The Painted Boy (8 page)

“So when you say I should let you know if I change my mind . . .”

She laughed. “Don’t worry. If you do, I’ll know.”

“But—”

“Later, Jay Li.”

Maybe he blinked. Maybe he had a momentary sensory lapse. But one moment she was standing right in front of him, the next she was half a block away. She lifted her hand, turned, and stepped between a pair of buildings. Then she was lost from sight.

Jay stood where she’d left him, staring down the street to where she’d disappeared. He couldn’t help but feel that he must have dreamed the whole encounter. Never mind all the things Paupau had told him. Never mind the growing list of strange—sometimes impossible—things that he’d already experienced since the bus let him out in Santo del Vado Viejo yesterday.

The dogs’ odd behavior?

Suddenly being able to speak Spanish?

They were nothing compared to what he felt now.

He remembered what she’d said:

The scales you can hear whispering against each other in your mind? I hear them, too
.

After everything else—the dragon on his back, Paupau’s endless training stories that left him more confused than prepared—that was the one thing he couldn’t escape. He hadn’t told the Hernandezes and Anna about it last night, because how do you begin to explain the constant sound and feel of some enormous scaled being shifting inside you?

But the woman knew.

She seemed to know exactly who he was and why he was here, even when he didn’t.

This is like some Chinese version of a spirit quest for you, isn’t it? To see if you’re actually worth the mantle of your clan
.

What did she expect, that he’d put El Tigre in prison and clean up the barrio? That some kid could accomplish what the whole police department couldn’t, just because he had a dragon on his back and his grandmother told him stories about these heroic men and women who were both human and dragon and went around standing up to injustice?

The yellow dragons—isn’t your whole thing about making places safe, fixing what’s wrong
?

His encounter with the woman left him feeling more troubled than talking to Flores had. El Tigre was only an opponent—why, Jay couldn’t begin to figure out—but they’d worked out a truce even if it didn’t make sense why a man like him would listen to, or care about, a kid.

But the woman . . . talking to her made the whole world feel wrong. Like the dirt underfoot was suddenly spongy. That here in the middle of this desert, he was standing underwater.

He needed a couple of deep breaths to steady himself, standing there swaying on the sidewalk. But finally the world settled down again. Everything felt normal, except for the whisper of scales rubbing against scales that he heard somewhere deep in his mind.

Though that was beginning to seem normal now, too.

Or at least familiar.

 

 

“You did
what
?” Rosalie said when Jay got back to Tío’s house.

“Yeah,” Anna added. “Do you have a death wish or something?”

Tío had already gone ahead to the restaurant by the time Jay returned, but the girls were sitting on the back patio, gossiping over coffee. He supposed that he should have expected this reaction.

“I don’t have a death wish,” Jay told them as he sat on the low wall dividing the patio from the backyard. “I just want to be left alone, and I figured the best way to make that happen was to go talk to him. So I did, and now it’s all cleared up.”

Rosalie shook her head. “
How
can it all be cleared up? What did he want from you? What did you say to him?”

Jay looked over his shoulder. The dogs had all gathered nearby, sitting on their haunches, watching him. He was going to have to try talking to them, he thought, as he turned back to the girls.

“I still don’t know for sure what he wanted,” he said. “I get the feeling that he thought I was some kind of threat to him.”

“Yeah, right,” Anna said.

Jay smiled. “That’s what I thought, too. But it was weird, right from the moment I first went through the door of the place.”

He moved from the wall to the table where they were sitting. Pulling up a chair, he leaned his arms on the table and told them everything—even how he’d had that strange
ping
of recognition when he saw Flores and the woman.

“You’re saying she just disappeared?” Anna said when he was done.

Jay shook his head. “I don’t think so. She’s just, like, really fast or something.”

“It all sounds so bizarre,” Anna said.

“Welcome to my life.”

“Can you trust him?” Rosalie asked. “Flores? I mean, he’s just some gangster, right? How can he be trusted?”

“I know,” Jay said. “That woman sure didn’t trust him. I don’t even know that I do. But I want to if it means I can get the chance to have a normal life.”

“But she thinks you were—what? Sent here to clean up the barrio?”

Anna snorted. “Good luck with that.”

“Right,” Jay said. “It’s stupid to expect that of a kid.”

“Except,” Rosalie said, “if you’ve got these special powers . . .”

Anna laughed, then using a deep, mock-serious voice, she quoted from the
Spider-Man
movies, “ ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’ As if,” she added in her own voice.

“And I don’t have any powers,” Jay said.

The girls both looked at him.

“Okay, so I’ve got some weird things going on. But I’m not Superman. I’m not even Spider-Man.”

“But what if the woman’s right?” Rosalie said. “She seems to think you’re here on some kind of spirit quest to, you know, awaken this dragon thing in you.”

“You guys are taking this way more seriously than I do,” Jay said, “and I’m the one who’s been living with a dragon on his back and Paupau’s stories for the last six years.”

Anna shook her head. “Don’t look at me, cowboy. I need more proof than I’ve seen so far. We only have it on your word that you didn’t know Spanish before you got here, and that the tattoo just showed up on your back one day.”

“It’s not a tattoo.”

She waved a hand. “The jury’s still out on that. But Our Lady of the Barrio here is way too trusting.”

“I’m a good judge of character,” Rosalie said.

Anna laughed.

“Well, you’re my friend, aren’t you?”

They locked eyes for a moment, then Anna nodded.

“That’s true,” she said. She turned to Jay. “Don’t get me wrong. I like you. I even sort of believe you—or at least I believe that you believe. But I’m not sure I trust you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I just have this weird feeling that we’ll put all this faith in you, and then you’ll turn around and break our hearts.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“And I believe that, too,” Anna said. “Or at least that you wouldn’t do it on purpose.”

“I just want an ordinary life,” Jay said. “Can’t we pretend that none of this weird stuff ever happened and start over? I’m just the new guy from out of town who’s started working at the restaurant.”

“I can do that,” Rosalie said.

“So trusting,” Anna said.

“Anna . . .”

“Okay, okay. I can try, but . . .” She pointed a finger at Jay. “Don’t make us regret this. I may look like some sweet rocker chick, but don’t think I can’t seriously mess you up, because I can.”

“Fierce,” Rosalie said.

“Better than trusting.”

“Sometimes.”

Anna nodded. “Sometimes,” she agreed.

When they both turned to Jay he held his hands palms out in front of himself.

“I’ll be good,” he said. “Honest.”

Anna grinned. “I do like a boy who knows his place.”

-
3
-

 

 

 

AS THE NEXT
couple of weeks went by, Rosalie found it easier than she thought to put aside the mystery that was James Li. It wasn’t that she didn’t think about it from time to time—mostly when she was lying awake waiting for sleep—but he was just so . . . normal. He was a hard worker, a good learner—his peach salsa was to die for—and an easy person to be around, both in the restaurant and out. He got along well with all her friends—even her cousin Ines, who was notoriously picky about whom she liked. Ramon, who never had a lot of time for anyone who wasn’t a music junkie, planned to take Jay hiking in the desert.

He fit in so well she almost forgot that Jay hadn’t always spoken Spanish. That the image on his back had appeared overnight. That the dogs had treated him with such strange reverence at first, although now they simply jumped all over him like any of her friends.

If only Tío and Anna had been able to just let the mysteries go as well.

But inevitably Tío would take her aside and start in on some repetition of the conversation they’d been having ever since he learned about Jay’s visit to the pool hall.

“” he’d say. “”

“”

“”

“”