LUCENT FEMALES SHALL NOT ATTEMPT TO TRAVEL WITH THEIR MATES.
Ari showed up at two a.m. on Friday morning with two bags and a grin. “S’up ladies! Let’s go!”
I’d met Ari at an arcade by my house. Two games of Galaga, one shared cotton candy, and we were best friends. She was homeschooled by her parents. My parents hadn’t known we had Lucents that close to our home. Good thing Ari had a super big mouth. She’d gotten angry at her mother at a family dinner and flashed from the table to her room. Her mother gasped and her father lost all the color in his face. I simply smiled, clapped, and responded, “Ari can flash too?”
“Where are you gonna be,” I asked both of them. Between Ari and my mom, someone had to take inventory. I was the most responsible of the group and that was really saying something since, in general, I was mostly selfish and wild.
“I’m going to the alley behind the hotel,” my mother reported like I was the parental and she was the teen queen.
“And I’m flashing to one of the lifeguard posts on the beach,” Ari answered in turn.
“Okay, Mom, you go first and I will be right behind you. Then we can all check in and get some sleep.”
“You already made reservations.” My mother thought the whole thrill of our gift was flying by the seat of our pants. But what did an advance reservation hurt?
“Yes, we all have cabins out on the water. Are we ready?”
Ari was gone before she could answer and her crystal clear golden wake told me she’d arrived without trouble. My mother was next and her wake, pale purple, like a beauty queen’s dress, resembled pixie dust—a good sign.
My turn.
It was a simple process. I visualized the place I wanted to go, and I was there. I didn’t understand the physics of it—nor did I care. The science behind it would probably take all the fun out of it. I just knew that I could get into Sacs in the middle of the night or was able to see the sunset in every time zone in the world—all on the same day. It wasn’t necessary for me to have visited the spot before, just to have seen pictures or video—the beauty of a cell phone with internet was incomparable.
I felt the familiar tug of time and space plunging me to my desired destination, and before I knew it, I was next to my mother in the alley behind a tropical Belizean paradise.
No time was wasted—I knew Ari’s game. The last one in the ocean after arriving at a destination bought breakfast the next morning. After checking in quickly and paying a fee for our odd arrival time, I slipped my maxi dress onto the floor which revealed an ivory crocheted bikini. I loved the cabins in Belize. Why people stayed in hotels overlooking the best view in Central America, when they could stay in these huts hovering atop the ocean was a mystery. I booked the same cabin every time, no matter what.
As my toes wrapped around the edge of the porch surrounding my hut, I heard a splash and knew that breakfast would be on me. I dove in after Ari, and from that time until the tangerine sun began to peek over the horizon, we played and swam like children.
It wasn’t often Ari and I were free like this. One would think that, with our gift, we could go anywhere, anytime. But Ari was in the same kind of specialized delivery business as I was. She and Sway had taken the medical side of it. They flashed from place to place with vials, samples, and God only knew what else.
Except Sway had been stripped of her ability.
Ari was tired from the traveling, so she suggested we go ashore. We leaned back, side by side on the shoreline, and the tide caressed us as it rose. I closed my eyes as the first rays of the sunrise hit my face.
“Is it a gift or a curse, Bee?”
Ari had called me Bee since we were kids. I knew what she was referring to, but acted ignorant, as I always did. The right or wrong, the blessing or curse question of what we could do, never went away.
Yet, I still had no answers.
It hid behind the thick red curtains on the stage of my life. Everyone could see its form behind the material, and the curtains swayed this way and that, letting us know it was there and trying to get our attention.
I didn’t know the answer.
If there even was an answer.
“What?”
“Flashing.”
Leaning back on my elbows, I threw my head back. Ari counted on me to soothe her worries. I tried my damnedest to fulfill that role. What could I say this time that would placate her?
I began, “The first time we flashed to Jeju Island, I spent three days there, just taking in the scenery, these two older men were arguing. Theo was with me. Our parents had all travelled together. And of course…”
She groaned. “He speaks Korean.”
“Yeah, so he starts translating for me. They were in one of the most majestic, serene places on the entire planet and they were arguing politics. So, I looked at Theo and I said, ‘I don’t understand.’ He answered, ‘There is no perfect gift. Every good comes with bad—every blessing carries its own curse.’”
She made a gagging noise. “He makes me sick when he’s right all the time.”
I cracked up at her blatant disdain for Theo. A picture of Ari and Theo was next to the phrase ‘love/hate relationship’ in the urban dictionary. Theo could drive her completely into the ground with anger—but if anyone wrongly batted an eye in her direction—he was on them in a heartbeat.
“Me too.”
“I miss his smug ass, sometimes. I bet you just miss his ass.”
I pretended not to hear her while cupping a handful of sand, and then I stuffed it into her hair. Instead of reciprocating, she flashed out into the ocean, past the breakers, and flipped me off.
“I miss him so bad it hurts.”