“Hi, Paige,” she says shyly, scooting in next to me. “Sorry I’m late.” She disappears. Reappears. Gone again. Back for more.
Julia Ash is always late.
Julia lives in the apartment across the alley from mine. She gets the Times and the Deadtown Funnies every morning. Milk delivered twice a week. Sometimes I sit on my fire escape and watch her try to make herself eggs. She flickers in and out and in and out and the yolk plops onto the floor or the counter or gets hurled against a cabinet in frustration. If the egg makes it into the pan, it always burns before she can hold on to a spatula long enough to scrape it onto a plate. Then she cries. The only way Jules ever gets breakfast is if the gargoyle who lives above her takes pity and fries her a sunny-side up on his red-hot demonic palm. His name is Christopher. He has a crocodile face and four green tongues and a high jazzy tenor. Sometimes Christopher holds her while she cries, cries and whispers: Please let me stay. Please let me stay.
Julia is pretty fucked up.
She lights up Deadtown style: fish a burning cig out of your purse, flick your lighter, and dark flows up to extinguish your smoke. She breathes the drifting ash.
“I can’t stay,” she says.
No shit. Gone. Here. Redhead. Brunette. Blonde. A bruise on her cheek. No, wait, on her shoulder. A black eye. She’s always so nervous. Shaking. Clenching her hands into fists and letting go and clenching again. “Lucas gets angry if I’m not home when he gets back from work.”
THE HEAT DEATH OF JULIA ASH
On Monday, I am Julia Ash. I dye my hair cranberry red and live in a trendy suburb with three cats, two teakettles, and one first edition Jane Eyre on which I have never once spilled ramen broth.
On Tuesday, I eat a star.
On Wednesday, I stand silently in front of a classroom at St. Ovidius’s School for Wayward Children, a sensible brunette in sensible pumps, lecturing telepathically on the fall of the Byzantine Empire.
On Thursday, I tuck a platinum curl behind my ear, hit send on a new UrbanFeed article and reach over Audrey III, my ginger tabby, for my tea. She leaps away over a stack of papers, spilling a bowl of hot ramen, staining the left corner of Jane Eyre the color of oyster sauce.
On Friday, I am Charybdis, Insatiable Devourer of Galaxies, and my hair is the color of a nebula. I starve in space, alone, naked. I am stronger than my hunger.
On Saturday, the Millennial Men fight Lodestone in the shadows of the Antarctic ice shelf. I pulled down mountains onto his head, and we freeze to death together, his black hair and mine fusing to the lichen forever.
On Sunday, Charybdis is inside me, like a liver or a lung, but it is not me, and when it opens my mouth to swallow Arcturus, I am not responsible. It’s not my fault. While Arcturus’s planets go dark, one by one, I can smell pampas grass faintly in the burning stellar gas.
On Monday, it all begins again, the (maybe) cats and (stained or unstained) Jane Eyre and (possibly) St. Ovidius and my (very pressing) deadlines and the (probable) ice and the (yes or no) stars burning inside me like tea coming slowly to boil.
It’s just so hard to keep everything straight when my life is being constantly edited by a madman with a bottle of cosmic Wite-Out in his fist. But every Sunday night, at 1:47 AM, he gives me fifteen minutes of Definite Reality. Some people get fifteen minutes of fame. I get fifteen minutes in the dark with the authentic, canonical universe curled up in my lap, purring away like a pulsar and wrapping its tail around my wrist.
What do you know? Look at the time.
• • •
1:47 AM
I am Julia Ash. I want to be Julia Ash. It’s a relief to be her. Julia Ash is good and kind and beautiful. Julia Ash is special.
Julia Ash is a mockingbird.
You can call us freaks. You can call us monsters and mutants and abominations and threats to national security. But we call ourselves mockingbirds. See, when Mr. Charles Darwin sailed to Galapagos all those years ago, it wasn’t the finches or the turtles that first tipped him off that some game was afoot in the genetic record. It was the mockingbirds. On those small, confined islands, mockingbirds evolved quickly enough for anyone to see with two regular old nineteenth-century human eyes. Thus, our boy Chuck began to consider the transmutation of species. And now, in the post-Darwin world, on this small, confined planet, some of us are also quick—and strong, and full of ice and fire, and invisible, and psychic, and in flight, and invincible. We are mockingbirds. We look like you, we imitate your walk and your songs and your nests and your colors, but we are not you. We are the transmutation of species.
Professor Yes came to collect me when I was eight. When you are eight and you lock yourself in the closet, keening back and forth and sobbing for everyone to stop thinking so fucking loud, someone always comes to collect you. They’ll wear a suit and unfashionable glasses and a Deeply Concerned Expression. Almost certainly sporting respectable, Deeply Concerned grey hair. If you’re very lucky, that person will be Dr. Clara Y. Xenophile and not anybody who works for Child Protective Services or the local mental hospital.
Dr. Clara told my parents to call her Professor Yes. Everyone did, because she never said no to a child in need. She said that she understood me. She’d been troubled herself as a girl. She’d devoted her life to helping the young and the lost. She was the headmistress of a place called St. Ovidius’s School for Wayward Children, which wasn’t any awful Catholic laundry or Dickensian orphanage, but simply a place full of people who also understood poor little Julia. She said it all in such a nice voice that I’d already packed my bags by the time my parents thought to ask about tuition.
I sat down in Dr. Clara’s long, beautiful red car. It was so quiet in there. Perfectly, absolutely quiet. No one else’s thoughts banging down the doors of my head. A bottle of water and a crystal tumbler of green apple slices waited in the cupholders. Professor Yes slid in next to me. Our eyes met and held on for dear life. I liked her face. It was brown and broad and had the good kind of wrinkles that make you look like you know top-shelf stories about just everything. She wore her long silver hair in a big, twisty, old-fashioned bun. Suddenly, I knew she didn’t need those glasses at all. She only wore them so that everyone would think she was nothing but a harmless old lady who’d done too many crosswords in her day.
Words unfurled in my brain. They didn’t bang or holler or kick the can down my spinal column like everyone else’s stupid thoughts. Dr. Clara’s thoughts wrote themselves in lovely cursive golden letters across my cerebellum, and each letter smelled like fresh-cut green apples.
Don’t tell anyone. It’s our secret.
And that’s how you begin to win over a child. People who share a secret share a heart.
• • •
1:49 AM
I loved school. I’d always been an obnoxious little know-it-all bookworm. But at St. Ovidius’s, being a know-it-all bookworm wasn’t obnoxious. I didn’t have to wait until it was clear none of the other children knew the answer before I raised my hand. The moment I walked under the white stone arch with NAM VOS MUTASTIS ET ILLAS carved on it, I was home. I didn’t have to pretend to be normal. I was a mockingbird, and St. Ovidius was Galapagos. I wasn’t a Problem anymore.
I was a Psionic.
Just like Professor Yes.
I didn’t even have to raise my hand in class anymore. Except in phys ed, which I took with the Kinetics because, after an hour of sweating and crying in Professor Yes’s office, I lifted the little bronze phoenix statue on her desk a couple of inches into the air without touching it. It floated there for six whole seconds before it burst into glops of ultraviolet lava. The Professor was so impressed, she frowned. That constant, reassuring, kindergarten-teacher smile just bolted off her face and she looked like someone else completely. But I was just as shocked. I didn’t even know I could do that until I did. Maybe that should be carved on the white stone arch instead. It probably sounds impressive in Latin.
But as the years went on, the Psionic/Kinetic curricu
lum stopped challenging me. It sounds awful, but I was bored. I course-hopped all over the school. Elementals, Shifters, Mechanicals, even the constantly changing halls of the Ontologics Wing, where the kids who could spank time and turn reality into a paper airplane practiced on the unsuspecting masonry.
I remember sitting in the common room with Henry Hart, a boy so beautiful, he’d done national commercials before he accidentally ignited the overbearing director of a Frosty Frogs spot and Professor Yes came to collect him. Everybody knew his face, even if they couldn’t always quite remember where they’d seen him before. I met Henry because we both hated running. Sure, gym class meant shooting fireballs into a basketball hoop and turning the bleachers to ice, then a waterfall, then a jungle, then back again, but it also meant plain old boxing and volleyballs-to-the-face and running laps. Henry and I both dragged our feet on the big gravelly track, halfheartedly jogging if a teacher saw us slacking. I knew who he was right away, but I never said anything. There’s no such thing as before St. Ovidius. We were in love before we finished the thousand meters.
We were twelve. In the common room, at night, we were twelve. In big green armchairs with brass bolts in the arms, drinking (decaf) coffee like Real Live Grown-Ups, we were twelve. Henry balanced a cozy little fireball on the back of his fingers, making it hop from knuckle to knuckle.
“That’s awesome,” I said, dazzled by the nearness of him. “Your control’s gotten so much better.”
Henry scowled. Sometimes when a person scowls, it ruins their face, makes them look cruel, but not Henry. “It’s nothing,” he snapped.
“What do you mean, nothing? You’re a glorious deity of fire and you know it.”
He looked up out of his green armchair, his mouth all screwed up like he was going to cry. “It’s nothing. I’m nothing. I can’t do anything a cheap flamethrower can’t do. Maybe a hundred years ago I’d be a . . . a superhero. A legend. But now? You can buy me at an army surplus store for $49.99 plus tax. And you don’t have to feed a flamethrower fifty bacon cheeseburgers a day to keep it firing.” Henry needed calories. He needed saturated fat. It autolyzed his combustive enzymes or something. “I’m not like you.”
I stared at my knees to keep him from seeing the shame rolling down my cheeks.
He rushed over to me, knocking over his coffee onto an ethics textbook (onto a first edition copy of Jane Eyre). “No, no, Jules, that’s not what I meant. I mean . . . you’re really something else. You can’t buy a Julia Ash off the shelf anywhere, at any price. I’m a mockingbird. You’re the HMS Beagle.”
I still wasn’t like everyone else, not really. I wouldn’t find the end of what I could do until years later, at the edge of a white dwarf star.
• • •
1:51 AM
I met everyone I ever loved at St. Ovidius.
We got to pick new names when we graduated. My friends stopped being Henry Hart and Lachlan Reed and Lana Kowalski and became a pantheon: the Silver Siren, Zigzag, Pell-Mell, the Maroon Marauder, Snow Queen, Whitewater, Paravox, Ha’Penny. Hal Cyon. Bruce Force. Crucible.
Henry. My Crucible.
After graduation, Professor Yes called a group of us into her office. The melted chunks of the bronze phoenix I’d exploded still sat on her desk. We sat down—me, Crucible, Bruce Force, Hal Cyon, Zigzag, and Paravox. I was the only girl. I tried not to let it bother me. It was time to take the next step, Professor Yes told us. To use our powers for good instead of spinning our wheels. She was putting together a team. The best of us. To fight, not crime or mustached evildoers or endemic social inequality, but other mockingbirds. Mockingbirds who wanted to expose us or enslave everyday normals like our parents. Or just plain rule the world, like some people had always done, long before any of them could fly. In time, there’d be dozens of us, but just then, in that office, while I stared at the clumps of phoenix on her mahogany desk with the smell of green apples swimming in my brain, we were only six. The Millennial Men. We were going to make a better world.
For a while, that’s just what we did. Hal Cyon trapped Doctor Nocturne in a pocket dimension stuffed inside the blue whale in the Museum of Natural History. Crucible burned down the lair of the Rat Bastard with his army of mutated rodents inside. Zigzag got to Victor Volatile’s Boomsday Device just in time and cut the wires with his razor breath. The Clock of Ages changed the timeline so that none of us ever met—and Paravox changed it back with one arm tied behind his back. Bruce Force just beat the hell out of anyone and chomped his cigar while he did it. I personally erased the eight-sided mind of the Arachnochancellor and disintegrated his webship. We battered Miasma in the streets of Guignol City while his mustard-gas golems hissed and spat under every stoplight. But mostly we fought Lodestone, Professor Yes’s nemesis, a mastermind right out of our textbooks, able to command stone from the depths of the earth and bent on bringing all mockingbirds under his control. Their war began long before any of us were born.
Of course, they always came back somehow. Doctor Nocturne rode that blue whale into a crowd of philanthropists and turned them all into philanthrozombies. Victor Volatile built a new laboratory on the moon. Lodestone always slipped through our fingers, his iron face disappearing back into the shadows. But that was the game. We grew strong. I grew strong. It made everyone nervous, but I couldn’t see why. Isn’t stronger better? Would they all have whispered like that if Bruce suddenly sprouted new powers? I doubted it. The world likes a big man punching things to get bigger and punch harder. But even Crucible got quiet when I came into a room by the time the whole disaster with Sergeant Pluto started darkening the edges of our little family portrait.
Some Sundays, I wonder why the Millennials agreed so easily to be Professor Yes’s personal matadors. They don’t call her that because she never says no to a child in need. They call her that because she can make anyone do whatever she likes. Say no to drugs; say yes to Professor Yes. Her psionic strength beats even mine. Of course she’d never do it.
That would be wrong.
She wouldn’t.
• • •
1:53 AM
By the Terrible No Good Very Cosmically Significant Day, I could fly.
Flying is weird. The first time I did it, I got airsick. Flying doesn’t feel like flying. It feels like the sky is inside you and hates the earth so much, it wants to rescue you. The worst thing is the cold. It’s brutal up there. My hair freezes, my eyebrows, my eyelashes—I have to thaw them slowly in the sauna or it shatters into a million dark red pieces. Flying in space is worse.
When I say the words flying in space, you don’t really think about it much. An action in a place. Right. Fine. Julia flew through space. But once you’ve snorted a line of physics and punched a hole in escape velocity, you’re not flying at all anymore. There’s no wind to ride, no storms to stow away on. Up there, you’re not a bird; you’re a ship. Your skin goes hard, crystalline, you stop needing to breathe, and your endocrine system shifts into propulsion mode. And you roar through the stars. There’s no up or down or end to anything. Eddies of radiation and stray gravity and microscopic debris spin around you like ribbons on a maypole. It hurts the whole time.
Only Zigzag and I can do it, out of the lot of us. But Zigzag was born that way—a nuclear-powered engine in a pixieish boy’s body. I just kept going one day and by the time I looked behind me, I had made it past the Kuiper Belt. The point is, none of it would ever have happened to Zig, who’d been best friends with space since he was playing with plastic soldiers three feet above his mother’s backyard.
We were coming back from victory on Mars. Lodestone had built a new city under a diamond dome on the red sand of Isidis Planitia, a city where mockingbirds could live in peace—so long as they lived by his law. We pulled down his statue onto the long red central boulevard of Lodria Prime, and I swear I only thought for a moment of how nice it might be to live in this place, where we wouldn’t have to hide. Lodestone himself escaped into a maze of underground tunnels, but all in all, we
’d had a very satisfactory Monday. Zigzag and I raced each other through the black while the others napped on their fancy Falk Industries rocket, fitted out with mints on every pillow. The sun winked and sparkled on the hem of Zig’s violet cape, on the glass edge of the Earth, on the crags of the moon. I wasn’t paying attention. I was happy. I ran right into it, like a deer and an eighteen-wheeler.
Later, Professor Yes said it must have been a solar flare, but that’s bullshit. I caught something up there, but it didn’t come from the sun. I felt it slide over me and around me and into me, the color of hunger, the color of the future and the past, the color of the Galapagos Sea.
Its name was Charybdis.
I shivered electric. I tried to call out to Zigzag, to the Millennial rocket disappearing far ahead of me, but all that came out of my mouth was fire and geometry. I vaporized into infinite particles, each cell of me, briefly, fully sentient and screaming.
I rematerialized in my parents’ living room. They were at work. Only the dog saw me. Hard winter sunlight streamed through windows I hadn’t seen in years. I turned on the radio; David Bowie told me to shut my mouth. I opened the cabinet—they still had the clay mug I’d made in second grade. It was shaped like an elephant, but the trunk broke off in the kiln. I made myself a cup of coffee, but when I tried to drink it, my two-creams-one-sugar turned into red Martian dust. I poured Mars out into the sink. A thin white stalk spooled up out of the sand and opened into a flower on fire.
“Huh,” I said.
Everything had changed.
• • •
1:55 AM
At first, it was all fantastic, just splendid, what a gift for the cause! Professor Yes was perfectly happy to wheel me out on the showroom floor, a mockingbird who’d flown past all her limits and become an eagle, a hawk, a 747. The metaphors fell down. I was the biggest gun she had, and, for a while, she aimed me everywhere. There were no rules. I reached out one hand toward Sergeant Pluto and he disintegrated into a hundred shades of the color green. I wept and cities rebuilt themselves. I laughed and Victor Volatile turned into a new inland sea somewhere in North Dakota. Nobody had a problem with the new Julia as long as she did their chores for them. Kept the world nice and tidy, took the rubbish out, dusted off the minimalist black-and-white discussion piece morality had become.