Hunger, revenge, anger aside, it felt good, being in that truck. Being Tariq’s “friend.” Careening toward death together.
I did not want the ride to end. I didn’t want to get home, get out of that truck, crawl alone into the lonely cavern of my bed. I wanted to press my warm body against his and fall asleep.
Realizing this made the black stars bloom in the air around me. Cursing, breathing, trying hard not to panic, I pressed the tips of my fingers to the glass and shut my eyes. Felt energy move through me; felt my lungs suck in chi from the cold dark endless curve of space. Focused the scream of self-hate that was trying to howl out of my throat and forced it out through my fingertips instead.
I opened my eyes, pulled back my hand.
Where my fingers had been pressed, tinted red where I’d been bleeding, were five tiny star-shaped cracks in his window.
RULE #19
Your body is eternally bonded to the bodies of the people you love, and those bonds will assert themselves in terrifying and unpredictable ways.
DAY: 14
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 1500
Coffee. Pancakes. Anger.
The smells woke me up, dragged me out of bed.
Somehow we had survived. Protected by Allah or Yahweh or whatever other god looks out for undeserving, drunken teenagers, we made it back to Hudson without dying. Now it was morning, and my mother was downstairs, sitting at the kitchen table and waiting for me.
Oh crap, I thought, hopping into my pants, she knows. Knows I snuck out of the house, went to the city, almost got trampled in a basement mosh pit, and finally got in a car with a drunk driver going ninety miles an hour down Route 9 at two in the morning.
Or maybe she just knows I got suspended from school?
I brushed my teeth, running through a litany of excuses, knowing she’d see through every one.
And then the trusty refrain of my broken stomach set in, the pain that blotted out everything else, and I marched bravely to the kitchen, to the food I could not let myself touch. Before I rounded the corner, I saw it. On the side of the fridge, still. The photo of my skinny mom. The young woman, probably not much older than I am now. My mom, before she lost control. Before terrible things happened to her, to transform her into the sphere before me.
It didn’t matter. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t happen to me. And I would control that. And I wouldn’t lose it, now that I knew about my powers.
“Morning,” I said. She sat at the table, pressing her hands to her face. Her wild brown hair still held the shape of her hairnet, which meant she’d only gotten in from work a little while ago, hadn’t changed, hadn’t showered. Pancakes were stacked ominously high on a plate before the place where I normally sat. I grabbed a mug of coffee.
“Why do you take it black?”
I shrugged. “Tastes better that way.”
“You’ve tried it with half-and-half?”
“No,” I said, “but—”
“Try it,” she said and handed me the jug.
I stared at it, watched thick creamy fat slosh in the little jug. “No, thanks.”
“I thought so,” she said. “Sit.”
I sat. Sipped. Waited.
Her face was red and lined and had never looked so old before. “I’m worried about you, Matt. Why aren’t you eating?”
I gulped, audibly, idiotically. I had not anticipated this. “I’m eating.”
“Good. Then eat,” she said, and stabbed my pancake heap with a fork. “Eat them all.”
“But, there . . . there must be ten pancakes here,” I whispered helplessly.
“Then you’d better get started.”
“Mom? Where is this coming from? I don’t—”
“You look sick. Can you even see yourself? Have you looked in a mirror lately?”
“Of course I ha—”
Up came Prop #3, following the pancakes and the half-and-half: a mirror.
Oh, no. This was an intervention.
My mother had obviously put a lot of thought into it. So the least I could do was look. I saw a chubby face and a fleshy neck staring back at me in that mirror. I saw a nose so large no one would ever love me. I saw a head too big for its body. More than that, I saw the ghost of Christmas future.
The way my cheeks would swell up, my chin triple, like Mom’s had. The way I would have to lumber through the world to get around. It sent a cyclone of broken glass shards spinning in my stomach, but I stared at him, that future failure, and at her, and I smiled, even though I felt like crying. I did it to make my mother feel better. Because pain was booming and crackling like thunder inside of her, and only I could hear it. Only I could see how close she was to breaking.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said, and put the fork down. “I didn’t realize.”
She stood, and I saw her lower leg was encased in a plastic boot.
“What the hell?” I yelped. “What happened to you?”
“Last night, at work, I had a . . . a moment. I was swinging the hammer—”
The hammer is how they knock the hogs out. Before they kill them.
“—and I got distracted. And I missed. And hit my leg. The plant doctor said there’s a slight chance of a stress fracture.” She laughed, although it was not the kind of thing you laugh at. The hammer could kill a person as easily as a hog or shatter every bone in her leg.
“You’re such a pro, Ma,” I said. “What distracted you?”
Here she turned, eyed me hard. “It was the strangest thing. I thought I heard you calling for me. Like when you were little, and you had a nightmare. Clear as if you’d been standing right there in the slaughterhouse with me.”
I shivered, turned cold inside. “You heard me calling you. Last night. When?”
“Just after eleven p.m.,” she said. “I know it sounds crazy, but I really did hear it. Mind playing tricks on me, probably—telling me I needed to get some damn sleep. But then, a mother just knows things.”
Had I called my mother with my mind? And had she heard me a hundred and twenty-five miles away?
Tear-blind, I stumbled out of my chair and swamped her in a hug.
“Shhh,” she said, because by then I was sobbing. Her hair smelled like pig blood, and it smelled wonderful.
“It’s—”
I said it several times, and each time I was weeping too hard to make any other words beyond it. She held me, and even though I was taller than her now, even though I was not that little nightmare-haunted boy anymore, my mother was a mountain of a woman who could keep me safe forever.
“It’s Maya,” I said, finally, when I felt sure I could say things without breaking.
“I know, honey.”
“I want to do something,” I said. “I want to help her.”
“So do I, Matt. All we can do is be there for—”
“No!” I said sharply, pushing her back. “No, that’s bullshit! I won’t accept that.”
“Matt,” she said, the mom-voice, the you-know-you’re-being-ridiculous tone made me madder.
“You know something,” I said. “I know you do.”
“No, honey,” she said, but she was exhausted from her long shift, and she was thinking, and her thoughts were raw and chaotic and overloaded with emotion.