by Leah Thomas
I’ve gone to Myriad each morning with the pervasive buzz of Owen’s sob ringing in my ears. Louder on a daily basis. Performances during Musical Interpretation fail to diminish it. My presence in every room punctures many a buoyant grin. When Chloe stood up to perform today, tears hit her guitar halfway through “Heroes.”
In Belletristik class, I pulled my beanbag as far away from my peers as I could. Lodged myself in a corner by the window. Forsook the warmth of the fireplace. Dr. Hoppen took two steps after me. His expression changed. He left me to shiver.
Yes. Do keep away. I will only cramp your stomachs.
I did not open my copy of “Der Sandmann.” It highlights a popular German legend: The sandman does not just put children to sleep. He steals their eyes and feeds them to his own children on the moon.
For all I care the moon can have the rest of me as well.
I ate my pickle sandwich on a bench in the tulip garden beside the clock tower, wishing I’d brought an extra set of gloves. No one else occupied the gardens. January air iced me over.
The buzz. In the mess hall everyone else might hear it. They might sob.
For a heartbeat, I could not see despite the volume of my breathing.
Then Molly click-clacked in heeled ankle boots along the icy sidewalk. Unusually disheveled. Lace scarf partially unwrapped. Earmuffs dangling around her neck. Her sighs revealed droplets of water in her eyelashes, held in place by cold. She scanned the gardens, failed to see me in her peripheries.
She crouched. Put her hands over her eyes.
This sudden display of private grief. I intended to leave her to it. As I stood, her second mouth hissed. She twisted around.
“Oh, it’s Prince Moritz.” She wiped her eyes. “Didn’t I tell you to make friends?”
“And you.” My voice rasped. I had not used it in days. “Where are yours?”
“You seem out of sorts.” Without ceremony, she click-clacked closer and joined me. Smiled like she hadn’t been crying. “Shouldn’t you be excited about my upcoming performance in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds? God, the title really is a mouthful.”
“Fortunately, you’ve got, ah, mouths to spare.”
No smile on either side. “Terrible, Prince.”
“Beg pardon. You’re catching my gloom. Perhaps you should sit on another bench.”
“You act like I wouldn’t understand when I’m the only one here who really could.” Her lips trembled. “You don’t have a monopoly on gloom, you know.”
A twinge in my ears; Klaus appeared on the path. Hair more mussed than usual. Not even wearing a coat. Beside me, Molly tensed. Clutched my arm as he passed. Her second mouth made a shushing sound. Nearly spoke.
Molly clapped a hand over the back of her head.
“Molly, may I ask what’s the matter?”
She lowered her hand only once Klaus was out of sight. “You shouldn’t be so polite. People think you’re putting on airs.”
I bit my lip to prevent myself from spitting a retort.
“The character I portray in this play kills a rabbit. To spite her own daughters, she kills their pet. It’s horrible. Why did I audition for that part, I wonder?”
I can’t say.
“At least in older plays violence is purer. In Shakespeare, people stab or poison each other. They don’t usually go around killing pets. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“I suppose older fiction is more . . . direct.”
“Klaus tried to kiss me,” Molly said breathlessly. “In the wings after first dress rehearsal. I wondered why he was there. There’s only one set in Gamma Rays. Why would he kiss me, Moritz?”
“He makes no secret of, ah, liking you. It’s unseemly, even.”
“He likes parts of me,” she agreed, “but I’d never let him run his hands through my hair.”
I started—had the mouth on the back of her head snickered at her expense?
“You want to believe the best of people; the people I told didn’t love me less for it.”
“Prince, you’re sitting alone on a bench in the snow.”
“Yes.” That flustered me. “Because I’m a fool. I’m not alone because I’m eyeless.” I said the words and knew they were true. Forum betrayal aside, Owen cared for me regardless of my flaws. As I’ve loved you despite yours, Ollie. (We rot together.)
“What’s wrong with us, Moritz? Apart from the obvious.”
“I find it difficult to say.”
“You haven’t got two mouths? Brrr!” To think there are actually people who say “brr!” “Will you really come to my show?”
I nodded. “Would not miss a live rabbit-throttling.”
Now a smile played on her lips. “You’re terrible.”
“Quite.”
The heat of city streets is meant to melt snow. Yet the cold beyond the walls of Myriad numbed my ears to nothingness. After a long walk, I found myself outside Bernholdt-Regen.
Who should be standing beside the gate on my way out but Lenz Monk, jabbing broken icicles into snow. He nodded. Handed me a snowball.
“For cars,” he provided.
“Thank you?”
“Yeah.” He lobbed the ball at a vehicle so tiny it might have slid off the road, but Lenz missed. The driver honked. Not particularly hilarious to me.
Lenz nudged me with his elbow. If my sour mood was contagious in some supernatural way, his chortle was contagious in a natural one. “Go on, then.”
“Fluff it.” I clicked my tongue at an oncoming car. The snowball hit the sign affixed to the roof.
Lenz clapped me on the back. Handed me another. “Again!”
Once the second snowball landed on the next taxi, striking it in exactly the same spot, Lenz whooped and asked for a third performance. I complied. This left him in such paroxysms of joy that I had to snicker at the way he collapsed into a snowbank.
To think he used to scare me.
Perhaps telling you about disrupting traffic is insensitive. We laughed.
By the echoes of footsteps in the courtyard behind me, I saw the quiet of him.
Owen. Watching from the gate. His mouth a thin, disapproving line. If the waves of my regret reached him, he remained unmoved. He knew I could see him even as I faced the road. He knew. And he went the other way.
I dropped my snowball.
Lenz wiped snow off his pants. “You should compete in our next Bundesjugendspiele!” (Intramural sports tournament.)
“I don’t go here anymore.”
“Oh. Why not?”
I made a conscious effort to turn. Watched Owen retreat.
Again, my ears seemed muffled. He faded.
“I don’t know.”
I descended the library stairs. The windows seemed taller. The carpet ragged. No one sat at the desk. I clicked my tongue and caught sight of a bearded man between the shelves.
“Can I help you?”
“I wish to speak with Frau Pruwitt.”
“She’s taken some time off.”
Frau Pruwitt hasn’t been visiting. As far as I know. I haven’t really been visiting our home, either. The apartment felt empty, somehow, after braving the tundra.
My ear ached in sharp pulses. Hearing faded, returned. Blind, not blind.
I did not visit your forum. I don’t intend to. That is one story I’ve heard enough of.
Blind, not blind.
You are too good to ever blow up a hospital. But, Ollie, I’ve decimated that laboratory so many times in my imagination. Destroying a fictional version cannot satisfy me. That would change nothing. Least of all me. It’s too late. Born without eyes. Born without.
Here I am. Blind again.
chapter nineteen
THE POISON IVY
Here’s another story, Mo.
Back when I was maybe eight years old and my whole world was just the cabin and the woods, I remember one day going blueberry picking with Mom. It was overcast even though it was summer, but Mom had on a smile
, and soccer shin guards for kneeling on the damp moss. She assigned me the job of bucket holder and warned me not to wander off, but after hearing about fifteen berries plop against plastic, I got really bored and—you know where this is going.
I didn’t get far before she caught me with bramble scratches all up and down my forearms from trying to catch a garter snake. Mom was so blustering angry she left the berries and dragged me straight home by the forearm. I felt like crap for ruining a day outside without even a stupid snake to show for it, and I swear the place where she grabbed me burned. It burned and then it itched, and when she called me down to dinner, I stayed upstairs.
By the next morning, my whole arm was on fire. I was scratching it raw.
“Ollie?” Mom knew to look under my bed. She lay flat on the boards and caught me peering out from behind my Legos tote. “Come out. I want to show you something.”
She sat on the bed and waited for me to join her, and when I did, her eyes went right to the bedsheet I’d wrapped around my arm. She lifted her hand: she was wearing an oven mitt. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
On the count of three, she pulled off her oven mitt. I unraveled the sheet.
We stared at our matching angry bubbles.
“Poison ivy gets worse if you scratch it. But ignoring it is bad, too. When something’s wrong, you have to treat it, Ollie.” She hugged me with her clean arm. “When something’s wrong, no matter how wrong, share it with me. Okay?”
Moritz, there are probably better ways for me to say I’m worried about you. But this is all I have, all I can think of right now.
I’m scared that with this shit happening, you’ve wrapped this sheet around the chaos so you don’t have to look at it. Owen, Fieke, me, everything. If you want me not to talk about the forum, okay. But that doesn’t change that it exists.
Doesn’t change that I’m scared you’re doing the very last thing we want to—letting things fester. That’s the earache, maybe. That’s the rot. Maybe that’s what seeps out of you.
Please, Moritz. You need help. And I’m not enough. I’m never enough.
I sat on my bag with my fishbowl in my lap, needled to pieces as anesthesia faded from my system, replaced with a throbbing jaw and aching bones. As I squinted at the snowy parking lot, it began to sink in.
The Impala was gone.
My head steamed hot around the egg I’d given it, but I didn’t want to go anywhere I could hurt people. What I wanted was to be back at Junkyard Joe’s with Liz. Hell, I wanted to be locked inside on a rainy day again.
What was I supposed to do?
He left me. He actually, really, entirely, and totally—
“You should go inside. It’s cold.”
I nearly jumped out of my bodysuit. Bridget stood beside me.
“Hey, look who’s talking.” I cleared my throat. “Do you only own track clothes?”
“This is fine. My heart is only eleven miles away. Brian’s house.”
“About that. Do you go around, you know, tossing your heart to people? Hot potato?”
“No.” Bridget cracked her fingers.
“Are you going to go get it?”
She shook her head. “I have something for you.”
I groaned. “Tell me you aren’t about to hand me your spleen.”
“Not my spleen.” Bridget handed me the college-ruled notebook she’d been holding in the waiting room. It still had a price tag on the front. I opened the first page and blinked in surprise.
The first line read:
This is the story of a girl called Bridget.
Flabber my gast. “Why . . . ?”
“You asked for my life story.” Bridget picked at the peeling toe of her shoe.
“I don’t deserve it, though.” I pushed the book back and blew on my hands; rubber doesn’t feel great when it’s covered in snow. “I can’t even own my own story anymore. I might be the villain. Which sucks. It really sucks when you leave home and you get this feeling that you’re just distracting yourself from reality, pretending to be helping people, pretending you aren’t worse than cars, but then again, maybe if you mess up enough, you’ll be sent back home, and even though it’s crazy, maybe she’ll still be there and what a stupid nightmare you’ve been living in the real world, a stupid nightmare when maybe someone’s waiting for you—”
“She’s not waiting for you. Your mother’s gone.”
I forgot where I was, didn’t know I was standing.
“You’re right!” I laughed too hard. “Everyone’s gone!”
“Dr. Auburn-Stache, too.” Bridget nodded. Her hair, wrapped in knots around her head, almost like a crown.
“It’s my fault.”
“It’s not always about you. Be quiet.”
And for some reason I was. I guess I was just really tired.
“I’m going to run to my foster home. You should go inside.”
“You worried I’ll get frostbite?”
“Only stating facts.”
“You saved my life today.” I stared at my fingers. “I thought you couldn’t care less?”
She shrugged. “I couldn’t.”
Before I could think of what to say, Bridget took a knee, counted down from three under her breath, and launched herself into the parking lot. Vanished before I knew it in the whiteout descending on Fayton, Ohio.
I peered at the notebook. Wondered why she wrote it. Why she’d tell me the truth when Auburn-Stache wouldn’t. Why she saved a disaster like me. Things weren’t exactly adding up about Bridget, but my head, my everything, hurt way too much to care.
People came and went. I told an orderly I was waiting for my ride. And because my hands needed to be busy, I peeled open the notebook and started reading.
By the time Ms. Arana scuffed along the sidewalk and stood beside me, my fingers were almost frozen to the pages. Snot covered my chin. Tears burned my cheeks.
“Oh, honey. On your feet.” Keys jangled in her hand.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You’ve got a hankering for hot chocolate, by the looks of it. Come with me. There’s always room for strays at our house.” Venom filled her voice: “There’s no excuse for leaving people behind.”
“Except dying, I guess.” Mutterseelenallein.
“I’m not dead, and neither are you.” She nudged me with her boot.
I sat in her messy minivan with my eyes half glazed over until we arrived at a house that must have been only blocks away from Bridget’s; it looked the same. I was so out of it I didn’t even snark when Brian opened a front door covered in claw marks. He glared from deep inside his hoodie, a heart-shaped bulge in his front pocket.
I know I’ve got no right to ask, with the secrets I kept, but if you know where he went—can’t you tell me, Moritz? I noticed you were so quick to get melodramatic about you and me rotting for eternity like the worst cheese because I lied to you. But what about your lies?
I’m not angry. I just want Auburn-Stache to come back and tell me what terrified him so much. I want him to knock on the door, and then I’ll run down this hallway full of fish tanks and he’ll see I’m wearing the stupid hat and I don’t hate him and maybe we can go home (even though she’s not there). Maybe Arthur could just . . . come to my house instead, and bring his guffaw with him? Childish, I know. I’m a toddler, remember?
After months of living with Ginger-Rage Brian and Ms. Arana, I’ve had enough of the electric world to last awhile. And reading Bridget’s story didn’t make me feel like we have a place in the world. If anything, I doubt it more than ever. I don’t blame her for being heartless. Maybe you have to be, fellow hermit. Maybe that’s what the world does to you.
Moritz, I’m going to have a normal person copy Bridget’s story with a machine that copies things.
Let someone else tell stories for once. Honestly, I’m not up for it anymore.
Arthur hasn’t answered a single one of my stupid letters.
chapter twen
ty
THE GIANTESS
Ollie. I’m not thinking altogether clearly. Something a trifle upsetting happened last night. I may not be myself.
How my head hurts. My ear.
I cannot spare the energy to be cryptic. Auburn-Stache sent me an e-mail in December. Perhaps two weeks after he abandoned you. I heard briefly about the bus. About your grief.
I will be honest: I believe his abandonment is justified. Cruel as that sounds.
Don’t ask more of me. It is not my poison ivy to share. Please.
It can’t be my story to tell.
I spent yesterday evening all but locked in the auditorium. The stagecraft hive mind murmured under its collective breath, but without threat of mutiny. Klaus did not ask to be backstage building a massive skeleton of a fallen giantess at the very last minute, either. A scheduling conflict between Year Two and Year Three students’ midsemester musical performances meant Into the Woods would be performed two weeks ahead of schedule.
We had only days left to hammer together trees, fairy-tale cottages, and a life-size wheeled cow. Of all idiotic things, I was tasked with braiding enormous rope into the ponytail of an equally enormous head of hair for a fallen giantess.
The giantess is an antagonist in the second act of the Sondheim musical. When she is finally slain, she will fall across the stage. Back to the audience. Most productions choose to show her feet; some ambitious Myriad student decided to instead create her head and shoulders for the sole purpose of dramatizing her demise. The audience would never see her face, so no one gave her one. Eyeless like me. Let us rot.
Klaus rigged a pulley system that would allow her to fall without damaging the stage. Would allow us to hoist her upright again once curtain fell. A repurposed ladder supported her shoulders from within, to spare us from building her an enormous spine. Someone installed a platform at its top. A fort in the half dome of her skull. Lazy fools hid from Klaus there.
Even as we labored backstage, Year Three performers hurried through their dress rehearsal in partial costume. Scampering about with wigs askew, forgotten lines inscribed on palms. Makeup Effects students chased them with foundation and brushes, toner and spirit gum. Orchestra members scurried toward the pit, violins and flutes in hand. (Chloe lifted her eye patch and saluted me with her clarinet but otherwise kept her distance.) Max strutted around in furry ears and feet, Red Riding Hood’s tailcoated wolf. He might have winked at me while he waited in the wings. Hard to tell under the false eyebrows pasted to his forehead.