C.E. Murphy - Walking Dead

I didn’t feel sorry for Doherty. I was tempted to take Petite out for a high-speed spin and lose him, but it was still raining. Besides, his entire purpose in existing, as far as I was concerned, was to prove I was a liar, a fraud artist and an unsafe driver. No way would I give him the satisfaction of being proven right. I patted Petite’s dashboard as I climbed in, promising, “Another time, baby,” and drove over to Thor’s apartment. I figured I could earn good-girlfriend points by ordering Chinese and sacking out with him for part of an hour, even if I hadn’t called like I said I would.

His monster truck wasn’t in the parking lot, and the lights were out in his window. I pulled over to dig out my phone and laboriously punch in his number. My general loathing for cell phones had instilled in me an utter refusal to learn how to use them properly, although I was beginning to break down: this one asked every time if I wanted to save the number, and I knew one of these days I’d give in and do it. Not today, though. I peered up at Thor’s apartment as his phone’s voice mail invited me to leave a message. “Are you out having fun without me? I’m sorry I didn’t call earlier. There was a murder, and…” And that was all he really needed to know to forgive me. “I’ll probably be busy with it tomorrow, but if you want to have lunch, call me, okay? It’s supposed to be my day off, so I can probably sneak out for an hour to eat with you. Okay. I’ll talk to you later.”

I hung up and looked in my rearview mirror. Doherty’s Miata was idling half a block behind me. They were decent little cars, Miatas. They were certainly the right size for somebody of Doherty’s build. I wondered if Petite reflected my build accurately, and was sure The Truck reflected Thor’s. Amused by the idea, I drove home, changed into clothes that could both pass on a fencing strip and be wearable in public, and ate a Pop-Tart on my way out the door to the gym. I got there early, but went in anyway, pleased with the idea of leaving Doherty sitting in his car in the rain.

My next conscious thought was that my ankle hurt. I peeled my eyes open to find Phoebe standing beside the bleachers I’d sacked out on, her foot drawn back to kick my ankle again. “Oh, you’re awake. I guess that means you’re not having another out-of-body experience.”

“I dunno. You didn’t try kicking me last time.” I sat up and mooshed a hand over my face. “You showed up.”

“So did you.” Phoebe folded her arms. “Prove it.”

“What, that I’m here?” I kicked her in the ankle, feeling as satisfied as a seven-year-old with the tactic. “Good enough?”

“Ow! Prove you’re a shaman.” She thrust her jaw out, glaring at me defiantly.

I sighed. “Got any hangnails?” She probably didn’t. Phoebe kept her hands in beautiful condition, whereas I did well to remember to cut, not bite, my nails. “Chronic pain? Recent injury? Bad teeth?” She shook her head with each question, until I rolled my eyes. “I’m a shaman, Phoebe. Basically what I do is heal. I need to have something to heal before I can prove it.”

She got a glint in her eye and headed for her fencing bag. I jumped up and ran after her, catching her shoulder. “Don’t be an idiot. Hurting yourself to prove me wrong is stupid. What if I can’t heal you?”

“Then you’re full of shit.” She pulled away and I let her go, not having much of an argument against that. “You’re full of shit anyway,” she said grumpily. “What kind of crap is that? Shamanism? You weren’t insane yesterday.”

“Yeah, I was. You just didn’t know it.” I went back to the bleachers and sat down, elbows on my knees and head dropped. “Look, I get it. I’m like one of those nice ladies in a long skirt with wildflowers in her floofy hair who prattles about magic and Mother Earth and spiritual guides and who are tolerated because they seem harmless enough in their obviously crazy way. Except I don’t own any skirts and my hair’s only floofy right when I get up. And that’s more like a mohawk.”

Phoebe stared at me. I suspected I wasn’t helping myself. “Believe me, I was more comfortable being normal. I don’t talk about it because I don’t want people to look at me the way you’re doing. I’m sorry I can’t prove it. All I can say is for me it’s real, and I’ll try to keep it out of your hair if you still want to give me fencing lessons.”

She echoed, “‘For you it’s real.” Jo, real is real. You don’t get a different real than I do.”

“Of course I do.” I blinked, genuinely surprised. “You’re five-four, I’m five-eleven and a half. We experience different realities based on that, never mind something as off the wall as shamanism. We have a lot of converging points in our realities, but you live in a reality where you need a stepladder to change a smoke alarm, and I live in one where the top shelf in the kitchen is a reasonable place to keep things I use regularly. From one perspective, me being a shaman isn’t any weirder than you trying out for the Olympic fencing team.”

“It’s a lot weirder.”

“Yeah?” I arched my eyebrows. “How many Olympic-class athletes do most people know?”

“How many shamans do most people know?”

“That’s my point.” I shrugged. “They’re both extraordinary. I’ll grant you that the difference is, if you tell people you tried out for the Olympic team, they’re likely to say, ‘Really? Cool,’ and if I tell people I’m a shaman, they’ll probably say, ‘Oh, reaaalllyyy…’ and be uncomfortable.”

“Well, what’m I supposed to do?”

I let out a breath of semi-laughter. “I’d ignore it.” I had ignored it, but that hadn’t worked out so well for me. Phoebe, however, wasn’t stuck living between my ears. “Write it off as ‘oh my God, Joanne’s lost her mind,’ and don’t worry about it any more than you’d worry about a friend who collected snow globes or something else you had no interest in. The nice thing about me is I’m not likely to regale you with stories about shamanism, whereas some of those collector types can’t talk about anything else.” I thought it was a very convincing argument. In fact, I sort of wondered why I hadn’t thought of it before. Presumably I’d been too hung up with self-loathing and rejection. I bet this approach was much healthier.

Phoebe looked at me a long time, like if she scowled hard enough or long enough, she might worm her way inside my mind and get a better understanding of what’d gone wrong. Finally, though, she shook her head and said, “Yeah, okay, whatever,” and picked up her gear bag. “Are we going to fence, or what?”

I met Billy back at the precinct building, damp with sweat but in a better humor. He said, “I guess it went okay with Pheeb,” and tossed me the keys to an unmarked police cruiser. I wanted to take Petite, but with the cost of gas what it was, driving a police vehicle on police business just made the receipts easier. At least I got to drive. Not that I could remember Billy ever doing the driving since we’d been partnered.

In police academy, they’d impressed on us that there were two kinds of good drivers. One was the kind who followed all the rules, drove the speed limit, never double-parked and always wore their seat belts. I was usually that kind of driver.

But I’d also cut my driver’s teeth on hairpin Appalachian roads with plunging cliffs on one side and sheer rock face on the other. I could jackass Petite around a forty-five-degree turn at speeds way above the limit without losing momentum, and I’d spent my share of time feeling like Wile E. Coyote, dangling in the air over a dark green valley when me and another driver’d met coming opposite directions on a road barely wide enough for one. Dancing a police car through road cones and driving with blown-out tires was nothing.