Elijah stomped the brakes again and stalled the car to keep from hitting a gorilla. The remnants of the parade flowed around them, and Elijah caught scraps of strangers’ thoughts that he didn’t want and couldn’t use: a recipe for guacamole, the current score of the Rockies–Red Sox game. He put the car in gear, restarted it, and touched his fingers to his aching head. “Your dad could be number one, but he doesn’t want to attract too much attention. People would blackmail him, kidnap him, kill him. And you. He’s been hiding in plain sight.”
In plain sight of everyone including Holly. She took it as a personal slap in the face, and her anger stirred. Then she cocked her head at Elijah. “What about your mom?”
They passed under the single traffic light and reached the edge of town—a good thing, because Elijah was growing impatient with pedestrians wandering into the path of the car. “My mom doesn’t have power,” he said, but come to think of it, he wasn’t so sure. This was one of the things he’d been trying to puzzle through, and Holly’s thoughts kept interrupting him.
Holly’s flamboyant dad was the more obvious trickster. Yet Elijah’s mom was the head dealer at the casino. The ability to read minds would come in handy for a job like that. And she’d conveniently taken a vacation just when his Mentafixol was cut off. She hadn’t been around for the past few days, so he couldn’t read her mind and discover all her secrets.
“Am I getting this wrong?” Holly’s voice interrupted his logic again. “You’re not mad at your mom.”
“My dad’s dead,” he said. “It’s always been just me and her. I guess she did what she had to do.”
“My God, Elijah, we’re not saying she worked late at the casino some nights. We’re saying she took your power away from you for seven years. She drugged you and told you that you were mentally ill. She might as well have tied you up in the basement. Get mad! Wake the hell up!”
She shoved his shoulder—not with her hand but with her mind—hard enough that he momentarily lost his grip on the steering wheel, and the Pontiac veered to the center of the road. He stomped the brake. The car screeched to a stop. The engine was dead.
As red dust billowed around them, he glared at her, surprising himself with the force of his anger. “Don’t. Do. That!” he shouted.
She stared wide-eyed at him, frightened at how dangerous he looked. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“Then you have to learn to control it!”
“Me!” she squealed, her fear turning back to anger. “You’ve been tromping through my mind twenty-four/seven!”
Turning away from her, he took a calming breath through his nose and started the engine again. “I saw an overlook on the drive in. Let’s stop there and we’ll talk.”
That meant they would have to drive through the tunnel. Holly closed her eyes, but the warmth of the sun cut off sharply. Her skin chilled, and the noise of the motor echoed weirdly around them. She sensed the whole weight of the mountain on top of her.
Feeling everything she felt, Elijah gripped the steering wheel and held his breath until they emerged into the sunlight on the other side of the mountain. The darkness of her thoughts didn’t relent. He found himself racing to the scenic overlook. He pulled into the empty parking lot, stopped the car with a jerk, snagged the box of Mentafixol, and leaped out, away from her, out of her thoughts. Only then did he breathe a sigh of relief.
He led the way up a path between red boulders. Beyond a row of weathered wooden picnic tables, the ground ended in a cliff. He stood as near the edge as he dared and looked way over into the canyon surrounded on all sides by rugged mountains. He couldn’t see the bottom.
Darkness approached him from behind. He turned to watch Holly follow in his steps up the path, beautiful as ever, a faraway look in her eyes the only sign that her world as she knew it had ended. She seated herself on a boulder with her long legs folded gracefully to one side, ankles crossed, very close to the edge of the cliff.
He backed away and seated himself about fifteen feet from her, just out of range of her thoughts.
And suddenly he felt like himself again. Her anger lifted from his shoulders. She was just his beautiful friend, in a world of trouble. He placed the box of Mentafixol on the rock beside him—the land side, where it was safer, not the cliff side, where he might accidentally kick it into the abyss. Not yet.
“It could still be a joint hallucination,” he called to her.
“They would have come after us,” Holly said. “If we really had MAD and we were dangerous when we ran out of Mentafixol, they would have kept a closer eye on us. They would have known you were headed here to get some. They would have called the police to lie in wait for us and make sure we got drugged up. You haven’t heard the thoughts of anyone lying in wait for us, have you?”
“No, but you’re saying two different things. If the police were here, we would be insane. If I heard their thoughts, I wouldn’t be insane.”
“You’re not,” she said. “Because of Kaylee. That’s what convinced me. She’s been up here to oversee the Mentafixol as part of her security job with the casino. That’s why my parents sent me to live with her, too. I thought I’d gained my freedom, but they were still watching me. It all comes back to the casino.”
“So, what are we saying?” He opened the box and took out one of four plastic bottles. He peeled the lid off the bottle and tipped the contents into his hand. Golden pills poured out and spilled over each other. He grabbed a handful and threw them full force off the cliff. They caught the setting sunlight as they fell, each one a potential shining moment of his high school and college years and Holly’s, thrown away under the heavy influence of a drug and their parents and the machinations of some mysterious power struggle at the casino that they didn’t understand. He watched the glinting pills bounce against the rocks and fall until they disappeared into the canyon below.
He turned back to her. “Are we ready to get rid of all of these? Are we sure?”
“I don’t want to live this way.” The bitterness in her voice surprised him, and now he wondered what she’d been thinking in the two minutes he’d sat beyond range of her. He’d stayed in the kitchen too long during a TV commercial break, and now he’d missed a major plot point in the show. He rose and shifted closer to her again, into her thoughts.
With her mind she lifted the remaining three bottles out of the box. Even after her little displays over the past few hours, Elijah was amazed at the bottles shedding their tops in concert and pouring forth their pills of their own accord. Hundreds of golden pills united in a single stream and raced toward Holly’s head, where they formed a moving, shining halo over her hair.
“But you know what?” she said. “Even if this were all an illusion, I don’t think I could go back.” She would rather die than go back, she thought as she leaned over the edge and looked down into the gorge, the halo of pills still shimmering above her.
Elijah wasn’t sure he was reading her right. He moved even closer to her, trying to decipher her racing thoughts into one coherent line. She didn’t just mean she couldn’t go back to taking Mentafixol. She couldn’t go back to Vegas. Her parents had lied to her. Her friendship with Kaylee was a farce. The home she’d known was gone.
She focused on the chasm in front of them. With her mind she measured the distance to the bottom. Calculated her weight—Elijah sensed that she held herself in her own hand, like measuring the heft of a rock before she threw it.
“Don’t,” he murmured. He’d seen her manipulate small pills and bottles and a box in midair. That didn’t mean she was strong enough yet to levitate her own body.
She stood.
“Holly, don’t,” he said.
She moved to the edge.
“Don’t!”
One second she was there, pointing her toes as if readying herself for her dismount from some Olympic gymnastics event, and then she stepped out, and then she was gone.
“Holly!”
His voice echoed around the rocks. He didn’t even realize he’d moved, but gradually he understood he must have rushed forward and tried to grab her in that last moment. His belly was hot on a sun-washed boulder. His arms stung from scrapes against the rocks. He still reached out for her, grasping at any chance he could still save her—never mind how he would avoid going over the cliff with her. She was gone. He couldn’t even see her in the deep, dry chasm. Oh, God, she couldn’t be gone?
“Holly!” he shouted once more. Then he held his breath, wishing his God damned heart would stop beating in his ears so he could listen for her. He didn’t hear her scream or cry or thud below. She’d simply vanished.
Lithe wisps of trees hung from the walls of the cliff. He imagined her catching a branch as she went down, saving herself. He could cling to hope. Even if she was still alive, she was too far away for him to read her mind. But he could run to Shane’s car and drive around the lip of the canyon until he found a road downward. He could make his way back to the place where she must have landed. He would call the police or whatever they had up here in the wilderness—Mounties—to help him.
As he pulled back to run for the phone in his car, he realized just how precarious his position was. To follow the trajectory of her fall, he’d scrabbled way out on a precipice and down the gentle slope it made before its sheer drop. He was clinging to the cliff face, and one false move would send him plunging after her. She would never get help then, if she was still alive to need it. He clung tighter to the rocks under his hands, sliding carefully backward.
Holly hovered inches above the sandy bottom of the canyon. Each grain of sand was a different color—red, orange, pink, white, yellow, even green and blue and purple—dislodged in the last million years from different strata in the vast mountains. The grains gleamed like jewels in the evening sun. A black ant clambered among them, oblivious to their beauty, headed somewhere important.
And so Holly was glad she’d stopped herself at the last moment from hitting the canyon floor. Her parents had betrayed her, her best friend Kaylee had betrayed her, she’d been lied to and deprived of her real life for the past seven years. But here was this ant, navigating his own mountains on a gorgeous summer day, the longest day of the year. The world went on without Holly, and when she stepped outside her own personal hell and looked around, she knew the world was worth staying for, even if she was alone.
She took a cleansing breath and assumed a tree position she’d learned in the college yoga class she’d signed up for on her own, to calm herself before the stress of the ballet class her mom insisted on. She placed her hands to her heart’s center, one leg folded up, the other pointed down. Even as she hovered in midair, she could just brush the surface of the sand with the toe of her shoe. She unfurled her hair in a semicircle around her head.
She rose slowly through the canyon as if riding in a glass elevator, enjoying the view. The mountain changed from white to purple to pink as she lifted herself. The foliage clinging desperately to the rock walls changed species with the elevation. An eagle soared next to her, perhaps alarmed or confused by her presence but more likely going about her own business of being an eagle. That too was worth living for.
And then she saw Elijah peering anxiously over the edge of the canyon where she’d jumped. His fingers were white with pressure on the red rocks.
Her heart went out to him. “Oh, God, Elijah, I’m sorry.” She landed next to him on the tilted rock, grabbed his hand, and pulled him back from the edge to safety with her, onto the boulders where they’d sat before. “I didn’t even think about how it would look to you. I was thinking about myself.”
He sat with his head in his hands, breathing hard. The light brown waves of his hair caught the sunlight and split it into a million colors, like the grains of sand on the canyon floor.
“Hey.” She reached over and put her hand on his shoulder.
Finally he jerked his head up. His face was stark white. “I called to you!” A tear escaped the corner of his eye. He brushed it away angrily.
“I’m sorry, really. I didn’t hear you.”
He put his hands on his knees as if he still needed support. He took a long, shuddering breath. “I can’t believe you’d scare me like that after everything we’ve been through together.” A cool breeze, whispering of evening, blew a wavy lock of hair across his forehead.
And in that moment, she realized he valued her as much as she valued him. He’d never come out and said it. His biggest show of friendship had been to kidnap her, which, though she knew he’d meant well, was kind of twisted. He could read her mind. He sensed how far she’d fallen for him. But she’d assumed her crush was one-sided. He must have forgotten that she couldn’t sense whether he felt the same way about her.
“Of course I do!” he exclaimed. “Are you blind?”
“Not anymore.” She surrounded him with her power and hugged him gently all over. When he sighed appreciatively, she increased the pressure of the massage and draped her arm around his shoulders, too.
He sniffled. “I feel ill.”
“You know what? I’ve had candy, but you haven’t had anything to eat for a whole day, have you?”
He shrugged.
“Eat the rest of the seafoam. And then— Can you drive? We’ll have dinner at that restaurant next to the hotel.” She squeezed him with her arm and her power.
He turned to look at her. Now his pupils dilated. His green eyes went black, and he bit his lip. She hadn’t imagined this at Glitterati. She wasn’t imagining it now.