“What do you mean? Why did you stop surfing so early?”
He pushed his waterproof glow-in-the-dark watch in front of her. She stared down at the face of the watch in disbelief. Two hours had passed since the sun had set and she’d left Collin.
“I’ve been looking for you for almost an hour,” he scolded.
She continued to stare at the watch.
“What happened to you?” He took off his jacket and placed it around her shoulders. It was warm from his body heat and she gratefully snuggled into it.
“You’re shivering and—”
“And what?” She tried to push into his mind to see what he was seeing but her own mind felt sluggish.
“How’d you break your glasses?”
She took them off the top of her head. The lens was missing from the right side.
“I don’t know.” She hated the tremble of fear that had crept into her words.
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
She shrugged.
“Did you fall on the rocks?”
She shook her head, even though she knew he couldn’t see her in the dark.
“You didn’t try to climb up the cliff, did you?” he asked.
“Maybe.” She tried to force herself to remember. “I must have fallen.”
“You know how dangerous that is!” He sounded really upset.
They walked back toward the van in silence, following the bobbing beam of his flashlight. Soon streetlights from the highway cast a dim light over the beach.
Finally she was able to steady herself enough to speak without the strange twitch in her words. “I don’t know what happened,” she said. “I thought I was on top of the bluffs, but then I woke up in the sand like I had fallen asleep.”
He opened the van door and the dome light came on. She glanced up and saw the worry on Collin’s face. She wondered what he was seeing on her own face, because he held her hands tightly.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” And in the same breath he said, “You’re lucky paramedics aren’t scraping you off the rocks.”
He opened her hands and looked at the palms. They were scratched, as if she had fallen and tried to grab hold of something.
She closed her hands into fists.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said and slipped into the passenger side of the utility van. She pressed her bare feet into the carpet. What had happened to her blue sandals? She touched the top of her head and squinted, trying to remember. It only made her feel dizzy. The fire seemed hazy now, like a dream. The more she tried to pull it into focus, the more it drifted away.
“Serena.”
She became aware then that Collin had been talking to her.
“Do you want to go to the hospital?”
“No,” she said.
“Sure?”
“Yeah.”
She felt his hand touch her head and then she looked at the tips of his fingers. A single drop of blood sat on the top of his index finger.
“You must have hit your head,” he said. “Maybe we should go to the hospital.”
“I’m fine.” She tried to sound convincing as she pulled down the mirror on the visor. She examined the small scrape. “It’s not deep.”
“Promise me that you’ll stay away from the bluffs,” he said.
“I promise.” But she didn’t think she had fallen. She would remember slipping, trying to hold on, the freefall.
“Home?” he asked. The concern in his eyes made her feel guilty.
“Yeah, turn on the heat,” she said and pulled the seat belt around her. She hated the unclear feeling inside her head. She clasped her arms around her for warmth. Even the familiar smells of surf wax, zinc oxide, and suntan oil didn’t comfort her the way they normally would. She wanted to be away from this beach that had once been such a place of solace.
Collin jumped behind the wheel and turned on the engine, then the heater.
She turned and looked toward the cliffs, hoping to see the faint glow from a fire through the fog. She didn’t see anything. Maybe Collin was right. Maybe she had fallen.
He pulled into the fog-locked traffic and turned the music higher.
By the time they merged onto the Santa Monica Freeway, her heart rhythm had returned to normal.
“How was it?” she asked finally.
“The skeg was humming,” he said. A skeg was the tail of the surfboard and humming was the whistle the skeg made cutting at high speed through the water.
Her mind felt less fuzzy now and she gently pushed into Collin’s mind to see if he had seen anything that might give her a clue about what had happened. She didn’t find anything unusual, but twice he glanced at her as if he could feel her sorting through his thoughts. What would he do if he found out she could read his mind?
CHAPTER THREE
SATURDAY MORNING, the aroma of baking muffins filled Serena’s warm kitchen. Her pet raccoon, Wally, paced near his food dish, his nails clicking impatiently on the floor. Serena sipped her now cold coffee and finished telling Jimena about the night before.
“And then I woke up on the beach by the seawall,” she finished.
“That’s it?” Jimena asked.
“It.”
Jimena leaned against the cupboard, deep in thought, and raked her hands through her long black hair. Her hooded, zip-front sweater hid the tattoos on her arms, remnants from her days in a gang, but the tattoo on her belly peeked over the top of her hip-huggers.
“That’s some bad stuff.” Jimena shook her head. “Feed Wally while I think.”
Serena filled a bowl with grapes, then mixed a can of cat food with some baby food on another plate.
Jimena helped her set the food on the floor, then she sat on the counter and swung her long legs in and out of the sunlight cascading through the windows. “It had to be a dream,” she decided, and counted on her fingers. Her nails were long and painted turquoise. “First, I would have had a premonition, sin duda, if you were going to meet up with a group of Followers.”
“Probably,” Serena agreed.
That was Jimena’s gift. She had premonitions about the future. She was almost always forewarned if one of them was going to have a serious run-in with the Followers. It was creepy to think that she could see the future, especially because she had never been able to stop any of her premonitions from coming true, no matter how bad they were.
“Second, no one can stay in a fire that long and survive. If the Followers could, Maggie would have told us.”
Maggie had introduced Jimena and Serena a year back. At first it had been a very reluctant friendship. Jimena had been deep in a gang, jacking cars and hanging out with her home girls. No way was she going to be friends with a wimp like Serena. Serena had liked that Jimena never played games the way most girls did, saying one thing and doing another. That made it easy for Serena to respect her. The first time they had fought a group of Followers, Jimena had changed her mind about Serena. Serena had never backed down. Now Jimena trusted Serena with her life.
“Third,” she said as Serena pulled the muffins from the oven, “the fire felt cold. That’s dream stuff.”
Serena took the muffins from the tin and set them in a basket.
“What’s fourth?” Serena had caught Jimena’s thought. She carried the muffins to the table and set them next to the butter and a carafe of coffee.
Jimena jumped off the counter and followed her. She sat down and buttered a muffin. Steam curled into the air as the butter melted. “Fourth, you wouldn’t be here if you’d met up with a gang of Followers.”
Serena nodded, but the explanation didn’t feel right. She knew there was more, but she couldn’t seem to work her mind around it. She slumped back in her chair. “Stanton chased me.”
“You told me.”
“I think he caught me.” Serena slipped Collin’s cozy sweater off her shoulder. She showed Jimena the bruises on her arm that looked as if someone had grabbed her hard.
Jimena tou
ched the four round bruises near her shoulder.
“You must have done it yourself on the rocks,” Jimena assured her. “You’d remember if someone grabbed you.”
“Maybe,” Serena said. “Remember last month when the Followers caught Morgan and stole her hope?”
Jimena nodded.
“She was all dazed,” Serena continued. “And didn’t know what had happened to her. Maybe that’s what happened to me.”
“Followers don’t want your hope. They want you, Serenita.”
“Still . . .”
“Don’t worry about it,” Jimena assured her. “Worry can’t do nothing to protect you. Friends are for that, and I got your back.”
“Thanks.” Serena chewed the side of her mouth, thinking. “It’s just weird not to be able to remember what happened for almost two hours. Maybe I should tell Maggie.”
Jimena gave her a curious look. “You’ll have to wait until Thursday, when we meet her for tea. She won’t be back until then, remember?”
Serena started to answer when the back door opened and Collin walked in.
“Hey,” he greeted them. He wore vans, low-slung baggies, and a bad mood. He’d just come back from an early morning at the beach and hadn’t bothered to wipe the zinc oxide off his nose and bottom lip.
“How was it?” Serena asked.
“Waves were awesome.” Collin opened the refrigerator and pulled out a quart of milk. He stood in the open refrigerator, swallowed the milk, then tossed the carton in the trash and slammed the refrigerator.
From the scrape marks on the side of his leg, Serena figured he’d wiped out. He must have hurt himself to quit so early.
Suddenly, his nose drained. He tried to catch the water with the back of his hand, then grabbed a dish towel and wiped his chin and nose.
“Tienes mocos,” Jimena laughed. “You are such a faucet nose.”
Collin frowned. After a grueling surf session his nasal passages filled with sea water, and then drained at embarrassing times.
“I thought you never wiped out?” Jimena added with a big grin. “Didn’t you tell me a faucet nose was caused by having water forced up your nose during a wipeout?”
“Look, ghetto,” Collin said with a burst of anger that wasn’t like him. “You don’t even know what a wipeout is.” He started rummaging noisily through the cupboards.
“Oye, mocoso.” Jimena stood, her chair scraped back. “Who you calling ghetto?”
“You.” Collin slammed a cupboard door.
Jimena took her attitude stance and now the air prickled with rising tension.
“Over in El Monte, they call you the kook of Malibu.” Jimena danced with her words, spreading the syllables long with a superexaggerated Mexican accent that normally she didn’t have.
Serena shook her head. “Kook” was an especially derogatory term, meaning someone who lived inland and got in the way of real surfers by doing something impossibly stupid like abandoning a surfboard so that it caused a major wipeout for someone else.
Collin’s eyes lingered on Jimena. “Yeah, well, it was a fool kook who caused me to wipe out today, probably one of your ghetto friends.”
“Please.” Serena rolled her eyes. “Do you guys have to fight every time you see each other?”
Collin grabbed a muffin, eyes still focused on Jimena, and shoved it in his mouth as if he were purposely trying to gross her out by eating with his mouth open.
She shook her head. “I’ve seen blood and brains, little boy, you think you’re going to gross me out with bad table manners?” Jimena cleared her throat as if startled by a memory that had been conjured up. She turned to Serena. “So what you looking for in the garage sales today?”
Collin tapped the edge of the table angrily. “Later,” he said, and trundled out of the kitchen.
“Fringed poncho, maybe.” Serena watched Collin leave the room.
“I want some of those psychedelic polyester shirts.” Jimena sipped her coffee.
“We better go.” Serena stood. She wished her brother and her best friend wouldn’t fight so much.
They left the house and started walking over to Fairfax Avenue. They walked in silence for a while, then Serena spoke. “Can you believe what Morgan said about me needing a boyfriend?”
“That’s her life.” Jimena shrugged. “She can’t live without a guy.”
“It’s not like it’s exactly easy for us to have boyfriends,” Serena said.
“Yeah,” Jimena agreed. “Every time I meet some reteguapo guy, the more I like him, the more premonitions I get about him. The more premonitions I get about him, the more I don’t like him. It takes the magic out when I see him sneaking around and doing things he doesn’t even know he’s going to do yet. Only Veto was true to me, but then he ends up dead.” Her words turned hoarse.
“Well, at least none of them are calling you weird,” Serena offered.
Jimena laughed so loudly that the people lined up to eat at Red turned and looked at her. “I wish I could have seen you sitting there, all pretty and suavecita, saying ‘thank you’ and ‘I like you, too,’ when he hadn’t even said a word to you.”
“But I never got mad at a guy for something he hadn’t even done yet,” Serena shot back.
“Yeah,” Jimena considered. “Who wants a boyfriend anyway? Guys are a mess of hormones and sweat.”
“Me?” Serena said weakly.
Jimena smiled at her. “Yo tambien, but different this time. I don’t want to know all about the future with him. I don’t want to see his death coming, or see him messing with some ruca. Someone like your brother. That’s what I want.”
Serena stopped suddenly, and two Hassidic men on their way to temple almost bumped into her. “You hate my brother!”
“I mean some vato like your brother but not your brother,” Jimena corrected.
“What do you mean?”
“Con tu hermano, the only thing I ever see him doing in the future is riding a wave.”
They were silent for a long time, then Serena spoke hesitantly, “You ever think that maybe we’re not supposed to have boyfriends because of what happens when we turn seventeen?”
“I had Veto,” Jimena whispered.
“And he died,” Serena finished for her.
Jimena nodded. “Maybe we’re not.”
Their gifts only lasted until they were seventeen. Then, Maggie had explained, there was a metamorphosis. They had to make the most important choice of their lives. Either they could lose their powers and the memory of what they had once been, or they disappeared. The ones who disappeared became something else, guardian spirits perhaps. No one really knew. They didn’t talk about it much. It was too frightening.
“Vanessa has a boyfriend,” Serena added hopefully.
“Yeah, but she almost didn’t,” Jimena pointed out.
Vanessa had the power to become invisible, but when she became really emotional, her molecules began to separate on their own. When Vanessa had first started dating Michael Saratoga her molecules had gone out of control, and she had started to go invisible every time he tried to kiss her.
“There they are.” Serena pointed down the street.
Catty and Vanessa were vamping it up on the corner of Fairfax and Beverly, in bell-bottoms with exaggerated lacy bells that they must have pulled from Catty’s mother’s closet.
Vanessa gave them the peace sign. “Feelin’ groovy.” She winked. She had gorgeous skin, movie-star blue eyes, and flawless blond hair. She was wearing a headband and blue-tinted glasses. Catty was forever getting Vanessa into trouble, but they remained best friends.
“Love and peace,” Catty greeted them. Catty was stylish in an artsy sort of way. Right now, she wore a hand-knit cap with pom-pom ties that hung down to her waist, and her puddle-jumping Doc Martens were so wrong with the bell-bottoms that they looked totally right. Her curly brown hair poked from beneath the fuchsia cap and her brown eyes were framed by granny glasses, probably another steal from her mother.
“You like our retro look?” Vanessa giggled at all the cars honking at them.
“Yeah, but what’s that smell?” Jimena sniffed.
“Mom’s aromatherapy.” Catty rolled her eyes. “It’s lavender, so I won’t be so stressed out.”
“When were you ever stressed out?” Serena hooted.
“Never,” Catty answered “Mom just thinks everyone is stressed.”
Serena smiled. “It doesn’t smell so bad.”
“I don’t think I’ll be borrowing it.” Jimena wrinkled her nose.
Maggie had brought them all together and was still showing them how to use their special powers to fight the Atrox and its Followers. According to Maggie, they were an unstoppable force, but that’s not how they felt. More often they felt as if their powers controlled them.
Vanessa waved a newspaper. She had circled and numbered the garage sales and brought a map.
“The first sale is only a block away.” She started in the direction of Fairfax Avenue.
Serena told them about the cold fire and the girl named Lecta as they walked down a side street.
“It had to be a dream,” Vanessa said. “The fire was cold.”
“If they were acting like they wanted to party, maybe you did some act of kindness to them so they couldn’t hurt you,” Catty said.
“I’m sure I didn’t,” Serena said. A Follower could never harm a person who had done a genuine act of kindness toward him or her. Serena looked at Vanessa. Once Stanton had trapped Vanessa in his childhood memories. While she was there she had tried to save a younger Stanton from the Atrox. For that he could never harm her.
“Do you know anyone named Lecta?” Vanessa asked.
“No,” Serena admitted.
“It was a dream,” Catty insisted. “The girl didn’t burn.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling her,” Jimena agreed.
“Yeah.” Serena scowled. “But it felt so real.”
“Haven’t you ever had one of those dreams where you want to wake up but you can’t, then when you finally do, you feel relieved what happened was only a dream?”
“Sure.” Serena nodded. “But this was different.”