I knew it! And I still can’t believe it.
“I was thinking I could take pictures,” he offers.
My head is spinning. Maybe Mama’s been approaching this all wrong for years now. She’s been looking for evidence that’s two decades old, proof of intent to harm and recklessness in the planning stages before the plant even opened, but it’s hard to find things that have been buried for twenty years, especially if you’ve already been digging for sixteen. What if, instead of looking back and then, we started looking here and now?
But River’s still talking. “I tried his birthday, mine, my mom’s. Their anniversary. I even tried the days before and after their anniversary in case he forgot. But it’s none of those.”
“What?” I try to refocus on him.
“His laptop,” he explains and when that doesn’t do it, “It’s password protected.”
“Oh.”
“But his phone isn’t.”
“His phone isn’t what?”
He reaches over, I think to touch my cheek, but instead he pulls the magic coin from behind my ear. “Password protected.”
I wait before I reply to make sure he’s saying what I think he’s saying. “You’ll look on his phone?”
“Yeah.” He sounds slightly nervous, but only slightly.
“For us?”
“Yeah.” A little more sure.
I breathe out and can’t breathe in again. “What if you get caught?”
“What can he do? Ground me? It’s not like I’m getting invited to lots of parties, hanging out with tons of friends, going to all the good clubs.”
I try to smile, but my face is frozen. “Won’t it feel like a betrayal?”
He looks at me. And then he takes my hand. I feel it all the way up into my chest. “I think it would feel like a betrayal not to.”
Two
Mab comes home and has two pieces of news, and she says they are very exciting, and she is all panty and red and cannot wait to tell.
The first piece of very exciting news is Nathan Templeton pretends to drink tap water but actually drinks bottled water, and River is going to take pictures of the bottles and also look on his father’s phone for more evidence.
The second piece of very exciting news is River’s parents went to Ivy League colleges and so did his grandfather so River is probably going to go to one too.
It is a very disappointing afternoon because these are the two most boring pieces of exciting news I have ever heard.
Everyone in Bourne drinks bottled water, and everyone in Bourne knows the Templetons are liars so all aspects of the first piece of news are the opposite of exciting which is dull, predictable, or depressing, and this is all three.
“Ho hum,” I say because that is what people do in books when they think what you said is not interesting.
“Don’t you see?” Mab is so excited she is wiggling which is not a facial expression but a whole-body expression. “We can prove Nathan Templeton isn’t really drinking the tap water.”
“Not drinking the tap water is not illegal,” I regret to inform her.
“We can prove he’s making a big show of drinking the tap water—and showering in it, doing his laundry, washing his vegetables—but really it’s all lies.”
“Pretending to use the tap water is also not illegal,” I tell her.
“Subterfuge!” Mab insists.
“Ho hum,” I repeat.
And no one except Mab cares where anyone else goes to college. Only the people who also go there are impressed, and you already know them so they will be evaluating you on your other merits or lack thereof anyway.
But talking about where other people are going to college is something people do care about, and it is contagious like yawns or strep throat, so Mama gets mad at me for not doing my homework, and the person whose fault that is is River.
“Monday,” she says while I am cutting up a box that pasta came in. “What are you doing?”
“I am cutting up a box that pasta came in,” I tell her although I do not know why since that is obvious from looking at me which she is.
“You need to do your homework,” she says.
“Lie.”
“I’m not playing a game,” Mama says. “You need to do your homework and get into college.”
“I am not doing my homework because there is no point,” I tell her, “and I am not going to college.”
“Of course you are,” Mama says.
“Which?”
“Both.”
“There is no point doing Spanish homework because I do not speak Spanish,” I explain patiently, which is nice of me because we have already had this conversation many times. “There is no point writing an essay about what Emily Dickinson meant when she wrote, ‘I heard a Fly buzz—when I died’ because if she meant to be understood she would not have written something so impossible and untrue.”
“Oh, Monday”—Mama closes her eyes—“it’s so true.”
“If she were dead, she would not hear anything. Or write any more words.”
“Well, it’s poetry,” Mama says, like that is an excuse to not make sense. “What did you write in your essay?”
“I did not write anything in my essay because there is no point in doing my homework, but if I were going to do my homework what I would have written is ‘Emily Dickinson means for me, the reader, to be confused. I am. So she has done her job. And so have I.’”
“What does Mrs. Lasserstein say when you hand in essays like that?” Mama asks although I do not know why because she knows the answer.
“Mrs. Lasserstein says I am being too literal, but there is no such thing as too literal. Literal does not come in degrees. That is like being too seventy-seven point four. That is like being too bicycle.”
“Monday, you do not know everything.”
“There are many things I do not know,” I agree.
“Just do your homework. I’m not arguing with you about it.”
“Lie.”
“You’re being too literal.”
“There is no such thing as too literal!”
Mama has two plans, a first-things-first plan and a then-save-the-world plan. Her first-things-first plan is to win a class action lawsuit against Belsum and make them pay for what they did. You would think this would be an easy goal to achieve because so many things are obviously true facts. It is an obviously true fact that our water used to be clear and then it was cloudy and smelly and then it was green, but Belsum said water did not need to be clear, odor-free, and colorless to be safe. It is an obviously true fact that my father did not use to have cancer and then he did, but Belsum said he ate a lot of red meat and felt a lot of stress, and that was probably why. It is an obviously true fact that a lot more babies were born with birth defects than before Belsum came or than in towns where Belsum is not located, but Belsum said we were eating chemicals in our food and putting chemicals on our lawns and wearing chemicals in our clothes and sitting on chemicals in our sofas, and probably those were the chemicals that were causing our problems and not Belsum’s chemicals at all.
Then Belsum said they had scientists study GL606 and those scientists said it was perfectly safe, but that was because those scientists worked for Belsum, but that turned out not to be illegal. Then it turned out Belsum measured the amount of GL606 that was in the water and issued a statement saying that amount was the amount that was safe, but that turned out not to be illegal either. Then it turned out that it is very expensive to run for government office and the people who had done so successfully had had their campaigns paid for by Belsum. And they were the ones who decided whether or not things were illegal.
That is how I know Mab’s idea to get River to take pictures of the bottles of water under his sinks will not work. Russell says notoriously. These cases are notoriously hard to try successfully. That means cases like ours are famous for failing.
That leads Mama to her second plan, her then-save-the-world plan.
“Go t
o college and become lawyers,” she says to all three of us, even though you cannot become a lawyer by going to college but have to go to college and then go to law school.
“Go to college and become lawyers and make the world a better place,” she says, even though lawyers do not make the world a better place, and even though she has a lawyer, Russell, who is already not making the world a better place or even removing Belsum from it.
“Go to college and study hard and learn everything,” Mama says, “and get far, far away from here.”
And if you say, “I do not want to get far, far away from here. I want and have to live at home because that is what home means. It means where you live,” Mama will say, “Then move somewhere else, and home will be there.”
But she is being too literal.
Three
Winter is hard for me. Cold makes my muscles stiffer, less flexible, less predictable than usual. Snow makes even Bourne’s ultra-accessible sidewalks and streets impassable or—worse—not quite impassable. You think you can make it. You are making it! Sidewalks have been cleared and salted. Snow has been shoveled and removed and not just a tiny strip down the middle but edge to edge. Your power chair is powerful indeed … until suddenly a tree branch laden with ice and snow snaps and falls across your path, or you swerve right to avoid black ice and wind up stuck in a snowbank.
Saturday morning is not cold enough to snow. The temperature will hit sixty by noon. But chilly mornings remind me my precious solo outings are numbered, at least until spring, and at the bar last night, Tom promised he had wonders in store if I stopped by the depot. So first thing this morning, that is what I do.
When I get there, he’s all the way under a huge touring van with “The Dendrites” airbrushed on the side. He says band vans are the easiest to convert into wheelchair vans—it’s all the extra room they left inside for drum kits and visits from groupies—and he can get them cheap because there’s always a surplus. Engines may not last forever, but they last longer than rock bands and are easier to fix. I tap Tom’s foot gently with my front right wheel, and he rolls out from under.
“Mirabel! Excellent.” He stands and shoves out of the way the ambulance stretcher he repurposed as a mechanic’s creeper. “Come on. Your pile’s over here.”
I follow him through the converted old garage, past what look like stacks of junk but are really citizen-specific solutions Tom’s collected, built, and repaired. There’s a stack that’s five deflated inner tubes, a coil of wire, and one of those orange hazard cones. There’s a stack that’s clothesline, a box of extra-large binder clips, and a heap of dog tags. There’s a stack that’s nothing but two balls of twine and fourteen two-liter soda bottles with their ends cut off.
My pile is a solar panel, four black mats, four wooden boards. I smile at him, hold my hand to my heart. It’s gratitude plus a Christmas-morning sort of excitement. My items aren’t wrapped, but they might as well be. They’re gifts. And their purpose—at least for the moment—remains a mystery.
“The boards are for the ramp into the house,” Tom explains. “Replacements. You’ve got rot. I know your mom likes the wood, but there are so many more durable materials out there for a wheelchair ramp.”
“Natural materials are healthier materials,” my Voice mocks my mother. It can’t do impressions, but Tom’s heard this from Nora enough times it doesn’t have to.
“As I keep telling her”—he laughs—“that’s only true if you’re licking them. If you’re just rolling over them, wood is not ideal.”
“What else is new?” Sarcasm is also hard for the Voice, but in Bourne, ideal is too high a bar.
“I also rigged up a portable solar charger, just in case of power outages or, I don’t know, a zombie apocalypse. It won’t work when it’s rainy. Or at night. But on sunny days, you can attach it to the back of the chair, and it’ll collect energy as you go.”
“Enough to outpace zombies?” my Voice asks.
“Well, they’re slow,” Tom says. “But don’t go too far, and make sure you save power to get home. You don’t want to get stranded when the sun sets.”
Always good advice for an apocalypse.
“I also found some weighted rubber mats to help you navigate cords when you do have power. I’m giving you a few because they’ll work for anything. You can just lay them down over whatever’s in your way and get right over.”
If only.
“Thank you,” my Voice says.
“My pleasure.”
“Thank you,” my Voice repeats in the exact same tone, no change of inflection to mean the difference between polite appreciation and the ocean-deep gratitude I owe Tom for making my life a life. But he gets it anyway. After all, my Voice is largely his work as well.
He starts to load what will fit into the giant sack he attached years ago to the back of my chair like a luggage rack but finds it already full. Nora’s sent him three dozen pumpkin cupcakes. He makes the swap, and we fist-bump. When I turn for home, I’m giddy with my prizes.
And as if all that weren’t miracle enough, just outside Tom’s door, I all but run over River Templeton.
“Mirabel!” A flash of panic as he leaps out of my way but then, undeniably, delight to see me.
“Sorry!” my Voice says.
“No, no, I’m sorry,” he says.
“Sorry!” I tap again. It’s the first time he’s been alone with my Voice, and I wonder if he’ll think it’s strange—I’m strange—to have a conversation with.
“No, it was definitely my fault.” He does not seem to think it’s strange. I remember when he came to the house and couldn’t stop staring. The novelty of me has worn off, I guess. Other girls would be unhappy about this development, of course, but I am not other girls. “I was distracted.”
I type, quickly but there’s still a lag. “By what?”
“The limitations of your hardware store.” He indicates it with his chin as if there might be more than one hardware store in town. There is not. “My mom wants an extra key for the side door, but your hardware store doesn’t have a key-copying machine.”
“Church,” I tap.
“Huh?” he says.
So he has to wait while I type. “The key-copying machine is in the church.”
He waits for me to amend that statement, like maybe it’s autocorrect’s fault. It’s not. Then he waits for me to explain, but it’d take me till winter to type in a thorough gloss of Pastor Jeff’s fundraising schemes.
“Weird,” he says eventually.
I don’t disagree.
“I was also looking for spoons to practice bending with my mind,” he adds, speaking of weird, “but your hardware store doesn’t carry spoons either.”
“Do they in Boston?” my Voice wonders.
“Well no, but there’s a separate store for everything in Boston. Whereas your store seems more … general. It had this”—he opens a brown paper bag to show me his purchase: a cookbook thick as a thigh—“which is also an odd thing to have in a hardware store, so I thought maybe there was some kind of culinary section.”
“You cook?”
“No.” He grins. “That’s why I bought a cookbook. But I figure cooking’s like magic. You follow the directions, stir a bunch of stuff together, and presto! Poof! Dinner! Plus if your brain could stir the spoon for you, think how much time you would save.”
I consider what a difference telekinesis would make in my life. So that’s another thing River and I have in common.
“Can I walk with you?” he says, and I nod and push my joystick forward, and he falls into pace beside me, and we take in the perfect October morning, that lovely-all-over feeling of being outside and neither sweating nor shivering, though I am shivering, just a little, the smell of leaves drying or dying or whatever that smell is that comes when the trees turn and the seasons change and the whole world shifts toward what comes next.
But then he says, “Oh, Mirabel,” and blushes hard. “I shouldn’t have said ‘walk with y
ou.’ I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean … I just meant…”
“I know what you meant,” my Voice assures him. I did, but that’s not what’s remarkable. What’s remarkable is that he even noticed. And having noticed, he could have just pretended he never said it. He could have just ignored it. Instead, he was brave. Awkward and brave.
“Thanks,” he says, which is sweet, thanking me. “I need to expand my vocabulary. I should study with your sister, come up with some other words besides ‘walk’ to mean, you know, wander around next to you. Traipse? Ramble? Take the air?”
I laugh.
“She’s great at the whole synonym thing,” he says, then scoffs, “And she says she’s worried about getting into college.”
I nod, agreeing that this is silly, not her worry but that worry. She’ll have no trouble getting in.
“Seems like smart runs in your family,” which is a nice thing to say but nothing compared to what he says next. “Do you think you three will go together?”
We three?
I stop to look at him. So he stops and looks at me. He reads the confusion on my face. “You know, to college?”
I type. “I will not go to college.”
He laughs. “That’s what your sister said too. You’re both crazy.”
This is not as miraculous as telekinesis, but it’s close.
When even my Voice is speechless, he says, “Maybe it’s like the hardware store.”
I raise my eyebrows.
“Different in Boston.”
Isn’t everything?
“At my old school, everyone goes to college. Everyone wants to get out of town, and our town’s a lot more … you know, than yours.”
I try to nod.
“And you’re smart, you and your sister. Your sisters. So, you know…”
He trails off, but honestly, I don’t know. Not whether or not I’m smart—I know that, obviously. What I don’t know is why he thinks smart has anything to do with leaving town. What I don’t know is why he’s not smart enough to realize that the options open to him and his Boston classmates and even Mab and even Monday are not open to me.
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