The Magic Rain

Chapter Fifteen: Down by the Creek

I hadn’t known what to expect. Jo-Bri had gathered us all together in a field down the hill from our house, by the creek that ran past our property and beneath the highway to the east. It was beautiful and I’d always loved going down to sit and watch the water go by.

We all sat on the emerald green grass that was cool to the touch, while Jo-Bri stood facing us, talking to us.

The sun was shining, a few stray clouds wandering past. I thought of the giant birds Jo-Bri had told me about, with 25-foot wingspans, and his world’s light green sky.

I watched Jo-Bri move, the shapes his luscious lips formed as he spoke each word, the way he leaned his big, hard body this way or that, and the way he moved his hands. I shook my head. I had liked boys since puberty, maybe even before that, and had seen boys who were handsome – heck, Mike and Scott were gorgeous, but never had I been affected by anyone the way Jo-Bri affected me. Physically, of course, but also emotionally. I yearned for him. I loved watching him, touching him whenever I had the chance to.

And I knew that what came next might just kill me.

I glanced at my parents, who sat nearby, and wondered if they had ever felt for each other what I felt for Jo-Bri. And what would they say if they knew what he and I felt for each other? Would they say I was too young? That it was too soon for me to know what I really felt? That I couldn’t possibly know Jo-Bri well enough to really love him?

And while I wondered all these girly, romantic things, Jo-Bri told us about Hodon and how the "dark wizard-king" was going to try to destroy our world.

After Jo-Bri had finished explaining how he had come to our world, and who Hodon really was, he paused.

It was a lot to take in. I had already heard it and it still affected me and made me afraid. We were talking about the end of the world. The world I wanted to share with Jo-Bri for the rest of my life.

"So what can we do to help you?" Mike asked.

Jo-Bri hesitated.

"I believe there’s a reason for everything that happens," he finally said. "Since you’re all here, all part of what’s happened, I have to believe that you’re supposed to be part of what is going to happen. Since we are all here together, and since we know about the danger that faces us and everyone else in the world, I’m guessing we’re supposed to do something about it."

Jo-Bri smiled.

"All I know how to do right now is to teach you some of the magic my father taught me." He paused, and then added, "Is still teaching me," and I knew he was feeling the voices inside him – the voices of his parents and of the people from his village.

"Can you teach me to see through girls’ clothes?" Mike asked, grinning mischievously.

"I’ll teach you that," Linda said suggestively and we all laughed.

Jo-Bri glanced at me and I realized how much I wanted to teach him that too.

"I don’t understand," my mother said. "Why are we so ‘evil’ in our world and your world is so pure? Why are we so…”?

"Fucked up?" Jo-Bri said and we all laughed in surprise, especially my mother.

"You really have learned our language," my mother said. "But yeah, why are we so fucked up? We’re destroying our environment and half of us hate the other half for even talking about it, much less trying to fix it. We’re racist, sexist – hell, we were heading for the edge of the cliff way before Hodon came into the picture, and we spend our time watching reality TV while letting millions die of starvation and AIDS and war and pollution. We’re just…"

"Mean?" Jo-Bri said.

My parents both nodded and I felt suddenly sad.

"Yeah," my father said. "Mean. And stupid."

Jo-Bri smiled gently and that little movement of his full lips dazzled me because it seemed to radiate exactly the goodness my mother seemed to be yearning for.

"It’s not all bad," Jo-Bri said and somehow he was able to say that without sounding patronizing. "There are amazing things in your world, beauty that takes my breath away."

He glanced at me.

"Your daughter," he said, and his voice got huskier, "when she smiles, it… transforms everything around her."

My parents narrowed their eyes and I felt both overwhelmed by Jo-Bri’s comment and worried by my parents’ reaction. I don’t think they’d realized how close Jo-Bri and I had become.

"Little things," Jo-Bri went on, "like an overloaded person drops a parcel on a city street and suddenly several people stop to pick it up, someone else offers to help them carry their parcels, people volunteering at libraries and soup kitchens, people filled with kindness and passion and courage."

Jo-Bri shook his head.

"I’ve been overwhelmed by the goodness in your world," he said and I wanted more than ever to hug him. "From your daughter’s smile to people sitting with the dying in India so that they don’t die alone."

"But…" my father said.

Jo-Bri took a deep breath.

"But something has changed. The… balance has shifted. You see, it’s not that we don’t have evil in my world, but… it’s in balance with or maybe even overshadowed by goodness. Fear and ignorance will always cause some people to do evil, but when things are in balance, normal people will normally act kindly."

He paused a second.

"A new mother walks down a street with her baby and people stop to admire the child, gush at how cute he or she is, and everyone feels good while this is going on. That’s ‘normal.’"

"I’ve never told this to anyone before," Mike said, hesitantly, blushing slightly, which only made him look even more loveable. I noticed that Linda glanced at him with a look that must have been like the ones I always gave Jo-Bri. I wasn’t surprised. Maria and Scott were getting closer as well. Debbie seemed to be the only one not "attached" and I felt badly for her.

"When I see a movie or a story on the news about people doing cool stuff for other people," Mike went on, looking sheepish, "I almost want to cry. It’s like… I want it to be that way so much, and… it isn’t."

Scott laughed and Maria slapped his arm.

"That’s sweet!" Linda snapped at Scott, who raised his arms in mock fear, cringing back from her.

"Sorry!" he exclaimed.

"Screw you, Scott," Mike said.

"You’re laughing," Jo-Bri said to Scott, "but kindness and goodness is what most of us want most of the time. And when we think we’re losing it, or maybe even that we never had it…"

"We cry," my mother said, nodding, and again I was proud of her, seeing the hurt and yearning on her face. That was something most boys didn’t seem to understand; that it took courage to be vulnerable, to cry and to admit how hurt you felt. Boys just seemed to walk around with suits of armor on, like they’d die if they ever admitted how they really felt.

Scott took a deep breath. "Okay, so maybe sometimes I feel that way too. My father…"

Scott swallowed hard and we all waited, even Mike, who had every reason to rag Scott back.

"He drinks too much," Scott said, and my heart went out to him. I felt bad for what I’d just thought about boys not being able to feel hurt.

Maria slipped her arm around Scott’s and he flashed her a smile, but one that came and went too quickly.

"He and my mother fight a lot and I know my mom’s always afraid that he’s going to leave us. Mike, you’ve got more guts than I do, because I can’t even see movies like that. It hurts too much to see what I don’t have. What I might never have."

Maria tightened her grip on Scott’s arm.

"It’s getting worse, isn’t it?" my father said, and I frowned, surprised at the concern in his voice. "I see it all the time," he said. "In my office, with my patients, my students, all around me. I see people hurting, wishing for something better, as if they can sense something slipping away and they’re afraid that it won’t ever come back. Is it slipping away, Jo-Bri?"

Debbie suddenly started crying. I was up in a flash, and so were Linda and Maria. The boys watched, suddenly looking almost comically helpless, as we comforted her.

"What’s wrong, sweetie?" I asked, stroking her hair while Linda and Maria hugged her.

She shook her head, wiping her eyes and smearing her mascara.

"My mother’s dying," she said.

Jo-Bri knelt beside us now and we automatically moved aside to allow him access to Debbie. I marveled at how easily he took control of the situation.

He said nothing, simply placed his hands on either side of her pretty, tear-stained face. Within seconds tears were rolling down Jo-Bri’s cheeks too, and I felt my heart breaking for him – for both of them, but I felt proud too, of this man-boy who was strong enough to feel and show this kind of emotion without seeming in the least weak. I noticed that Debbie was staring at him in wonder. He slowly withdrew his hands and sat back on his heels.

"The fact that you can still feel this way means that there’s hope," he said quietly, and then glanced around, "for all of us. For your world."

He touched her cheek again and she pressed her cheek against his hand.

I could see the yearning in Debbie’s eyes, the yearning for Jo-Bri, and I felt a little sad, knowing she couldn’t have him. She was my friend and I wanted someone like Jo-Bri for her.

Jo-Bri stood, his beautiful face set in hard lines. The kindness still shone through his eyes, but it was a strong kindness, not a fearful or weak one. He turned to my father.

"Yes," he said. "I think it is slipping away."

Jo-Bri paused then.

"I’ve learned so much from Melinda," he said, and smiled at me, causing a little flutter in my stomach. "And I’ve read your encyclopedias, gone online for hours at a time, watched television, and it seems that there was a major… "Swerve" in your history about seventy five years ago."

We stared.

"The Holocaust," my father said, grimly.

Jo-Bri nodded. "When I first saw references to the Holocaust in Melinda’s mind, I was confused. Then when I began reading about it, I couldn’t believe it. It didn’t seem possible that anything like that could have happened, and then it didn’t seem possible that your world could have survived the guilt that something like that should have created in the human race." He frowned, and then said, grimly, "The guilt should have destroyed you."

The statement startled me.

"Why do you say that?" I asked, feeling hurt, as if the man I loved was judging me along with everyone else in the human race for what had happened so long ago.

"Imagine your father gets drunk and kills an entire family with his car," Jo-Bri said.

"Gee, thanks," my dad said, but he was wincing, not kidding.

"Imagine the guilt," Jo-Bri added.

I did imagine it. I could actually feel the fear in my belly.

"Now multiply that by a million. Twenty million people dead, whole families, whole bloodlines, whole villages, the equivalent of three entire major American cities, the population of some entire countries, slaughtered. It may not have been your father who did this, not even someone you knew, but someone, a member of your species committed an act so evil that no one can even understand the magnitude of it, not even the survivors. Twenty million people. Murdered. Think one person shot in the head and left on your lawn so that when you woke up there it is, the corpse on your lawn, staring at you with dead eyes."

I shivered and saw the others do the same.

"Now imagine two corpses on your lawn, two sets of dead eyes, maybe the flies starting to crawl on the bodies."

"Stop," I said, revolted.

"Ten corpses," Jo-Bri went on and I knew why he was doing it but that didn’t make it any easier. "A hundred corpses on your lawn, on the street in front of your house so that you can’t even get to the street without walking on the bodies, a thousand, and now your entire block is covered with bodies, a million bodies so that the stench is assaulting your nostrils and you can’t get out of your house, can’t walk to the curb, can’t walk out of your neighborhood without walking on bodies, can’t escape your own city without walking on a sea of bodies, now imagine twenty times that many bodies – "

I shook my head. I felt violated.

"You’re right," my mother said, and I saw that her eyes were brimming with tears. "The guilt should have killed us."

"Instead," Jo-Bri said, "somehow the world went on. There were trials like Nuremberg, books and movies written about it, but essentially the world just went on with life, as if this were just another thing that happened, not the most horribly significant event in the history of the world. Some people even began claiming it never happened!"

I blushed, because I had heard of those people, the Holocaust deniers, and they had never seemed important to me. In fact, I was ashamed to admit that the Holocaust itself had never seemed that important, something that happened a long time ago that had nothing to do with my life or my world now. I had never even seen "Schindler’s List."

"But something had happened," Jo-Bri finally continued, "something terrible, and like any trauma, no matter how much the victim of that trauma might deny it or try to put it behind him, eventually the symptoms had to show."

"What symptoms?" Mike asked.

Jo-Bri considered that, as if looking for just the right word. "Self-hatred."

I don’t know why, but that one term struck me deeply, it really did, and I didn’t know why.

"Self-hatred?" Scott said, shaking his head as if in denial.

"What do you mean?" Linda asked.

"I know what he means," my father said. "Look at our culture, our television shows, our music. We’re filled with contempt for ourselves and for others."

I groaned. So did all my friends, except Debbie, who was frowning. I put that down to Jo-Bri having just bonded with her so intimately through her sorrow. She’d probably be willing to go to a Billy Graham crusade right now if Jo-Bri suggested it.

"American Pie," my mother said and before any of us could ask what that meant, Jo-Bri nodded. "The song by Don MacLean, I mean," my mother added.

"Yes," was all Jo-Bri said.

"What?" I asked, confused, and admittedly a little defensive. You don’t get to be a teenaged girl without feeling as if everything you like is being attacked by your parents and the older people in the world, especially your music. So sue me – I love hip-hop and rock and roll. And it has nothing to do with self-hatred, I just… I just like the music, okay?

"There’s an interesting shift in music and in the culture of your world as a whole in the fifties going into the sixties," Jo-Bri said, and both my parents nodded. Of course they would nod, I thought dryly.

"It became mean."

"That’s what ‘American Pie’ was about," my father said. "The day the music died."

"Oh, God," I moaned.

Jo-Bri laughed and I loved him for it. That struck me again. I did -- I loved this man-boy.

"Music in my world is used to celebrate and to mourn, to laugh and love and cry and dream," Jo-Bri said, "it is sacred and joyful and soulful," and because I did love him, I sighed and leaned forward to listen, even though I was sure I’d heard it all before. "So why did it become so mean in your world?" he asked. "When did sneering and simulated sex and disrespect and ignorance and arrogance and sexism and aggression become part of what should be a celebration, the highest, most touching form of verbal expression?"

I know, I know, there’s some hip hop that talks about bitches and "capping pigs," but…

Jo-Bri took a deep breath.

"This is important," he said, and that hit all of us, because of the seriousness in his voice. It was a little like a slap in the face, waking us up.

"This isn’t just about magic," Jo-Bri said, considering carefully what he was going to say. "Hodon is a wizard and he will use magic, but even the greatest magician who ever lived can’t conquer an entire world, unless that world is already compromised."

"Compromised?" Debbie asked, and I could see that she was focused now in a way she had never been in all the years I’d known her. She looked more serious and… aware. She was listening instead of talking, and that was significant, given that we’d all assumed that she was simply ADHD and incapable of really paying attention. I thought of the effect Jo-Bri had had on me, placing those huge hands of his on me, and I could only imagine what Debbie had just gone through with the man I loved -- the mysterious, gorgeous, powerful man I loved. The one who hated my music and my lifestyle?

"Like I said, there is a lot of beauty in this world," Jo-Bri said. "But like your father said, it is slipping away. Look at what we see, at what we accept as being ‘normal.’ Women treated like objects whose only worth is in their tits and ass."

Scott laughed. My mother glared at him. I noticed, though, that she was wearing a low cut blouse.

Jo-Bri ignored them both.

"Gang bangers," he went on, "being treated like heroes. Entertainers and athletes defacing their bodies with tattoos, and strutting about with sneers, barely able to speak English and when they do half their vocabulary has to be bleeped, videos in which talented singers sell their music by basically selling their bodies, as if an ugly woman can’t sing well and a sexy, half-naked one doesn’t have to sing well because it’s more about their skin than their talent. Reality shows in which we watch people show their worst behavior, celebrities who are famous for being famous or for being drunk or stoned of just contemptuous, and you eat it all up, like this is normal, like this is entertaining."

We stared. Jo-Bri stared back. I could tell my parents wanted to stand up and cheer.

Jo-Bri glanced from one of us to the other, seeing that he had not reached us. I mean, I understood what he was saying, but the world was about to be invaded by some kind of super wizard, I thought there were more important things to worry about.

I worried that maybe he’d get angry, but instead he shook his head, as if disappointed, and I realized that his disappointment hurt me a lot more than his anger would have.

"Close your eyes," Jo-Bri said quietly. We all hesitated. "Close your eyes," he repeated, gently, in that deep, rich voice of his.

We did.

"I’m going to help you feel," he said, and I didn’t understand what he meant, but I could hear him speak quietly in some other language, and slowly I became… aware. I had been sitting in this beautiful field, surrounded by grass and flowers and trees, the creek flowing by, the sound of birdsong and yet I had not been really aware of it. I gasped as that awareness increased, and I could sense the others react the same way, and even Jo-Bri’s quiet voice became part of the beauty, mixing in with the sound of the breeze, the occasional insect, the birds… it was stunning. It filled me up and seemed almost to lift me up off the ground and make me… bigger somehow, as if my consciousness were expanding and taking my physical body with it, and I was amazed that I had never seen the world this way before.

Then, in the background, I heard something… music… slowly it became louder, and I realized it was hip hop – no, rock and roll… it was both and neither, a pounding beat that seemed to eat away at the feeling I’d had, the joy, the peace, and it got louder and louder and now I could hear lyrics being screamed more and more loudly, the beat getting louder as well, and it felt as if the music was beating me, pounding me down into the earth, smashing me… I began to feel afraid though I wasn’t sure why… it was if I were being attacked, assaulted, but I knew this music, it was my music, and just as I had never felt the world quite like this, I had never felt this music like this either, the anger of it, the contempt, the… hatred.

I shook my head and actually heard someone moan as if in pain or fear.

Then an image of half-naked women dancing to the wild, pounding beat, and sneering, angry looking men, moving violently in time to the music which made me realize that the music too was violent, and the fear built in me, and the feeling of violation increased.

Slowly the music and images faded. I realized I was panting. The awareness of the beauty around me was gone now, and instead I felt numb.

Now that the screaming music was gone, I could hear Jo-Bri’s voice again, quietly speaking in that strange language, the language of magic and spells. As his voice went on, I felt something growing in me.

Fear. At first it was like the fear I’d felt while listening to the pounding music and watching the images of the violent men and frightened women, but then it grew well beyond that and deepened, reaching into me instead of just wrapping itself around me the way the music had.

I opened my eyes and stood up, feeling a rising sense of panic, and I saw that my friends had stood as well, glancing around.

"What’s going on?" I asked, trying to control the fear and the volume of my voice.

My parents were on their feet now too, looking as if they wanted to flee.

Jo-Bri’s voice rose even louder now and it sounded as if he were shouting.

"Stop it!" Debbie yelled.

"Stop it!" Mike yelled as well.

"Please," Maria said, crying.

Suddenly Linda dropped to her knees, covering her ears as if against some loud noise. "Please," she said, sobbing, "stop it."

It felt as if my legs were going to buckle and then suddenly they did. I fell to my knees and immediately placed my head on the grass, and heard myself start to scream in terror.

Then it was over. I was kneeling, my forehead pressed against the grass, my hands over my head and I was still screaming. I forced myself to stop and realized how heavily I was panting. I had heard about panic attacks and wondered if this was what I had just experienced. Except that no panic attack could have been this bad.

I slowly raised my head off the grass and saw that everyone except Jo-Bri was down on the ground, either lying or kneeling. We were all perspiring and panting heavily. All three girls were sobbing.

Jo-Bri allowed his head to drop onto his chest, as if looking exhausted – or disgusted.

"I’m so sorry," he said as we all struggled to our feet.

Jo-Bri shook his head, and I realized that he had been sobbing as well and that startled me even more.

"I – I just wanted you to understand."

"What did you do?" my mother asked, gasping, my father helping her stand up, having gotten to his feet before she had.

Jo-Bri took a deep breath. "This is a fraction of what Hodon can do."

"Jesus," I said, and had to force myself not to cry in despair. That was the word – despair.

"How are you going to withstand something like this if you’re already filled with self-hatred?" Jo-Bri asked. "The music you listen to, the television you watch, the language you use, all of it shapes you. Hodon wants you to despair. So do the hip hoppers and rock and rollers and reality television producers, they want you to be less than you can be, and by being less than you can be you leave yourself open to Hodon."

"A fraction?" Mike said, still gasping for breath. "That was a fraction of what Hodon can do? Jesus Christ, Jo-Bri, how can we fight that?"

"By knowing who you are, and what you’re worth."

I didn’t know what to say, I still felt overwhelmed by the feelings Jo-Bri had created in me, and I felt betrayed as well, hurt that he had put me through this. I shook my head and then looked up. Jo-Bri was standing in front of me, his hand on my shoulder, and there were tears in his eyes.

"I’m sorry," he repeated. "But you didn’t understand."

"No," I said, and heard a coldness to my voice, "I didn’t. I didn’t understand what you were capable of."

He winced and I immediately felt sorry, though still too angry to admit it.

Jo-Bri studied my face a moment longer, then stepped back into the middle of the field.

"My God," my father finally managed. My mother had her head on his chest and was sobbing.

"How could you do this to us?" Linda said, sobbing as well. "How could you?"

Jo-Bri closed his eyes a moment, gathering himself and I felt a twinge of guilt. He had tried to tell us and we hadn’t listened. Well, now we were listening.

"Hodon brings fear with him," Jo-Bri said as if by rote, or as an incantation. "Despair is his weapon. He will make you feel worthless; he will make life seem worthless. He will kill you with fear."

I felt as if the fear were returning, starting in my belly and flaring upward and through my body.

"Stop it," I snapped.

Jo-Bri stared at me. "Mel… I’m not doing anything."

I put my face in my hands and began sobbing. I had never felt this kind of despair. I suddenly remembered what Jo-Bri had said, that the worst moment was the moment when the fear and pain stopped, because that was when you realized how horrible it was, and realized that it would start again.

It would start again, when Hodon came. I wanted to kill myself.

The admission shocked me to my core.

"We can’t fight this," I heard myself say and hated myself for saying it, even though I felt it was true with every fiber of my being.

"Then we’ve lost," Jo-Bri said.

I stared at him. He wasn’t bluffing. There was no despair in his voice, it was just matter of fact. I realized something else – Jo-Bri wasn’t going to run from Hodon, even though he had no chance against him. He would face him because that was who Jo-Bri was. And I was about to let him down.

I felt a surge of anger.

"No!" I snapped, surprising myself as much as the others around me.

Jo-Bri stared at me. His hand was partially lifted from his side, as if wanting to touch me, to hold me, but waiting to see what I had to say first.

"Melinda – " my mother said.

"Mel," my father said too.

I felt their fear, their worry and I met their gaze, holding it, and then finally turning back to Jo-Bri. "What do we need to do?" I said.

He took a deep breath. "Read the rain," he said, "and become who you really are."

I nodded.

I’ll never forget that afternoon, of course – it was spent with the man I loved, my parents and my closest friends, and we were there to find a way to try to stop the destruction of our world. So how do you ever forget something like that? But even more than that, I remember it as the beginning of my awakening as a human being.

What followed that day and in later days and weeks was life altering, though it didn’t seem so at first. I guess we all thought it would be like "Bewitched" or "Harry Potter," where we learned how to pop in and out of places, become invisible, brew up love potions, weave spells and tame wild animals.

Instead, Jo-Bri seemed more interested teaching us how to tame the wild animal within us rather than trying to defeat any external enemy.

At one point my mother said, "We have found the enemy and he is us." I laughed when she revealed that that was a line from an old cartoon called Pogo, but Jo-Bri jumped on it, nodding enthusiastically, as if it were the secret to life.

As it turned out, maybe Pogo had been right all along: we were our own worst enemies – except for Hodon of course.

Over and over we came to realize all the ways in which we disrespected ourselves and those around us. More amazing, though, was the fact that we had not seen it. We had done all these self-sabotaging things and never once considered the consequences – to ourselves and to others.

My parents were way ahead of us in some ways, because it’s not like they were going to walk around with their pants hanging below their butts, their hats cocked sideways, flashing gang signs. Neither did we, but it was surprising the ways in which we acted disrespectfully toward ourselves and others.

It may sound like an easy thing: you’re shown the ways in which you’re behaving inappropriately and you just… change. But we had been brought up to consider certain things acceptable, normal, "okay." And now we saw that so many of those things, those behaviors, those important parts of our culture were actually attacks on our own integrity and, more importantly, our own power.

And power was exactly what we needed if we were to have a chance against Hodon and his wizards and soldiers.

So, again: you find out that these things are "bad" and you stop doing them, right?

And, again, not that easy. Take music, for example. Sitting in that field, feeling the real magic of life flowing through me, the heavy metal rock and roll and sneering hip hop had seemed like an obscene attack on my senses, and at that moment it had amazed me that I had never seen them that way before. There wasn’t a single life affirming thing about that music, the beat, the lyrics, nor the images of the sneering, tattooed, half-naked women or sneering, tattooed, angry men miming sex and violence with their every gesture and expression while screaming their off-key hatred at me.

But that music was also a part of my culture, my life, and my upbringing. I remember so often being in my car, bopping to some hard rock or hip-hop song, jumping up and down behind the steering wheel like some "head banger" driving down the street or highway and it was… fun. It didn’t matter that the beat was an acoustic assault on my inner peace, that the lyrics were disrespectful of women or police or authority or just people in general. It… was… fun. And sometimes it was the only way I had to deal with the stresses of life (I know, what stresses does a 17-year-old girl have, right?). It was part of the only control I had over things – I could be in my car, listening to my music, doing my little dance and to hell with anything or anyone else, because that moment, that enjoyment was mine and no-one could take it from me.

I think we were all defensive about the parts of our lives we considered uniquely "ours," as part of our identity. It was part of who we were as a generation, part of our rebellion against the "establishment," (whatever that was) and of course one way of separating ourselves from our parents, which every teenager desperately needs to do.

How do you give all that up just because some wizard from another world tells you it’s not good for you? Okay, he wasn’t just any wizard, he was… my wizard. I smiled at that, feeling warm all over – some parts of me more than others.

And I knew I was being unfair because Jo-Bri didn’t use words like "good" or "bad." Instead he spoke of the ways in which we were suppressing our own power as human beings and, more importantly, as spiritual beings.

And this wasn’t just an exercise in theory anymore; it was a life or death situation – not just our lives and deaths, but the survival of our entire species.

So we began mastering our magical dominance of the external world not by twitching our noses or waving our wands, but by turning off the televisions and car stereos, closing our eyes and going inside.

It drove us crazy at first. I mean, it wasn’t bad for a few minutes, maybe even ten or twenty minutes, but when it extended to hours, sitting there, doing nothing but listening to Jo-Bri’s deep, quiet voice guiding us to places we had never been because we had never wanted to go there…

By the end of the first day I felt stoned (or at least what I imagined stoned would feel like, I’ve always been too much of a sissy to do drugs), and my legs and butt hurt.

That night, I wanted nothing more than to be with Jo-Bri with my eyes open (or closed, depending on what we were doing…). But when we met on the patio behind the house, we just… sat there, saying nothing, and I wondered what was wrong. I put it down to the stoned feeling and swore not to repeat it the next night.

By the end of the second day I had spent as much time silently screaming in boredom as I did "meditating" (I wasn’t even sure what "meditating" meant, to be honest), and really, really wanting to be with Jo-Bri. And again, we spent the evening on the back patio, quietly, not saying anything, and I began to worry that what I had thought of as our torrid (if unconsummated) love affair had been a flash in the pan.

It was after the third day that I finally had enough. I had thought that after a day of "teaching me," Jo-Bri would turn back into the gorgeous, loving boy I had fallen in love with and we could just be teenagers together. Instead, he seemed distant and it was killing me.

So we sat on the back patio, staring up at the stars without saying a word. So I screamed. Really, really loudly.

"What’s wrong?" I heard my mother yell as she and my father came running out of the back of the house.

I noticed that Jo-Bri was still calmly sitting there, though now he had a little smile on his face – you might almost call it a smirk.

"Are you okay, sweetie?" my father asked as my parents stopped in front of me, panting.

I felt like an idiot but was way too angry to admit it.

"I’m fine," I grumbled.

My mother stared at me in disbelief. Then she glanced at Jo-Bri, then back at me. "Okay," she said, putting her hands on her hips, and I knew I was in trouble, "I don’t know what’s going on with you two, but you need to talk it out."

She turned and started walking away, my father following, then she suddenly stopped and swiveled back to face us again. "And do not yell unless Hodon is climbing over the back fence and has at least five wizards with him!"

She then marched away again, mumbling under her breath, my father casting an apologetic glance back at Jo-Bri and me.

I turned to face Jo-Bri. He stared back. "Well?" I said, almost putting my fists on my hips like my mother had – God, was I becoming my mother already?

Jo-Bri narrowed his eyes. I blinked. He was just… so… damned… cute.

"Will you stop that?" I said, peeved.

He laughed. Unfortunately, that was cute too. I didn’t want cute at that particular moment, at least not the kind of cute that was just… distracting.

"Stop what?" he asked.

"Being quiet!" I said, and realized how silly that sounded.

He stopped laughing and studied my face. "I love you," he suddenly said, quietly, calmly, not in a blasé way, but rather with a calm certainty that took my breath away. It was a long moment before I could manage: "Well then why haven’t you said anything to me?"

He took a long, slow breath. "Close your eyes."

"I’ve spent all day closing my eyes," I said, and yes I knew how petulant I sounded but for some reason I actually wanted to sound that way, maybe because I thought it would cause Jo-Bri to coddle me – or even better cuddle me.

Jo-Bri raised a single eyebrow.

I considered whining, maybe even mewing… instead I sighed and closed my eyes.

I waited. And waited. I opened one eye. Jo-Bri was gone. I came that close to screaming again but didn’t want to put my parents through that again, and definitely didn’t want to incur my mother’s wrath – she was small but feisty, which is how I had always liked to think about myself as well, but I definitely didn’t feel feisty at that moment.

I stood up, anger flowing through me.

"If you can’t be by yourself," Jo-Bri said and I twirled around. He was standing a few feet away, staring up at the stars. "Then how," he continued, "can you be with anyone else?"

I wanted to smack him. No, seriously, just walk up and smack him on the back of that gorgeous head of his.

"I thought you said you loved me," I said, still trying not to scream in frustration.

He turned to face me, and I saw that his face was serious, even grim. "It’s because I love you that this is so important."

I realized I was panting. My heart was racing. I was afraid. Afraid that he had left me, and that I might still lose him. It was dawning on me how much I… needed him, and that realization slammed into me, almost knocking the breath out of me.

He nodded and I knew that he had read my thoughts -- or maybe just my posture and heavy breathing.

"Fear is the greatest weapon that Hodon has," he said, his voice hard now. "Fear is how he will destroy your world. I can’t let that happen. Neither can you."

I nodded, because as angry as I was with Jo-Bri for "screwing" with me, I knew that he was right – fear, not anger was my primary emotion. And if I was afraid because Jo-Bri had walked ten feet away from me, how would I feel when Hodon put his fear into me? How would I resist his fear when I was already so full of my own?

Jo-Bri held his hand out to me. My heart leapt but I forced myself to take a breath, to hesitate and center myself before walking slowly, calmly toward him. When I slipped my hand into his, my heart leapt again but instead of joy I felt fear again. I shook my head.

"You can’t have fear and joy at the same time," he said. "Fear is the enemy of joy… peace… even love. Fear fills every space it exists in, pushing everything else out. It paralyzes you, it takes away your ability to choose, it makes you unable to give anything to anyone else."

He paused, thinking, then, "Fear is selfish."

That was like a slap in the face.

He led me off the patio and through the gate in the back yard fence, down to the field by the creek.

"Sit," he said, indicating the grass.

I sat, noting that the night air was getting chilly.

He sat several feet from me, crossing his legs. I crossed mine too, knowing what was going to follow.

"Close your eyes," he said.

I did, and the fear flared even more strongly inside me. I wasn’t even sure what I was afraid of, though it seemed that it was the fear itself that frightened me. I remembered from one of my classes that one of our presidents had said something about that.

"There is nothing to fear but fear itself," Jo-Bri said, and my eyes snapped open. How did he do that? It was kind of creepy.

"Close your eyes," he repeated, gently but firmly.

I did and thus began the longest night of my life.

The air temperature dropped slowly but steadily. My butt, already sore from a day of "meditating," hurt even more. My legs, crossed beneath me, began to cramp. And all I wanted to do was to fall into Jo-Bri’s arms and have him hold me, and protect me.

At one point I heard my mother’s voice, then my father’s, and finally Jo-Bri responding to them, then the silence returned so I assumed that whatever he had said to them had caused them to go back to the house.

And through it all I continued to feel afraid – afraid that I would always be afraid, afraid that Hodon would kill us all, afraid of the fear that Hodon would make me feel, afraid that Jo-Bri would leave me once we had defeated Hodon or maybe even before then, afraid that Hodon would kill Jo-Bri.

I don’t know how much time had passed since I had felt the last tinge of fear, but at some point during the night I realized that the fear had left me. It flared again just because I thought of it, but that too soon faded away, and I felt… deep and dark and warm, even though I could tell the air temperature was even lower than it had been.

And then, somehow, it was morning. I could tell because I could see the light through my eyelids. And I was at peace. I didn’t want to move, had no desire to, had no desires at all, really, and it was as if I were at peace for the first time in my young life. And once again it was only upon losing everything else, the fear, the desire, the anger, it was only upon letting all that go that I realized how much I had been holding onto in my short life.

I felt the pressure on my lips and opened my eyes. Jo-Bri was kissing me and something flared in me so strongly that I felt as if I had actually burst into flames. I pulled him to me and fell back onto the grass, releasing my legs from beneath me, allowing him to mold himself to me.

We made love there on the grass that was covered with morning dew, in the cold morning air by the creek that had flowed past this spot for countless hundreds of years, and there are no words to describe it because it wasn’t about words or even feelings, but rather just the experience itself, the purest physical act I’d ever performed, an act so pure that it went far beyond the physical and it was as if I were growing and expanding outward and inwardly at the same time, filling space and time and becoming both more physical and less, and at some point I experienced the faint, far away thought that I might just keep on expanding forever and never come back to the compact physical form that I now understood was such a small part of who I really was.

Afterward we lay in each other’s arms, naked, Jo-Bri still inside me and again I didn’t want to move, though for different reasons now. I could feel myself returning to the "real" world and there was a tinge of disappointment in that, though I knew it was necessary and I smiled, knowing it was okay.

"Wow," I said, knowing that speaking would in itself distance us from the experience.

Jo-Bri smiled and I marveled at that, his beautiful face, those pale green eyes, full lips, and I moved just enough to remind myself – and him -- that he was still inside me.

Part of me, the busy, chatting part of my mind that was the "old" Melinda, wanted to ask questions, but the "new" part of me didn’t have to.

Eventually we dressed and walked silently back up to the house. I saw that the sun had just crested a new horizon, and that it was probably about 6 a.m.

My parents were sitting on the patio, both asleep, and I smiled, feeling more love for them than perhaps I ever had. They had sat there throughout the cold night, just so that they could be close in case I needed them.

I knelt by my mother’s chair and gently kissed her forehead. I glanced up at Jo-Bri and he was smiling at me and I marveled that only a few hours ago I had so desperately needed him to talk to me, when now words seemed completely unnecessary.

My mother stirred and her eyes fluttered open. I had forgotten how blue they were, how beautiful she was, and when her full lips curved upward in a smile, I felt a surge of energy run through me.

"Hi," I said, not really wanting to speak.

She just smiled and suddenly we were hugging. I was startled, not by the hug but by the fact that she seemed to know as well as I did that words were not necessary for us to express ourselves.

When we finally pulled apart, I saw that my father was staring at me, studying my face, and then he glanced at Jo-Bri and I knew that he knew what had happened down by the creek. I knew that they would not have been able to see us from where they sat, but…

My mother touched my cheek so gently that I felt a tear rolling down my cheek. She studied my face and gently wiped the tear away, so that for a moment I felt like a little girl again.

But I wasn’t a little girl. Not anymore.