Inherit (6 page)

It’s become zombie-hand, doing what it will outside the confines of my brain’s commands. And what it’s doing is dialing Jonas’s number, which, embarrassingly, I know by heart. It is a memento on my hand, a scrawl to remind me of our night together, but it stopped being necessary after about two hours, when the actual digits were permanently seared into my memory.

I try to hang the phone up, hold it away from my ear, anything to stop this stupid plan, but Jonas picks up, says hello and leaves me with no choice but to answer back.

“Hey, Jonas. Uh, what’s up?” I squeeze my eyes shut and curse my renegade hand.

“I’m glad you called. I just got off work.” His voice has an energy that doesn’t mesh with a long day covered in grease. I know deep down it’s all about me, and I’m tickled and uncertain at the same time.

Apparently, my hand is the only part of my body that has a life of its own. Loki bounds out to the kitchen and my hand plucks the chicken I had put aside for my very own sandwich and throws it to the little beggar at my feet. I click my tongue as she snatches up the meat and throws me a toothy smile. But my out of control hand can’t help my mouth think of anything interesting to say to Jonas, and there’s this long, uncomfortable stretch of time where I search for anything not absolutely pathetic to dribble out, but nothing comes.

Panic sets in.

Jonas laughs, and it’s such a big, loud, long sound, no human should be able to make a noise like that without the help of a synthesizer. It’s like he’s mass-marketing good humor, and I’m the first one at the register to pick some up for myself.

After a few minutes of goofy giggles, he asks me out. On a date.

“My grandma is sleeping.” I bite my thumbnail.

“Maybe you could leave her a note? Or, if it’s okay, I could come by your place. I could bring a board game. Scrabble? Parcheesi?”

Never has Parcheesi sounded so totally enticing. “Bring it on.” I feel my cheeks pink like tulips, like roses, like blossoms in the spring. It’s torture waiting for the phone to click so I can squeal and stamp my feet with pure glee.

I grab Loki and hold her slightly in front of me. “You pretty, pretty girl! Maybe your crazy luck isn’t all bad.” Her golden eyes are warm and sweet, and she licks at my hand and face when I give her another piece of chicken and kiss her ears.

What is happening to me? I’m loopy with love.

Chapter 6

For the ten minutes it takes him to get to my house, I try to ice my brain. I don’t want to wish or hope or do anything that will excite my supposed-genie of a fox and mess this all up, I don’t want to project some big deal on tonight and make it more than it is, and I don’t want to imagine one moment of total unequivocal fun that might never happen. So I make sandwiches and, when Jonas knocks, the table is already set like I’m some 50s housewife excited for her man to waltz in.

Except I’d be the worst housewife ever, since it’s just a cold sandwich and a glass of orange juice, which is all we have in the house. Oh, and a dill pickle, and some only slightly stale potato chips.

He has an armful of dusty board games in broken cardboard boxes and a bunch of violets bound with a twist-tie. He balances the games on one forearm and offers me the flowers.

“Thank you.” My heart pumps hard, and all I can smell is the sweet promise of violets. I put them in a teacup with some tap water, and they spruce up the table and waft a delicious smell that’s soft and, inexplicably, purple.

“Is this for me?” He points at the sandwich hopefully.

“Yeah. I hope you like avocado and chicken.” I go to sit, but he jogs over and pulls my chair out. It’s meant to be pure chivalry, but it winds up an almost traumatic collision. I have to just relax and let him grab the chair and scoot me in awkwardly, and it would have cast a cloud of strange awkwardness over the night, except he laughs just above my head.

“I was totally trying to be smooth. I didn’t mean to smash your ankle on the chair leg.” When he sits across from me, he hangs his head sheepishly.

“Forget it! I hardly use my ankles.” I smile, he smiles, I’m surprised hearts and rainbows and animated birds don’t pop out in my kitchen above our heads. “So, how was work?”

He swallows a huge bite of sandwich in one ravenous gulp. “It was work. Today seemed to be ‘bring your really expensive car in and treat your mechanic like a worthless piece of shit’ day. How ‘bout you?”

I finish chewing and swallow. “Good money, alright people, but my ex came in at the end.”

All of the animated birds shut up at this announcement. And a little animated thunder cloud rolls over Jonas’s head. “What did he want?”

“First I thought he wanted to eat. Then I thought he wanted to harass me.” When he puts his sandwich on the chipped plate in that throw-down-and-duel way, I clarify, “Not harass like bodily harass, Jonas. Just exist-to-irritate-me harassment. But none of it happened anyway.”

“Why not? He realized he’s an asshat and decided to bother someone else?” Jonas mutters between mouthfuls.

“Um, no. It was kind of weird.” I glance at Loki, gnawing on a chicken bone with relish, and reach down to stroke her back. “I made this wish that he would understand what it’s been like for me with Bestemor being a little mental, and he wound up being understanding.”

Jonas looks at me like he’s waiting for the kicker. When I don’t offer anything else, his face breaks into a suspiciously smug smile. “So your big shock was that your ex-boyfriend wasn’t one hundred percent a douche and decided to have some sympathy for the fact that you bust your ass caring for your ill grandma? Enlighten me. What exactly did you see in this guy?”

“I was young and he’s so cute.” I sigh and bat my eyelashes, enjoying Jonas’s facial twitch. “But that’s not the point. I
wished
it and it happened. And it wasn’t just JR being nice. He was saying—” I wave my hands around. “He was saying things I’ve only thought to myself! Things I don’t talk about with anyone, not even Nevaeh. And he used my words like he climbed into my head and took them out.”

Jonas bites his pickle casually, then leans over and scoops up the fox. “So you think this little guy has something to do with it?”

“Girl,” I correct. “Bestemor named her Loki.”

“You realize it doesn’t make much sense. I mean, I saw the money and the tire. And the coat,” he adds, running a big hand over her silky fur. I love how gentle he is with her. Much as she makes me crazy, I feel incredibly protective about her. “But there’s always a logical explanation, Wren. Always.”

I shake my head. “Nevaeh did some research, and apparently there’s a long history in Japan of these foxes being familiars. Like they serve families of…witches.” He raises an eyebrow. “I know, it sounds insane! But things have been happening. And if there’s a different, logical explanation, I really wish I could figure it out.”

I pop my hand over my mouth. I said ‘wish’! I have to rewind and think about what I wished for, and only manage to settle down when I realize that it was a good wish.

“Let’s use logic, then. We’ll test your wishing fox theory. We’ll use the games.” He puts the Loki down and she sits under the table like a perfect, dainty lady at my feet. I love the warm brush of her fur against my ankles and the buzz of heady calm that she seems to bring me. He clears the plates, grabs the games and sets them in front of me. They are a dusty, crumbling pile of fun turned into our own personal Ouija board, which we will use to quiz my sudden supernaturality. “Pick any game.”

I run my pointer over the boxes and collect a line of dust on my fingertip. I finally grab Scrabble.

“Good choice. Now I’ll set out the board and you wish.” He flops the board on the table and distributes the pieces like a dealer in Vegas.

“For what?” I ask.

“How about all of one letter? Like, wish for all the t’s or something.” He shakes a little black pouch and I examine the board, filled with pink and blue stars and neat, logical boxes.

I close my eyes and wish for all the letter m’s to magically land on my little wooden letter pew. When I open my eyes, Jonas closes his, reaches into the bag and pulls out seven little wooden squares. I get two m-tiles and frown.

“I only got two m’s.” I shrug at my lack of luck and the failed experiment.

His smirk morphs into a smile then explodes into a laugh. “There are only two m-tiles in the game. I told you to pick ‘t’!”

“You told me to pick ‘t’
or something
,” I remind him. “So that proves it, right?”

“I don’t know. The chance of getting both m’s is pretty decent. I mean, getting six t’s would have been the clincher. That would have helped tip the scales in this whole wish fox mystery.” His fingers are surprisingly agile, the nails rimmed with black grease that also fills in the cracks and whorls on his fingertips.

“Should I try again?” I turn all my tiles right side up and glance at him. He’s handsome. Not JR handsome, not drop-dead, girls drooling all over handsome, but I love his sharp cheekbones and full bottom lip. I like the light eyelashes that spring around his eyes, which are too dull to be blue, too bright to be grey. I like the long, tangled look of his limbs heaped on the chair and spilling over, splayed across the faded linoleum floor and the chipped kitchen table.

“Let’s just play. Maybe we’ll come up with a better test later.” He nods at me to put down my tiles.

I run my fingers over the smooth wood and click
flame
into the slots. “What kind of better test?”

Jonas leans forward and rubs his chin with his grease-tinged index finger and thumb. “I don’t know. Things showed up, so we know that it’s possible for material stuff to appear. Maybe. And you think JR’s sudden human reaction is part of this wish-thing, even though I think it’s just him realizing he screwed up big time.” He flicks the tiles that spell out
friar
off of my ‘f’ and moves his mouth back and forth. “Is there something weird you want? Something that would be a miracle if it happened?”

I add
meteor
off of the ‘r’ in
friar
and think about what might burst on the horizon of my life like an explosion of comets and swirling stars. “Like Bestemor getting better?” My voice registers lower than the softly clicking tiles.

“Is she that bad?” He presses
grant
into the squares with over-cautious fingertips.

I slide my tiles back and forth, annoyed with the blank I pull. I hate blanks. I hate the possibility. I wish I—

I clench my teeth, slide the tiles a few inches away from me and look at Jonas, sitting still as the resigned letters on the Scrabble board.

“She’s bad.” My voice is marooned, far away from my weak body which has dissolved into a mess of jerky fingers and weepy eyes. “Sometimes it’s so bad, I’m sure she’s all gone. Then so good, I wonder if I imagined the bad. Which is the worst. By far the worst.”

His hands travel over the board, his elbows knock tiles loose, his wrists settle onto the grooves right where I’m about to build
raider
, off the ‘e’ anchoring
meteor.
He plucks my hands and holds them. His skin is scratchy and my eyes burn from the sharp chemical odor of Brake Cleen wafting off of it.

“So wish it away.” He presses my hands like he’s pushing me forward. “Make the wish.”

I close my eyes, but I cannot will myself to use this force I don’t trust yet on the one person I love above all others. “Did you ever read that short story ‘The Monkey’s Paw’?”

“I don’t think so.” Jonas steadies my shaking hands. “Why?”

“It’s about this little mummified monkey’s paw,” I explain, my voice quivery. “And you get three wishes from it. So this soldier shows it to this nice old couple with a son, and tells them it only brings bad luck. Really bad. But they think he’s just being dramatic. So they wish for money.” I stop.

“That’s a pretty boring wish.” Jonas tilts his head and the fluorescent light casts a yellow-green glint over his hair.

“The soldier said boring was better. But it wound up turning on them.”

“How?”

“The wish, it’s for enough to pay their house off or something. A few days later their son dies and the money his company gives them is exactly enough to pay the house off.” Every hair follicle on my body stands at ginger attention.

“That sounds like a depressing story.”

“That’s not the worst part. So the wife is hysterical, and she wishes the boy back. Like alive again, after he’s been dead and buried. So he hammers on the door, and the old man figures it out, and wishes the kid dead again. And everyone is miserable. Or dead.”

“It’s just a story, Wren. Make-believe.” Jonas’s voice croons in my ear. He’s leaned close to me.

“Make-believe? Like a fox that makes wishes come true?” I shake my hair out of my eyes and yank my hands from his so I can wipe the tears away with my knuckles. “What if I throw everything off whack, Jonas?”

“But the people in Japan, the ones who keep these foxes, they don’t all bring misery down on the people they love, right?” His logic wiggles through the pages of tragic short-story that shuffle past my memory’s eye. “If this is some kind of magic wishing fox, you should be able to control the wishes, right?”

I pull my finger under my eyes and collect the damp tears. “Control them?”

“Maybe we can do some research?” He shakes a few Scrabble tiles in his hand, letting the smooth wood jiggle and clack. “Once you know what you’re in for, it won’t be so freaky.”

New tears rebel against my attempts to wipe my eyes dry. They slide down my cheeks and drain all of my strength. Jonas ambles over to me and eases me out of my chair. The smell of motor oil clogs my nostrils, but under that oily smell is the warm tang of his skin. I burrow through and take deep breaths, my nose buried in his chest. His long arms bend around me.

“Don’t cry, Wren. I’m here. I’m right here.”

For a minute, that feels as unbelievable as a wish-granting lucky fox.

Chapter 7

Through all my tears and sadness, I have a sudden, pulsing desire; I want to kiss him. I want to grab him by the shirt, pull him down to my face and press my lips onto his. Everything feels so bad, so confusing. I want to fall into his arms and let him kiss it all away.