Chapter 11: Nothing’s Nailed Down

I was feeling kind of cool when I got home. Not like Harry Potter cool, but... I might be damaged, but I'm special and damaged, which is better. Right?

The notes on conjuration had been really sparse: Envision a form. Give it reality. Apparently, that was the whole thing, all the way up the ladder. Make a form and make it as real as you could. First, real enough for one person to see in their mind by sharing the form. Then, real enough for everyone to see by making the image ‘real enough’ to be visible. I didn’t understand the how of it, but it sounded simple enough as a concept. And then all the way up the ladder to making permanent, real things was just a matter of making it more and more real.

I tried to picture myself as a master conjurer. There were no notes about how to get rid of things you conjured, leaving me to suspect that you probably didn’t. Perhaps that was another discipline. So the first thing I ended up picturing was me summoning a couch because I wanted to sleep on it, and then in the morning having to get the couch out of my room, around the corner, into the hallway, and down the stairs just to have enough room to open my dresser drawers.

It was starting to feel like every single part of my new life came with drawbacks. It was almost reassuring in a way—I didn't want to look at my new life with rose-colored glasses.

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On the way home, I saw the first thing that made me really question my sanity.

It was high. You could tell because it was small and really slow, yet it was staying up in the air, which meant it was actually big and very high. Like an airplane.

It wasn’t an airplane.

Sunlight refracted off its surface in glittering jewel tones as an eagle the size of a Cessna lazily glided overhead. It was up so high that despite the fact I could tell it was moving quickly, it stayed within my sight range for a long time—all the way up to the gas station, where I traded extra cash from the grocery run for an energy drink.

I’m not great at saving money.

It was gone when I came out again.

I know an energy drink plus potato salad doesn't sound as good to other people as it does to me, but as I walked through the front door, I was excited. That excitement turned to horror when I saw my empty, gallon-sized Ziploc bag—potato salad remnants sticking to the inside—sitting limp and empty next to a clean plate and piled-up soda cans beside ‘Mom’, where she slept, sprawled out full-length on the sofa in the darkened living room.

“Lights off,” she mumbled sleepily. “Tryna sleep.”

"No!" I yelled. My self-control isn’t all that great sometimes. "’Mom’, no! That’s all I had to eat!"

"There’s pizza in the fridge," came ‘Dad‘s’ voice from the next room. He didn’t sound like he understood the problem.

"I hate it here! ‘Mom’, that was mine!"

"Shut up," she said. "I'm sleeping."

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"You’re sleeping because you’re in a food coma because you ate all my food! My teacher gave it to me because she saw that I was hungry, and then you ate it!"

She sat up, a look of vague alarm on her face at the idea of a teacher—a mandatory reporter—saying that I looked hungry to the extent that she’d had to provide food herself. I wasn’t surprised at the reaction, but I was disgusted.

"What? Say that again," she demanded.

“You ate,” I said, enunciating clearly, “my food. Around here everything anyone has that isn’t nailed down gets stolen! And nothing’s nailed down!”

Her face went a mottled red immediately, which, upon reflection—an instant after speaking—was predictable.

"Go to your room!" she screamed, "UNGRATEFUL LITTLE SHIT!"

"Bite me!" I yelled, and slammed the front door behind me.

Well, that was stupid. I had half of the day left stretching out before me, and now I couldn’t go home.

I wondered what Toby was up to. I wondered if he was still mad at me. I wouldn’t blame him. I'd kind of gone off half-cocked when I first started panicking about how everything had different colors. He had been suspect number one through ten because he was the only drug dealer I'd ever done business with, which may have led to me abusing our friendship a little by going to his house and screaming at him for a while. But maybe he’d understand. He was pretty solid like that.

Toby had his own studio apartment next to a lake. They’d made lots of little standalone buildings, probably meant for retirees—people who didn’t want to have to put up with the neighbors banging on the walls. Toby didn’t want people making noise complaints about the inebriated people on the premises whenever he threw a party. He called them "work parties." It was the stupidest thing.

Toby was nineteen. And I know what you’re thinking: how can you be nineteen and still in high school? Re-doing two grades will do it. Toby was not an academic overachiever, but he was gorgeous. The hair rules that everyone was held to at our school—off the collar—applied to him, too, in theory. But he was... I don’t know if "clever about it" is the right word. He used so much product in his hair that it fell into these big, amber, swooping waves that bunched his hair up and broke it apart into ringlets. But if he started sweating, if you pulled one of his hairs down, it would’ve been an inch past his collar. Maybe they gave him a little leeway because he was a legal adult. Maybe they gave him a little leeway because they liked him, or they didn’t want to risk starting a cycle of academic discipline that might throw off his chances at graduating high school again for the third year.

He was such a nice guy. And an idiot. I could admit it to myself in the privacy of my own head. He was one of my favorite people on the planet, but I would never let him touch my homework or any of my electronics. If his life depended on it? Maybe. Just maybe.

I cursed my way up to his apartment and walked right up to the door. I always brought my bike inside. I don’t care what people say. If something's actually important to you, you keep it in eye-shot. You just do. I knocked.

He answered the door and looked at me blearily. I could tell from the mark the pillowcase had left on his face that he'd been asleep, too. It was a day for afternoon naps, apparently.

"Come in," he said. He didn’t ask for an apology. He didn’t look hurt, just... up. "Maxine is here," he said, like a pronouncement. "I’ll let her in."

"I am sorry I yelled at you," I started.

"Man, you were flipped out," he said. "I would’ve done that too if I had a... me yelling at me." He plopped right on the couch. "I don’t know. I don’t even know. You’re good."

It was moments like this that I knew why I appreciated Toby so much.

"So," I suggested as we made ourselves comfortable on the couch, "since I may have gotten in a fight with 'Mom'... maybe... would you mind if I hung out here for a bit?"

"Coolio," he said. "I'm chill."

Whether that meant "I don’t care" or "that’s awesome," I couldn’t tell. I could never tell. Toby would reach for familiar phrases—"I'm chill," "cool, man," "my brother"—whenever in doubt, like a pet parrot with gorgeous, flowing hair.

He turned on the TV, and I let Spongebob distract me from my stresses for at least a little while.