Pyxis: The Discovery (Pyxis Series) (9 page)

“It makes you realize how much we have here, and how much we take for granted,” he said quietly. “Simple things, like clean water and basic medicines.”

“I can’t imagine,” I said. “Sounds really amazing.”

“It was. But it’s so good to be back. I’d hate to miss out on, you know, all the Tapestry political scandals and celebrity sightings.” He grinned, his hazel eyes bright. My heart flipped a circle in my chest.

“So where does that leave you with school?” I asked, suddenly afraid he could get held back a grade.

“I kept up the home-school thing while we were there. So, I’m basically already done with sophomore year. In fact, I could pretty much teach your classes. You need a tutor?”

I snorted and rolled my eyes. As if. Up until now, my GPA had always been a good half-point higher than Mason’s.

“Lucky you,” I said. At Tapestry High, several weeks of school remained before summer break.

“But I’m not sure about Ian,” Mason continued. “He’s probably going to have to keep working through the summer to finish seventh grade.”

“Well, maybe that’ll keep him out of trouble,” I said, and Mason nodded.

We both finished eating, but neither of us moved or spoke. I felt Mason watching me, and I avoided his gaze, focusing on the paper napkin I was twisting around my fingers.

“Want to go out back?” he asked.

I nodded. We put our dishes in the sink and the leftover food in the fridge, and we grabbed our jackets before heading out to the tree house. Mason went up first, to make sure no wild animals had moved in during the Flints’ absence.

“All clear,” he called down. “It’s not even that dirty, considering.”

I climbed up, and when I poked my head through the trapdoor in the floor, a musty, woody, but not unpleasant smell hit my nose. To me, this was what childhood smelled like. Mason and I had spent hours up here when we were little.

“My beanbag chair,” I said happily, and draped myself over the green, vinyl-covered lump in the middle of the tree house.

Mason laughed. I’d always loved the sound of his laugh, a bubbly rumble that started deep in his throat and seemed to spill out and expand into space. He sat down against one wall and stretched out his long legs, ankles crossed. His hands folded across his stomach, and he regarded me for a moment. I tried not to fidget.

“So what’s the news at school?” he said finally. “Sophie still a nightmare? How’s Angeline? Who’s with who?”

“Sophie is still Sophie,” I said, and rolled my eyes. “But you know I’m not the best source for gossip.” I paused and shifted on the bean bag chair. Where to begin with the
pyxis
and all the rest? “There’s been some … strange stuff going on lately. I don’t really understand most of it, but I think it could involve you.”

He waited for me to say more, but after a moment of silence passed, he crab-walked over, settled himself cross-legged on the floor next to the bean bag, and propped his elbows on his knees. That was so Mason. I gave him a creepy, vague statement like that, and he stayed perfectly calm.

“What kind of strange stuff?” he asked.

I took a deep breath and suddenly felt overwhelmed. I clamped my lips between my teeth and waited for the prickle in my nose to pass. I was
not
going to start crying.

“There’s this box…” I began. I told him everything. The
pyxis
, the dreams about Grandma Doris and the white liquid, Harriet Jensen. He let me talk uninterrupted, his eyebrows drawn in a skeptical expression. When I mentioned the piece of paper in the lid of the
pyxis
, that finally got a reaction from him.

“It has my name on it?” he said.

I nodded.

“I think I need to see this thing.”

With the leaves of the maple tree filtering out the little sunlight that remained, the tree house had grown so dim that it was washed in gray. I was suddenly very aware that Mason’s arm was barely an inch from mine. I shivered.

“Are you cold? We can go in,” he said.

“I’m okay,” I said, just above a whisper. There was something about being in the tree house at dusk that made me want to be still and speak quietly. Mason looked at me, and for a crazy second, I was sure he was going to kiss me.

“Uh, want to go get frozen yogurt?” I stood up. Avoiding his eyes, I brushed off my jeans. “Then we could go by my house and I could show you the
pyxis
and the list.”

“Sure,” he said after a second. I couldn’t read his voice.

As we walked to the yogurt place downtown, I was relieved that the weird moment in the tree house seemed to have passed. We bought our yogurt and headed to my house.

The place was silent, and I led Mason down to my room. He set his empty yogurt cup on my desk and took in everything with a quick glance. The expression on his face was soft, almost fond. I brought the
pyxis
out from its hiding place. I’d kept it in a space in the wall behind an old wall heater that didn’t work anymore. It took a little effort to remove the front of the heater, but it was the perfect hiding spot.

Mason leaned over the box and ran his finger over the letters that spelled “
pyxis
” across the top.

“Pixies?” he asked.

“No, it’s picks-iss,” I pronounced. “Ang and I looked it up. It’s the name of some constellation and also the Greek word for a box that holds medicine.”

He tipped the lid back and peered at the five bottles inside. “But these aren’t medicines.”

“I don’t think so, but I really don’t know,” I said.

“Huh. So you’ve been dreaming about the box?”

“Not exactly. In my dream, my grandmother keeps telling me I need to give some of the white bottle to my Aunt Dorothy. She’s like, extremely … adamant about it in the dreams.”

“Are you going to?”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “I’m going to try next week, when I go to Danton for my driver’s test.”

Mason looked down at me with a wry smile. “This
is
some weird crap, Corinne.”

I shivered again. “Tell me about it.”

I popped open the secret compartment, unfolded the waxy, Tapestry Lake Convergence paper, and handed it to him. He sank into my purple chair, propped his forearms on his knees, and held the piece of paper in both hands. His lips pursed in concentration, revealing his dimples.

He handed the paper back to me. “I think I’ve got it memorized. You’d better keep this with the
pyxis
.”

“So … any ideas?”

“Let’s go back to my house,” he said, his face serious. “I want to check out that website, the one with the weird animation you told me about.”

I could tell he was withholding judgment until he could check things out for himself. I appreciated that he wasn’t questioning my sanity. Yet, anyway.

In Mason’s room, I watched over his shoulder as he typed in the URL I remembered, but nothing came up. Searches didn’t give us anything, either.

We gave up on the website, pulled his yearbooks out from his closet, and took them to the family room and sat side-by-side. As we flipped through them, I pointed to various people’s photos and updated him on everything I could remember about who was with who, who’d broken up with who, who’d allegedly slept with who, and any other Tapestry High gossip I could think of. Not that I was especially plugged in, but I was more in the loop than he was. I tried not to notice every time his tanned forearm brushed mine.

Around ten o’clock, I pulled out my phone.

“Hi, Mom,” I said when she answered. “I just wanted to let you know I’m still at Mason’s.”

He tapped my knee to get my attention. “Tell her you’re staying here tonight,” he whispered. I raised my eyebrows and felt a small bolt of nerves shoot through me.

“I’m, uh, I think I’ll just stay here tonight. We’re still catching up.” Mason grinned and gave me a thumbs-up approval.

“Oh. Well.” My mom sounded surprised, and for a second, I thought she’d veto the plan. “Are Mason’s parents there?”

I rolled my eyes. “Um … they’re in Danton shopping. Don’t be weird about it. We’re
fine
, Mom.”

“Watch your tone, Corinne,” she warned, then let out a long sigh. “Okay, I’ll see you in the morning, then.”

“Okay, love you,” I said, and I hung up before she could change her mind.

Mason and I used to stay overnight at each other’s houses all the time when we were younger, but it’d been years. I wondered if Mom might think better of it once she had a chance to consider how old we were. Not that anything was going to happen between us. Yeah, not a chance.

Mason scooted back so he was sitting with his back against the armrest of the sofa, his legs stretched out behind me. “Hey, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something,” he said.

I moved to sit against the opposite armrest, my knees drawn up to my chest.

Oh God. Here it was. I so did not want to get into the Winter Solstice Festival, Sophie, blah, blah, blah. I curled my hands into the sleeves of my sweater to keep from fidgeting.

“I had some messed-up dreams the last few days I was in Africa,” Mason continued. “You were in a lot of them. They were really horrifying, not like usual nightmares. They were … I don’t know, more
real
, somehow.”

His eyebrows were pinched together in a frown. He actually looked scared. A knot of dread began to curl up in my middle. I’d managed to forget what he’d said in his e-mail about his dream of the cove.

As he searched my face, I saw realization dawn in his eyes.

“You’ve been having them, too.” There was no question in his voice.

I nodded. Echoes of the terror I’d felt in the dreams shot through my mind like shards of ice, and I wrapped my arms tightly around my ribs as I looked at him. Even through my anxiety about the dreams, I couldn’t help noticing how good his hair looked longer. He should have worn it that way all along. “How’d you know?”

“I don’t know how I knew. But I knew.” His stared at me with wide eyes.

“The … the black fog?” I asked, dreading his answer.

“Yeah.”

“Last night, did you dream of—”

“Your grandmother’s house,” he finished.

“I just can’t … How could this be?” I started shivering, little quakes rippling through my body every few seconds. “How are we having the same dreams? Are we crazy?”

He chuckled, the tension leaving his face for a moment. “Maybe. You, definitely.”

I didn’t feel up to laughing at his jokes at the moment. I shivered harder. My teeth were actually chattering a little. “They’re just s-s-so awful. I’ve never been so terrified in my life. Do you think we should tell someone?”

He reached for the throw blanket draped over the back of the sofa and handed it to me.

“I guess we could.” His forehead wrinkled with doubt. “I’m not even sure what I’d say, though. Or what anyone could do about it. Our parents would probably just send us to a shrink or something. Somehow, I don’t think that would help.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.” I was positive he was right, but it was scary to admit that no one else could help us. I unfolded my legs and stretched them alongside Mason’s, and then I spread the throw over both of us. After a moment, I shopped shivering.

I yawned. “God, I’m exhausted. But, lately, I’m scared to fall asleep.”

“I know the feeling.” He adjusted the pillow behind him.

The warmth of his leg alongside mine comforted me. For reasons I couldn’t articulate, I felt safer than I had in a long time. After a few minutes, I couldn’t keep my eyes open. As I started to lose consciousness, I heard Mason mumble something.

“I’ll keep you safe. I’m the…” his last word was garbled, but I thought it sounded like he said
shield
. Odd choice of words, I thought as I fell into a blessedly peaceful sleep.

|| 15 ||

WHEN I WOKE UP the next morning, I wondered if things might be awkward between us. After all, it’s not every day that my oldest friend comes back to town after five months away, we discover we’re having the same terrifying nightmares, and then we fall asleep together on his sofa. But it wasn’t awkward. If anything, the dreams and the
pyxis
seemed to give us something to focus on. Something besides the fact that we were pretending we hadn’t kissed five months ago and I hadn’t been ignoring him ever since.

I told Mason that I wanted to go to my grandmother’s house to poke around, hoping that he’d come with me. He agreed to meet me at my house in an hour, after we’d both showered and changed. I walked home alone, figuring it was only a couple of blocks and odds were slim that anything would happen to me in that short distance. It was unseasonably warm, well over sixty degrees already, and I peeled off my jacket halfway to my house.

After I showered, I called my dad at the café.

“Hi, Dad. I know you’re busy, but I was wondering if I could get the key to Grandma Doris’s house,” I said. “There’s a, uh, cheesecake recipe we used to make, and I didn’t see it in her recipe box. I thought maybe I could look around the kitchen for it.”

“Sure, the spare is in the top drawer of my desk downstairs.” I could tell he was focused on something else.

“Great, thanks! I’ll see you later tonight.” I started to hang up.

“Oh, wait, Corinne?” He suddenly sounded a lot less distracted. I cringed, paranoid that he somehow guessed I was lying. “Could you check under all the sinks and make sure there aren’t any leaks? And you could turn down the heat about five degrees, now that we’re past the danger of frozen pipes?”

“Sure, of course,” I said. My shoulders relaxed a little. “Call me if you think of anything else I can do while I’m there.”

I brushed on some mascara and blush, and went upstairs to eat a bowl of cereal and wait for Mason to show.

He let himself in the front door without knocking, just like he’d done for years, and for a second, it was almost as if he’d never been gone. He wore a faded, blue t-shirt under a black, fleece vest, and well-worn cargo shorts, all of which seemed a little too small. In fact, now that I really looked, Mason was actually kind of ripped. Building wells agreed with him.

“Can I have some of that?” he said. “We don’t have any food in the house yet.”