If the room had been quiet before, it became absolutely silent once Mrs. Gleason had stopped talking. No one moved, as if the entire room had forgotten to even breathe for the briefest moment. Several quiet seconds passed before the spell broke and the room exploded into a chorus of hushed conversations.
“Did she say ‘Curser?”
“Her mom’s a Curser?”
“Why did they invite her in here?”
“A Pusher and a Curser? Can that even happen?”
“That can’t be right can, it?”
I looked around, bewildered, trying to catch bits and pieces of every single conversation. Obviously “Curser” was significant to these people, but it meant nothing to me.
“What is a Curser?” I asked.
Mrs. Gleason seemed to deflate. Her shoulders slumped and her eyes dropped to my shoes. She took a minute to gather her thoughts before straightening again. “I apologize. This is all much more complicated than I expected. I was not prepared for … for who you are.”
Another non-answer. I was starting to feel my irritation rise again and I struggled to maintain my cool. “What do you mean ‘who I am'"?
Just then a door flung open, the same door Mrs. Gleason had entered, and slammed hard against the wall. A young man with light brown skin and jet black hair swung into the room on a pair of forearm crutches. He glanced around obviously confused by the tension in the room until he saw Mrs. Gleason. “Mam, Horatio is on the phone. He said it’s urgent.”
Mrs. Gleason pressed her lips into a tight grimace and shot me an apologetic glance. “I promised you some answers, and I will give them to you as best I can. But for now, I must deal with this. I am sorry.” She turned to Jazmin and said, “Take her to the arena. See if you can get her to repeat whatever it was she did earlier.”
“Yes mam,” Jazmin said quickly.
Looking toward Nick, Mrs. Gleason said, “I’m assuming you are going to go with them whether I tell you to or not?” Nick didn’t respond, he just flashed his huge smile. She then faced the room and said with the tone of someone that absolutely expected to be listened to, “The rest of you have things to be doing, I am sure.”
There was a flurry of movement and murmured conversations and in a brief moment, everyone had cleared out of the room.
Jazmin jerked her head toward the hallway and started walking without saying a word. Nick smiled at me and said, “Come on. This will be fun.” He placed a hand in the middle of my back and made an “after you” gesture with the other. His hand felt large and warm on my back and a part of me wanted to lean into his touch. My world had become a state of constant upheaval and even that slight touch felt like a reassuring strength. Part of me also hated being led like a clueless child so when I picked my backpack off the ground I slung it over my shoulder roughly and felt a smug sense of satisfaction when I felt it slam into his arm.
I followed Jazmin into the hall and saw her standing by a door I hadn’t noticed when we’d walked through earlier. She held the door open and I saw it led to a stairway that must go down to a basement. I didn’t like the idea of being even further trapped in with these people, but by that point, I was hooked. There were too many things I needed to know and there was no way I was going to leave without getting some answers. I stepped through the door and down the stairs.
The stairs ended in a huge, square, unfinished basement. The walls were bare cinder blocks with a few wooden crates stacked against them here and there. The floor was simple concrete, rough, and pot-marked in places with age. Overhead fluorescent lights gave off a steady hum.
Jazmin and Nick entered behind me. “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen someone give that kind of attitude to Mrs. Gleason,” Nick said with his wide, teasing smile. “I thought for sure she was going to lay you out.”
Had I given her attitude? I hadn’t meant to be rude, but I had to admit my nerves were pretty raw and it was completely possible I hadn't been as polite as possible. “I uh …” I stammered.
“Don’t let him get to you, Delilah,” Jazmin said, giving Nick a not quite playful punch to the shoulder. “You were fine. You’ve got a lot going on and I’m sure Mrs. Gleason understands that.”
“Thanks,” I said sheepishly. “It's all just so overwhelming, you know? My dad leaving, and then last night … and somehow it's all connected to you guys with your … I mean, is any of this real? Can all of you really Push like that?”
“Yeah,” said Jazmin. “And not just the ones upstairs. There are actually a good many of us. Those of us that you saw are still kind of in training, but there are Pushers all over the world.” As she talked she stepped over to a large crate and started rummaging through its contents.
“Training for what?”
“To fight, mostly,” said Nick.
“To fight who? The Cursers?” I guessed.
“Yeah, exactly.”
“Like my mom?” I chided myself for the defensive tone in my words, but I couldn’t help it. I’d never met my mom, but my dad used to tell me stories about her for hours. He’d tell me the same stories over and over in such great detail I felt like I had known her and of everything I knew about her, nothing lined up with anything that could be considered a curse.
Nick’s smile vanished and his face seemed to soften as he said, “I honestly don’t know anything about that. I’ve never heard of your mom or your dad.”
“What exactly is a Curser?” I asked.
“Well, they’re …”
“Nicholas!” Jazmin interrupted, walking back to us carrying a large plastic box in her hands. “Mrs. Gleason said she would answer her questions.”
Nick threw up his hands. “Oh come on Jazmin. Her dad is missing! She deserves to know what she has fallen in the middle of. Besides, she already knows about us. It's not like I can tell her anything Mrs. Gleason wasn’t going to anyways.” The intensity in Nick’s words took me by surprise. I hadn’t really expected the cocky pretty-boy to be so concerned about the feelings of a complete stranger.
Jazmin gave an uncommitted grunt and set the plastic box on the ground several feet away from us. Nick scrunched up his face in concentration. “Curses are kind of like us, I guess. I mean they are people with different abilities. We don’t know why they have them or when it started. We just know that we have been fighting them as long as anyone can remember.”
“So it's like a rival gang or something? You all just fling stuff at each other in dark alleys? Do you sing songs and snap your fingers a lot too?” I asked.
Nick chuckled. “I wish! Cursers’ abilities are completely different than ours. They literally curse people … hence the name. And they can’t do it from a distance, but if they can touch you - their skin touching your skin - they can lay all kinds of curses on you. We don’t even know what all kinds of curses they can do. We know some can make you horribly sick, some can put you to sleep, some can make it so you can’t sleep at all. I’ve heard some of the more powerful ones can make your skin slough right off your bones.”
Jazmin scoffed “That’s just a rumor. No one has actually seen it happen.”
My stomach went a little queasy at the idea of my skin falling off. I swallowed hard and asked, “They have to touch you skin to skin? Is that why you were asking if they’d touched me last night? You thought they might have cursed me?”
“Yeah, even touching you through your shirt wouldn’t do it. They’ve got to touch your skin,” she answered.
“I guess I’m glad he just slammed me in the back then.” I saw Jazmin shoot Nick a reproachful glance and the tips of his ears started to turn pink. “What?” I asked.
“Well …” Nick answered sheepishly. “The dude was about to grab you, and you were so far away from us …”
“Wait!” I demanded. “You hit me? That was you?!?”
He threw up his hands and shrugged his shoulders. “I didn’t hit you. I just pushed you a little.”
“A little my ass! My back still hurts and I have a huge bruise!"
“Uh sorry about that,” he said, a smile playing on his lips.
“Jerk!” I balled up my fist and punched him in the shoulder. I wasn’t really trying to hurt him - ok, maybe I was trying to hurt him a little - but when my fist landed it hit solid muscle, and whatever my intention was, I’m sure it hurt my hand more than it did him.
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He chuckled and gave me his huge, dazzling smile. Jazmin rolled her eyes, again, and said, “Nicholas is an ass sometimes. But he is right, and he probably saved your life.”
“And what do I get for it? Not even a thank you? Just a little punch to the arm!” Nick said in mock offense while rubbing the spot where I’d hit him. My face turned beet red. He was right, at least from what I could tell he was. He had likely saved my life and I hadn’t even said thank you. Of course, it was still possible they were lying and the whole thing was a setup to send me further down the road to insanity. God, it was all so confusing.
“I uh … thank…” I stammered.
Nick waved me off. “Heroes don’t need to be thanked. Now let’s see if we can get you to push again.” He paused for a beat, but my brain was having so much trouble keeping up with everything that by the time I realized he was giving me an opportunity to make a sarcastic comment about his use of “heroes” the moment had passed and he was already moving on. He pointed to the plastic box on the ground. “See if you can push the box.”
I rolled my eyes and shook my head at him. “I can walk over there and push it if you’d like, but I can’t do the thing that you do”
“We think you can,” Jazmin said.
“Like you did in the kitchen,” Nick added.
“That wasn’t pushing. I flipped the table. I must have hit it at a weird angle or something. It didn’t fly across the room or anything, I just flipped it.“
Nick pointed his palm at the box, an instant later it flew toward his hand like it was being pulled by an invisible string. The second it touched his palm his arm flexed again and the box flew away, tumbling across the floor like a tumbleweed. “We call it “pushing” because … well I don’t know why. I guess because calling it pulling sounds dumb. But it’s not just pushing. We can move stuff and the more practice you put in the greater control you have over its direction, speed, and distance.
“I’ve never seen anyone do it the way you did it. Every single Pusher I’ve ever heard of can push in a single direction at a time and yours was all spread out. But if it wasn’t pushing, it was something close to it. Maybe with some practice, you can narrow your control.”
My eyes danced between Nick and the box and I’m sure the look of bewilderment on my face was a step or two short of attractive. “So you guys are basically Jedi?” I asked.
Nick nodded, waved a hand in front of my face, and with a serious tone said, “These are not the droids …”
Jazmin slapped Nick’s arm down. “We aren’t Jedi.” She said sternly “There is no “Force” to align with, no invisible connection between everything in the universe. At least not that I know of. There is just something in our genes that allows us to do this.”
“Well, it's not in my genes,” I started. But that wasn’t true, was it? According to Mrs. Gleason, my dad was a Pusher. Of course, it was possible she was lying, but if she wasn’t did that mean the ability to push was in my genes after all?
I shrugged and turned toward the box. I held up my hand, palm out and fingers spread like I had seen Nick do. I stared at the box, trying to will it to move. Two, three, five seconds passed and nothing happened. I glanced over at Jazmin, “What do I do?”
“Push,” she said simply.
“But how? That doesn’t make any sense. I’m just staring at the box. Nothing is happening.”
“It doesn’t ‘happen’,” she said, sounding like an impatient school teacher. “You push it. It’s not magic. You’re not casting a spell or something. It comes from your body. It’s in your bones, in your muscles, in your cells.”
“Well, I don’t know what to do with my body,” I said exasperated.
“It’s like wiggling your ears,” Nick said, altogether unhelpful. I stared at him deadpan until he elaborated. “Do you know how to wiggle your ears?”
“Uh, yeah, a little I guess. But it doesn’t make shit fly across the room.”
“No, not like that. But how did you learn to wiggle your ears? Could you teach me how to do it?”
“I don’t know. I guess I just figured it out one day, but I don’t know how to explain it.”
“Exactly. You did it one day and learned how to isolate the muscles to make it work. Once you did it the first time you could make yourself keep doing it. But before you wiggled them the first time, no one could have told you how.”
“Ok,” I said slowly. “I guess that makes sense. But that still doesn’t help me move that damn box.”
“Sure it will,” Jazmin said. “You’ve already done it once. You’ve just got to remember how to activate those particular muscles.”
I grunted a reply that was neither agreement nor completely polite, but I turned back to the box and held out my hand. I focused my eyes on the little UPC label at the bottom and tried to remember exactly how it felt when I’d hit the table in my kitchen. I flexed the muscles in my back, shoulder, and bicep - which looked significantly less impressive than when Nick did it - and jerked my hand forward.
Nothing.
Not so much as a fleck of dust wiggled. I glanced at Jazmin and Nick who nodded in unison to keep trying. So I raised my arm and tried again. And again. And again.
And again.
A couple of hours later I had a headache, my arm was shaking so bad I could barely hold it up, and Nick and Jazmin were sitting on the floor against the wall behind me.
Jazmin tossed me a bottle of water. I twisted off the cap, took a sip, and sat on the floor across from them. “Ok maybe I don’t have the thing, “ I said.
“Of course you don’t have it!” Came a voice from the stairs. I jumped, spilling water all over myself.
Standing in the doorway was the sharp-faced boy, Dietrich, from upstairs. He was looking down at me with pure hatred in his eyes. Jazmin and Nick both jump to their feet placing their bodies between me and him
“What the hell are you doing down here?” asked Nick.
“I wasn’t talking to you, Nick,” Dietrich sneered. “It’s obvious she isn’t a Pusher. She would have done it by now if she was.”
“Everyone goes at their own pace, Dietrich,” Jazmin said coolly. “And it isn’t any of your business.”
“For their first time, sure. But anyone that has done it can do it the second time pretty easily.” He pointed a long boney finger at me, “She obviously hasn’t pushed before. I don’t know what you think you saw but it couldn’t have been pushing. It must be some kind of Curser thing. And letting a Curser into our place is my business.”
Nick stepped up close to Dietrich so the two were almost touching noses. Nick was an inch or two taller than Dietrich and must have outweighed him by several pounds of pure muscle, but Dietrich didn’t back down an inch. “You don’t know what you're talking about Dietrich. And Mrs. Gleason wants her here. So why don’t you run along before things start getting tense around here?” said Nick.
“The old lady doesn’t know what she’s doing. She’s got to be crazy to let a damn Curseborn in here.”
For a moment I thought things were about to explode. The muscles in Nick’s back and neck tensed and I thought for sure someone was going to throw a punch. Then I saw Nick relax and I could hear the casual smile in his voice when he said, “Then why don’t you go tell her what you think.”
It immediately became obvious that there was a lot about Mrs. Gleason that I didn’t know. Dietrich didn’t flinch at having the bigger and stronger Nick in his face, or Jazmin right there either, but he physically faltered at the idea of confronting Mrs. Gleason. He took a step back, and his face curled into a vicious snarl. “Just keep your eye on her. There’s no telling what damage could be done by opening our doors to a Curseborn.” He spit the last word out like soured milk and stomped up the stairs.
Jazmin and Nick both let out deep sighs of relief as Dietrich left and gave each other significant looks as they turned back toward me.
“Curseborn?” I asked.
“Forget it, Delilah. It’s nothing.” Jazmin said. Her tone was casual, almost flippant, but I noticed her eyes had gone a little wide and her lips were pressed tight. Nick ignored the question and stepped over to pick up the box.
“It’s obviously something! Why else would he say it like that? And why would you look so … scared when I asked,” I demanded.
“I’m not scared!” She yelled. I flinched a little. She was both bigger and stronger than me, and it was obvious that I had hit a nerve. Jazmin took a long slow breath. “Ok, look. It’s just an old wives tale. Like the Pusher’s version of the boogeyman. The Curseborn Pusher, the child of both a Curser and a Pusher. Someone with perverted and chaotic powers, so twisted up on the inside that they inherently seek to destroy.”
“Destroy what?” I asked.
“Anything. Everything. Everyone.” Her voice took on an almost pleading tone as she continued, “But it’s just an urban legend. Something someone made up a long time ago to scare little kids from ever wanting to get close to a Curser, probably. Or a father desperately trying to avoid a Romeo and Juliet situation. In all of our records of every Pusher in all of our recorded history, there hasn’t been a single Cureborn.”
“I’m the first?”
“Yeah.”
“So I could be that thing? Like turn evil or something?”
“Well, no …”
“But how do you know? Do you have a record of every Pusher and every Curser that has ever lived? How do you know it's just made up? How do you know that whatever it is that I am isn’t festering inside me, turning me into something? If I really am the first Curseborn that you’ve ever seen, how do you know what I will become?” My voice rose with each question, fear and uncertainty building into a crescendo. So many things had come to blindside me in the last 24 hours. So many things had been shoved on me as truths, things that I never would have even thought about outside of some cheesy urban fantasy novel. I felt like the solid ground I had always walked on had become quicksand and my mind was flailing for something solid to latch onto.
“Relax,” Nick said. He had stepped up beside us quietly and I had kind of forgotten he was there. He shoved the box into my shoulder hard enough to make me take a half step back. “It’s nothing for you to worry about. Dietrich is just a paranoid asshole. And all that Curseborn stuff is made up.” He hit me again with the box, and I felt my face begin to flush with irritation. “I mean you’ve been trying to move this thing for a couple of hours now and nothing has happened. More than likely you just don’t have any gifts at all, much less any super strong, super evil ones.” He bumped my shoulder again, in the same spot and it was really starting to hurt.
“Stop hitting me,” I demanded.
“I’m just saying it’s not something to worry about. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s just something out of your weight class … little girl.” He smacked my shoulder with the box again, this time even harder.
My temper flared, and my fuse hit the critical point. “Stop it!” I shouted and slapped the box out of his hand. As I did I felt a pulse run through my muscles, from my back and shoulder down my arm and through my fingers. The box slammed to the floor, cracking the old plastic in half, and bounced several feet away. Half an instant later Nick and Jazmin were lifted in the air and landed several inches back. Followed almost immediately by the boxes against the wall behind me bouncing and rattling and the water bottles still sitting on the floor hopping and rolling several feet away from me.
I froze, my mouth hanging open in shock. I glanced at Jazmin who seemed to be just as surprised as I was. Then I looked at Nick. He had his wide, obnoxious smile plastered on his face. “And that, Delilah,” he said, “is how you push.”