Because You Love to Hate Me(11)
“Is it gold-plated?”
The harp gasps. “I am not an it, and I most certainly am not gold-plated.”
“She’s gold-plated,” I hiss. “Now get going!”
Jack hesitates. He looks up at me with this lopsided expression and I think this might be like one of those moments in a story where the guy says this awkward thing, and the girl says this sarcastic thing, and there’s a moment of silence and they just stand there until he lunges and kisses her anyway . . . You know the story?
Well, that doesn’t happen, because first of all Jack’s, like, a fourth of my size, so not only would the logistics be off, I’m just not that into him; second of all, my dad’s thundering down the basement stairs, and I can already imagine him bellowing I’m going to kill you once he gets a look at Jack. Unlike in that aforementioned made-for-TV story, Dad will mean it.
And he’ll probably eat Jack on top of everything.
So, yeah, forget about the kiss.
Jack ends up in the clouds every couple of weeks or so, but I never know exactly when he’s going to make his appearance because he doesn’t know, either; it’s something to do with the magick beans and the phases of the moon. It takes three beans to grow the stalk, and he has less than half a bag left because he wasted a bunch before realizing all moons don’t cultivate good beanstalks. Once he jumped on a stalk just as it started to grow, and as usual, it shot him upward. But it stopped about halfway. I was just hanging there at twenty thousand feet. It took me ages to climb down and I won’t go on about how many times I nearly slipped. I could’ve died.
Jack has lots of Almost Dying stories. He’s explored underwater forests with faulty air tanks, still taking time to skim his fingers over swaying treetops. He’s spent two nights in the Gobi Desert with a half-filled canteen. He’s scrambled out of ancient tombs just as their tunnels are collapsing. He’s eaten python in a Beninese rain forest to consume the snake’s powers. He’s spent one full night alone in a haunted Japanese forest without a light source, his back against a tree trunk.
Jack just isn’t afraid of anything, not even castle-dwelling giants in the sky.
We’re sitting near the cloudline, near Lookout South, and I stare up at the constellations, feeling small despite my bigness. There are an infinite number of galaxies up there, but I’ve never given serious thought to leaving this five-mile stretch of cloud. I’ve always known my world to be practically microscopic, but since getting to know Jack, it’s managed to shrink even more. Part of me wonders if he’s telling the truth about all the things he’s done, when he’s summering here and there, tagging along with his antiquarian, wanderlustful uncle and his beloved tabby cat. Even though my only requirement was that he be honest, I realize it doesn’t really matter. Because Jack isn’t afraid to dream, isn’t afraid to try new things, and this has come to mean more to me than anything else.
“What have you never done,” Jack says, “that you’ve always wanted to do?”
I’ve been so caught up in his stories and the inability to offer any interesting ones of my own that I just blurt it out: “Everything.”
Jack looks up at me with his fine-boned, deceivingly good face. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay. You just need to start small.”
I know plenty about small. If we are only as big as our dreams, Jack is the giant, here. “You know I haven’t even looked over the edge of the clouds before? Not even at the lookout points.”
“Isn’t this your kingdom? The seat of your empire?” Jack picks at bits of cloud and rubs them between his fingers until they evaporate. “You can do whatever you like.”
I shake my head. “I’ll never look over. It’s too dangerous.”
“Never say never. And anyway, you don’t have to set out to climb Mount Everest from the start.”
We’ve got distant relatives there. They hate it. Used to be they could host vacations for giant folk, since anyone who witnessed them whooshing down the sides of the mountain never lived to tell the tale; but now humans have smartphones and the internet and it’s too risky, being seen, even if the giants stay up in the clouds. I tell Jack this and he asks me what’s so different about Mount Everest, why giants there might be seen even in the sky when giants aren’t seen everywhere else, like here.
“Because,” I say, “when humans visit places like Mount Everest, they’re already prepared to see something they haven’t. They want to be blown away. So they see giants and villages in the sky and a bunch of stuff that isn’t even there. They want to believe.”
Humans didn’t have a choice before, believing in us or not. They were forced to see us, reckon with us. But their numbers grew faster than ours, and they created guns and bombs and lasers, and magick doesn’t have the same kind of exponential growth as technology. Magick is an ancient thing; it’s always been here and always will be, and so it takes its time. It isn’t concerned that its wielder might need it to step up from anticannonball defense.
I look at Jack sitting there and think back to the way I’d unknowingly put the squeeze on him in the basement. Is it bad that I want to do it again, to squeeze harder, to discover firsthand the limits to . . . ? To what, I don’t know. I just know I want to push.