Rush (12 page)

They could think what they wanted, and I
didn’t care if they believed I’d capitulated the same way I always had. In my
heart, the knowledge that I’d seen something not easily explained away remained
intact. If Max was really a devil worshipper, though...that put my attraction
to him on a whole new level of stupid.

Chapter 10

Max

Trent and his fellow bullies were
between me and my science class and the bell was about to ring. The hallway
boomed with the loud voices of kids laughing and shouting as they dashed into
their classes at the last minute. I’d been late three times this semester
already. If it happened again, Mr. Brown had promised me detention. But in
order to get in the class, I had to make it around the knot of football players
and wrestlers that had congregated near the door of my class.

Trent was at the center.

I was small for my age; I hadn’t hit my
growth spurt yet. That gave Trent and company a major advantage over me, not to
mention all the social clout they had as athletes. But they couldn’t keep me
from getting into my class—not really. They could only make it difficult and
embarrassing. I lifted my chin and squared my shoulders, my hand tightening on
the strap of my backpack. Striding forward as if they didn’t intimidate me, I
pretended I hadn’t even seen them.

One of the bigger boys stepped directly
in front of me. “Where do you think you’re going?”

I stepped to the right to get around
him, but he mirrored my actions.

“My class is right there,” I said with a
movement of my head to indicate the room.

“My class is right there,” he mocked in
a high voice.

Was that the best he could do? Idiot.
Still, he was bigger than me and he had back-up. I glanced at Trent. He was
watching with a grin, arms crossed, legs spread, obviously enjoying my
discomfort.

I tried again to pass, but the bully
wouldn’t let me. Like I said, I was small for my age. A lot smaller than Trent
and his buddies.

“Let me by.” I tried to make my voice
strong. Unfortunately, it cracked in the middle of the sentence.

They laughed. One of them shoved me.

“Don’t be in such a hurry, Maxi-pad,”
Trent said.

“Yeah. What’re you in such a hurry for?”
someone echoed.

“Maxi-pad,” another guy said. “Good
one.”

Other students began to gather around
the spectacle we were creating, their faces alert with interest. I was burning
all over, my neck and face hot with shame. Would Mr. Brown take this incident
into account when he decided whether or not to punish me? Probably not. He
hadn’t any of the other times it had happened.

“You’re going to be late for your
classes,” I said.

“Oooh, we’re shaking in our shoes,” the
first guy retorted. They could probably get away with lateness. Their type
always seemed to get away with shit that would get a kid like me in huge
trouble.

The bell rang. Their audience melted
away as kids scurried to make their classes before they were officially late. I
heard a few of them repeating “Maxi-pad” to each other and laughing. Great.
That would be my new nickname from today onward.

Mr. Brown came out of his class,
frowning. “What are you boys doing out here?”

“We’re just helping Max get to class,”
Trent said.

Mr. Brown fixed me with a stern glower.
“Late again, Max? I warned you what would happen, didn’t I?”

“But they’re late, too. Why don’t they
get detention?”

“This isn’t about them. It’s about you.
Now get in the classroom and take your seat.”

I obeyed with a sullen clench of my jaw
as my stepbrother and his friends stood in the hall, chortling.

***

Caroline was avoiding me. She wouldn’t
even look at me. In the essay class, she kept coming in late and choosing the
seat farthest from me, her gaze carefully turned away from me.

It hurt. It shouldn’t have, but it did.
She was supposed to be nothing more than a means to an end, yet here I was
moping because she wasn’t friendly to me anymore.

I needed to get my head back in the
game.

There were more important things to
think about than whether or not Trent’s sorority chick girlfriend liked me or
not. Fred’s warning, for example. I hadn’t heard anything more about this ghost
who was trying to contact me and I’d been too busy to do any ritual work designed
to bring the spirit closer.

On Saturday morning, I drove out to Brad
and Marie’s farm. I found them in the garden in back of the house, working at
some gardening activity I couldn’t identify. Marie’s hair was braided and
coiled on her head like an old-fashioned milkmaid. They both wore ragged jeans
and ratty old sweat shirts and were dragging around a plastic tarp covered in
some kind of brown chunky stuff.

Brad looked up at me and waved. “Max!
You’re here just in time to help.”

“I don’t know what you’re doing,” I
said.

“That’s okay.” Brad grinned. “I’ll teach
you everything you need to know.”

“That’s just what I was afraid you were
going to say.”

“We’re spreading mulch over the beds.
When we finish that, we’ll set some cold frames over our winter crops.”

“Okay, sure. Mulch. Cold frames.” What
the heck was a cold frame?

Although I’d grown up in Billings, I’d
really been a town kid. I’d had little exposure to the country, and when I ran
away I ended up on the streets in Seattle with no way out to the countryside
that bordered it. My parents hadn’t been gardeners. So I hadn’t experienced the
deep-down inner quiet that came along with clean country air and the
wind-rustled murmur of tall grass and trees until I’d followed Brad and Marie
down to Avery’s Crossing.

I’d been here a few months, and it still
surprised me how quickly I’d adapted to small town life and how much I liked
being out here on the farm. It was almost like an instant meditation, where all
I had to do was get out of my car and a light trance state came over me.

When Brad and Marie had told me they
were moving down here, I’d dreaded it. I wanted to go with them, but live in
Avery’s Crossing? I figured there would be absolutely nothing to do here, and
that was sort of true but I loved it anyway.

“What brings you out here today?” Marie
said after a while.

“Can’t I just come out and visit my
family?” I said.

“Of course you can. But I can tell there’s
something else.”

I glanced at her, then at Brad. He had a
baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, so it was hard to see his expression.

“Fred told me something recently,” I
said. “I wanted to run it by you guys.”

Brad sat back on his heels. “What was
it?”

“He said...” I chewed on the inside of
my lower lip as I thought about how to approach the subject. Direct was
probably best. “He said there’s a spirit trying to get in touch with me.”

“Did he have a name?” Marie said.

“No. He couldn’t even tell if it was
male or female.”

They exchanged a glance. Did they
already know something about this?

“What?” I said.

“Huh?” Brad replied.

“You two looked at each other like you
were having a silent conversation.”

He still looked puzzled. “I don’t think
we were.”

Maybe it was just the effect of being
married to the same person for so many years. What would that be like? My dad
had lost my mom when I was five, and they’d only been married about six years
at the time. Of course, he’d been with my stepmom for a long time, but that
wasn’t a marriage I’d use as a role model. My stepmom followed his orders...to
the letter.

“We don’t know anything about your
spirit,” Marie said. “But we can find out for you if you want.”

Did I? I’d driven out here for the
express reason of talking to them about the situation, yet now I was here I
wasn’t sure I wanted to investigate. Something about this particular spirit...I
could sense it would change me in a way I couldn’t imagine and wasn’t sure I
wanted.

“I don’t know,” I said finally.

“It’s probably better to find out than
to wonder,” Marie said.

“Whatever this entity wants, you know
you have free will, right?” Brad added. “You don’t have to cooperate with it.
If you don’t like what it’s telling you, send it away and ignore it.”

I bowed my head with a sigh and pulled
another dandelion from the ground. Something told me ignoring this spirit
wouldn’t be so easy. “I know.”

“Let’s get washed up and have lunch,”
Marie said. “Then you can decide if you want us to go further with it.”

I followed them back to the house,
thinking how lucky I’d gotten when I’d found them. Or when they’d found me.
Most kids on the street weren’t so fortunate. They never found any significant
help, or they ended up with adults who only wanted to use them. Sometimes worse
than they’d been used in their families of origin.

It was thanks to Fred, of course. He’d
nudged me in their direction, the same way he’d protected me from the worst
effects of living on the streets. Fred had been a guardian angel of sorts for
me ever since I’d been eleven. If it weren’t for him, I might not have survived
my adolescence.

***

For lunch, we had turkey sandwiches
around Brad and Marie’s kitchen table. After we’d cleaned our dishes and put
them away, we re-convened at the table and Marie pulled out her Tarot cards.
She hadn’t done a reading for me in a long time.

Brad lit the pillar candle in the center
of the table and Marie closed her eyes, whispering the invocation she always
used before a reading. The atmosphere in the room settled and deepened as Brad
and I also focused our energies on the cards and the question. I wondered which
spread Marie would use. The particular spread chosen would shape the reading
and affect the kind of answer we received.

She opened her eyes and began to shuffle
the cards. After a few repetitions, she sorted through the deck and pulled out
a card. Then she handed the deck to me to shuffle.

“Celtic Cross,” she said. “Using the
Knight of Cups as significator.” The significator represented the querent—that
was me—while we took turns shuffling the rest of the cards.

“The Knight of Cups?” I looked at her
with a quirk in my brows.

“A young man with powerful psychic
abilities and a deeply emotional nature.”

“Deeply emotional. That’s me,” I said
dryly.

“Just keep shuffling.”

Brad winked at me. I finished shuffling
and handed her the cards. She gave them another few rounds of shuffling and
then laid them out in the traditional Celtic Cross design. A Tarot reader
usually lays the cards face down and turns them up during the course of the
reading. The Knight of Cups remained at the bottom, face up, to represent me.

Marie turned up the first card. “Seven
of Swords. This represents the situation you’re in and what you’re doing at the
present time.” She took a breath. “Seven of Swords indicates sneaking around,
deviousness. You’re hiding something from those around you and hoping you don’t
get caught. You’re either spying on someone or carrying out some kind of plot
against another.”

Although she didn’t look at me, I
flushed. This was not what I’d expected to come through in the reading. It was
supposed to be about the spirit who was trying to contact me, not my plan to
take revenge on Trent.

She overturned the next card. “What
crosses you is the Two of Cups. A new love affair opposes your sneaky plans.
You have a new chance here, a chance to change your direction. Will you take
it?” She glanced up at me, her gaze full of meaning. I said nothing.

The next card was the Six of Cups,
reversed. “This card indicates a bad childhood. No surprise there. You have
memories of evil being done to you and this is what’s at the bottom of all the
sneaking around you’ve been doing. Now, behind you is the Seven of Swords.
There is much strife in your past, but you didn’t fight well. Or you were
unable to fight. Unable to defend yourself.”

I nodded. I’d been too small to fight
Trent then. Too small to fight my dad.

She moved on to the next card. “Above
you—this is the best that can be expected in the circumstances. The Reversed
Hanged Man. In the past, you acted as a sacrifice, a scapegoat. Your days as a
sacrifice are soon to be over, but only if you can conquer your perceived need
to be devious.”

That couldn’t be right. Only deviousness
would allow me to get back at my stepbrother.

“In the future,” Marie said as she
turned over another card, “you have The Hermit, which indicates you will soon
be looking for truth. A solitary search. Only you can say what is right and
what is wrong for you in this situation. But you surely have a search for truth
in your immediate future. Maybe a reckoning with it. A great truth is going to
be revealed.

“Here we have the way you see yourself.
The card in this place is Queen of Cups.”