Strange Girl Read online

  “I didn’t work on her. The Big Person did. What movie are we going to?”

  “If we go to Balen we’ll have our choice of eight different films.”

  “What time are you picking me up?”

  “In an hour. I’ll see you in an hour.”

  Aja said good-bye and I set down the phone. Janet read my mind.

  “Mike was right,” she said. “Aja is the problem.”

  • • •

  Again, I borrowed Janet’s Camry and drove out to pick up Aja. On the way to the Carter Mansion, Dale called and asked if he and Mike could hook up with us after the film. They were going to a movie in Balen as well—a horror flick. I’d already decided to take Aja to a romantic comedy. The films ended at the same time so I said okay. We agreed to meet at ten at the restaurant in the Hilton.

  The film turned out to be pretty funny and I laughed a lot, along with Aja. She seemed to have a thing for the theater’s popcorn. She ate a king-sized container all by herself. She told me she hadn’t had any dinner.

  “Bart’s still grieving over Aunt Clara,” she said. “He left home to be alone so I didn’t bother cooking anything.”

  “It normally takes people a while to get over a death in the family.”

  Aja nodded. She understood.

  Meeting up with the guys was fun. Mike looked much better than he had at Clara’s funeral, although he continued to wear a one-inch-wide head bandage. There was no arguing the obvious. His recovery was nothing short of a miracle. But my relief was short-lived. Not long after we each ordered dessert, Dale told me he’d heard Lisa Alastair had been healed.

  “Damnit! Her father told me he wouldn’t talk about it,” I said.

  “I think Lisa herself started the rumor,” Dale said. “She’d made friends with some kids who were staying at the Great Western. And she’d told them she was too sick to play. But after—well, after Aja got involved and Lisa was suddenly better, she went out to play and told her new friends that an angel had healed her. And the kids told their parents.”

  I groaned. “Casey Morall’s going to hear about this.”

  “Hopefully it won’t turn into a big deal,” Dale said. “If the man swore to you he wouldn’t talk about Aja, then Casey won’t have anyone close to Lisa to interview and it’ll just be another rumor if she posts it on YouTube.”

  “Everything she’s posted has been secondhand,” Mike said. “That hasn’t stopped the millions of hits.”

  “Is she still hounding you for an interview?” I asked.

  Mike snorted. “Three times a day, every day. The chick doesn’t know when to quit.”

  Dale stared at Aja across our table. “Can you tell us one way or the other—so we can quit arguing among ourselves—did you heal Mike and Lisa?”

  Aja was slow to answer. “This body you see, that you call Aja, she can’t heal anyone.”

  “But you’re more than the body,” Mike said. His remark surprised me. As far as I knew, he’d never heard Aja talk about the Big Person and the Little Person. Yet, it was possible, given his near-death experience, that he understood Aja better than any of us.

  Who had been the second being of light?

  Whose hand had he seen while outside his body?

  “Yes,” Aja said.

  “Can you explain that to us?” Dale asked carefully.

  Aja repeated her explanation of the Big Person and the Little Person that she’d given me the previous night. Most of it sounded new to me, not just because I had only a foggy memory of what she’d told me, but because hearing it again, straight from her mouth, made it somehow real again. As she spoke I felt my mind quieting, my worries fading away. Watching the faces of my friends, I suspected they were feeling the same way.

  Yet I still had plenty of questions. “If the Big Person worked on Mike, as well as Lisa, how come you only got sick when you healed Mike? How come you’re not sick now?” I asked.

  Aja hesitated. “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Could you try to explain?” Dale said gently.

  Aja considered. “When I lived in Selva, I used to lie in the river and stare up at the sky. I loved it. The current would pull me downstream and occasionally I’d feel a fish swim beneath me. Sometimes it was a big fish and it wouldn’t even have to brush my skin for me to know it was there. It’s the same whenever I feel the Big Person heal someone. I feel a motion in the vastness. Before, I seldom caused the motion. The Big Person would just do what it would do.”

  “But with me?” Mike said and let the question hang.

  Aja glanced at me and Dale. “Your friends were worried about you. Dale was crying and Fred was struggling to figure out a way to make things better. While the doctor operated on you, I slept in the waiting room with my head on Fred’s shoulder. But I didn’t feel any motion in the Big Person. No big fish swam by. Then morning came and the doctor spoke to us and he acted like you were going to die. It was then this body—no, it was then Aja thought to do something to fix you.”

  “That’s when you said you had to go to the bathroom but you really circled around and snuck into the recovery room right after Dale and I left,” I said.

  Aja lowered her head. “I did have to go to the bathroom.”

  “But you did sneak into the recovery room,” Dale said, and there was a tear in his eye. A tear of gratitude.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Are you saying you overruled what the Big Person wanted to do for Mike?” I asked.

  “The Big Person cannot be overruled.”

  “Then why did you get sick after healing Mike?” I persisted.

  “I let the Little Person get involved,” she said.

  “Which means you must have a Little Person,” I said, more to myself. I began to feel like we were interrogating the girl and that we should stop. At that instant she reached under the table and squeezed my hand. She didn’t say anything.

  “There is one point I hate to bring up,” Dale said. “It’s not an opinion I share, but I worry others might think it’s the case. If you start talking to them about having a Big Person and a Little Person inside of you, they’ll think you’re suffering from dissociative identity disorder.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s the new name for people who have multiple personalities,” Dale said. “It usually stems from a trauma experienced in childhood. The person creates another personality as a coping mechanism. The ‘alter’—that’s what psychologists call it—holds on to the trauma and shelters it from the main personality.”

  I couldn’t help but remember what Bart had told me. How Aja’s parents had been killed when she was a child.

  “So the person is able to totally block out what happened to them?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Dale said, and smiled. “But it’s not like I’m worried Aja’s suffering from DID. People with that condition are almost always miserable. They can’t function in the world. And they certainly can’t work miracles,” Dale added as he gazed at Aja. “Besides, you seem like the least traumatized person I’ve ever met.”

  She smiled. “I feel fine.”

  Our dessert came and the guys talked about the movie they’d seen and I told them about ours. Aja and I shared a huge banana split while Dale had a vanilla shake and Mike had chocolate cake with ice cream. We all drank coffee. What was interesting was how easily we switched from discussing the secrets of the universe to stuffing ourselves.

  It wasn’t until near midnight when the restaurant was closing that we stood and prepared to drive back to Elder in our separate cars. We paid the bill and headed for the door. But Dale pulled me aside while Mike and Aja walked on ahead. He spoke in a hushed tone.

  “You know Aja’s becoming a celebrity. Tomorrow’s Monday—the start of a new school week. Already people have been asking her questions, but come tomorrow they’ll be swarming all around her. How’s she going to take that?”

  I sighed. “I was thinking the same thing. For all her hidden power, it’s
not like she’s very good at defending herself.”

  “What should we do?” Dale asked.

  “I was hoping you’d have some idea.”

  Dale stared after Aja and Mike. “Maybe we should pray to the Big Person to protect her,” he said.

  Any other night, I would have laughed at the idea.

  “Something bothering you?” Dale asked when I didn’t respond.

  I shook my head. “It’s nothing. Everything’s fine.”

  And it was, I told myself.

  Aja had said she was fine.

  Still, I kept wondering how her parents had died.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I PICKED UP a hint of Aja’s fame when I arrived at school the next day. People talking in the locker halls about her YouTube videos, or the fact that Mike was still alive and walking around with a hole in his head. I took it in stride until I entered Mrs. Billard’s class a few minutes before the bell rang. Our teacher had yet to appear; the class was gossiping.

  “Nobody returns to school a week after brain surgery,” Macy Barnes, our head cheerleader and student body president was saying. “There’s no question that she healed Mike. I don’t know why you guys are still arguing about that.”

  “She says she didn’t do anything to Mike,” Ted Weldon, everyone’s favorite football jock, countered. “You calling her a liar?”

  “I’m just saying there’s something spooky about that girl,” Macy said. “You’ve seen the way she stares at people. And the way she talks—you’re lucky if you can get more than a yes-or-no answer out of her. Then there’s her photographic memory.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in that,” Ted interrupted.

  “I believe in it now,” Macy said. “That girl’s got some kind of power. But you’ve got to ask where that power comes from. We know she healed Mike and that soldier at the concert. But how come she never gives God credit for the healings? That’s what I want to know.”

  I couldn’t take it anymore. “You mean she doesn’t give Jesus credit,” I said. Macy shrugged like I was stating the obvious.

  “Same difference,” she said. “It’s like she wants all the glory.”

  I snorted. “On one hand you say how quiet she is. On the other hand you accuse her of seeking glory. Face it, you’re threatened by Aja because she doesn’t fit into your black-and-white world. To you a person’s either righteous or evil—a Christian or a nonbeliever.”

  “I believe in good and evil,” Macy said. “I’m not ashamed of that. And before you start ridiculing my religious beliefs, has it ever occurred to you that America is a Christian nation? Sure, I know Aja didn’t grow up here. She’s from Brazil. But that’s a Christian nation as well. How come she refuses to acknowledge Christ when she does a healing?”

  “Maybe she’s Jewish,” Ted said. “Her last name is Smith.”

  Christ, I thought. Smith wasn’t a Jewish name.

  “She adopted that name when Clara Smith adopted her,” Macy said. “It’s not her real name. She’s kept that secret. If you ask me she keeps a lot of things secret. I bet even Fred doesn’t know her real name.” Macy added, “And he’s sleeping with her.”

  I glared at her. “I like how cleverly you slipped that in. How you implied that she can’t possibly be a good person because she’s a slut on top of everything else.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Macy said.

  “Liar,” I snapped.

  “Everyone stop talking,” Mrs. Billard said as she strode into the room just as the bell rang. She was all business. “Open your textbooks to page one-twelve. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover today.”

  For the next fifty minutes Mrs. Billard talked nothing but American history. I didn’t even try listening. I was too heated up. Yet when the bell rang Mrs. Billard asked that I stay behind. She wanted to talk. She told me to close the door.

  “I was listening before class started,” she said.

  I wasn’t surprised. “Why didn’t you speak up?”

  “You’re asking why I didn’t defend Aja? After our talk the other day you probably think I owe the girl. And you’re right. But I didn’t intervene for one very simple reason. I think Aja can take care of herself.”

  “Because you feel you’ve been touched by her power?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way but yes.”

  “She may not be as powerful as you think.” I told Mrs. Billard about how sick Aja got after working on Mike. The woman listened closely. She appeared touched.

  “Thanks for sharing that with me,” she said when I finished. “I’m almost glad to hear she has a chink in her armor. It makes her seem more human.”

  “She is human.”

  “I know that, Fred. And I know that you love her and want to protect her. But you’re just going to create more enemies for her by attacking those who have every right to question what she’s doing.”

  “Macy’s an idiot. I had a right to call her on her bullshit.”

  “Macy’s on track to be class valedictorian. She’s far from stupid. She also happens to be Christian. Do you want to shut her up because of her beliefs? Because she has faith?”

  “If Macy stuck to what Jesus said I wouldn’t have a problem. ‘Love thy neighbor’ and all that good stuff. But Macy’s attacking Aja for one reason—she doesn’t give Jesus credit for her healing abilities. And that’s wrong. I don’t care what you say, it’s just wrong.”

  Mrs. Billard shook her head. “You think you’re going to get the whole world to see Aja the way you do? I’d be surprised if you changed a single person’s mind. Listen, Aja’s something new and exciting. Now you know how people react to what’s new. Half are intrigued while the other half are fearful. That’s natural. But the half that are scared of her—you’re not going to help Aja by going around telling them how stupid they are.”

  “So what do you want me to do?” I asked.

  “Let Aja take care of herself.”

  “She won’t! That’s the problem. She won’t lift a finger to defend herself.”

  “Maybe that’s the best defense of all.” Billard paused. “Trust Aja. I do.”

  “You don’t fear her anymore?”

  “No. The opposite. I find her inspiring.”

  I expected Mrs. Billard to elaborate but she told me to go enjoy my lunch. On the way to the courtyard I ran into Nicole Greer. She wanted to explain why she’d been spying on Aja for Casey Morall.

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “I know why you did it.”

  “Why?” Nicole asked.

  “You were trying to break us up.”

  “That’s not true.” Nicole paused. “So you’re together, then?”

  “Yup.”

  Her face fell. “Why?”

  “What do you mean why? I’m with her because I like her.” I tried to step past her but Nicole blocked my way.

  “I don’t believe you. You’ve been in love with me for the last two years. Something like that doesn’t vanish overnight. The only reason you’re with Aja now is because she’s popular.”

  “Oh, brother,” I muttered.

  “All right, fine, poor choice of words. She’s not popular, she’s a freak. There’s no way you can have a normal relationship with her. But we can have that. I swear to you, I’m over Rick. I shouldn’t have been with him in the first place. I should be with you.”

  I stopped and stared at Nicole. “No,” I said.

  “No what?”

  “No, I’m not with Aja because she’s popular or because she’s a freak. No, you’re not over Rick. And no, we should not be together.”

  It was a universal truth: Girls as pretty as Nicole did not comprehend what the word “no” meant. It was genetic, I think. She stomped the ground, unsure whether to weep or scream. In the end she did a little of both.

  “I know you still love me. Don’t deny it,” she said.

  “I don’t love you.”

  “You can’t love Aja! You just met her!”

  People were begin
ning to stare. I raised a hand, cautioning her to get a grip. I leaned closer. “I want you to stop.”

  “Stop what?”

  “This whole song and dance about you and I living happily ever after. And stop spying on Aja. It’s beneath you.” I pulled away. “I’ve got to go.”

  Nicole called after me. “Casey Morall knows about Lisa Alastair.”

  I halted in midstride, turned. “You told her?”

  “No. She found out on her own. And right now, she’s in Ohio. She’s just beginning to ramp up her investigation.” She sniffed. “I just thought I should warn you.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I found Aja on the same bench where we’d shared our first lunch. Dale, Mike, and Janet stood around her the same way the Secret Service stood while guarding the president. When anyone got too close to Aja, Mike would glare at them. His head bandage added to his intimidating look.

  “How are we all doing today?” I said.

  “I’m fine,” Aja said.

  Janet grumbled. “This isn’t working. Wherever Aja goes there’s always someone asking for her help. They’ve got a sick aunt. A sick uncle. A dying pet. Someone—it was Carl Burger in chemistry—came up to her and asked if Aja could help fix his sister.”

  “What’s wrong with Carl’s sister?” I asked.

  “He says she’s ugly,” Janet said. “She’s got too many pimples and her nose is too big. Can you imagine that?”

  “I can when I think of Carl’s face,” I said.

  “He’s uglier than his sister,” Mike agreed.

  “All I’m saying is the honeymoon’s over,” Janet said. “Aja’s never going to have a moment’s peace. This town—hell, this country—is full of sick people. They’re all going to want Aja’s help.”

  “Did this happen to you in Selva?” Dale asked Aja.

  She considered. “The people there were simple and polite. Only if there was an emergency, someone might come running and try to find me. But I explained that talking to my body didn’t tell the Big Person anything new. That if there was going to be a healing, it would happen all by itself.”

  “Like with Lisa Alastair?” Dale asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You mean it didn’t matter that her father called you?” I asked. The possibility had never occurred to me.