1
Fire’s Child
FIRE RAN THROUGH all my dreams and I ran after it, the blackened ground crackling beneath my feet. It wasn’t the first time I’d dreamed of chasing the fire. I dreamed the flames whenever we moved—eight times in my thirteen years on the planet—and when I’d started at my new school, and right before my mom married Oscar …
And that was it; I was awake. I glanced at the clock—my mom was old-fashioned, like, still-reads-the-newspaper old-fashioned, and wasn’t going to let me have a cell phone until I turned fifteen—3:08 a.m., sigh. Might as well get a glass of milk and read for a while. I flipped back the covers and started to get out of bed.
That’s when I discovered that the sound of the world starting to change is a sort of scratchy, scuffing rasp. It felt like there was sand on the floorboards.
What the heck?
I leaned over and flicked on my lamp. The soles of my feet were covered in gritty black powder. I ran a fingertip along my heel—soot, or something very like it. And more on my sheets. I started to freak out a little at that point, because I couldn’t think of any reasonable explanation, and if there wasn’t a reasonable explanation, then I might be going …
I suddenly felt sick to my stomach. Leaping out of bed, I bolted for the bathroom. I made it as far as the kitchen before I almost tripped over my mother. She was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the kitchen, wearing a full-skirted red dress. All the houseplants were lined up in front of her, and she had a small trowel in one hand. She was singing:
“Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true. I’m half—” She broke off as she noticed me.
“Oh, hello, Kalvan, what are you doing out of bed? I’m repotting the plants.”
At three in the morning? I wanted to ask. But I didn’t. It was a long way from the strangest thing she’d ever done. My stomach lurched again, and I forced myself to ignore it for the moment. Being gentle with Mom was much more important than my problems.
“What was that you were singing?” I asked.
“‘Daisy Bell,’ or ‘On A Bicycle Built for Two’ … Well, one variation on it, anyway. I like to sing to the plants. They listen so well, and it helps them grow.” She smiled her lopsided smile and rose to her feet, coming to put her hands on my shoulders and look down into my eyes. “Perhaps I should sing to you more often.”
I snorted. Genevieve Munroe was a tall woman—much taller than me, her only child, though I hoped to catch up to her not quite six feet in the next year or two. She was also pale, almost shockingly so in contrast to the thick, soot-black hair that hung nearly to her waist. I was much darker—like my dad, she always said. But I had my mother’s strange amber-brown eyes.
Strange. That was a good word for my mother. It covered everything from finding her repotting plants at three a.m. in what appeared to be a formal gown to her insistence on sending me to a series of weird schools that had culminated in the five years I’d now spent at the Free School of Saint Paul—a magnet program for the children of people who believed that traditional education stifled creativity. Most of all, strange was a kinder word than some I’d heard used to describe her.
My mother looked over my shoulder. “What on earth?”
I turned to follow her gaze and saw the trail of smudged black footprints leading back to my room. “Um…”
She let go of my shoulders and stepped around me, squatting so that her red skirt pooled around her feet like a circle of fire. She ran a fingertip across one of the prints and lifted it to her nose, sniffing.
“Ash and char.” She spoke as though she were remembering something from long ago and far away. She tilted her head to one side and half sang, “Ash and char, sun and star, wind and smoke, ash and oak … No, that’s not quite right. How did it go?”
“Mom?”
She jerked as though startled. “Sorry, Kalvan, I got lost there for a moment.”
“What was that you were saying?”
“Nothing, a couple of old rhymes your grandmother Elise used to sing to me at night. There was another one that felt the same even if it didn’t sound it, but she only sang it on the solstice and the equinox and the turn of the seasons. She said it was important to keep an eye on the North’s changing Crown, whatever that meant. Now, what was that other verse … Summer’s King, brings the birds a-wing, Winter’s Queen, draws wolves so lean, Queen of sun, harvest done, King in ice, death’s the price … something like that, anyway.
“But there I go meandering again.” She smiled and shook her head before rising to look down at me. “You had better go wash your feet while I clean up here. I don’t think your stepfather would be very understanding about the ashes of burned dreams.” She made a shooing motion. “Hop to it—tomorrow’s a school day.”
It wasn’t until I was back in bed and half-asleep that I thought to wonder how my mother had known the soot came from my dreams, or to remember how freaked out I’d been about the whole thing before I talked to her. But then, my mother had that effect on me—making the odd feel normal, and the truly bizarre no more than passing strange. It could be scary.
Sometimes it seemed like she wasn’t entirely of this world, like she’d wandered in from one of my books about wizards and elves and the misty lands of faerie. It made her a weird mix of fragile and frustrating. I spent half my time wishing I was something out of stories, too, so I could protect her, and half of it wanting to just be part of a normal family with normal problems. I tried to follow that thought further, but sleep had too strong a grip, and before I could chase it very far, I fell once more into dreams and darkness.
* * *
The harsh beeping of the alarm felt like someone poking me in the bridge of the nose with a fork, and I half fell out of bed in my rush to shut it off. Saying that morning is not my best time is like saying our Minnesota winters are not the warmest. Forty Below, meet Kalvan when he wakes up: you have a lot in common in the misery department.
That’s why the clock was on top of my bookshelf on the far side of the room from my bed. If I can reach the snooze button without getting out from under the covers, I will keep hitting it over and over without ever actually waking up. I blinked at the clock now as I smacked it repeatedly in an effort to get it to shut up—6:15 a.m.!
I felt a brief stab of panic. The bus came at 6:20, and there was no way I could even walk the five blocks to the stop in—Wait, Kalvan, think it through. The alarm went off at 6:15. That must mean I set it for 6:15, right? So, what was I thinking … I shook my head and tried to clear out the worst of the cobwebs. Nope, nothing. I was going to miss my bus.
Just then, my stepdad, Oscar, stuck his head into my room. “Get a move on, Kalvan. Your mom’s already gone, so I’ve got breakfast waiting on the table. We need to be out the door by six forty-five.”
I blinked at him stupidly. “What?”
“Move!” he growled. Oscar spent a lot of his time growling. Well, when he wasn’t snapping, snarling, or shouting, that is.
My stepfather had a temper on him, and zero patience. Add in that he was a big, burly man, and there was something very troll-like about him. That illusion seemed even stronger than usual this morning, as some trick of the light made his face look as if it were carved from granite and his eyes were as hard and cold as a pair of blue glass marbles. I blinked and rubbed my own eyes then. Red light flared across my vision like dancing flames, and I thought for a moment that I smelled smoke. When I looked at Oscar a second time, he looked even more like a man of stone.
He frowned, and it seemed a miracle that granite could move like that. “Come on, speed it up.” Then he was gone from my doorway.
His words came out as a command, and I found myself moving to obey without really thinking about it. Grabbing a pair of socks, some jeans, and a T-shirt from the pile of clean clothes my mother had left on my dresser, I bolted for the shower. I snagged my egg-and-bagel sandwich off the kitchen table as I went by and wolfed it down while I waited for the water to get warm.
After a few minutes, the fact that I had simply done as told like some kind of zombie finally registered and I shook my head angrily. I didn’t like that one bit, but I still hadn’t sorted out what was going on, and I tried not to fight with Oscar unless I had a very good reason. Especially in the morning when I’m stupid and slow. I can win an argument with him, but I have to think fast and make a good case … And even when I do win, the end result can look a lot like losing.
Five minutes later I was hopping around as I tried to get my still-damp foot to go the right way into my pants leg. Shirt was next, and then socks. Brushing my teeth ate up a few more precious minutes. When I came out of the bathroom, Oscar was waiting impatiently in the back hall, though he looked human again. Oscar works for a civil engineering firm specializing in highway projects, and he had on the retroreflective vest he always wore for on-site stuff.
That’s when I finally woke up enough to remember what the late start was all about—Oscar’s current project was in the same direction as my school, which meant he could drop me off along the way. That saved me an hour and change on the bus and bought me an extra twenty minutes in the sack.
“About time!” He tossed me my backpack, which I quickly slung over one shoulder. “Why your mother lets you sleep that close to when you have to leave, I’ll never understand.”
Because she’s got even stranger sleep habits than I do? Because she knows that even fifteen more minutes on the morning side of things makes a huge difference in how well I deal with the rest of the day? Because she’s a better person than you are? Of course, I said none of that.
It would only have made Oscar grumpier than he already was, which he would take out on me now and Mom later. Instead, I grabbed a jacket off the coat tree and opened the door for my stepfather. We didn’t get along very well, and I had no idea what my mom saw in him, but she needed stability in her life. Oscar was nothing if not stable and predictable, kind of like that geyser at Yellowstone, Old Faithful—right down to the eruptions you could set your watch by.
Oscar and I didn’t talk on the way to school—we’d both figured out long ago that us talking in the morning always ended badly. I just slipped into the passenger seat of his big gray Crown Victoria and pulled out a book. Mercifully, it was a brief ride—ten minutes to my downtown school. The janitor was just unlocking the doors as I got there, and he smiled at my sleepy wave.
Score one for weird schools. At a normal school, I’d have had to wait in the office or something until more of the teachers got there, but freedom and personal responsibility are what the Free School is all about. So, I was able to head up to my advisor’s homeroom—which was also the school’s black box theater—and crash out on a beanbag chair for another forty minutes of catnapping.
* * *
At lunch I couldn’t bear the thought of spending any more time inside than I had to. So, I headed for the playground in back of the old high school building, which the Free School had taken over. There were probably a dozen other kids heading the same way. Most of them had bag lunches and wanted a chance to hang out in the sun instead of the cafeteria. Others were skipping lunch, or trying to catch a quick game of pickup basketball before heading back in.
At the Free School, lunch is an open period for everybody and you can do pretty much whatever you want, though eating is strongly encouraged. Hmm … maybe I should explain open periods for those of you who went to regular schools. At Free we put together our own schedule in consultation with our parents and advisors.
You have to learn all the stuff you would at a regular school, but not necessarily in the same order, or in class. So, if you’re reading above your grade level, they won’t make you take a class with other kids your age. They’ll let you test out of it and offer you the chance to take a literature or drama class a couple of grades ahead so you stay challenged.
They’re also super into “unstructured time,” or open periods. Everybody has at least one class hour a day that’s not scheduled. Some kids use it to play games, or read a book, or write software—whatever you’re into. In addition, everybody gets to run a bit wild at lunch.
When I got outside, I saw my best friend, Dave, already sitting on the broad concrete railing that surrounded the playground, a science fiction novel in one hand—books were one of the things we had in common. He waved and smiled as I got closer, and I couldn’t help but grin back at him. We’d been tight for about three years now, and he’s the sunniest person I know. I’d never understood the idea of an infectious smile until I met Dave. He’s got these ridiculously white teeth and skin a couple of shades darker than mine that really makes them shine, and you just can’t help but smile with him.
“Hey, Kalvan. Is it Monday enough for you?”
I shook my head ruefully. “I am soooo not ready for it to be the second week of school. What happened to summer?”
“Poof!” He made a popping gesture with his fingers. “But I bet we could grab a bit of it back, if we wanted to…” He jerked his chin toward the big wooded hill to the north of the school.
I knew immediately what he was thinking. The hill was the perfect place to sit and read or talk on a sunny afternoon. We’d discovered that the previous school year. And, to be honest, the idea of slipping off for a bit had been in the back of my mind from the moment I’d decided to head for the playground. Things always go chaotic around noon because of lunch and the fact that it’s the time of day when a lot of the older kids go off to internships or classes at the local college. People are coming and going like crazy, with kids everywhere doing all kinds of things. It’s hard for the teachers to keep track of everybody, which makes it the perfect time to skip out of school for a bit. And this was one of the best places to make the break.
I hopped up onto the concrete beside Dave and pulled a book out of my backpack. We chatted and pretended to read while keeping an eye on Pete—the teacher monitoring the playground. When he went to break up an argument among the basketball players, I rolled off the low railing, hooked my backpack over one shoulder, and dashed across a bit of open lawn to drop into the ditch that ran behind the gym. Dave was right behind me.
The school is built on a steep slope and the ditch keeps the building from flooding. It also makes a great escape route. There aren’t many windows on the gym side of the school, and you’re much less likely to be spotted going out that way. Now, all we needed to do to make it clean away was duck around the corner and into the hedges that separated the school from the government buildings around the capitol and …
“Hello, Kalvan, Dave.” I froze as, turning the corner, we nearly ran smack into our principal, Aaron Washington—a tall, black, balding man, though still fit for his age. “Where are you headed on this lovely day?” He smiled as he asked the question, but I knew we’d be in trouble if we couldn’t come up with a good answer.
I quickly held up the book I hadn’t yet put away. “We were just trying to find a quiet spot to read.” As I spoke, I felt a strange heat at the back of my throat, like cocoa on a cold night, or a campfire in the darkness.
“Not planning on sneaking off school grounds, I hope.”
I wanted to say no and look innocent, but my mouth didn’t want to listen to me. “Thinking about it,” I replied with a broad smile as the heat spread from my throat to my lips and tongue. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Dave giving me a what-are-you-doing! look—I ignored it. “But we weren’t going to sneak off very far, Aaron.”
Calling all our teachers and even the principal by their first names was among the hardest things I’d had to learn when I first started at the Free School, but that was one of many tricks the school used to “break down habits of authority.” Aaron raised an eyebrow at that, but didn’t say anything.
I lowered my voice conspiratorially. “If you follow this hedge back up the slope, you can get to the stoplight behind the court building—which is the safest place to cross over to the big hill.” I pointed at the top of a steeply wooded slope visible above the building behind the school. “There’s a spot just below the brow of the hill where the afternoon sun is perfect for reading.” I shook my book gently.
Aaron’s other eyebrow went up, and Dave looked positively gobsmacked. “That’s very … honest of you. I take it you two’ve been there before.”
I smiled fire and nodded. “It’s one of the places Evelyn”—our drama teacher—“takes her roving theater class to work outside. She says the natural setting helps put our minds in a different place from the school environment. She also has us pick up trash as part of our service-to-community requirements.”
The Free School was big on service learning, and on taking responsibility for things that had to get done. Anyone who spent any length of time at the school quickly learned that the answer to the question “If not me, then who?” was almost always “me.” It was another aspect of our whole Freedom Is Responsibility motto.
“We figured we could do a bit of cleanup before we started reading, right, Dave?” Dave nodded rather bemusedly as I reached into my half-open backpack and pulled out a plastic bag from the convenience store. “You know, if we were sneaking off school grounds to read a book during the open period at lunchtime, which, of course, we’re not going to do … and not just because we got caught.” I grinned another fiery grin. “No, because it would be wrong.” I made the puppy eyes of innocence.
Aaron actually chuckled now. “That’s probably the most charming lie I’ve heard from a student in the last ten years—Evelyn is an excellent acting teacher, and I can see why you’re one of her favorite students.” He turned his gaze on Dave. “Did you have anything you wanted to add?”
Dave just smiled that big smile of his and shook his head. “Not right at this moment, no. I think Kalvan’s got it covered.”
“Wise move.” Aaron assumed a stern expression as he shifted his attention back to me. “However, I can’t countenance your leaving school grounds. While the Free School might encourage you to make use of open periods to do whatever most appeals to you in hopes of producing a more well-rounded human being, the State of Minnesota frowns on students leaving the grounds during school hours without a specific educational purpose in mind and written permission.”
“I understand that, Aaron.” I felt as though I were filled with a fire that warmed without consuming.
“Good.” Aaron nodded. “So, I’m going to continue my walk around the building now, and I would like you two to tell me that you are not going to be off to the hedge as soon as my back is turned. I would also like you not to drop off that bag filled with trash from the slope in the trash bin out in front of my office no later than the end of sixth period. Do you understand me, Kalvan, Dave?” He didn’t smile, but there was a certain light of mischief in his eyes as he spoke.
“I believe that we do.” I nodded. “It’s been nice talking with you, Aaron. Thank you for helping keep us out of trouble, and we are absolutely not going to sneak away once you’re out of sight and carefully cross the street behind the school with the walk signal and go read on the slope, are we?”
“Not a chance,” agreed Dave.
“And not pick up trash,” added Aaron.
“Definitely not.”
“Excellent, then we all understand one another.”
“Perfectly.” I nodded, and Dave echoed me.
Without another word, Aaron walked around the corner of the school, leaving us alone.
“What just happened there?” demanded Dave.
“No idea.” I wasn’t ready to share the sense of being filled with fire. Dave looked like he wanted to argue, but I shook my head. “Let’s at least get clear before we talk about it.”
As we ducked into the hedge, I tried to sort it out for myself. I’m pretty good at talking my way out of trouble with adults, but I’m not that good. It felt almost like magic. I was confused, but I didn’t let the wonder I was feeling or the fire roaring away in my soul prevent me from quickly heading for the hill, with Dave trailing closely behind.
As soon as we got to the base of the slope, we ducked into the undergrowth. There was a narrow slot of a path that we followed upward. Maybe twenty feet along, Dave bent and picked up a plastic soda bottle and handed it to me. “Get the bag out.”
I nodded. “I should have thought of that.”
“I don’t know what happened back there with Aaron, but if we don’t drop off that bag of trash, we’ll be in deep weeds.” His words came out a bit wheezy from the climb, and he pulled out his asthma inhaler to take a brief hit.
As we finished filling the bag and settled into the little dell below the brow of the hill, Dave gave me a curious look. “Speaking of which, what did happen back there?”
I paused for a long time before answering that because I didn’t want to lie to Dave, but the truth was going to sound pretty crazy, and crazy was not a thing to talk about lightly between Dave and me.
Finally, I just plunged in. “You know about my mom.”
It wasn’t a question. It was one of the things that had drawn Dave and me together after we got to know each other. I don’t like to use the word crazy about my mom, but it saves a lot of time. My mother is more than half-crazy. Or mentally ill, if you prefer the technical term. Dave gets this in ways that most people simply can’t because his dad is bipolar and pretty intermittent in taking his meds.
Dave’s mom had kicked his dad out because she was afraid he might hurt one of the kids, but he still tried to be a part of their lives when he could. My mom might not have a formal diagnosis, but Dave had eaten a number of meals at my place, and he knew the score. There were conversations we could have together that neither one of us could have with someone who hadn’t been in the same place.
Dave nodded. “And…”
“When Aaron caught us, I suddenly felt … like, well, I could talk my way out of anything. It was like I was full of fire and I just knew that whatever I said was going to be the right thing to say and that it would work. Does that sound crazy to you?”
Dave looked a little sick. “Yeah, I’m sorry, Kalvan, but actually it does. My dad can get like that when he’s in one of his up phases.”
I felt like he’d kicked my stomach, and I must have looked it, too, because Dave quickly held up both hands, like he wanted to soothe me. “On the other hand, when my dad’s up and starts spinning lines, he isn’t half as smooth as you were back there. Heck, I’ve heard you spin a few in my time, and you’re not usually that good. Also…” He frowned and trailed off.
“Also what?” I demanded. That was part of our deal. If either one of us started to go the way our parents had, the other was supposed to play the voice of reality.
“Well, what you did was weird. I could kind of feel it in my guts. That patter wasn’t aimed my way, but it felt like you were … I don’t know, projecting convincing more than being convincing. I could see it affecting Aaron and felt the edges of it, but I didn’t feel the need to buy into it.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know, Kal, the whole thing was hinky.” He sighed. “Why don’t we talk about something else?”
“All right, but you’d tell me if you thought I was going like my mom, right?”
“That’s the deal we shook on.” He nodded solemnly.
“Thanks, Dave. I need that.”
“Hey,” said Dave, “you getting pressure from Evelyn to start thinking about what you want to do with your life? She bugged me about it this morning.”
It was an awkward change of subject, but I was happy to move away from the shaky ground of the previous topic. “Yeah, what’s up with that? We’re barely thirteen.”
Dave laughed. “But this is the Free School, land of making your own path in life, and it’s never too early to start exploring the possibilities. Am I right?”
I had to laugh then, too, and nod, because yeah. All the choose-your-own-adventure stuff could get a little old. “I told her I was mostly thinking about lunch at that point in the day, and she gave me that look.”
And here Dave mimed looking at me over a pair of imaginary glasses. “Yeah, I bet she loved that. I told her I’d gotten as far as thinking that maybe I wanted to be an actor, and since that’s her thing, I was totally off the hook for a while.”
“I could see doing that.” Acting was my favorite class.
On the other hand, and especially given my morning, what I most wanted in life at the moment was to grow up to not be like my mom. Acting was cool, but it wasn’t exactly a normal kind of career, and sometimes what I really wanted from life was a little bit of normal.
Only, that wasn’t really true, either, because every time I tried to do normal I got bored, and I didn’t do well with bored. Not at all. It gave me too much time to think, and then my brain went weird places and … I shied away from that thought. When I had too much time to think, I started to think too much like my mother.
That’s a lot of why I skip so much. Free was better than any of my old schools because I got to take at least some of my classes with the older students, and that pushed me a lot harder. But not all the time, and not all my classes. Reading helps, and exploring or doing something physical helps. But even at Free they expect you to pay attention and participate when you’re actually in class. It’s just easier to get out of my own head when I’m alone or hanging out with one or two people.
Neither Dave nor I mentioned it again over the next half hour, but the fact that he’d said I was sounding a bit like his dad lay heavily between us until his phone beeped from the depths of his pack.
“Ooh, I gotta go. I can’t miss this next class.” He hopped to his feet. “Are you coming?”
“Nah, I think I’m gonna stay here. I aced the entry test; I can afford to miss a few science classes.”
“All right, catch you later.”
“Back atcha.”
Dave had been gone for ten minutes when I looked up from my book and saw a bright flash of red at the base of the lilac thicket that walled us off from the crest of the hill. My first thought was that I had spied a fox—I’d seen them in the city once or twice before. But a moment later I got a better look, and no fox ever born had ears that long or such a stubby little tail. A rabbit … no, it was far too big and rangy for that. A hare, then, but one of very unusual color.
“Aren’t you fancy?” I whispered, not wanting to startle it into bolting. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a beautiful hare before. Would you like some of my muffin?” I’d decided to save it for later, and now I reached cautiously into my backpack.
The hare cocked its head to one side. “Depends. What kind is it?”
“Banana nut,” I replied, then froze. “Wait, did you really ask me what kind of muffin this is?”
“Of course not,” the hare said in a masculine voice dripping with sarcasm. “You know as well as I do that rabbits can’t talk. Now, cough up the muffin.”
Copyright © 2018 by Kelly McCullough
