Victories (6 page)

“And I’d like to find something that makes me look less like a Hallmark Christmas Special,” Addie said, wrinkling her nose.

“Or a very special episode of
What Not To Wear,
” Loch said helpfully.

Spirit met Addie’s gaze.
Underwear,
she mouthed silently, and Addie nodded vigorously. “Hey, we’ve got fifty bucks,” she said, striving to sound cheerful. “We can come up with whole wardrobes for that—and besides, I can sew, remember?”

“And whatever it is, it won’t be gold, brown, or cream,” Addie said feelingly.

*   *   *

Addie and Loch looked completely baffled as they followed Spirit and Burke through the store.
Well why not?
Spirit thought.
Addie’s heir to a billion-dollar pharmaceutical company. Loch’s father did
something
that left Loch with a fat trust fund.
She doubted either one had seen the inside of a Goodwill Store—or any other thrift shop—in their lives, while the White family had shopped at them as a matter of course.

Taking pity on them, she led Loch and Burke to the racks of men’s clothing. There weren’t any jeans in Burke’s size, but there were a pair of work pants in good condition. The real find was work boots in his size. They were battered and worn, but they’d certainly last as long as …

… as long as we have to live if we don’t win,
Spirit thought. Every time she managed to stop thinking about Mordred and the Apocalypse, something happened to remind her.

She left Loch and Burke browsing through shirts and went off with Addie.

“You’re really good at this,” Addie said, watching Spirit swiftly sort an entire box of underwear into two piles: possible purchases and totally hopeless.

“Not everybody’s born rich,” Spirit said absently. A moment later she heard her own words and turned to Addie in horror. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean—”

Addie smiled ruefully. “It’s okay. Really. I know I’ve led a pretty sheltered life. The way Oakhurst was run—not the magic and the craziness, but the uniforms and the rules about what you could have—covered up a lot of the distinctions between—”

“The haves and the have-nots?” Spirit asked with a smile.

“The haves and the have-even-mores,” Addie corrected. “In my old life, I would never even have met someone like Loch, or—” she broke off suddenly, her face twisting with grief. “Or Muirin,” she whispered. “I would never have met Muirin.”

“She—” Spirit said. She stopped, shaking her head. It was too soon. “Come on,” she said, “let’s see if we can find tops that don’t suck this much.”

There wasn’t a huge selection, but Spirit found a couple of long-sleeved T-shirts and a couple of heavyweight shirts to go over them. The shirts were plaid flannel, but at least they weren’t
gross.
Since they were still under budget, she grabbed a couple of the nightgowns. The ones in the best condition were circus tent huge, but she could cut them down later.

If there
was
a later.

“Okay,” she said, “Let’s grab the guys and get out of here.”

“Unless you want to see if the— The
you-know-whats
are here,” Addie said with a faint smirk.

“Sure,” Spirit said mockingly. “Probably in with the small appliances, right?”

*   *   *

When they found Burke and Loch, they were at the back of the store, in what seemed to be the “General Junk” department. Burke had a copy of
Huckleberry Finn
in his hand, frowning faintly at it. Loch was looking through a stack of Archie Comics.

Behind the two long tables of unloved books and magazines was a collection of battered cardboard boxes, some stacked precariously against the wall, some propped against the legs of the tables, some open on the floor. It was clear the boxes had once contained donations, and now had been used to consolidate the discards. A sign taped to the cinderblock wall behind them said “Fifty Cents Each.”

As they approached, Loch dropped the comics back to the table. “I think I’ve found where Yard Sale rejects go to die,” he said, and gestured toward the boxes.

“You’d be surprised at what people will waste good money on,” Burke said absently, setting the book down and bending down to look into the nearest box of discards.

“I wonder if that’s per item or for a whole box,” Loch said, indicating the sign, “because if it’s per box it’s definitely a bargain.…” He walked over to a stack of battered boxes and pulled out a VCR tape. “If you’re an archaeologist, of course.”

“Burke?” Spirit said quietly. She was sick with sudden fear. He didn’t look right. He didn’t look right
at all.
Something was happening. Something that shouldn’t be.

Loch looked up sharply at the sound of her voice. She saw the movement out of the corner of her eye, and wanted to say something—anything—but she couldn’t look away from Burke. He’d gone utterly still. Not like waiting, or even like holding as still as you could and trying not to be noticed. Burke was as still as if he’d been turned to stone. She couldn’t even see him breathe.

Loch didn’t seem to notice either the strangeness of Burke’s immobility or Spirit’s sudden panic. He walked over and waved his hand back and forth in front of Burke’s face jokingly. “Hellloooooo?”

“No. Wait,” Spirit said in a small airless voice. But even as she spoke, Loch poked Burke in the chest with a careless finger—and froze into the same stillness.

“Loch!” Addie cried.

She dropped her armload of clothes to the ground. Spirit grabbed for her, but Addie was already moving. Spirit lunged after her, and this time got a good grip.

But Addie had already touched Loch.

And suddenly Spirit was … somewhere else.

*   *   *

It was almost as if she’d been suddenly blinded, though all around her was the gelid grey light of a rainy afternoon. She could see her body, but there was nothing else.

“Hello? Loch? Addie? Burke? Hello?”

No answer. Her friends were gone. The store was gone. Even the sounds and smells of the real world were gone. She stood in a formless grey space.

Just as she formed that thought the grayness swirled and parted as if it really was fog. She had no time to wonder who was responsible—was this an attack or just some weird new consequence of having magic?—when she realized she was staring at her bedroom.

Her
real
bedroom. The one in the house in Indiana, the one that was gone the way her whole family was gone. There was a poster on the wall for the third
Pirates of the Caribbean
movie, the one that had come out when she was thirteen, it had only survived a couple of months, because Fee’s birthday was in August.…

As if the memory had possessed some sort of force, suddenly Spirit wasn’t looking at it from a distance. She was standing in the middle of her bedroom—her bedroom as it had been four years ago. She saw a scattering of DVDs on the bedspread of Fee’s bed. The moment she saw them, Spirit’s cheeks flushed hot with shame, and she could hear—
really
hear, not just remember—the sound of Fee’s voice.…

“She ruined them! She ruined all of them!”

“She stole my lace blouse—the one I worked on for weeks! She ruined it!”
Now it was her own voice, filled with fury and self justification. For Fee’s tenth birthday, Mom and Dad had gotten her DVDs of her favorite movies. All secondhand, but all in good condition. Fee had been thrilled, and all Spirit could think of, seeing her happiness, was how the day before, Fee had “borrowed” the lace tunic Spirit had spent weeks making, and climbed a tree and fell out and tore it to shreds.

And so she’d taken a pair of scissors and scratched each one of the disks, ruining them.

“Who are you? Why is this happening?”
she shouted, while inside her mind she cried:
I’m sorry! I’m sorry, Fee! I didn’t mean to hurt you like that—

But the room melted away around her as if it were fog, and something new began to take shape.…

She turned and ran, holding her hands out in front of her in the hope she’d feel any obstacle instead of running into it. There was nothing in front of her, nothing beneath her feet but flat smoothness. The mist swirled in front of her. She staggered to a stop, backing away slowly as the mist parted again to show.…

Her bedroom again. Early evening on a cold dark spring night. There was a wide red stripe of tape on the floor, marking her side of the room separate from Fee’s. She’d been five when Fee’s crib was moved into her room; she’d demanded the boundary line. Over the years it had gotten frayed, and she’d pulled it up one year and didn’t bother to replace it. But it had still been there when she was eight.

When she was eight.…

“No, no, no!”
she screamed. She didn’t want to see this. She didn’t want to
remember
this.

But suddenly she was standing in the empty room, hearing the frantic barking coming from outside.…

When she was eight, they’d had a dog named Mister Wiggle, a stray who just showed up one day. He was terrified of storms. He’d been outside one day when it started to thunder. Dad was in his studio, Mom was out, Fee was spending the night with friends. Spirit was the only one who heard him, and she was curled up in bed with a book, warm and comfortable. So she’d ignored the frantic barking until it stopped.

And they never saw Mister Wiggle again.

“I’m sorry!”
she shouted. Tears were running down her face now.
“I didn’t know you’d run away! You must have been so afraid.…”

She turned and ran again, this time with her eyes closed, running as fast as she could. She ran for long enough that if she’d been in the real world she’d have left the store, crossed the parking lot, the street, run for block after block. At last she was forced to stop, panting, winded, gasping for breath.

And as soon as she opened her eyes, the mist before her swirled and changed again, forcing her to remember—to relive—the scene it showed.

Flat Rock Elementary School. Her fifth grade classroom. She’d had Mrs. Beech.

Flat Rock Indiana was the closest town to where they’d lived, and it was where she’d gone to school until eighth grade—the high school was a two-hour bus ride from home, and Dad had been fighting with the school board anyway, so after that she’d been homeschooled. But she’d gone to school in Flat Rock until she was twelve.

She looked around the empty classroom. She could hear the whisper of children, the scrape of chalk on the blackboard.

“Stop it!”
she yelled.

But she could hear Mrs. Beech announcing the test, and heard the rustle and shuffle of papers as the tests were handed out. It was a math test. And she’d cheated.

She’d known the answers—she was good at math—but she was bored and didn’t want to go to the trouble of solving the problems. So she’d cheated. And accused the boy she’d copied from of being the cheater. And gotten away with it.…

“Yes!”
she shouted, as the classroom dissolved and another image began to form.
“Yes, I did those things! All of them! But they were wrong! And I was sorry! That’s not all I am! That’s not
who
I am!”

She didn’t know why she was being forced to relive all her worst moments—not the bad things that had happened to her, but the bad things she’d done: every time she’d been mean, or cruel, or selfish; every time she’d disappointed Mom, or Dad—or herself. She knew they were being dragged out of her memories, and each one was more horrible than the last. There seemed to be no end to them. She knew—somehow—that they’d continue until she broke under the weight of her guilt and her shame.

And who would stop Mordred then?

She had to fight back.

How?

That’s not all I am! That’s not who I am!

Then prove it.

The second voice, the second thought, seemed to be her and not-her, and for an instant Spirit thought of the woman she’d glimpsed in her dream. But she had no time to trace that thought to its source. The mist was parting again. She could smell the smoke of an autumn bonfire.…

She closed her eyes and concentrated, summoning a different memory.

She was standing in her bedroom, looking at the shredded paper that covered the floor. Her posters. All the books she’d saved up her money to buy.…

Fee had torn them all to shreds, even though Spirit had confessed about the DVDs and apologized. And when she’d gone back to her room afterward, this was what she’d found. She’d cleaned up the mess and never said a word about it. And she replaced every one of Fee’s birthday presents, even though it took all her allowance for the next six months.

She still smelled the bonfire, and felt the cold October wind. She summoned another memory.

Jayce Bingham at school, showing off his new cell phone, something Spirit could never hope to own. Annie Morgan was looking at her sympathetically. Spirit knew Annie thought she had a hard life. She sympathized with Spirit every time something like this happened. It would have been easy for Spirit to agree, to complain about her parents forcing her to live in the Dark Ages: no cable, no cell phone, no iPod, and only dial-up at home. Secondhand clothes. Her parents’ weird hippie friends.

She never did, no matter how tempting it was.

Was the wind dying down? Was the smell of burning leaves fainter? She didn’t dare open her eyes to check.

She remembered the night she
hadn’t
gone to the eighth grade dance. Davey Logan had asked her, but there’d been no money in the budget for a prom dress, or even for the fabric to make one, so she’d turned him down. Dad had known she was disappointed. He’d cajoled her into making fudge—a special treat. And while the pans were cooling, he’d asked her what she’d think about doing high school at home.

She’d hated the thought.
I’ll be buried alive and never see anybody!
But he’d looked at her hopefully, and she knew it was what he wanted for her, so she took a deep breath, and forced herself to smile, and said it would be great.

She thought of every time she’d been proud of herself, even if it was a secret she never told. When she’d seen what she should do—honesty, kindness, perseverance, keeping her word—and done it for no other reason than it was right.