I Died to Save Forty Dollars

I was seventeen, with $1,906 to my name.

I died to save forty of them.

◇◇◇

It was 11:40 on a Sunday night, and I was lying on the blue carpet of my bedroom floor with my chin on my arms, watching anime on my phone. The phone was propped against a TV I'd pulled out of my grandpa's garage. I'd listed that TV for sixty dollars, then thirty, then FREE. Now it was a phone stand.

The anime was free too. Somebody had uploaded the whole series off their old VHS tapes, tracking lines and all, and I'd been working through it all week. The main character was a sorceress who couldn't have been five feet tall. She ate like a horse, blew up anything that annoyed her, and hunted bandits for their money. That last part was my favorite.

Saturday I was buying a car with my own money. Four years of birthday cash, mowed lawns, and junk out of that garage, sold to suckers. Grandpa knew about some of it. It was finally enough, as long as the seller was desperate, and I'd found one. Twenty bucks down to hold it. Refundable. I'd made him write that down.

I wasn't poor. I was cheap, and I was damn proud of it.

Down the hall, a door opened.

Mom stopped outside my room. She didn't come in.

"It's almost midnight."

"One more episode."

"It's a school night."

"Ten minutes."

"Five."

"Deal."

I'd have taken two.

"Phone off after," she said.

"I will."

"You'll forget."

"I won't forget."

"You forgot to pay me back for the pizza."

"That's different. I didn't forget."

It was eleven dollars. She'd been asking since August.

There was a pause, and I could hear her smiling through the door.

"Good night."

"Night."

The episode was twenty-two minutes. I watched all of it, and then the next one. Then I set my alarm, put in one earbud, and scrolled until my eyes got heavy.

I didn't turn the phone off.

◇◇◇

Sometime after midnight, my heart did the thing.

It was like missing a stair in the dark. A hard thump, then a gap where the next beat should have been, then a flutter under my ribs. It had been doing that every couple of months since freshman year, and it always stopped if I sat up and coughed.

I sat up and coughed. It kept going. I coughed again, harder, and it stopped.

I'd looked it up once. The internet said it was either nothing or I was going to die, so I went with nothing. The other answer meant telling Mom, and telling Mom meant a doctor, and a doctor meant forty dollars. My money, my bills. That was my rule, not hers. Forty dollars was the car fund's entire November.

Her light was still on. I could see it under my door. Ten words down the hall and she'd have had me in a waiting room by Tuesday, paying some guy with a stethoscope a month of car money to tell me I was fine.

I lay back down. If it happened again, I'd cough again. Coughing was free.

I can't prove what happened next. Nobody handed me a death certificate. But if I had to bet, my money's on the heart.

Doctor I didn't see: +$40

Deposit I'll never see again: -$20

Net: +$20

Me: dead

◇◇◇

There was nothing.

My room was gone. The ceiling, the streetlight around the curtain, the TV I couldn't give away, all of it. Eyes open or shut, I couldn't tell the difference, and after a while I couldn't tell if I had eyes.

I tried to sit up and couldn't. I tried to find my hands. There weren't any. No blanket. No heartbeat.

Okay. Okay. Sleep paralysis. People get that.

Then my alarm went off.

Far away, like a phone ringing in a house down the street. The marimba one. I'd been meaning to change it for a year.

It played. It kept playing. Nobody turned it off.

Come on. Hand. Every morning. Slap it.

It didn't stop.

After a while I heard a door, and footsteps in a hallway I knew by heart, and Mom saying my name. Annoyed. You're going to be late.

She said it again. It sounded different the second time.

I don't want to talk about the third time.

I started making offers.

Take the money. All of it. $1,906.

Nothing.

The car. I'd tell the guy to keep the twenty.

Nothing.

I'd turn the phone off. I'd pay her back for the pizza. I'd walk down the hall and tell her about my heart, and I'd pay the forty dollars. I'd pay it twice.

I didn't have a mouth. Every offer went out into the nothing and didn't come back.

Then her voice started getting farther away, and she wasn't the one moving.

Something was all around me. Cool, steady, pushing. Like the air off a lake before a storm. It was the only thing in that place that felt like anything, and it was taking me with it.

I tried to run. I didn't have legs.

So I fought it the whole way.

It didn't care. It went where it was going, and I went too.

◇◇◇

Somebody was crying.

Right in my ear. Then cold all over, and light bright enough to hurt, and hands lifting me.

The crying came with me.

It was me.

I tried to stop. My chest pulled in another breath and let out a thin, furious wail into somebody's face. I had never made that sound in my life.

"Where the hell am I?" I said.

"Hwaaaaah."

"Where. Am. I?" I said, slower.

"Hwaaah. Hwah."

That was worse.

The hands rolled me up in something warm and scratchy like a burrito, arms and all. Kidnapped, no pants, and now restrained.

A face came down into the blur. A woman, young, her hair stuck to her forehead, dark with sweat. She looked like she'd been hit by a truck and was thrilled about it. She was crying too, the happy kind.

She said a couple of words, then a long soft one with the end going up. It wasn't Spanish. It wasn't anything from a movie.

I got one arm loose. It swung up in front of my face on its own.

A tiny red fist, wrinkled, with fingernails like grains of rice. Attached to me.

I made it open. It opened. I made it close.

Coma, I thought. Still asleep. I was in a hospital somewhere with a tube in my arm, and this was the dream, and dreams don't have to make sense. People wake up from comas. People wake up from them all the time.

I'd read once that you can catch a dream by its hands, because dreams get hands wrong. I looked at the fist again. Every fingernail was right where it belonged.

I decided comas were different.

I'd seen this show. I'd seen forty of this show. Guy dies, wakes up small, a woman he's never met is crying over him in a language he doesn't speak. There's a word for it and every otaku alive knows the word and I knew it too.

I wasn't going to say it.

Saying it meant the hospital was gone. The hospital was the one where Mom was sitting in a chair next to the bed.

So I screamed instead. The body was going to do that anyway. I just stopped arguing with it.

I don't know how long I cried. Long enough that she had to walk me up and down. Long enough to run out, then do some more out of spite.

The spite paid off. She walked when I cried and stopped when I stopped. I made a note.

Then I was done, and I lay on her shoulder and breathed.

She smelled like sweat and soap and something herbal. Her heartbeat was under my ear. Slow and even. Not bothered by any of this.

She didn't have to hold me. I'd been screaming in her face for an hour. She held me anyway, and patted my back, and said things in a voice that was trying to help. I was pissed at her for not being my mother. The patting worked, too, which made it worse.

She carried me to a window. A pale curtain lifted in a breeze and let in a stripe of light and fell back. The air touched my face.

Cool. Moving.

For one second it was the same thing I'd felt in the dark.

Then the curtain dropped and it was a curtain.

A man came over, tall and tired, with dark stubble. He stood next to her and said something, low and a little shaky. He touched my forehead with one ink-stained finger, carefully, like I might go off. Then he put his hand on her shoulder and she leaned into it, and the two of them looked at me for a long time.

I looked back. They were close enough to see, and I couldn't turn my head, so I got a good look.

Her: late twenties, maybe. Green hair, drying in the window light, green right down to the roots. No dye job did that. A plain white nightgown with no lace or anything. It was against my cheek, and it was softer than anything I'd ever owned.

Him: about thirty. Dark hair, green eyes, ink on two fingers. A plain shirt, sleeves shoved up. It looked old, and the cuffs still weren't frayed.

I liked them already.

They were mostly looking at the top of my head.

I found out later why. I'd come out with her hair. Green like spring grass, and plenty of it. She took full credit.

So these were my parents now. Nobody had asked me. If anybody had, I'd have wanted to see their finances first.

◇◇◇

Babies eat.

She fed me. I had no say in it. The part of me that was seventeen wanted to die again. The part of me that was a baby ate and got warm and fell asleep. The baby won. The baby was going to win every argument for a while.

◇◇◇

When I woke up the window was dark, and the fire was down to coals.

For one second I was home. The furnace was about to click on. I'd roll over and see the TV, and I'd have slept through the alarm, and Mom would be mad.

I tried to roll over.

Still small. Still here.

A chair creaked. The woman picked me up and I let her.

There was a lamp behind her. Glass chimney, brass base. Most expensive thing in the room. The man stood beside it. He said something to her, and then he took a book out of his pocket.

It was small and dark, with a brass clasp and corners worn soft.

New most expensive thing in the room.

He opened it. From where I was, the page was a pale square with gray fuzz where the writing should be.

He put one finger on it.

The fuzz lit up.

Yellow light ran along lines I hadn't been able to see, curve to curve, little hooked strokes, all the way to the last hook. It looked like a circuit board. Then it looked like something I almost understood, until I tried.

But I could tell which way the light was going to turn before it turned. Every time.

And a flame appeared in the air over his fingertip. Over it. Floating. No match, no lighter, no wire, and no reason on earth for anyone to go to that much trouble to fool a baby.

Real magic. The kind the sorceress threw around every episode. I'd spent my last night watching an anime about it, and woken up six feet from a man doing it.

He carried the flame to the lamp like it was nothing. The wick caught. Gold light filled the glass. His flame went out, the page went dark, and he shut the book and put it in his pocket.

He hadn't said one word.

Two thoughts, at the same time.

The first: I have to learn that.

The second: I'd underpriced that book.

I'm not going to pretend the second one came second. A lighter cost a dollar. That thing was every lighter ever made, forever, and it fit in a pocket. Fifty dollars. No. Five hundred. No, if the other pages did other things--

He saw me staring and wiggled his fingers at me.

Forget the fingers, dumbass. Do the book again.

He didn't open it again.

I swung my arm at his pocket. It went sideways and hit me in the face. He smiled wider.

The woman said something. He laughed, a real one, and she shifted me up onto her shoulder, and the lamp slid out of view.

The first spell I ever saw, and I got pulled out of it because I couldn't hold my own head up.

They talked in low voices for a while.

Most of it was mush. I couldn't tell where one word ended. But two sounds kept coming back.

Mara.

Dalen.

I didn't know yet that those were their names. I held on to them because they were the only things in the room that repeated.

The woman got back into bed with me and rubbed my back. The man sat on the bed and pulled the blanket up over the three of us. I kept waiting for one of them to get tired of me and hand me to somebody who knew me.

They just stayed.

Back home there was $1,906 I'd never get to spend. Four years, and I never even got the damn car.

Somebody else was going to spend it now. Probably on hospital bills. Probably at full price.

And some bastard across town had my twenty dollars. It was REFUNDABLE.

I didn't know where I was. I didn't know whether anyone back there knew I was still somewhere.

But I'd gotten a whole second life for free.

And a man in this room carried fire in his pocket. Here, fire was a thing you kept next to your keys. If people here needed fire, and somebody who could count got hold of a book like that--

I could see it already. A sign with my name on it. A line out the door. A car, or whatever they had here instead of cars, and then a second one, just because. People calling me sir.

Then I spit up on her shoulder.

The business plan had problems.