Levitating Las Vegas

12




Elijah started the Catalina with an erk and meant to speed away from the candy store before the old man dashed after them and snatched his Mentafixol back. But Elijah hadn’t driven ten feet before he had to brake hard for a group of men hiking down the street. They weren’t in costume for the parade but were decked out in Western wear like real cowboys. They might actually have been molybdenum miners.

“They put us on Mentafixol to keep us from using our power,” Holly murmured, one pink fingernail tracing patterns on the box on the seat between them.

“Apparently,” Elijah said. He was trying to get his brain around the situation himself. He could read minds. It was real. After twenty-one years as a fatherless nobody, he had more power than he knew what to do with.

The concept just wouldn’t sink in. He had no room in his head for his own thoughts because Holly’s black anger pushed them out.

“And they told us we were crazy so we’d take the Mentafixol.” Her words came faster and faster to keep up with the darkness swirling in her mind. “That’s what my dad meant when he said he’d reveal all the secrets of his magic act to me after his impossible feat of physical stamina tomorrow. He knew I was coming off Mentafixol. The secret is that there’s no trick to it. He has power just like me. That’s how he levitates with no wires. And he’s only number four on the list of the ten biggest mysteries of Las Vegas? Seems like he could pull out all the stops and at least make it to number two.”

Elijah stomped the brakes again and stalled the car to keep from hitting a gorilla. The remnants of the parade flowed around them, and Elijah caught scraps of strangers’ thoughts that he didn’t want and couldn’t use: a recipe for guacamole, the current score of the Rockies–Red Sox game. He put the car in gear, restarted it, and touched his fingers to his aching head. “Your dad could be number one, but he doesn’t want to attract too much attention. People would blackmail him, kidnap him, kill him. And you. He’s been hiding in plain sight.”

In plain sight of everyone including Holly. She took it as a personal slap in the face, and her anger stirred. Then she cocked her head at Elijah. “What about your mom?”

They passed under the single traffic light and reached the edge of town—a good thing, because Elijah was growing impatient with pedestrians wandering into the path of the car. “My mom doesn’t have power,” he said, but come to think of it, he wasn’t so sure. This was one of the things he’d been trying to puzzle through, and Holly’s thoughts kept interrupting him.

Holly’s flamboyant dad was the more obvious trickster. Yet Elijah’s mom was the head dealer at the casino. The ability to read minds would come in handy for a job like that. And she’d conveniently taken a vacation just when his Mentafixol was cut off. She hadn’t been around for the past few days, so he couldn’t read her mind and discover all her secrets.

“Am I getting this wrong?” Holly’s voice interrupted his logic again. “You’re not mad at your mom.”

“My dad’s dead,” he said. “It’s always been just me and her. I guess she did what she had to do.”

“My God, Elijah, we’re not saying she worked late at the casino some nights. We’re saying she took your power away from you for seven years. She drugged you and told you that you were mentally ill. She might as well have tied you up in the basement. Get mad! Wake the hell up!”

She shoved his shoulder—not with her hand but with her mind—hard enough that he momentarily lost his grip on the steering wheel, and the Pontiac veered to the center of the road. He stomped the brake. The car screeched to a stop. The engine was dead.

As red dust billowed around them, he glared at her, surprising himself with the force of his anger. “Don’t. Do. That!” he shouted.

She stared wide-eyed at him, frightened at how dangerous he looked. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“Then you have to learn to control it!”

“Me!” she squealed, her fear turning back to anger. “You’ve been tromping through my mind twenty-four/seven!”

Turning away from her, he took a calming breath through his nose and started the engine again. “I saw an overlook on the drive in. Let’s stop there and we’ll talk.”

That meant they would have to drive through the tunnel. Holly closed her eyes, but the warmth of the sun cut off sharply. Her skin chilled, and the noise of the motor echoed weirdly around them. She sensed the whole weight of the mountain on top of her.

Feeling everything she felt, Elijah gripped the steering wheel and held his breath until they emerged into the sunlight on the other side of the mountain. The darkness of her thoughts didn’t relent. He found himself racing to the scenic overlook. He pulled into the empty parking lot, stopped the car with a jerk, snagged the box of Mentafixol, and leaped out, away from her, out of her thoughts. Only then did he breathe a sigh of relief.

He led the way up a path between red boulders. Beyond a row of weathered wooden picnic tables, the ground ended in a cliff. He stood as near the edge as he dared and looked way over into the canyon surrounded on all sides by rugged mountains. He couldn’t see the bottom.

Darkness approached him from behind. He turned to watch Holly follow in his steps up the path, beautiful as ever, a faraway look in her eyes the only sign that her world as she knew it had ended. She seated herself on a boulder with her long legs folded gracefully to one side, ankles crossed, very close to the edge of the cliff.

He backed away and seated himself about fifteen feet from her, just out of range of her thoughts.

And suddenly he felt like himself again. Her anger lifted from his shoulders. She was just his beautiful friend, in a world of trouble. He placed the box of Mentafixol on the rock beside him—the land side, where it was safer, not the cliff side, where he might accidentally kick it into the abyss. Not yet.

“It could still be a joint hallucination,” he called to her.

“They would have come after us,” Holly said. “If we really had MAD and we were dangerous when we ran out of Mentafixol, they would have kept a closer eye on us. They would have known you were headed here to get some. They would have called the police to lie in wait for us and make sure we got drugged up. You haven’t heard the thoughts of anyone lying in wait for us, have you?”

“No, but you’re saying two different things. If the police were here, we would be insane. If I heard their thoughts, I wouldn’t be insane.”

“You’re not,” she said. “Because of Kaylee. That’s what convinced me. She’s been up here to oversee the Mentafixol as part of her security job with the casino. That’s why my parents sent me to live with her, too. I thought I’d gained my freedom, but they were still watching me. It all comes back to the casino.”

“So, what are we saying?” He opened the box and took out one of four plastic bottles. He peeled the lid off the bottle and tipped the contents into his hand. Golden pills poured out and spilled over each other. He grabbed a handful and threw them full force off the cliff. They caught the setting sunlight as they fell, each one a potential shining moment of his high school and college years and Holly’s, thrown away under the heavy influence of a drug and their parents and the machinations of some mysterious power struggle at the casino that they didn’t understand. He watched the glinting pills bounce against the rocks and fall until they disappeared into the canyon below.

He turned back to her. “Are we ready to get rid of all of these? Are we sure?”

“I don’t want to live this way.” The bitterness in her voice surprised him, and now he wondered what she’d been thinking in the two minutes he’d sat beyond range of her. He’d stayed in the kitchen too long during a TV commercial break, and now he’d missed a major plot point in the show. He rose and shifted closer to her again, into her thoughts.

With her mind she lifted the remaining three bottles out of the box. Even after her little displays over the past few hours, Elijah was amazed at the bottles shedding their tops in concert and pouring forth their pills of their own accord. Hundreds of golden pills united in a single stream and raced toward Holly’s head, where they formed a moving, shining halo over her hair.

“But you know what?” she said. “Even if this were all an illusion, I don’t think I could go back.” She would rather die than go back, she thought as she leaned over the edge and looked down into the gorge, the halo of pills still shimmering above her.

Elijah wasn’t sure he was reading her right. He moved even closer to her, trying to decipher her racing thoughts into one coherent line. She didn’t just mean she couldn’t go back to taking Mentafixol. She couldn’t go back to Vegas. Her parents had lied to her. Her friendship with Kaylee was a farce. The home she’d known was gone.

She focused on the chasm in front of them. With her mind she measured the distance to the bottom. Calculated her weight—Elijah sensed that she held herself in her own hand, like measuring the heft of a rock before she threw it.

“Don’t,” he murmured. He’d seen her manipulate small pills and bottles and a box in midair. That didn’t mean she was strong enough yet to levitate her own body.

She stood.

“Holly, don’t,” he said.

She moved to the edge.

“Don’t!”

One second she was there, pointing her toes as if readying herself for her dismount from some Olympic gymnastics event, and then she stepped out, and then she was gone.

“Holly!”

His voice echoed around the rocks. He didn’t even realize he’d moved, but gradually he understood he must have rushed forward and tried to grab her in that last moment. His belly was hot on a sun-washed boulder. His arms stung from scrapes against the rocks. He still reached out for her, grasping at any chance he could still save her—never mind how he would avoid going over the cliff with her. She was gone. He couldn’t even see her in the deep, dry chasm. Oh, God, she couldn’t be gone?

“Holly!” he shouted once more. Then he held his breath, wishing his God damned heart would stop beating in his ears so he could listen for her. He didn’t hear her scream or cry or thud below. She’d simply vanished.

Lithe wisps of trees hung from the walls of the cliff. He imagined her catching a branch as she went down, saving herself. He could cling to hope. Even if she was still alive, she was too far away for him to read her mind. But he could run to Shane’s car and drive around the lip of the canyon until he found a road downward. He could make his way back to the place where she must have landed. He would call the police or whatever they had up here in the wilderness—Mounties—to help him.

As he pulled back to run for the phone in his car, he realized just how precarious his position was. To follow the trajectory of her fall, he’d scrabbled way out on a precipice and down the gentle slope it made before its sheer drop. He was clinging to the cliff face, and one false move would send him plunging after her. She would never get help then, if she was still alive to need it. He clung tighter to the rocks under his hands, sliding carefully backward.



Holly hovered inches above the sandy bottom of the canyon. Each grain of sand was a different color—red, orange, pink, white, yellow, even green and blue and purple—dislodged in the last million years from different strata in the vast mountains. The grains gleamed like jewels in the evening sun. A black ant clambered among them, oblivious to their beauty, headed somewhere important.

And so Holly was glad she’d stopped herself at the last moment from hitting the canyon floor. Her parents had betrayed her, her best friend Kaylee had betrayed her, she’d been lied to and deprived of her real life for the past seven years. But here was this ant, navigating his own mountains on a gorgeous summer day, the longest day of the year. The world went on without Holly, and when she stepped outside her own personal hell and looked around, she knew the world was worth staying for, even if she was alone.

She took a cleansing breath and assumed a tree position she’d learned in the college yoga class she’d signed up for on her own, to calm herself before the stress of the ballet class her mom insisted on. She placed her hands to her heart’s center, one leg folded up, the other pointed down. Even as she hovered in midair, she could just brush the surface of the sand with the toe of her shoe. She unfurled her hair in a semicircle around her head.

She rose slowly through the canyon as if riding in a glass elevator, enjoying the view. The mountain changed from white to purple to pink as she lifted herself. The foliage clinging desperately to the rock walls changed species with the elevation. An eagle soared next to her, perhaps alarmed or confused by her presence but more likely going about her own business of being an eagle. That too was worth living for.

And then she saw Elijah peering anxiously over the edge of the canyon where she’d jumped. His fingers were white with pressure on the red rocks.

Her heart went out to him. “Oh, God, Elijah, I’m sorry.” She landed next to him on the tilted rock, grabbed his hand, and pulled him back from the edge to safety with her, onto the boulders where they’d sat before. “I didn’t even think about how it would look to you. I was thinking about myself.”

He sat with his head in his hands, breathing hard. The light brown waves of his hair caught the sunlight and split it into a million colors, like the grains of sand on the canyon floor.

“Hey.” She reached over and put her hand on his shoulder.

Finally he jerked his head up. His face was stark white. “I called to you!” A tear escaped the corner of his eye. He brushed it away angrily.

“I’m sorry, really. I didn’t hear you.”

He put his hands on his knees as if he still needed support. He took a long, shuddering breath. “I can’t believe you’d scare me like that after everything we’ve been through together.” A cool breeze, whispering of evening, blew a wavy lock of hair across his forehead.

And in that moment, she realized he valued her as much as she valued him. He’d never come out and said it. His biggest show of friendship had been to kidnap her, which, though she knew he’d meant well, was kind of twisted. He could read her mind. He sensed how far she’d fallen for him. But she’d assumed her crush was one-sided. He must have forgotten that she couldn’t sense whether he felt the same way about her.

“Of course I do!” he exclaimed. “Are you blind?”

“Not anymore.” She surrounded him with her power and hugged him gently all over. When he sighed appreciatively, she increased the pressure of the massage and draped her arm around his shoulders, too.

He sniffled. “I feel ill.”

“You know what? I’ve had candy, but you haven’t had anything to eat for a whole day, have you?”

He shrugged.

“Eat the rest of the seafoam. And then— Can you drive? We’ll have dinner at that restaurant next to the hotel.” She squeezed him with her arm and her power.

He turned to look at her. Now his pupils dilated. His green eyes went black, and he bit his lip. She hadn’t imagined this at Glitterati. She wasn’t imagining it now.

But he didn’t kiss her this time. He growled, “Don’t ever scare me like that again.”

“I won’t,” she whispered.

“And when you’re playing around with your power, seeing what you can lift, do not experiment with your body over a deadly chasm.”

She laughed. “Okay.”

To her relief, he smiled. “But you definitely need a magic act of your own. And somewhere in it, you need to levitate in that pose with your hair in a circle around you. That was totally f*cking cool.”



A man sat down right behind Elijah at the next table in the crowded restaurant, thinking very loudly about the overheated radiator in his truck. Holly couldn’t read Elijah’s mind—Elijah had to keep reminding himself of this—but she recognized the expression on his face. She stood and walked around the wagon wheel table to switch places with him and give him some distance from the other restaurant customers, for the third time in the hour they’d been eating.

He stood, too. When they passed each other, he closed his eyes and inhaled the scent of oleander in her hair.

Then he sat down in her chair and surveyed the crumbs on the plates. Some of the dishes originally had been hers, some his. They’d lost track.

“God, I feel better,” he said. “I’m glad you suggested this. If you hadn’t, I might have passed out eventually. It didn’t even register as hunger to me. I guess my head is full of other stuff.”

She sat down, too, and pushed away the plate with the crust of his second slice of pie. It moved only a millimeter with all the other plates in the way. “I never thought I’d say this, but I’ve had enough to eat.” She patted her flat bare stomach. “That would be the ultimate revenge on my mom, to show up in Vegas with a muffin top hanging over my bikini bottoms.”

He grinned. “You have a long way to go.”

She opened her mouth to say something about edamame. He never learned what she was going to tell him, because she looked sharply over her shoulder at a man their age sitting down at the table next to them. Whew—she’d thought for a second that it was Rob.

Her fear and then her relief shot through Elijah in quick succession. He leaned forward, gripping the edge of the wagon wheel. “What do you mean, Rob was stalking you?”

And then, as the scene flashed into her mind, he saw what Rob had done to her that night at Glitterati.

Elijah had wanted to hurt Rob several days before. He just hadn’t understood why, or trusted his own instincts. Now he knew he’d been right.

Her dark eyes widened. “Elijah. Don’t look like that.” She reached across the plates and put her hand on his hand. “Don’t do anything. Don’t go after him.”

“How could I leave that alone?” Elijah demanded.

“He’s a cop. You’ll just get yourself in trouble. Besides, Kaylee’s goons already beat him up.”

They sure had. They’d dumped him on Elijah’s doorstep. And Elijah had been zonked on Mentafixol and beer. He felt even more powerless with her soft hand on his hand, trying to comfort him for something that had happened to her. He sat back in his chair and slipped his hand out from under hers. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I can’t believe I let that happen.”

“You didn’t let it happen,” she insisted. “We weren’t together that night. You were just borrowing a Mentafixol pill. And even now, you’re not—” Realizing what she’d been about to say, her mouth snapped shut.

“What do you mean, I’m not your boyfriend?” he exclaimed in disbelief.

Her straight ballet posture sagged, though the green sequins on her bikini top still glittered ethereally amid the rustic Western decor of the restaurant. She leaned over the plates and said quietly, “I didn’t say that.”

“You thought it. You stopped yourself from saying it at the last second. You might as well have said it.”

“Because you can read my mind,” she said through her teeth. “You can’t get mad at me for thinking something if I didn’t say it.”

He put his elbow on the wagon wheel and his chin in his hand, considering her. The big hair, exotic makeup, and revealing costume made her look older than she was. The pout on her lips and the little worry line between her brows made her look like his twenty-one-year-old girlfriend. Even now, she was confused about what he felt for her, and she searched his eyes for clues.

“That’s the whole problem,” he said, straightening in his cowhide chair. “Just like back at the cliff. I know how you feel about me. I forget you don’t know how I feel about you unless I tell you. And I haven’t been doing a good job of telling you.”

He stood and rounded the table again. The closer he got to the man sitting behind Holly, the louder he heard the man’s thoughts about his overheated truck. Elijah desperately wanted to tell the man to spring for a new one already. What did the man expect after twenty years and three hundred thousand miles?

But when Holly looked up at Elijah expectantly, false lashes fluttering slowly around her deep brown eyes, for the first time he could almost block out the thoughts of a man sitting three feet from him. Elijah knelt in front of Holly. He laced his fingers through her thick hair and kissed her.

The kiss started sweet. That’s how he felt about her, and that’s what he’d meant to show her. But when she made a small noise, he found himself kissing her harder on the mouth. This was nothing like their kiss at Glitterati. This was not sweet anymore. This was raw and real.

She wound a coil of gentle pressure around his chest, along his arms, and around his fingers in her hair. Her whole body tingled as she used her power. He felt her sensations and her racing pulse, and his too.

Finally she broke the kiss and pulled back, her breaths light and quick. “Somebody’s going to tell us we should get a room.”

He gave her an evil grin. “We have a room.” He reached beside her and slid the bill from the table. “I’ll pay this and we’ll go up.” Actually they would be visiting the gift shop next door first. He hoped that somewhere between the moccasins and bags of colorful tumbled rocks, the shop stocked condoms.

He moved slowly, listening to her mind, waiting for some sign that she’d rather not. But she wanted this. As he waited in line at the cash register and glanced backward, her mind and her dark eyes and her toes pointed together in her glittering shoes all told him that she wanted him, she’d wanted him all along, and none of her thoughts about him had been his imagination.