The Emperor of Any Place (31 page)

“Totally,” she says. “I can’t wait.”

Then she tells him that she liked
Alpenglow
the best and that
Collateral Spam
was pretty weak, but then third sequels always are, “Don’t you think?”

Evan isn’t sure what he thinks. His mind is reeling.

“I don’t believe this,” he mutters.

Olivia looks him square in the eye. “Why are you really here?” she says.

Whoa! He didn’t think this through. But before he has to start making up some outrageous lie, he notices “New projects” on Yamada’s menu bar. And when he scrolls down, there’s only one project listed:
Kokoro-Jima.

“Amazing,” he says. “Freaking amazing.”

Her eyes do a little Spanish Inquisition number, but he just turns back to the screen. “I know,” she says. “Look at this.” She pulls up four full-color spreads:

1. A Japanese soldier, his face wracked with pain, lying on his belly, parting bamboo with his fingers.

2. A wrecked cargo plane in the jungle, the sky filled with carrion crows.

3. Another soldier, an American, holding some kind of weird yellow contraption in his hand, his other arm ending in a bandaged ball where a hand should be.

4. A band of flesh-eaters standing in the long grass like a bunch of bad-ass amigos in a Tarantino movie. Amigos with torn gray skin and red eyes.

Evan leans back in his chair, wraps his arms tightly across his chest. His heart is beating out of control. He stares at the illustrations, shaking his head in stunned disbelief. Then he notices that Olivia is watching him.

“You know something about this?” she says.

He nods. “Yeah, but I can’t tell you. Not right now.”

She weighs his answer and he can see she’s dying to press him for more, but then she backs off.

“It’s really too bad,” says Olivia.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“No, that’s cool. I mean about the project.”

“What?”

She shakes her head. “Apparently the whole project is on hold.” She scrolls down to Yamada’s closing remarks. How the book is pretty well complete but hung up in “Production Hell.”

Back in the car, Evan texts Leo. He doesn’t know much about what a cease-and-desist order from a lawyer might be, but it’s a good guess that Yamada’s site is in violation of it. Not that there’s any mention of Griff. Not that there’s any picture of him.

He backs out onto Laramie Close and then just sits there, not knowing where to go. Home? If it was hard to play dumb before, it’s going to be impossible now. But where else does he have to go? He looks back toward Olivia’s door. She’s standing there watching him. He waves. Makes gestures like there’s something wrong with the car. Then it moves — jerks — and he makes a joke of it, like he was doing something wrong, like he’s just learning. She frowns and goes in. He owes her an explanation, but it will have to wait.

He goes home. Mystery solved — well, one mystery, anyway. It’s not the publication of
Kokoro-Jima
that Griff ’s pissed off about; it’s this graphic novel by a best-selling author. But what is Griff ’s problem? Why does he feel so threatened? They can change the name of the killer; it doesn’t have to be him. Or is it the idea of it? The marines: the whole honor shtick. What’s their motto?
Semper fidelis:
always faithful. Is that what’s eating him up? Only one way to find out.

He enters the back door and sees the brown cordovans, sitting on the floor at attention.
Your deduction, Sherlock?

The fiend is out, Watson.

Evan tears upstairs. In his room, he opens the closet and pulls down the black box filled with three years’ worth of furious Pokémon buying and trading. Kneeling on the floor, he removes the lid and his blood runs cold. Slowking is no longer in the dead center of the box. The stacks have been returned neatly but not exactly. Evan gingerly removes one stack, then another. There’s no yellow at the bottom. The book is gone.

He can’t stay here. Not now. He needs to think. He needs to come up with a plan. He has to go —
now
— before Griff gets back.

He leaves. Squeals out of the driveway. Next door, Lexie Jane is standing in her driveway with two other girls with skateboards. They peer at him, their hands keeping the glare of the sun out of their eyes. Burning rubber is not what people do in Any Place. You’re not supposed to be going anywhere that fast. You’re not supposed to have to escape from your own home, but right now he needs to be any
other
place than here.

So . . .

Back to the mall. Or maybe to Olivia’s? Maybe her folks can get those adoption papers signed up double quick. But going back would mean talking about
Kokoro-Jima
and he can’t do that. Then another idea occurs to him. Something that is almost normal. It doesn’t solve anything, but it
puts off
solving anything, and that’s what he needs right now — because he has a feeling that his head might explode otherwise. He pulls out his phone. It’s not a plan. It’s just an evening, which is as far ahead as he can see.

The vision overtakes him out of nowhere. It’s what Ōshiro described in the book, but it’s real, suddenly — surprisingly real. Evan sees the soldier make his way up a sandy hill. There’s a white flag hanging limply from the barrel of his rifle. The soldier has a framed picture under his other arm. He’s shimmering a little in the heat haze; light bounces off the glass in the frame. He stops, raises his head. Evan sees it, too: a flash of light high in the trees.

Intel.

There are ghosts trailing him — them. Evan is one of them. If he squints he can see others, insubstantial, hovering a little apart from one another. They are spread out like a
V
of geese following the soldier. They tremble in the onshore breeze as if the wind might unwind them. In the reflection off the blistering white sand, they seem little more than a coalescence of light, a thickening into moving forms.

He stares into the hot white haze, tramping along, trying to keep up, feeling on his bare feet the heat of the sun-smacked sand, though, when he turns to look, he sees that he has left no footsteps.

Then his eyes catch a glimpse of other specters, moving surreptitiously through the undergrowth to his left, like jackals keeping their distance from a lion but wanting what the lion wants. These are nothing like children, but large lumbering things with red-hot eyes. Evan looks behind him, and they are there, too, following at a distance, just as Ōshiro described them. He hurries to catch up to the soldier — is drawn to him, pulled along. So are the other ghost children, not like geese now, but more like a pack of skittish dogs on invisible leashes.

Griff comes to a stop at the crest of the hill, smack on top of his noonday shadow. He stares out to the cool blueness of the sea. His face is covered with sweat; his eyes look grim.

Evan feels a presence close at hand and, turning to his left, sees a ghost girl looking directly at him. Her hair is almost the same color as the air, long, and lifted by the breeze, flying out about her. Who is she? She is clothed in a luminous shift. She brings a wavering hand up to clear away the ash-white blondness from her face.

“Evan,” she says.

He is shocked that she knows his name — that she can talk. The familiars didn’t talk in Ōshiro’s story. When he tries to respond, nothing comes from his mouth.

“Evan? Evan!”

And he is sitting in McDonald’s.

There is a conventionally pretty girl sitting across the table from him with several little red bird clips in her brown hair. For a moment he can’t recall her name.

“Where were you?” she says.

Bree, that’s her name.

“Your eyes got all, you know, far away . . .”

“It’s nothing. I . . .”

“Do you want to tell me?”

Evan sighs, smiles. “Sorry, it’s just been a weird time lately.” She doesn’t know about his father’s death. It’s not something you say to a friend of a friend of a friend. The whole date would get really . . . what? Awkward. Pretty well impossible, really.

Bree gasps. “Oh my God, it’s not like those people who suddenly fall asleep, even if they’re driving a car?”

“No.”

“That would be really scary.”

“Yeah,” says Evan. “That’s called narcolepsy. It isn’t narcolepsy.”

“Oh,” she says. She smiles. “That’s good, at least.”

“That was almost what we called our band,” Evan says, aiming for levity and sounding more like he’s on amphetamines.

“Excuse me?”

“The Narcoleptic Bunnies,” he says.

Her smile is genuine but edged with concern —
not a good expression on a first date,
thinks Evan.

Date? What am I doing on a date?

“I like your band’s name,” she says. “Pocket Monsters, right?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“That’s like Pokémon all spelled out?”

Evan sighs. “Yeah. Pokémon is a contraction, actually.”

“I know,” she says. “My little brother explained it to me.”

He’s holding a Coke. When did that happen? He puts it down on the table. His hamburger sits on its wrapper, untouched and not looking all that hot.

“So. Your little brother is into Pokémon?”

Bree nods, glad to be having a real conversation, and all Evan can think is why did the band call itself anything so memorably geeky.

“Do you still play?”

“Guitar?”

“No. You know —”

“Oh, Pokémon. No. Not for . . . I don’t know, years.”

Bree has a dab of something on her lip that makes her look vaguely vampirish. It’s even a little sexy. Probably just dipping sauce. She looks hopeful and then sort of sad. “You just sort of drifted away,” she says. “Does it happen a lot?”

“Like I said. Things have been, you know, difficult. I haven’t been getting much sleep.”

“I get that.” Bree nods sympathetically. “Should you see someone about it?”

Tell her something.
He tries on another smile from his hidden stash. This one is a size too small. He takes her hand. “I haven’t told anyone this,” he says, but then he’s distracted again by the dab of dipping sauce.

Aware of the focus of his gaze, she licks her upper lip.

“Gone?”

He nods.

“Tell me,” she says, and holds his eyes, damply, in her own. Her hands are kind of damp, too.

“I just had this weird sort of vision.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

She squeezes his hand a little. “You want to talk about it?”

“The vision?”

“Sure, if you want. But I was thinking more about how the vision is probably just a symptom of how ‘weird’ things are right now for you. It’s like . . . you could tell me about that . . . if you want. If it would help, I mean. But you don’t have to.”

He shakes his head. “Thanks, though.”

“Okay,” she says. Her shoulders droop a little, but she tries on a smile of her own — a pretty good one, all things considered. With her free hand, she pushes back a lock of hair that’s escaped from one of the red bird clips. She’s got nice hands. Her nail polish is blue. Blue and chipped. Then her hand, finished with her hair, drifts toward their clasped hands and rests on top of them. “So you were having this vision?”

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “I was on this desert island. The sun is totally blazing down. And . . . Are you ready for this?” She nods. “There are these ghosts.”

“Ghosts?”

“Yeah. Ghost children.”

“But it’s daytime?”

“Yeah.”

“How can there be ghosts in the daytime?” It is something Evan has not considered. “I mean how can you even see them if the sun is shining?”

“They’re not kids in sheets.”

“I know, but —”

“And I’m one of them.”

“What?”

He doesn’t say it again, lets her figure it out.

Bree’s hand flies to her mouth. “You’re one of the ghosts?”

He nods, wonders too late if this could be a deal-breaker. They have been together approximately three hours.

Her eyes grow even wider. “Do you mean you’re dead?”

Evan gives it some serious thought. “That’s the crazy part,” he says. “These ghosts . . . it’s as if they’re the ghosts of people who
will
be, instead of the ghosts of people who used to be.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I know. It’s pretty out there,” he says. Bree’s hand, skittish as a pigeon, flutters back down to the pile of hands. Now his other hand joins their three hands, so that there is a knot of fingers sitting in the middle of the table.

“Preincarnation,” he says.

“Reincarnation?”

“No.
Pre
incarnation. That’s what’s so different. They’re ghosts from before a person is born. You know, as in ‘prenatal’ or ‘premature’ or . . . like that.”

“Or ‘preoccupied’?” she says.

“Yeah,” he says.

Her eyes slip away. She looks down at the table.

“Oh,” he says, suddenly getting it. “‘Preoccupied.’ Right. You mean me?” She nods. He’s impressed in a way; she’s sharp.

“You don’t have to talk about it,” she says. “It’s none of my business.”