One Night Later
“Do you think the cheerleaders actually know what’s going on in the game?” I asked my friend Amanda as we watched the homecoming matchup between the Lions and the Tigers (oh my!). “Or do they just wait until the crowd cheers and act excited?”
“Probably a little of each,” she said. “I mean, Sydnie . . .” She pointed to a girl who’d just done about twenty-five backflips. “Her brain’s probably too scrambled to keep track of what’s going on on the field, but some of them are pretty smart.”
As if to prove it, the squad all started cheering just as the wide receiver caught a tough pass for first down. I noticed the name on the back of his jersey. BRANDON.
Brandon?
“Who’s that guy?” I asked Amanda. “I never saw him before.”
“Yeah, it’s weird,” she said, pumping her fists. “He’s new. One day last week, he was just at practice. No one remembered him from before, but he had a jersey and he was on the roster, and since Spencer broke his leg last month, they were happy to have him.”
A strange thing, to be certain. But I was no stranger to strangeness.
“He just . . . appeared?”
“Yeah. He’s really good.”
“He is.” It couldn’t be him. Brandon was a common enough name. No, not really. “What’s his first name?” The team was lining up again.
Amanda shrugged. “I don’t remember. John, maybe?” She was watching the game—watching her boyfriend—and wanted me to shut up.
I couldn’t stop watching the player. Brandon. So was everyone else when he ran the next pass in for a touchdown. The graceful way he caught the ball, the way he ran, all of his movements were so familiar.
So familiar.
Nonsense! I had never seen James play football! There was no football in seventeenth-century Salem! However, I dimly recalled having seen him play at lacrosse, a game that did exist then. He was a Shakespeare sonnet at that.
My eyes followed him as he high-fived his teammates, then took off his helmet to drink blue Gatorade.
His hair was bright auburn.
I fidgeted in my seat, clenching my fists, waiting for the game to be over so I could see him, though it might only lead to bitter disappointment. “I’m going to sit closer,” I told Amanda as the fourth quarter began.
“Okay. I never knew you liked football that much.” She followed my eyes. “Ohhhh, that new guy’s kind of hot, huh?”
“Kind of.” I moved closer. The helmet was back on, but his movements, even the size and shape of his hands were what I had been seeking, seeking for so long.
Could it be him?
Finally, it was over. Of course, there were many girls wanting to congratulate the football hero, hoping to meet this new boy. I was in a crowd of them when suddenly I felt a tap on my shoulder.
“Excuse me,” a voice said. “I’m looking for . . . is there a girl named Kendra here? Sort of strange and wonderful? Pretty, but rather old?”
His very voice. I felt a bit hot, but it must have been the crowd streaming out. I always feel a bit claustrophobic in crowds. I felt my throat tighten and tears come to my eyes.
I turned. “I’m Kendra,” I said, then stepped back.
It was him. It was James.
My heart was a ball of rubber in my throat. I was choking. Finally, I got out, “I thought you were dead.”
“I thought I was too. I stopped getting your letters, and I thought I’d die from that. I started taking greater and greater risks.”
“I wrote every day.”
“I know. I found out, eventually. But that was after my plane was shot down in the battle of Normandy.”
But he was immortal. “How—?”
“I wasn’t killed, obviously, but I was unconscious, burned, disfigured.”
I looked at his perfect face, his perfect, perfect face.
“They took me to a hospital,” he said.
“Hey, James,” a blond girl said. “Great game!”
“Back off,” I told her. “He’s mine.”
She muttered an unkind word under her breath, but James sort of smiled at her. “It’s true.” He looked at me. “Do you want to go someplace else?”
“I want to know where you’ve been the last sixty years—sooner, rather than later.”
“I couldn’t find you, Kendra! The mirror disappeared in the wreck, and when I finally got back to London, you were gone. I asked all around.”
And he had not shown up in my mirror either. I had experienced this with it. Often, someone was missing, and I seemed not to be able to find them. I had tried it with kidnap victims, missing persons. Sometimes, as with Grace’s brother, Jack, I could find them, but other times, it seemed beyond my magic. James must have been “missing” at the time I looked for him, his whereabouts unknown to the British government. And I hadn’t tried after that, assuming him dead.
It was just starting to sink in to me that I was truly seeing James, talking to James, for the first time in so many years. I held my icy hands to his cheek. “Are you real?”