Living with Your Past Selves (Spell Weaver) (17 page)

“Proud? But I screwed up completely!”

“You came to the rescue of a damsel in distress, even though you knew it could mean trouble, big trouble. And even after you knew she had just been using you, you decided to protect her. Hell, even when it looked as if Dan was going to crush you, you didn’t say a word.”

“He wouldn’t have believed me,” pointed out Stan.

“Maybe not,” I replied, “but most guys would have tried to tell him, anyway.”

“Tal, I really wanted to, well, you know…” Stan blushed and looked away.

“Yeah, you and every other straight guy that ever looked at Eva. Okay, so there was a little lust in the equation. But even Eva knew you well enough to know that wouldn’t be enough. That’s why she made up that whole story about needing someone, being desperate for some kind of support. From the way she tells the story, she practically had to drag you over to her. And then there’s how you behaved with the kelpie.”

“Is that what that was? I knew it was something…unnatural. But I almost got you killed.”

“No, I almost got myself killed. I could have easily vanquished that thing. I hesitated. I almost got both of us killed. But what I meant was, how you were ready to give me the sword, even though it was your only defense. That was one of the bravest things I have ever seen.

“Yeah, brave! I spent hours cowering under a bench!”

“Bravery isn’t the absence of fear. It is acting despite being afraid. Until I got there, though, there was no action that wouldn’t have been stupid. Hiding was smart, not cowardly.”

“But trying to give you the sword wasn’t that brave. I knew you could use it to defeat the kelpie and save both of us.”

“Maybe, but on some level you knew it was a risk, and you did it anyway. Say what you want, but I’ve seen battle many times in my lives, and I have seldom seen even a trained veteran do what you did. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a hero, and I couldn’t be more proud of you. Wow,” I said, suddenly noticing how he looked in the glare of the bus ceiling lights. “You’re more bruised up than I thought.”

Stan looked around to make sure no one was close by, then leaned still closer to me. “I got to see Eva in her bra. That sight was worth a few bruises.” I could hardly believe my ears—an actual joke! Clearly, Stan was on the mend.

“Heck,” he continued, “if I could have seen her without the bra, Dan could have cut my face clear off.”

“Yeah, well I imagine in those circumstances he would have cut off something else,” I replied quietly. Joking a little with Stan felt great—not too long ago I was afraid we would never joke again—but the problem of what to do about Dan remained. I had been keeping my eyes on him as much as I could. He had been sitting near the front of the bus, not saying a word to anyone, barely moving.

No one his age should have to go through that much. I should know—I was an expert at going through too much.

I thought Stan and I would be okay, at least. Our friendship was intact. But whether our relationships with Dan would ever heal, to say nothing of Dan’s relationship with Eva, well, that was anyone’s guess at this point. If, as Nurse Florence had said, someone was trying to isolate me, they had not completely succeeded yet, but they had accomplished a lot in a single day.

And then there was the unresolved question of a kelpie—in the UCSB lagoon, no less! It would hardly have surprised me more to run across the Loch Ness Monster in the high school pool. It was also troubling that the kelpie behaved so atypically for its kind. Kelpies worked by luring their victims into the water and drowning them, not by using their shifting abilities to beat their victims in combat. And what about how the kelpie just happened to pop up right where Stan was, intercept him before he even got to the dorms, herd him down to the lagoon, and trap him there? Again, too much coincidence. I had the paranoid feeling that whatever evil force was plotting my downfall was getting more and more aggressive. It could not be very long now until there was a direct confrontation.

About the time we hit the Santa Brígida off-ramp on Interstate 1, Nurse Florence came back again, sat down behind me, and said, “I’m worried.”

“Oh, really? About what? Things have been going so smoothly up to now.”

“Now is not the time for sarcasm. Listen, Coach Miller was going to take the bus back to the school, but he just got a call from Carrie Winn to drive directly to the Schoenbaums’.”

I wrinkled my forehead. “That’s only a few blocks difference. Most people could walk home from Stan’s house just as easily as they could from the school.”

“True, but why does Winn care what our first stop is?”

“I don’t know. She’s probably there and wants to be sure she gets to greet Stan when he comes back. Right now, that doesn’t seem like such a big bump in the road, certainly not compared to everything else that’s happened.” I could see Nurse Florence remained unconvinced, but she decided not to keep pressing me and went back to her seat right behind Coach Miller.

Just a few minutes later the bus pulled onto our street. Although it was late, as we approached Stan’s house, the light became almost blinding. I didn’t know what was happening at first. Then, squinting against the light, I managed to make out the news vans—three or four of them. The lights had been set up by the camera crews.

So that was what Carrie Winn was up to? A photo opp? A sound bite?

Most of my fellow students didn’t seem that daunted by the presence of cameras. In general the football players and cheerleaders streamed out of the bus to line up for their fifteen minutes of fame. But they were not the ones the news crews were here for.

Aside from Coach Miller and Nurse Florence, neither of whom seemed to intend to get out, there were four of us left on the bus: Eva, trying to become invisible in the very back; Stan and I near the middle; Dan at the front. The eloquent spaces among us created telling visual imagery, but none of the photographers seemed interested in capturing our little tableau inside the bus.

I got up and started to usher Stan out. “Well, buddy, let’s get this over with. They aren’t going to go away.” Stan nodded and started to get up, then fell back.

“Ouch! I think I twisted my ankle.” Only Stan could twist his ankle getting up from a seat. I helped him up and let him lean on me as we weaved toward the exit.

As we stepped through the exit, camera flashes exploded like firecrackers on the Fourth of July. It wasn’t until later I realized how much Carrie Winn had spun the events of that night, making our arrival almost one of those archetypal Pulitzer Prize photo moments. “The brave survivor moved slowly down the steps, leaning on the young hero who had rescued him.” Actually, we both nearly stumbled and fell in all the commotion. As soon as we set foot on the sidewalk, we were surrounded. I would almost rather have dealt with the kelpie again.

Stan was clearly confused by the questions being flung at him and the continuous flashing of cameras. I wasn’t much better. Neither one of us immediately responded, and the reporters became more insistent. Beyond them, the camera crews of the various news networks were jockeying for position. At that point I would have given anything to be home in bed. My house was only a few steps away, but getting there now seemed a feat comparable to scaling Mount Everest.

Then I saw Carrie Winn cutting through the crowd, striding toward us, purpose incarnate. In moments I found myself freed from the chaos of reporters only to be trapped in the middle of a press conference.

Carrie Winn, immaculately coiffed and dressed, especially for what must have been one o’clock in the morning by then, flowed into what was obviously a carefully prepared speech as soon as the cameras started rolling.

“I have never been as proud of my town as I am tonight. We all rallied together, every last one of us, to find one missing young man. But I am especially proud of that young man, Stanford Schoenbaum, who I am told showed great courage in the face of an attempted abduction, and of my intern, Stanford’s classmate, Taliesin Weaver, whose quick thinking led us right to Stanford and whose bravery saved Stanford’s life. Let’s have a round of applause for our young heroes.” The applause was deafening and would have been flattering, had I thought I deserved it. Then Stan and I had to teeter back and forth next to Ms. Winn, like trophies in the case, while she found subtle ways to claim credit for us, for the town, for whatever she could lay her hands on.

Salvation finally came from an unlikely source: poor Mrs. Schoenbaum, who had to wait through all this public relations buzz to hug her son. She might have had to wait longer, but she has always been a determined woman, and tonight she would not be denied, even by Carrie Winn. Her appearance, of course, was another perfect photo opp, in fact two: Mrs. S. hugging her son for dear life, and Mrs. S. giving his brave rescuer, yours truly, a peck on the cheek. In both cases Ms. Winn managed to deftly work her way into the shots. After the peck on the cheek, Mrs. S leaned close to me and whispered, “Thank you!” with such force it was genuinely moving.

At that point, Stan’s parents tried to whisk him away, but it is hard to whisk right through a solid wall of reporters, even for Mrs. S., and for a moment they got mired in the mob. Then Nurse Florence, who had finally gotten off the bus, said, politely but forcefully, “In deference to the ordeal this family has gone through tonight, let’s give them some privacy, shall we?” Ms. Winn, who had been just about to part the crowd for the Schoenbaums, looked more than a little annoyed that someone else had stepped in. However, making a virtue out of necessity, she parted the crowd for me, and, just as I expected, when the reporters got out of the way, my parents emerged, a study in contrasts, simultaneously smiling and tearful. After a family hug, we started a retreat toward our house. Then I noticed Dan, face like a thundercloud, standing near the edge of the crowd.

“Mom, Dad, I need to say thank you to Dan. It’ll just take a minute.”

“Okay, Tal, but not too long, okay? It’s almost two a.m. now, and you have a big day tomorrow.” I looked at her confusedly.

“Why is tomorrow so big?”

My mom chuckled at that. “Don’t you remember? You were invited to the pre-homecoming game party at Ms. Winn’s house, and tomorrow is the day before homecoming—I’m sure that’s when the party was scheduled. I think I was told it was for the coaching staff, players, managers, and you and Stan, the team tutors. I don’t know if Stan is going to be up to it after all this, but I think you should go if you can, especially since Ms. Winn seems so impressed by you. It can’t hurt to have a friend like her.”

Great, another opportunity to become a prop in the Carrie Winn self-glorification pageant.

“Okay, Mom, I’ll hurry.”

Keeping to the shadows so as not to attract the attention of any more reporters, I finally managed to end up next to Dan.

“Well, Dan, do you want me to get you released from your bargain tomorrow?” Dan looked at me, his face almost devoid of any emotion.

“I’m going to give it a day or two before I decide,” he said finally. Well, that was better than nothing. I had been sure he was ready to get as far from me as possible. Encouraged, I decided to press my luck.

“It would mean a lot to Stan if you forgave him.” Dan’s eyes flashed angrily at that.

“Are you getting ski reports from hell, Weaver? Because that’s about when I’m going to forgive Stan.” I probably should have stopped at that point, but you know the old saying, “In for a penny, in for a pound.”

“Dan, he could have been killed tonight. He spent hours thinking he was going to die. Isn’t that enough for you?”

“No,” he replied curtly, “it isn’t. And you, no more fighting dirty, no more using Jimmie to manipulate me.”

“I apologize for that, and I’ll never do it again. As for Stan, what is going to satisfy you? What can he do to make this right?”

“Well,” began Dan slowly, “there is an old football team tradition. It goes back to 1996, the year the school was founded. When someone wrongs a member of the team, the offender has to fight that member.”

“What, so you can beat Stan up again? Dan, you already bruised him up pretty badly, and you did your best to humiliate him.”

“No, not that kind of fight. Boxing. Olympic rules. Well, ‘kiddie rules,’ really. You know, junior boxing. Coach will referee. Tomorrow is the perfect day, because there’s no practice. We can easily squeeze in a match between the end of school and Ms. Winn’s party.”

“Stan isn’t going to box with you. He’s been through enough.”

“No boxing, no forgiveness,” said Dan adamantly.

Tired as I was, I had another idea.

“Okay, you’ll have your boxing match—with me.”

“You know I can’t box with you. I can’t get my fist close enough after the bargain I made.”

“I know, but if I’m standing in for Stan, someone else can stand in for you. How about Shahriyar? Obviously, he can throw a punch,” I said, pointing to my split lip. Shahriyar had only been at our high school since the beginning of the year. Prior to that he had lived in Beverly Hills, and before that somewhere back east. At some point, he had gotten considerable boxing training, as well as kick-boxing, Tae Kwan Do, and mixed martial arts. If Dan really wanted me to get beaten, he could not have chosen better than Shar, so I figured mentioning him made the offer more tempting. I was right.

“Okay,” said Dan finally. “I accept the substitutions you propose. Meet me tomorrow in the gym. I’ll let Coach and Shar know.” Then he turned and disappeared into the night, without so much as a “goodbye.” I sighed and walked back to my house. Most of the crowd, including reporters, had left. The news crews were packing up. With no more press, Carrie Winn had vanished as fast as ice in August.

I was exhausted, once again worn down to the point where it was a miracle I got up the steps on the front porch. As soon as my head hit the pillow, I lapsed into dreamless sleep, almost sleeping through my alarm the next morning.

CHAPTER 12: NEAR HOMECOMING

Over breakfast, I got treated to several journalistic interpretations of last night’s “glorious” events: one from the
Santa Brígida Herald
(which I think Carrie Winn owned), one from the
Los Angeles Times,
Santa Barbara edition, one from an online school newspaper, and one from a local news anchor. Normally, my mom was strict about not watching the TV during meals, but now even she could hardly tear her eyes away from it, at least until my story finished.