A Fistful of Sky (3 page)

When my throat was sore from talking to him and my arms were so tired and heavy I wasn’t sure how much longer I could go on, Jasper hugged me. “It’s okay,” he whispered. I touched his forehead. It wasn’t too hot or too cold. It was wet with sweat.

I fell asleep smiling.

When I woke up Jasper was sitting up among the snarled, sweat-soaked blankets and shoveling hot Cream of Wheat into his mouth. “Want some?”

I shook my head.

“You should eat, Gyp. You haven’t been getting enough food or sleep.”

I rubbed my hand across my face. My skin felt greasy. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Starved is all.” The cereal he was eating was steaming, but that didn’t seem to bother him. He swallowed without chewing.

“Did the power come on you?”

He smiled down at me. “Oh, yes. Oh, yes.” He put the spoon down and drank the rest of the hot cereal, set the bowl aside and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I need a shower, and then I need lots more breakfast. You want to sleep some more?”

I checked in. Every muscle in my body felt stretched and tired. I nodded.

He smiled again and touched my forehead; I fell into a deep comfortable sleep.

Jasper and I sat in the bamboo thicket a couple days later. The sun pounded down on the yard, but the bamboo shade was cool, even though no breath of breeze moved through the canes.

Jasper had had three accidents already—power surges that once shut off the electricity in the house for two hours, once did unfortunate things to most of the food—popped popcorn, melted butter, burned bread, cooked eggs in their shells, baked apples in the fruit bowl, exploded milk and juice cartons all over the inside of the fridge—and once made all the paint in his room blister and peel off the wall in long twisted strips.

Flint and Beryl were afraid to be near him. Flint moved out of the kids’ wing to sleep on a couch in the living room. Mama and Opal and Tobias could channel power surges, so they weren’t scared of him, just irritated. Daddy ^as on a business trip.

A power surge could really hurt me, but I didn’t care.

Jasper had tried to make me stay away from him. I Couldn’t. Now he was holding a green stone I had found at the beach that morning. He stared at it. He murmured a chant Uncle Tobias had taught him. I huddled on the papery white leaves, hugged my knees, and watched my brother speak to a stone in a language I did not know.

“Keep this.” He held the stone out to me.

“Why?”

“It’s got power in it. I know I said I wasn’t going to do that, but you need this. It should protect you from power—mine, or Opal’s, or anybody’s.”

I took the stone. It felt warm in my hand. I looked up at my brother. “I thought your transition was going to change everything for the better.”

“I feel a lot different.”

“What does that mean?”

He stared over my shoulder, leaf-green light touching his eyes. “I don’t know. I just—I can’t imagine hiding in a closet to spy on Opal. I can’t believe I did that just last week. There are so many more interesting things to do.”

“Mage things?” I whispered.

He nodded.

“Things I can’t do.”

He licked his upper lip, then nodded again. He looked beyond me. “Everything’s singing, Gyp. I couldn’t hear it before, but now I can. There are voices everywhere. I have to learn their languages.”

A minute went by before he met my gaze again. No wonder he had looked so distracted since transition.

I said, “Can you do a predicter mystery for me?”

“Which one?”

I set down the rock he had given me. I opened my backpack and pulled out a watch and a little zipped-shut bag of flower petal dust. This was something Uncle Tobias had taught us last fall. “Tell me… .”

“What, Gyp?”

“Tell me when I’ll transition. I don’t like being on the other side of a wall from you.”

“You really want to know?”

I thought about that. Tobias had told us to be careful of questions. Some would offer us answers that hurt. I felt a chill brush the back of my neck. Then I thought, Opal’s sixteen, Jasper’s fourteen, I’m twelve. Will my transition be soon? Will it be this year? Or will it be four years before I know what Jasper and Opal know now? If I ham some idea of when I’ll transition, I can plan. Or at least I can stand it,

What if I don’t survive? Do I want to know?

If I don’t survive, I should know so I can do what I need to first.

“I want to know,” I said.

Jasper took the spell ingredients from me and prepared them, then said the chant that would give us an answer. He tossed the flower dust up and watched it float down. I watched too.

When Uncle Tobias had demonstrated Image in the Air, I had seen a picture of Mama as a young girl, which was what Uncle Tobias had asked about.

This time I just saw flower dust drifting, swirling down. Maybe only Jasper could see the picture. I looked at him.

“No,” he whispered, shaking his head.

“No what?”

He hesitated. “No transition.”

“What?” I felt like someone had punched me in the gut.

The dust settled. Jasper looked away. “I could be wrong. I haven’t tried this before. Maybe it’s not one of my gifts.”

“What did you see?” I whispered.

“Nothing.”

“What did you see?”

He shook his head.

“What did you see?” I asked him a third time.

“I just saw you, older, but without any magic, Gyp. You. Just you.”

Some people never went through transition. People in our family always married outsiders. Sometimes outsider genes stopped children from having a magical heritage. I had never imagined it could happen to any of us.

“Hey,” Jasper said. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I probably did it wrong.”

I felt cold despite the hot still air of the afternoon. I hugged myself and shivered.

Since transition, Opal had changed into someone I didn’t know and wasn’t sure I liked.

Jasper had changed into someone I didn’t connect with the same way I used to.

I wasn’t going to change.

The future stretched ahead of me like a dark corridor I would walk all alone. All those notes I had taken while Uncle Tobias was teaching us … I might as well burn them. There was no skill inside me. My family was no longer my family. Cold welled up in my stomach and my chest, traveled outward to my toes and fingers.

“Stop it, Gyp.” Jasper picked up the green stone, grabbed my hand, and closed my fingers around the stone. “Hang on. Hang on.”

The stone was warm. I pressed it to my breastbone and felt its warmth wash through me.

“See? You can do magic.”

I remembered working Opal’s beauty brush, painting horns onto Jasper’s forehead. No problem there. If somebody gave me an object with magic in it, I could work it.

“Come to me whenever the stone needs a charge,” Jasper said. “I’ll take care of you. Nobody needs to know.”

“Not even Uncle Tobias?”

“You don’t have to tell him. Let’s pretend we never did Image in the Air, okay? Let’s pretend you never asked the question.” He patted my shoulder.

I could pretend, but I couldn’t deny that everything had changed. Jasper had never patted my shoulder before. He felt sorry for me now.

I couldn’t wish away the answer to my question.

I felt the warmth that came from the green stone, and . thought, Well, all right. If pretending is what it takes, I’ll be the best pretender ever.

“I don’t know my range, anyway. Maybe I didn’t look for enough ahead,” Jasper said. “Maybe you transition later.”

How old did I look? I wanted to ask. Then I thought, Better if I don’t

know. I had heard of late transitions, but they were even more dangerous than normal ones.

I touched my forehead with the green rock. Warm as sunlight. I looked at Jasper, and noticed that his nose looked a lot like Flint’s nose, like my nose. Opal’s beauty brush could stroke away any resemblance we had on the surface, but Jasper and I had been together in her closet, together in my closet, together in the bamboo thicket a week ago, a year ago, three years ago. A thousand thousand memories connected us. Whatever else happened, nothing could change that.

I slipped the green stone into my pocket. “Let’s go run through the sprinklers.” Jasper smiled. “All right.”

THE summer I was sixteen, Dad took my brothers and sisters on a trip ninety miles south to Disneyland and Universal Studios. Uncle Tobias and Aunt Hermina also left on trips, though in different directions. It didn’t dawn on me until later how sinister this was.

After everybody left, I wondered if the whole everyone-goes-on-a-trip-but-Mama-and-Gyp hadn’t been Mama’s idea. Why weren’t we on that trip, too? We did family things together every summer, so what was different this year? She’d probably used persuasion, one of her best skills, to get everyone else to leave and me to stay.

It had been a while since anybody had cast something scary at me. I’d stopped carrying the protection stone Jasper had made me.

Flint had transitioned the year after Jasper, and before I remembered I had the stone, he erupted at me—by mistake—and I ended up with my first broken bone. I was laid up in the hospital for a while, and I got to use crutches and have people sign my cast, and then a couple months later I had to learn how to get both legs to work together again, Flint felt really guilty about the accident; he left me alone until I recovered. Then he really went after me, maybe to get back at me for all the times I had beat him up. The stone came in handy at that point, when I remembered to carry it, and remembered to get Jasper to charge it.

Dad played power chess with Flint to teach him what it was like to be outclassed completely and lose at something, and eventually Flint got the message and backed off on torturing me.

Beryl transitioned the next year, after Opal moved to Hollywood to find

work in the movie industry. By that time Beryl and I were pretty good friends, so I had never carried the stone around to protect me from Beryl.

I had to do a lot of mental maneuvering so I didn’t spend all my time and energy getting mad at my siblings for being themselves. In time, my mind became well-trained and agile. It shied away from negative thoughts and impulses. I used a lot of mental whitewash. I believed I was perfectly happy.

Nobody talked about the fact that everybody had gone through transition but me. Historically, there were late transits—Cousin Raychel hadn’t gone through the sickness until she was nineteen, and then it was touch and go, but she made it, and afterward she was one of the more powerful people in the family. Maybe everyone thought a late transition would happen to me. I wavered between hope and despair, with despair often outweighing the hope. After all, I had Jasper’s prediction to depress me. Every once in a while, though, like on Christmas Eve or the night before my birthday, I got all worked up and imagined: Maybe it will happen tomorrow.

I hadn’t asked Jasper to charge the stone with protection for me in about a year. My siblings cast prank spells on roe sometimes, do-my-work-for-me spells sometimes, and sometimes favor spells if I asked for them, like spells to help me study for a test without getting distracted by TV, or a spell that guaranteed me good hair on school picture day.

I was completely unprepared for Mama’s spell.

I didn’t even know Mama had spelled me at first. I woke up like I did every summer morning and went down to the kitchen to put together breakfast. Breakfast was my favorite meal of the day. You couldn’t have too much bacon, in my opinion. Fried eggs were okay if you put paprika and maybe garlic powder on them, and toast was a great excuse to eat butter and jam, or better yet, peach preserves. On the other hand, a nice layer of melted butter on warm toast could be doused in brown sugar, which would melt into a deep brown frosting, or you could spread a sweet spicy mixture of white sugar and cinnamon into the butter. Yum!

So why did I take out skim milk and a box of Fiber Plus cereal? Why was I measuring a cup of cereal and a half-cup of milk into a bowl? What was this measly amount of food I didn’t even like doing in front of me at the table?

I tried to get up and grab a jar of raspberry jam, but my body wouldn’t cooperate. Instead I found myself eating bits of pulverized plywood wetted

with thin white liquid. I finished the whole thing, small as it was, then washed my bowl and spoon and the measuring cup and left the kitchen.

My stomach cried aloud, “My god, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Well, maybe not in those words.

All the luscious things in the kitchen, bananas, cupcakes, ice cream, the candy jar, the cookie jar, last night’s leftover lasagna in the fridge, they all whined behind me, saying I was neglecting them. Yet I left the kitchen.

What was wrong with me?

Maybe if I could just get away from the house. … I still had some allowance left. I could go buy Hostess Cupcakes at the liquor store down on the Old Coast Highway. Or head up to the village, where we had a charge account at the market, and stock up on all kinds of stuff.

My body had other ideas. I went up to my room and changed into my bathing suit, then went outside and jumped into the pool.

I never jump into the pool. I believe that such a move can be deleterious to the health. Getting into a pool takes time. One toe at a time, specifically. Okay, then you have to go down a whole step. Then another. Then another. Once you’re standing on the bottom and your suit is wet up to the waist, you can take ages edging along toward the deeper water, until your body has time to get used to the water decently.

That summer I had an awful black-and-yellow suit Mama had helped me buy. The suit didn’t have any of those features that helped disguise how fat a girl was, like a little skirt to hide the upper thighs, or extra material to disguise one’s width. It was a tank suit that showed every bulge. Mama had even tried to get me to buy a bikini. Insane! That had made me suspicious, too. My mother was a total fashion plate. She always looked great. I should have suspected something was up when she made me look terrible.

The result of having an ugly swimsuit was that I hadn’t gone swimming so far that summer unless nobody else was home. And the beach? Forget about it.