“Oh my,” she said, and fell, not before Jemma became aware that her femurs had fractured spontaneously under her own weight. She bounced down the stairs, oofing and screaming and coughing, and lay still in the middle of the restaurant set.
Brava! said Dolores. Brava! Jemma hardly heard her. She stood up, dumping Kidney out of her lap, stepped back from the balcony, and ran down the ramp. People screamed — their emotions already worked up by the elaborate show — and backed against the balcony as she streaked by, and then away from it as she hurried through the lobby and ran up on the stage. The diners fled their tables as Jemma stepped up next to Dr. Sashay and assaulted her with fire, calling up reserves that seemed equal to what had harrowed the hospital to burn at the rapidly spreading blackness in her. But her rage and her fire only seemed to make it worse — she could tell that was how it looked, though she couldn’t stop herself from trying and trying to win. Whole hospitals’ worth of fire, enough to fill the whole place, the sum of the whole harrowing and again — she called and it came, and Dr. Sashay screamed, lifted by the conflagration, not saying words, though people would swear later they heard her say, “Stop, stop, please stop,” until she was just an ashen image of herself that shattered against the stage when Jemma finally released her.
66
Every year the Fourth of July in Severna Forest began with a semi-official joyride; in the minutes just after dawn wild teenagers would fly over the hills in borrowed convertibles, honking their horns incessantly, hooting and shouting in a display of patriotic enthusiasm flavored with mischief and the fading drunk of the previous night’s long party. Jemma was standing at her window when they came. The car, small and black, stopped in front of the house. A girl with long brown hair stood unsteadily in the back seat, lifted an air horn, and blasted it at every house in range, handling the can like a gun. She spun it over her finger and slipped it back into her pocket, then, facing Jemma but not seeing her, lifted up her shirt and shouted something unintelligible. When the car leapt away again she fell back, so her body lay across the giant paper flag that was taped over the trunk, and her shining hair spilled down to lay against the shining chrome bumper. Jemma watched her face, upside down and laughing, disappear over the crest of the hill.
She’d been waiting for the horn. Like dawn on Christmas, it released her from parent-enforced stasis and freed her to run around the house proclaiming the holiday. She ran away from the window, out her door and down the hall to her brother’s room. Calvin was sleeping through the racket, curled up in his boat-shaped bed, entwined with Al, his stuffed snake. Five feet long and thick as a bolster, the snake was lime-colored, with big sad blue eyes and a pink tongue that had become frayed over the years along its edges. Jemma watched her brother sleeping for a few moments. His face was nestled against the snake’s face, and the pressure of his breath made Al’s tongue flicker and look as if it was tasting the air. Jemma was afraid of the snake; it seemed liable to come alive at any second and strike at her, but at the same time she wished that Joe or Alice or Emily or Ra-Ra the Conqueror, some of the other residents of her bed, could wrap around her and hug back like Al did.
“Wake up,” she said, tugging on the snake’s tail, the movement transmitting through all his coils so his face moved up and down against Calvin’s cheek. Calvin opened his eyes.
“It’s too early still.”
“It started. It’s the day, now. It’s the Fourth of July!” Jemma proclaimed all holidays with almost perfect equability; Christmas reigned supreme and drove her into the most fervent tizzy, so she’d run shrieking like a madwoman all over the house as soon as the first blue light of dawn ended her practically sleepless night. But she’d shout and stomp with not much less energy over Thanksgiving, Halloween, the Fourth of July, and Easter. Other holidays she was less familiar with, but she celebrated them as she discovered them in school, and had been known to invent associations and ask her parents why there was no Memorial Day feast upon the table, or why the Labor Day Puppy had left no treats beneath her bed.
“Not yet. I’m still asleep. This is all a dream, right now. It’s still pitch black outside, if you’d just wake up and look. Go back and lie in your bed and count to ten, then open your eyes.”
“Come on,” she said, pulling now both on his leg and Al’s tail. “Come on. It’s right now!”
“This is a dream, and Al is going to bite you, and his poison will make you burst into flame.”
Jemma hesitated then, reaching around with her left hand to pinch herself on the bottom, making it smart but not crying out. Then she jumped up on her brother’s bed and bounced vigorously, her feet touching against him every third or fourth bounce, until she missed her footing and stepped right on his belly, and fell down against him. “The sawdust,” she was saying, “and the turtles and the Red Rover and the fireworks and George Washington, we’re going to miss them if you don’t get up!”
He opened one eye. “Go get me a drink of water and then I’ll get up.” Jemma scrambled off the bed and hurried down to the bathroom. She emptied a cup of a year’s worth of accumulated toothbrushes — she and Calvin each had three or four, because the older models wore out or were superceded by fancier shapes or prettier colors — filled it with water, and hurried back to the room, careful not to spill. But when she arrived the door was closed and locked.
“Hey,” she said, knocking with her foot.
“It’s too early,” Calvin said, and then he would not respond no matter how hard she knocked. She wanted very badly to pour the cup of water over his head, and waited silently at his door for a little while for just that opportunity to present itself, patience losing out eventually to a growing thirst. She drank the water and went downstairs.
Her parents’ door was closed; she did not try the knob but listened at the wood, hearing nothing. She went into the living room, already the warmest and brightest room in the house, the peach walls and carpet glowing, and climbed into the bay window. She could see all the way down to the river. A thin line of mist hung over each of the three ravines; the haze over the river lifted even while she watched a boatful of tiny teenagers leave the docks and go swiftly over the water. She heard their horns, and the other horns echoing overland from every direction, and then the boat passed the bend in the river and all became silent. But still everything, the rising sun, the glare off the water, the thinning mist, seemed ready to shout. Even the air seemed about to proclaim the great day. She went into the dining room, sat at the table, put her fists under her chin, and waited.
She followed Calvin down the hill, walking in the rough of the fourth hole and kicking at dandelion heads. In an aerated shoebox under her arm she carried her racing turtle, #40, Mr. Peepers. Every so often she’d hold the box up, lining up her eye to check on him, watching the steady progress he made consuming the lettuce leaf she’d put in there to keep him happy on the trip. Calvin said eating before the race would make him slow. Her father said he’d race faster because the lettuce would make him happy, and because he’d sprinkled a dash of cayenne pepper on the leaf.