Whispered Magics

  I walked out.

  o0o

  The rain started right after the dinner I didn’t eat. I sat at my window and watched. First it pelted down, hissing and roaring. Then it tapered into soft drips. Then, slowly, it got stronger, until the drops between my window and the lamppost were like thin spears of icy-white light.

  At midnight, there was Ben, his hair hidden in his hoodie. I pulled on a sweatshirt. If he’d worn only a shirt, so would I. No one would call me a sissy, afraid of a little wet. I was just as tough as any bad kid, and I cared even less.

  When I landed, I had a coughing attack. After I caught my breath he said, “You sound sick. This will make it worse.”

  “Who cares?” I said. “They don’t. Be glad to get rid of me. And since she already killed my dad and got away with it, why not me?”

  “What?”

  “My mother.” I snarled the word so nastily it made me start coughing again. “Killed my dad.”

  “Geez!” Ben exclaimed, throwing up his hands. “Why is it some people have all the luck?”

  “That my dad is dead?” I said, really angry now.

  “No, no,” he said quickly. “But here’s you, sit all period in math and English doing nothing, and nobody notices. Me, now, I look at one of them wrong, and it’s back to Detention. Then when I get home . . .” He gave one of those shrugs again. “So how’d she do it? And get away with it?”

  “Dumped him,” I said, a year’s worth of bitterness making my voice shake. “He moved out and that disgusting idiot moved in with us. With her. Anyway, Dad started—” I hesitated, then said quickly, “—she made him start drinking, but he wasn’t some old drunk. So one night, something happened to his car . . .” I stopped, and closed my mouth hard. I sure wasn’t going to cry in front of some boy and have him laugh at me.

  “Some people have all the luck,” he said softly. “Hey, let’s see if the ghosts come out in rain.”

  The ghosts were there, clothes streaming and fluttering as if the rain were nothing but wind. They seemed delighted to see us.

  Ben and his crowd went up to the bridge again. I didn’t feel like doing much, so I mostly sat and watched Sarah and two other little ones playing some kind of game. Was it something kids had played a hundred years ago? I hugged my arms close, and as the silvery little kid ghosts clapped soundlessly and hopped and twirled, I thought about how wonderful it would be to just hang out in a park for a hundred years, playing and playing. How lucky the ghosts were! The weather didn’t have any effect on them, for some of them were in summer clothes, but they just danced about like leaves in the wind, light and uncaring.

  A movement by my leg made me look up, and I saw my little Sarah-ghost. She really did remind me of Sarah, I thought. My sweet little cousin Sarah, whom I hadn’t seen since Dad’s funeral.

  The little ghost looked into my face, her eyes and mouth sad. I reached out to pull her into my lap, like I used to with Sarah, but my hands went right through her. The air was so cold I shivered.

  She stood there looking at me, sad and still and cold and not breathing, and I shivered again, without knowing why, except I missed Sarah horribly. She’d been kind of a little sister to me. Though I hadn’t seen her for six months—hadn’t really thought about her—I thought now, What if she died, just like this little girl? I would never see her again.

  The screech of tires sounded like a scream this time.

  I whirled around, saw from the glitter of lights through the rain that the car had turned completely around. A couple minutes later, there was Ben, wheezing with laughter.

  “We better go,” he said, still grinning, as around us, the ghosts laughed and danced. “Cops’ll be here in a minute.”

  Just as we reached the edge of the park, revolving red lights up on the bridge made us turn and look. The ghosts winked out, like candles being snuffed. There was nothing to see but swings and slides and play equipment, with water running down it all in streams.

  We started to run, but my chest hurt too much. I faltered, and Ben slowed again.

  “That was fun,” he said. “God those drunks are stupid . . . I think I’d like to try faking’ em out. Just once. And if I end up playing forever in Neverland, who cares? Damn drunks,” he said. And laughed again.

  “Damn drunks,” I said. But I didn’t feel like laughing.

  o0o

  “Is Sarah there?”

  “Who is this?”

  I thought for a moment about lying. “Hi, Aunt Margaret. It’s Anna.”

  “How are you doing, dear?” My aunt’s voice was soft and careful.

  “Okay. Is Sarah there?”

  “Well, she’s at her piano lesson. But we could call you back . . .”

  I tried to think of something to say, but my throat closed up and my eyes burned.

  “Anna? Anna?”

  I hung up.

  o0o

  “I don’t think you should do it,” I said to Ben on the way to the Park.

  The air was bitter, with that funny smell, like a refrigerator, that usually means snow is coming.

  “Do what?”

  “With the cars. Something might happen.”

  “They’re just drunks,” he said in his angry voice. “Drunks are mean, nasty, and they mess up everyone around them and don’t give a damn.”

  I thought of the little ghost, and Sarah, and back to the little ghost who would never be warm again. Would never be hugged. But I couldn’t say that out loud to a guy like Ben.

  “What if the car goes over next time? And there’s, like, a baby in the back seat? Or a grandmother? Or a kid like us?” What if the drunk is someone like my dad?

  “That’s the breaks,” Ben said, still in that hard voice. “Drunks—”

  “It’s not the kid’s choice to be there, and die,” I said. My voice got hard as well. Better than crying.

  “So the kid gets saved a whole lot of grief,” he said, then he stopped, squinting at me. His face looked thinner than ever in the bleached light from a store window. It looked old. “What kid are you yakking about anyway, dork?”

  “Anyone who didn’t choose what was happening,” I said. And because my voice went shaky—I didn’t know why—I added, “Dork yourself. Stupid, selfish, loser dork.” And I ran ahead, as fast as I could, arriving at the park alone.

  Keeping my back to the bridge, I pushed all the swings high, and the ghost kids had a great time swinging up and jumping. They didn’t fall like we would. They fluttered down, light and pale as ash after a fire.

  When I got tired of that, I spun the carousel. A swarm of ghost kids jumped onto it, soundless except for the creak of cold steel.

  Then my little Sarah ghost came up next to me, with her curly hair and pinafore and her long skirt with a ragged hem. She looked at me with her black eyes, blacker than the sky.

  And I remembered that Internet thing. “Do you see the light?”

  She blinked, looking right at me, so I said it again. By now I felt pretty stupid as I pointed at the nearest street lamp. “Do you see the light?”

  She turned around in a slow circle. It meant she had heard me. The first time any of them had really made it clear they could hear us, and not just see us. It gave me a weird feeling.

  She faced the other way for a time, then glanced back at me with her head tipped in question. “Find the light,” I said, and she turned around again.

  I squinted in the direction she was facing, but all I saw were trees bounding the park, and beyond them, a row of stores.

  But as I watched her, the expression on her face changed. Surprise, wonder. She looked up, unblinking, and this time I saw reflections in her eyes. Bright, silvery light—silver, gold, blue, all the colors, but brighter than stars.

  It sent a prickly feeling through me, not fear—not quite—and I spun around, hoping I could see what she saw. Surrounding me were just the usual street-lamps and the store-windows, their neon lights looking weaker than ever in the bone-cold darkness.

&nbsp
; When I turned again, Sarah was walking slowly past me. She held her arms up, like someone was going to carry her, and again I spun, but I didn’t see anyone there. And when I looked back, Sarah was gone.

  The other ghosts went right on playing.

  I was alone. It was my own fault, there I was, alone. Again.

  Alone, and my head ached and my arms were cold. I didn’t even look toward the bridge, but turned and ran home.

  o0o

  “Anna?”

  I jumped off my bed. Too fast. I stopped, coughing hard.

  “Anna?” My door opened, and Sarah peeked in.

  She was real. Her face was flushed, her eyes brown and smiling. I hugged her hard, felt her warm cheek against mine, and her solid little body in my arms. I could hear her heartbeat, and mine, past my ragged breathing.

  “Anna? Don’t cry,” she said. “Mom said if you want, I can come over and we can play. Or you can come to my house. Want to? I started collecting porcelain ponies, just like you.” She grinned proudly. Her front two teeth were missing. “I have six now. Want to hear their names?”

  I looked over at my collection, still lined up on the shelves that he had made. I hadn’t even looked at them in months. “Sure,” I said. “Tell me all about them.”

  o0o

  At midnight, I was alone again. Ben hadn’t come.

  I couldn’t sleep, even though I felt rotten. I kept thinking about Sarah’s visit. How happy she was to see me. If I hadn’t called, how long would I have gone without seeing her again? How careful all the adults were at dinner. Sarah didn’t notice. She just gabbled away like always, but anytime I spoke, all the adults smiled and agreed, just like a row of robots. Like I was a bomb and might explode if they moved wrong. When Sarah and my aunt left, my mother thanked them for coming, and when the door was shut, he said, “Thank you for joining us this evening, Anna.”

  Careful, polite. More of the bomb business.

  But I felt like a bomb, I thought as I stared at the softly falling snow out my window. Like all my feelings about the divorce and Dad might blow up, and no one cared.

  Except Sarah cared. And Aunt Margaret. Otherwise why would she bring Sarah over, even though Mom divorced her brother?

  My thoughts circled round and round, like the ghost kids on the carousel. Anger and happiness and sadness all fluttered and streamed, just like their clothes, leaving me feeling cold inside.

  I thought about Ben again. Was he out there? And if I end up playing forever in Neverland, who cares? he’d said. Had he been playing alone in Neverland Park at night, until the ghosts came?

  I thought of those cars going right through the ghosts. They wouldn’t go through Ben. Why hadn’t I thought of that before, when I was yelling at him about drunks and cars and kids? That he was in danger, too?

  Ben doesn’t care, I thought. My thoughts whirled round the carousel again. He doesn’t care if anyone dies—including himself.

  o0o

  I pulled on my coat. In the pocket was the cell phone that he had given me, when I started going to school by myself. I’d never touched it. I was going to throw it on my bed, but shrugged. It could stay in the coat.

  The snow fell softly. It was cold and silent and scary in the Park. Not even a ghost in sight. I toiled through the soft mounds of snow toward the bridge, coughing as I struggled up the embankment. Flickers of white seemed to dance between the trees, but I couldn’t tell if they were ghosts or snow, or tricks of my aching eyes.

  When I got to the top, black spots smeared my vision. The ghosts were there, all of them, but my attention went straight to the skinny figure in the middle of the street, his thin hair and baggy sweatshirt and old, worn jeans outlined in the harsh beam of oncoming headlights. His face pale as the ghosts’.

  Gasping, I floundered toward him, kicking up snow in all directions.

  He stood still and straight as the car wavered through the snowdrifts; the light veered away, then lit him again, then veered, and he was no more than a shadow in the dark.

  Then the lights swung back, and the car was close. Closer.

  And Ben didn’t move.

  All my spiraling feelings—Sarah, and the little dead girl-ghost, and my dad who’d said he loved me but went away, and the step-dad who didn’t say anything but made me things—it all blended into one thought, straight as those headlights aiming at Ben.

  “No!” I yelled.

  Ben’s head jerked. For a moment I saw his face.

  “Jump!” I screamed, with all my strength.

  The sound mixed with the screech of car tires. Lights swung, the car roared away, and my smeary vision found the thin dark figure, limp as a rag doll, lying in the snow.

  I flung myself down beside him. A dark stream came out of his mouth, looking black in the streetlight. Blood.

  “Ben,” I cried. “Don’t die. Don’t die.”

  “Anna.” It came out like a groan. His eyes were open, black, the streetlamp gleaming in them. And in my mind I heard his voice the other night, almost as pain-filled as now, but I’d heard the pain as anger. Who cares? Who cares?

  “I was mad at you for not coming,” I babbled. “But then I missed you, and so here I am. I was going to walk you back.”

  “Better go . . .” he whispered. “Get in trouble.”

  I was about to say I don’t care but suddenly I was sick of those words. I looked around. We were alone. Even the ghosts were gone. “I’m getting help.”

  The phone! I pulled it out of my pocket and clicked it on. To my surprise, it held half a charge, still. I stared down at the phone, knowing I’d been dead wrong about Ben. He cared, but it seemed like no one else in his life cared about him.

  I punched 911 and reported the accident. Then I stared at the phone for a long second, knowing that if I called home, my secret life would be gone forever—that because my mother did care, that she’d be very angry.

  He had programmed our number into the Favorites. I hit HOME.

  “Anna?” Mom sounded terrified. “Anna, where are you?”

  “At the bridge above Neverland Park. Mom, after this is over you can ground me till I’m fifty, but now I gotta stay here. There’s somebody who needs me.”

  I heard her take a deep, shaky breath. “I’m on my way.”

  I pocketed the phone and bent over Ben.

  “No light,” he muttered, groping weakly with one hand. “Can’t see . . . Are the ghosts gone?”

  I caught that hand and squeezed it. “No one here but us,” I said, faking a laugh. It sounded like the rattle of pebbles on ice.

  Ben was silent, his breathing ragged, which sent pain through me, sharp as ice shards. In the distance I heard sirens wailing, and I squeezed his hand again, harder.

  “Unh,” he groaned—a protest. But when I eased my grip, his fingers tightened on mine, just a pulse.

  I looked at his thin face, knowing that I’d chosen my darkness, while he hadn’t. My family all tried in their own ways to hold out lights to me, but I was too angry to see them. Ben, closed off from the light by other people’s anger, had no lights—no hope.

  He squinted up at me. “They are gone. I can’t see them.”

  “Maybe the ghosts found their light,” I said. My eyes stung, my throat hurt, my nose was running. Footsteps clumped around us, flashlights glared in our faces. Hands reached, some to help him, some to push me away. But Ben’s head turned toward me, so I gripped his hand and said, like making a promise, “Let’s find yours.”

  Finding the Way

  “Honk! Honk!” The damage alarm was louder than the pings and klonks of the meteorite shower our scout ship had accidentally encountered on our emergence from hyperspace.

  “A puncture! We’re losing energy,” Kikinee shrilled.

  “Teer! Noot! Take evasive action,” the Vmmm’s voice hummed over the intercom. “I will fix the puncture.”

  Teer waved at me to take piloting as she worked at her computer.

  I did my best to guide our scout ship
around the biggest meteorites. There was no time to set up a course. I punched us back into hyperdrive, and the screens smeared as our engines took us between dimensions.

  With no idea where we were going, I yelled to our navigator, “Thisko, can’t you—”

  “Navigational computer is down,” Thisko said, five of his eight tentacles working away.

  “At least if we drop out of hyper around a planet,” came Smelch’s mournful hoot, “we won’t have to spend five long hours in the Room for Reviewing Actions.”

  Kikinee waved at a cable that had shaken loose when the first big rock hit the ship, and chirped, “Quiet, Smelch, and give me a hand with that gravity-link.”

  Still muttering, Smelch shot one of its six hands across the cabin to the dangling wires. The fingers quickly maneuvered the gravity-link back to where it ought to be, and we felt gravity ripple through the ship again.

  Then Kikinee tossed the hand back across the cabin and with a loud splorch, it reattached to Smelch’s arm.

  We were all strapped into our pods, so we hadn’t floated, but a couple of the things that had come loose—like part of Kikinee’s lunch—stopped floating and dropped with a thud, klank, and a squashy noise. Kikinee and Smelch scrambled to clean up.

  When things were stable again, I pulled us back into the realtime dimension, hoping we would emerge in the safety of space.

  We were lucky.

  “We’re near a system,” Thisko said after a pause, and sent the coordinates to my screen. “Noot, get us there! The third planet shows that the atmosphere is mainly oxygen and hydrogen—”

  “Is the planet on the survey list?” came the Vmmm’s voice. “Dangerous life form warnings?”

  “Class Five listing for this system,” Teer said, checking Thisko’s data.

  I was still busy piloting us toward the mysterious planet and trying to shed the enormous velocity built up during our jump between dimensions.

  “Average sun, ten planets in all—looks like one broke up—” Teer went on.

  The scout ship bucked again.

  “No details now,” I said. “We’re still not stable! I’m taking us to the planet with the oxygen. At least we can breathe that.”