Because You'll Never Meet Me

by Leah Thomas

  “Read this.”

  “I’m not illiterate. But I do have something of a learning, ah …”

  That eyebrow derailed me once more.

  “I mean to say, as much as I would like to, I can’t.” I frowned. “Mock me if you must.”

  She made a tch! sound, Oliver!

  “Mock yourself. I don’t tolerate laziness. I don’t know how it’s possible, but you see just fine. So click all you need to until you can read the book.”

  I pursed my lips. “I can attempt to read the title because I can see the raised outline of the letters. It’s embossed. But images on a flat surface …”

  It was so strange to be talking about this with a severe old librarian, but even stranger that it did not feel strange. Perhaps this was similar to being scolded by a grandparent.

  “Well, well! Whatever is the matter with your generation? Try harder!” Frau Pruwitt slapped her hand on the table. “What about the space between the ink and the paper? Surely printed font is slightly raised or indented on the pages! The font wasn’t grown on the trees, now, was it? The printed letters are either thicker or thinner.”

  “On a nearly microscopic level …”

  “You’re saying that isn’t enough for you to work with? I drag you down the hallway, bleeding and mumbling about how bothersome the individual dust motes clogging your vision are—”

  I had been mumbling?

  “—but now, when you’re in a completely reasonable state of mind, you won’t even try to read a damn book because it might possibly require the slightest bit of effort? Shame on you, son. Your mother should be ashamed!”

  “You don’t know anything about my mother.”

  “Do. Not. Shout. In. My. Library.” With each word, she tapped her long-nailed fingers on my wrist. “I know your mother isn’t here. Who is? I am.”

  I swallowed. “Undeniably.”

  “Start with the title, Mr. Farber.”

  I leaned forward. Tried to focus my MBV on the letters. They shifted before my ears.

  “Click if you need to. Don’t be shy!” And she clicked her nails against the book, illuminating the letters for me.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said.

  It was a copy of Daredevil Visionaries, Volume 1, by Frank Miller.

  Her eyebrow was still up near her hairline.

  “Sit yourself down and clickity-clack until you can read comics like any other boy.”

  I picked up the book.

  Oliver, what if people apart from you could see me as something, someone, deserving of happiness? Not as a hero, mind. Just as “any other boy.”

  The idea frightens me. Coward that I am. Me, born of science and ambition gone wrong. I felt that wrongness every day, until you wrote to me. Until you infected me with wondrous, hopeful nonsense.

  Frau Pruwitt has given me a book about a certain blind superhero. And now I am feeling something other than despicable.

  What have you done to me, Oliver Paulot?

  Initially, nothing came of our exercises. Frau Pruwitt was right. There is the most microscopic layer of space between pages and the ink on them. Like you, I struggled with focus. I tried to narrow my MBV. Tried to aim the clicks precisely.

  That was the only noise Frau Pruwitt would allow me to make in the library. Not that there were many students to disturb in the high-windowed room.

  I gave myself headaches. A more violent person might have tossed that book down on the floor. Frau Pruwitt made no point of watching me work; she went about her business among the shelves, chasing out any pupils who dared giggle in the aisles. At the end of the day, she’d ask me to tell her what I’d read.

  At first, I only shook my head.

  “Tomorrow, Mr. Farber.”

  After a week, I started to grasp how to see the panels. How to aim the sound so that the words and pictures appeared in my head. Just barely. I began to see shapes. Letters.

  Ollie, if I could write like you do, I could describe how I felt when I read my first page. When I clearly saw those first images. It was only an introduction page, featuring little more than Daredevil’s billy club–toting silhouette. But it was enough to make me proud.

  Matt Murdock disguises his weapon as a cane. You must have known that. And he is blind but not blind, Ollie!

  Of course I’d seen letters. I’d memorized the spellings of things, just so no one could ever call me illiterate. But I’d never truly stared at words on a page and strung the shapes together within my head.

  The librarian handed me another book when I read the first page to her. A book with intimidating heft.

  “It’s a start. Later, read this one.”

  I focused. Clicked. “Der Herr der Ringe?” I said. “The Lord of the Rings?”

  “I’m an old hippie. So sue me.”

  Here is my grand news, Oliver.

  I am learning to read. Frau Pruwitt is assisting me. Not in Braille, but in text. One day, perhaps even very soon, I’ll be able to read your letters on my own. Without Father’s accent. I’ll see your abhorrent handwriting for myself and scrawl back at you in my own.

  And here is one last bit of news. I unfolded the piercing girl’s paper airplane at long last in the library, while the air turned warm outside.

  Here is what it said:

  If you’re a decent fluffing human being, stay away from Owen. —Fieke

  Could I actually be such a thing?

  Mo

  P.S. Send me an extensive booklist, please. I want to read all the books that made you, Ollie Ollie UpandFree.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Book Light

  That last letter was like staring at the sun, Moritz! Glorious burns on my corneas! I never thought I’d see you that happy, and now I feel like the blind one. I’ll tell my keepers I got my dose of daylight. Don’t worry about me being unhappy!

  But which lady do you go for? There’s Fieke the Goth Wonder (what kind of name is Fieke? I mean, maybe it’s kind of awesome, but I don’t think I’m pronouncing it right: “FEEEEEEEK”), Frau Pruwitt of “steel buns,” and sourpuss Frau Melmann, the underdog no one’s rooting for.

  Seriously, I keep teasing you about these dames (that’s the polite way to address a group of women, right?), but I’m still waiting on your love story. If that sounds dolphin-wavy, so be it! But if we’re such good friends, I don’t see why you’re so closemouthed. I mean, you don’t think I’d be weird about it or something, right?

  No matter what you said.

  Anyhow, I would ask you to send some of that love my way, but I think I’m finally coming around to the idea of perpetual hermit bachelorhood. Hermit Bachelors are gentlemen. I have to move on from Liz.

  It’s so cold here for spring. We’ve still got slush and snow beneath the low boughs of the pines. I spend most days under my comforter. Dorian Gray spends all day sleeping, too, and no one wonders if he’s depressed. I mean, I can fold paper just fine without standing up. I can do calligraphy in bed. All my boring hobbies can be bed hobbies, so why bother?

  Auburn-Stache wasn’t too pleased during my last checkup. He was really gentle when he took my blood pressure, like he was worried he was going to crush my arm in the constricting sleeve.

  “You need more sun.”

  “I’m a vampire now. Didn’t you hear?”

  “You need to eat properly.”

  “Haf thee blood for thif night creature?”

  He grabbed my chin and made me meet his eyes. “Do you see me smiling, Oliver?”

  “I can never tell with that mustache of yours, Major Armstrong.”

  “Major—?”

  “Alex Louis Armstrong? From Fullmetal Alchemist? Why does nobody read manga? Never mind.”

  Dr. Auburn-Stache released my chin and the armband at the same time. “Maybe I need to move out here for a while. You aren’t recovering well, or at all. And where do you think your mum is right now?”

  “Over the moon?”

  “Don’t be cute. She’s downstairs r
esting. Do you know why?”

  “She had three Popsicles and now she’s feeling a comedown from the sugar high.”

  “She’s exhausted. And you’re lazing about like a dead boy.”

  I scowled. “Hey, I didn’t ask her to worry.”

  “Everything she does is for your sake.”

  “But I’m not the one who wants to marry her.”

  His eyes flashed. For the first time in my life, I wondered if Auburn-Stache might hit me. It shut me up, at least.

  “Oliver, I know you’re still, ah, recuperating—”

  “I’m just dandy, Doc.”

  “I know you’re still in pain, but your mum needs you. And you need her. You’ve only got each other.”

  “She’s got you, too.”

  Auburn-Stache sighed, plied his goatee with his fingers. “She doesn’t have me in the way you’re implying. She never will.”

  It sucked just hearing him say that. You know what I mean, Moritz? It sucked knowing that all of us Idiotic Lovesick Cabin People were romantically doomed. Even Auburn-Stache wasn’t laughing anymore.

  “I’ll try harder,” I said. “Please don’t leave your other patients high and dry or low and wet or anything else.”

  He ruffled my hair. “Ollie. You don’t really think I’m here because you’re a patient? You’re family. I could never be grateful enough, really, to have known the Paulots. You and your parents took me from a very dark place … to a better one.”

  “Are you about to tell me about the laboratory? About my dad? I promise to eat like a king if you tell me something new. I’ll get a tan. Honest.”

  He paused. “What a bribe, Oliver. But it’s not my place to tell you such things.”

  “Wait. You want to, don’t you?” I couldn’t believe it. He looked even twitchier than usual; his leg was shaking. “You think she’s wrong to keep things from me?”

  “Not exactly, Oliver. I understand your mum’s perspective.”

  “Well, that’s one of us.” I coughed. “Is she really that sick?”

  “She’ll be better if you get out of your dark place. It’s been months now, Ollie.”

  “But who’s counting.”

  He sighed and leaned forward. “But you must know that it really wasn’t your fau—”

  “You should go check on her. This vampire needs some shut-eye.”

  He opened his mouth and closed it again, eyes shining behind his glasses. I pretended to be fascinated by the loose threads in my sheets until he got the point.

  After he was gone, I pulled the blinds down and kicked away enough of my books and models to shut the door. It was nighttime inside again.

  Maybe I could climb out of dark places, if someone pulled me out. It can’t be you, Moritz, because you’ll never meet me.

  And maybe it can’t be Liz, either, but it used to be.

  Liz began trying to treat my incurable illness—in secret, of course. If Mom had known what Liz and I were up to, she wouldn’t have let the girl within a fifty-foot radius of me. I remembered how she’d flipped out at Auburn-Stache after the house fire because she thought he might be “experimenting” on me. If she realized what Liz and I were doing, she might have chased her with more than a variety of rolling pins. There might suddenly have been bodies in the fishpond after all.

  But because Mom had no idea, because she saw that I was a happier kid and I didn’t try running away from home anymore, we had some fun before Liz started going to high school.

  Liz explained my circumstances to her parents, who were exactly the sort of accepting people she had described them to be. Her father wrote Mom a letter that made her teary-eyed, made her run around opening windows and singing. Despite the locked doors, I think Mom always wanted me to have friends, but it was pretty hard to persuade people to send their kids to a cabin in the woods to spend time with someone they presumed was a young delinquent and his basket-case caretaker.

  Starting the fall I turned eleven, every Wednesday afternoon Liz’s dad dropped Liz and her bicycle off at the end of our long driveway. She rode up to our porch, usually wearing a plaid skirt and white tights coated in mud.

  She always shouted “I’M HERE!” at the top of her lungs, even before she was within sight of the cabin.

  I was always already in the driveway.

  “And I’m HERE!”

  Where else could I be?

  The second time Liz came over, she came to my room carrying her dad’s “borrowed” book light inside her raincoat. The book light had a tiny electric battery in it that I could practically smell on her.

  “Why would you bring that?” I snapped.

  “Calm your jets, UpandFree. It’s turned off. It’s tiny.”

  “Yeah, well, so are particles of Hebenon. They’ll still curdle your blood.”

  “What’s Heb—oh, forget it. Look, Ollie, don’t pretend to be a sissy. Because you aren’t.”

  “Oh! So you’ve noticed I’m not a girl?”

  “Sheesh, Ollie. You’d have a hard time making friends even if you could go to school!”

  “You’re a charmer.”

  She actually punched my bedspread in annoyance. “Gah! This is what I’m saying! You’re never serious about anything!”

  “I’m serious about being afraid of that book light.”

  “No.”

  “What?” I blinked.

  She didn’t look away. “You’re not. You can’t be. I watched you run straight at that power line. You let it tackle you without even hesitating. Don’t pretend to be a sissy!”

  And she pressed it into my hand.

  “I like you because you don’t pretend.”

  It was the most precious thing I’d ever held—imagine being able to read at night without a lantern!

  Every week, she handed that book light to me. And I would hold it, even though it buzzed oddly against my skin and flared in my aura, gave me the pre-seizure wooziness. I held it tight.

  Because she asked me to.

  But before she started “helping” me, she began each afternoon by listing off things I’d never done until I was crazy annoyed. No one could rile me like Liz. Even if I met all the other people in the world.

  “You’ve never sat in a massage chair, or seen a sitcom!”

  “I hear they aren’t funny anyway!”

  “You’ve never seen a tollbooth!”

  “Why would I want to?!”

  “Or a humidifier.”

  “Hey, low blow! I’d love to see a humidifier!”

  “Or even a lamp.”

  “I’ve seen lamps, damn it!”

  Once I was angry, she would toss the light to me.

  I shivered when I caught it, my head throbbing, but I wouldn’t fall in front of her again.

  I held it for as long as I could. My palm sizzled.

  She grinned. “See? No biggie.”

  Over the several months’ worth of Wednesdays, we got up to a lot of shenanigans in the woods, climbing trees and looking for frogs, building forts and digging disgusting, muddied swimming “pools” that always ended up filled with earthworms and leaves and deer piss after a day or so.

  We spent a lot of days at the junkyard, too. We had scavenger hunts orchestrated by Uncle Joe, who mostly liked to sit on the porch with a beer and, weirdly, Noam Chomsky books in hand, hollering instructions at us from his lawn chair. He also liked to take photos of birds; the batteries in his camera were small and far enough away that they didn’t bother me. We used to lie on the roof of the Ghettomobile and count stars, which sounds hammy but was actually nice. Or we’d set up a tent in one of our backyards and have a campfire and catch fireflies and shout “rabbit!” whenever smoke wafted into our faces.

  I never challenged the power line, although we passed close to it when we were walking the trails. We were always quiet when we were near it. It was like an unspoken rule. I was biding my time; so was the power line. But I didn’t really want to leave home as much anymore. Home was where Liz came to find me
, where I shouted, “I’m here!”

  Liz brought the book light all the time, for what good it did. The one time she tried switching it on before tossing it to me, I started shaking and it somehow got flung against the far wall of my room. I hadn’t thrown it. It just buzzed and jolted and got as far from me as possible, like it had a mind of its own. Like it couldn’t bear the bizarre charge of me.

  That electromagnetic repulsion effect had happened again, and I was panting.

  “Maybe next week,” she said. “Don’t let it get you down.”

  It made me queasy. Not the electricity. The way she said that. Maybe she was starting to believe what I’d told her from the start: there was no getting better.

  But let’s stave off the darkness a little longer, okay?

  I’ve saved the best day for last.

  Moritz—I don’t know why I didn’t say it clearly. Caught up in my own crap, I guess—but it’s awesome that you’re learning to read. I’m going to send you the best reading list I can think of, and purposely tuck some crappy books between the good ones to keep you on your toes.

  I’m evil. It’s funny imagining you reading, oh-so-slowly, oh-soclickity, just to realize that you’ve read a “bodice-buster” romance about a lusty pirate and a blushing damsel. (Don’t ask me why I have those books. I have broad tastes, okay. Are you interested in space cats?)

  I’m not going to say that you could be “any other boy,” though, Moritz. Because I still think you should be aiming for total badass superhero type. Yeah, I knew about Matt Murdock’s darn echolocation. I was being cunning, see. I am waggling my eyebrows and nudging you with my elbow. MBV is worthy of comics.

  All those times I told you to have confidence and you finally get it from a disgruntled librarian? Are you shitting me? You are a decent human being (again, I despise the way you despise yourself!), and if you really want to talk to Owen Abend, you should go for it anyhow! Fieke the Fierce can’t stop you.

  Maybe that’s why Liz left me behind. I never threw an airplane at her face.

  Ha, ha.

  ~ Ollie

  P.S. I guess I haven’t been needling you so much lately because I’m sick of getting needled myself. Seriously, if people keep tiptoeing around me like I’m on my deathbed, I’m going to go from troubled Jekyll to apeshit Hyde. I may throw battle-ready Dorian at their faces. He may be a cuddlesome lump, but he’s got the teeth of a piranha, my deadly Persian cat!