Under the Light Read Online Free PDF

back to where I’d been.
    “I think it worked,” I told him. “But it’s not like I walked back and measured the distance.”
    He got up on his knees. “Okay, I’m going to visit the spot on the exact opposite of the globe from right here.”
    He didn’t worry that I would ditch him, apparently. He disappeared in a blink and was back five seconds later. “You’re right. Hard to prove I did that correctly,” he said. “It was—”
    “No, don’t tell me what it looked like.” I smiled. “We’ll both decide to go to the spot exactly on the other side of the earth and see if we end up in the same place.”
    He grinned. “One, two, three.”
    Strangely, we sat facing each other on the moving back of the oceans. There was no land in sight and only starlight glimmering off the constantly appearing and vanishing edges of waves.
    I felt a laugh building in my middle. He pointed at me and we zipped back to the field. This zapping back and forth in space would’ve seemed like a dream, but I’d never had a dream this interesting.
    “What if you want to go somewhere that’s not familiar to me, like the playground of the school where you went to kindergarten, or your grandma’s back porch?” I asked. “You could find it but I’d be lost, right?”
    He shrugged. “It’s not like you’d really be lost,” he said. “You could just decide to come back to this field.”
    “Okay.” It couldn’t actually be dangerous. We couldn’t be hurt. And he was right—all I’d have to do was fly to a place I was familiar with. “Pick somewhere only you know.”
    He thought for a second. “How about the park where I learned to ride a two-wheeler?”
    “Sure.”
    “Wait.” He looked anxious for a moment. “I don’t want to be able to take you somewhere you don’t want to go.”
    “If I don’t like it, I’ll zip right out of there,” I told him.
    He thought about that for a few seconds. “I guess.” He shrugged. “Okay. But you go first. You take me somewhere.”
    “The first beach I ever went to,” I said aloud.
    In a flash I was standing knee-deep in waves at Archer Beach—the water couldn’t wet my dress or pull on my legs, but I was there. Only, I was alone. I could see a lonely parking lot light on the hill nearby, a log in the sand that looked a bit like a crocodile in the moonlight. I paused, to make sure he wasn’t going to pop out of the water and surprise me.
    When I came back to the field he was right beside me and said, “Guess that doesn’t work.”
    “Maybe I have to really take you.” I reached over and took his hand. The heat made something curl inside me.
    This time I thought of a place he would not know or think of as significant. I didn’t even say it out loud. I just thought of the department store window where as a little girl I’d stared at a ballet scene from
Giselle
displayed in marionettes. After that day, I wanted to be a ballerina.
    Even though we weren’t reflected in the glass, we stood on the sidewalk inches from the windowpane, and I still held his hand.
    “Shit,” he whispered, looking around—he gripped my hand tight. “That’s freaky.” Then he corrected himself. “Freakier.”
    We tested several theories. For one of us to take the other to an unfamiliar place, we had to be touching. We found by trial and error that if we chose a famous place but did not get specific, and did not hold hands, we’d sometimes end up far away from each other: one below the letters of the Hollywood sign and the other on top, or on two different sides of Niagara Falls. To stay together we had to touch. When we were arm in arm or hand in hand, either of us could say or think a place and we’d fly there, as fast as a thought.
    Standing face-to-face, holding each other by both hands, we took turns naming places, faster and faster. As soon as I realized we were standing between the paws of the Sphinx in Egypt, I would say, “The Lincoln Memorial,” and we’d be in Washington,