Nowhere Near You

by Leah Thomas

  “Do you want to go out with me?”

  Bridget looks at him. “No. I don’t want to.”

  “I thought you’d say that. But will you go out with me anyway?”

  Bridget considers. “What does that involve?”

  “Making out. If I were a romantic asshole, I’d ask you to give me your heart.”

  “Okay.” Bridget blinks. “I never wanted it anyhow.”

  Bridget asks Brian when she can give him her heart.

  He says, “Give me . . . ? Oh. Um, wow. How about after trick-or-treating for canned goods? Mom always makes me fund-raise, but she has to work a double shift on Halloween because it’s a full moon this year. All the crazies are crazier in the hospital when that happens. She won’t be home all night. Just wear a scary costume.”

  Bridget dresses in a white lab coat and carries silver utensils. She arrives on Brian’s doorstep. Brian is dressed in a suit. He is faking a comb-over.

  “So guess who I am?” Brian never grins. “I’m my father. I’ll be sure to send his new wife pictures. Maybe she’ll leave him for me.” He holds out his elbow. “Don’t you think I’m awful?”

  “You’re trying to be.”

  “Let’s get this over with.”

  The heart skips a beat in her pocket. This is unrelated to Brian. It must be happy to be leaving her.

  Hours later, they deliver their cans of creamed corn to the cafeteria at the school, where student council waits. The room is full of boxes of macaroni, tins of Spam, and cans of beans.

  “Why have you only got seven cans?” asks the class president, Ariel Ramirez.

  “When they asked what I was collecting for, I told them it didn’t matter because I would just take the goods and move in with some new family. They didn’t laugh.”

  Bridget shrugs.

  Ariel sighs. “You two are basically a thing, then.”

  Bridget’s heart thumps in her lab coat pocket.

  They sit together on his couch. The walls are filled with heating lamps and small animals. Brian reaches for her. She holds up her finger. Brian hollers when she unbuttons her shirt and hands her heart to him. He shoves it off his lap.

  Bridget lifts her heart up off the floor. So he can see how it is beating with pain she doesn’t feel. “It’s yours.”

  “Please just go. Go. Please.”

  Bridget doesn’t put it in; she drops it into her coat and walks out the door and onto Brian’s driveway, indistinguishable from the Tidmores’ driveway. And from there she runs. She sprints back to the latest house that is not a home and keeps going.

  And that’s all there is, Moritz. She didn’t give it a good ending. Maybe because she wrote it overnight. Or maybe because she doesn’t care. She didn’t give her story any closure. Maybe closure is something you only get in fiction. It doesn’t seem fair. If every Blunderkid has an unbelievable story, why can’t we have the upsides of fiction, too?

  ~ O

  P.S. Reminder, because I’m still fuming about Maxhole: You know how you and me are like magnets with the same charge, and we literally repel each other with our weird illnesses? That’s the only kind of repulsive you’ll ever be.

  chapter twenty-two

  THE MARIGOLDS

  You were right about things festering, Oliver. Poison ivy.

  Not only in my public life at Myriad, or the private life I squandered with Owen and Fieke. The things I keep from you fester, too. And perhaps the person you should be training to fight really is me. I am worse than repulsive, Ollie.

  And can I just blame others? Where is the line where I end and they begin?

  I see everything. But not that line.

  When the night of Molly’s show finally arrived, I waited beside her makeup kit and listened to her pin back her glorious curls. Her second mouth was muzzled with a wool mask. I hadn’t smelled lozenges of late. I did not ask. I was not being sensitive to her feelings. I was simply overcome by my own.

  That buzzing sob grew louder all the time. Often I could not see through my right ear. I began to wonder if my emolocations were so strong that they were echoing back to me. Perhaps I was blinding myself. Sometimes I could not see the faces of people who spoke to me. Could not hear them.

  “I’ve never known you not to listen, Prince.”

  “Beg pardon.”

  “Oh, don’t. I’m just nervous.” She wrung her hands. “I’ve done plays before. And I’m the villain. People always love a good villain. I’m just making a fuss.”

  “You’ll be wonderful.”

  “Did you happen to see—I mean, is Klaus here?” Before she pulled her hair into a bun, I could hear the mouth muttering. Incomprehensible.

  “Scowling in the front row.”

  I’d nodded at him on the way in. He’d folded his arms. Put his foot on the chair beside him. The moment I passed I saw him remove his foot and pat the chair. Beckoning me. Watching my reaction. I wanted to maintain my pace. But my ears aren’t so keen now. I had to stop walking to focus on him. Klaus took note of my pause. His frown deepened.

  “I saw Max here earlier, Moritz,” Molly said.

  “Oh?”

  “I know that look, Prince. He’s a scoundrel. I’m assuming something unpleasant happened, the way you’ve been acting. Are you all right?”

  Max Fassner avoided me when I returned to school. Gone were his winks and his fond, unnerving jabs. I must be ill, Ollie. I almost missed the attention. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “If you say so.” Her hands shook when she applied her lipstick. “I just saw him fawning over another boy in the foyer.”

  Blind again. Molly said my name once more. I had to grab the curtain to regain my bearings. For a moment, I saw and heard nothingness. The old void. Am I standing, Ollie?

  “Moritz? Can you hear me?”

  My sight returned. I wished her luck. She tapped the back of her head with a finger, said, “Shush, shush.” Blinking repeatedly. Ragged breaths. Muffled muttering. I left her alone.

  I chose a seat near the rear of the theater. Here, my moods were less likely to disturb others. I clicked my tongue over the gentle rumble of chatter. Listened for familiar faces. Head throbbing. Ears temporarily focused.

  Relief. Max wasn’t in the audience.

  Footsteps onstage. Actors finding their marks behind the curtain. Molly sat down at a kitchen table. A set we’d built to look like a shabby apartment. The curtain lifted; the rest of the audience applauded.

  Molly became a stranger. A cold middle-aged woman dissociated from reality. She held a phone conversation with an imaginary teacher.

  The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds tells the story of Tillie, a young girl irradiating marigolds for a science fair. Her family is impoverished. Her mother, Beatrice, is mentally ill and spiteful. Her sister, Ruth, is prone to seizures, Ollie. Beatrice attempts to sabotage Tillie’s success in the fair. Tillie remains hopeful.

  I have no idea how the play ends.

  I found Molly’s performance unwatchable. The way she treated her “children” so disaffected. I am sure that is wonderful acting. Fiction that chilled me. Molly based her performance on my mother. My mother who tormented children. My mother, the protean creator of all that’s wrong with us. A reason I fail at being human.

  My mother may reenter my life soon, Ollie. I haven’t told you this yet. Another festering thing.

  I left the close air of the auditorium to stand on the quiet stairs outside. Waited for my vision to adjust to the echoes in the beautiful foyer. There was a delay in the time it took me to process my surroundings. That ringing ache in my ears. That’s why I didn’t immediately see what was occurring in plain sight.

  Max. His arms wrapped around a young man, as Molly had forewarned. By the time my vision cleared, I heard both of them staring at me. Max with smug disdain. His newfound paramour with defiant anger. The slightest ounce of remorse.

  He was very quiet, Oliver.

  “Nice to see . . . Moritz.”
Max stepped forward to clap me on the back. His voice went in and out of coherence. “This is . . . very quiet. I didn’t get . . . name.”

  “His name’s Owen,” I supplied.

  Of course. I’d invited him. Of course. Some would call this karmic. I call it the final drop that overflowed the barrel.

  A year ago I would have crippled Max as I crippled Lenz. With a physical jab in the gut or throat. A few ribs broken on impulse. I may have crippled him in the giantess.

  All I wanted was to disable Max so entirely he would gargle blood for the rest of his life.

  My ears failed me. I could scarce keep my balance. Anechoic chamber.

  Owen’s face: What was it I could not see?

  Sometimes character growth hurts more than harms us. Sometimes I regret that you are my conscience. I can’t be barbaric without anticipating your reprimand, Ollie. I can’t shove people anymore.

  I only wished misery upon them. Wished they could feel an ounce of the pain I felt. I attempted to project “festering” dolphin waves right into their cores. Let them hear what I heard.

  I made the loudest possible clicking sound in the void.

  Two sets of eyes rolled back. Two mouths gasped. Limbs smacked against the marble floor. Noses trickling blood. I did not lay a finger on them, but when my vision returned, they were both collapsed, splayed on the stairs.

  Owen looked like a child. Another child tormented by me and mine.

  I gasped. Stepped blearily over them and made for the exit while the world faded in and out of view. The winter air only worsened the pain in my head. I slipped on the ice of the pavement. Perhaps someone called out to me, but while my ears still cooperated, I longed for shelter and the willow stood before me. I passed under its whipping branches and grabbed the trunk when my ears failed again. Tore off my goggles. Threw them down. As if that would make me unsee what I had seen. All the things I have always seen and been with my ears wide open.

  I fell.

  Time did not matter. The where was nowhere.

  Someone lifted me from the snow. Hoisted me upright. Draped my arm over broad shoulders. Oh, cold air, damp snow, numb nose. I could not hear. A chasm of nothingness. Of black. At first I struggled against my captor, remembering Max’s hands.

  “Calm . . . Farber . . . just me!”

  Even through the pulsating pain in my head and heart I could recognize that tone.

  Klaus.

  I stopped fighting. Put my hand to my face. Where were my goggles?

  “Stop that, Farber!” I heard, because he shouted. Even so, the sound was muffled. I was underwater again. I did not realize until he pulled my hand away that I’d raked my skin raw. Scratched my skin to bleeding.

  I tried to tell him that I could not see. Could not hear.

  “Farber! You don’t . . . need . . . shout! . . . don’t . . . need . . . hear . . . you hold . . . have . . . fever!” Finally, I let him pull me forward.

  “Calm down,” Klaus repeated. “It’s okay.”

  Were any words ever less true. I trembled for you, Oliver.

  A bacterial ear infection. Likely contracted in the cold. I never cover my ears with hats. The doctor at the emergency room didn’t ask about my eyelessness. The infection had crippled me enough that I wasn’t feigning blindness anymore. I was halfway blind.

  In bursts of clarity and vision, I recall that Klaus refused to leave the room. He reassured the doctor that my collapse could have nothing to do with the inexplicable collapse of two other boys on campus. Two boys currently under observation.

  I did not see Father, though I smelled the engine grease. When he arrived, he set my cane at the foot of my bed. Fell asleep in the chair beside me. I cannot remember the last time we had a genuine conversation. Now if he spoke to me I could only halfway listen.

  The partial deafness in my right ear should leave me. It may take time for the antibiotics to defeat the infection. The pain may stick around a spell longer. As it is, my vision is patchy at best. Sometimes I thrash my arms. Sometimes I am underwater.

  The doctor says I should have come to see her long ago. Before it got so dire.

  “Weren’t you in pain?”

  If you and I went to hospitals every time we were in pain, we would never leave them. We are better at sending others to them.

  Auburn-Stache has not visited. He has been busy. Is it so horrifying to think he might care about other Blunderkinder like he cares for you? We all need it. Everyone needs. If what you want is someone who cares most for you, you have me.

  Like Molly has Klaus. If only she would see it. He sits at my bedside knowing I am eyeless. Surely he would stay by her knowing she is double-mouthed. Shut up! Have each other.

  You have me. Everything really is so tenuous. Any of us can be reduced to nothingness without notice, can collapse or implode without notice. So I will tell you what it is that Auburn-Stache will not. I don’t want to be the boy who lies to you. I’m done with that.

  Tell me stories, Oliver. I can’t bear the thought of future silences.

  Oliver, Auburn-Stache has reason to believe Blunderkinder are dying.

  This is why I will never stop telling you that I love you.

  chapter twenty-three

  THE BRISTLE-BRUSH

  Moritz, it’s a good thing I’m busy or I’d be flipping out. Why haven’t I heard more from you? Please tell me you’re okay.

  What do you mean, Blunderkinder are dying? How can I meet them if they’re dying? He told me Arthur was fine, so? What’s going on?

  Was it your goal to keep me up at night?

  Not that I could sleep much here anyhow. You try sleeping with rodents on your face.

  Ms. Arana forgot to mention she lives in a zoo. The last thing I expected when she showed me to the living room was walking past seven terrariums to get there. She shoved a boa constrictor and two cats off the couch before I could sit down.

  “Do you charge admission?” She cleared heaps of clutter from the coffee table. I had to wonder if it was electricity or pet dander causing my runny eyes now. “I bet you could.”

  “Something to consider, honey! I’m sick of graveyard shifts.”

  “Yeah, and if you work days instead, you’ll never have to see me.” Brian’s attempt at a fierce expression was kind of negated by the several kittens rubbing up against his leg, mewling at him. Maybe they could smell the heart in his pocket.

  His fierce expression was kind of negated by what I’d just read about him, too.

  “Enough. Go to bed, Brian.”

  “It’s not even noon yet.”

  “Then go to school!”

  “No.”

  “Don’t be such an asshole to your mom.” Maybe I shouted, because he didn’t argue. Ms. Arana seemed surprised by his silence.

  “Ollie, you’ve gotta be exhausted. I can make up that sofa bed for you. Or get you something to eat. You . . .”

  I stopped listening, I guess; I kept nodding off despite the stench of fur. I leaned my head back and something purred under my ears. A big Persian cat. Dorian Gray was also a Persian. So this guy smelled a little like home.

  Moritz, I realized something. If I keep living in the past, the distance between you and me only gets wider. The future when we meet becomes impossible again.

  So from here on in I’m gifting you with my present. (Ha, ha.)

  It’s going to be so easy that you’ll want to smack me. Because here I go, summing up days and days in one sentence. Ready or not, Moritz:

  I didn’t do a whole lot except lie in a puddle for that first month. (BOOM!)

  I spent hours writing you, making every hopeful sentence foolproof. Played fetch a million times with maybe five dogs I was too freaked to take for a walk. I wrote Arthur, too (he still sucks at replying, or maybe he just didn’t buy my happy-go-lucky act, either, because I wanted to only tell him good things and it got really hard for me to make up details about states I’ve never been to or stories about people I’ve never met or happines
s I’ve never felt). I counted fish in tanks. And I tried really hard not to look out windows, especially once people put stomach-churning Christmas lights up everywhere because going that way meant madness and buses and kids I might kill by accident, no biggie.

  I got to know my housemates. Half of Kingdom Animalia, give or take, plus Ms. Arana and her totally errant son.

  Here was the weekday routine: Ms. Arana worked mostly night shifts and slept most of the day, only peeking her head out of her room around 7:00 pm to get herself some macaroni casserole and shoo iguanas off the counter. She always dragged me off my hermit couch and watched me eat, making sure I didn’t gag it up like her greyhound, Kushla, who liked licking my feet. Whenever I asked her about Auburn-Stache, she said “Soon, honey,” and then pulled on her scrubs and some bizarre plastic clogs and headed out the door until after dawn.

  Brian usually got home right before she left, in time to be angry with her about whatever-the-hell: she didn’t buy new kibble or she didn’t clean up Kushla’s latest surprise on the bathroom rug and they were out of 409. He didn’t speak to me but fed and watered and walked the animals and then slouched right up the stairs to his bedroom.

  He kept Bridget’s heart in my fishbowl so that nothing would get at it. That was my idea, but Brian insisted on keeping the fishbowl in his room. I figured that was probably a good way to stop the pets from pawing at it. Every day I asked him to give it back to her. He sulked.

  On weekends, Brian left the house in the morning and didn’t come back till dark. I figured he had a lot of Stop signs to stand under. Who knows. To quote Bridget: I didn’t care. He didn’t care, either, and we never talked to each other.

  Ms. Arana did what she called her “weekly catch-up,” which meant she went around and cleaned up the worst of the animal messes and picked stray teenage socks off the floor, but she was always too exhausted to keep up with it. Most Saturdays she was asleep again by noon.

  And me, I just got stir-crazy and stir-crazier, waiting for Auburn-Stache to come back. And the longer I sat sinking into that hairy couch, listening to the burbling of tanks and the yawning of canines and the scratching of cat claws, the deeper I sank into my own head.