Destiny
The Soul-Shifting Adventures of a James Dean Rebel Girl

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Chapter Three
The Kids in Black

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I fell asleep after the call and woke to the musical plinky-plink of pebbles on the window like ice in a scotch glass. The rain still poured. Everything was sheeted by water, even the street lights. I hate monsoon season because of this.

I look out the window which is wet with rain and I can see myself reflected not in the glass but in Jamie's face – a red-haired flapper goddess in a black sheet-toga with gold poetry brushing against my skin. The wind blows my hair across my eyes. I push it back and Jamie's suddenly at my window, dripping wet and tousled. His white t-shirt is clouded cellophane against the muscles of his chest. He's like Huck Finn or Peter Pan, out there in the rainy night, grinning at me, his eyes on fire.

"Get in here, you psycho!" But I'm laughing.

"Come on," he urges. Is this how Wendy felt when Peter Pan pulled her towards the nursery window? Sometimes he makes me want to just run into the night and never go home.

"I'm in a sheet," I remind him – remind myself. "Get in here before you get sick."

"Hurry up," he said, climbing in like a monkey on a jungle gym. I'd removed the screen on my window ages ago. When my father found out, he was certain I'd taken up smoking – as if – but my mother made him let it go. Somehow, she knew why I needed the screen off without me having to talk about it, and she knew I'd never abuse the "screen privilege," as she called it. "The moon's poking out of a gap in the clouds. The sidewalks are about to light up like a frickin' Christmas tree!"

The Frank Sinatra lilt tingled over my skin and made me giggle. I make him turn around while I wiggle-worm into dry panties and put on a bra. It sounds dumb but I don't know what to wear. I rifle through my closet, humming "Billie Jean[1]."

I like Jackson's oldies. Get over it.

So I'm humming that song, imagining Jamie soaking my carpet with the diamond raindrops coming off of his nose and fingers and wrist bones, and I grab this little petticoat-style miniskirt that I modified to make it knee-length, this ruffly type skirt-thing the pale washed out color of the spring sky after it rains when the clouds are thin but still hanging around. I shimmy it on, grab a black tank top with an Amy Brown fairy on it, and my denim jacket that I found at Goodwill and studded with all these store-bought, free-styling gold and white and silver buttons.

Need shoes, though.

"We're gonna lose the moon," he says, and I think of what book we might read when we get to his place. Jamie just bought Guarding the Moon, by Francesca Lia Block. He was really excited because he loved the idea of motherhood but obviously couldn't have any kids, being a dude, and we both loved Ms. Block's way of expressing herself.

"Won't," I said.

"Will, crazy girl."

"Cool it, crazy boy," I say, quoting "Be Cool" from West Side Story, hugging my body as I think about what we're about to do.

I hear girls talk at school about sex and how exciting and great it is, and I know it can be when you've got a good guy who cares about making sure both of you have a good time. Still, this is way better. Sex has inconvenient strings dangling off of it, waiting to latch onto you, and it causes lots of chemical imbalances in your brain when you're under thirty, tricking you into thinking the guy you just screwed is The One when he's just someone.

But me and Jamie... he had this way of thinking of things to do that could scald your mind like the first bite off of an extra cheese and pepperoni pizza when you're starving and haven't eaten all day – hot and it kinda hurts, but at the same time you don't care because it tastes so good.

Thinking about all this, I hugged myself again. It feels liquid blue under my bones, like a thousand rivers of turquoise blood. My blood is blue diamond rain. I glanced at Jamie. His eyes are blue raindrops, like my heart, just as big, bigger even. The air sizzles lightning white around and between us. I grab my white tennis shoes with the mismatch double laces to make them extra long. Rainbow Brite, Invader Zim, Silver Hawks, Care Bears, and at the end, so I can have multicolored aglets, Voltron: the Defender of the Universe, chopped into bits and stitched on at the ends – red, blue, green, yellow. My shoes, with their fabric paint swirls and stars and things, sparkle in the night light glow from an occupied wall socket. My heart is so big and liquid rain style in my chest right now, I felt like I'd explode. I shoved on my shoes, start to get going, remembered my folks.

Jamie saw the memory on my face. Sometimes my face is like a mirror, reflecting everything that crosses my mind, from the memory of my fave fantasy movie playing in my head to the color of my internal rainbow to why I cry every time I have to get dressed to go to school even though I love my clothes. And my best friend can read my silver-glass face like a children's picture book because we know each other that well.

"You need to tell your Mom?"

He likes my mom. I nodded.

"Make it fast, okay?" He says. "Thunderclouds are rising fast. I can feel it."

I race down the hall to my mom's office. I think, but I'm not sure, that I'm not running to my mother, but running from the tense static sound in Jamie's voice. There's raw and electric tension in his eyes. Diamonds like aqua rain, but they can cut, like thorns. I'm suddenly as scared as the moonless nights in rated R movies. Fear is copper blood in my mouth. The blue is dissipating.

"Mommy?" I call, knocking. If you don't make noise, my mom jumps out of her skin when she finally notices you.

"Yeah?" Her version of "come in."

I walk into the office, full of at least fifteen huge and mismatched bookcases – bought for super cheap at Goodwill – some full of DVDs like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, My Neighbor Totoro, Fly Away Home, Gideon's Trumpet, and the Golden Compass (she refuses to own the book series); some with a few spiral notebooks stacked on the deep shelves, some with those fancy leather journals you can get at the big bookstores at the malls with the gilt pages and the fancy gold and silver leaf on the front, back, and spine. But mostly, books. All kinds of things from Harlequin Romances to the Heralds of Valdemar, Lois Duncan to Little House on the Prairie, Artemis Fowl to VC Andrews. Every book, actually, by Tamora Pierce, Robert Cormier, and in the Once Upon a Time series. More than twenty-thousand books in this one room – which was actually the second master bedroom. My mother is crazy. There's a stereo, a two-monitor computer, a laptop, a television, DVD player and VCR combo, even a Playstation 3 because my mom's in love with Kingdom Hearts.

She says it all helps her write.

The walls above the book cases are decorated with airbrush and aerosol paintings my mom bought at the county fair over the last thirty years (since she was thirteen), cross-stitched tapestries of scenes from books, and hanging bamboo cuts with watercolor paintings.

Now you know where I get it.

At the computer desk, notebook in hand, knees crossed with her bare feet on the desk (her toenails sport black French tips) is my mother – hair almost to her knees from twenty-four years of prenatal vitamins, glasses sliding off her nose, sucking on the tip of a pen. The glass bottle on her desk gleams under the overhead light.

People see her sucking on that bottle while she's writing. It's always there, full of some bubbling brown substance no one can identify because the bottle was handmade in one of her college art classes and has no label, only these gorgeous star burst designs. They think she's an alcoholic, but I'll let you guys in on a little secret – it's full of Coke-a-Cola. No booze. I check, often, by asking for a sip.

She never says no.

Though she does sing the Cola Song from that one Faith Hill commercial every time I ask.

"What do you need, baby?"

She tucks one long strand of hair behind her ear. Most of it is kept back from her face by a blue bandanna she found in the street once in tenth grade. I told her it probably belonged to a gangster, but she kept it.

"I'm going out with Jamie," I say.

She looks at me over the rims of her spectacles. I didn't know why she did this. It wasn't as if she could see me, especially since the only eye with a decent view of me was her left eye – the hereditary bad one.

"It's Friday," I remind her when she tugs at her old engagement ring – synthetic sapphire, diamond, aquamarine, sterling silver – on the iron chain around her neck. Like a kind of sign language. Mom-sign. That should be a book. The Teen Guide to Understanding Mom Sign. The tugging, almost absently, means "Hmmm. Not so sure about that idea, kid." The clock reads 10:21 pm. It can't be "too late" to go out. I've gone out at three in the morning before with parental consent.

"Drive careful in the rain," my mother says, turning back to her notebook. I can see her hasty, but incredibly neat and small handwriting – her capital letters take up less than half of the college rule line – scrawled across the page. "And nothing romantic," she adds, though I could tell from her tone that she was only saying that so when my father had a heart attack, she could remind him that she'd warned me. "Keep it fraternal."

"No problem. Platonic as a Greek philosopher," I say, hug her – she smells of strawberry and red cherry jam, prepackaged waffles, cold north seas, and night-blooming jasmine in summer with honeysuckle – and run back to him.

We take off into the rainy night, making sure we close the window on the way out. The wind tousles my hair. It's no longer howling. I taste the sky and the wilderness as raindrops slide into my mouth. In the distance, through the Aquarian veil of the pouring skies, I can vaguely make out the shape of Jamie's car, a T-bird, the old kind from those old movies, like the one in the old song. I feel like I'm in some crossway mix between the Fast and the Furious and Grease. My chest is full of lightning and hotrod oil lit up to blue flames by cigarette lighters. I even start singing "Grease Lightning" up at the sky.

Yes, I do randomly burst out into song. Don't you?

Under the burnt pumpkin glow of a street lamp I can see the fire-engine red paint job. Wherever my feet slap the pavement, the sidewalk lights up bright white like in an eighties music video, lit up like the Hollywood Boardwalk. The world has that silver glamour sparkle from the black and white forties' films and it's beautiful.

We make it to the Thunderbird and it happens again.

Jamie turns to stone. It's like he just got a big smack on the lips from Medusa. His eyes are hot glass shards that slice the night and me. I watched his nose twitch as if his sense of smell could thrust past the sting of expectant lightning, thunder, the icy kiss of the rain in our noses.

"Jamie?"

"Get in the car," he snapped. It's like a slap in my face. My skin stings.

"Why? What's wrong?" I look around, trying to spot what he's looking at. My heart in my throat chokes me with drumming thrumming blood. I can't swallow my hammer snare pulse and put it back into my chest. I'm soaked and don't care. My bones are legions of maggots. Something's out there – I can taste it.

"Get in the car, Kate!"

He yells at me, and I finally see them

There are three of them. My chest burns. They're only kids, like me, like Jamie, none of them older than nineteen if that, but I hate them. It hurts how much I hate those kids. I've never seen them before but there they are like a bad dream, back from the dead, back in black, the bad guys in some old western film with Clint Eastwood and a man in black, Hell's own skeleton crew, teen vamps with blood red eyes but I only think they're red because these freaks coming up on us are too nebulously evil to be classified as bloodsuckers. They move like zombies, like sleepwalkers, and when I realize I can't look away from them I remember a snatch of phrase from the Goblin Market.

We must not look on goblin men....

A sob catches in my throat. The blood fear is back, back in my mouth, biting the tip of my tongue. The voice in my head – the voice of sanity, Jamie's voice, my mother's voice – is saying, "Run, run, run!"

"Who are they?" I manage to whisper.

"Get in the car, come on," Jamie says. The knife edge voice is paralyzing me. His fear shrouds those kids like poisonous gas. I think – or am I imagining it? – that I can see their teeth gleaming and their eyes black as marbles in the sockets, even though it's pouring rain and they're far enough away that I can't see what color their hair is or whether they're guys or girls. All I can think is, "West Side Story, West Side Story, it's coming, it's coming, oh no...." And those kids were walking toward us and I just can't move, I can't, can't even breathe, the world swimming in front of my eyes. I'm going to faint. The Jaws music pounds in my brain.

"Oh, hell, Jamie...." I whispered, and he suddenly grabs me by the back of the neck, startling me out of my fear-paralysis and he shoves me into the car, I don't know how he got to me like that, but I'm in the T-bird and he hood slides just like Bo Duke across the wet metal hood and jumped into the driver's seat. His hands fumble the keys.

"Shit, shit, shit!" He mutters. "Shit!"

"Jamie!"

They're not even twenty feet away, those monster kids. Rain had plastered my hair to my head, dripped off my glasses, soaking my clothes. I was shaking wet. And I can see those kids coming. For a second, the world is green and hot and sickly. My brain feels like a Stephen King novel. My heart is a witch doctor's drum, pounding up fear and horror and the knowledge that suddenly slugs me in the face that I very well could die out here, tonight, with Jamie.

"Roll up the windows!" Jamie yelps. His fear galvanizes me.

My hands were so slick at first that they just slip off the rollers for the windows, but I managed to get a grip and shove the windows up finally. Right then, the engine roared to life. It wrenches a scream out of me and I jumped a mile in the air, whacking my head on the roof of the car. Not wearing a seatbelt, I realize absently. With a cry of near fear and savage exultation, like Tarzan in the books or John Bender in the Breakfast Club, Jamie revved the engine so it roared like a dragon and we screeched away into the rainy night.

The kids in black watched us drive away.

"Who were those guys?" I demanded.

"Don't worry about it."

"What? No, they tried to kill us!" I felt sure that if we hadn't moved, we both would've been deader than dead. I don't know how I knew it, but those "kids" wanted to do us real damage.

"Don't be dramatic," he says.

I stared at him incredulously as the lights burn through the car windows and light up his profile like a forest fire. Dramatic? I was being dramatic? I was going to kill him! Those guys... those kids were like something out of a Dean Koontz novel. Like in the Taking. Demons. Devils. There was just something that was so totally, absolutely wrong about the whole group. Jeez. Just thinking about it, about them, turned my skin to ice and my heart into a drum. My fingertips tingled as if they were waking up after being asleep for a long time. As soon as I noticed it, my chest tightened.

By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.

Shakespeare, Macbeth.

Freaky.

In most situations like these – not being stalked by psychotic, supernatural entities dressed up to look like pseudo-goth teenagers, but just situations where I wanted to curl up in a ball and hide under a rock for the rest of my life so no one would ever be able to find me, no matter how far down the rabbit hole they went – these situations made me want to hug Jamie. There's just something so comforting about hugging a strong guy, listening to his heart so that you know he's right there with you, and he's warm and you feel so safe.

It's not romantic, it's not sexual. It's only like that if you make it. All it is, is the knowledge that here is someone you trust, someone strong enough to protect you, strong enough to let you fight for yourself first until you really need this champion. Strong enough to let you win the fight but loving enough that you can go to them when the weakness hits your knees and the butterflies fly back into your stomach and you can't stand up anymore and you'll fall if they don't catch you. And your skin is ice and your heart is cold and tears are hot in your eyes and all you need is one person to hold onto you until you can pull yourself back together again. Sometimes you get it from a huge group of girls, but you normally get it from a single guy or two. Jamie does that for me usually.

But how could I hug him, find comfort from him, when he said all that stuff about being dramatic? Why would he just shove my panic into the dirt like that?

Then it hit me like a sledgehammer on crack. He's hiding something from me, something big. He'd never do something like this to me, knowing the way I am, knowing how I hang on him because there really is no one else. Jamie's not a jerk, whatever he might've done in the last ten hours, and he would never make me cry on purpose. He has something to hide.

Something huge.

"Who are they?" I demanded. I try to put some kind of authority in my voice, pushing at him with my mind, thinking hard at him to just give up and surrender the information. Somehow, despite the obvious suddenness of the situation, I knew instinctively that there was something I needed to know about this whole thing. Not sure, but I think it has something to do with me.

"Kate," he growls, teeth clenched. I'm reminded of Forty-Seven from the movie Hitman. "Drop it. Just drop the whole thing, okay?"

"Tell me," I say. "It's important, I know it." Resentful of the fact that in order to get him to level with me about something incredibly dangerous to us both I had to both level with him and bug him until it drove him crazier than an ADHD kid on speed, I added, "Do you know them?" My voice was like slivers of ice in my throat. I chafed my hands when the frigid fingers began to shiver and shake. "Is that it? Those were the people you saw today, aren't they? What is going on?"

Keeping my eyes riveted on him, I saw his hands white and slick with rain on the steering wheel and I realize we haven't turned the heater on though we're both turning into Popsicles. His hands shook. He wanted a cigarette bad, I could tell. It was his security blanket of sorts. There are blue diamond points in his eyes. I was close to that push pin skull panic again when I see his eyes.

"Kate-"

He's going to blow me off. No way.

"Jamie," I say, trying to shove every ounce of earnestness into my voice. "Tell me."

The rain skitter-skated on the windshield. The electric lights lit up the leather interior of the purring Thunderbird, lit up the deep worry lines on Jamie's forehead. The clock on the radio had acid green numbers that seared my night-adjusted eyes. Barely eleven pm. I waited for Jamie to speak. Bongo drums beat a Rasta rhythm in my chest. Blood fear poisoned my mouth, and copper stench filled my nose.

"I can't," he says finally.

I cross my arms across my chest, hoping he hasn't noticed the way my tank top clung like silk to my wet body, showing more of my breasts than I'd expected. Glaring, I settled in to fight him to the end. I won't let him out of this. I have to know.

"If I do, then things will get really bad. Okay? Just... okay, look, just trust me, okay? You're my best friend and I don't want you to get into any kind of trouble. Any trouble. Okay?"

"You say 'okay' a lot, ya know that?" I jibed him. My lips were numb from cold rain and cold conversation. My eyes glitter, I can feel the crystal prickles in my eye sockets.

"Kate!" He yelled, startling loud in the confines of his car.

I know it's serious now. He would never yell at me like that just for making a joke unless we were in some kind of trouble. But if we were in trouble, why wouldn't he tell me? I knew, though, that it was way, way serious, whatever trouble was coming. So I nodded. I have never had a reason to question Jamie ever, until tonight. Never, ever. So what was I supposed to do? Should I trust that he knows what's best in a really bizarre situation that I know absolutely nothing about? He's been my best friend for thirteen years. Or do I kick his ass for holding out on me?

Sigh. Choice made.

"If you're in real trouble, I deserve to know," I say, trying to keep my voice gentle.

He blows out a smoker's breath, a nervous habit when things get tense. He's in real, real, real trouble then. Like gangster trouble. Mob trouble. Maybe murder or CIA trouble. Taxes? It took down Al Capone, after all.

Supernatural trouble? I mean, I'll be the first to admit that I have contingency plans in case zombies invade. So does my mom. We're not like, super firm devout believers in monsters or anything, but we live less than a day's drive from Mexico and my mother refuses to take us in case a chupacabra decides we look tasty. Once she married my dad and moved out of her parents' house, she refused to visit her grandparents up in New Jersey because she'd heard on television of a woman and her son being attack by the Jersey Devil.

So was I willing to consider some weird demonic angelic thingy going on? Yes. At least half-heartedly.

"I'll tell you," he says, and I snap my attention back to our conversation, "when we get to my place."

Well, I would have to be satisfied with that. I know why he wanted to wait for a bit before we talk. He needs to figure out all what he's going to say, or whether to really say anything at all. Sometimes, he could be super sneaky, like a baby trying to put something sharp and pointy in its mouth. But I am not going to let this go. Never. No way. Not until the whole thing went away and our lives could go back to normal. Whatever normal was.

We sat in silence in the car as the stale orange lights, like the mango juice they serve at zoo camp – pale, washed-out and old looking, and tasting strongly of rancid hot dogs – burned like torches in the darkness of the city. Love the light pollution laws usually, put in place for the observatory people to stargaze. Not tonight. Things are a bit too freaky to be in a really dark city right now.

The rain chimes on the windows, diamond bright under the oncoming headlight beams, and the acid clock numbers blink in the interior darkness surrounding and muffling us both in the car.

After awhile of sitting in long, dimly and intermittently lit shadows and uncomfortable silence, Jamie flicked on the radio. Immediately "Lola" by the oldies group the Kinks comes on. I can't help but laugh a little. It's always a good day when you can listen to a song about a guy who accidentally picks up a chick named Lola at a bar, dances with her, hits on her, and then realizes she's a dude.

"That's perfect," I say.

"Cute, that's cute," Jamie says, and his Frank Sinatra voice is back, tickling my neck. Things are nowhere near as bad as they could be, then.

He could still laugh.

[1]I don't give a rat's butt whether or not Michael Jackson bleached his skin & had 40 million nose jobs & looked like a woman & molested kids. I mean I care if he molested kids because that's just sick but I still like his music. His early music when he was still "black." His early music like Billie Jean & Thriller & Black or White, is awesome & I grabbed it off of the internet for free so he didn't make a dime off my contributions while he was alive and he's dead now.