JESSE’S LEG SWELLED UNTIL HE COULD BARELY WALK ON IT. He told the Mindells a centipede had bit him on the Prairie Path. He was fine, he said, just allergic to stings. No, he didn’t need to see a doctor. Really. Mrs. Mindell gave him some over-the-counter medicine from her bathroom cabinet.
He didn’t say anything about the old man.
You know what to do, don’t you?
What had that meant?
What he’d do is get some bug poison and spread it around the tree. Honor must have smuggled in some live centipedes with her to make into more of her jewelry, and they had escaped.
Or something like that. Something straightforward and rational, not spherical and nuts.
Kellie phoned him, as he’d asked. “What’s wrong?” she said. “You sounded upset.”
“It’s nothing, really,” he said, regretting he’d left the message. After all, what could he tell her without sounding crazy?
“Jesse Jones,” she said, “don’t you give me that.”
So he told her something that really did bug him. “I found out that I won’t be able to take driver’s ed next year if I don’t have a birth certificate—a real one, I mean—and a Social Security number. So when am I going to get them? I mean, if I can’t take driver’s ed, I’ll never get a license; and if I don’t have a license, how am I going to go out with girls?”
Kellie was silent for a moment and then burst into laughter.
“It’s not funny,” Jesse said. He meant it too, and he meant it for more than just the driver’s license. Honor, the old man, the scarf, the spirit shrine to the Demon Queen, none of it was funny.
“No, it’s not,” Kellie agreed, while still chuckling. “Don’t worry, Jesse. The AEA lawyers are working on getting you your papers. There’s still lots of time yet before you have to start worrying about impressing girls with your driving skills.”
Jesse’s leg was still swollen enough the next day that he stayed home from school. Wesley stopped by for a visit. He looked at Jesse’s leg and said, “If you were a horse, you’d have to be put down.”
“Any more encouraging words?”
“Allyn Shields asked me where you were.”
“She did?”
“Don’t make anything of it, dude. She’s on that student council committee where they send cards to sick students.”
Jesse hobbled to the closet. “I want to show you something.” He got out the scarf, which he had hidden in a shoebox at the top of the closet. Spreading it on the bed, he asked, “What do you think of this?”
“Looks like a rag.”
“The design in the weave. You’re the math genius. Is there any sort of coded message in it?”
Wesley’s thin nose twitched. He loved a good logic problem, Jesse knew. Wesley traced the patterns of rusty browns and reds, the ray bursts and the stick figures that were struggling and falling. “What you have here is a story,” he said. “A battle between good and evil. See, up here in the heavens are twins before they are born. They’re innocent, right, they’re not involved in anything. Then something happens. A plot by the gods to change everything. The twins get separated with great violence. One twin is thrown down from the stars, which should kill him, but one of the gods barely succeeds in saving his life. The other twin is born; but without his brother, he turns into evil. And then down here—this is earth—you see, the twins meet up again and they have this huge battle. One will kill the other and the fate of the earth depends on who wins.”
Jesse stared at his friend. Wesley grinned and tapped his forehead. “Pretty quick, huh, coming up with that on the spot?”
“So that’s not what this one is?”
“No idea, dude. I made it up. Hey, the Mindells have Internet, don’t they? Let me show you my bedroom spy cam.” A minute later, they were seated in front of the computer in the study. Wesley logged in, typed in some addresses, and called up the cam. His bedroom appeared on the monitor.
His kid brother was poking around in his closet.
“Hey, hey, you jerk!” Wesley shouted. “Get out of there!” He jumped to his feet, grabbing his bag. “If I hurry, maybe I can bust him. Younger brothers, they should be outlawed. See you later.”
“Say hi to Allyn for me.”
Wesley paused long enough to shake his head and say, “I’ll tell her you’re at death’s door, and only the thought of seeing her again is what’s keeping you alive.”
After Wesley left, Jesse returned to his bedroom. He studied the scarf, still spread on his bed, barely aware of the throbbing in his swollen leg.
He thought about that jolt of recognition when he saw Honor that first day of class. She’d felt it too. Then there was the fact that they had been thrown together at the same time in a small country town in the middle of nowhere.
But, God, one look at the mirror was all it took to show they were about as related as a moose was to a mongoose.
And Wesley wasn’t any psychic. He just made that story up.
Whatever Honor’s craziness was, Jesse wasn’t going to get sucked into it. Every day he could feel wisps of the alien and terrifying breeze of Cambodia on his neck.
He put the scarf back into the shoebox, and the shoebox back in the closet, and everything else out of his mind.
The weatherman predicted a change in the weather. An unstable air mass was rolling across the plains, with possibilities of severe storms.
The morning had an icky feel to it, as if the greasy sky was rubbing up against Jesse’s skin. The hazy sunlight oozed like egg white. Jesse was sweating by the time he got to school, still limping slightly. He couldn’t wait to get inside, where hopefully maintenance had turned on the creaky air conditioning.
Honor must have come early. Jesse spotted her on the third floor balcony, leaning against the railing, hunched like a gargoyle as she stared out at the town. He hurried through the doors before she spotted him.
As he opened his locker, Allyn came up to him. “Hey, heard a centipede bit you.”
He leaned close to whisper, “Don’t tell anyone, but it was actually a radioactive spider. Now I can swing from buildings to rescue pretty girls.”
“I might have to stage something so you can prove it,” she said, and spun away.
Jesse was still grinning as he walked into home room. It wasn’t a triumphal return. Nobody asked him where he’d been or how he was. Honor looked tired. A rash of acne had broken out on her chin.
By English, thunderheads were boiling up from the distant cornfields. They made Jesse uneasy. He’d take a good California earthquake over a tornado any day. An earthquake was just the earth shifting, but a tornado seemed much more personal and malicious. Even the other students were restless.
“Honor, I think you have a short story for us?” the teacher, Miss Olsen, said, with an encouraging smile on her long, horsey face.
Honor stood in front of the class. She held her handwritten pages close to her face and read, “The first time I kissed a boy, he died because of it.”
Heads snapped up. Miss Olsen’s smile vanished, replaced by a pop-eyed expression as though a mouse had climbed up her leg.
“What did she say?” Betsy whispered.
“Hey, start over again,” Andy called out.
Honor dutifully began again. “The first time I kissed a boy, he died because of it.”
Thunder rumbled even closer as Honor read on. In the story, the boy was deadly allergic to peanuts and the girl had just eaten a peanut-butter sandwich before kissing him. And the way the story was written, at the end Jesse was wondering if the girl had done that on purpose. What was worse, he wondered if the story had actually happened and if the girl was Honor.
He wasn’t the only one. Miss Olsen said to the silent students, “That’s the power of fiction for you.” She turned to Honor. “It is fiction, isn’t it?”
Honor blinked. “Of course it is. He had one of those Adrenalin injectors. I jabbed him in time.”
Another long silence. “If you kissed me, I’d need one of those too,” Andy finally said.
Several of the other boys snickered.
“You know, Andy,” Honor said, “if an original thought ever struck you, you’d have to go to the emergency room.”
Jesse hid a smile. Andy frowned, his single neuron working at capacity to process that, when the school tornado siren blasted into life. Jesse looked out the window, his amusement gone in an instant. Low black clouds tumbled, and gusts of wind shook the trees. Was this a drill or the real thing? They marched out of the classroom and went to their assigned places, split between the computer lab and the hall right outside. Jesse was on the fringes of the outer group, feeling very exposed. He knelt and counted off with the others.
“Honor, you didn’t count off,” Miss Olsen said.
Silence.
“Where’s Honor?”
Nobody knew. Nobody volunteered to go look.
But Jesse had a pretty good idea where she was. Well, leave her to it. None of his business.
His conscience, though, kicked him in the rear. It was one thing to say it was none of his business, but it was another to leave her alone knowing she was doing something stupid and risking her life.
He inched backward toward the closest stairs and scrabbled up the first flight on his hands and feet so nobody would see him. Hail pelted the glass on the landing. Once on the second floor, he sprinted up to the third. The windows shuddered and rattled. He had to shove hard against the balcony’s door to push it open.
Honor gripped the railing, her face flushed with excitement as gusts lashed her hair. The city sirens wailed, the loudest of them on City Hall on the other side of the PE field. In the quad in front of City Hall, the employees who called themselves the Prayer Warriors, wearing full-length yellow raincoats, stretched out their hands to the sky as they prayed for God to calm the storm. Mrs. Volter led them, her hood down, her red hair seeming to glow.
A block down from City Hall by the Main Street Circle, George jigged a dance in the rain, a glass of whiskey in his hand, not a drop spilling as he whirled around the circle’s ornamental fencing.
Jesse grabbed Honor’s hand and shouted, “We have to get to shelter!”
She yanked her hand away. Low dark clouds whipped around them with a hard spray and then lifted.
Honor nearly leaned off the balcony as she pointed, jabbing with her rigid arm. “There, Jesse,” she shouted. “See it?”
He saw it all right. In the distance, by the Welcome to Longview barn, a funnel grew out of a cancerous black mass and felt hungrily for the land. George shot his arms straight up with his legs spread wide, as though in welcome. The Prayer Warriors thrust their arms higher and shouted their prayers with greater urgency.
The funnel paused and then lifted and began to break apart. The dark clouds grew lighter in color. The storm suddenly eased up as if the bottom had fallen out of it.
Honor turned, her cheeks flushed. Behind her rain-streaked glasses, her eyes danced. She looked wild, even beautiful. “Wasn’t that something? That’s how she’s going to come. When everything’s ready, she’s going to come on a wind like nobody’s ever seen before.”
By study hall, the weather had cleared up to sporadic bouts of sun and cloud. Honor sat at her usual place at the reference table, with her Sanskrit palm leaf text, copying the writing.
Andy cruised behind her and snatched her glasses off her face. He crammed them on to mock her but jerked back, genuinely startled. “God,” he said, “eyes this bad, I suggest going sonar.”
Honor leaped up to grab them away from him, yelling at him to give them back. He laughed, pushing her off with one hand, holding the glasses high over his hand with the other.
Jesse snuck up and snatched the glasses from him. “Don’t be so grade school,” he said, handing the glasses to Honor. Andy’s fists clenched, but by then Mr. Applegate was on them, threatening major demerits.
Things quieted down. Honor resumed her Sanskrit study.
Betsy and some other of the glamour girls huddled at another table by the stacks, their polished heads bent together. They buzzed quietly. They kept glancing at Honor with serious expressions, not the usual gossip gigglies.
Betsy brushed her hair back and, after getting Mr. Applegate’s permission, went over to Honor’s table, standing on the other side. “Excuse me, Honor,” she said. “Have you ever thought of laser eye surgery?”
Honor didn’t look up. Red blotches surfaced on her cheeks.
Betsy said quickly, “I’m not making fun of you. Honest. I had laser eye surgery. Best thing I’ve ever done.”
“The doctors say I have the kind of eyes they don’t want to risk,” Honor said dully.
“Oh.” Betsy cleared her throat with a little cough. “That thing you’re studying? Are they really black magic curses? Because if they are, you really shouldn’t be bringing them into school. I’m not saying they are; that’s why I’m asking. I don’t want to be, like, accusing you of anything if it’s not true.”
Honor inched her head up to look at Betsy and just as slowly lowered it. She put a finger to a line and said in a voice that picked up speed without taking breath, “Ong aung mung ring pang pung mang ang hauh! Hauh! Black wind from my heart and red wind from my liver and green wind from my kidneys, ascend high and higher yet and break her bones, hauh! hauh!, and smash her beauty—”
Betsy stepped back. “Okay, okay, I get it.”
Honor kept on chanting “—hauh! hauh! Wind, tear her hair out and wind twist her neck—”
Betsy put her hands over her ears. “I said stop it! Stop it!”
“—ang mang pung pang,” Honor said in a slowing voice that trailed away into silence.
Betsy lowered her hands, a stricken look on her pale face.
Honor smiled. “Don’t worry. In English it doesn’t work. And you need to make all the proper offerings in the first place.”
Before the period ended, Principal Matherne had already called Honor to his office.
When she finally rejoined the class for world history, everybody fell silent, including Mr. Pendergrast, who, apart from tests and exercises, considered the absence of his voice an unnatural state of affairs. Honor headed straight to Betsy’s desk and stood there, staring at a spot on the desk. “I apologize. That was inconsiderate behavior not in accord with our school’s values.”
Honor was obviously channeling Principal Matherne’s exact words, but it was an apology. Betsy smiled as graciously as she could.
“And this,” Honor said, holding up the palm leaf text she had been studying for everybody to see, “is a Hindu myth about Garuda, a half-man, half-bird creature. That’s all it is.”
She stared at Jesse as she said that, as though daring him to believe it.
Wesley opened a plastic container and unhappily pondered its contents, a single scoop of plain tuna on undressed salad.
“That’s all you’re eating?” Jesse asked. For once, he himself had snagged hot, crisp pieces of pizza.
“My dad’s on a diet, and according to my mom, this is by way of moral support.”
Jesse handed him one of his pizza slices. Wesley brightened. “Thanks.” Half the pizza vanished in a single bite. “So I hear Principal Matherne is going to pin an award on you for saving Honor from the tornado, and then he’s going to shoot her for abusing Betsy.”
“It’s not funny,” Jesse said.
“So does this mean you’re asking Honor to the Homecoming Dance?”
Jesse glanced over at Allyn’s table, where he was rewarded by a sliding glance of her green eyes. “I’m asking Allyn.”
Wesley broke out coughing and swigged some Coke. “You’re crazy.”
“Why?”
“Dude, you have a cow pie between your ears? She’s going out with Stuart. How many times do I have to tell you?”
“No law against me asking.”
“Your funeral. Stuart will probably try to nine-iron your testicles.”