*inspired by the image above*

It was me, the boy in the wheelchair, the forgotten road in the woods behind the old trailer park, and the leaves stuck midair, centimeters from my spectacled nose.

I pushed my glasses up. “Hh-h-ow?” The word stumbled from my mouth. My cheeks blazed as my weakness was laid bare yet again in front of this boy who lurked in the corner of every lecture hall on campus. The boy who was preferential to shadows so he could—I presumed—mask his wheelchair and keep pity at bay.

Jude. His name was Jude.

He hadn’t said another word after asking me to walk with him, but now he adjusted his brown leather jacket and watched me with the briefest of smirks on his lips.

Jude’s magic was clandestine, without expression; he did not snap his brown fingers, nor did he wave his hands across the air, digits wiggling. The dark coils atop his head did not dance with a yellow, electric foreshadowing. His was sneaky, sophisticated creepiness. 

Oh Yeah. I had no doubt now. If I had been the sorting hat from Hogwarts, this dude was straight Slytherin. And I was out here with him. Alone. A moth in a web.

I yanked the zipper of my jacket all the way up to my chin, fighting the shiver sliding up my spine, though it was probably close to seventy degrees.

The leaves were elm, copper-toned with edges round, and miraculously encased in a blue-ish crystalline tinge, and winked like steel calamity in the evening dusk. Frost? Enthralled, but suspicious, I pinged it downward with my pointer finger, gasping when the edge sliced my finger. It hit the dirt path and shattered. 

The earth sucked up the wetness in a blink.  

This was what he’d wanted to show me?

I shoved my finger in my mouth for a second, then removed it as words formed on my tongue. “The ice r-r-rink gy-gymnasium…that was y-y-you?” My eyes widened. “And p-p-rofessor Lyn-Lyndsay?” The poor woman who taught The History of Mythological Creatures had stepped onto the iced gymnasium floor and become gridlocked in ice from the waist down. It took the janitor hours to chisel her out, and that was with the aid of a space heater he’d had stashed under a pile of junk in the storage room.

Jude leaned—or did he slide?—forward in his wheelchair, fingers gripping the armrests.

I felt the shift in him, in the air, like he was about to peel the very skin off my bones with his power. What had I done wrong? I’d left my seat to hand him the worksheets in every class we had together (which was two), hadn’t peppered him with a million and five questions about what had happened to him…Oh. I had offered to hold the door open for him a few times. Oh man. Talk about insulting a Slytherin.

He’d said he wanted to show me something, back in the woods. I came, like a friggin idiot, and now--?

A force slammed me backwards into a tree, my shoes at least a foot from the ground. I tried to scream, but all oxygen was gone. The remaining leaves that Jude had suspended in midair were suddenly in front of my face, glassy edges gleaming, taunting my impending doom. One flicked at my throat like a blade, drawing blood.

“J-j-j,” I said once I could drag in a breath again, panting. “P-p-please, Jude,” I said.

He wheeled close to me, eyebrows furrowed in…frustration? Intensity? “Help yourself,” he said, staring at my clenched fists.

I coughed and sputtered, tasting soot on my tongue. I swallowed. “N-no way. I c-c-c-can’t—“ My chest began to burn.

“You can, Fen. And you will.”

Crapsauce. He KNEW.

The familiar warmth coiled quickly in my belly, my magic awakening quick as a gasoline-induced bonfire. Yet fear raced even faster.

I had to shut it down. I couldn’t go there again. The phoenix inside screamed and thrashed her wings against my will, against the confines of my ribs, but I refused to free her.

Instead, I forced myself to go limp, choosing to be at the mercy of Jude instead of the creature inside of me. My head rested against the bark of the tree, but inside, I still wrestled for control. I unclenched my hands, and they shook.

Jude’s eyes flickered, able, somehow, to see my inner struggle  against what he probably thought was self-preservation.

Far from it. I was trying to save him. 

Another leaf cut into my cheek just as a tear streaked down it.

Jude’s lips slackened, his eyes softened. “You’re not going to save yourself, are you?”

I was able to shake my head once, my flat black hair flopping the sides of my still red face.

“I could kill you, you know.”

Oh, I knew. But I also knew that I would kill us both before he could even try, but I didn’t dare say it. It would’ve come out as a stutter anyway. He wasn’t the one that had more lives than a cat—he would stay dead.

I laughed, a small, you-have-no-idea laugh. 

To my surprise, I slid down the tree.

Jude, releasing his hold on me, popped out of the wheelchair onto both feet like he’d gotten prayer at a healing service. 

I stared as he danced around the tree he’d just held me hostage on. What in the friggin Diagon Alley was this? Dizzy, I bent over, hand on my chest. So maybe he *didn’t* know about me and my…ability. Thank whatever god there was. I adjusted my glasses and kept telling myself to breathe.

“Okay, so,” he said, slinging his jacket onto the handles of the wheelchair, “I need you to read something.”

Standing upright, I gaped at him.

“What? Oh, too much? Look, I’ll sit back in the chair again...” He hopped back into the chair and wheeled up to me a second time, grinning. “That better?”

I was the one who wanted to flay the skin from his bones now. “What the fr-frick, J-J-Jude!”

He laughed, had the gall to pat me on the thigh. “I had to test you, okay? You passed.” He pop-a-wheelied the chair toward the abandoned trailer park I was beginning to think was not so abandoned.

Lovely. I trotted after him, tennis shoes crunching on gravel and twigs, mind spinning, breath chugging in short gasps.

“There’s a book–from my uncle–and I can’t read it.” He glances at me just as he rolls up to a dilapidated single wide and gestures to the door. “The pages are blank.”

“So you’re n-n-not dis-dis…abled-d?” I wipe my sweaty hands on my skirt.

“Nah.” He doesn’t even bother to turn the doorknob, but shoves the door open with his shoulder, leaving the wheelchair behind.

The inside of the trailer is ‌sanitary, clear of debris, and it smelled of the bathroom at home after mom nazi-sprayed it with the citrusy-goodness of Mr. Clean. He jogged to the living room, knelt on the worn carpet behind a flower-patterned 80s sofa, and pulled out a small wooden box with metal fastenings. Tossing the lid up, Jude slid his hand in. 

The book itself was dainty, a pocket notebook with a hardcover and a blue ribbon draped down the middle of its pages, pages full of cursive script. 

My face must’ve lit up, because he pumped the air with both arms. “I knew it! You can see words, can’t you?” He closed the book and inhaled. Exhaled. “Here,” he says, placing the book into my hands. “Read it.”

Sitting cross legged on the floor, I turn to the first page and read it to myself, Jude leaning in so close he’s almost in my lap.

 

If you are reading these words, you are blessed. There are few left who can. 

 

Do not idly share these words with those who are blind–to do so is to ensure their swift doom. They do not have eyes to see, ears to hear, nor hearts to understand.

 

These words will lay siege to the soul. What is on these pages will kill the flesh.

 

With a gasp, I slam the book shut, pulse racing. Jude’s blind: the book is unreadable to him. I cannot share its contents, or he’ll die. Fear crawls across my shoulders like a daddy long legs. 

Jude tumbles backward onto his rear. “Aren’t you going to tell me what it says?”
There’s no way I trust my voice right now. I shake my head.

His expression darkens like a tornado, fast and menacing. “Whattaya mean, no?”

Oh man. He might really kill me now. I shove the book into his chest and back away, fully intending to return it; I have no use for it, no desire for it. But I’m astonished that it’s still in my hands when I backpedal away from him. Like, stuck. Glued. “I m-m-mean no, J-J-Jude.”

He growls and steps toward me, fists forming. “Then give it back!”

“I d-dont even–” A terrified shriek comes out of my mouth. “It’s s-s-s-stuck!”

“I’m not an idiot, Fen.”

I clench my eyes shut. I know he’s not an idiot. If anyone’s the idiot, it’s me, Fen, the girl with a bumbling tongue. How can I tell him with the fewest words possible? “The b-b–book warned me t-t-to–” I shake my head and try again. “The w–words were a w-w-warning.”

He pauses; it seems to throw flour on his grease fire. “You mean, dangerous?”

I thrust my open palms at the boy no longer in the wheelchair, pages fanned out, the cover adhering to my skin. “I think s-s-so.”

He grabs the back cover and tugs. Nothing. Blinks and exhales. “Tell me.”

I offer a prayer to the gods of the book. “These words will lay siege to the soul. What is on these pages will kill the flesh.” Cheesy Red Lobster biscuits! Not a single stutter.

He totally missed my Mother Theresa moment. 

However, frozen leaves spin around us, not close enough to harm me, but near enough to be a threat. “That’s from the first page?”

“I s-s-swear.”

Jude rakes his fingers down his face. “All right. Come on.”