He and May were the last to leave Albee’s. The shop windows were filled with promises of Christmas. Colors and lights streamed over the slushy pavement. The cars were inching headlight to brakelight down Main Street, out of town. Bobby and May leaned on the parapet of the bridge. The lights of the houses on the hill where Uncle Lew lived were mirrored in the sliding water. May was wearing mittens, a scarf, a beret, her red hair tucked out of sight, just her nose and eyes showing.
“When I was eight or nine,” she said, “Mum and Dad took me on holiday to the coast. It was windy and sunny. I had a big brother then. His name was Tom. We were both kids and he used to give me piggy backs, sometimes tickle me till I almost peed. We loved to explore the dunes. Had a whole world there to ourselves. One morning we were sliding down this big slope of sand, laughing and climbing all the way up again. Then Tom doubled up at the bottom, and I thought he must have caught himself on a hidden rock or something. I shouted Are You Okay, but all he did was groan.”
“He was growing up?”
May nodded. “The doc at home had said it was fine to go away, but I realized what was happening. I said You Stay There, which was stupid really, and I shot off to get someone. The sand kept sliding under my sandals. It was a nightmare, running through treacle. I ran right into Dad’s arms. He’d gone looking for us. I don’t know why, perhaps it’s something grownups can sense. He found someone else to ring the ambulance and we went back down the beach to see Tom. The tide was coming in and I was worried it might reach him…”
She paused. Darkness was flowing beneath the river arches. “When we got back, he was all twisted, and I knew he couldn’t be alive, no one could hold themselves that way. The blood was in the sand, sticking to his legs. Those black flies you always get on a beach were swarming.”
Bobby began, “That doesn’t…” but he pulled the rest of the chilly sentence back into his lungs.
May turned to him. She pulled the scarf down to her chin. Looking at her lips, the glint of her teeth inside, Bobby remembered the sweet hot things they had done together. He marveled at how close you could get to someone and still feel alone.
“We’re always early developers in our family,” May said. “Tom was the first in his class. I suppose I’ll be the same.”
“Maybe it’s better … get it over with.”
“I suppose everyone thinks that it’ll happen first to some kid in another class, someone you hardly know. Then to a few others. Perhaps a friend, someone you can visit afterward and find out you’ve got nothing to say but that it’s no big deal after all. Everything will always be fine.”
“There’s still a long—”
“—How long? What difference is a month more or less?” She was angry, close to tears. But beneath, her face was closed off from him. “You had an elder brother who survived, Bobby. Was he ever the same?”
Bobby shrugged. The answer was obvious, all around them. Grownups were grownups. They drove cars, fought wars, dressed in boring and uncomfortable clothes, built roads, bought newspapers every morning that told them the same thing, drank alcohol without getting merry from it, pulled hard on the toilet door to make sure it was shut before they did their business.
“Tony was all right,” he said. “He’s still all right. We were never that great together anyway—just brothers. I don’t think it’s the physical changes that count … or even that that’s at the heart of it.…” He didn’t know what the hell else to say.
“I’m happy as I am,” May said. “I’m a kid. I feel like a kid. If I change, I’ll cease to be me. Who wants that?” She took off her mitten, wiped her nose on the back of her hand. “So I’m not going through with it.”
Bobby stared at her. It was like saying you weren’t going through with death because you didn’t like the sound of it. “It can’t be that bad, May. Most kids get through all right. Think of all the grownups … Jesus, think of your own parents.”
“Look, Bobby. I know growing up hurts. I know it’s dangerous. I should know, shouldn’t I? That’s not what I care about. What I care about is losing me, the person I am and want to be.… You just don’t believe me, do you? I’m not going through with it, I’ll stay a kid. I don’t care who I say it to, because they’ll just think I’m acting funny, but Bobby, I thought you might believe me. There has to be a way out.”
“You can.…” Bobby said. But already she was walking away.
* * *
The envelopes were handed out at school. A doctor started to call at Bobby’s house, and at the houses of all his friends. Next day there was always a show of bravado as they compared the bruises on their arms. The first child to grow up was a boy named Arthur Mumford, whose sole previous claim to fame was the ability to play popular tunes by squelching his armpits. In that way that the inevitable always has, it happened suddenly and without warning. One Tuesday in February, just five weeks after the doctor had started to call at their houses, Arthur didn’t turn up for registration. A girl two years below had spotted the doctor’s car outside his house on her paper round the evening before. Word was around the whole school by lunchtime.
There was an unmistakable air of disappointment. When he wasn’t performing his party piece, Arthur was a quiet boy: he was tall, and stooped from embarrassment at his height. He seldom spoke. But it wasn’t just that it should happen first to someone as ordinary as Arthur—I mean, it has to happen to all of us sooner or later, right? But none of the children felt as excited—or even as afraid—as they had expected. When it had happened to kids in the senior years, it had seemed like something big, seeing a kid they’d known suddenly walking along Main Street in grownup clothes with the dazed expression that always came to new grownups, ignoring old school friends, looking for work, ducking into bars. They had speculated excitedly about who would go next, prayed that it would be one of the school bullies. But now that it was their turn, the whole thing felt like a joke that had been played too many times. Arthur Mumford was just an empty desk, a few belongings that needed picking up.
In the spring, at least half a dozen of the children in Bobby’s year had grown up. The hot weather seemed to speed things up. Sitting by the dry fountain outside the Municipal Offices one afternoon, watching the litter and the grownups scurry by, a friend of Bobby’s named Michele suddenly dropped her can of drink and coiled up in a screaming ball. The children and the passing grownups all fluttered uselessly as she rolled around on the sidewalk until a doctor who happened to be walking by forced her to sit up on the rim of the fountain and take deep slow breaths. Yes, she’s growing up, he snapped, glowering at the onlookers, then down at his watch. I suggest someone call her parents or get a car. Michele was gasping through tears and obviously in agony, but the doctor’s manner suggested that she was making far too much of the whole thing. A car arrived soon enough, and Michele was bundled into the back. Bobby never saw her again.
He had similar, although less dramatic, partings with other friends. One day, you’d be meeting them at the bus stop to go to the skating rink. The next, you would hear that they had grown up. You might see them around town, heading out of a shop as you were going in, but they would simply smile and nod, or make a point of saying Hello Bobby just to show that they remembered your name. Everything was changing. That whole summer was autumnal, filled with a sense of loss. In their own grownup way, even the parents of the remaining children were affected. Although there would inevitably be little time left for their children to enjoy such things, they became suddenly generous with presents, finding the cash that had previously been missing for a new bike, a train set, or even a pony.
May and Bobby still spent afternoons together, but more often now they would just sit in the kitchen at May’s house, May by turns gloomy and animated, Bobby laughing with her or—increasingly against his feelings—trying to act reassuring and grownup. They usually had the house to themselves. In recognition of the dwindling classes, the teachers were allowing any number of so-called study periods, and both of May�
��s parents worked days and overtime in the evenings to keep up with the mortgage on their clumsy mock-tudor house.
One afternoon, when they were drinking orange juice mixed with sweet sherry filched from the liquor cabinet and wondering if they dared to get drunk, May got up and went to the fridge. Bobby thought she was getting more orange juice, but instead she produced the plastic flask that contained her bitter milk. She laughed at his expression as she unscrewed the childproof cap and put the flask to her lips, gulping it down as though it tasted good. Abstractly, Bobby noticed that her parents used a brand-name product. His own parents always bought the supermarket’s own.
“Try it,” she said.
“What?”
“Go on.”
Bobby took the flask and sipped. He was vaguely curious to find out whether May’s bitter milk was any less unpleasant than the cheaper stuff he was used to. It wasn’t. Just different, thicker. He forced himself to swallow.
“You don’t just drink this, do you?” he asked, wondering for the first time whether her attitude wasn’t becoming something more than simply odd.
“Of course I don’t,” she said. “But I could if I liked. You see, it’s not bitter milk.”
Bobby stared at her.
“Look.”
May opened the fridge again, took out a carton of ordinary pasteurized milk. She put it on the counter, then reached high inside a kitchen cabinet, her blouse briefly raising at the back to show the ridges of her lower spine that Bobby so enjoyed touching. She took down a can of flour, a plastic lemon dispenser, and a bottle of white wine vinegar.
“The flour stops it from curdling,” she said, “and ordinary vinegar doesn’t work. It took me days to get it right.” She tipped some milk into a tumbler, stirred in the other ingredients. “I used to measure everything out, but now I can do it just anyhow.”
She handed him the tumbler. “Go on.”
Bobby tasted. It was quite revolting, almost as bad as the brand-name bitter milk.
“You see?”
Bobby put the glass down, swallowing back a welcome flood of saliva to weaken the aftertaste. Yes, he saw—or at least, he was beginning to see.
“I haven’t been drinking bitter milk for a month now. Mum buys it, I tip it down the sink when she’s not here and do my bit of chemistry. It’s that simple.…” She was smiling, then suddenly blinking back tears. “… that easy.… Of course, it doesn’t taste exactly the same, but when was the last time your parents tried tasting bitter milk?”
“Look, May … don’t you think this is dangerous?”
“Why?” She tilted her head, wiped a stray trickle from her cheek. “What exactly is going to happen to me? You tell me that.”
Bobby was forced to shrug. Bitter milk was for children, like cod liver oil. Grownups avoided the stuff, but it was good for you, it helped.
“I’m not going to grow up, Bobby,” she said. “I told you I wasn’t joking.”
“Do you really think that’s going to make any difference?”
“Who knows?” she said. She gave him a sudden hug, her lips wet and close to his ear. “Now let’s go upstairs.”
* * *
Weeks later, Bobby got a phone call from May one evening at home. Mum called him down from his bedroom, holding the receiver as though it might bite.
He took it.
“It’s me, Bobby.”
“Yeah.” He waited for the lounge door to close. “What is it?”
“Jesus, I think it’s started. Mum and Dad are out at a steak bar and I’m getting these terrible pains.”
The fake bitter milk. The receiver went slick in his hand.
“It can’t be. You can’t be sure.”
“If I was sure I wouldn’t be … look, Bobby, can you come around?”
She gave a gasp. “There it is again. You really must. I can’t do this alone.”
“You gotta ring the hospital.”
“No.”
“You—”
“No!”
Bobby gazed at the telephone directories that Mum stacked on a shelf beneath the phone as though they were proper books. He remembered that night with Tony, the lights on everywhere, burning though everything as though it wasn’t real. He swallowed. The TV was still loud in the lounge.
“Okay,” he said. “God knows what I’m supposed to tell Mum and Dad. Give me half an hour.”
His excuse was a poor one, but his parents took it anyway. He didn’t care what they believed; he’d never felt as shaky in his life.
He cycled through the housing development. The air rushed against his face, drowning him in that special feeling that came from warm nights. May must have been watching for him from a window. She was at the door when he scooted down the drive.
“Jesus, Bobby, I’m bleeding.”
“I can’t see anything.”
She pushed her hand beneath the waistband of her dress, then held it out. “Look. Do you believe me now?”
Bobby swallowed, then nodded.
She was alone in the house. Her parents were out. Bobby helped her up the stairs. He found an old plastic raincoat to spread across the bed, and helped her to get clean. The blood was clotted and fibrous, then watery thin. It didn’t seem like an ordinary wound.
When the first panic was over, he pushed her jumbled clothes off the bedside chair and slumped down. May’s cheeks were flushed and rosy. For all her talk about not wanting to grow up, he reckoned that he probably looked worse than she did at that moment. What was all this about? Had she ever had a brother named Tom? One who died? She’d lived in another development then. Other than asking, there was no way of knowing. “I think I’d better go and phone—”
“—Don’t!” She forced a smile and reached out a hand toward him. “Don’t.”
Bobby hesitated, then took her hand.
“Look, it’s stopped now anyway. Perhaps it was a false alarm.”
“Yeah,” Bobby said, “False alarm,” although he was virtually sure there was no such thing. You either grew up or you didn’t.
“I feel okay now,” she said. “Really, I do.”
“That’s good,” Bobby said.
May was still smiling. She seemed genuinely relieved. “Kiss me, Bobby,” she said.
Her eyes were strange. She smelled strange. Like the river, like the rain. He kissed her, softly on the warmth of her cheek; the way you might kiss a grownup. He leaned back from the bed and kept hold of her hand.
They talked.
Bobby got back home close to midnight. His parents had gone up to bed, but, as he crossed the darkened landing, he sensed that they were both awake and listening beyond the bedroom door. Next morning, nothing was said, and May was at school with the rest of what remained of their class. The teachers had mostly given up on formal lessons, getting the children instead to clear out stockrooms or tape the spines of elderly textbooks. He watched May as she drifted through the chalk-clouded air, the sunlight from the tall windows blazing her hair. Neither grownup nor yet quite a kid, she moved between the desks with unconscious grace.
That lunchtime, she told Bobby that she was fine. But Yes, she was still bleeding a bit. I have to keep going to the little girl’s room. I’ve gone through two pairs of underpants, flushed them away. It’s a real nuisance, Bobby, she added, above the clatter in the dining hall, as though it was nothing, like hay fever or a cold sore. Her face was clear and bright, glowing through the freckles and the smell of communal cooking. He nodded, finding that it was easier to believe than to question. May smiled. And you will come see me tonight, won’t you, Bobby? We’ll be on our own. Again, Bobby found himself nodding.
He announced to Mum and Dad after dinner that evening that he was going out again. He told them that he was working on a school play that was bound to take up a lot of his time.
Mum and Dad nodded. Bobby tried not to study them too closely, although he was curious to gauge their reaction.
“Okay,” Mum said. “But make sure you change the
batteries on your lamps if you’re going to cycle anywhere after dark.” She glanced at Dad, who nodded and returned to his paper.
“You know I’m careful like that.” Bobby tried to keep the wariness out of his voice. He suspected that they saw straight through him and knew that he was lying. He’d been in this kind of situation before. That was an odd thing about grownups: you could tell them the truth and they’d fly into a rage. Other times, such as this, when you had to lie, they said nothing at all.
May was waiting at the door again that evening. As she had promised, her parents were out. He kissed her briefly in the warm light of the hall. Her lips were soft against his, responding with a pressure that he knew would open at the slightest sign from him. She smelled even more rainy than before. There was something else too, something that was both new and familiar. Just as her arms started to encircle his back, he stepped back, his heart suddenly pounding.
He looked at her. “Christ, May, what are you wearing?”
“This.” She gave a twirl. The whole effect was odd, yet hard to place for a moment. A tartanish pleated dress. A white blouse. A dull necklace. Her hair pulled back in a tight bun. And her eyes, her mouth, her whole face … looked like it had been sketched on, the outlines emphasized, the details ignored. Then he licked his lips and knew what it was; the same smell and taste that came from Mum on nights when she leaned over his bed and said, you will be good while we’re out, won’t you, my darling, jewelry glimmering like starlight around her neck and at the lobes of her ears. May was wearing makeup. She was dressed like a grownup.
For a second, the thought that May had somehow managed to get through the whole messy process of growing up since leaving school that afternoon came to him. Then he saw the laughter in her eyes and he knew that it couldn’t be true.
“What do you think, Bobby?”
“I don’t know why grownups wear that stuff. It isn’t comfortable, it doesn’t even look good. What does it feel like?”
“Strange,” May said. “It changes you inside. Come upstairs. I’ll show you.”
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection Page 39