by Leah Thomas
“Go get help! My phone!”
I don’t know how I had time to be hurt, but I did. “You brought your phone?”
“Go get it! You could hold the book light, so you can hold a damn phone! In the tent! Run!”
“Let me check first. Whether he’s got a pul—”
“Go, Oliver!”
Maybe she should have gone, but how could I ask her to leave him? How could I say anything when I couldn’t think?
I couldn’t think, Mo.
It felt like I was dream-walking again. Like the day I met her. But I was running instead, and it was dark and cold and I couldn’t feel my foot, and when I got to the campfire, I nearly tripped and fell right into it. This was nightmare-walking?
I tore open Liz’s tent, heart thumping against my ribs, grabbed her backpack, and took it out by the fire so that I could see what was inside, and then tore through her clothes and past her toiletry bag and through the pack’s lining and finally something stung my hand:
The phone had been wrapped up in two Ziploc bags, rolled inside her bathing suit, but it was glowing just enough to make me nauseous. Gagging, fighting the tremors, I tried to grab it.
But I was way too hyped up, too charged, and when I reached for the phone it spun away from my hand and smacked against the circle of stones around the fire pit.
“Shit!” I scampered after it again, but it was repelled again, almost into the coals.
I upended the bag of extra tent poles and pulled it over my shaking hand like a glove. It made the slightest difference, and I was able to pick up the phone. I could feel the veins in my hand popping, but I held tight. After a second, it buzzed against my palm, and I squeezed tighter. After that, it didn’t sting quite so much.
I ran. I ran, but I already knew.
I’d known when I first saw him there. The way his torso was twisted. The way his body was breaking so many basic anatomical rules, there was no way he wouldn’t be paralyzed at the very least, no way he would walk or sit on the porch and fake bird-watching—
And I ran anyhow.
Nothing had changed at the clearing. Liz was still shaking him, still pressing her ear to his chest. Joe’s eyes were closed; his face was pale, very still. And I knew again.
His spine was broken.
I was biting my tongue so hard that I was piercing flesh, and the arm that held the phone was numb all the way up to my shoulder. Dry heaves racked my chest, but all I could really think about was how I should tell her, but I couldn’t tell her—
Liz looked at me with wild, hopeful eyes when I burst out of the foliage; if she realized, she was pretending she didn’t. I held the phone up and felt my head clear a bit when I handed it over.
“Here! But I thought there was no signal out here—”
“That was years ago!”
She pressed a button on its side and tapped the screen. I waited for the phone to reflect her, but the screen buzzed to white for only a second before hissing back to black, to nothingness.
“It’s not working—what the hell? What’s wrong with it?”
She tapped ineffectually at the screen.
“Oh no.” I pressed the heels of my palms into my temples, but it wasn’t enough. “No no no no no NO!”
“What—did you drop it?!”
“I didn’t. I swear I didn’t. It just … I couldn’t touch it.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
The screen was empty. I took a step back, then another.
“Electromagnetism.”
“Oh god. You shorted it? He’s dying and you—! Anyone else here and this wouldn’t have—couldn’t have—but no, I brought you!”
I know she was beyond upset. I know she was devastated. But I can’t forget the way her face looked when she said that.
“You could have gone for the phone, if I’m so predictably terrible!”
Then she was standing, holding it out in front of her, up to my face. I winced and shook my head, shook my head. Blank screen, but I still felt tiny needles pricking my skin.
“What are we supposed to do?” Her face was collapsing in on itself, an imploding star. “What are we …”
She pushed the phone closer to me.
I put my hand in front of my eyes, but I shouldn’t have. I shouldn’t have, because with the sight of her and the almost-corpse of him and the volume of my breathing in my ears and everything else, of course I felt bee stings in my fingertips and suddenly I had repelled it again.
The phone smacked her in the mouth with enough force to tilt her head back slightly, enough to knock against her teeth before it fell to the forest floor. She whimpered and covered her mouth and stared at me like I was …
“Liz—” I reached for her, and she withdrew, eyes wide.
“Go. Get away from me!”
“Liz—I’m so sorry,” I mumbled. “The campers. I’ll go get the other campers. Maybe …”
“Anyone else and this couldn’t happen.” She was so quiet. But there was no way I’d miss a word of it, even as I backed away from that look in her eyes. “Anyone in the whole world, and instead it was you.”
I stumbled alone in the dark, heading in the vague direction of the other campground across the lake, falling over logs and my own feet and almost falling into the water again, scraping my arms on branches and brambles all but invisible in the dark. Away from the clearing, away from the lantern, away from Joe, away from Liz.
I followed foggy gray trails of electric smog to the opposite side of the lake, trails that became tinged with color the longer I stumbled along them. I kept falling, kept eating dirt, and I couldn’t figure out why, because I didn’t notice that I had sliced my foot open until hours later, maybe after midnight or maybe close to dawn, what felt like eons after I left the clearing where Liz and Junkyard Joe—dead, he must have been dead—
—you don’t know that. She wouldn’t let you check his pulse. She didn’t even want you to touch him, freak.
Freak, freak, freak.
All I could see the whole time I was wandering through the dark were the same stupid images spinning through my head: Liz’s face when she told me to go, the stillness of Joe, the kiss, her face, the terrible kiss, the dark. Her face.
Firelight filled my eyes, but I didn’t realize I had arrived at the campground until I walked right into some man who wore a fluorescent-orange vest.
“Help?”
“Jesus, kid, where did you come from? Aren’t you freezing?”
“He’s vomited all over himself—”
Fire and light and noise and, yes, lines and clouds of electric colors that were stretching out to greet me. The smog of their trucks, the buzz of their lamps, all stretching out fingers to hold me. I would be happy to meet them, happy for them to shut me off.
“I don’t need help; Joe does. Except if he’s dead, he doesn’t need help and maybe he’s dead, but he’s over there, and you should go … go … help him because I’m a freak and I can’t do it, okay. I can’t do it and I can’t do phones and I can’t.”
“Here, son,” said one of the men.
He held up something that was buzzing blue and sizzling goldfuzzing light, and wrapped it around my shoulders.
And with the weight of the electric heating blanket on my shoulders, I was gone, gone, gone.
She was right, you know.
If it had been anyone else, it wouldn’t have happened that way.
~ O
Chapter Twenty
The Cat
Moritz, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. If that’s what it takes, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I was an idiot, I’m always an idiot.
Why did you stop writing me?
Please. You have to talk to me. Please. I know you aren’t ether. I know you feel, you think. I know you care. I never thought you were a void.
Where are you? What’s happened in the weeks since we last spoke? What should I do? What would you do if you were me? How can I ever expect Liz to come hang out after all that?
I don’t think I can answer any questions without your help anymore. I can’t focus enough to think of answers, and if this is a laser beam, then it’s getting wide enough to swallow the world or something, and that doesn’t even make sense and I’m sorry for that, too.
Moritz, I don’t know what’s worse: that maybe you never got my last letter and I have to write it all over again, or that maybe you did get it and you’re so disgusted that you don’t want to speak to me anymore. Has something happened to you?
Stop writing, Mom says. Maybe it was the wrong idea to write. Stop writing. It’s not therapy. Stop needling, because maybe that’s all we’re doing to each other. Experiments of our own? Sorry, Moritz.
But I didn’t finish it; we’re not fully up to date yet. Please let me finish. Please listen to me, and I’ll be quick and there won’t be any fuss and hoopla.
See, Joe didn’t die after all; it was touch and go for a while. He was comatose for a month, and with every day that he was sleeping, I was almost wishing he would die because he was dragging out my guilt, and yeah, you can say the fall wasn’t actually my fault—I’ve heard that from everyone, even from Liz once, when she stopped by to tell me he’d woken up and the doctors, they told him he’d be paralyzed from the hips down probably for as long as he was living, that one doctor said he broke sections of his lower spine (vertebrae lumbales) and tore nerve clusters on impact and that getting a medical helicopter out there sooner probably wouldn’t have helped, PROBABLY, and even during the early days when I was in my sickbed half comatose myself with stitches in my foot, and Mom was there telling me “Shush” and “It’s not your fault.” And Auburn-Stache kept holding my hand and he wouldn’t even smile his goofy smile and he said, too, “It’s not your fault,” even then I heard “probably.”
We all heard about the doctor saying “probably.” Probably means maybe he could have been walking now. Maybe. Probably, maybe.
And then last week, while I was waiting for you to send me a letter, when I was waiting for anything, Dorian Gray died. He just curled up on my bed and didn’t get up again when I tried to shove him off my pillow as usual. My cat? That wasn’t my fault, either, because that cat was really old, and he meowed whenever you touched his back or scratched him under the chin, didn’t purr but meowed in pain when you stroked him because of arthritis, and he couldn’t even really jump up on the sofa anymore, and things that are old die sometimes and there’s nothing you can do about it but bury old things under a pine tree in your backyard.
Or things that are young die, too, especially when they do secretive work in laboratories and they really shouldn’t, because that can ruin a family and a kid’s life, I think. I’m starting to put the pieces together and maybe being a lab experiment is the same as being sick after all, because we don’t live in colorful panels with speech bubbles and exciting noises.
Moritz, please. I don’t know who else to talk to. I can’t think straight. The house won’t stop moaning, and my fingertips are raw from folding origami flowers because I don’t know what to do or what to play or read to make this better. Maybe my fingertips will peel away, just rub away, and the bones will poke through, and then how will I hold the pen properly to write you because bones can’t grip without skin, even phalange-bones, and I’d just end up bleeding all over the paper so you have to answer me soon.
To make it stop.
Moritz?
Please.
Chapter Twenty-One
The Fishbowl
It’s been so long since I last heard from you, and I’m happy to report that I haven’t given up on you yet! I’m still writing you pointless letters every week, even though my autobiography is pretty much up to date. It’s not like things have been all that eventful here, so I’ll just keep telling you about the books I’m reading and about building bike ramps and about baking cheesecakes (German double-chocolate ones, strawberry ones, and blueberry ones, but not blackberry ones), which I’ve been getting into. But there aren’t enough people to eat the cakes, so they end up moldering a bit in the icebox, but we try to eat them anyhow.
Mom is looking younger in the summer weather. She isn’t prancing around sniffing daisies or anything, but she’s been sitting on the porch and teaching me to knit lately. I think maybe we’re both doing better. I mean, I’ve come to terms with losing things, and she must have done that ages ago. I never see that lab coat. I don’t even bother needling her about my dad anymore.
Anyhow, I try not to worry about you. I try really hard, just like I try to focus. I really hope you aren’t dead or something, or Lenz didn’t beat the crap out of you again. But if you are lying in a hospital bed somewhere, I think I’ll keep writing you anyway, because it does help me and it gives me a reason to write. I can pretend. If that’s okay. I know Liz wasn’t into pretending, except for when she was pretending I could have a living room like any other kid who maybe wouldn’t let her uncle get paralyzed out in the cold woods.
Focus, Ollie. Focus.
Who’d have thought I could miss someone I’ve never actually met? Me. I’ve thought that. I miss tons of things I’ve never seen, and now you most of all.
Something kind of miraculous happened the other day, and I need to tell you about it.
Liz rode her bike up my driveway on a Wednesday afternoon.
I wasn’t waiting for her. Mom and I were actually out back deadheading multicolored daylilies in the flower beds that border the house, so she ended up having to walk around over the uneven grass to find us.
She didn’t shout “I’m here!” like she used to, but Mom still heard her coming.
“Ollie, don’t freak out.” Mom squeezed my arm.
I turned around, squinting in the sun, and there she was. Like she’d never left, and for a moment, I wanted to just grin at her like of course we were fine, but then I could see ages between us, months of standing in the driveway by myself. My throat constricted and my ears burned and I couldn’t say a damn thing, because what if it came out as screaming? I dropped the shriveled yellow flower head.
She put her hand over her mouth. Her hair was growing out, and it seemed darker against the bright blue sky. She hadn’t bothered with braids. Not a speck of muck on her. I almost didn’t recognize her.
“Hey.” More of a whisper than a scream. “How’s it hangin’?”
“Oh, Ollie,” she said, kneeling down and wrapping her arms around me.
I’m not going to lie, Moritz. It felt really nice to feel her arms again, and she smelled awesome, like sugar or something, but in my head she was still standing in the forest clearing, looking at me with that face, so I gently pushed her away and stood up. It was weird—I was way taller than her now.
“I could play the xylophone on your rib cage!”
“Glockenspiel, please.”
“Have you both gone on a hunger strike? I want to stuff burgers down your throats. I mean … what happened?”
Mom smiled at her. “We’re just going through some growth spurts, Elizabeth.”
“What, even you, Ms. Paulot?”
“Tch. I’m a late bloomer. And you never really grow up.” After seven seconds, she climbed to her feet. “I’ll go get us some lemonade, hey? Like a good motherly stereotype.”
She left us there on the sunlit lawn.
“Ollie,” Liz said, “you look terrible.”
“What a lovely thing to tell me on a lovely summer’s day. And speaking of lovely, you look lovely.”
“I mean it. You and your mom. If I’d known …”
“If you’d known, you could have stopped by every week to comment on how terrible we look.” I laughed and began trudging toward the porch.
Freak, freak, freak.
“Oliver,” she said, “why won’t you look at me?”
“The sun’s in my eyes.”
But even when we reached the shade, I didn’t really look at her.
“So, what brings you to our humble abode, Liz? Looking lovely, as already stated?”
She didn’t smile. “Lovely, huh.”
“Yep. I guess high school still suits you, then.”
“Well. High school isn’t actually that different from middle school, turns out.”
“I wouldn’t know, of course.”
“Ollie …”
“Look, Liz—what do you want?”
And here I was trying for a sunny disposition, Moritz! I was trying, but it’s hard. Because you told me to be honest with myself, and honestly I wasn’t feeling very sunny inside. I felt like something small that was hiding in the dark until Liz lifted the log to see me squirm.
“I want to go to the junkyard, but not by myself. There are some things there in the trailer that I want to pick up. Some things Uncle Joe wants in his hospital room. I’m the only one who knows where he keeps things. I was the only one who visited him.”
“Oh.”
“But I wasn’t really visiting him, you know.” Did her voice crack?
“You weren’t, huh.”
She put her hand on her cheek and looked out at the lawn. “I wasn’t. And that makes me feel worse about it. This was where I ran away to, I guess.”
I shrugged. “This is all a bit too grown-up for me. I just want to go inside and play with my Legos. Like a good little hermit.”
“Please, Ollie.” Funny how she isn’t even fazed by my sarcasm anymore. I guess she shouldn’t be, since I learned half of it from her. It probably bores her.
“Lemme get my shoes on.”
Liz shook her head. “No, not today. Next week, maybe.”
“Why wait? It sounds so very fun.”
“I have plans.”
“Plans?”
She blinked at me. “You want me to say it? I’m meeting friends. For friends things. For high school things and electronic music and electric lights and all sorts of power lines. Happy?”
“Oh, wicked.” This was all wrong, but I couldn’t seem to stop it. “You can tell them all how terrible I look!”