Living with Your Past Selves (Spell Weaver) Read Online Free Page A

the high school quad, but I decided to adopt a “wait and see” attitude.
    And so we walked along slowly, the silence broken only by our footsteps and my soft whistling, and I thought about Santa Brígida, a town that was both home and a never ending puzzle to me.
    If you have ever passed through Santa Barbara, you might know about where my “city” (really a town) is. It’s just a little east of Santa Barbara on the coast, between Coast Village and Summerland. But the best way to describe Santa Brígida is in reference to Montecito, which is just north of Coast Village, and so northwest of us. For lack of a better way of putting it, Santa Brígida is “wannabe Montecito.” In fact, but for some legal snarls, the town name would have been something with Montecito in it. While Montecito traces its origins to the late 1700s, Santa Brígida, despite the historic sounding name, only goes back to 1996—coincidentally, the same year I was born. Montecito is an enclave of prestige and wealth; Santa Brígida is an enclave of people who aren’t quite as wealthy as those in Montecito but who would very much like to look like they are. Both communities are demographically very heavy with executives, entrepreneurs, and various professionals, though the average income in Montecito is considerably higher. Undaunted by that difference, the developers did their best to imply that home buyers would get the “Montecito experience” (whatever the hell that is) at a lower cost.
    So why did the town leave me puzzled? It hadn’t until my hospital stay. Afterward, the place always seemed just a little off, somehow, like everyone was trying too hard. The very houses themselves seemed to groan with the weight of the expectations placed upon them, if not the weight of the extra stories—I learned in architecture class last year that the Spanish colonial revival style typically only had one story, but in Santa Brígida, most of them had two or more. The square footage also tended to be big for residential properties in the area—except, of course, some of the homes in Montecito. To complete the intended effect, the developers paid extra to get fully grown trees, including the enormous palm trees on the street Stan and I were walking down, trees that, when enshrouded by fog like today’s, looked even more out of place than usual.
    How all this worked out financially was another puzzle. How could the developers have poured such money into extras, put the houses on such large lots, and still been able to sell the houses at reasonable rates? Rumor had it they got the land “dirt cheap,” if you will pardon the cliché. The way my luck was running, the whole place would probably turn out to be built on a toxic waste dump or Native American burial ground, with ecological and/or karmic consequences one could readily imagine.
    As we were nearing the school, Stan mumbled something to me. I was deep enough in my own thoughts that I answered without thinking.
    “I knew it!” Stan practically yelled. He surprised me so much I almost lost my balance.
    “Stan, what the hell?”
    “Tal,” he said, slowly and deliberately, “I just asked you a question—in Hebrew—and you answered it. In Hebrew.”
    Well, that was a problem.
    I guess I should mention that Welsh wasn’t the only language I wasn’t supposed to know in this life but did. There was a poem in “The Tale of Taliesin” that was sometimes attributed to me, though I couldn’t remember writing it. A lot of it was pretentious nonsense suggesting that the bard Taliesin (whom I thought of as Taliesin 1) was with God at the creation and would be in the world until the Day of Judgment. Hogwash, probably, but there were specific verses talking about being with King David when Absalom was slain and witnessing other events in ancient Israel that stirred dim memories in me, as did the references in the same work to Alexander the Great. In any case, my ability with both Hebrew and Greek was