Words of Stone (8 page)

“I know,” Blaze replied, hoping that he sounded cheerful and cooperative. But Glenn couldn't understand. Blaze hadn't told him about the words of stone.

At first it had made perfect sense that Claire had been the one to write them. Blaze had told her about the fire, and the next morning the words appeared. But since then Claire had acted completely normal—whatever that meant for someone you hardly knew.

Although Blaze had tried to avoid Claire, she still treated him kindly, which puzzled him. Even if he had been ignoring her throughout an entire meal, she would present small gestures—a look, a grin, a compliment—that would cause Blaze to drop his silverware.

“I have something for you, Blaze,” Claire said when she arrived. “Come to my car.”

It occurred to Blaze that he could pretend not to have heard her. He could just walk past her into the kitchen to get something to nibble on while he waited for dinner. He followed her to her car.

“Your dad told me that he had given you a canvas to work on. I thought you might like to have your own paints.” Claire opened the car door and pulled out a box the size of a portable TV. She placed the box on the ground and opened it up so Blaze could see inside. “I know you have watercolors, but these are acrylics. They're my old ones—I don't use them anymore.”

There must have been thirty tubes of paint. Blaze could tell that some of the tubes had been used, but others looked brand new.

“I know your dad would let you use his oil paints in his studio, but this way you can paint in your own room if you like. Whenever you want. And you can clean up with water. They're easy.”

“Thank you,” said Blaze. He turned the tubes in his hand, reading the names of the colors.

“The brushes are in here,” Claire told him, picking up a long, thin manila envelope that was tucked in the side of the box. She took out one of the brushes and pretended to paint in the air. Her wrist moved gracefully, round and round. “Well, I'm going to see if Nova needs any help in the kitchen,” Claire said, handing the brush to Blaze.

“Thank you,” Blaze said again.

“You're welcome.”

Blaze carried the box to the porch and sat down. The tubes of paint reminded him of party favors frozen in various stages. The kind that unroll as you blow into them, then collapse on themselves as the air escapes, curling up. Blaze was familiar with most of the colors because of Glenn: cadmium red, alizarine crimson, burnt umber, cobalt blue, yellow ocher. He pretended to paint in the air as Claire had done. He was beginning to get excited about starting his canvas.

His certainty that Claire was responsible for the words of stone had been a knot lodged inside his chest. The knot was gradually loosening. Blaze was glad that he had waited, that he hadn't said anything to Glenn.

“
Was
it my imagination, Simon?” Blaze asked. He wanted to convince himself of that. He told himself it wouldn't be surprising, given that it was July. His dreams were proof of the power of his imagination.

He would wait. He would push it out of his mind. After all, he had something new to concern himself with: Joselle Stark. She had said they were true friends—and yet they barely knew each other. If they
did
become true friends, maybe he could tell her about the words of stone. Maybe she'd know what to do.

A spider hanging motionless in its web caught his eye. The web was a perfect, intricate hexagon strung between two posts of the porch railing. Blaze didn't like spiders particularly, except from a distance. He pictured Joselle Stark approaching this spider easily and touching it with her finger. Blaze knew he would go to the hill tomorrow. He wondered if she would be there.

“F
or the first couple years of your life, you were probably no bigger than a salt shaker,” Joselle told Blaze, cupping her hand and holding it out to indicate size. “In fact, it's probably a miracle you lived. I'll bet your parents have photographs from when you were three, but they tell you they were from the day you were born.” Joselle brushed a tangle of hair away from her eyes. “Parents do things like that,” she added crisply, snapping her fingers.

Blaze wondered exactly what Joselle meant. She confused him completely, but at the same time she spoke with such authority that he was compelled to accept as true everything she said. “I was little, but not
that
little,” he mumbled at last, blushing a bit, opening and closing his fists.

“Believe what you have to,” Joselle said, shaking her head.

It was only their second time together. They were sitting beneath the black locust tree, within the semicircle of Blaze's stones. He hoped that Joselle wouldn't ask about the stones, or worse, move them. Whenever Joselle poked at them with her foot or gazed at them for what seemed like a long time, Blaze felt a small tremor in his leg. He could never explain his stones to this curious girl who reminded him of wild, impish, confident children he had only known in books.

“Want some?” Joselle asked, lifting the necklace of popcorn she was wearing over her head and offering it to Blaze. “Popcorn. Fresh popcorn,” she called, making her voice sound important.

“Thanks,” said Blaze, pulling off a few kernels. Bewitched, he handed the necklace back. Each time he chewed and swallowed, his teeth creaked and his throat tickled.

“I always get the hulls stuck on my teeth. And always my tooth with the micro-dot,” Joselle said.

“What's that?”

“It's this teensy-weensy thing printed on my tooth with my name, address, and birthday. You can't even see it with the naked eye. I used to think it was really neat until I realized it would only do any good if they found me dead. You know, to identify me.”

Blaze tried to absorb this, but his mind kept stumbling on the word dead. It made him shiver. And of course, he thought of his mother. He could see an image of her, memorized from a photograph, so clearly among the leaves above him that he thought he could make the image stay there forever. But the breeze fluttered, the leaves stirred, and she disappeared. “My mother is dead,” he heard himself say.

For once, the girl seemed to be at a loss for words. Wrapped in absolute silence, Blaze watched her. Joselle twisted her popcorn necklace, then pushed and pulled pieces of popcorn as though she were moving counters on an abacus. She appeared to be so deep in thought that Blaze wondered if he could see what she was thinking in the air around her if he looked hard enough.

“Well, you're not the only one,” she suddenly blurted out, one large tear sliding down her face. “My father is dead.” She placed her necklace over Blaze's head, draping it crookedly across his shoulders. “Welcome to the orphans' club,” she sniffed. “The saddest club of all.” Then she kissed his cheek sharply and quickly before vanishing behind the slope of the hill.

“T
hat's about all I know,” said Nova. “But if you like her, it would be nice to have someone to play with. Someone so close.” She moved her basket up a few feet and continued picking beans. The plants were heavy with pods that ranged in color from milky yellow to emerald. The sizes and shapes varied, too. Some beans were huge and so swollen they looked surreal. Others were narrow and small and straight as nails. “Is she here for a long visit, or a short one?”

“She didn't say exactly,” Blaze answered. He was sitting in the row next to Nova eating a bean. Mist tickled his eyes when he snapped it. “Her father died,” he said.

“I wasn't aware of that,” Nova said. She really didn't know much about Joselle Stark. Or her mother. “I'm not even too familiar with Floy,” Nova told him. “We greet one another, but that's about it. I guess the hill is big enough and our houses are far enough apart to keep our lives separate.” Nova took off her hat and fanned herself with it. “Would you like to have Joselle over for lunch?” she asked. “Egg salad sandwiches? With homegrown beans and homegrown lettuce?”

“Not today. But maybe sometime.” Would Joselle say yes if he asked her? Possibly. After all, she had kissed him. Blaze had never been kissed by a girl before. Just thinking about it made his heart anxious. And he thought about it a lot. No one had ever been so interesting to him before. And to have Joselle confide in him about her father bonded them.

When Nova finished picking her row, she pointed to the tomato plants. “I've got more tomato plants this year than ever. If they all ripen, we'll have enough tomato sauce and chili relish and salsa for the entire town,” she said. She heaved her basket of beans into her arms and sighed. “I'm going inside to start blanching these. And I'm hoping that my legs don't fall off first. Bad circulation,” she added matter-of-factly.

Blaze watched Nova trudge through the garden and across the lawn. Her thick, corded veins seemed to pulse with each step. Blaze wandered over to his favorite corner of the garden, glancing over his shoulder at Nova until the back door shut behind her. In the corner, a stand of sunflowers formed a wall. Slivers of blue, blue sky shone through the lattice of leaves and huge drooping yellow flowers. When the wind hastened, Blaze could smell the basil, which was planted in a raised bed near the sunflowers. Sometimes he'd pick some of the basil leaves and rub them on a small patch of his arm near his wrist, tinting it green. Then, periodically throughout the day, he'd bring his arm up to his face and inhale deeply. Last year, he had hung a big bunch of basil from the doorknob in his room; the room smelled wonderful for nearly a week. It was amazing to Blaze that everything that was so alive and leafy and aromatic and productive in Nova's garden had begun as tiny seeds. The whole process was one of the most hopeful things he knew. Thinking about Joselle Stark was hopeful, too. Blaze wondered how long she would be staying with her grandmother. He hoped she'd at least stay until school started in the fall.

Blaze wanted to do something special for Joselle because he felt so badly about her father. He wanted to give her some kind of gift. He lay down under the sunflowers, trying to think of something appropriate. It wasn't long before he fell asleep, dreaming, as the morning crept away slowly without him.

The only things of value that Blaze had to offer Joselle were his lost key collection and his Noah's ark. He didn't think he could bear to part with the ark—and besides, he could picture Joselle commenting on how infantile it was—so he gladly put that thought out of his mind. The key collection would also be hard to give up, but not having it around would be something he would just have to get used to. At any rate, the lost key collection wasn't serving its purpose. Blaze had collected the keys and kept them near his bed while he slept with the secret hope that they might open the locked doors that often appeared in his dreams. Usually Reena's voice came from behind the doors, calling him. It was a stupid idea anyway, Blaze thought. A real key can't open something in a dream.

He looked at each key carefully, trying to remember where it had been found or who had given it to him. When he placed the mason jar that held the keys in a box and sealed it, he had a premonition that he would wake up in the middle of the night, panicked and needing the keys. “I hope I'm doing the right thing, Simon,” he whispered. Regretfully, he wrapped the box in the comics from the previous Sunday's newspaper, tied a limp bow on top with red yarn, and held it tightly on his lap until he knew he was ready to meet Joselle on the hill.

As she opened the box, Blaze detected first amusement, then baffled uncertainty in Joselle's look. After a moment she shrieked lustily and said, “Oh, I get it—you think you have the key to my heart.” She batted her eyelids and preened herself, obviously enjoying her remark.

“It's not a joke. It's a present.”

“Oh, piffle, piddle,” she said airily. “Don't be so serious all the time.”

Blaze tried to explain his feelings about Joselle's father, but only got frustrated.

“Let's play a game,” said Joselle, barely allowing Blaze a word. “It's called Personal Scent. It'll just take me a minute to get ready.”

Blaze watched Joselle. She unrolled the top of a brown paper sack from the local grocery store and opened it up. The bag was soft and crumpled from use, from being held by sweaty hands. One by one, Joselle took out small glass bottles of various sizes filled with different colored liquids. She lined them up between them like a tiny fence.

“Like I said, the game is called Personal Scent. And I, Joselle Stark, am Keeper of the Scents.” She shook the mason jar, rattling the keys. The sound was grating. “The game will now begin!” she announced. She placed the mason jar in the bag and moved it aside.

With a dainty flick of her wrist, Joselle chose one of the small bottles. She unscrewed the tarnished metal top and rubbed a generous amount of some of the clear golden liquid on her arm. She replaced the bottle and chose another one. This one was filled with a cloudy liquid tinted a suspiciously bright blue color. Joselle leaned over toward Blaze and splashed his shirt with it. She was so close that Blaze could practically taste the perfume she was wearing. It was overpowering and sweet.

“Now smell yourself,” Joselle instructed.

Blaze did as he was told.

“That is your personal scent. Now you have to become a different person—someone who would smell like that.”

Blaze was confused. His face was blank. “I don't get it,” he said, mindful of Joselle's delight and discouraged that he didn't understand.

“Watch and learn,” Joselle said. She sniffed her arm. “This is a beautiful, flowery perfume,” she commented, her eyes half closed. She sniffed her arm again, then inhaled and exhaled luxuriantly. “I am definitely a Veronica,” she said, speaking with a lilting accent. “Veronica Marsdale. And I am someone's perfect mother. Picture me wearing a carnation pink dress and lipstick that's thick and cakey in a nice way.” She leaned toward Blaze again and whispered into his ear. “Who are you?” she asked, still speaking as Veronica.