Little Spark

12 - Yours

The only thing I'll remember about the trek back to Common Grounds is the awkward silence. Luca tries to lighten the mood by sharing an old woodsman's tale about rubbing bear poop on your skin and clothes to avoid becoming the lunch of a woodland carnivore, but that just intensifies the awkwardness.

"So, I'll see you guys at school on Monday?" I say, making a feeble attempt at normality once we get back to Common Grounds.

Luca flashes me a sly smile. "I guess so, provided all the light bulbs have been replaced by then."

Apollo laughs. "I gotta say, Bliss, in my seventeen and a half years as... me, I've never seen a surge that powerful. You busted every light bulb on the first floor of a building five times the size of a football field."

"Seriously," Luca says. "Once you get a grip on it, you, Bliss Myer, will be a force to be reckoned with. The super-shadies won't know what hit 'em."

I look at Candis, expecting some snarky comment full of PhD-level vocabulary, but she's staring off into the distance. I can't explain why, but seeing her so distracted worries me.

"Thanks for taking me today, Candis." I say, breaking her concentration.

She looks at me, then quickly shifts her eyes away and shrugs. "Sure. No problem."

"Until Monday then?"

"Yeah. Until Monday."

********************

When I get to my room, the 'Dead Light Bulbs' box I hid under my bed is sitting on the desk with a note perched on top:

I see you found some buried treasure in that shed, Granddaughter! Forgive the invasion of privacy, but your room was a hot mess; quite a feat considering I just cleaned it yesterday... Anyway, there's a VCR in my room. Come on in whenever you want to look at the videos. I also put a cassette player in your desk drawer for the audiotapes. And if you want to get those photos developed, the only safe place to go is Flash Camera & Film on Main Street.

Love ya, baby doll!

Gigi

I open the drawer and see the cassette player, but the thought of listening to the tapes in the box just thickens the cloud of restlessness in my head. I move the box to the closet so I won't have to look at it.

As I collapse on the bed, completely exhausted despite the fact that it's only 1:00PM, chunks of The Powerhouse conversation knock around in my brain. The mayor is a Shadow, so I assume his wife is too; I don't think the supernaturally evil would be real keen on marrying outside the fold.

Of course, the revelation weighing most heavily on my mind is the one that brought our "Sparks 101" session to a premature end: my mom has been assumed dead for longer than I've been alive. The most troubling thing isn't that my very existence has legitimately shaken the foundations of this town (although that is a pretty big deal), it's that I feel like I've learned more about my mother in the four weeks since her death than I knew from sixteen years of living with her. I mean, of course she had a life before I came into the picture, but I guess that since it was just her and me, I never really thought about who she might've been before she was 'Mom'. Now that I see how much I never saw, I'm not sure what to do with it.

I look at the beach picture. She's got zinc oxide on her nose, her face is plastered with a smile as bright as the sun, and her tanned skin glows in the sunlight. As full as my heart is with love for the gorgeous woman in that photograph, I'm struggling to miss her right now because I feel like I have no idea who she actually was. It's unsettling.