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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.
