XGeneration 1: You Don't Know Me (29 page)

“There’s just a short stretch of woods before the greenway.”

“All right.” Scott seemed more in control of himself. His breathing had softened, and his walking was not quite as stilted, as if the pain had lessened or he had learned how to move with it. Janis resisted the urge to take his hand as she might have when they were kids.

They stepped over the curb. Gravel crunched beneath their shoes. The path narrowed as it entered the trees, and Janis led the way. Crickets chirped single notes in the cool night. A scent rose around them as well, one Janis had always associated with late fall: the tea-like scent of browning sweet gum leaves. Janis felt her pupils dilating as she waited for Scott to catch up. And inside the darkness, she found the courage to say what she’d wanted to say two months before, when she had walked up the street toward his window.

“I went back there, you know. That night.”

“Back where?” His white shirt swam up in front of her.

“To the woods, to when we were kids. It was the time we—”

“—crossed the swampy area on the fallen tree,” Scott finished for her. “The time we saw the dog.”

She stood looking up at him as if someone had just landed on her back, knocking the wind out of her.

“I went there, too,” he said.

“Wait, not just remembering being there, but
there
there?”

His glasses nodded. “I know what it sounds like, but…”

“It sounds like exactly what happened to me!” Her laughter was loud with surprise and relief. But then she felt her father’s pragmatism creeping over her. “What was I wearing?”

It came out in a jumble: “Red shorts, one of those Florida halter tops with a smiling sun, and green Keds.”

She laughed again, unreality spiraling through her. She wanted to tell Scott everything then: about her experiences at night, about her saving tip at the soccer game, about her confrontation with Amy just now, about her belief that she had done more than just remember their childhood that night, but that she had carried them both inside of it somehow.

Instead, she asked him a question. “Why did we stop going into the woods? I don’t remember.”

Scott shrugged. “Middle school, I guess.”

They resumed walking, the moonlit streaks of limestone guiding them along. Janis thought about that.
Middle school.
And she saw that Scott was right. A longer school day followed by blocks of organized activities stacked one right after the other, abutting dusk and dinnertime. And with that had come a rigid rationalization of her world, a brave new world where the tangle of feral woods and her imagination no longer fit. Even their middle school had been neatly cordoned—not just into seven periods, but into A and B teams, new blocks of friends.

“You were on B team, weren’t you?” she asked him. “That’s probably why I don’t remember seeing you. What did you do after school? What sorts of things were you into?”

He seemed to hesitate. “Oh… telephone systems, computers, rockets, D&D… you know, cool stuff.” The noise he made when he laughed sounded healthier. “You?”

“Let’s see… softball, soccer, foreign language study. You know, girl stuff.”

His laughter followed hers, and before Janis was ready, they were coming to the verge of the greenway. Off to the right, she could hear the car traffic along Sixteenth Avenue and could even see the phosphorescence of street lights as glints through the trees. Scott shuffled up beside her.

“I know these aren’t the same woods as the ones in Oakwood,” Janis said. “But it’s like… I don’t know… like you’re beyond the reach of the world when you’re in here. Like none of that can touch you.”

“Yeah,” Scott said quietly.

She felt the strange urge to take his hand again, but now Scott was peering behind them, his breathing gone still. Janis listened, and soon she heard it, too, the tinkling of metal.

“Oh, it’s just someone walking their dog. I saw them back on the street.” She quickly added, “A small dog—not a Rottweiler.”

They left the woods for the greenway and were soon climbing over the guardrail that ran along the south side of Sixteenth Avenue. After a dash across the four lanes (or in Scott’s case, a hobble), they were at their neighborhood and beginning the steady ascent up Oakwood’s main street. Beneath the glare of street lights, Janis and Scott walked quietly, self-consciously, maybe.

When Janis looked over, Scott appeared better. He had removed his bowtie and suspenders, undone his top button, and rolled up his sleeves. He’d straightened his hair as well. Except for his stiff-legged gait, there was little to indicate the torment he had just been through. And was that a shadow of a smile?

“What is it?” she asked.

“Do you remember the time we were playing down here and saw Mrs. Thornton coming down the hill on her bike?”

“You mean her broomstick? I thought we always ran away when… wait!” She grabbed Scott’s arm. “That wasn’t the time we made a dare to see who could stay in the street the longest?”

Scott chuckled. “The ultimate game of chicken.”

“I thought I was going to wet my pants.”

“No, that was me. You were the one giggling.”

As they passed over the spot where their eight-year-old selves had once stood facing the terrible Mrs. Thornton, Janis felt fresh giggles bubbling inside her. “What was that thing she used to say?”

Scott screwed up his face and shook his finger at the air. “The streets are no place to be mucking around!”

“That was it,
mucking around
. Oh, god.”

“Then she’d tell us to go home or else she’d—”

“
—phone
our parents,” Janis finished through more giggles. When she realized she was leaning against him, she released Scott’s arm and looked up at him. “So what happened? Who won the dare?”

“Neither of us.” Scott grinned and combed his fingers through his hair. “Mrs. Thornton braked so hard—to stop and lecture us, probably—that her bike wobbled and tipped over. We fled into the woods.”

“Poor Mrs. Thornton.”

When Scott laughed, Janis realized she had been bearing a yoke around her neck all school year because now she felt it splitting and falling away. She was going to have to answer to some people tomorrow—Margaret and Blake not the least among them—but for now, she was glad she’d walked Scott home, glad that it was just the two of them again. She hopped onto the curb and walked along it balance-beam style, like she used to when she was younger. Scott strolled along beside her, hands in his pockets, not limping at all.

Soon, the curb flowed into a driveway, and when Janis turned, she beheld a garage door the color of old teeth. A dark house rose around it. She felt the smile across her face thin to a line and then vanish. She steered Scott from the house, almost to the other side of the street, where the specter of cockroaches and sheds and hatches and yellow-tinted glasses couldn’t reach them.

At the intersection that split Oakwood into its three subdivisions, Janis slowed. “I guess this is us.” She cocked her head to the left. “The Meadows.” The reluctance in her voice surprised her.

“Hey, um, that house back there,” Scott said. “The brown one…”

Janis turned to where the second story of the Leonards’ house loomed above the house on the corner, and she suppressed a shiver.
Why did you draw away from it?
she could already hear him asking.
Did something happen?
She looked back at Scott’s eyes and studied their concern.

“If I tell you something,” she asked, “will you promise not to say anything until I finish? Even if you think it’s completely crazy?”

He nodded.

“I need to hear you say it.”

“I promise,” he said.

But she already sensed that he wouldn’t think it was crazy. That he wouldn’t think
she
was crazy. Her certainty went back to their childhood and the woods and the way their imaginations had once grown around and inside one another’s. That connection was still living.

“Let’s keep walking,” she said, her heart already doing double-time. “Let’s go up to The Grove.”

When they had walked a block, she took a deep breath.

“I guess everything started this summer…”

24

Scott watched Janis’s hands—hands that, when not holding the thick chains of the swing, shaped the night air in front of her, anxious to convey the truth of what she was sharing. It was a need Scott understood. There was more than one moment when he had wanted to take her hands and tell them to be still, that of course he believed her. But he didn’t move or speak. For the hour or more that she talked, an hour which had carried them into the park and onto the swing set where they eddied back and forth, he watched her hands, mesmerized.

There was her closeness, sure. There was their cocoon of darkness, where the street lights and distant houselights didn’t quite reach. There was the cascade of events that had started with the gut-rending humiliation of being singled out and beaten raw in front of the others—in front of her—but that had led somehow to their walking home together. A magical, cleansing walk that seemed to have spanned years.

But what most mesmerized Scott now, watching her hands, were the very things their motion conveyed: out-of-body experiences, telekinetic powers, ghost-like images that sounded to Scott like precognition, and the whole business with Mr. Leonard and his shed.
Whoa.
Maybe because he had spent so much time these last years taking the world of Jean Grey and Scott Summers and projecting them over Janis and himself—what he wanted them to be—little of what she told him jarred with his sense of the possible, the real.

If anything, her account deepened it.

Janis’s hands stopped moving. Scott looked over to find her eyes, large and dark, peering at him through the night. Her hair was still braided into pigtails, her cheeks still dotted with fake freckles, but a tension drew on the contours of her face, making her appear much older than her fourteen years.

“So are we talking straightjackets and padded cells here or what?” she asked.

Only then did Scott realize she’d been waiting for him to respond. “No, no!” He twisted his swing to face her, his too-big shoes digging into the mulch. “That’s not crazy at all.”

“At all?” She smirked and lowered her eyes. “Now I know you’re just humoring me.”

Scott sensed then that she had tried to tell others—probably even Blake—and been looked at askance. Disbelief was what she had come to expect. “What I mean is
I
don’t think it’s crazy. Really. I believe you.”

She raised her eyes but kept her head down, like she was waiting for the punch line.

He got up from the swing and gestured for her to follow. “C’mon.”

“Huh?”

He walked several paces forward, toward the teeter-totters, then turned around to face the four swings. Janis followed him. “That one, on the far right.” Scott pointed. “Do you think, if you tried, you could make it move?”

Janis looked from the swing up to Scott and back.

“I don’t know,” she said. “The only times I’ve done it, I haven’t really tried. Not consciously. Like tonight. I wasn’t planning to knock Amy out of her chair. It just sort of… happened.”

“Try now,” he encouraged her.

Janis remained staring at the swing. Then she pushed her frilly sleeve to her elbow and raised her arm. Scott watched the way her brow tensed down over her eyes, making them deeper and darker, more beautiful. He stood back to give her space. And then something in the air made his skin prickle, as if the molecules around them were being roused from their sleepy Brownian motion into a state of agitation. The chain creaked. The black rubber seat began to rock and twist, back and forth.

Scott laughed. “It’s working!”

Janis dropped her arm. “No, that’s just the wind.”

When Scott looked again, he saw that the other three swings were replicating the creaking motion of the first. The huge oak tree in the corner of the field rustled its dark leaves.

“But I felt something,” Scott said.

“Yeah, me too. The wind.” She shrugged in a way that said,
Sorry I couldn’t prove it to you.

Scott came over and placed one hand on the curve of her shoulder and the other on the soft underside of her wrist and raised her arm toward the swing again. It was the kind of contact that, as recently as that summer, would have sent him into conniptions even to
think
about. Now, a deep calm moved through him, like the tide. It came from the night, from the spell of unreality that secluded them. He stooped until his sight line ran along her arm.

“I find it helps to picture the object as clearly as I can,” he said. “Not just how it looks, but how it feel—”

Janis drew her arm away. “Wait, helps you do what?”

“I, um…” Scott rubbed the back of his neck.

For so long, he had wanted to tell someone, someone who would believe him or, at the very least, not call him an ass-wad. And here she was: Janis Graystone, the love of his young life. And therein lay the problem. How could he start popping off about modems, telecommunication lines, and ARPANet without coming off as a total stooge? The kind of person he had been working so hard to grow beyond? In his mind’s eye, he saw his middle school photo, poster sized and unfurled. He remembered the raucous jeers.
Ner-errrd!

Janis crossed her arms and arched an eyebrow. “Scott?”

His own arms sagged to his sides. He never could hold out long against that look. “Yeah, I guess I have something to tell you, too.”

Janis took his elbow and led him back to the swing set. “Sit,” she ordered, pointing. “Speak.”

Scott did the first, removing his glasses. Then he told her everything. From his discovery that he could navigate the telecommunication system to his awareness of the tap—or whatever it was—and his attempt to short it. He picked away the masking tape from the bridge of his glasses as he spoke. It gave his hands something to do and made him all but blind to the way Janis, who stayed silent, was receiving his words. The words came easily, though. In his own telling, he tapped into a resonance that existed between their experiences: projecting their consciousnesses, influencing remote objects, or in his case, remote data streams, being monitored, feeling alone in the experience… until now.