Captivate (8 page)

I try to nod but it’s hard with the silly neck brace thing. “I’m sorry about the car, Gram.”

“The car, my dear, is the least of my worries.” She says. Then she does a very un-Betty thing. She leans over and kisses my cheek. Her lips are soft and dry. “You are going to be the death of me.”

She chuckles. I’m on my back, staring up at their faces. The light is so fluorescent bright that I can make out their pores, Nick’s individual eyebrow hairs. So many people have been in this ambulance dying. Some of them Betty has saved. She is a hero. So is Nick, taking down so many pixies all by himself and never complaining, just trying to keep everyone safe. A hero can be anyone, but I have two right here, and they love me. Tears seep out of my eyes.

Nick leans down and kisses my eyelids. “Loving you, Zara, is a full-time job. It’s a great job, don’t get me wrong. It’s the best job in the universe. But it is not easy, because you tend to….”

“Get hurt” Betty suggests. “Find trouble? Pass out? Break arms?”

“All of the above.” Nick laughs.

My hands find Nick’s wrist and I grab onto its thickness. “You know, I’m the patient here. Where’s the bedside manner? Where’s the sympathy?”

“Zara, sympathy is just a good excuse to buy greeting cards and make sorry eyes and secretly gloat over how glad you are that you aren’t the person whose crap is hanging out there for the world to see.” Betty says.

A check at the hospital reveals:

 one sprained wrist

 a couple of minorly bruised but unbroken ribs, and

 one small neck strain that does not require a neck brace.

Gram changes into her civilian gear at the hospital, putting on a flannel shirt and L. L.

Bean cords, and then drives us home in her truck. I’m in the middle seat leaning against Nick.

I push my thigh against his. “Well, thank God.”

“Thank God what?” he asks. His hand slowly rubs up and down the place where my shoulder meets my arm. It makes me good shiver.

“That I don’t have a neck brace. It’s hard to rock a neck brace, especially if we’re still going to that dance.”

He leans in and kisses my nose. “If anyone could do it, you could.”

I tilt my head so our lips meet.

“Hormonal ones, I am right here. Me. The old lady otherwise known as your grandmother,” Betty says.

“Sorry. He’s just irresistible.” I say, settling back against him.

“Well, try to resist the irresistible,” Betty says knowingly as the truck bumps over a pothole. “Sorry! Didn’t mean to jostle you.”

“Wait,” Nick says. “What did that mean?”

“She said to resist the irresistible,” I explain.

“But that means me.”

Betty starts laughing again. “You have a high opinion of yourself, don’t you, Mr. Colt?”

He starts stuttering. “But Zara said and then…...and you said…..”

“I didn’t just mean you, Nick,” she says, her voice softening for a second. Then it hardens up and I know what’s coming. We told her about the pixie guy I freed. The voice hardening means Official Grandmother Lecture Time. “For Zara the irresistible isn’t just you, it’s justice. It’s being noble. It’s being the martyr. It’s about ending pain for others and forgetting about herself or the big picture.”

“That’s harsh, Betty,” Nick defends me.

“Harsh? I’ll tell you what’s harsh. Her little do-gooderness set a pixie free, possibly a king, judging from how quickly he healed, and she almost died because of it.” She takes a corner and even though she’s mad at me she takes it slow so I don’t bounce around too much. “You get that, don’t you, Zara? You could have died today.”

My bruised ribs hammer home her point. We pull into our driveway. All the windows in the Cape are dark. The sky is dark. Everything is dark. The woods are just pieces of shadow. You can’t tell what’s back there. You can’t tell who might be watching.

A pixie’s true skin color is blue. Cookie Monster, Grover, and other lovable Muppets are also blue.

Do not confuse the two. Muppets don’t kill you. Usually.

“Wake up. Zara! Honey! Wake the hell up.” Betty shakes me.

I swat at her, hit her flannel pajama top. The soft plushness of it is so different from Betty’s hardness. The lights are on in my room. Huh? My eyelids flutter, but I manage to open them, sit up. My voice is a frantic mess. “What? What is it? Pixies?”

She holds my arms up by the shoulders, but her grip loosens. “You were having another nightmare.”

I flop back onto the pillows. My chest aches from all the movement. “Again?”

I’ve had one every night since the accident. That makes a week’s worth of nightmares.

“You remember it?” Her hand touches my forehead, soothes away some hair.

“Yeah.”

“You want to tell me?”

“Gram, nobody likes to hear about other people’s dreams. It’s like watching PowerPoint presentations of somebody else’s vacation in St. Croix or something. You hear about the beach but you aren’t really experiencing the beach, so it’s just not that interesting.”

Her eyes close a little bit as she examines me. Her hands work at soothing out her pj top, which features frolicking lions and lollipops. Then she stills herself. She is so solid and good and crusty, the best kind of grandmother. “I’m sorry I woke you up,” I finish.

“Not a big deal, sweetie. I’m up all the time.” She leans over and kisses my forehead.

She straightens up and walks stiffly across the hardwood floor to the open door of my bedroom and hesitates by the light switch. “You want me to shut this off?”

My pulse speeds up. It hits against my skin, like blood is trying to beat its way out of my veins. “No. Light is good.”

The door clicks shut and I stare up at the Amnesty International poster that hangs over my bed. There’s an image of a candle wrapped in barbed wire, a flame that still burns.

There were flames in my dream. They flickered around my feet and I was running through them, running up the stairs of a house, running toward someone. Every single part of me needed to get up those stairs, deeper into that fire. The hallway was just like the one in the big pixie mansion that we’ve trapped my father and the rest of them in. I thought for a second that’s who I was looking for, but I suddenly realized that it wasn’t him. Nick called my name from the bottom of the stairs, but I ignored him, rushing deeper and deeper into the flames where the blond pixie was waiting for me.

Then Nick screamed. I turned around and he was surrounded by pixies, feeding pixies ripping at his clothes, his flesh. I hesitated and that’s the worst part of the dream—me hesitating. The flames were so tempting, the pull to go farther into the house so great.

But then I ignored my need and started to head back toward him. And when I did? Bam.

Something grabbed me from behind. I shrieked. And Betty woke me up. That’s it. End of dream.

Man, I hate dreams. How is it they can make you feel guilty when they aren’t even real?

Worry keeps me from sleeping. I get out of bed to use Gram’s laptop, which she’s letting me borrow until we go up to Bangor and buy a replacement. I open up my e-mail to read Amnesty’s current Urgent Action paper. It’s about Fidelis Chiramba, Gandhi Mudzinga, and Kisimusi Dhlamini, who are in a jail in Zimbabwe just for being political activists, though they all have major medical issues. They weren’t even allowed to appear for a trial. It drives me nuts. I shoot off an e-mail to the Zimbabwe government and consider getting ready for school.

Instead I work on the pixie handbook for a bit. I’m working on the chapter “Saving yourself from Pixies.” Even that gets old, though. So I mossy up and open the shades.

The sky is bright blue, a brand-new day. I wonder how those captured monks I’ve read about feel, what their sky looks like, if they can even see it, if their candle of hope shudders against shrill scenes.

The woods just beyond the driveway sway with the wind, and for a second it seems as if something is moving between the trunks, a man. I shiver. It reminds me of my father always vanishing before he finally told me who he was, what he wanted.

“He’s locked up,” I announce to the window. My breath fogs it up. I use my fingertips to wipe the fog away. “And I refuse to let the other pixie guy be out there.”

I try to make it sound tougher. “Absolutely refuse.”

The woods sway some more and for a second I sway with them, dizzy, confused. I shake my head, imagine Nick’s broad face, the line of his chin, his mischief-twinkling eyes. I turn away from the woods and go take a shower.

It’s when I’m getting dressed that I get an idea. My stepdad wrote in the margin of an old Stephen King novel a long time ago, tipping us off about pixies. Maybe he did that again. Just because Betty and my mom don’t know anything about Valhalla or Valkyries doesn’t mean he didn’t. I race into his old bedroom and eye the ratty-looking paperbacks in his bookcase. They are almost all Stephen King. The top shelf starts with King’s first book, Carrie, and goes on chronologically to this short story collection, Nightmares and Dreamscapes, which was published in 1993. Stephen King wrote a lot of books after that, but they aren’t here. They are probably at our house in Charleston. I thumb through them all, flipping through the pages, looking for my dad’s writing in the margins; little notes about things, signs that he existed. Sometimes just seeing a page earmarked makes my stomach hitch up. Losing people you love affects you. It is buried inside of you and becomes this big, deep hole of ache. It doesn’t magically go away, even when you stop officially mourning. I do not want that hole to get any bigger. I do not want to lose anyone else.

I thumb through the books pretty quickly and find nothing. I slide the paperback into its place. There are other books here and I should go through them too, but I can’t be late for school. I pull out an H.P. Lovecraft collection of short stories. On the cover is this monster hiding in the far back of this horrifying cavern that looks straight from hell. The cavern is beneath a tombstone.

“Creepy,” I mutter.

I find a couple phrases in the margin. The first one is: “Leave Risk Sixty.”

The second is longer: “A Baa Ebbed Fly Tight Vigor Trolls.” Total gibberish. I tuck the book under my arm and bring it downstairs with me and say to the room, “Great.

Thanks, Dad.”

Downstairs, Betty’s left a note on the fridge:

Early shift. Take your pain medicine. Do not sell it at school.
JUST
KIDDING! Sort of.

I drop my spoon on the floor. “Crud.”

It clanks. I pick it up and stand, woozy. I have to steady myself by placing a hand on the fridge. I throw the spoon into the sink. Metal hits metal. All my organs seem to shudder inside me. I am instantly cold as I peek out the window. There’s nothing out there, just shadows. I try to uncurl my fear and pour some Cocoa Puffs. The crunch of chocolate balls is strangely tasteless in my mouth. I check to make sure my ankle bracelet is still safely fastened. It is.

“There is nothing to worry about,” I announce.

The refrigerator hums in happy oblivion. That’s the only answer I get.

Pixie eyes turn up a tiny bit at the ends.

Nick has driven me to school for the last week, which is nice because it means we get to spend more time together and I get to make sure that he has not been murdered by any evil pixie kings. Truth is, though, neither of us are all that good in the morning and we both kind of spend the whole car ride grunting and stretching and yawning.

He parks his
MINI
and grabs my bags for me. Sometimes having a slightly sprained wrist is good. It’s healing well, though. The splint is off and it’s just wrapped now.

“Do you have to take
all
your books home every single night?” He asks, hauling my new book bag over his shoulder since the last one died a fiery death.

“Yep.” I smile at him.

He leans over so he can whisper in my ear. “You are lucky you’re so cute, baby.”

I wave to Paul and Callie, who are going out and are both in our art class. They have matching Mohawks died green, which is really sweet in a retro way. Jill and Stephanie are holding hands and looking very much like morning people. They are so in love.

Lovebirds are all around us, basically, but none of them have to worry about their other half being murdered by pixies because of who they are….or aren’t.

I walk closer to Nick, put my good arm around his waist. We reach the glass doors at the front of the high school. He opens it for me. Suddenly there is heater-warmed air and lots of noise. He keeps holding the door so that Paul and Callie and Jill and Stephanie can get through too.

“We are so late,” Jill says. She gives me a thumbs-up. “Love your jeans. Nice.”

“Thanks,” I say as I see Issie zipping up the ramp to the second floor toward Devyn. Her gauzy blouse sways with the movement.

“Issie! Devyn!” I yell.

Devyn turns around and waves, smiling. He’s wheelchair free—just the metal braces that connect to his forearms! Cassidy’s standing next to him.

“Nick’s hand death-locks around my forearm. “He doesn’t have his wheelchair! Zara, he doesn’t have his wheelchair at all!”

He lets go of me and vaults over the railing of the ramp. Nick’s arms wrap around Devyn and he swings him around in a big circle with the force of his hug. People scatter out of the way. One of Devyn’s braces falls off his arm and hits the ramp. Issie leaps over it as she runs up. She lunges right into the group hug. She’s screaming, she’s so happy.

We knew this was coming, but to see it…to actually see him without his chair? The feeling is heart-stopping good. I pick up the brace as I trot up the ramp. “No wonder you didn’t want a ride today,” Issie’s saying. She keeps patting him on the back. “No wonder! Did you drive yourself?”

“Nope. Cassidy drove me.”

“Right!” Cassidy interrupts, fiddling with her sparkly pink barrette.

“She—she drove you?” Issie sputters.

“Yeah, Is. I wanted to surprise you all.” Devyn smiles at me. “What do you think, Zare?”