She almost turned and flew back. But maybe the birds were in recess somewhere nearby. “Hello?” Patricia said into the darkness.
“Hell,” a voice said back, “o.”
Patricia had been standing planted in a patch of ground, but at the sound of that voice she jumped, and rose four feet in the air because she still weighed nothing. She remembered at last how to come back down to earth.
“Hello?” Patricia said again. “Who’s there?”
“You called out,” said the voice. “I answered.”
This time, Patricia could tell somehow that the voice was coming from the Tree itself. Like there was a presence there, at the center of its big trunk. There wasn’t a face or anything, just a feeling that something was watching her.
“Thank you,” Patricia said. She was getting cold, after all, in her panda pajamas. She was barefoot outdoors in the autumn night, even though this wasn’t her body.
“I have not spoken to a living person,” the Tree said, forming the words syllable by syllable, “in many seasons. You were distressed. What is wrong?” Its voice sounded like the wind blowing through an old bellows, or the lowest note playing on a big wooden recorder.
Now Patricia felt embarrassed, because suddenly her problems felt tiny and selfish, when she placed them in front of such a huge and ancient presence. “I feel like a fake witch,” she said. “I can’t do anything. At all. My friend Laurence can build supercomputers and time machines and ray guns. He can make cool things happen any time he wants. I can’t make anything cool happen.”
“Something cool,” the Tree said in a gust of vowels and a clatter of consonants, “is happening. Right now.”
“Yes,” Patricia said, ashamed again. “Yes! Definitely! This is great. Really. But this just happened on its own. I can’t make anything happen when I want it to.”
“Your friend would control nature,” said the Tree, rustling through each syllable one by one. “A witch must serve nature.”
“But,” Patricia said, thinking this through. “That’s not fair. If nature serves Laurence, and I serve nature, then it’s like I’m serving Laurence. I like Laurence, I guess, but I don’t want to be his servant.”
“Control,” the Tree said, “is an illusion.”
“Okay,” Patricia said. “So I guess I really am a witch. Right? I mean, you called me a witch just now. Plus I left my body, that counts for something. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. I know it must be hard work being a tree. Especially a Parliamentary Tree.”
“I am many trees,” the Tree said. “And many other things besides. Goodbye.”
The journey back to Patricia’s house went much faster than the outward trip, perhaps because she was much sleepier. She passed through the ceiling of her bedroom and into her body — which was twisted with horrible stomach pain, because she had eaten enough hot peppers for a hundred thousand curries.
“Aaaaaaaaa!” Patricia shouted, sitting up and clutching her stomach. “Bathroom break! Bathroom break! I need a bathroom break NOW!!!!”
ON MONDAY, SHE sat across from Laurence at lunch at the far end of one of the long tables, next to the slop cans, where the kids who had no clique of their own were stuck.
“Can you keep a secret?” she asked him.
“Sure,” Laurence said without hesitating. He was poking holes in his gray, clammy hamburger with a knife. “You already know all of my secrets.”
“Great.” Patricia lowered her voice and covered her mouth. “So listen. You probably won’t even believe any of this. I know it’s going to sound crazy. But I have to tell someone. You’re the only one I can tell.” She told the whole story, as best she could.
6
EVERY TIME LAURENCE showed Patricia another one of his inventions, he felt a crick in his neck. Sort of a charley horse, that only happened when he pulled an experimental device out of his knapsack. He wondered about this for days until he realized: He was instinctively flinching away from Patricia and lifting one shoulder. Braced for her to call him a creep.
“Here’s something I’ve been working on,” he would start to say — and then his neck would spasm. Even when he realized he was doing it, he couldn’t stop. Like part of him always flashed back to his sixth-grade Show-and-Tell disaster, the Laserscoop.
But if anything, Patricia just seemed endlessly curious. Even when he showed her the remote-controlled cyborg cockroach kit he’d ordered from the internet, one day after school. “Here’s where you connect it to the roach’s central nervous system, so it will obey all of your fiendish commands,” Laurence said, pointing at the little wires on the tiny metal wedge, fresh out of the box. A truck belched underneath the pedestrian overpass they were sitting on, so neither of them could talk until it had passed.
“Roach-borg.” Patricia looked at the roach-saddle in Laurence’s palm. “That is nuts.” She started to do a Borg voice from Star Trek: “Doritos are irrelevant.”
“So you’re not grossed out?” Laurence put it back in the box it came in, and the box back in the knapsack. He looked at her: still kind of giggling, though with a nervy edge to it. A car pulled a boat down the road. Probably the last chance for sailing this year.
Patricia considered this. “Sure, it’s kind of yuck. But not as bad as when we dissected a cow brain in Biology class. I just don’t feel sorry for a roach.” Her legs kicked against the metal underside of the bridge, through the slats in the railing. Right now, as far as Laurence’s parents knew, he and Patricia were halfway up the Crystal Lake Trail.
They both just watched the cars for a moment. Patricia had taken to rolling up the sleeves of her uniform cardigan all the time, so people could tell at a glance that she wasn’t cutting herself — she really wasn’t, okay?
“Just remember,” Patricia said in a suddenly grown-up voice, “control is an illusion.” He could see the unscathed veins in her bare forearm. He realized she was quoting the magic voice she’d talked to. “And yet,” she went on, “I’m still jealous of your toys. You just never give up. You keep on making stuff. And whenever you show off something new to me, you have this look of joy on your face.”
“Joy?” Laurence thought he had misheard for a moment. “I’m not joyful, I’m pissed off, all the time. I’m a misanthrope.” That was his new favorite word, and he had been waiting to use it in a sentence for a while.
She shrugged. “Well, you look joyful. You get all excited. I envy that.”
Laurence wondered if he could possibly cringe and be joyful at the same time. He rubbed his sore neck, first with one hand, then with both.
For some reason, Laurence believed Patricia’s story about talking to some birds and having an out-of-body experience. He was still kind of a gullible person, which had made him easy to prank at summer camp — but also, he rebelled at the idea of starting to close off possibilities in the world. If Patricia, who was sort of his friend, believed this stuff, then he wanted to support her. Also, she was suffering for her “witchcraft” and it would offend some basic sense of fairness for Laurence to think she was being punished for nothing. And really, was her story any crazier than other stuff, like the way Laurence’s body seemed to be rolling out new, totally unrequested features with alarming speed? Not really.
Plus Patricia had become pretty much the only person Laurence could talk to at school. Even the other so-called geeks at Canterbury Academy were too chickenshit to hang with Laurence, especially after he’d managed to get himself banned from the school’s computer lab (he wasn’t trying to hack anything, just make some improvements) and the school workshop (he was doing a carefully controlled flamethrower experiment). She was the only one he could laugh with about the Saarinian Program’s weird test questions (“Faith is to religion as love is to ____”), and he liked how she people-watched in the cafeteria, how her gaze turned Casey Hamilton’s student-council campaign into an amusing pageant taking place on the outskirts of fairytown.