“You can glide without a patch?” Sal is skeptical.
I shrug. “Yeah.”
“And you can control people?” Erica asks.
“Yeah.”
“Prove it,” Cassandra says from the stairs, where she’s sitting. “Show them—we’ll go outside.”
I shake my head. I’m sitting on the coffee table with my back to her, so she can’t see me. “I can do it here. It’s probably easier without all the other people around here in the background.” I look for Corina, but she’s in the bedroom. She’s been in there since before I came back. “Okay,” I say and lie back on the table, closing my eyes.
The three of them are obvious in the closed-off Jungle of the bus. There’s nothing else to hide them. They’re loud and clear right in front of me. Their music is on the top of the pile in the drawer. I think about what to do for a demonstration. Something too small and they won’t be able to tell if it was me or not. Something to big and I could lose friends . . .
I go for juvenile. When the music is written, I open my eyes and sit up.
“So?” Sal asks.
“In just a moment, you’re going to pick your nose and eat it,” I tell him. Erica looks at me and then at him. I hear Cassandra getting up off the stairs behind me.
“It isn’t gonna happen,” Sal tells me. He’s smiling like it’s a joke.
I shrug and point at his hand, which is already rising slowly to his nose.
Erica gasps. “What are you doing?”
Sal’s hand finishes its slow approach to his nose and his finger extends up into the nostril. He’s not looking at us; his eyes are focused on his own hand. He’s still smiling like he was when he said it wasn’t going to happen.
He pulls out a decent-sized booger, examines it on his fingertip, and then pops it in his mouth.
Erica explodes. “Holy shit!” She points at him as he’s swallowing. “He did it! He did it!” She freezes, turns to me. “You did it.”
Sal suddenly returns to life. He makes a face, gags, then runs to the kitchenette, pushing me out of his way so he can spit into the sink. “You mind-slaved me,” he says between spits. “I was like, there’s no way, and then I felt myself think, I should pick my nose and eat it, even though I remembered that I’d just freakin’ told you all that it would never happen.” He makes a face and spits again. “Augh!”
“How did you do that?” Cassandra asks. “Show me.”
I try to explain.
I tell them about the music, the guitars, and how I find the sheet music. It doesn’t make any sense to them.
There’s movement at the bedroom door. I turn around. Corina raises her chin at me and crosses from the bedroom to the couch. She sits down next to Erica in the seat Sal left behind, not asking or anything, but nobody says a thing about it. They’re all too nervous.
She closes her eyes.
I’m just about to ask her what’s up, but then I can’t because my head’s too full.
I feel her in every sense. I smell her smells, and feel her touches. Our music is joined and momentarily we are playing the same notes, and it’s louder than anything else in existence. I feel her changing my melody, my intensity. I feel myself smile.
Then I remember that I’m hungry, too, and I know what I want to eat.
My hand comes up to my face, my finger, my nose.
My mouth.
“What’re you doing?” I hear Sal say it, but he’s a million miles away. He’s outside Corina and me.
Corina recedes. It’s like a tide has gone out. I’m not underwater with her anymore, but she’s left traces of herself all over me. I reach out for her and she’s there. We’re connected again.
“What the hell?” Erica’s question brings both Corina and me back to the moment.
“I can do what he does now,” Corina says. She rolls up her sleeve to show us a starfish-shaped thing on her arm. “Sybil’s patch.” Then: “This one’s different, though. Lots of stuff I can do.”