Miscreated Page 7

  But no winged men, frozen or otherwise.

  Just the girl in white, in the same white raincoat and boots, though it wasn’t raining in the bubble, and its surface was free of any watery streaks. The space was small; if Jimi stood on his toes, his fingers would brush the ceiling, but the width was about double that. Not that it mattered. The bubble contained a folding chair the girl in white was sitting in and a wicker basket full of leather-bound books with gilt edges, like the white Bibles they passed out at Sunday school. Everything was white, like his bedroom at his dad’s, and the light was painless, sourceless—not a lamp to be seen.

  The girl in white wiped her eyes, like she’d been crying. Except what would a troll have to cry about? Allergies made more sense, and she’d built this bubble to keep out contaminants.

  Like him.

  “I don’t want company.”

  Jimi ignored her for the moment because when he’d looked out at Portero again, the people had shifted, as though they’d moved while he wasn’t looking. He closed his eyes and then looked again.

  That’s exactly what they were doing. The man had dropped his umbrella, and the two girls, no longer arm in arm, now headed in opposite directions.

  “What did you do to them?”

  “Why are you here? In my personal space. Space that I set aside. For me.”

  “Answer the question. Why’s everyone frozen? Where’re the winged men?”

  “What winged men?”

  “You didn’t see them?”

  “No.”

  “But you saw me? Running toward you?”

  “I never see you. You just show up. Uninvited.”

  “Has any human ever seen you, besides me?”

  “When I allow it. Mostly I don’t.”

  “Why make an exception for me then?”

  “I didn’t! I have no idea how you keep tracking me down. I find it deeply disturbing.” She looked more woeful than disturbed, but what would a troll have to be sad about? Jimi had to be misreading the situation, overlooking a danger he hadn’t sensed. A real one, not like his Dez-induced hallucinations.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Why’re you hiding in here?”

  “I’m not hiding. I’m waiting. I don’t owe you explanations! You’re the one trespassing.”

  “I won’t stay long.” A little longer. It was warm and dry here. Cozy. He sat near her basket of books. “If this is your space, why’s it so depressing?”

  “Who cares what it looks like? I read when I’m here. Do I need gold and marble floors to read a book?” She opened the one in her lap, as though she was about to begin ignoring him; but she closed it again and dropped it in the basket. “You think it’s depressing?”

  “If I could create my own world, it would at least have music, a comfortable chair, a mini fridge, good art on the walls, Las Vegas showgirls lined up over there. Even some balloons would be something.” He looked in the laundry basket: The Secret Garden, The Magician’s Nephew, A Wrinkle in Time, The Complete History of Scottish Rite Masonry.

  He read that last title aloud, but she only shrugged. “Sometimes I don’t pay attention to what I’m grabbing off the shelf. Showgirls? Wouldn’t your dead girlfriend get a bit salty?”

  Salty as in burn the world and salt the earth? Probably. But he only said, “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “Finally realized the truth?”

  Jimi sighed from deep in his soul. “I thought I was ready to let her go, but now I really am. Now that she’s trying to drive me insane.” He told her about the failed deliverance, slipping out of the world. About the bee sting and the winged men no one else could see.

  “I think that’s why my eyes are so sensitive now. She’s forcing me to see things that are destroying my vision, my mind. She wants me to end up at Jhonen’s in a straitjacket.” He cast a baleful eye upon the girl in white. “For all I know, you’re part of her evil plan. I can’t decide if you’re real, and if you are, whether you’re a good witch or a bad witch.”

  “Do I have to choose? Which kind are you?”

  “I’m above all that petty generalization. I am me.”

  “Then so am I,” said the girl in white. “I,” she announced, “am me. And Dez is dead. Doesn’t matter if you’re ready to let go or not. She’s gone, been gone a long time.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I understand plenty. You’re the stupid one, Grievy McSadface.”

  Before Jimi could work up a good head of outraged steam, the girl in white stood and passed through the bubble wall. The way she did it reminded Jimi of Moses parting the Red Sea, but Moses had taken his whole tribe along for the ride.

  The girl in white left Jimi behind.

  Though he liked being out of the world and separated from his troubles, he panicked a little, afraid she was a bad witch after all, and had forever trapped him in this bubble of nothingness.

  But she had only gone as far as the Taquería Ria food truck. She grabbed a container of food right out of the vendor’s hand, and no one said anything, because everyone was frozen. The girl in white drifted among the Porterenes, the only living girl in a wax museum.

  She passed through the bubble and brought in the smell of chile rellenos and rain, though she was as dry as she had been when she’d left. Strange girl.

  “Let’s sit over there,” she said, stalking past him, “since you won’t leave.” The folding chair had widened into a white porch swing. It wasn’t attached to anything, but it held her weight and Jimi’s when he slid in next to her.

  He looked around the bubble. “How do you do this?”

  “I’m not doing anything. I don’t have to; the world bends around me, that’s all.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Stop acting surprised. The world bends around you too, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  “But I’m not like you,” Jimi said.

  “You bet you aren’t.” She seemed as baffled by him as he did by her.

  “Are you dead?”

  “I told you I wasn’t.”

  “Undead?”

  “Stop being stupid.” The smell from the food finally got to him, made his stomach growl so loudly, the girl in white let go of her annoyance enough to smile, sort of, at him. “Take this.” She passed him the chile rellenos and a ginger ale she pulled out of the pocket of her raincoat. “You can’t eat and talk shit at the same time.”

  “There isn’t anything I can’t do.” Jimi took the food, not even pretending he wasn’t hungry. Running for one’s life really worked up an appetite, and he hadn’t eaten since lunch at school.

  Jimi stretched his legs alongside the girl’s, enjoying the peppers stuffed with beef and cheese. He’d been planning to order a hamburger at Smiley’s but this was—

  He was supposed to meet his friends at Smiley’s; that’s why he was starving. He pulled out his phone to call them and let them know to start the dinner meeting without him, but every number he typed escaped the screen and hung against the domed ceiling briefly before popping like bubblegum.

  “We’re outside of time,” said the girl in white upon seeing his amazed expression. “It happens.”

  “That’s why everything looks like it’s frozen out there. Except you. You were at regular speed.”

  “I,” she reminded him, “am me.”

  “Why are you outside of time?”

  “I’m waiting for someone,” she said, like he was annoying her. “I didn’t want to wait in the rain.”

  “Who’re you waiting for?”

  “Listen…whatever your name is. What’s your name?”

  “Jimi Elba.”

  Instead of shaking his hand or introducing herself, she swiped chile sauce from his chin and licked her finger. “You’re right, Jimi; you’re completely psycho and not because of some alleged haunting. You have an ability that you shouldn’t, and your mind has cracked under the strain. I mean, why should a nobody like you know how to slip and slide out of the world, out of t
ime itself? Clearly you can’t handle it, which is why you’re being ‘haunted’ by your dead girlfriend and ‘communicating’ with clockwork bees that only you understand. Straight up imagining things, the way any kid’ll look up at the sky and see a cloud that looks like a duck or a Tickle Me Elmo.”

  Her horrible speech was melting the bubble, corroding it so that Jimi was left vulnerable to the elements. The fancy swing had disappeared, leaving Jimi to sit with the girl in white opposite the food truck, in the entrance of a closed shop. Like a bum. Like an idiot.

  “That level of craziness can also cause pain, like, it starts in your head but ends up affecting your body, which accounts for your back pain and sore eyes. You’re fixating on winged things because you’re obsessing over that fairy costume your girl died in. So obsessed, you tried to drown yourself in the river because of her. The winged men you thought you saw are a manifestation of your own omnipresent death wish. I see it lurking in there.” She waggled her fingers before his eyes. “The craziness and something else. Something dark and tragic and bleeding.”

  By the end of her speech, Jimi was fully erect but angrily so. How dare she infiltrate him like that, sifting through his mind and his soul with her sticky little troll fingers and prizing out his innermost fears. She was wrong anyway. She had to be; if he was being driven insane, the haunting wasn’t a symptom, but rather the disease.

  “So what’s next? You fixing to marry me now? Since you know me so well, since you got me all figured out?”

  “We couldn’t…” She stared down at her shiny rain boots. Shiny from the drizzle that also dampened his turned up pant cuffs, his Fred Perrys. The sky was darker now, more violet than orange, and the people were visibly in motion; not at full speed, but no longer frozen.

  “I’m not saying I know everything,” said the girl in white, “especially about people who aren’t dead. All I’m saying is”—she took a deep breath before looking at Jimi again—“no dead person would make the kind of effort you’ve described. So stop trying to kill yourself; nothing good will come of it.”

  “I’m not suicidal. How many times do I have to say it?”

  “You are or we wouldn’t keep running into each other like this. Seriously, Jimi, ninety percent of what I know is death related, and suicides are my specialty.”

  Something hit the ground a few feet from their outstretched legs. It took Jimi a while to realize that something was a man. Or had been.

  “See?” The girl in white crawled to the body, leaned over it. “The building’s not such a tall building. Anyone else would have broken a couple of bones and called it a day, but this one landed just wrong.”

  Was she checking the pulse? The impact with the sidewalk had cracked open the man’s skull, and Jimi was now wearing part of the man’s brain. On his skin. A pulse check was beyond pointless.

  A short while later, the girl in white went back to the entrance and, after taking a linen handkerchief from her pocket, cleaned Jimi’s face—brains on his face?—as best she could.

  “Sorry to add more spice to the crazy pot.” The rain had paused again unfortunately, but she didn’t need to be washed clean of brain or blood. The girl in white was queerly immaculate, as always.

  “Think about getting professional help before that pot gets any spicier.”

  She took Jimi’s empty food container and dumped it and the brainy handkerchief into a nearby bin. Her fancy hearse of a Rolls pulled up next to her and she slipped inside without a wave goodbye, let alone an offer to drive Jimi home.

  As she disappeared around the corner, Jimi realized he’d reentered the flow of time because everyone began moving at normal speed. Then froze for a completely different reason.

  Because of the corpse spread across the sidewalk and possibly because of Jimi who was crouched in the shop entrance with bits of brain hardening on his clothes.

  Some of the younger kids cried or screamed but were quickly hushed by their mothers, their siblings, their friends. If some thing had caused the man’s death, it was gone now. Corpses were harmless, worth neither tears nor screams.

  The Porterenes moved on.

  So did Jimi.

  Chapter 8

  Jimi sprawled back in his mother’s bathtub as thick, chin-high layers of bubble froth reshaped themselves into faces. None of the faces were happy.

  Alexis sat nearby on the lid of the toilet, still dressed in her work clothes. Her diamonds lent an air of elegance to the act of scrubbing brain matter off of his jeans, but her flat ironed hair was no longer straight and silky. The steam from Jimi’s bath was slowly reverting it back to its curly state. Too bad the steam wasn’t strong enough to revert her personality.

  Jimi had a soft, out of focus memory of chasing Alexis in the backyard of their little house in France and tickling her. He couldn’t imagine touching her like that now. He didn’t dare.

  The scritch of the brush across the heavy fabric was lulling Jimi to sleep, soothing after the screaming he’d endured at the square when the girl in white had allowed the world to continue.

  Alexis watched him in that robotic way she had; eyes like lenses, scanning every twitch and micro-expression. She wasn’t like that with everyone—she saved her robo side for him alone, like a secret.

  “Am I different?”

  The scrubbing stopped. “How do you mean?”

  “This girl said she could see it in me. Something dark and tragic and bleeding.”

  “What girl?”

  “Some girl. She might be a witch or a devil. Everywhere she shows up, someone dies.”

  “She could say the same thing about you.” One manicured nail scratched at a stubborn fleck of medulla oblongata. “Death falls in love with certain people, and can’t bear to take them away, and so takes the people around them.”

  Jimi sat up and poured body wash onto the back scrubber. It smelled like the Caribbean. Like the beach and like pineapples. Nice things. That’s what he’d think about. Happy happy happy, all the time.

  “Was it someone you knew, this person who died?”

  “How would I know?” he said, unable to stop the words, which were definitely not happy. “He landed on his face, then his face landed on me. So what if Death is attracted to me; that doesn’t mean I want the evidence on my skin.”

  “It isn’t on you.” Alexis grabbed the brush from him and placed it on the counter out of reach. “If you keep scrubbing like that, your skin won’t be either.”

  Jimi glared at her for a long while before sinking down into the tub once again. The scrubbing had been painful, but soothing, the way the pain of a scratch could soothe an itch. The bubble foam floated high, but for every screaming face he swatted out of existence, another took its place. He wished he could scream like that. He should have when he’d first seen the body back at the square. But he hadn’t and if he started now, Alexis would think less of him than she already did. Which is why Jimi had left most of the day’s adventures untold. Alexis didn’t like weirdness, especially now that she was pregnant. If he told her about winged men and journeys outside of time, she really would put him out of the house.

  “I doused the bumblebee watch.” That was safe to talk about.

  “But not the last thing,” said Alexis, like she didn’t think he’d really cut his last link with Dez.

  “Carmin has it. He ‘borrowed’ it last year.”

  “Such a klepto, that boy.” Alexis went to the counter. “I’ll tell Paul to cancel our date night.”

  “Don’t cancel because I’m here. I wouldn’t be if Dad had been home. I should’ve gone to Grandy’s. I don’t know why I biked all the way up here.”

  “Boys want their mothers when they’re hurt or scared,” Alexis said, carefully rinsing his jeans in the sink. “No matter how inconvenient.”

  “Go on your date. I don’t care what you do. I’m fine.”

  “We can watch something on Netflix. Order some sushi; you like sushi. Besides, someone should keep an eye on you. César’s
too busy with that child bride of his, and even if he wasn’t, he’d never admit...”

  “What?”

  “That there’s something.” Alexis met his gaze in the mirror, and her reflection was less robotic than usual. More like the French version of her that had died the day they’d come back to Portero.

  Alexis broke their gaze and focused on the jeans.

  “Something that needs to be watched.”

  Chapter 9

  What’s this?” Grandy said, kissing Jimi’s cheek after he’d set his duffle bag by her front door. She herded him, along with his dad and Giselle, into the crowded dining room. “You finally moving in?”

  “He’s going home with Alexis after dinner,” César explained, sitting himself and Giselle at the table and leaving Jimi to fend for himself. “His mom gets Thanksgiving this year, and I get Christmas.”

  “We,” Giselle said, always needing to be included.

  “Sorry.” César kissed her belly. “We get Christmas.”

  “See how my folks split me up?” Jimi said. “Like The Parent Trap, except one hundred percent less charming.”

  Grandy found Jimi a sliver of space at the huge table and shoehorned him in. “You’re at my house now, and the only thing that’s getting split apart is that turkey.”

  The littlest kids started chanting, “Turkey, turkey, turkey!”

  “Yeah, Grandy, damn,” Carmin said. “Let’s eat.”

  Grandy smacked Carmin upside the head. “Watch that mouth, boy. We can’t eat without Alexis.”

  “I think we should,” César said, reluctantly. “Punctuality isn’t her strong suit.”

  Once Grandy’s Thanksgiving feast was underway, she asked Jimi, “How’re you feeling these days?”

  Jimi pondered the question, savored it. He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had bothered to ask. “Better, I guess. Normal. I haven’t slid anywhere or been attacked. Since Carmin lost the only item left between me and deliverance, Dez knows she’s free to take her time and drive me insane at a leisurely pace.”