Parallelogram Omnibus Edition

by Brande, Robin

  And a deliriously happy dog. And Halli. Who grinned at me and offered her usual “Heya” before handing me a bundle of clothes.

  We’d agreed that I’d show up wearing just the thick long underwear my mom bought me a few years ago when we decided to try sledding in the mountains above Tucson. That lasted half a day—we realized neither one of us likes being cold—but I still had the clothes, since I never seem to get rid of anything.

  “This is good,” I said of the private little nook Halli had found us off the trail. It was hidden enough that no one could see us from below or above.

  “Hurry, though,” Halli said. “People could come over that rise any minute. I’ll keep a lookout.”

  “I’m so sorry about yesterday!” I said. “I overslept and then I had to go to school—”

  “It’s fine,” Halli said. “Just hurry.” She glanced above her up the trail. She was making me nervous.

  “Did I miss anything important?” I asked. It’s hard to dress when there’s a dog constantly trying to lick you, but I sped it up as best I could.

  “No, just the train ride and a night at the inn. Hurry—two hikers up above.”

  I finished pulling on the black hiking pants she’d brought me, then slipped the thick fleece shirt over my head and pulled it down. I hadn’t bothered wearing shoes, since I didn’t have anything appropriate anyway. I slipped on the brand new pair of hiking boots Halli handed me.

  “Did you buy these?” I asked. “For me?”

  “I didn’t have an extra pair in your size. Ginny was a nine.”

  “Thank you,” I said, almost ridiculously pleased. My first gift in another realm.

  “You’re welcome. But keep an eye out for blisters. Ideally I should have had you start wearing those a few weeks ago to break them in.” Halli smiled. “But, then, I didn’t know you a few weeks ago.”

  Which almost seems impossible. Has it really only been six days?

  “Besides,” Halli said, “I didn’t know myself I’d be coming up here until a few days ago. I owe that entirely to you.”

  “To me?” I laced up the second boot even though Red’s face kept blocking my view. “What did I do?”

  “You woke me up,” Halli said.

  “How?”

  She sighed and leaned back against the rock. “I’ve been so isolated this past year—on purpose. I haven’t gone anywhere or done anything. Every adventure I’ve ever had has been with Ginny. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it anymore without her.

  “But then you showed up,” Halli said, “and I saw how I used to be.”

  I stared at her in shock. “I remind you of how you used to be?” What, I thought—weak and pasty and scraggly-haired?

  “Adventurous,” Halli said. “Curious. Willing to go try new things and go new places just to see what the world is like.”

  She stood up and brushed off the back of her pants. “We should go. We have a lot of ground to cover today.”

  I was glad that she turned and started hiking, because I didn’t know what to say to her. The idea that she found me inspirational in any way was just ludicrous. I mean, I understood her point about sort of giving up for a while after her grandmother died, but my experiment in meditation was nothing compared to all those maps I’d seen on Halli’s walls. She’s obviously lived a much bigger life than I’ve ever even imagined for myself.

  To which I know she would have said, “But you traveled to another universe.”

  Yeah, but it almost feels accidental. Like I just stumbled on an idea that turned out to be right. A good idea—don’t get me wrong—but a lucky one, nevertheless.

  The people Halli had spotted up above caught up with us soon enough. When I saw them at a distance and noticed how fast they were hiking, I thought they must be really young and fit and burly.

  No, turns out they were really old and fit and burly. At least as old as my Grandma Marion, if not older.

  “Grüs Gott,” the woman said to Halli.

  “Grüs Gott,” Halli answered back.

  I just smiled and gave them a quick nod.

  Then Halli and the two of them started talking in what I could only assume was German. While I stood there smiling like an idiot.

  At one point the woman turned toward me and asked Halli a question.

  “Nein,” Halli answered. “Das ist meine Cousine.” Which, even though she pronounced it “coozeena,” sounded an awful lot like “cousin.” So I guess we were skipping the twin thing.

  “Ah,” the woman answered, smiling and nodding at me. I smiled and nodded back.

  “Auf Wiedersehen,” the woman eventually said, giving us a little wave as she hiked on.

  “Wiedersehen,” Halli responded.

  The old man smiled at us and followed his companion.

  As soon as the couple was far enough out of hearing, I said, “So I’m your cousin, right?”

  “It just seems easier,” Halli said.

  “Fine with me. I don’t know any of these people.”

  But that was the thing, as I was soon to find out.

  They knew her.

  31

  At first I thought people were just being friendly. I thought maybe that’s how it was with everyone in the Alps.

  Stopping to talk, to ask a few questions, to smile, and sometimes shake Halli’s hand. I heard “coozeena” a lot. Apparently a lot of people had to be told I was her cousin.

  At one point a few hours into the hike, two young men with long legs and big strides caught up to us and were ready to just pass us and keep on going, when one of them stopped and elbowed his friend. The two of them whispered. Then the one who’d been elbowed said in hesitant English, “Excuse—Halli Markham?”

  “Si,” Halli answered. “Buon giorno.” Then they carried on the rest of the conversation in Italian. While I smiled stupidly because I couldn’t understand. Although the words mia cogina did sound a little like cousine, which meant Halli had to explain our similarity again.

  The two guys were really into Halli. I mean really. They talked faster and faster, and one of them made hand motions like waves on the ocean, and the other one slapped his forehead at that and then talked really fast, and all the while Halli was . . . polite. That’s the only word I could use to describe it. She certainly wasn’t as animated as they were. She said “Si, si,” a lot and let the guys go on for quite a while. But finally you could see she was trying to wrap it up.

  She said something more in Italian, made an “I’m sorry” shrug of her shoulders, and the young men each took a turn shaking her hand and kissing both of her cheeks. Then she waved goodbye to them and they finally trekked on, and once they were far enough ahead of us, Halli sagged down onto the trail.

  “Sometimes they wear me out.”

  “Who, those guys?” I asked. “Do you know them?”

  “No, just . . . admirers, I guess.”

  “Of you?” It came out sounding more surprised than I meant it to. Of course people would admire Halli. She was obviously cool.

  Halli looked at the sky. “We only have another half hour or so before you have to wake up.”

  Seriously, I was so disappointed to remember that. I was just getting into the hiking. It was arduous in places, but it was also incredibly beautiful out there in the cold mountains above the treeline.

  “I wish I could just pop back there, tell my mom to let me sleep in today—tell her I’m sick or something—and come back.”

  “Can you do that?” Halli asked.

  I considered it. Went through a quick checklist of what I thought we’d be doing in each of my classes. Tried to decide if there was anything too important to miss.

  I’ve never been a school ditcher. Never. It’s just not in my nature. But maybe it’s because I never had a better offer.

  “Let me do this,” I said. “I know if I tell my mom I’m sick, she’ll fuss over me for a while, so I won’t be able to come right back. Let me see if I can talk her into going to work at her normal time,
then I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

  “What time should I look for you?” Halli asked.

  I did the calculation. “Let’s make it 5:00 this evening, just to be safe. That’s 9:00 AM my time. I’ll tell her I just want to sleep, so I’m turning off the phone. She might come home for lunch to check on me, but we’ll just have to take our chances.”

  That would give me from 5:00 at night to as late as 1:00 in the morning Halli’s time, if my mom stayed at work all day. Not that I’d need to be in Halli’s world that long. I was sure that after a long day of hiking, she’d want to go to bed pretty early.

  We hiked a little bit further, then started looking for a convenient place from which I could disappear. We sat in the shadow of a small cliff and waited for my alarm to go off. No sense in leaving any sooner than I had to.

  “I’ll be looking for you,” Halli said. “Five o’clock.”

  “Five o—”

  Then the horrible, hideous beep from my clock.

  I pushed out of bed and stumbled toward the kitchen, where my mother sat sipping her coffee and reading the paper.

  I leaned against the doorway and groaned.

  “Oh, Mom, I feel soooo sick.”

  32

  Halli said we’d be sleeping in a hut.

  I had a perfect image of it in my mind. We’d crest some hill, and there it would be, this sweet, simple little wooden structure—a hermit’s hut—where we could sleep for the night. No electricity, just lanterns or candles. Although Halli did say there would be food there. So maybe just cold bread and water.

  And even though she hadn’t brought sleeping bags and pads like she had with her at the campsite where I first met her and Red, she did bring something called a sleep sack for each of us, and said that would be enough. Apparently there were mattresses of some kind in the huts, and blankets, and you just sleep in your little sack like a cocoon, and layer the blankets over it.

  But when Halli and I met up again in the bedroom of the hut, and she escorted me out into the hallway to show me around, all I could think was, hermit’s hut?

  Um, excuse me, it was a party.

  As in hordes of people. Maybe a hundred? Young, old, men, women, Italians, Germans, Austrians, Swiss, and yes, even a few other Americans besides Halli and me.

  “Why are all these people here?” I asked, slightly alarmed.

  Halli laughed. “I’m not the only person who knows about the Alps.”

  She gave me a quick tour of the place—or at least the bottom floor. The building was more like a dorm than a hut. A big dining hall, several floors that she said held plenty of rooms and beds, community bathrooms (for each gender, of course—even in a parallel universe they understand the need for modesty), and special heated rooms where everyone could hang up and dry all their moist, stinky clothing and boots.

  “Where’s Red?”

  She pointed her thumb behind us. “Dogs sleep in their own building.” She leaned over and whispered, “Which is why this isn’t my favorite place. Wait till you see where we’re going tomorrow.”

  I missed my little buddy. Missed always being tackled first thing when I showed up in Halli’s universe.

  Maybe that’s a sign. Maybe I need my own dog some day.

  “Hungry?” Halli asked.

  I was, but I wasn’t sure for what. It was breakfast time to my body, but here it was dinner time. I could adapt.

  Halli took me to the dining hall. Propped just outside the doors was a menu written on a chalkboard. The menu was in German. Halli translated it for me.

  The main theme seemed to be potatoes. Which was fine with me. My preferred preparation is in the potato chip form, but I’ve also been known to dive face-first into a bowl of mashed. I’m not picky.

  Halli pointed to the listing for the vegetable stew. “Mmm, that’s my favorite here.”

  “Okay, I’ll take that, too.”

  Halli placed our order—in German, of course—with the hut manager. She paid the manager, too, with a handful of some kind of coin I’ve never seen before. I couldn’t even offer to pay my share, since (a) I wasn’t sure the place took dollars, (b) I hadn’t stuffed any cash into the waistband of my long underwear, and (c) I wasn’t sure if doing that would have worked anyway. I had no idea if money traveled.

  Once the hut manager turned away, I asked Halli if I could see one of her coins.

  One side had an image of two intersecting circles. Pretty basic. The other side showed a man’s face in profile. He looked sort of vaguely familiar, which kind of surprised me. But his name wasn’t jumping out at me—not that it would have been his name over in Halli’s world anyway. Still, it bugged me that I couldn’t think who he reminded me of.

  “What do you call these?” I asked Halli as I handed her back the coin.

  “Icies.”

  “You mean, like . . . ice?”

  “No, international currency. ICs.”

  “International?” I said. “Does that mean everybody uses the same money? In the whole world?”

  “Of course,” Halli said. “Don’t you have that?”

  Dollars, Euros, rupees, yuan, pesos—I couldn’t even think of all the different kinds of money out there. It seemed sort of overcomplicated, now that Halli mentioned it.

  “Let’s go in,” Halli said. “They’ll bring us our food in a minute.” Then she opened the door and led me into the noisy dining hall.

  All of the tables were full. Or at least mostly full. We found two seats at a table near the front, and as soon as we approached I heard more than one person in the room shout, “Halli Markham!”

  Halli gave them all a little wave, then sat down.

  The young woman beside Halli pointed at me. I heard Halli give her usual introduction, “Meine Cousine.” Why did everyone care so much who I was? It was kind of getting annoying. But everyone smiled at me and I smiled back. Whatever.

  Then for the rest of the evening the conversation swirled around me, all in languages I didn’t understand. Halli was pretty good about translating for me as we went along, but sometimes the conversations went too fast. It’s like those scenes you sometimes see in movies where the foreign character says something really, really long and complicated, with many parts, with lots of emotion, and when it comes time for the translator to translate, he says, “Mr. Kobenevsky says ‘No, thank you.’”

  “What language was that?” I asked after someone new had stopped by the table and conversed with Halli for a few minutes.

  “Polish.”

  “How many languages do you speak?”

  Halli laughed. “A little of a lot.”

  I ended up retreating to my own special world where it was just me and my delicious dinner. We understood each other perfectly. A big heaping bowl of vegetable stew made of potatoes, onions, carrots, and cabbage; tons of bread; some sort of fried dough with powdered sugar on it for dessert (unbelievably great).

  By the time my belly was full, I was totally exhausted. Not just because I’d been hiking over rock and more rock for several hours earlier, but because being in the middle of a noisy crowd and not being able to understand people is really mentally tiring.

  Plus, I’d already been up for hours, with very little sleep before that. So the whole thing was catching up to me.

  Looked like it finally caught up to Halli, too. Shortly after dessert, she yawned deep and wide. She leaned over and patted my leg. “Let’s go say goodnight to Red.”

  We headed back to her room to get our coats so we could take the dog out for a brief walk. As we made our way toward the far end of the long hallway, I noticed a lot of our dinner companions turned off and headed up the stairs to the next floor.

  “Where are they all going?”

  “To the mattress lager.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’ll find out tomorrow.”

  Very mysterious. And too mysterious for me to care. I just wanted to lie down and sleep.

  But first, a certain furry co
mpanion.

  We grabbed our coats and were just about to leave the room when Halli’s screen rang. She gave out a sound between a groan and a growl.

  “Better hide,” Halli told me.

  I crouched down behind one of the two beds, and Halli stood as far away from me as she could. Then she pressed the top of her screen and we watched her mother’s head swirl into view.

  “What,” Halli said.

  “Hello,” her mother answered cheerfully. “Where are you?”

  “You know where I am.”

  “Where, specifically?”

  Halli told her the name of the hut—something long in German.

  “Are you alone?” her mother asked.

  “No, there are about a hundred people here. They’re all my friends.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic.”

  “I’m not. They know me up here. I’ve come often.”

  “How long are you staying?” her mother asked.

  “A long time. Until the snow runs me out of here.”

  “Could you be more specific?”

  “Why do you care, Regina?”

  I heard a sniffling sound. I stole a look over the top of the bed. Halli’s mother was wiping what might have been a fake tear. Halli rolled her eyes at me.

  “I’m tired, Regina,” Halli said. “I have to go to sleep now.”

  “Please be careful.”

  “I’m always careful,” Halli said. “I wouldn’t still be alive if I weren’t.”

  With that, she punched some button on her screen and her mother’s head disappeared. Halli growled in irritation, then stood there for a moment composing herself.

  I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t my business.

  “I need my dog,” Halli said forcefully.

  I wasn’t going to argue.

  “Hi, buddy! Did you miss us?” Halli asked as the dog jumped and whined with excitement. Other guests of the dogs’ hut wagged their tails and yipped at us, obviously hoping for a little spillover love. I petted a few heads in the near vicinity, then Halli and Red and I took a walk.