10.

Lucy lay in bed reading. Her headboard lamp blazed down on her head.

She glanced up at her lamp. She loved her headboard lamp. Her father had walked in one day through her open door with the lamp in his hands and wordlessly hung it over her headboard, above her head. She had watched from her bed as he plugged it in. With a smile, he had pulled the chain and burning incandescent light had poured into her eyes. “Good?” he had asked.

“Good,” she had replied, squinting.

Lucy reached up to adjust the hot metal shade. The feel of the scorching metal surprised her. She tapped the edge of the shade. Interesting. She pressed the pad of her index finger against it until it hurt. She looked at her finger and saw a narrow red welt. It faded as she watched.

Lucy suspected that perhaps she should be frightened of John. Things that alarmed other people often bothered Lucy not at all. Last year in school she had given Brian Burwell a black eye because he had put a dead bug down her dress and pinched her butt. The principal, the school nurse, and the school counselor had all looked at her with frightened, angry eyes. Her parents had been called. Brian’s parents had been called. Many words had been said. Lucy had explained and produced the dead bug. The adults had cringed. She had been chastised for hitting another student.

“Lucy,” said the principal, “I think you owe Brian an apology for hitting him.”

Only her own parents had been in the room at the time. Brian and his parents had been waiting outside.

“Is he going to apologize for putting a bug down my dress and pinching my butt?” Lucy wanted to know.

The principal had looked at Lucy’s parents. Lucy’s father had cleared his throat and raised his eyebrows. “Well?” he said to Principal Waters. “Is he?”

Lucy had been sent out into the hallway. She had sat forever on a blue molded plastic chair outside the principal’s office, kicking her feet and feeling thirsty. Brian and his parents, in plastic chairs of their own against the opposite wall, had stared at her. Their chairs were green.

Eventually her parents had emerged and taken her home and nothing more had happened, but Lucy had the distinct feeling that not everyone had been satisfied. Certainly not Brian Burwell. The next day he had put a dead, dried-up worm in her pocket. Determined to halt the process of escalation, Lucy had sneaked the dried-up worm into Brian’s lunch, tucking it neatly into his peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Patsy Nickerson had seen her, but Lucy was certain Patsy wouldn’t tell. Patsy had no love of Brian Burwell.

Brian threw up on a cafeteria table at lunch, causing Jimmy Tinsworthy to throw up at the sight. They were both sent home for the rest of the day. “I think they have the flu or something,” Cathy Jamison told Lucy.

Lucy tried to look concerned.

She understood that she had missed something in the discourse of the adults who had been called to the principal’s office after the initial dead bug and butt-pinching incident. She didn’t know what it was. She never learned what it was. But she had certainly missed something.

She was not afraid of John, but she wondered if she might be missing something about him.

She sat up in bed. “John,” she said aloud to her quiet bedroom. “Come here.”

He immediately appeared, sitting cross-legged at the foot of her bed. He blinked. He scratched his elbow. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Are you still mad?”

“Yes,” Lucy said. “You won’t tell me why you’re here, and then you tell me you’re going to leave. That kind of stinks.”

“It does.”

“Is John even really your name?”

“No,” he said.

“Do you have a name?”

“Yes,” he said, “but it’s not a word. It’s hard to explain. And only my mother and my siblings use it.”

“Siblings?”

“Brothers and sisters,” he said.

“You have brothers and sisters? And you really do have a mother?”

“I told you I did.”

Lucy chewed on the end of her thumb, thinking. “Yeah. You did. But you said you don’t have a dad.”

“I don’t,” John said. “And my mother isn’t exactly my mother, and she isn’t even really a she. And my siblings aren’t really brothers and sisters. They just came from my mother like I did.”

“Are they like you?”

“Yes.”

“So what are you?”

“There’s no word for what I am in a language you understand,” he said. “I can show you what I am, if you want.”

“How?”

“I can make you see it.”

“Will it hurt?”

“I would never hurt you.”

“All right,” Lucy said. “Show me.”

He showed her.

Lucy’s open eyes saw nothing in her world; instead, she had a glimpse of his. A dazzling tiny drop, a luminous musical speck of John’s alien reality: a burning peek at his existence that filled her imagination and then overflowed it. Her mind reeled, stumbled, caught a bit of humanity, righted itself. She shook her head clear.

“You see,” he said.

“I did see,” she said. “I still don’t know what to call you. You’re … but you aren’t.”

“Right.”

“And I can’t say your name.”

“It’s okay. You can keep calling me John.”

Lucy frowned. “But if that’s what you are,” she said, “why are you here with me? Why aren’t you off doing everything you can do?”

He smiled. “You saw those things.”

“Yes.”

“I am doing it. I’m doing all of it. Everywhere. All the time. I’m unbound. I’m here with you, and I’m watching a galaxy collapse on the other wide of the universe. I’m listening to the beings on a distant planet sing their young into flower. I’m swimming through oceans of gold and purple and green on a gas giant orbiting a binary star.”

“All at once?”

“Uh huh.”

“So if you can do all of that stuff at once,” said Lucy, “why do you have to leave?”

“I have to,” he said. He began idly conjuring strange flowers from nowhere. He laid them on the bed, nestling them into folds of Lucy’s blanket around her feet. Their sweet scent rose into the air. “So that you can be who you’re going to be, without any influence from me.”

“What’s wrong with your influence?”

“It’s not human,” John said. He tucked an enormous lavender bloom between her ankles as Lucy sat very still and watched. “I’m not human.”

“So what?”

“So you can’t experience things the way I can. You’re bound. I don’t want you to get sick of being what you are.”

“That sounds stupid.”

“I know. Sorry. It’s kind of like an after-school special, isn’t it? Or Little House on the Prairie. Wholesome but preachy.”

Lucy closed her eyes and leaned back against her headboard. “You’re starting to sound like a grown-up.”

“Sorry.”

“Why do you get to decide?”

He sighed. “Someone has to.”

“Totally like a grown-up.”

“I know. Sorry again.”

“Okay,” said Lucy, opening her eyes. “If someone has to, why shouldn’t it be me?”

He scattered a drift of delicate white papery blossoms. “Because I know things you don’t.”

“So tell me.”

“I wish I could.”

“You could if you wanted to,” Lucy said.

“Okay. I don’t want to.”

“Ha! I knew it.”

John rolled his eyes. “Would you be happier if I said I’m going away and you can’t stop me?”

“Is that the truth?”

“Yes it is. But it’s also true that I like being here with you and I think you’re better off without me for a while.”

“Do I get a say at all?”

“In whether I stay or go? No. If I think it’s important to go, would you really try to stop me?”

She looked at his display of strange and pretty flowers. She didn’t recognize any of them. “No,” she said finally. “I wouldn’t. But I’m still mad about it.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I keep saying that, but I really am. But I’m still going to go. I’ll give you fair warning. I promise.”

She yawned. “Are these flowers for me? What are they?”

He smiled. “Their smell will help you sleep and give you nice dreams. They’ll be gone in the morning.”

They were.