Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions (25 page)

“Come on,” Laura says excitedly. “We have to find you something to wear.”

It’s all right
, I tell myself.
Just go through with this. Don’t cause trouble. Do what’s expected. Go to the dance and let them laugh at you and then come home right away. There will still be time to leave.

I find a dress in my closet and put it on but I can’t zip it up. I go back outside to the front room. “Can you help me?” I ask Laura.

She doesn’t hesitate. “Of course,” she says, and she zips it right up, but her hands never touch me at all.

The transport drops me off in front of the gymnasium built above our classrooms. The doors stand open wide, and inside I can see figures moving.

I don’t want to admit it to myself, but I am curious. Last year, I didn’t come because I wasn’t asked to the dance, but I didn’t know that I never would be. Even with my father getting more and more quiet, I didn’t realize how much his absence would change things. How it would change me.

I pause in the empty doorway to watch.

People dance in couples, so close, so tight against each other. The air smells like flowers and tastes like strawberry. A spring flavor. If it were fall, we’d smell spices and taste apples.

Traditions from long ago. There’s a wedding scene in the films from the Beautiful Time. In the scene, the woman wears white. The man wears a dark suit. In front of the couple is a lovely cake, flowers, a pile of sumptuous gifts. But it’s what is behind them that makes you breathless.

It’s the sunset.

And it is bigger than our whole world.

“
There
you are,” says a girl whose name I don’t know. “Every-one’s waiting. Come on.” I look where she’s pointing and see the sun and moon and the other stars standing together at the front of the gymnasium. I’m supposed to join them. I follow the girl along the side of the room.

Twentieth century, only two hundred and fifty years ago, but different in so many ways. Slow, sluggish cars instead of light-fast transports. Girls with skirts with silly little dogs on them and boys with slick black jackets
.

This could happen then. They had dances and they crowned kings and queens too.

No. That’s not the right time.

Mia is the moon, of course. I can tell by the crown on her head, made of large silver circles. The other girls who are stars have smaller crowns, and the girl ahead of me turns and hands me one, the silver points of each star sharp and precise in my hand. “Put it on,” she whispers. “It’s time for the star dance.” Something like pity flashes across her face. “You can leave after this song. The next dance is for the sun and the moon.”

I’m lifting it to my head when I see him.

Elio.

He’s the sun.

I know it even though the boys don’t wear crowns like the girls do.

And I don’t know if my crown caught some of the light from some part of the room and reflected it at him, or if he heard the girl talking to me, or if he just happened to move at that moment, but he looks at me just as I settle the stars in my hair.

I drop my hands down and look back.

If anyone were to tie me here, it would be him.

But I have to go. And now I know where and when.

There’s never really been any question.

The Time of the Beautiful People.

Two hundred years ago. The early two thousands.

The best years.

The kind years.

The years where my father has gone.

When the music starts for the star dance, two of the boys reach out their hands to two of the girls. The other boy, the last star, doesn’t even glance my way. He asks Mia to dance.

She turns toward me, her face a pale flash in the pretend starlight filtering down from the ceiling. I don’t wait to see her smile. I turn back out to look at the watching crowd. Some people laugh. Some people just look. Some turn away. I don’t know who is more cruel: those who watch, or those who pretend they see nothing.

I lift my chin.
After this dance, I can leave. It won’t be long.

I feel their breath in this crowded place and smell their sweat. I’m in the middle of them and I can’t get away.

I don’t want them to matter. They haven’t, for so long. But I don’t know if I can do this.

Someone else laughs, and I close my eyes, trying to block it out, for practice. I think of my father and I remember him making animals for me out of bits of folded paper. Small. Smaller, until the paper became a tiny frog, or a little winged bird. But then he stopped making things. He started bending inward, and I was left with nothing to hold.

Someone says my name, and my eyes fly open.

Elio. He walks toward me. In the artificial starlight, his hair is no color at all, but I know his face.

He stops in front of me.

He puts his hand out for mine. “Will you dance with me?”

“Look,” someone behind me whispers. Across the floor, Mia dances on, oblivious for now. The circles in her crown flash in and out of the lights.

I look back at Elio but I don’t take his hand.

“Sora,” he says. He runs his other hand through his hair, an impatient gesture I remember. “This isn’t right. You’re supposed to be dancing.”

The music behind us from the musicians sounds like everything does here. Like everything looks here. Bright, shiny, hard, with no place for anything deep.

I look down and so I see the moment when his fingers close around mine. I’m glad I’m not looking at him because I gasp, just barely, when our fingers touch.

I didn’t remember this. I didn’t expect this.

He is so warm. It feels so good.

I look back up. People still watch us, and I watch him. He smiles at me, the way he did when we made it rain, and then he pulls me close.

People behind us gasp in surprise. “What?” Elio says, over my head. “She hasn’t been Untouchable for months. It doesn’t matter.”

But it does.

The music suddenly seems so full and beautiful. I look up at Elio. He reaches for the crown. “Do you want this?” he asks, and I shake my head. He pulls back long enough to give it to me and I take it and drop it behind me. I don’t look to see where it falls. He pulls me back where I was, and this time he rests his cheek on my head. I feel the warmth through my hair, all the way down to my toes.

Maybe all the Beautiful People aren’t gone. Maybe Elio is one of them. And I never knew. All I had to do was show the pain.

Could it be that easy?

I wish they’d do a weather pattern; that they’d let it rain or snow above us to explain the drops on my cheeks and those I must be leaving on his shirt. But no—because this is the stars’ dance, the weather in the room is black sky and showery silver light. When it’s Mia’s turn, the room will be bright and white. Everyone will see her dance and everyone will want to look, but for a completely different reason than they wanted to look and laugh at me.

He runs his hand down my back just as the music ends and the silver lights dim.

And suddenly I think he might kiss me. He whispers, “Sora. Are you all right?”

“Yes,” I say, and I think he holds me a little tighter.

Please kiss me
, a voice in my head whispers, and though I’m hearing my own thoughts, I almost don’t recognize them.
There has to be a reason to stay here.

He leans just a little closer; I feel it in his breath on my cheek and in every piece of me that’s touching any part of him.

The lights begin to come back on, slowly. I’m still holding on, holding on, my face tipped back, looking up at Elio.

“Sora,” he says, gently, and then when I don’t let go, he looks around. People are watching again. And starting to laugh. He lets go and I step back.

Mercifully, the room plunges back into darkness. Someone yells at someone else to fix the lights. It’s common, the power shorting out inside the Globe.

I have to leave.

I didn’t think one touch would undo me.

I think I might hear Elio behind me but I don’t stop. I hurt too much. I feel too much. This is dangerous. My father succeeded because he shut himself off before he left. I have to do that too. Though he doesn’t know it, Elio has put everything at risk.

The auxiliary power has come back on by the time I reach the transports, so I can get home. The night sky of the Globe throbs dull gray. We’ve never seen a real sky. I slam the door of the transport shut and it begins to move.

And I let myself look at other truths as I slide along in the dark.

My father lied to me. He never intended to come back to me. He never went back to the time of the Beautiful People. He didn’t believe in them. He had no faith. He went back to when he first met her. My mother. Just to be with her, even if it was for only a handful of moments.

Someone might say that was beautiful.

I don’t think so at all.

I don’t know what he planned to do. To stop her from having me, perhaps. I wondered for a long time if I would someday vanish, if he could change the future when he walked back into the past. But I didn’t go anywhere.

I’m here, but I’ve forgotten how to take up space. How to think about anything except going away.

I couldn’t change his mind. So I didn’t try to change anyone else’s mind, either. I let them think I’d been Outside too, and when they looked at me, I gave them the hard, flat stare of someone who has seen too much. When Elio or any of the others tried to talk to me, I didn’t answer back, or I said words that meant nothing at all.

What has happened to me is my fault too.

I can’t stand to be touched anymore. It breaks me.

I have to be healed. I have to be loved.

And the Beautiful People can do it.

The transport stops.

It’s dark inside my apartment, but that doesn’t matter. I walk to the little table, open the drawer, unlock the box with the key I wear around my neck. I don’t need light to do any of it. The sphere rolls perfectly into the hollow of my hand.

I know I can leave. It’s all I know how to do.

I think of the year: 2011. That will be the one. I look at an image from that time. Not the one of the wedding; I’m worried that if I choose that one, I’ll fly straight past the cake and the people and into that sky full of sunset and burn up before I’ve seen anything. Instead, I look at a picture of one of the Beautiful People. She walks across a red carpet and everyone stands near her, stretching out their hands, screaming, calling to her, while she turns a beatific smile upon them.

I pick up the little glass world that my father gave me before he took what was left of my own.

This is how you leave.

You sit. You are quiet. You close your eyes. You think. You put the stone in your hand and hold it. There is no short way to this, no magical spell. Rushing will do you no good at all.

And not many people can do this. There is always something that holds them back and ties them down.

Not me.

I’m gone.

I didn’t expect to like it so much in here, in the in-between. So dark, so quiet. Maybe there is no sense in trying to find any time. Any place. Just leaving might be enough.

If you stay here, you become lost. And no one can find you.

I like lost.

Wherever I am, in the corners of my mind, in the edges of space, wherever it is, I lie down to rest.

There is no time.

There is no me.

And then something happens. A light here, another there.

Is it them? Are the Beautiful People coming to find me?

No.

I’m alone.

I’m standing in the stars. I’m standing on top of the Globe, I think, and then I look down and see it’s the moon under my feet. Or maybe the sphere. I can’t tell if I am tiny or enormous, and it doesn’t matter because I’m really
outside
, under the stars.

I stand there for a long time, trying to find the right words for what I see. Spending minutes, hours, years perhaps, choosing each one.

Infinite.

Bright.

Beautiful.

And I remember: I should think of the Beautiful People, if I want to find their time and escape my own.

Their time. My time.

The real gift is to have any time at all.

And suddenly, in the clarity of the starlight, I can see how things really are. The Beautiful People are real and they are not real. They lived, but they are not who we have made them out to be. The Beautiful People were not beautiful. Not any more or less than any other people throughout time and space. They reached out their hands sometimes and not others. They were kind like Laura and Elio and cruel like Mia. We made them beautiful because we needed to believe in them. And we wanted to believe they would heal us. We—I—wanted to believe they would
love
us.

And I see that my father chased a memory when there was someone real who loved him right there in his imperfect world. Me. He shut down and folded in, and his body became small because he had let his mind become even smaller. As I have done.

It will hurt, I see, to try to open up again.

I am stronger than he was.

I take one last look at the stars.

For a long time I feel only the pain. Then other things nudge at the edges of my mind. The feeling of my face pressed deep into the rug. My fingers clasped tightly around a glass sphere.

The sound of a voice at the door.

“Are you there?” he asks.

Elio.

His voice is rough but soft, as though he’s been calling for hours. And in all the distances traveled tonight, the one I think of now is the one when Elio reached out his hand and touched me.

The room is dark and quiet and still. I stand up and walk to the door. I let go of the sphere. It doesn’t make a sound as it falls onto the thick rug at my feet. But there is a sharp snap when I crush it under my heel.

“I’ve been Outside,” I say through the door.

There is no sound on the other side for a moment. Is he still there?

And then, he speaks.

“So have I.”

At the Late Night, Double Feature, Picture Show
by Jessica Verday

he worst thing about cannibal Girl Scouts are the badges. You would think it’s the fact that they want to chase you down and strip the flesh from your bones. I mean, what’s worse than
that
? But you’d be wrong.

It’s the badges.

The badges tell you exactly
how
those little green devils will turn your skin into bite-size Fruit Roll-Up pieces. Trust me, I’ve seen it happen before.

The one that was tracking me now had four badges: knot tying, tree climbing, fire building, and archery. Basically, that meant she could shoot me with an arrow, hang me from a tree (with a proper knot, of course), and then roast me over a big ol’ campfire.

Girl Scouts. They’re doing it wrong.

A twig snapped behind the bush on my right and I honed in on it, focusing again on the task at hand. Waiting for the little girl to come out and just show herself already, so that I could do my job and
prove
to everyone at home that I was part of
their
team.

Well, a bigger part than I already was.

My phone vibrated, the special one-two-three vibration that told me it was Andy. I ignored it and tried not to think about how much my back was killing me.

“Come
on
,” I whispered. “Nice, juicy piece of meat sitting right here.” I was pretending that my shoelace was tangled and I’d been fidgeting with it for the last twenty minutes.

Something crunched in the woods. There was a flash of dark green, and she catapulted herself at me from the trees.

“Hrrrruuunnngggghhhh!”

She made the unintelligible sound midlunge.

I sidestepped and whirled out of the way. Little brown shoes and carefully styled blond curls went flying as she crashed into the tree on my left. She couldn’t have been more than ten. Hands raised into dainty claws, she turned around and came at me again.

Fishing for the pouch on my utility belt, I counted the seconds as she came closer and closer.
One Mississippi . . . Two . . .

And then she was on me.

Sixty-five pounds of squirming, snapping, biting child that wanted to tear off my nose, ears, fingers,
anything
she could get her little chompers on. She opened her mouth wide, using both hands to hold me down. Tiny bits of fragmented flesh were caught between an ingrown baby tooth and a new adult tooth.

“Damn it!” I yelled, fingers finally grabbing hold of my saving grace. The one thing that would hopefully distract her long enough to stop her from turning any of my digits into her next Happy Meal. “Stop! Here!”

I withdrew a piece of turkey giblets. It’s the closest thing to human flesh that I’ve found without it actually
being
human flesh, and I thrust it up under her nose. Her face turned frantic, nostrils flared as she greedily grabbed onto it with both hands and shoved it into her gaping jaws.

She ripped and tore her way through the entire thing. I pulled up my watch and timed her.

Eight seconds.
Not bad.

Her eyes glazed over and she looked down at me, a tiny smear of blood staining the corner of her mouth.

“That’s it,” I said. “You’re not getting any more.”

She cast a glance at my arm. The one that I was still holding up to look at my watch.

My fingers groped at my belt again, but the pouch was empty.
I’m out of meat.
“You were supposed to restock me, Andy. You little shit!” I said between gritted teeth.

The girl didn’t care. Her eyes were glazing over even more, but there was still enough wildness there that made me uneasy. Her mouth opened . . . teeth bared . . .

And then she fell over.

I shoved her off and rolled, using the ground to push myself up to a standing position. “Didn’t see that one coming, did you? When’s the last time your food fought back?”

Nudging her with the toe of my boot, I saw a small bit of plastic resting next to her hand. It was a piece of capsule that still had some allergy medicine in it.

Benadryl. Fastest, easiest, cheapest way to take ’em down.

My phone vibrated again. “Andy, what do you want?” I hissed into it. “I’m in a movie theater.” No one at home knew what I was
really
up to.

“Dad needs you to get some birchwood. From the farm. He wants to carve some more stakes tonight.”

“I can’t,” I said hastily. “I have to—”

“Just do it, Jane. Dad needs it. How’s the movie?”

“Boring part. They just had a chase scene through the woods. Some guy with a chainsaw. Now the blond bimbo is suggesting they split up.”

“I thought you went to go see a chick flick?
The Notebook
or something.”

Andy, Andy, Andy. Always trying to trip me up.
Too bad little sister is better at this game than you are.
“Why would I go see that piece of crap?” I snorted. “I told you I was going to see
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
and
The Crazies
. It’s a double feature.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s right. I must have gotten the titles mixed up.”

“
You
got a chick flick and a horror movie mixed up? I might expect that from Dad, since he doesn’t watch horror movies, but come on, big brother. What chick flick has the word
chain-saw
or
massacre
in it?”

“What, you’ve never heard of
My Heart’s Massacre
or
Chainsaw Beauty
?”

He laughed and I did too, but then I saw something that made me stop laughing. Glancing at Polly Prissy Pants, I told myself that it wasn’t true. I didn’t see what I
thought
I’d seen. “He’s back with the chainsaw. I have to go.”

Her foot twitched. She was waking up.

“Have fun at your movie, little sister!” Andy’s voice was sick-eningly sweet.

“Oh, bait me,” I said.

Andy laughed so hard it made my ear hurt, and I hung up on him.
Bait me
was our replacement for
bite me
. . . in more ways than one.

Bait is what I was. Literally.

My family were hunters. Supernatural hunters. Everyone gifted in their own way with some unique power or skill. Everyone but me. And so I became the bait. It was my job to be the helpless girl in a dark alley. The clueless teenager with a flat tire. The lost hiker with a broken shoelace. You’d be surprised at how many demons, vampires, and vengeful spirits there are out there.

Normally, each hunt we went on had to be carefully vetted and approved by every family member. But this time, I’d wanted to do something on my own. To bring in a catch without them, and
prove
that I was ready to be more than just bait.

Bait me, my ass.

I had just enough time to turn, when the trees parted. Green berets and sashes came crashing through the branches as a swarm of hungry Girl Scouts caught sight of me. According to their badges, it was the rest of Troop 409.

And I was all out of meat.

“Shit.”

All those years of obstacle course training and nighttime avoidance maneuvers that Mom and Dad had
insisted
upon when I turned nine suddenly came in handy. I hooked left and started sprinting, jumping over roots and ducking under tree limbs as I went.

The Girl Scouts had a surprising amount of endurance for being so young. Either that, or I was getting soft.

But I still had a few tricks up my sleeve. I took out my knife and sliced my hand. Crisscrossing my path, I left traces of blood on each tree that I passed in order to confuse them. They were only capable of focusing on one thing right now: food.

Suddenly, the trees came to an end and I found myself back on the road. Where my car
should
have been.

My car that was now gone.

Stolen. Or towed. Who knew which one?

“This is
so
not what I need right now.” I turned around in a circle, but my car didn’t magically appear. I quickly clicked my heels together three times, but that didn’t do it either. “Damn Dorothy bullshit. That stuff from the movies never works.”

My phone was in my pocket. All I had to do was make one call, and Dad or Andy would come pick me up. But that would lead to several problems. First, I’d have to explain the whole “I’m not really at a movie” thing, but more importantly, I’d have to explain why I’d driven to woods that were two hours away from home to try and track cannibal Girl Scouts on my own.

That, I definitely did
not
want to do.

“Please, won’t you come play with us?” a voice said, from the trees on the right.

“We want to play with you,” said another, on the left.

Close. Too close.

I couldn’t let them see me panic. That was Dad’s number-one rule. So, I yelled back, “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to play with your food?”

One of them giggled.

The giggle was what set me off. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and I started running down the road.

When I finally saw headlights, I knew it had to be divine intervention.

I waved my arms wildly to flag down the driver of the black SUV. Stealing a glance at the woods behind me, I was sure that I could still hear them giggling and grunting.

“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” I chanted, as the driver rolled to a stop and opened his window.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“My car broke down. Can you give me a lift?” Already, I was opening the back door.

“Okay, sure.”

I climbed in, surprised to see that there were three other people seated inside. “Go, go,” I urged the driver. “Just get out of here.” I tried to look out the back window, but it was tinted. So darkly tinted that I couldn’t see anything.

“Is something chasing you?” the driver asked, shifting gears. “Was it a bear?”

“Something like that.”

The doors were all safely shut now, but I wouldn’t feel better until we were moving again. “If you can just take me to the interstate, that would be great. There’s a movie theater at the second exit. I can get a ride home from there.”

“Headed that way ourselves.”

He hit the gas pedal and we moved away from the woods. Not fast enough for my liking, but at least it was in the right direction.
Away from them
.

The inside of the car was dark, but my eyes were adjusting and it was then I started noticing what my traveling companions were wearing. Feather boas. And . . . corsets. With high heels and fishnet stockings.

Then I noticed something else. The smell.

It’s a very unique scent, and hard to describe what it is exactly. Dad has this theory that it’s the chemicals given off by a body when it’s slowly starting to decay. It takes years to be able to hone your sense of smell to even be able to recognize it.

But I knew what it was.

That smell, plus the tinted windows and the boas could only mean one thing: I was catching a ride from a car full of vampires in drag.

“So,” I said casually, putting a hand down by the top of my boot. I always carried an extra stake in there. “Where are you guys going?”

“Denton,” the vamp next to me replied. “We’re on a road trip.”

“We can call a mechanic for you,” the driver offered. “When we get there.”

“A satanic mechanic!” the rest of my traveling companions sang out.

And that was when I acted.

Grabbing hold of the stake, I slid it free and slammed it under the chin of the guy in the seat next to me. “If I were you, I’d start praying to whatever god you believe in
right now
.” With emphasis on the last two words, I dug the tip of the stake into his skin and heard a gasp of pain.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” he cried.

Suddenly, the tires locked and we swerved wildly as the driver slammed on the brakes. We came to a stop in the opposite lane.

I kept my grip firm. Little hiccups of sound filled the car and I realized that the big, bad vampire was crying.

“Please,” he said. “I swear, we won’t hurt you. We’re just going to a—”

“Oh, stop it. Like I’m going to believe a vampire?”

Light from the overhead console flooded the interior, and I blinked at the sudden brightness.

“How do you know what we are?” the driver asked.

I glanced at him and saw that his face was covered in white makeup. A black circle had been drawn around the edges as an outline, with exaggerated blue eye shadow and heavy red lipstick completing the look.