I Am Number Four (20 page)

FOR ONCE, SINCE WE ARRIVED IN OHIO, THINGS
seem to slow for a time. School ends quietly and for winter break we have eleven days off. Sam and his mother spend most of it visiting his aunt in Illinois. Sarah stays home. We spend Christmas together. We kiss when the ball drops at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Despite the snow and the cold, or maybe even in retaliation against it, we go for long walks through the woods behind my house, holding hands, kissing, breathing in the chilly air beneath the low gray skies of winter. We spend more and more time together. Not a day passes during that whole break that we don’t see each other at least once.

We walk hand in hand beneath an umbrella of white from the snow piled atop the tree branches overhead. She has her camera with her and occasionally stops to take pictures. Most of the snow on the ground lies
undisturbed aside from the tracks we have made on the walk out. We follow them back now, Bernie Kosar in the lead, darting in and out of the brambles, chasing rabbits into small groves and thickets of thorny bush, chasing squirrels up trees. Sarah wears a pair of black earmuffs. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose are red with the cold, making her eyes look bluer. I stare at her.

“What?” she asks, smiling.

“Just admiring the view.”

She rolls her eyes at me. For the most part the woods are dense aside from sporadic clearings we continually stumble upon. I’m not sure how far in any one direction the woods extend, but in all of our walks we have yet to reach their end.

“I bet it’s beautiful here in the summer,” Sarah says. “We can probably picnic in the clearings.”

An ache forms in my chest. Summer is still five months away and if Henri and I are here in May, we will have made it seven months in Ohio. That is very nearly the longest we have ever stayed in one place.

“Yeah,” I agree.

Sarah looks at me. “What?”

I look at her questioningly. “What do you mean, ‘what?’”

“That wasn’t very convincing,” she says. A mess of crows fly by overhead, squawking noisily.

“I just wish it was summer now.”

“Me too. I can’t believe we have to go back to school tomorrow.”

“Ugh, don’t remind me.”

We enter another clearing, larger than the others, an almost perfect circle a hundred feet in diameter. Sarah lets go of my hand, runs into the middle of it, and drops into the snow, laughing. She rolls to her back and begins making a snow angel. I drop beside her and do the same. The tips of our fingers just barely touch while we make the wings. We get up.

“It’s like we’re holding wings,” she says.

“Is that possible?” I ask. “I mean, how would we fly if we’re holding wings?”

“Of course it’s possible. Angels can do anything.”

Then she turns and nuzzles into me. Her cold face against my neck makes me squirm away from her.

“Ahh! Your face is like ice.”

She laughs. “Come warm me up.”

I take her in my arms and kiss her beneath the open sky, the trees surrounding us. There are no sounds save the birds and the occasional pack of snow falling from the nearby branches. Two cold faces pressed tightly together. Bernie Kosar comes trotting up, out of breath, tongue dangling, tail wagging. He barks and sits in the snow staring at us, his head cocked to the side.

“Bernie Kosar! Were you off chasing rabbits?” Sarah asks.

He barks twice and runs over and jumps up on her. He barks again and pushes off and then looks up expectantly. She grabs a stick from the ground, shakes the snow off it, and then hurls it into the trees. He races after it and disappears from sight. He emerges from the trees ten seconds later, but instead of returning to the clearing where he had exited it, he comes from the opposite side. Sarah and I both spin around to watch him.

“How’d he do that?” she asks.

“Don’t know,” I say. “He’s a peculiar dog.”

“Did you hear that, Bernie Kosar? He just called you peculiar!”

He drops the stick at her feet. We walk towards home, holding hands, the day nearing dusk. Bernie Kosar trots beside us the whole way out, his head on a swivel as though ushering us along, keeping us safe from what may or may not lurk in the outer dark beyond our line of sight.

Five newspapers are stacked on the kitchen table, Henri at his computer, the overhead light on.

“Anything?” I ask out of habit, nothing more. There hasn’t been a promising story in months, which is a good thing, but I can’t help but always hope for something every time I ask.

“Actually, yes, I think so.”

I perk up, then walk around the table and look over
Henri’s shoulder at the computer screen. “What?”

“There was an earthquake in Argentina yesterday evening. A sixteen-year-old girl pulled an elderly man free from a pile of rubble in a tiny town near the coast.”

“Number Nine?”

“Well, I certainly think she’s one of us. Whether she’s Number Nine or not remains to be seen.”

“Why? There’s nothing really extraordinary about pulling a man from rubble.”

“Look,” Henri says, and then scrolls to the top of the article. There is a picture of a large slab of concrete at least a foot thick, eight feet long and wide. “This is what she lifted to save him. It must weigh five tons. And look at this,” he says, and scrolls back to the bottom of the page. He highlights the very last sentence. It reads: “Sofia García could not be found for comment.”

I read the sentence three times. “She couldn’t be found,” I say.

“Exactly. She didn’t
decline
to comment; she simply couldn’t be found.”

“How did they know her name?”

“It’s a small town, less than a third the size of Paradise. Most everyone would know her name there.”

“She left, didn’t she?”

Henri nods. “I think so. Probably before the paper was even published. That’s the downfall of small towns; it’s impossible to remain unnoticed.”

I sigh. “Hard for the Mogadorians to go unnoticed too.”

“Precisely.”

“Sucks for her,” I say, and stand up. “Who knows what she must have left behind.”

Henri gives me a skeptical look, opens his mouth to say something, but then thinks better of it and goes back to the computer. I return to my bedroom. I pack my bag with a fresh change of clothes and the books I’ll need for the day. Back to school. I’m not looking forward to it, though it’ll be nice to see Sam again, whom I haven’t seen in nearly two weeks.

“Okay,” I say. “I’m off.”

“Have a good day. Be safe out there.”

“See you this afternoon.”

Bernie Kosar rushes out of the house ahead of me. He’s a ball of energy this morning. I think he’s come to look forward to our morning runs, and the fact that we haven’t done one in a week and a half has him chomping at the bit to get back to it. He keeps up with me for most of the run. Once we make it I give him a good pet and scratch behind his ears.

“All right, boy, go home,” I say. He turns and starts trotting back to the house.

I take my time in the shower. By the time I finish, other students are beginning to arrive. I walk the hall, stop by my locker, then go to Sam’s. I slap him on the back. It startles him, then he flashes a big toothy grin
when he sees that it’s me.

“I thought I was going to have to whip somebody’s ass there for a minute,” he says.

“Just me, my friend. How was Illinois?”

“Ugh,” he says, and rolls his eyes. “My aunt made me drink tea and watch reruns of
Little House on the Prairie
nearly every day.”

I laugh. “That sounds awful.”

“It was, trust me,” he says, and reaches into his bag. “This was waiting in the mail when we got back.”

He hands me the latest issue of
They Walk Among Us
. I begin flipping through it.

“There is nothing on us or the Mogadorians,” he says.

“Good,” I say. “They must fear us after you visited them.”

“Yeah, right.”

Over Sam’s shoulder I see that Sarah is coming our way. Mark James stops her in the middle of the hallway and hands her a few sheets of orange paper. Then she continues on her way.

“Hi, gorgeous,” I say when she reaches us. She stands on her toes to kiss me. Her lips taste like strawberry lip balm.

“Hi, Sam. How are you?”

“Good. How’re you?” he asks. He seems at ease with her now. Before the incident with Henri, which was a month and a half ago, being in Sarah’s presence would
have made him uncomfortable, and he wouldn’t have been able to meet her eye or know what to do with his hands. But now he looks at her and smiles, speaking with confidence.

“Good,” she says. “I’m supposed to give you both one of these.”

She hands us each one of the orange sheets Mark just gave her. It’s a party invitation for this upcoming Saturday night at his house.

“I’m invited?” Sam asks.

Sarah nods. “All three of us are.”

“Do you want to go?” I ask.

“Maybe we could give it a shot.”

I nod. “You interested, Sam?”

He looks past Sarah and me. I turn to see what he is looking at, or rather who. At a locker across the hall is Emily, the girl who was on the hayride with us, and who Sam has been pining for ever since. When she walks past she sees that Sam is watching her and she smiles politely.

“Emily?” I say to Sam.

“Emily what?” Sam asks, looking back at me.

I look at Sarah. “I think Sam likes Emily Knapp.”

“I do not,” he says.

“I could ask her to come to the party with us,” Sarah says.

“Do you think she would go?” Sam asks.

Sarah looks at me. “Well, maybe I shouldn’t invite her since Sam doesn’t like her.”

Sam smiles. “Okay, fine. I just, I don’t know.”

“She kept asking why you never called after the hayride. She kind of likes you.”

“That is true,” I say. “I’ve heard her say it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” says Sam.

“You never asked.”

Sam looks down at the flyer. “So it’s this Saturday?”

“Yes.”

He looks up at me. “I say we go.”

I shrug. “I’m in.”

Henri is waiting for me when the final bell rings. As always, Bernie Kosar is in the passenger seat, and when he sees me, his tail begins wagging a hundred miles an hour. I jump into the truck. Henri puts it into gear and drives away.

“There was a follow-up article on the girl in Argentina,” Henri says.

“And?”

“Just a short article saying that she has disappeared. The mayor of the town is offering a modest reward for information on her whereabouts. It sounds like they believe she’s been kidnapped.”

“Are you worried about the Mogadorians having gotten to her first?”

“If she’s Nine, like the note we found indicated, and the Mogadorians were tracking her, it’s a good thing that she vanished. And if she’s been captured, the Mogadorians can’t kill her—they can’t even hurt her. That gives us hope. The good thing, aside from the news itself, is that I imagine every Mogadorian on Earth has poured into Argentina.”

“Speaking of which, Sam had the latest issue of
They Walk Among Us
today.”

“Was there anything in it?”

“Nope.”

“I didn’t think there would be. Your levitation trick seemed to affect them rather profoundly.”

When we arrive home I change clothes and meet Henri in the backyard for our day of training. Working while consumed with fire has gotten easier. I don’t get as flustered as I did on that first day. I can hold my breath longer, close to four minutes. I have more control over the objects I lift, and I can lift more of them at the same time. Little by little, the look of worry I saw on Henri’s face during the first days has melted away. He nods more. He smiles more. On the days it goes really well he gets a crazed look in his eyes and he raises his arms in the air and yells “Yes!” as loudly as he can. In that way I am gaining confidence in my Legacies. The rest have yet to come, but I don’t think they’re far off. And the major one, whatever it will be.
The anticipation of it keeps me up most nights. I want to fight. I hunger for a Mogadorian to saunter into the backyard so that I may finally seek revenge.

It’s an easy day. No fire. Mostly just me lifting things and manipulating them while they are suspended in the air. The last twenty minutes pass with Henri throwing objects at me—sometimes just allowing them to fall to the ground, other times deflecting them in a way that emulates a boomerang so that they twist in the air and go blazing back towards Henri. At one point a meat tenderizer flies back so fast that Henri dives face-first into the snow to keep from being hit by it. I laugh. Henri does not. Bernie Kosar lies on the ground the whole time watching us, seeming to offer his own encouragement. After we are done I shower, do my homework, and sit at the kitchen table for dinner.

“So there is a party this Saturday that I’m going to go to.”

He looks up at me, stops chewing. “Whose party?”

“Mark James’s.”

Henri looks surprised.

“All that’s over,” I say before he can object.

“Well, you know best, I suppose. Just remember what’s at stake.”

AND THEN THE WEATHER WARMS. BRISK WINDS,
bitter cold, and continuous snow showers are followed by blue skies and fifty-degree temperatures. The snow melts. At first there are standing puddles in the driveway and the yard, the road wet with the sounds of splashing tires, but after a day all the water drains and evaporates and the cars pass as they do on any other day. A lull in the action, a brief reprieve before old man winter takes up the reins again.

I sit on the porch waiting for Sarah, staring up at the night sky full of twinkling stars and a full moon. A thin, knifelike cloud cuts the moon in two and then quickly disappears. I hear the crunch of gravel under tires; then headlights come into view and the car pulls into the driveway. Sarah gets out of the driver’s side. She’s dressed in dark gray pants flared at the ankles, a navy blue cardigan sweater beneath a beige jacket. Her
eyes are accentuated by the blue shirt peeking out where the jacket’s zipper ends. Her blond hair falling past her shoulders. She smiles coyly and looks at me, fluttering her eyelashes as she approaches. There are butterflies in my stomach. Almost three months together and yet I still grow nervous when I see her. A nervousness that’s hard to imagine time will ever assuage.

“You look gorgeous,” I say.

“Well, thank you,” she says, and bobs a curtsy. “You don’t look so bad yourself.”

I kiss Sarah on the cheek. Then Henri walks out of the house and waves to Sarah’s mom, who is sitting in the passenger seat of the car.

“So you’ll call when you’re ready to be picked up, right?” Henri asks me.

“Yes,” I say.

We walk to the car and Sarah gets behind the wheel. I sit in the back. She’s had her learner’s permit for a few months now, which means she can drive so long as a licensed driver sits in the passenger seat beside her. Her actual driver’s test is on Monday, two days away. She’s been anxious about it ever since making the appointment over winter break. She backs out of the driveway and pulls away, eventually flipping the visor down and smiling at me through the mirror. I smile back.

“So how was your day, John?” her mother turns and asks me. We make small talk. She tells me of the
trip to the mall that the two of them made earlier in the day, and how Sarah drove. I tell her about playing with Bernie Kosar in the yard, and about the run we went on after. I
don’t
tell her about the training session that lasted for three hours in the backyard after the run. I don’t tell her how I split the dead tree’s trunk straight down the middle through telekinesis, or how Henri threw knives at me that I deflected into a sandbag fifty feet away. I don’t tell her about being lit on fire or the objects that I lifted and crushed and splintered. Another kept secret. Another half-truth that feels like a lie. I would like to tell Sarah. I somehow feel that I’m betraying her by keeping myself hidden, and over the last few weeks the burden has really begun to weigh on me. But I also know I have no other choice. Not at this point, anyhow.

“So it’s this one?” Sarah asks.

“Yes,” I say.

She pulls into Sam’s driveway. He paces at the end of it, dressed in jeans and a wool sweater. He looks up at us with a deer-caught-in-the-headlights blank stare. There is gel in his hair. I’ve never seen gel in his hair before. He walks to the side of the car, opens the door, and slides in beside me.

“Hi, Sam,” Sarah says, then introduces him to her mom.

Sarah reverses the car out of the driveway and pulls
onto the road. Both of Sam’s hands are planted firmly on the seat in nervousness. Sarah turns down a road I’ve never seen before and makes a right turn into a winding driveway. Thirty or so cars are parked along the side of it. At the end of the driveway, surrounded by trees, is a large, two-story house. We can hear the music well before we reach the house.

“Jeez, nice house,” Sam says.

“You guys be good in there,” Sarah’s mom says. “And be safe. Call if you need anything, or if you can’t get ahold of your father,” she says, looking at me.

“Will do, Mrs. Hart,” I say.

We get out of the car and begin walking to the front door. Two dogs run up to us from the side of the house, a golden retriever and a bulldog. Their tails are wagging and they’re sniffing spastically at my pants, smelling the scent of Bernie Kosar. The bulldog is carrying a stick in his mouth. I wrestle it away from him and throw it across the yard and both dogs sprint after it.

“Dozer and Abby,” Sarah says.

“I take it Dozer is the bulldog?” I ask.

She nods and smiles at me as though in apology. I’m reminded how well she must know this house. I wonder if it’s odd for her to be back now, with me.

“This is a horrible idea,” Sam says. He looks at me. “I’m only now realizing that.”

“Why do you think so?”

“Because only three months ago the guy who lives here filled both our lockers with cow manure and hit me in the back of the head with a meatball during lunch. And now we’re here.”

“I bet Emily is already here,” I say, and nudge him with my elbow.

The door opens into the foyer. The dogs come rushing in past us and disappear into the kitchen, which lies straight ahead. I can see that Abby is now holding the stick. We’re met with loud music that we have to yell over to be heard. People are dancing in the living room. There are cans of beer in most of their hands, a few people drinking bottled water or soda. Apparently Mark’s parents are out of town. The whole football team is in the kitchen, half of them wearing their letterman jackets. Mark comes up and hugs Sarah. Then he shakes my hand. He holds my gaze for a second and then looks away. He doesn’t shake Sam’s hand. He doesn’t even look at him. Perhaps Sam is right. This may have been a mistake.

“Happy you guys could make it. Come on in. Beer’s in the kitchen.”

Emily stands in the far corner talking to other people. Sam looks her way, then asks Mark where the bathroom is. He points the way.

“Be right back,” Sam says to me.

Most of the guys are standing around the island in the middle of the kitchen. They look at me when Sarah and I enter. I look at each of them in turn, and then grab a bottle of water from the ice bucket. Mark hands Sarah a beer and opens it for her. The way he looks at her makes me realize yet again just how little I trust him. And I realize now just how bizarre this whole situation is. Me, being in his house now, with Sarah, his ex-girlfriend. I’m happy that Sam is with me.

I reach down and play with the dogs until Sam comes out of the bathroom. By then Sarah has made her way to the corner of the living room and is talking to Emily. Sam tenses beside me when he realizes that there is nothing else for us to do but walk up to them and say hello. He takes a deep breath. In the kitchen two of the guys have lit a corner of the newspaper on fire for no other reason than to watch it burn.

“Make sure you compliment Emily,” I say to Sam as we approach. He nods.

“There you guys are,” Sarah says. “I thought you had left me all by my lonesome.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I say. “Hi, Emily. How are you?”

“I’m good,” she says, then to Sam, “I like your hair.”

Sam just looks at her. I nudge him. He smiles.

“Thank you,” he says. “You look very nice.”

Sarah gives me a knowing look. I shrug and kiss her
on the cheek. The music has grown even louder. Sam talks to Emily, somewhat nervously, but she laughs and after a while he eases a little.

“So are you okay?” Sarah asks me.

“Of course. I’m with the prettiest girl at the party. How could things be better?”

“Oh shush,” she says, and pokes me in the stomach.

The four of us dance for an hour or so. The football players keep drinking. Somebody shows up with a bottle of vodka and not long after that one of them—I don’t know which—throws up in the bathroom so that the smell of vomit wafts throughout the whole downstairs. Another one passes out on the living-room sofa and some of the others draw with marker on his face. People keep filtering in and out of the doorway leading to the basement. I have no idea what is going on down there. I haven’t seen Sarah for the past ten minutes. I leave Sam and walk through the living room and the kitchen, then walk up the stairs. White, thick carpet, walls lined with art and family portraits. Some of the bedroom doors are open. Some are closed. I don’t see Sarah. I walk back downstairs. Sam is standing sullenly by himself in the corner. I walk over to him.

“Why the long face?” I ask.

He shakes his head.

“Don’t make me lift you in the air and turn you upside down like the guy in Athens.”

I smile, Sam doesn’t.

“I just got cornered by Alex Davis,” he says.

Alex Davis is another of Mark James’s brood, a wide receiver for the team. He’s a junior, tall and thin. I’ve never talked to him before, and likewise know little else about him.

“What do you mean by ‘cornered’?”

“We just talked. He saw that I’ve been talking to Emily. I guess they dated over the summer.”

“So what. Why does that bother you?”

He shrugs. “It just sucks, and it bothers me, okay?”

“Sam, do you know how long Sarah and Mark dated?”

“For a long time.”

“Two years,” I say.

“Does it bother you?” he asks.

“Not in the least. Who cares about her past? Besides, look at Alex,” I say, and nod to him standing in the kitchen. He is slumped against the kitchen counter, his eyes aflutter, a thin layer of sweat glistening on his forehead. “Do you really think she misses being with that?”

Sam looks at him, shrugs.

“You’re a good dude, Sam Goode. Don’t get down on yourself.”

“I’m not down on myself.”

“Well then, don’t worry about Emily’s past. We don’t have to be defined by the things we did or didn’t do
in our past. Some people allow themselves to be controlled by regret. Maybe it’s a regret, maybe it’s not. It’s merely something that happened. Get over it.”

Sam sighs. He’s still wrestling with it.

“Go on. She likes you. There’s nothing to be scared of,” I say.

“I am, though.”

“Best way to deal with fear is to confront it. Just walk up to her and kiss her. I bet you she kisses you back.”

Sam looks at me and nods, then goes to the basement, where Emily is hanging out. The two dogs come wrestling into the living room. Tongues dangling. Tails wagging. Dozer drops his chest to the ground and waits for Abby to come near enough and then he jumps at her and she jumps away. I watch them until they disappear up the stairs, playing tug-of-war with a rubber toy. It’s a quarter till midnight. A couple is making out on the couch across the room. The football players are still drinking in the kitchen. I’m starting to get sleepy. I still can’t find Sarah.

Just then one of the football players comes rushing up the basement stairs, a crazed, frantic look in his eyes. He rushes to the kitchen sink, turns on the water as high as it will go, and begins throwing open the kitchen-cupboard doors.

“There’s a fire downstairs!” he says to the guys nearby.

They begin filling pots and pans with water, and one
by one they rush down the stairs.

Emily and Sam come up the stairs. Sam looks shaken.

“What’s wrong?” I say.

“The house is on fire!”

“How bad?”

“Is any fire good? And I think we started it. We, uh, knocked a candle into a curtain.”

Sam and Emily both look disheveled and have clearly been making out. I make a mental note to congratulate Sam later.

“Have you seen Sarah?” I ask Emily.

She shakes her head.

More guys rush up the stairs, Mark James with them. There is fear in his eyes. For the first time I smell smoke. I look at Sam.

“Go outside,” I say.

He nods and takes Emily’s hand and they leave together. Some of the others follow, but some stay where they are, watching with drunken curiosity. A few people stand around stupidly patting the football players on the back as they rush up and down the basement stairs, cheering them on as though it’s all a joke.

I go to the kitchen and grab the largest thing left, a medium-sized metal pot. I fill it with water and then go downstairs. Everybody has evacuated aside from us battling the blaze, which is far bigger than I
expected. Half the basement is consumed in flames. Dousing it with the little water I have left is completely futile. I don’t try, and instead drop the pot and dash back up. Mark comes flying down. I stop him in the middle of the stairway. His eyes are swimming in booze but through it I can see that he is terrified, that he is desperate.

“Forget about it,” I say. “It’s too big. We have to get everyone out.”

He looks down the stairs at the fire. He knows that what I’ve said is true. The tough-guy front is gone. There is no more pretending.

“Mark!” I yell.

He nods and drops the pot and we go back up together.

“Everybody out! Now!” I yell when I get to the top of the stairs.

Some of the drunker ones don’t move. Some of them laugh. One person says, “Where’s the marshmallows?” Mark slaps him across the face.

“Get out!” he screams.

I rip the cordless phone from the wall and shove it into Mark’s hand.

“Dial 911,” I yell over the loud voices and the music that still blares from somewhere like a sound track to the erupting pandemonium. The floor is getting warm. Smoke begins to billow up from beneath us. Only then
do people take it seriously. I start pushing them towards the door.

I dart past Mark as he begins dialing and rush through the house. I take the stairs three at a time and kick through the open doors. One couple is making out on a bed. I yell at them both to get out. Sarah’s nowhere to be found. I sprint back down the stairs and through the door into the dark, cold night. People are standing around, watching. Some of them I can tell are excited by the prospect of the house burning down. Some laugh. I can feel myself begin to panic. Where is Sarah? Sam stands at the back of the crowd, which must total a hundred people. I run to him.

“Have you seen Sarah?” I ask.

“No,” he says.

I look back at the house. People are still coming out. The basement windows glow red, flames licking against the panes of glass. One of them is open. Black smoke pours out of it and floats high in the air. I weave through the crowd. Just then an explosion rattles the house. All the basement windows shatter. Some of the people cheer. The flames have reached the first floor, and they’re moving fast. Mark James stands at the front of the crowd, unable to divert his gaze away from it. His face is illuminated by the orange glow. There are tears in his eyes, a look of despair, the same look that I saw in the eyes of the Loric on the day of the invasion. What
an odd thing it must be to watch everything you’ve ever known be destroyed. The fire spreads with hostility, with disregard. All Mark can do is watch. Flames are beginning to rise up past the first-floor windows. We can feel the heat on our faces from where we stand.