Magonia (6 page)

He’s killing time in high school. He barely passes his classes because he says he’s proving a point. He plans to graduate at the bottom and then take over the world. Better for the inevitable, eventual biographies, I guess.

Jason is notoriously frustrating to all teachers. He doesn’t work up to his genius potential. He
merely looks at you, blankly, and conquers.

“A feather in your lung,” he says. “Really? You snorted a feather? Going for an Icarus thing?”

When we were ten, I did go for an Icarus thing. Jason built the wings, from plans drawn by Leonardo da Vinci. Turns out that canvas and balsa-wood Renaissance wings don’t cut it when you’re hopping from the top of the garage. He broke his arm, and I broke my leg, and that was the end of Icarus. Our parents were relieved. It was one of our few displays of semi-normal. They told everyone the story of the wing fail for years, with these hopeful voices, an
oh, kids, they do the craziest things
tone. All the while not itemizing any of the other craziest things Jason and I did.

When we were twelve, we stole Jason’s mom Eve’s Pontiac, and drove it three hundred miles in order to acquire the correct feathers for the taxidermy of a hoax griffin. We paid a weirdo in cash, got back onto the freeway, and drove home, busted by Eve in Jason’s driveway. The Pontiac had a trunkful of dead turkey and roadkill lynx on ice, along with assorted talons from vultures, and a serious stash of superglue and glass eyeballs. Eve, to her credit, had an expression of
hell yeah
on her face when we opened the trunk, because Eve is the kind of person who’d build a hoax griffin on a moment’s notice, but then she had to pretend parental upset. Carol, Jason’s Mother Number Two, went to bed for four days.

Jason and I did normal things, too, knee-skinning things, bug-capturing things. But it’s the griffin-building that sticks in everyone’s minds.

Jason will either be recruited by the CIA or he’ll live a life of crime. No one is sure which. I mean, like those are opposites anyway.

“What?” I ask him. “Do you really think you get to have an opinion about me snorting feathers?”

I sit, despite the frost on the step. My dad sighs, takes off his coat, and buttons it around my own.

“Five minutes,” he says. “Then I’m coming back for you.”

“Don’t snort that,” Jason says, pointing to the coat, though of course it’s fake down, not really feathers.

We sit a minute in comfortable quiet, except that today has sucked so much nothing’s comfortable.

“There’s an increased likelihood of something,” I say experimentally.

“Of?”

“You know. Soon. Very soon.”

“You’ve been dying since forever,” says Jason, who doesn’t respect the rules. “And if they think things are accelerating, they’re wrong. You look good.”

He glances at me.

“For you, you look good.”

His face tells me I don’t. The fact that he suddenly takes off his scarf and wraps it around my throat tells me I don’t. Jason doesn’t normally seem nervous, even though he’s spent his entire life on a constant loop of calculation, worried about everything.

“How are you?” I ask him. “You seem weird.”

“Good,” he says, talking too fast. “I’m fine, I mean, I’m not the one we need to be worried about, obviously. So stop worrying about me.”

This version of Jason doesn’t bode well.

“Did you take your pill?”

“Stop,” he says. “Of course I did.”

I’m suspicious. Also guilty. Because if Jason’s this worried, it’s my fault.

My dad makes us come in, but he leaves us alone in the kitchen. Jason begins speedy work on baked goods. I watch him from behind as he pushes up his sleeves and puts on my dad’s apron. His hair is the color of the chocolate he’s melting. He has freckles on the back of his neck, five of them. His most distinctive feature is the serious furrow between his eyebrows, which he’s had since we were nine and he realized we definitely weren’t immortal.

I don’t know how someone who’s a genius might have thought we’d live forever, but he’d been working on some kind of chemistry compound related to both starfish and tortoises, and he was pretty sure, up until it exploded in his garage, that it was totally going to be a Thing. I think he was trying to grow me some new lungs, but he’s never admitted it.

Jason looks like someone recently emerged from a sealed city. Last week, he wore the T-shirt top of a pair of ancient
Star Wars
pajamas to school, with his grandfather’s suit jacket over the top of that. The pajamas dated from when he wasn’t the height he is now. The sleeves ended not far below his elbows. The shirt was tight. He didn’t care. I saw girls looking at him all day long, not with the expected look of horror, but with happy surprise.

It was like he’d grown boobs over the summer. Well, except not, but you know. He’d become stealth hot or something.

Jason, however, didn’t notice the girls. I mean, he’s straight, but he’s never cared whether anyone knew it or not. He has two moms. The last time anyone commented critically on that, he gave that guy a black eye. Jason’s right hook, and the resultant bruise, startled everyone, including Jason, I think, because it isn’t like Jason normally punches people.

When Jason feels inclined, he’s been known to make chocolate éclairs. Today he feels inclined. If I weren’t already worried, this’d worry me. Chocolate éclairs are for birthdays. If he’s making them early, I must really look bad.

Yeah. I think I’ll avoid the mirror.

“I’m home, aren’t I?” I say. “They’d never have let me come home if things were that awful.”

Jason just looks at me with his particular hazel-eyed stare. The stare claims he doesn’t give a shit what I say, and that nothing could possibly surprise him. He’d pull it off, if not for the furrow, which is especially deep today, and the rapid way he’s stirring.

Maybe it’s that furrow, maybe it’s me, also feeling worried, but I tell him everything. The whistles, the ship, all of it. The way it just drifted out of the clouds. Hunting.

Hunting?

I don’t know why I think of it that way, but that’s how it felt. Hunting. I tell him about Mr. Grimm, too, who acted weird, in my opinion, though maybe that was me acting weird. For a second, I was pretty sure Mr. Grimm saw the ship, too, but then he pretended not to.

Jason puts the pastries in the oven, whisks their filling for a moment, and considers, as though he’s rifling through papers inside his brain.

“Ship was a cloud formation. Basic answer.”

I start to protest.

“Stay with me,” he says. “Unexplained visual phenomena. Green ray starts UFO panics all the time.”

I raise my hand.

“People understand like half of why light does what it does,” Jason continues without answering my question. “There’s a whole category of mirage where people see ships in the sky. Some people actually think the
Titanic
sank because a mirage made the iceberg invisible.”

I’m researching while he talks, on my phone. Boy’s a Wikipedia sinkhole, though he’s doing it without any internet connection. He’s just whipping the éclair filling, casually facting me into oblivion.

What I saw, though, was not any of the things he wants to make it. I feel bitey.
He should believe me.
He’s the person who always believes me. I count on him to be my primary enabler of Vivid Imagination.

“You looking it up? Pissed off with me for not swallowing your story without questioning anything? Well, how about spooklights,” he says. He turns around and grins at me, which disgruntles. “UFOs, black helicopters, phantom dirigibles. All those things.”

Then he says one more word and for some reason, it stops me dead.

“Magonia.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

“Magonia?” I repeat, feeling twitchy.

The word isn’t unfamiliar. I try to joke it out.

“Is that a disease? A kind of architecture? A poisonous plant? If it’s a disease, I don’t want to know, I warn you right now. I’m not in a disease textbook mood—”

“We’re not talking about diseases. We’re talking about mirages. Check the
Annals of Ulster
,” Jason says, and sighs his long-patented Sufferer’s Sigh.

“Ulster. Like blisters crossed with ulcers? Leprosy of some kind?” I blather to disguise the fact that the word immediately haunts me. I feel a memory of this lurking somewhere in the black holes of my brain. Maybe I read about it somewhere. After all, everything I know, I read about.

Jason snorts.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t read the
Annals
.”

“I’ve read them.” I lie, because maybe I have, maybe I haven’t. I cough, part fake. I don’t know why I’d even try to lie to Jason. When someone hangs out with you every day since you were five, they pretty much know what you’ve read, and they definitely know when you’re emergency-skimming internet synopses beneath the kitchen table.

The
Annals of Ulster
are Irish histories, according to the wikis.

“No one’s read the
Annals of Ulster
. But I studied the relevant sections today. Mass hallucinations. About seven forty-eight AD, there’s this: ‘Ships with their crews were seen in the air.’ Does that ring any bells? Anything at all?”

Nope, nothing. He goes into his favorite mode, fast-talking, clipped words, robot boy.

“Basics. Not the
Annals
, but part of the same story. Eight thirty or so AD. France.” He grand-gesture sketches out the date and place in the air with his hand, subtitling his documentary. “This Archbishop of Lyons reports four messed-up people in his town, three guys, one woman, insisting they fell out of the sky. Fell from ships. In. The. Sky. Are you hearing me?”

I’m hearing him. So hearing. I pretend I’m not.

“The bishop goes to a public meeting where these four are in the stocks—”

I interrupt.

“Do not tell me you’re doing the universal hand gesture for ‘in the stocks,’ because that doesn’t exist, no matter how hard you just tried to make it a thing.”

He has the grace to blush and remove his hands (and the precariously tilting bowl of éclair filling) from “dude trapped in the stocks” position.

“—and getting screamed at for being crop thieves. They’ve been dumb enough to claim they’ve been stealing crops from earth using little sky-launch boats. The people in the town agree with the idea that they’re crop thieves, because, duh, they’re having harvest problems anyway.”

I am so annoyed at the randomness of Jason Kerwin. He’s a mutant memorizer. He has no apologies for that, and never has.

“
MAGONIA
, they say—all of them. We fell out of Magonia. People in town start to freak out.”

Jason whisks the filling so hard some of it splatters on the fridge.

“Then what?” I ask.

“Yeah, so I can’t remember if the Magonians ultimately got hanged for being witches, or if they got run out of town, but I doubt it was a fantastic outcome for them, given that they’d already said they didn’t belong on earth and wanted to go home with all the village’s corn.”

“Jason,” I say eventually. “You are Not Relevant.”

“All I’m saying is, if you’re hallucinating, you’re hallucinating in an old tradition,” he says. “Congratulations on the quality of your visions. Want more Magonia?”

“Nope,” I say. “I want chocolate.”

I can’t believe I didn’t know everything about this Magonia stuff already. It’s totally my kind of thing.

“
Maganwetar
. That’s Old High German for ‘whirlwind.’”

“Jason,” I say.

“Calm down. I don’t speak Old High German,” he says.

“You’d better not,” I tell him. “Because that would be a big lie. The secret learning of Old High German without me.”

There’s no shaming him.

“Some people think that’s where the word Magonia comes from. If you’re from Magonia, then, you live in a whirlwind. That’s what Jacob Grimm says, the same guy who wrote the fairy tales. He also says that it might refer to magicians, like
magoi
, Greek, hence Magonia would mean ‘Land of Magicians.’ I prefer whirlwind. Plus, a land of magicians would be boring, because the whole point of magic is that not everyone can do it. Otherwise it’s just normal life. It’d be, basically, Land of Mechanics.”

I’m head down in my phone. There. Some archbishop named Agobard grumbling about how the people in his town believed hail and lightning were made by storm-makers in the sky.

“But we have seen and heard of many people overcome with so much foolishness, made crazy by so much stupidity, that they believe and say that there is a certain region, which is called Magonia, from which ships come in the clouds. In these ships the crops that fell because of hail and were lost in storms are carried back into that region; evidently these aerial sailors make a payment to the storm-makers, and take the grain and other crops. Among those so blinded with profound stupidity that they believe these things could happen we have seen many people in a kind of meeting, exhibiting four captives, three men and one woman, as if they had fallen from these very ships. As I have said, they exhibited these four, who had been chained up for some days, with such a meeting finally assembling in our presence, as if these captives ought to be stoned. . . .”