Authors: Cyn Balog
T
HE STORMS START LATE
that morning. The rain pounds the roof of our apartment, sliding down the windows in rivulets. We keep them open just a crack, because we don’t have air-conditioning, so my skin feels clammy. It’s midday, but even though my bedroom is dark, like just before nightfall, I can’t sleep. I spend most of the time staring at the boot on the ceiling, wondering what Christian can possibly mean. He can’t be suggesting that Wish has something to do with the tides. I never mistook the dreadlocked, Spenser-loving guy for sane, but this would make him completely off his rocker.
By one, when his shift ends, I’m dying of curiosity. I go downstairs in the pouring rain, drenching myself, and try to stroll into the store nonchalantly, as if looking for something for lunch. Christian appears in the door to the back room with a tray of sourdough loaves. He laughs. “Tip you over, pour you out?”
It’s only then I notice I have one hand on my hip and one hand frozen in the air, kind of like a teapot. I drop my arms to my sides and say, “Whatever.”
He starts slowly unloading the loaves of bread into the display case.
“It’s after one. Your shift is over.”
He keeps unloading the loaves, as if he didn’t hear me. Jerk.
“Hello?” I ask, getting more impatient. “Can we get a move on?”
He picks up the empty tray. “A little impatient, are we?”
“I can’t sit around waiting for you all day. I have things to do,” I say. Like lie in bed.
“Well, aren’t we popular?” he says in a sarcastic way that tells me he knows I’m not. He unties his apron, piles it on the counter, and heads for the door. “Let’s go.”
“Where are we going? Outside?” I ask, doubtful. After all, it’s raining buckets, cold rain. I was hoping all the answers could be found inside the bakery.
He nods. “To the beach.”
I sigh. Awesome. I never go to the beach when it’s sunny and perfect, and he wants me to trek up there in a torrential downpour. I pull the hood of my sweatshirt over my ears and motion for him to lead the way. But I get three steps and I’m already soaked and shivering. The wind whips my hood from my head. This sucks. Anything he has to tell me cannot be worth this. “Hold on. Are you showing me something related to Wish ‘playing with powers he can’t control’?” I ask as we hurry up the block, past Melinda’s hotel. The parking lot is empty and the Vacancy sign is blinking. Usually, she has guests staying until the end of September, but the place looks abandoned.
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” I turn on my heel and march back toward the bakery. As I do, I have to blink away the raindrops that fall into my eyes. “I’m going home. You’re nuts.”
He grabs me by the arm. “Hear me out. You’ll want to see this.”
I stop. By now, my hair is hanging in strings over my eyes and the hood of my sweatshirt is so heavy with water it feels like a cinder block around my neck. I think I could even wring out my undies. “I’m listening. Just make it quick. I’m getting pneumonia.”
“There was an ancient race of people who thought that people’s behaviors were controlled by the stars. Did you know that?”
I snort. “Oh, sure. I saw that on
Oprah
last week.”
He ignores my sarcasm. “You can see evidence of it in the way people still think that full moons cause deviant behavior.” He catches my confused look and says, “And astrology … it’s totally based on the belief that the stars control human behavior. At one point in time, astrology and astronomy were one and the same.”
“All right. But eventually people learned that astrology is a bunch of crap.”
He shoves his hands deeper into his pockets. “It’s not a myth. The stars do control our behavior. Our thoughts. Some of them, anyway.”
“Really,” I say, doubtful, wishing he’d get to the point. If Wish is being controlled by the stars, I’m Princess Leia. But then again, that would explain why he still hasn’t broken up with me. I probably don’t look as big from outer space.
“There was a cult in Europe in the seventeenth century that learned to control the stars, thereby controlling others,” he explains. “They’re called the Luminati.”
“Wasn’t one of the Indiana Jones movies about this?”
“
The Da Vinci Code.
And that was the Illuminati. Totally different.”
“Oh.” Still, I have never once been given the impression that Wish is inclined to bite the heads off chickens or drink blood or whatever ancient cults did. “Interesting,” I say, “but not entirely applicable to our situation.”
“You don’t think so?”
“No. You don’t know what I know about Wish. We’ve known each other forever. Wish is Wish. He’s not part of some power-hungry ancient cult. Believe me.”
“Well, the cult is still around. And it’s all over the world now. He may not be part of the organized cult, but he may have learned their practices. And that’s even more dangerous, the people who practice it alone, because they don’t know all the rituals well. And I’m not saying that he would
control
control people,” he says, a little flustered. “I’m talking about making people see things that aren’t real. About him.”
Things that aren’t real? Wish is the most real, down-to-earth person I know. He wouldn’t … “How do you know all this?”
“My mother was in Hollywood for a while. You said that’s where Wish lived. Some actors started using it in order to make themselves irresistible to their audience, and then their kids began using it, kids at the school I used to go to.…”
“Using it? What do they do?”
“It’s complicated. But somehow they get the stars to favor them. Tilting mirrors at the right angle toward them … wearing certain clothes … spending time under the sun … It requires a lot of precision. Part of the art of it is learning to use the stars without throwing off the balance of nature. This”—he waves his hands in the air—“is because your boyfriend isn’t particularly good at it, unfortunately.”
“I’m sorry. That is really crazy,” I say, but all the while I’m thinking about the past few days with Wish. How he wore nothing but black, which absorbs the rays of the sun. How he tilted the rearview mirror so the light shone into his face. How he was so upset when it rained …
“Think about it. There are millions of people in the world who read their horoscope these days because they believe the stars have some effect on them.”
“Astrology is a bunch of crap,” I repeat, but then I remember Wish’s grandma Bertha and all her spells and crazy beliefs. Maybe she was part of the Luminati. She was really into astrology, Wish said, and when he first went to live with her in L.A., it really creeped him out. But eventually, he stopped talking about how nuts she was. I thought he’d just learned to live with it … but maybe he started believing in it? After all, he was always interested in the stars, calling me out in the middle of the night to come view them through his telescope on the beach. Maybe he …?
“There must be some factual basis to it,” Christian says, but I’m not really listening. “Humans always try to control things about nature. Don’t you think that after all these years, someone might have found a way to control the stars?”
We approach the ramp to the boardwalk and climb up to where the dune grass is whipping in the wind. When we get to the steps that head down to the beach, I gasp.
It’s gone.
Well, not
gone
gone. It’s obviously high tide. Normally, there’d be a long stretch of white sand before the sea. That was how it was last night, when I stumbled on Wish, lying on the sand. I think about him sprawled there, in a space that is now completely covered by water. Now the water is lapping at the dunes, right before us. The lifeguard stand, once in the center of the beach, is barely visible in the black water. The ocean is angry and choppy, with whitecaps everywhere, and the giant waves, bigger than I’ve ever seen, boom like thunder as they crash to the sand.
“It’s been like this before,” I say weakly, though I can’t remember when.
“Has it?”
I nod. “It’s high tide. It will recede.”
He shakes his head. “It’ll be high tide in three hours.”
“Three?” I swallow. “But what does this have to do with controlling the stars?”
“The sun is partly responsible for weather on Earth,” he says. “And the sun is—”
“A star,” I finish. “And this cult, the Luminati …”
“They’re secretive, but they exist. But it’s believed that people practicing alone caused a plague in London in the 1600s. And a drought and famine in India in the 1700s. And in 1887 there was a flood in China …,” he rattles on, making my head spin.
“You’re joking.”
“I wish I was,” he whispers very seriously. He turns his wrist and holds it for me to see. The rain drenches his skin as he points to a dark blob on it that would look like a birthmark if it weren’t greenish. “Can you see that?”
I squint at it. “Unfortunate incident with a tattoo needle?”
“No. It used to be a star. The mark of the Luminati. I had it altered.”
I stare at him. “You mean …”
“Those kids at my school. I was one of them.”
“You were? So wait, what did you do?” I ask, my voice steadily rising. I can no longer keep the disgust out of it.
He nods, looking away, sheepishly. “It’s not like we bit the heads off chickens, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Um. I wasn’t,” I lie.
“My friends got me into it. It seems pretty harmless when you start. We would go out on the beach, late at night, and perform the rituals. We’d lie on the sand and wear all black to absorb the rays and the power of the stars. It may sound crazy, but sometimes the power of the stars was so invigorating that it gave us life on its own—we didn’t need any other form of nourishment. We didn’t need to eat or sleep to have energy; we could breathe without taking a breath.” He pauses and inspects my face, which I know has lost all color. I can’t stop seeing Wish’s lifeless body on the sand, beneath the stars. Can his beauty really be only a facade? “So this is familiar to you.”
“Um … no. It’s crazy to me. It’s not possible that a person, one person, could cause all this,” I answer. “If you want me to believe you, you have to show me.”
“It’s kind of hard now. The cloud cover,” he says.
“Sure it is. Fine. I’m going home. To sleep.”
“No, you see, it’s bad. Like a drug. It’s addictive. I had to move away from them, convince myself that I could be anyone I chose on my own, without the help of the stars. It wasn’t easy.”
I stare at him. It’s like he’s trying to convince me that aliens exist without producing the little green squishy bodies. For something as way out there as this, I need the physical evidence. I think he understands that, because he finally sighs and pushes the dreads out of his eyes.
“All right. Fine. I’ll show you. As soon as the storm ends. Okay?” His voice is strained. “I just kind of promised myself I’d never do it again, so … I’ll only show you a few things.”
“Okay.”
He shrugs and starts to walk away from the churning black waves, and I take a few breaths, tasting the salty spray of the sea on my tongue before following him.
A car horn beeps. A familiar red sports car kicks up a puddle near us, but I don’t feel the splash, because I’m already soaked. I stare at the car, too overwhelmed even to wonder why Rick would be beeping at me. The back window rolls down and I see Terra, wearing a pink hooded rain slicker. “Hey, girl!” she shouts at me.
“Oh. Hi!” I say. I was hoping to have the whole weekend away from them so that they might forget my antics of last night. But it’s good to know that my pathetic behavior didn’t completely turn them off.
“You were hilarious last night,” Erica drawls, leaning over Terra’s lap.
“Oh. Thanks,” I say, though I know they were probably laughing at me instead of with me.
“Did you have fun in the bathroom?” Erica gives me a wink.
Unbelievable. Everyone thinks I was in the bathroom doing things with Wish instead of puking or having stomach problems, two unfortunate things that would normally have hung around the old Dough Reilly in an impenetrable haze. Wish the Sun God and Dough, Goddess of Lard, getting cozy in the bathroom. The stars must like me and be working in my favor, because I can’t imagine a group of people being denser. I peer past the raindrops on the front windshield and see Rick drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, like he’d rather be anywhere else. He has an arm draped around someone … someone with hair darker and curlier than Evie’s. When he catches me looking, he pulls his arm away from her back. I can’t be sure, but it looks like … Becca?
Becca. Evie’s best friend.
Interesting. And yet not entirely unexpected.
Terra motions to the shoreline. “We had to come see this for ourselves. Isn’t it wild?”
It takes me a minute to realize she isn’t talking about Christian’s bizarre theory about Wish’s plans for world domination. “Oh, yeah.”
“I love these kinds of storms,” she gushes, rubbing her hands together greedily. Easy for her to say. She’s living on the mainland. She looks at Christian, taking in his dreads and the tattoos on his forearms, and raises her eyebrows, as if we were just exchanging bodily fluids. “Who’s your friend?”
I fumble through the introductions. Erica smiles and whispers something in Terra’s ear, but it’s loud enough for anyone to hear. “Rowr, the bad boy.” Please. I should let him go all Oliver Twist on them.
Terra babbles on. “One minute they’re predicting sun for the whole week, and the next minute, we’re in the middle of a huge nor’easter. The people who live here must be freaked. They can’t be at all prepared. I mean, this storm system totally came out of nowhere.”
Christian gives me a sly grin. “Oh, I have a good idea of where it came from,” he mumbles.
T
HE RAIN CONTINUES TO POUND
for the rest of the day, almost like it’s slamming directly against my skull, because I wind up with a massive headache. After the bakery closes, Mom comes upstairs and turns on the Weather Channel. I lie in bed, staring at the ceiling, only half listening to the cheery weather girl talking about “giant swells” and “gale-force winds.” The other part of my brain is trying to wrap itself around what Christian told me. It’s so stupid. Wish just has good genes and got lucky. People do that; I’ve seen people come back after a few months of summer vacation completely transformed, and Wish had a few years. It’s not possible to fool everyone into seeing him as gorgeous and charming when he’s not. And to cause a few natural disasters in the process. Not. Possible.
Since I’ve known Wish forever, we should be able to talk about anything. I’m just making up my mind to come right out and ask him when the phone rings. My mom pushes aside the curtain in my doorway a second later. “It’s your boyfriend,” she says softly.
All the resolve I built up quickly drains from my body. Yes, I vowed to confront him, but not now. I get up slowly, hoping my resolve will magically return by the time I cross the kitchen to the phone. No surprise that it doesn’t. When Mom hands me the phone, I see a worry wrinkle above her nose. “Make it quick,” she whispers, her face serious. “We need to keep the line open.”
“Hello?” I answer, nowhere near the confident vixen I’ve been trying to portray in recent days.
“Hey.” He sounds drained. “What’s up?”
I peek through the slats of the vertical blinds on our window. The water is raging down Central Avenue, like rapids. The curbs are completely submerged. Other than that, everything is just lovely. But really, “Did you make this storm?” is like “You have six weeks to live.” Not exactly a conversation one can have over the phone. Plus my mom is staring at me, ready to pluck the phone out of my hands the moment the word “bye” leaves my lips. “Not much,” I lie.
There’s a pause. “Do you … want to go crabbing with me tomorrow?”
I burst out laughing. What planet is he on? I’m about to say, “Are you crazy? The waves are like tsunamis and the island is about to be washed away,” but if he created this storm, he must know that. And if he created it, maybe he knows when it’s going to end. “Um, the storm?” I ask.
“It’ll be over tonight,” he says. “I heard it on the weather.”
I turn toward the television. Above the headline
SURPRISE STORM BATTERS THE JERSEY COAST,
a blond woman in a smart pink suit is waving her hand over a map of projected rainfall totals. Did he really? “But the water will probably be too choppy.”
Although, not if he has anything to do with it.
“Humor me,” he says, sounding exasperated. “I haven’t gone crabbing in forever. I miss it. I don’t care if we don’t catch anything.”
“All right.”
“Pick you up at eight a.m.?”
“Okay.” I hang up the phone and see my mother studying the television and chewing on her pinky fingernail. “Wish says it will end tonight.”
“They’re predicting it will continue until Wednesday,” she says. Then she shrugs and turns off the set. “Mr. Wishman probably knows more than they do. They’re always wrong. Either way, we’re not evacuating.”
“Is that what they want us to do?”
“They probably will. They always do.”
Evie wanders in from her bedroom and grabs a bottle of iced tea out of the fridge. “The rain’s stopped,” she says.
My mother and I run to the window, since we don’t believe it. It was just pounding against the roof a second ago. But Evie’s right. The pools of water in the street are still, and the sunset is breaking through the clouds on the horizon. It’s over.
Completely, one thousand percent over. Not five minutes ago it looked like walking out the front door would mean drowning. But now the fading sun is coming through the blinds, painting rosy red slashes on the living room wall.
The phone rings again. My mother answers and then gives me a curious look as she hands me the receiver, likely confused about why I am fielding more calls in a five-minute period than I have all summer. “I’m ready,” the voice says, muted and serious.
It only takes a second to process. “Christian?”
“Yes. It’s time. For the mission.”
Great. Now he thinks he’s James Bond. He must have been staring out the window, waiting for the all clear. I wonder if he’s calling from his shoe phone. “Um, okay. The beach?”
“Yeah. Meet you out on the street in twenty.” At least he doesn’t say something goofy, like “nineteen hundred hours” or “let’s synchronize our watches.”
The line goes dead, and I check to make sure I have nothing between my teeth and walk down the staircase, trying to be nonchalant. Christian is coming out of the hotel at the same time. I hear Melinda’s voice behind him. “You should bring a jacket! It’s chilly on the beach at night!” she screeches. He raises his eyes toward the heavens and exhales long and hard. Leave it to Melinda to single-handedly destroy his James Bond image the way she destroyed my hair.
He’s barefoot, wearing a black T-shirt that shows his tattoos. He has his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his baggy black pants. He doesn’t say anything, just motions for me to follow him. “Um. Was I supposed to wear black?” I ask, looking down at my pink sweatshirt.
“Not a big deal,” he says. “We’re not really going to do it, anyway. I’ll just show you a few things.”
We get to the boardwalk and by now the tide is going out and there’s a small sliver of beach. I kick off my flip-flops near the entrance and step down into the cold, damp sand, shivering in the wind. The waves are still big and choppy but they’re not nearly as scary as they were earlier in the day. He walks with me toward an overturned rowboat and stares up at the sky. Then his eyes lazily trail to the sand. The footprints have been smoothed away by the waves, so it looks like we’re the first people ever to come here. He drags his foot along, making a perfect circle on the smooth sand, stopping every so often to survey the sky. “Now, what I would do is walk around the outside of the circle, three times.”
“Uh, okay,” I say, keeping my opinions to myself. “What for?”
“It shows the stars you’re welcoming them.”
I can’t help it: I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, but “Why not just bake them a pie?” leaks out.
I expect him to fire back a zinger, but he doesn’t. He gives me a tired look, then stares at the horizon, where a few lights from passing ships blink on and off. Then, reluctantly, he starts to walk it.
“I thought you said you weren’t going to—”
“If this is what it takes to get you to see that this isn’t a joke …”
“Hey, don’t blame me if you burst into flames or whatever,” I say. Still, I don’t stop him. I’m too curious.
“It won’t do anything,” he whispers. I’m unable to tear my eyes away as he steps around the circle, putting his heel directly in front of his toe, like a high-wire performer. I shiver and my breath catches. And maybe it’s the moonlight bouncing off the waves, playing tricks on my eyes, but do the angles of his face begin to soften?
When he’s done walking the circle, he pulls his shirt over his head. It’s freezing, but before I can ask him what the hell he’s thinking, he says in a rather breathless way, “Now I just lie within the circle.”
As he’s getting into position, I gasp. He has tattoos all over his chest. They look like stars, suns, moons, planets. When he kneels in the sand, I can see them on his shoulders, too.
I want to tell him to stop, that this is all too creepy for me, but I can’t find my voice. He lies down and soon he is quiet and it’s like I am the only one there, the only live person on the whole beach. Because suddenly, he goes still and then even his chest stops moving and I know he’s doing exactly what Wish did. Whatever that was. And I know he doesn’t really want to … he’s doing it for me. I feel a stab of guilt for that. He said it was addictive; maybe it’s like dangling a vial of coke in front of someone in rehab. It’s been a few days since I was afraid of him; mostly I’ve just wanted to wring his neck. But gradually, as he lies there, open and vulnerable, I realize that a whole new side of him has been emerging, one I kind of like. And I sort of enjoy our verbal sparring matches, as much as I hate to admit it. I like him. So I finally find the words. “Stop,” I murmur.
He doesn’t. He continues to lie there. A seagull screeches overhead, somewhere among the darkening clouds, as if in warning. And then the stars begin to dull, or maybe that’s all in my mind, because Christian’s skin begins to glow. And at once it’s no longer Christian. It’s the image of Christian, his body and all … but it’s him without flaw. His tattoos disappear. He’s beautiful.
I double over, wanting to retch, but everything inside me is dry.
“Stop!” I shout, shaking his arm.
Nothing. I scream it over and over again, but it’s like he’s gone.
Breathless, I sink to my knees and shove him hard, so that he’s lying facedown in the sand. He finally stirs.
“What the—” he says, as if I woke him from a long night’s sleep. He rolls over and sits up, looking stunned. “What happened?”
“Okay, okay. I believe you,” I say, unable to control my chattering teeth.
He rubs his neck. “Ouch. Good. Because I’m not doing it again.”
“It hurts?”
“When you stop, it’s like a hangover.” He notices me looking at his chest, unable to break my gaze. “I used to take it very seriously,” he admits sheepishly. “It’s stupid. I wish I could get rid of them. They were just for fun. This is the only one that matters.” He points at the star on his wrist. “I wasn’t sure what tattooing over it would do, when I did it. The ritual takes longer, and I can’t get the full power of the stars, so the effect is not as drastic … but I’ll always belong to them.”
“Belong to them?”
“To the stars. This mark … it identifies you to the stars. It says you belong to them. If you don’t have it, it doesn’t work.”
“So you mean, I couldn’t do it if I wanted to?”
“Nope. Not without the mark.” He throws his shirt over his head, pulls his knees to his chest, and exhales. “It’s funny. You start out thinking it’s so cool, to be able to control the stars. But eventually they end up controlling you.”
“And there’s no way you can get rid of it?”
“No. Well, tattooing over it … trying to remove it helped. It made it less powerful. But it will never really go away. And it itches like hell sometimes. It wants me to perform the rituals. When I don’t, it gets angry.”
Angry? Who the hell would voluntarily get a moody tattoo? Wish is too smart for that. I think. “Wish doesn’t have that mark. That star thing. Don’t you think I would have seen it?”
“It depends on how well you know him.”
I’m about to tell him that as a matter of fact, I know Wish really well, better than I know myself, so screw off, when he says, “It doesn’t have to be on his wrist.”
“Oh,” I say, feeling stupid. I know him well, but not in the way that would allow me to identify errant birthmarks on his butt or anything.
My face must be all twisted in horror and embarrassment, because Christian smiles slyly. “Is he hot all the time? Like on fire? Does he wear all black? Does he get all pissy when it rains?” I don’t say anything, but my face obviously broadcasts better than CNN, because he says, “He’s definitely Luminati.”
I swallow. “Okay, fine, say he is. How does he stop, then?”
“Everyone who plays with the stars has had to learn that attempting to use their power can have disastrous results. First, your boyfriend needs to learn it, too. Until then, he’s in trouble.”
I exhale. That’s so cryptic. I was hoping there was a precise, twelve-step program for staraholics that I could get Wish to follow, maybe even anonymously, by stuffing a pamphlet in his locker. “Great. But how did you stop?”
“The hardest way you can, I guess,” Christian says. “Cold turkey. I had to.”
“Why?”
He looks at me for a moment and then breaks into a slow smile and shakes his head. “You remind me so much of my old girlfriend, it’s scary.”
I’m surprised. After all, he hasn’t said much about his past life “out west,” other than the whole belonging-to-a-cult thing. I figured it didn’t matter much to him, because like he said, he’s never going back. “Ravishingly beautiful?” I mutter.
“Asked too many questions.”
“Well,” I say, getting defensive, “I think a bomb like this requires them, don’t you?”
He smirks. “There’s another one.”
“Shut up,” I snap. Did I say I was starting to like him? Because now all I want to do is grab a handful of dreads and shove his head under the sand.
“She was really smart,” he says, looking up at the sky. His next words are barely a whisper. “Smarter than me, that’s for sure.”
I’m about to say, “So she dumped you?” but that’s another question, and I’d hate to prove him right.
So then there’s a long moment of silence, during which I become aware that just about every pore of my body is bulging into a goose bump, screaming out for warmth. And since I’m not snuggling against present company, I stand up and dust the sand off my shorts, and the conversation is over.