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“Ugh.”
“If you get in trouble, jump into the snow and start rolling.”
I look at Sam, who has a big grin spread across his face. He is holding a red fire extinguisher in his hand just in case it’s needed.
“I know,” I say.
Everyone is silent while Henri messes with the matches.
“You look like Sasquatch wearing that suit,” Sam says.
“Eat it, Sam,” I say.
“Here we go,” says Henri.
I take a deep breath just before he touches a match to the suit. Fire sweeps across my body. It feels u
“Go!” Henri yells.
I hold my arms out to my sides, eyes wide-open, breath held. I feel as though I’m hovering. I enter the deep snow and it begins to sizzle and melt underfoot, a slight steam rising while I walk. I reach my right hand forward and lift a cinder block, which feels heavier than normal. Is it because I’m not breathing? Is it the stress of the fire?
“Don’t waste time!” Henri yells.
I hurl the block as hard as I can against a dead tree fifty feet away. The force causes it to smash into a million little pieces, leaving an indentation in the wood. Then I raise three te
I grit my teeth, open my eyes, thrust my body forward and direct all of my powers into the stick’s very core. It explodes, splintering into small bits. I don’t let any of them fall to the ground; instead I keep them suspended, collectively looking like a cloud of dust hovering in midair. I pull them to me and let them burn. The wood pops through the flicker and hum of the flames. I force them back together into a tightly compacted spear of fire that looks as though it has sprung straight from the depths of hell.
“Perfect!” Henri yells.
One minute has passed. My lungs begin to burn from the fire, from my breath still held. I put everything that I am into the spear and I hurl it so hard that it speeds through the air like a bullet and hits the tree, and hundreds of tiny fires spread throughout the vicinity and extinguish almost immediately. I had hoped the dead wood would catch fire but it does not. I have also dropped the te
“Forget the balls,” Henri yells. “The tree. Get the tree.”
The dead wood looks ghastly with its arthritic limbs silhouetted against the world of white beyond it. I close my eyes. I can’t hold my breath much longer. Frustration and anger begin to form, fueled by the fire and the discomfort of the suit and the tasks that are left undone. I focus on the large branch coming off the tree’s trunk and I try to break that branch away but it won’t come. I grit my teeth and furrow my brows and finally a loud snap rings through the air like a shotgun blast and the branch comes sailing towards me. I catch it in my hands and hold it straight above me.Let it burn, I think. It must be twenty feet long. It finally catches fire and I lift it into the air forty or fifty feet above me and, without touching it, I drive it straight into the ground as though I’m staking my claim like some old-world swordsman standing atop the hill after wi
“The snow! The snow!” Henri yells.
I dive in headfirst and begin rolling. The fire goes out almost immediately but I keep rolling and the sizzle of snow touching the tattered suit is all I hear while wisps of steam and smoke rise off of me. And then Sam finally pulls the clip from the extinguisher and unloads with a thick powder that makes it even harder to breathe.
“No,” I yell.
He stops. I lie there trying to catch my breath, but each inhalation brings about a pain in my lungs that reverberates throughout my body.
“Damn, John. You weren’t supposed to breathe,” Henri says, standing over me.
“I couldn’t help it.”
“Are you okay?” Sam asks.
“My lungs are burning.”
Everything is blurry but slowly the world comes into focus. I lie there looking up into the low gray sky at the flakes of snow sifting sullenly down upon us.
“How’d I do?”
“Not bad for your first try.”
“We’re going to do it again, aren’t we?”
“In time, yes.”
“That was wicked cool,” Sam says.
I sigh, then take a deep, labored breath. “That sucked.”
“You did well for your first time,” Henri says. “You can’t expect everything to come easily.”
I nod from the ground. I lie there a good minute or two, and then Henri extends a hand and helps me up, bringing about the end of training for the day.
I wake in the middle of the night two days later, 2:57 on the clock. I can hear Henri working at the kitchen table. I crawl out of bed and walk out of the room. He is hunched over a document, wearing bifocals and holding some sort of stamp with a pair of tweezers. He looks up at me.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Creating forms for you.”
“For what?”
“I got to thinking about you and Sam driving down to get me. I think it’s foolish of us to keep using your real age when we can just as easily change it according to our needs.”
I pick up a birth certificate that he has already finished. The name written is James Hughes. The date of birth would make me a year older. I’d be sixteen and able to drive. Then I bend over and look at the one he is in the process of creating. The name listed is Jobie Frey, age eighteen, a legal adult.
“Why didn’t we ever think to do this before?” I ask.
“We never had reason to.”
Papers of different shapes and sizes and densities are scattered across the table, a large printer off to the side. Bottles of ink, rubber stamps, notary stamps, metal plate-looking things, various tools that look as though they belong in a dentist’s office. The process of document creation has always remained foreign to me.
“Are we going to change my age now?”
Henri shakes his head. “It’s too late to change your age in Paradise. These are mostly for the future.
Who knows what will happen that will give you reason to use them.”
The thought of moving in the future makes me nauseous. I would rather stay fifteen and unable to drive forever than move someplace new.
Sarah returns from Colorado a week before Christmas. I haven’t seen her in eight days. It feels as though it’s been a month. The van drops all the girls off at the school and one of her friends drives her straight to my house without first taking her home. When I hear the tires come up the drive I meet her with a hug and a kiss and I lift her off the ground and twirl her in the air. She has just been in a plane and a car for ten hours and she is wearing sweatpants and no makeup with her hair pulled into a ponytail and yet she is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen and I don’t want to let go of her. We stare into each other’s eyes beneath the moonlight and all either of us can do is smile.
“Did you miss me?” she asks.
“Every second of every day.”
She kisses the tip of my nose.
“I missed you, too.”
“So do the animals have a shelter again?” I ask.
“Oh, John, it was amazing! I wish you could have been there. There were probably thirty people helping out at all times, around the clock. The building went up so fast and it’s so much nicer than it was before.