2
Sunset stains the sky lavender and orange by the time I crawl onto the parking lot that passes for the coastal highway. The slow-and-go affords me ample time to admire the restless gray bay and San Francisco’s enchanted spires on the opposite shore.
I take the westbound off-ramp at University Avenue and chauffeur Brand to Emeryville, an urban blight bordering Berkeley where he tells me his ex-girlfriend lives.
“Turn left,” he says. “At the next corner, turn right. At the second light, hang a left. Here we are.”
The ex-girlfriend rents the ground-floor unit of a shabby little town house slapped together decades ago of dingy stucco. Weeds thrusting through cracked concrete serve as her front yard. A graffiti artist has accomplished with cans of spray paint what government subsidies never could: given the town house some character. Lurid obscenities splatter the walls and weird, leering faces. A monstrous red eyeball weeps tears of blood, the sort of apocalyptic vision only a potent hallucinogen can inspire.
I’m jarred by the sight of rusty security grilles barring up every window and door. People in Buckeye Heights have boarded up the windows and doors of foreclosed houses but they haven’t barred up everything against the crowbar of a thief. Not like this.
The sight sobers me, reminding me I’m entering another world.
The world of Berkeley.
Berkeley, home of the original campus of the mighty University of California. Berkeley of nouvelle cuisine and Berkeley of research leading to the atom bomb. Berkeley of genetic engineering and Berkeley of needle exchanges. Berkeley of free speech and Berkeley of political correctness. Berkeley of the Tree People and Berkeley of Students Against Hippies Living In Trees.
Berkeley, a world of wonders, of enigmas.
I can feel it thrumming all around me: Magic. Black, White, and Every-Color-Of-The-Rainbow Magic.
I pull Hi-Ho Silver over to the curb in a bus zone, yank the parking brake, and wearily climb out.
Brand climbs out, too. He takes his backpack from the backseat, strides around the Mustang, and drops the pack with a thud on the street. He wraps his arms around me in more than a friendly way, grasping me in a great big bear hug, lifting me clear off my feet.
“Easy, easy. You’ll squeeze the life out of me.”
He’s hard beneath the jeans. His power laps at my skin, greedy and insinuating. That’s not sharing power, that’s a power grab. A sorcerer’s grope. A rogue’s game.
He sets me down on my feet and I shove him away, smacking the palm of my hand against his chest. He staggers back, catching his boot heel on the curb, and sprawls with a grunt on the grimy bus bench.
Like I said, he ought to know from the start.
I expect his frown and a curse or two, but he only grins and hoists himself to his feet. “You got a number?”
“A number?”
“Yeah, you know that thing you need to call someone.”
I do have a number. I’ve got a brand-new cell phone with a brand-new number I’ve given nobody but one person and one person only: Carla, the realtor selling my mother’s house. I’ve disconnected my old landline, left no forwarding number.
Why? Because I don’t want Daniel calling me. I don’t want Daniel finding me. I don’t want Daniel tempting me to renege on a decision that’s supposed to be final. Is final. I know how tempting Daniel can be when he puts his mind to it.
And Brand?
“You didn’t just get out of prison or anything like that?”
“We’ll talk over lunch. I’m buying. I owe you big-time.”
Fascinating, how a man in cowboy boots refuses to answer a simple question. My number? I’m guessing he’s one of those men who loses women’s numbers as a matter of habit.
Against my better judgment, I give him mine.
He fishes a little black notebook out of his back jeans pocket and a stub of a pencil, and writes my number down. “Let’s get together, dear Abby. You’ve got magic. I could show you a real good time.”
“We’ll talk,” I say, “on the phone.”
“Brand? Oh my God, Brand?” a woman calls out in the rasp of a three-pack-a-day smoker.
The rasp’s owner bursts out of the town house, her welcoming smile swiftly rearranging itself into a dangerous frown. She stands over six feet tall with the muscular build of a gal who hauls UPS packages for a living. A Valkyrie in ripped jeans. I can see how she and Brand made a stormy physical match, if not a magical one.
She clutches, of all things, the knitted arm of a man’s sweater, the rest of the garment trailing beside her. The sweater looks to be nearly finished. A welcome-back gift for Brand? She also clutches a ball of homely gray yarn and a pair of lethal-looking steel knitting needles.
A dazed look films her eyes, as if Brand’s voice compelled her out the door before she had the presence of mind to set her knitting down.
She looks at him, at me, at him.
“Who the fuck is she?”
“Hi, there.” I wave. “Pleased to meet you, too.”
“Abby, this is Barb,” Brand says.
“Brand and Barb. Sweet. You two sound like a nineteen-forties horse opera in black and white. Starring John Wayne, say, and Barbara Stanwyck.”
They both look at me–he amused, she outraged–and say in unison just like a longtime couple would, “What?”
“Free-range rancher wants to roam around. Lady rancher wants to fence him in.”
Brand laughs, his easy merriment a little strained. “You see, Barb? Abby’s cool. She gave me a ride all the way from Sacramento.”
“Oh, I see. I see, all right.” Barb fixes her furious eyes on him as if she could bend him to her will. He stands where he stands, unmoving. Nope, she’s got no power. No power over him, anyway.
She steps between us and swivels to face me, looming over me. She’s got a good five inches on me, and I have to look up. I hate having to look up at lunatics.
“Brand is staying with me.” Gripping the knitting needles in her fist, she viciously jabs the tips against my breastbone, hard.
Oh, man! Is she trying to kill me? With knitting needles? The tips hurt enough to have punctured my skin, pierced flesh, dented bone. I jump back and glance down, expecting wounds and blood, but glimpse only a pair of angry red spots above the scoop neck of my tank top.
“Hey, Barb, you know? People get arrested for less.”
“Hey, Abby, you get it? Brand. Is staying. With me.”
I turn to him. “Is everyone so friendly in Emeryville?”
“Cut it out, Barb,” Brand snaps.
“Don’t give her any ideas.” My hand whips out and seizes the needles and pulses a volt of my power up the steel. A friendly electrical shock, that’s what Barb needs.
“Ow, fuck!” She flinches and shakes her hand, then stares at me, wide-eyed. I’m one of Them. One of the Weird Ones. Don’t ask me why, but I don’t think she likes me. “Why don’t you hit the road, you freaky slut.”
Brand grins, a lot less comradely. “I’ll catch you later, Abby. You should go.”
“Later,” I say as they stand in the street, glaring daggers at each other. A shining example of how love and hate tangle with passion, whereas indifference means the affair is truly over.
I climb into Hi-Ho Silver, turn the ignition. I don’t make a habit of grappling strange men in front of their jealous ex-girlfriends. I’ve got too much respect and sympathy for women. Even a psychopath like Barb.
I drive away from Emeryville, wondering whether I will catch Brand later. I kind of want to, even though he’s a cad. He’s got magic, oh yeah.
I should catch Brand later only after he’s moved to a place of his own. I want to meet up with Barb’s knitting needles a second time like I want an ice pick plunged in my chest.
And what about him staying with her? Isn’t that a little cruel when she so clearly hopes for a reconciliation and he so clearly doesn’t? Do I really want to connect with this user?
Brand plays a lot of games. Games I’m not ready to play. I’m on a rebound of my own devising after leaving Daniel.
First things first. Land the job, line up a paycheck. Register for school, start the class. Never forget what my mother told me on her deathbed. My survival depends on learning to master my power. Survival against the Horde when they finally come looking for me.
I feel feverish, my cheeks and my forehead burning. When I glance in the rearview mirror, my face is the color of a boiled lobster. Brand’s great big bear hug left little to wonder about and much to fantasize.
But, wait, wait. This isn’t me, Abby Teller. I’m not the feverish, fantasizing type. Am I?
No way. Not in a million, billion years.
So why did I pull over to the shoulder and slam on the brakes? Why spill my life story inside of five minutes? What did our clasped hands do? Why didn’t I mind he was being disingenuous, lying, jerking me around? And why do I feel so feverish?
What has Brand done to me?
You see? I set one foot outside of Buckeye Heights, and a foxy sorcerer is trying to enchant me.
Berkeley is going to be a blast.
********
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