan that well. I doubt his girlfriend—” I ignored the momentary twinge— “knows half of what you just told me.”

“I’m very perceptive,” she said with what I’m sure she intended to be a knowing smile, but it only made me feel creepier. I could tell she was being evasive.

“That can’t be all there is to it, Nurse Florence. No offense, but you aren’t telling me everything. I know you aren’t.” In this lifetime, I had never so openly questioned an authority figure. I was more than a little nervous, but I wasn’t about to back down now. Too much had already gone wrong to take chances.

Nurse Florence studied me for a moment, then stopped pretending to work on my lip and sat down next to me.

“You’re right, Tal. The truth is, I walked in Dan’s dreams and figured out what was going on. I had to know him if I was going to choose him.”

“What? Dream walking?”

“Oh, you’ll remember if you think back far enough. It wasn’t that common in the literature, but early Celtic shamans, like those of many other people, had the power to enter the dreams of others. With enough practice, you could do it yourself.” So the school nurse was a shaman? Anyone else on campus would have laughed in her face, but I knew too much to dismiss her story without further thought.

“What did you mean, ‘choose him’?”

“I guess you’re a little ‘punchy’ today, Tal. I thought you would have figured out by now that I’m trying to tell you it was I who sent Dan to be your protector.” My eyes widened in surprise.

Carrie Winn had told me she was the one. Obviously, one of the two women had to be lying, but which one?