Miracle - Chapter 1: Chapter 1

"Agh. Gross! Nobody wants to hear about your nasty girl issues, Maddy!"
My twin tossed her bobbed hair. It was the same dirty blond color as mine, though she wore hers several inches shorter. "Then go be somewhere else," she chirped as her friends giggled.
"You really ain't never had a period, Maddy?" one of her friends reiterated, making me cringe all over again. "That's so weird. By fifteen you should totally be on the rag like the rest of us."
"That's what I'm saying!"
"And the doc doesn't think anything's wrong?"
"Says I'm just a late bloomer."
"Super late. I got mine when I was nine!"
As if I needed to know that. I glanced around uncomfortably, hoping no one else was listening in. Most of the other kids were over at the picnic table, stuffing their faces with chocolate cake and made-from-scratch icing that I'd spent the better part of the morning working on. Tyler, the one I was most worried about, was preoccupied with three flirty girls hovering around him like flies on a horse's ass. The longer he stayed over there, the better. But it wasn't as if I could just walk off from my sister and her friends right now. I was still on his radar.
"Hey, you're lucky," Hailey piped up, nudging Maddy with her shoulder. "You got better boobs than any of us and you don't have to mess with tampons? Trust me, you're not missing out."
I clapped hands over my ears and glared. "Ugh, who talks about this shit at a birthday party?" It was already weird enough that Mom insisted on taking Maddy for a doctor checkup on our birthday every year. Not me, just Maddy.
"Oh, suck it up, Connor."
"Yeah, I don't know why it should bother you. You're practically a girl anyway."
Amused horror raised the brows of the other girls, and one murmured, "Oh no she didn't."
I stiffened, but it was Maddy who took my side now, both verbally and physically. She stepped close to me and gave her friend an icy stare. "Not cool, Jenna."
Jenna, who was relatively new to the inner ranks of my sister's social circle, tried to laugh it off. "Come on, it was a joke."
"It ain't funny," Maddy snapped, and wound an arm around mine. "Nobody gives Connor crap like that, you got it? Apologize."
I rolled my eyes a little. "She was kidding, Maddy."
"I don't care. She's apologizing or we're not friends anymore."
I sighed as the other girls' lips shaped into gleeful oohs. Jenna glanced at me with a wry grimace. "Sorry, Connor."
I had to nod acceptance. Since the day I'd come out to my family a year ago, my sister Madison had turned into an overprotective, zero-tolerance crusader for my rights. I guess it was because I'd been picked on pretty much nonstop since we started kindergarten. Maddy and I were fraternal twins, obviously, but except for one glaring difference we had still ended up with nearly the same genes. We were skinny, with the same hair and pale blue eyes, the same narrow facial features. We even had matching clefts in our chins. We both hated tomatoes, loved comic books, and preferred French fries to ice cream. And we were both attracted to boys. More often than not, the same boys.
Unfortunately, we were also the same height: five foot two. Perfectly respectable for her as a teen girl, but I was the shortest guy in our class and I always had been. Where Maddy made our dainty bone structure look cute, I just looked like a wuss. And that was exactly what I got called. Actually, it was one of the nicer labels I'd been christened with over the years.
Being gay on top of being small would have been a high school death sentence, if it weren't for my spitfire of a twin sister. She was pretty much the only reason I'd survived freshman year. After the first time I came home from school with two black eyes, bruised ribs and an impressively fat lip—not to mention a wedgie to end all wedgies, that left me unable to sit down for two days—she barely let me out of her sight the rest of the year. Woe unto the asshat who so much as looked at me sideways from then on, because Madison Hayes took crap from no one.
Speaking of which, she turned her self-righteous indignation on me next. "And you. Stop making excuses for people who bully you. They only keep doing it because you stand there and take it."
Easy for you to say. In podunkville Texas, it was against every moral and social code to hit a girl. But that consideration didn't apply to me. Standing up for myself at my size was a good way to ensure an even worse beat down. Besides, I didn't really feel insulted by being called a girl. Maddy was a girl, and one of the toughest people I knew. I shrugged. "It's not that big of a—"
The words died on my lips at a sliver of movement in my peripheral vision.
I turned to squint into the shadows cast by the shed in the far corner of our yard. My heart leapt into my throat as a hulking, fluid shape retreated into the blackness behind it, almost too smoothly to be perceptible. My pulse was suddenly hammering wild percussion on the back of my tongue. He's here?
I grabbed at Maddy's arm, but kept my voice down so her friends wouldn't hear. "Shit, did you see that? You saw him, right?"
"Huh? Who?"
I pointed across the yard in the direction of the shed. "I know I saw him. He's here, Maddy. He came."
"Oh my god, Connor. It's our fifteenth birthday. Time to give the imaginary friend thing a rest."
"I'm not imagining him," I whined, wiggling her arm. "Come on, I'll prove it."
"No way, I'm done chasing shadows with you. I want to enjoy my party. Go on your own if you want, crazypants."
If I stood there and argued he'd get away. I let go of her and took off running in the direction of the shed. If he was here, I was going to catch him for sure. It had been months since I'd last seen him. I went digging in my back jeans pocket for my cell phone as I ran. I had yet to catch up to him while Maddy was with me, so of course she didn't believe me.
But he was real. I'd seen him enough times to be sure of it. He'd even saved my life once, a very long time ago. If I could get a photo, Maddy would have to start taking me seriously.
"I'm not crazy," I muttered under my breath as I got close enough to the shed to inspect it.
The sun was going down, and the noises and lights from the party in our backyard seemed uncomfortably distant. I could hear teenaged laughter, the tropical electropop and husky vocals of Dua Lipa behind me. But now there was also the creaking of wood and rusty hinges. The dry rustle of breeze through knee-high weeds that Mom was forever bugging me to mow.
I circled the shed carefully. It was a crumbly building that smelled of mildew and gasoline, where we kept the lawnmower, gardening tools that hadn't been touched in a decade, old paint cans, unused mousetraps and containers of pest spray. It was chilly over here, never mind the fact that this late in June the days were usually in the upper nineties. And I had to keep slapping my arms and neck as mosquitoes rallied to a party of their own wherever my skin was unprotected.
My search turned up nothing, not even around the pile of cast off tires at the back. Frustrated and feeling a little sheepish, I called out softly. "Hello?"
No response, not that I'd expected one. I sighed. Should I even bother checking inside the shed? It was locked, so he couldn't have gotten in there. He'd run off again like usual, leaving me with that punch of emptiness in my gut that always followed his enigmatic visits. I don't know why I'd expected anything else.
A fresh sting on the back of my neck made me slap myself in frustration. I lowered my hand to grimace at the little smear of blood and bug carcass on it. Looking toward the party, I could see Maddy at the cake table chatting it up with her boyfriend, Justin. Tyler was close by, but if I took a slightly circuitous path back I could avoid him. He'd leave me alone if I was in Maddy and Justin's line of sight. Justin was a decent guy. He wouldn't let Tyler hassle me any more than Maddy would. With wavy dark hair, a manly square jaw, and all that lean muscle from riding rodeo in the summertime, he was ridiculously hot, too. My sister really had all the luck.
Thunk.
I spun around, abandoning thoughts of heading back. "Hello?" The sound had definitely come from inside the shed, but I tried not to get my hopes up. Probably just a jackrabbit, raccoon, or some other critter, they were constantly squatting in there.
But what if it wasn't? I turned on my cell phone's flashlight and aimed it at the shed door.
The padlock was gone.
My heart somersaulted in my chest as I swept the light onto the ground and spotted the lock lying in the dirt. I bent to pick it up. It was open, the hook part swinging freely, and when I tried to squeeze it closed it didn't catch. The end of the hook arm had been mangled a little. The metal was sheared off as if someone had pounded it open.
I stuffed the lock into my back pocket and focused my light on the door, barely breathing. Everything had gone quiet again. Scary quiet, so that I could hear the blood ringing in my ears. My fingers shook as I took hold of the door latch. The shed opened with a high-pitched complaint, and inside was absolute darkness. There were no windows, so the shard of light that formed in the doorway didn't reveal much of what was in there.
I shone the flashlight around, and it caught on a variety of gritty, weather-worn surfaces; the lopsided shelving unit stacked with cans and tools, the tarp-draped silhouette of the lawnmower, a ladder and set of shovels hung on the back wall. Lots of dark, shadowy corners, but nothing particularly shocking... or animate.
"Is that you?" I asked of the shed's insides. Nothing moved.
I went in, keeping the light trained in front of me. A stack of spare fence planks and a couple upturned sawhorses made for treacherous navigation. I kicked something that made a loud clanging noise, and just about jumped out of my skin when a tiny furry thing went skittering over the top of my foot and headed for the door.
Mouse, I reassured myself. Better that than a rattlesnake. The field mice liked to set up shop in sheds and other semi-sheltered areas this time of year when the snakes were most active. The little guy who had just beelined for the door was unlikely to last the night out there. I kind of felt bad for him.
A faint rustle, and I snapped the light to my right. There was another set of creaky shelves, holding crates of dirty car parts and a plastic bucket of plumbing tools. Two rusty tricycles that Maddy and I hadn't played with since we were kindergarteners were jumbled on top of each other in front of it.
It took a second to register that the top one had a wheel that was spinning. I hadn't been anywhere near it, and it's not like there was a breeze in here. I stared, goosebumps rising on the back of my neck. But instead of backing my skinny ass up and getting the hell out of there, I moved forward like a lunatic. "Hello? You're in here, right? Come on, talk to me."
Behind me, the shed door creaked... and slammed shut.
I shrieked and whirled, holding my phone out like a shield, flashing its light toward the only way out of here. A huge shadow was blocking the exit—nearly two feet taller than me, and almost as wide as the door itself.
My light panned up a pair of giant, heavily scuffed motorcycle boots. Black jeans smeared with dirt. The front of a raggedy black hoodie that was missing its strings, which looked like it was at least three sizes too big for its occupant, never mind how enormous he was. The hood was dropped low, so I couldn't see his face.
"Holy shit," I breathed, as excitement tensed every muscle in my body. "It's really you."
He stood motionless for a few seconds, and I was afraid to blink in case he disappeared. He seemed to be watching me, like he was trying to decide what to do next. Finally his hands left his pockets and pushed the hood back from his face.
God, he was every bit as beautiful as I remembered. Creamy mocha complexion, with a youthful grizzle of mustache and beard framing sensually full lips. Sharply chiseled jaw and high cheekbones, like a model in a fashion magazine. Thick brows slanting dangerously over eyes so black and piercing I could swear they were reading my mind. My phone shook in my hand, sending the light dancing across his face.
"Because it's my birthday, right? That's why you're here." The one and only other time he'd let me see him this clearly had been my seventh birthday. Though he'd been keeping me hidden from my mother's tweaked out mess of a boyfriend that night, so he kind of hadn't had a choice.
As if to answer the question, he extended a hand. There was a box resting in his palm, covered in gray velvet like one of those jewelry boxes at a department store. I blinked at it. "You, uh... brought me a present?"
He inclined his head.
I reached out to take it, but couldn't resist letting my hand make contact with his in the process. His skin was warm. I definitely wasn't imagining things. I tried to make the touch linger as long as I could before removing the box from his hand and opening it up.
It wasn't a ring, it was a watch. One of those super expensive ones with a square face and black silicone band, meant to be paired with a smartphone. My mouth dropped open. No one that I knew of in our backwater town of Prickly Pear, Texas had a gadget like this. None of us could afford it.
"Whoa. Are you serious, man?"
He kept staring pointedly, like he was waiting for me to put it on.
"Wow. This is really... I mean, shit, it's kickass. But the thing is, I don't have a phone this will work with." Mine was a cheap Chinese brand knock-off. It didn't have any of the fancy operating systems that something like this needed.
"Doesn't matter."
My eyes flew up to his face in shock. Had he just spoken to me?!
He stepped a little closer, and when I inhaled I was momentarily transported back in time.
Back to a sweltering, cramped attic crawl space, surrounded by itchy fiberglass insulation, with sweat and terrified tears rolling down my cheeks. I remembered fighting to hold back my sobs, to silence my breathing against the massive palm of his hand covering my mouth. I remembered how strong his arms felt wrapped around me, how reassuring his steady heartbeat had been at my back.
I remembered shaking in dread as Felix, my mother's meth-head boyfriend, jittered up and down the hall below us, kicking in doors and bashing his head against the wall, screaming my name. The side of my head throbbed where he'd clocked me with a cast iron bootscraper. My wrist hurt where he'd tied me to my bed with fishing line. I was awkwardly naked from the waist down, though my mysterious savior had wrapped me up in his shirt before he'd hauled us both up here. His breath was a desperate comfort against my cheek. When I turned my face into his giant chest, he stroked my matted hair as if I was a forlorn puppy. And despite the raging wreck of a human being pacing beneath our feet, I felt safe.
Mom had driven Maddy to Amarillo for a doctor's appointment, so I was alone in the house with Felix that night. I guess he'd had a stash squirreled away somewhere that Mom hadn't known about, and he'd taken the opportunity to get high while she wasn't around to curb how much he used.
In my seven year old mind I knew, without a doubt, that he was going to kill me. When Felix was sober he was a lethargic bum, as if the drugs had fried every brain cell that motivated a person to get off the couch and do something other than watch endless infomercials on TV. But when he was high, he was a twitchy, paranoid horror show. Usually Maddy and I would leave and hide out somewhere when Felix used. Mom seemed to like the amped up version of him though, probably because the drugs made him horny as hell. The two of them would bang wherever in the house they felt like it, and neither Maddy nor I cared to stick around for all that.
But that night I had been stupid. I was in our bedroom lost in the sci-fi novel Maddy had given me for our birthday, and hadn't heard Felix coming until it was too late. He'd burst in, raving and jacked out of his mind, and next thing I knew I was tied to the metal frame of our bunk bed with vicious plastic filaments slicing into my wrist and blood running into my left eye from the dizzying cut upside my head. My ears were ringing and I couldn't really see or focus on much, but I was aware of Felix tearing my pants and underwear off.
I remembered kicking and screaming, but his voice was a lot louder than mine. He was a lot stronger, and outweighed me five times over. There was nothing I could do. He pushed my face into the pillow and I couldn't breathe. It was lucky that I was too young back then to fully comprehend what he intended. I just thought he meant to suffocate me.
There was a crashing sound from the kitchen, and the ancient smoke alarm out there started going off. Felix sprang off of me like his own hair was on fire and went tearing down the hall, leaving me bawling and gasping hysterically into my sister's pillow on the bottom bunk.
A draft passed over my butt, and when I looked up he was there. My shadow man. I'd seen him before, every now and then—on the preschool playground, watching me and Maddy get off the bus, hanging out behind the giant pecan tree when church service got out. I'm pretty sure I'd dreamt of him a few times too. But now he was much closer than ever before, and with a finger pressed to his lips he cut the fishing line from my wrist, threw a flannel over me and gathered me into his arms.
He jumped. A small square section of our popcorn ceiling imploded and he was abruptly perched in our rafters, feet braced on the support beams, with me still cradled to his chest. He nudged the section of ceiling back into place just as Felix scuttled into the room and let out a howl of fury. I whimpered, and my protector laid a hand gently over my mouth to muffle the sound.
I don't know how long we were up there. It felt like a hundred years, but by the time things in the house finally went silent, the panicked thumping of my pulse had quieted too. In fact, with shadow man's arms around me, the stifling heat of the attic, and the exhaustion brought on by too much adrenaline, I was actually nodding off to sleep against his shoulder when he moved again.
He made the same shushing gesture that he had earlier and slid the square of ceiling aside. After examining whatever was down there and finding it satisfactory, he dropped down through the hole, then lifted me out too. The night air breezing in through the window was a relief.
He laid me in the top bunk, carefully, as if he knew that one was mine. He was so tall that he could easily see over it, even after he stepped down. And he tossed me a pair of underwear and sweatpants from my dresser without asking where I kept them. Before I could even get myself dressed, he had disappeared down the hall. I heard some thudding and rustling, the uneven metallic bang of our front screen door.
I tiptoed out of the bedroom, down the hall and into the living room, which was trashed. Broken bottles and shattered light bulbs, a long slash in the arm of the stained blue corduroy sofa, torn up magazines littering the nubby carpet. A glass pipe, burnt black inside the bowl and crusted with white halfway up the tube, lay abandoned on one of the armchair tables next to a greasy lighter. But the house was empty. Neither Felix nor my shadow man was in sight.
I went out onto the front porch and stared out down the dirt driveway toward the road. It was dark, and there was no sign of anybody out there. Wherever Felix had gone, he was gonna be sleeping off that binge for days. Mom and Maddy weren't home yet, and I didn't want to go back inside the house by myself. I sat down on the top step, wrapped my arms around my knees, and waited.
I was dozing off again when the shadow man returned. I didn't hear him coming until his weight settled onto the step next to me. I lifted my head from my knees and blinked up at him sleepily.
"You're back."
He grunted. He'd put his flannel back on, a plaid with a dark background and even darker stripes, and an attached heather gray hood that he had pulled up over his head. He wore it open over a black t-shirt and black jeans. His calf-high boots were muddy. I wasn't sure how he wasn't roasting in all those layers. This was Texas, in June. It was probably close to midnight and still eighty degrees out.
"Where's Felix?"
For the first time ever, I heard him speak. "You don't have to worry about him anymore." His voice was silky smooth and deep.
"You kill him?" I inquired hopefully.
Another noncommittal grunt. But he followed it up with a question of his own, just two words. "You okay?"
"Yeah." I laid my head against his upper arm, inhaling. He smelled like cloves and lemons. Spicy, strong, and clean. Like he could take on every badguy in the entire world and stomp their brains into dust. "Who are you?" I mumbled, my eyelids drifting shut again against my will.
I think I felt his cheek touch the top of my head, lightly, because my skull vibrated a bit with his answer. "Your guardian angel."
I was breathing in that citrusy scent again, right now in our old musty garden shed, with my shadow man standing not more than a couple feet away. And as the memory came back, I realized something.
"You look the same," I blurted out. A flicker of something crossed his face—maybe he didn't like that I'd noticed. But it was true. It had been eight years, but he hadn't aged. He'd looked like a high school kid back then, maybe seventeen or eighteen years old, which to me put him tantamount to a god. But here we were, eight years later. He should be in his mid twenties by now, but he didn't look much older than me. Still ginormous and imposing, but he could fit right in with any of the senior year guys at school.
He nodded down at the watch that was still in its box, in my hand. "Put that on."
"But I already said it won't work with my—"
He held up a phone of his own, sleek and black. When he tapped the screen with his thumb, the screen on the watch suddenly lit up too. The bits of extra light cast his face in an even eerier glow.
"It's connected to mine."
I frowned in confusion. "Why would you give it to me, then?"
"You're fifteen," he replied, which wasn't an explanation.
"So?"
"Things are going to change. You're going to need me. When you do, touch the watch and I'll come." His eyes slid to the side as a peal of laughter reached us from the party outside.
"What kind of guardian angel uses a cell phone and smartwatch to keep tabs on his... his... clients?" I couldn't think of a better word, though that one sure didn't sound right.
His lips curled up, just a teensy bit, at one corner. "A half human one."
"What?"
"Tell me something. How have you been feeling?"
"Huh?"
"Mood swings? Sweating more than usual? Hair growing in new places?"
I eyed him acerbically. I'd taken freshman Health 101 just like everyone else. In fact, I distinctly recalled being the butt of jokes every single class period because I seemed to be the only one not getting taller, hairier, and deeper-voiced like my classmates. "You're seriously asking me if I'm going through puberty right now? Jesus, what is with everybody blabbing their personal business all of a sudden? Is this some fifteenth-birthday-rite-of-passage nobody ever told me about?"
"Yes," he answered. I stared at him, waiting for him to elaborate. He didn't. "Put the watch on, Connor."
"Not until you tell me why I need a guardian angel to get through a normal phase of human development."
"Yours isn't going to be normal," he said.
I gaped at him.
"Connor! Connor, you out here?"
Both of us started at the sound of Maddy calling my name. My shadow man stepped back, dropping his phone somewhere inside his cavernous hoodie. "I have to go. Wear the watch. Wear it every day, you hear?"
"Wait!" I lurched forward, fingers clenching around both my phone and the gray velvet gift box as if they were reins that could pull him back. I couldn't see him, he'd pulled the hood down over his face again, but he paused. I didn't actually know what I wanted to say. He was going to leave no matter what, I felt that in my bones.
I licked my lips. "Um. Can you at least tell me your name? You have one, don't you?"
Outside the shed, someone was banging on the door. Both Justin and Maddy were out there shouting for me, and I think maybe a couple of Maddy's friends too. There was tension rapidly thickening the air between me and my black-hooded mystery man.
"You know mine," I tossed into the congealing space between us, like an unbaited hook into a fishing hole. As if that was going to convince him to give up anything. He'd been following me all fifteen years of my life and this was only the second time he'd let me hear his voice. "It's not fair."
I saw him shift his weight as the shed door rattled on its hinges.
"Ezra," he said.
The door splintered open and he vanished. Like, literally disappeared, a split second before Maddy and Justin came barrelling into the shed and nearly knocked me over.
"Oh my god. Oh my god, Connor, where've you been? You were gone so long I thought— We were all just hanging out and then someone said, 'where's Tyler' and ain't none of us seen him or you and I thought maybe he'd gotten you and... Jesus fucking H. Christ, you son of a bitch, don't you ever go missing on me like that again or I swear to god I'll flush the toilet every time you shower for a month, got it?"
I patted her back and tried not to wheeze as she squeezed the air out of me. Justin stood over her shoulder, biceps bulging, eyes darting around the innards of the shed like he was disappointed Tyler wasn't in here so he could win points with my sister for kicking his ass. Behind him, Hailey and Jenna and Maddy's other bestie, Miranda, were clustered together and alternately rolling their eyes and casting me exasperated looks.
But he was all I could think about. Had he really just dissolved into thin air, right in front of my eyes? Maddy was so sure I was making it up. She'd teased me about it for years, no matter how many times I'd tried to tell her.
But I really did have a guardian angel.
And now I knew his name.