Caloric

“Now I guess we just wait,” Sebastian said.

Another long, echoing silent pause began. It was hard to tell anymore how long anything was. Every second filled with silence crept by slower than molasses dripping down a tree on a cold day. Phoenyx couldn’t bear this. She couldn’t bear the loneliness of the silence. It invited all her horrors to come to the surface, to whisper in her ears terrible truths she didn’t want to hear.

“Ugh, I can’t stand all this waiting around!” she grunted. “I hate just sitting here waiting for someone to come, waiting for our fate to be decided, waiting for food that stopped coming. I hate when everyone is quiet and no one is talking. Most of all, I hate this God forsaken room!”

“We all do,” Lily said.

“So, can we please just talk, about anything?” Phoenyx beseeched the others.

“I can do you one better than that,” Sebastian said.

Before Phoenyx could ask what he meant, the cement floor on which she sat softened and went from dull gray to bright yellow-brown, turning into sand. The sand spread and radiated from underneath her to cover the entire floor of the room. The iron bars that separated and confined them disappeared slowly from bottom to top. At the center of the ceiling, the cement cracked and crumbled into oblivion, revealing glorious, vibrant blue sky behind it, until all the cement of the ceiling and walls disintegrated and opened up to a lively and spacious beach.

Phoenyx stood and did a three-hundred-and-sixty degree turn, absorbing everything she beheld. No longer were they trapped in a tiny room. She felt the sand crunch beneath her feet. She felt a sea-breeze softly caressing her face and brushing past her hair. She smelled the salt in the air and was so grateful for the warm feeling of the sun shining down on her. She heard laughter behind her and turned to see sprightly bikinied, teenage girls running toward the distant shore with a beach ball.

“Is this real?” Lily asked, picking up a handful of sand and letting it spill between her fingers.

“As real as you believe it is,” Sebastian replied.

“Wow, I knew you could make people see things but I never imagined you could do this,” Phoenyx said, in awe. “I mean, it’s not just an illusion; it’s not just sight and sound, I can feel it. I can’t find a single flaw in anything I’m seeing. If I didn’t know any better, I really would think I was at the beach. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, smiling fondly.

“Can you see your illusions like we can or is it all just in your mind?” she asked.

“I can see it if I choose to,” he answered. “Like right now, I’m seeing everything you’re seeing as if it were really here. For most of my illusions—when I’m trying to get away with something, for example—it’s easier to see what’s real.”

“If I had your powers, I’d probably put myself somewhere else all the time,” she said, staring out at the waves crashing up on the beach’s end.

“He used to,” Skylar said. “When we were at the foster home, Sebastian would turn our box fort into a grand castle, in which he made us kings. We would fight dragons and rescue damsels. We had quite a wild fantasy life.”

“Wow, I used to make believe as a kid too but that would have been so much more fun.” Phoenyx laughed. “Now, can you imagine us some ice cold beers? What’s the beach without beer?”

Sebastian laughed. “I could try but it wouldn’t be as good as the real thing. That’s one thing I can’t get quite right. Taste. I guess because everything tastes different to everyone. Taste is the only one of the five senses that’s relative.”

She sat back down and rested back on her hands to look up at the sun. It really did leave greenish-purple spots in her vision. What an amazing trick this all was! She could pretend that the sting in her eyes was from the salty ocean air rather than from days and nights of on-and-off crying. She could even almost ignore the hallow pain of hunger in her stomach and the constant aching of her spine and shoulders and hips that sleeping on the hard concrete produced.

“I think we’ve all had enough sitting for a while,” Sebastian said. “What say we play a game?” He held his hand up, palm open, and a volleyball materialized there. Just as suddenly, a volleyball net manifested right down the middle of the group, where the iron bars had been.

Happily and eagerly, they all stood to play. Sebastian held out the ball with one hand and curled the other into a fist to hit it upward and over the net. They hit it back and forth for a long time, laughing every time someone missed, or every time someone got hit by the ball. It became pointless after a while to keep score. Lily was a terrible aim and missed the ball constantly, which only made her more endearing to the others.

Phoenyx couldn’t get over how real it felt. She was absolutely lost in wonderment. That Sebastian could make all this was nothing shy of incredible. She couldn’t imagine the sheer amount of focus that creating a world must take. To have to pay attention to all the little details, like the way sand looks; how each and every grain is unique with its own shape and glint and color; and all the people around them. There were voices of teenage girls running around and the laughter of the kids building a sand castle further down the beach. All the voices were unique and individual. He must be thinking about it all right now, producing each and every detail with his mind moment by moment, and still socializing with the three of them, playing, and having a good time.

She watched him as he leapt up to hit the ball with the top of his head. He came off so goofy and fun-loving. She understood he had a whole other side to him. It was a secret he hid from everyone, even from himself, that he was really quite brilliant. His nonchalant and devil-may-care attitude was an escape from a mind as busy as a super computer.

The ball came her way. She jumped out of her consideration to hit it back over the fence.

“Ah, I need a breather,” Sebastian said after a while. His jacket and white button-down shirt were now off and thrown to the side. She admittedly had trouble paying attention to much else. “Phoenyx, do you wanna take a break with me?”

Dammit, stop staring at his chest. “Sure, I could go for a drink of water right now anyway,” she said casually.

He walked around the net and up the beach; she followed. It was only after they were a noticeable distance away that she realized something was wrong. It wasn’t possible that she and Sebastian could walk this far away from Skylar and Lily, the cell they were in was too small for that.

“Sebastian, how is it that we are so far away from them?” she asked as he sat down in the sand. “We shouldn’t be allowed to walk more than three steps away from them. The cell is too small for that.”

He chuckled softly. “Then you weren’t paying much attention. How many steps did you take?”

She was about to say that she clearly took several steps, but then she stopped short. She thought about it and realized she had only really taken about three steps. Why did it seem she walked much farther? If she only took three steps, how was she so far away from Lily? She hardly heard Lily from here.

“That’s all part of the illusion,” he said. “Much of what even the real world is is what people perceive it to be. It doesn’t always matter what actually is. So, if I make it seem like you’ve walked much farther away than you actually have, your mind will make up for it by perceiving something to make that more understandable. That’s why Lily and Skylar can’t hear us right now. They perceive that there are yards between us, when they are actually still only inches from us.”

He just gets more and more amazing, doesn’t he?

“So, they can’t hear us talking right now?” she asked.

“Nope.”

“So, Lily is still right next to me?” she asked. “If I stick my hand out right now in her direction, I won’t be able to touch her?” She did so without waiting for his answer. She extended her arm as far out to her right as she could, right at Lily, but there was nothing but air. “This is so trippy.”

She withdrew her arm and sat down in the sand next to him.

“So, about our date tonight…” he said. “I think we are going to have to reschedule.”

For an instant, her heart ached and she felt rejected. She couldn’t blame him. He just learned she was dangerous so why would he want her? She kept her cool.

“Chickening out already?” she asked playfully.

“Fat chance,” he said.

Relief washed through her.

“Any nice restaurant I would want to take you to would be filling up right about now.”

“How do you figure that?” she asked.

“Because it’s seven o’clock,” he answered.

She was taken aback. She looked all around. The sun was still in the same place in the sky it had been when they got here, so to speak.

“Have we really been playing all day?” she asked. “I didn’t even realize so much time passed. With the sun in the middle of the sky like this, I could play under it for hours more.”

He smiled. “I’m glad I could help put a smile back on your face. You had me pretty worried earlier. Do you want to talk about it?”

She looked out at the ocean, her throat tightening, making her unable to speak for the moment.

“You don’t have to,” he said. “I just wanted to understand. This has been the first time that Skylar’s telepathy made me feel left out rather than clued in. I guess I just don’t know how to handle it—especially when it concerns someone I’m starting to care about.”

The handsome fool wasn’t present in the face that was looking at her. His blue eyes ran deep, revealing the profound person inside she was realizing him to be. It felt again as though she had known him forever, like she could tell him anything. Hell, if the legend was true, perhaps they really had known each other forever, in hundreds of other lives.

Then it dawned on her...the dreams. She dreamt about Sebastian and he dreamt about her. They had met before. They must have. They weren’t just dreams, they were memories. The legend said that the elements were destined to reincarnation. It wasn’t just the elements, it was them—the souls the elements were bound to—that were also reincarnated. Suddenly, she was no longer afraid of scaring Sebastian off. She knew without a doubt that it just wasn’t possible. She could open up to him without fear of rejection.

“I came home from school one day and asked my dad if I could go to this party I was invited to,” she said. “He said ‘no’ and we got in this huge fight and…I don’t know…I got so angry. That was a time in my life when I really was a spoiled brat. I knew I could get just about anything. So when he refused to let me go, at a time when making friends meant everything to me, I didn’t know how to handle being told ‘no’. I always knew that it was me who started that fire. Even though it didn’t make any logical sense, I felt it.

“The fire started in the kitchen behind him and spread all over the house so quickly. My mom pulled me out and my dad ran back inside to get something. I ran in after him and got carried out by firemen right before the gun powder supplies caused the explosion that ultimately killed him.”

Sebastian put his hand over hers. “That’s how you got your scar.” They both looked at it then.

“When I ran inside to find my dad, I had my whole arm right on a part of the wall that was on fire and I didn’t even realize it,” she explained. “I couldn’t feel it at all; it was like the fire wasn’t even real. When I realized that the fire wasn’t hurting me, it scared the hell out of me, and it was only then that the fire started to burn. Because I had my arm so deep in the fire, it took a lot more skin than burns usually do. That was another part of the story I could never explain, until now. That’s why it was so easy to deny for so long.”

He moved his thumb over the scarred flesh; such a gentle touch sent a shiver across the surface of her arm raising goose bumps.

“It doesn’t sound to me that his death was your fault,” he said.

“If I hadn’t caused the fire, he’d still be alive,” she protested.

“No, if he hadn’t gone back in, he’d still be alive,” Sebastian corrected. “It was his choice to go inside a burning building; he knew the dangers. He just wasn’t lucky enough to make it out. It was an accident.”

“Just because something is an accident doesn’t mean someone isn’t guilty for causing it,” she argued.

“Just because someone is guilty doesn’t mean they deserve to be punished,” he countered. “You most certainly don’t deserve to punish yourself forever.”

“Maybe.” She shrugged.

“Besides, you’re Fire; for you forever is a long time,” he joked.

She scoffed. “I thought you didn’t believe in any of it.”

He pursed his lips. “I don’t…but I remembered something, an incident, from when Skylar and I were kids. It has me thinking. It could have been a coincidence but, if I’ve learned anything from this whole experience so far, it’s that there are no coincidences in life.”

His eyes met hers. She could tell he wasn’t just talking about their powers.

She swallowed. “Tell me.”

He cocked his head. “I’m not the best story-teller. Why don’t I show you instead?”