Magonia(12)

He glances at me.
“For you, you look good.”
His face tells me I don’t. The fact that he suddenly takes off his scarf and wraps it around my throat tells me I don’t. Jason doesn’t normally seem nervous, even though he’s spent his entire life on a constant loop of calculation, worried about everything.
“How are you?” I ask him. “You seem weird.”
“Good,” he says, talking too fast. “I’m fine, I mean, I’m not the one we need to be worried about, obviously. So stop worrying about me.”
This version of Jason doesn’t bode well.
“Did you take your pill?”
“Stop,” he says. “Of course I did.”
I’m suspicious. Also guilty. Because if Jason’s this worried, it’s my fault.
My dad makes us come in, but he leaves us alone in the kitchen. Jason begins speedy work on baked goods. I watch him from behind as he pushes up his sleeves and puts on my dad’s apron. His hair is the color of the chocolate he’s melting. He has freckles on the back of his neck, five of them. His most distinctive feature is the serious furrow between his eyebrows, which he’s had since we were nine and he realized we definitely weren’t immortal.
I don’t know how someone who’s a genius might have thought we’d live forever, but he’d been working on some kind of chemistry compound related to both starfish and tortoises, and he was pretty sure, up until it exploded in his garage, that it was totally going to be a Thing. I think he was trying to grow me some new lungs, but he’s never admitted it.
Jason looks like someone recently emerged from a sealed city. Last week, he wore the T-shirt top of a pair of ancient Star Wars pajamas to school, with his grandfather’s suit jacket over the top of that. The pajamas dated from when he wasn’t the height he is now. The sleeves ended not far below his elbows. The shirt was tight. He didn’t care. I saw girls looking at him all day long, not with the expected look of horror, but with happy surprise.
It was like he’d grown boobs over the summer. Well, except not, but you know. He’d become stealth hot or something.
Jason, however, didn’t notice the girls. I mean, he’s straight, but he’s never cared whether anyone knew it or not. He has two moms. The last time anyone commented critically on that, he gave that guy a black eye. Jason’s right hook, and the resultant bruise, startled everyone, including Jason, I think, because it isn’t like Jason normally punches people.

When Jason feels inclined, he’s been known to make chocolate éclairs. Today he feels inclined. If I weren’t already worried, this’d worry me. Chocolate éclairs are for birthdays. If he’s making them early, I must really look bad.
Yeah. I think I’ll avoid the mirror.
“I’m home, aren’t I?” I say. “They’d never have let me come home if things were that awful.”
Jason just looks at me with his particular hazel-eyed stare. The stare claims he doesn’t give a shit what I say, and that nothing could possibly surprise him. He’d pull it off, if not for the furrow, which is especially deep today, and the rapid way he’s stirring.
Maybe it’s that furrow, maybe it’s me, also feeling worried, but I tell him everything. The whistles, the ship, all of it. The way it just drifted out of the clouds. Hunting.
Hunting?
I don’t know why I think of it that way, but that’s how it felt. Hunting. I tell him about Mr. Grimm, too, who acted weird, in my opinion, though maybe that was me acting weird. For a second, I was pretty sure Mr. Grimm saw the ship, too, but then he pretended not to.
Jason puts the pastries in the oven, whisks their filling for a moment, and considers, as though he’s rifling through papers inside his brain.
“Ship was a cloud formation. Basic answer.”
I start to protest.
“Stay with me,” he says. “Unexplained visual phenomena. Green ray starts UFO panics all the time.”
I raise my hand.
“People understand like half of why light does what it does,” Jason continues without answering my question. “There’s a whole category of mirage where people see ships in the sky. Some people actually think the Titanic sank because a mirage made the iceberg invisible.”
I’m researching while he talks, on my phone. Boy’s a Wikipedia sinkhole, though he’s doing it without any internet connection. He’s just whipping the éclair filling, casually facting me into oblivion.
What I saw, though, was not any of the things he wants to make it. I feel bitey. He should believe me. He’s the person who always believes me. I count on him to be my primary enabler of Vivid Imagination.
“You looking it up? Pissed off with me for not swallowing your story without questioning anything? Well, how about spooklights,” he says. He turns around and grins at me, which disgruntles. “UFOs, black helicopters, phantom dirigibles. All those things.”
Then he says one more word and for some reason, it stops me dead.
“Magonia.”







“Magonia?” I repeat, feeling twitchy.
The word isn’t unfamiliar. I try to joke it out.
“Is that a disease? A kind of architecture? A poisonous plant? If it’s a disease, I don’t want to know, I warn you right now. I’m not in a disease textbook mood—”
“We’re not talking about diseases. We’re talking about mirages. Check the Annals of Ulster,” Jason says, and sighs his long-patented Sufferer’s Sigh.
“Ulster. Like blisters crossed with ulcers? Leprosy of some kind?” I blather to disguise the fact that the word immediately haunts me. I feel a memory of this lurking somewhere in the black holes of my brain. Maybe I read about it somewhere. After all, everything I know, I read about.