I didn’t answer him. I just stared at him. Through him.
“Let it go,” Dante said to Freddy, sitting at my table. “He’s in one of his moods.”
One of my moods? I thought. Since when do I have moods?
“Sorry,” I said. “I was somewhere else for a second. What’s up?”
“Did you hear about Ernest?”
“What about him?”
“He hasn’t been in school for days,” Freddy said. “Geez, Parker, didn’t you even notice that?”
I shook my head. “What’s wrong with him?”
“That’s the thing,” said Dante, pulling his chair closer. “No one knows.”
Freddy nodded. “First it was just the way he was acting ... you know, like he was tired all the time.”
“Big deal,” I said.
“Yeah, but now it’s ten times worse. It’s like someone tweaked his meds, or something. Or maybe he got tackled one too many times.”
“Anyway,” says Dante, “it turns out that it’s not just in his head. The story going around is that he has some kind of bizarre bone condition—his entire body is hardening.”
“What?!”
“His parents took him to a special clinic halfway across the country,” Dante added, “where he can be studied.”
I shivered and tried to shake the feeling off. “You don’t know if any of that’s true—it could be all talk.”
“Could be.” Freddy shrugged. “But I believe it. Did you see how pasty his skin looked his last days here?”
“Yeah,” said Dante. “And all he did was drink milk, like he couldn’t get enough of the stuff.”
“... Calcium,” I heard myself say in a voice so hollow, so empty, I barely recognized it as my own. “You need calcium to grow bone....” And I started to think about all the other strange appetites. Mud. Rocks. What was in that stuff? I took geology—I knew Silicon, iron. If Ernest’s body was building bone, what could a human being possibly be building with silicon or iron?
I stood up and walked away.
“Hey,” Freddy said, “where you going?”
His voice faded into the distance. I ran to the bike racks, jumped on my motorbike, and rode it home. My mind was whirling the whole way.
When I got home, Garrett was in the living room, on the sofa, watching TV
That was the first time I had ever seen him just watching TV. Garrett was always kind of hyper. Usually, if he wasn’t playing a video game, he was in his room playing his guitar, or in the garage waxing his car, or doing something active. He wasn’t someone who sat and watched TV in the middle of the afternoon.
“Hey, Garrett,” I said, with more care, more sincerity than I had ever shown for him, “you’re home from school early.”
Garrett turned to me. “So are you.” His skin was very, very pale.
“Yeah. Well. So, are you feeling okay?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m fine. Just a little tired.” He turned back to the TV
A straight answer with no insult? Something was very wrong. I walked over to him, pretending I was interested in the old rerun he was watching, and glanced down at him. His skin wasn’t just pale; it was gray, like an old tombstone. I turned to catch his eyes. They had always been brown, like mine. But now they were turning gray, too. Cloudy gray, like cataracts.
I turned and left the room, a feeling of horror growing in the pit of my stomach.
Whatever Ernest had, Garrett had it as well, and I’d bet that all those other weird-acting kids in school had also contracted the same strange sickness.
Then a thought arose—a thought I had always been able to push away, but now it clawed to the surface of my mind. It was the terrible knowledge that there was one thing Ernest and Garrett had in common.
They had both spent time with Tara.
“Maybe she’s a werewolf,” Katrina said.
“Don’t be stupid,” I told her. “Tara is no such thing.” I was out in the backyard, skimming leaves from the pool, while Katrina sat on a lounge chair cuddling Nasdaq, our disinterested Siamese cat, who would have rather been anywhere else than on Katrina’s lap at that moment.
“Have you ever seen her on a full moon?” said Katrina. “Besides, she comes from some weird foreign place. That’s where werewolves come from.”
I pulled the long pool skimmer up and purposely swung it over the lounge chair so that it dripped water on Katrina. Nasdaq took off, and Katrina just yelled at me.
“For your information,” I told Katrina, “I have seen her on the full moon, and she did not change into a wolf—or anything else—so your theory is all wet.” I shook the pool skimmer over her again to emphasize the point.
“All right,” said Katrina. “So maybe she’s a ghost.”
“Ghosts have no substance,” I reminded her. “You can’t touch a ghost—and I’ve touched her. She’s no ghost.”
“Well, then she’s an alien, or a zombie, or a robot.” Katrina was just reaching now, and we both knew it. Finally, she gave up with a sigh.
I wanted to totally drench Katrina for saying those things, but I couldn’t, because deep down I knew that she was onto something. Certainly Tara wasn’t the things Katrina had suggested, but she wasn’t what she pretended to be, either.
11
SMASHING HISTORY
I believe that we have free will. I believe we get the chance to make choices in our lives. Not everything is set in stone from the moment we’re born. We choose our destiny, our ultimate fate. But I also think that we don’t realize the choices we’ve made until after we make them. We’re racing down a freeway, only to realize we’ve missed all the exits, and the only direction we can go is dead ahead.
I might have been able to choose a different path after the first twisted curl appeared on my head—even after the second one. But by the time Tara reached up into my hair that third time, gently curling my hair around her finger and leaving behind a twitching, living thing, a part of me knew deep down that there was no turning back. Choice had become destiny. Future became fate.
She gave me that third lock on a windy Sunday, in the old oil field. Clouds billowed in the sky, high above. The dense cumulus puffs were shredded and re-formed by the fierce, tangling winds. We had started the insectlike oil pumps bobbing. It had become a tradition after that first day she had showed me this place. We would struggle to get them moving and stay until the last of them had ground itself still. Today she had prepared a picnic feast of exotic sliced meats with strange Italian names: mortadella, prosciutto, capocollo.
There were things I had to ask Tara today I didn’t want to ask them, but I had to. I felt there was no going on for me if I didn’t have at least some of the answers.
I took a bite of my sandwich. Delicious, I thought ... but something was missing. Something I couldn’t place. It was that way with everything I ate lately. Flavors had less bite; textures were less defined. I took a second bite, and a third, then finally I broke the silence.
“What did you do to Ernest, Tara? What did you do to him, and Garrett, and all the others?”
A gust of wind caught my paper plate, and it tumbled away, pasting itself across the eye of a giant bobbing mantis before blowing off into the trees beyond.
“I don’t know what you mean. I didn’t lay a hand on them.”
And I believed her, because I knew it had nothing to do with her hands. “Garrett said you took your glasses off.”
“Of course I did,” she said. “It’s not like I wear them twenty-four /seven.”
“You’ve never taken them off for me.”
She looked straight at me, but made no move to take off her shades. “Is our friendship based on whether or not you can see my eyes?” She smirked, making me feel foolish, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me.
“I want you to take off your glasses. I want you to do it now”
“No,” she said. Then she spread mustard on her sandwich and gave no further explanation.
I stood up, feeling angry. She c
ould not dismiss me so quickly. Not after I had accepted the task of luring people for her.
“I don’t believe your eyes are sensitive to the light. I don’t believe what’s going on in school has nothing to do with you. And I don’t believe you’re anything but bad news. I’m out of here.” I turned to leave. I got as far as the first oil well, and then she called out to me.
“Please don’t go, Parker. I’m sorry I’m so, so sorry.”
Hearing her apologize was enough to stop me. She had never been sorry for anything she had done. She always seemed to move through life with no conscience or regrets. I turned back to her.
“Exactly what are you sorry for?”
“For keeping you in the dark for so long. For all the half-truths and all the times I could have told you but didn’t.”
She came toward me, but I took a step back. She seemed hurt by that.
“Why can’t I see your eyes?” I asked her. “Why won’t you let me?”
She sighed. “It’s very hard to explain,” she told me. “It has to do with the way I look at people. I see very deeply when I look at people. Very few have the strength to look back.”
“And what happens when they do?”
“They ... change.”
“That’s crazy—you can’t change people just by looking at them.”
But then I thought, why not? People are changing all the time—changing their minds, their actions, their beliefs. Sometimes it takes an earth-shattering event to do it, but sometimes people change at the drop of a hat. Who’s to say that a glance from Tara couldn’t alter someone in ways they never imagined?
“Yes, it is crazy,” she said. “But it’s also true. My gaze sort of ... hardens people’s hearts to the world around them.”
Tara looked down. I could sense that all her layers of protection were gone. I’d never seen her vulnerable before. She had always been so sure of herself. I wanted to ask her more. Why was it that those who saw her eyes developed strange cravings for mud and milk? How could something as simple as a glance do that? But there were tears now, seeping out from beneath her sunglasses. When I saw that, I couldn’t ask her anything more.
“Do you hate me?” Tara asked. “Do you hate me for who I am?”
“I don’t even know who you are,” I told her. “How could I hate you?”
She reached her hand toward me. I let her wrap a lock of my hair around her finger. “My eyes are a curse. I move from one place to another with no companions. No friends. I’ve never really wanted a friend until now, Baby Baer.” I could feel the slight pull and tingle as my hair curled tight around her finger. I could feel it transform. I reached up and touched the lenses of her shades: dark silver like a still, summer lake and as smooth as a camera lens.
“Be my friend, Baby Baer. The others who tried to be my friends over the years were always too cold, or their tempers were too hot. But you, Baby Baer—you’re just right. Be my friend, forever and ever.”
I could feel the weight of the new curling lock on my temple. “I already am your friend,” I told her.
She smiled. “Then let me show you something....”
I returned with Tara to her mansion. Her parents were still away, but I was beginning to wonder if she even had parents.
The mansion looked like it always did. Overdone in marble and artwork, spotlessly clean, and the door unlocked. While everyone else in our neighborhood had all kinds of security systems, Tara invited trespassers.
“Don’t you worry about all of this stuff getting stolen?” I asked as we stepped in.
“Anyone who wants to take things is welcome. I wouldn’t miss any of it, anyway”
“But what if someone tried to kill you?”
“I’d kill them first,” she said, like it was nothing. Like it would be so easy for her to do.
Between the kitchen and the ballroom, we came to a large oak door. I remembered this door. It had been open once before, but Tara had quickly closed it. “Nothing in there for you to see,” she had told me then. I guess that wasn’t quite true, because now this was where we were headed.
She pulled open the door to reveal a set of stone steps heading down into darkness—but instead of going downstairs, she turned to go into the kitchen. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”
There was a musty odor rising from the basement: earthy, like a mountain cavern. Cold, damp air breathed out of that doorway, making me rub my arms to stay warm. But cold air sinks, I thought, it doesn’t rise. Yet this strange air was indeed rising from the basement, like a draft fed by an unseen wind.
I was uneasy standing at the head of the steps and glad when Tara returned. She held a candlestick in her hand. The flame flickered in the breeze rising from below. “C’mon,” she said. “And don’t be afraid.”
She began down the stairs, and I followed close behind, not wanting to fall out of the light cast by the candle, thinking about how Dante was afraid of the dark and sympathizing. “Wh-why would I be afraid?”
“Not that you would ... but you mustn’t ... because if you are, they can sense your fear.”
Not even the candlelight made me feel safe now. “They? Who are they?”
“You know. The monsters.”
I stopped moving. My feet just wouldn’t take another step. “What do you mean ... monsters?”
She said nothing for a moment. Then she laughed. “I’m kidding! Honestly, Baby Baer, you’re so gullible!”
“Ha-ha,” I said as I caught up with her on the steps. Usually basement stairs were short, but these kept turning corners as they went down.
“Trust me,” she said. “There’s nothing down here that can hurt you.”
“Except for you,” I told her.
“Hmm. Good point.”
We finally reached the bottom. My eyes had not yet adjusted to the dim light, but I could see well enough to make out shapes around us. “What are those?” I asked.
She reached out her candle and lit a second one in a candleholder that stood five feet tall. It was gold, but covered in layer after layer of candle drippings. Then she lit another such candle stand and another. Bit by bit the space around us was revealed by the flickering lights of the candles, and I could see what filled Tara’s basement.
Statues.
Dozens upon dozens of pale stone statues, like the finest Rodins or Michelangelos, filled every corner of the massive basement. Some of the figures were in robes, likenesses from ancient times. Others were dressed in clothes from Revolutionary or Victorian times. Some wore modern clothes, and others wore no clothes at all. They stood facing in different directions, stares locked on invisible points before them. I had never looked that closely at the ones upstairs, but here, surrounded by so many of them, I couldn’t help but be awed by the workmanship. It was their faces that struck me more than anything. The perfect textures. The chiseled wrinkles.
“Tara, these are amazing!”
“I knew you’d like them. My family has been collecting them for ages. There are too many to fit up in the house, so we keep them down here.”
We wandered through the maze of figures. They weren’t just people, but animals as well: mythical ones—unicorns and griffins. A man with the snarling head of a bull.
“All this must be worth a fortune!”
Tara just shrugged. “It’s only worth something if you sell it. These will never be sold.” Then she reached behind one of the statues and pulled out something completely out of place. It was a metal baseball bat. She smiled slyly and handed it to me.
“I want you to break them.”
I just stood there dumbfounded, the bat dangling from my hand. “What?”
“Break them. It’s not that hard. Just swing.”
I looked at the stunning works around me. The finely crafted expressions. The details on the hands. “Why would you want me to do that?”
Tara looked around at the statues, and I could hear hatred and disgust as she spoke. “Because these are the only friends I’ve ever had—
stone faces that can’t answer back ... can’t show emotion. I’m so tired of them, Parker. I want them gone. I want to start fresh and new. I want you to help me.”
“I can’t destroy things so beautiful.”
“Time will destroy them if you don’t. Time destroys everything. But if you destroy them, it will mean something.”
“What could it possibly mean?”
She gave me that sly grin again. “You’ll see.”
I was not much of a vandal. I didn’t go around tagging graffiti. I didn’t go to the old cemetery and push over tombstones, like some other kids were known to do—but as I held the bat in my hand, I did feel an urge to use it. I had never willfully broken anything in my life, but suddenly I felt a need ... I felt a craving to break something then. Perhaps it wasn’t a craving for mud, but it was a craving all the same. It had been so long since I had felt much of anything at all, the craving felt good. Its burning need for satisfaction was, in itself, satisfying.
“What are you angry at, Parker?”
“Nothing.”
“I don’t believe that. Everyone’s angry at something. Reach down. Find it. Bring it to the surface.”
It turns out I didn’t have to reach down too far. There were quite a lot of things I was angry about. Angry in a grumpy, brooding kind of way. It was the kind of anger that simmers but doesn’t boil. But I could make it boil. I could make it bubble, steam, and explode if I wanted to. Knowing I had that power was terrible and wonderful at the same time.
“I’m angry at my parents,” I said, “for the way they spend so much time on themselves and so little on us kids.”
“What else?”
“I’m angry at my sister. How lousy, rotten, spoiled she is.”
“What else?”
I gripped the bat tighter. “I’m angry at my science teacher. The way she expects everything so orderly and perfect.”
“And?”
“And the guy at the bicycle store who always rips us off. And the kids at school who think they’re so cool. And the basketball coach; and that supermarket checker; and that nasty neighbor; and the lying, cheating sleazeball at the comics store; and—”