Nowhere Near You

by Leah Thomas

  “Nah, I couldn’t.” I popped kernels into my mouth. “He knows all this stuff. He just doesn’t like being popular.”

  “My ex-husband told me I’d be too clueless to raise a teenager on my own. Now that I have two of them, I know he was right.”

  “Sometimes you talk stupid, Ms. Arana. I’m only here because you gave me a backpack.”

  Brian wasn’t in the first two events, but I cheered pretty hard anyhow because I knew some of the kids running them. Ms. Arana told me off for booing the opposing schools, but isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Brian sat on the bench on the edge of the track looking as skulky as ever. Maybe his coach wouldn’t let him wear his hoodie.

  The 200-meter race is tricky, according to Chelsea, the track captain (I sit next to her in social studies), because it’s not exactly long distance or a sprint. It’s that awkward in-between. The first heat of racers lined up and Brian was one of them. That meant he was in the fastest group. Go figure!

  The gun went off. “FORTH, BRIAN!”

  It wasn’t over in a heartbeat or two, but maybe ten. Brian came in fourth out of eight, which made him the most awkward and in-between of all.

  “He wasn’t trying.” Ms. Arana wasn’t angry, just making an observation.

  Brian obviously didn’t care about this race. He ignored the drinking fountain and skulked on over to the bench to sit by his stuff.

  That was when I noticed that his stuff? It included a brown paper bag.

  “Ollie! Where are you—”

  I was halfway down the stands already, and then I was leaping the bannister and hitting the ground and leaning up against the fence to holler at him.

  “Brian! Hey! Come here!”

  He rolled his eyes and trudged over. “Come to tell me to try harder?”

  “Nah. I want to know why you packed a very hearty lunch today.”

  Blank face. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “You always say that. It never actually unworries me.”

  He shoved his hands into his pockets, except he didn’t have pockets and he ended up looking like a dope. “I’m going to catch her. But I can’t win against her. I can’t actually chase her down. I have to do it the loser way.”

  “Um, what does that involve?”

  “Watch.” He slouched back to the bench.

  “Whoa, whoa,” I called, grinning. “Who’s this cocky youngster standing before me?”

  “Shut up, freak.”

  I headed back to the concession stand. This was going to require more popcorn.

  Bridget took an easy first in the 1600-meter. We hollered and cheered for her, and I came down to the fence for a fist bump. I noticed Brian on the bench, clutching the lunch bag but hardly moving an inch.

  “I think you’ll be able to stop running pretty soon,” I told her. “If you want to. Metaphorically speaking.”

  She blinked. “Today’s not any different. I don’t want it back.”

  “If you say so.” I returned to the sidelines. Chelsea said I could watch from the bench.

  I grinned. “I’m your mascot!”

  “Too scrawny.” I high-fived all the girls before they jogged to the starting line. Bridget’s hand was cold. I fived her the highest.

  She geared up with something like eighteen other runners for the 3200-meter. Two miles. Eight laps around. Spaghetti limbs can’t even consider it.

  Bridget pulled her knees behind her. Stretched her arms and legs like a pro. That expressionless face: tough luck beating Bridget, girls. (Hey, everyone was thinking it.)

  And it went pretty much as expected for the first six laps or so. Bridget got way ahead of the other runners. People in the crowd hollered her name! Probably her nice foster parents hollered hardest. Every time she passed I hardly heard her feet pounding like pistons.

  I’d almost forgotten Brian was there, until he stood up. He watched racers pass and sauntered closer to the track.

  Bridget came around the corner, way ahead of everyone else.

  Brian skulked out right in front of her, lunch bag in hand.

  A gasp from the crowd—

  Bridget stopped on a dime in front of him.

  “This is how losers catch people.”

  “I don’t want it back.” But she didn’t run. She let people pass her. She waited.

  Brian reached into the bag. I had my fingers on my eyes. The drama! The suspense!

  He reached into the bag and pulled out . . .

  . . . a sandwich. An actual sandwich without a heartbeat. Wheat bread, possibly.

  “Have lunch with me again. I don’t care if you’re heartless or not. It doesn’t matter to me. If you don’t want your heart back, fine. And if you do, fine. Whatever. But have lunch with me?”

  Bridget blinked.

  Four more runners passed.

  Bridget took the sandwich from Brian. Peeled the bread apart. “Tuna fish . . . and potato chips?”

  A ref hobbled over, blowing his whistle. The audience started booing.

  “If you ever do want me to pack your heart as well, I will. Not that I mind holding on to it. I like you not liking things. Or I like you liking them. I guess.”

  “I’ll have lunch with you.”

  I tore my hat off and whooped and not a single stadium bulb flickered.

  This Friday I’m supposed to brave the Megamart with Wharton. I’m not afraid.

  Moritz, do you think one day I could play electricity like a glock?

  chapter thirty-two

  THE BALCONY

  Ollie, consider: There are people rooting for us, and people we root for. So many others populate our lives now! They leave their marks. Your marks remain best, tucked in folders. Tears and smears and all, Ollie. You are near me.

  I’m not jealous of Arthur, only sorry I’ve never heard his guffaw. I’m not jealous of Bridget, only wishing I could take the laboratory out of her. Ollie, I want to meet them. I’m sorry I never have.

  And you! You’ve never seen Molly’s curls! Her smiles!

  If only writing could convey every aspect of all of us.

  We take what we can get.

  The Sunday after we chased Max from campus, I visited Molly once more. This time she hopped forward to meet me in a cotton dress.

  I handed her a set of goggles. “A token of thanks.”

  She pulled the goggles into her hair, holding the strap in her back teeth before snapping them onto her forehead. Another fetching accessory, on her.

  “It’s quieter today.” I walked to her window and opened it.

  “My mouth?” She smiled halfheartedly as I leaned on the balcony. “Yes, well. It’s been a happier day. Fewer dark thoughts when things go well. Putting Max in his place is heartening. The progress on the forum is heartening. We will find her.”

  “You’re on the forum?”

  “Oh, don’t act so surprised. I think half the student population is on the forum now. It was something else we talked about after the goggle scare. Role-players. All those people pretending to be other people! More actors, Prince.”

  “You can’t call me that today.”

  “Oh, you have to know by now that it’s a term of endearment.”

  “It’s not that. Consider the feelings of your other Prince.”

  I waved her onto the balcony. Molly gasped.

  Standing a floor below the balcony. Clad in a cape. Klaus. Not frowning.

  “Now, Moritz?” he shouted. “Or what?”

  “Yes,” I shouted, “but for the love of god, uncross your arms.”

  Klaus held his hands in fists against his sides and hollered at the top of his formidable lungs, “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?”

  “Shut up,” gasped Molly, from both mouths.

  From an acting standpoint, it was a disappointment after that.

  “What? Don’t interrupt!” hollered Klaus. “I don’t have it memorized all the way! Just give me a moment!”

  Molly held one hand over each smili
ng mouth.

  “Soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the . . . fich. It’s the east and Molly is the sun! Arise, fair sun, because, erm, you’re better than the moon, who is really too pale. Anon!”

  Hysterical giggles from both sides. “This is terrible!” she called down. “What gives you the right to butcher Shakespeare?”

  “I only know twentieth-century stuff. Moritz says you like old, romantic crap!”

  She spun to face me. “‘Romantic crap’!”

  “Beg pardon.”

  “Shakespeare’s fine,” she called, “but I prefer Twelfth Night.”

  Even as I backed away, I imagined Klaus scowling and crossing his arms. “I don’t even know that one! What’s it about? I’ll improvise!

  “It’s about people pretending to be what they aren’t.” Smiles dipped.

  “Fine!” cried Klaus. “Molly, I love you on the tenth night and the eleventh night or the thirty-seventh night. Not just on the twelfth one! Even if you like really old plays by dead guys. And if you wanted me to build a tin roof for a Tennessee Williams play, I would. And if you wanted to hide who you are, fair, um, lady, I’d laugh at you because I would love you even if you had seventeen heads and all of them had hairy mustaches.”

  “What about two mouths could you love a girl who was always hissing that she wasn’t sure about you and not sure about herself?”

  Klaus didn’t miss a beat. “Molly! If that’s all it is, then Mother will be chuffed! Someone more outspoken than I am!”

  Molly was damn near sobbing. “Can’t you at least try to stay in character?”

  “No. I’m not an actor, and I’m not acting.”

  Molly didn’t have the energy to hurry down to meet him. And Klaus did not wish to charge through the orphanage. So he walked politely into the building. Politely up the stairs. Politely down the hallway. Stood politely in Molly’s doorway.

  Molly’s hands, clasped in front of her. She bit her lip. And then Klaus rushed to embrace her. Molly tried to clamp her second mouth shut, but it continued chattering. Blurting out random Juliet lines. Klaus hushed her, pulling her head to his chest.

  I eased out of the room, entirely forgotten, as I should be in this case.

  Eugen stood in the hallway, blowing his nose in a handkerchief. He led me down to the lobby and all but collapsed at the front desk. Two children with pigtails in their hair hurried by.

  “Goodness. Since she was a napping child we’ve worried about the poor girl. It talked in her sleep. Our Molly, full of sad thoughts.”

  I should not be surprised by anything anymore. “You all knew.”

  Frau Andert sighed. “Who do you think knit those muzzles for her?”

  She threw a set of earmuffs at me.

  “I do hope you find your mother. And keep your ears warm, dolphinmo.”

  Blunderkinder among us. And us among them, Ollie, for as long as we’re able.

  chapter thirty-three

  THE DEVICE

  Moritz, everything went wrong today. Right when I thought I was on top of the world.

  I’m scared. I’m scared, and worse than that . . . I’m scary.

  Moritz. It’s all over.

  Everything.

  The automatic doors spun open in curls of gold followed by every shade of green, an electric lime sea.

  I stepped into the Electronics Megamart on St. Patrick’s Day.

  Dr. Wharton walked a few paces behind me, doing his staring gig with his hands in his pockets.

  I couldn’t believe how much stuff was in there. Counters full of laptops and tablets and screens, screens every-freakin’-where. Walls covered in screens, too. Tables and tables of phones. I know you remember my thirteenth birthday party, Moritz. How Liz set up a makeshift room full of fake appliances so I could pretend to have what everyone else has. But now I was in a room of actual electrical appliances, and I couldn’t think why anyone would ever need them. So many flat-screens. Screens that wouldn’t reflect a thing until someone looked at them. They were meaningless until someone looked at them.

  Well, I was looking, through green smoke textured like seaweed.

  “May I help you?” asked a desperate-looking guy in a polo.

  Dr. Wharton smiled. “Sure you can. Show us to your most expensive items!”

  The guy sort of grimaced but smiled at the same time and led us to more and more screens that I guess were bigger and techier somehow.

  “Ready, Ollie?” whispered Dr. Wharton. “Moment of truth.”

  I closed my eyes as Dr. Wharton tugged off my hat. Some of the heaviest pressure I’ve ever felt eased into me, then, as I breathed slowly and imagined dolphin waves, it lessened. I opened my eyes. None of the green electricity made a break for me. It just coated everything in emerald. I was on the seabed, staring at a reef that couldn’t care less.

  I took slow steps down the aisle. The monitors blared sound and color at me. But those things were not reaching for me. Not stretching. Just hanging out like I wasn’t there. I had this. By the end of the aisle, I was almost smiling, too.

  Wharton, right behind me: “It is your fault she died, though.”

  I sucked in air (not water) and pivoted slowly to face him. “What?”

  “Yeah. You heard me.” He showed his tooth. “Your mom was so busy worrying about you she never took care of herself.”

  I shook my head and the electricity rippled around me—the screen next to me flickered, and the one next to it, too. I took a deep breath.

  Remembered my dreams of you in the deer blind, Moritz, pulling me out. Out.

  Prickles on my bare temples.

  I needed to get out.

  Wharton stepped right up to me, hands in his pockets. I don’t know where he put my hat. “Not to mention she was only exposed to the laboratory so you could be born. That’s a lot of guilt to carry around.”

  All the electricity was caught in a new current, the current of me. Wriggling feelers tracing me, making my head pound.

  “And you know something else, Ollie?” Wharton pulled the nameless black device from his coat. “This? This device is called a Geiger counter. Do you know what it measures?”

  I shook my head; schools of sparks flurried away. “Stop it.”

  Children were playing handheld games in the aisle behind me. Moritz, I needed out—

  “It measures ionizing radiation. See, after you blew out the ice-cream parlor, I went home with this really nasty sunburn. In January! Didn’t take much to put two and two together.”

  I spun on my heel. An ocean erupted around me as I made for the door.

  “Do you know what else radiation causes?” he called while people yelped in the aisles, watching screens spark to white and black. “Cancer, Ollie!”

  Dr. Wharton increased his pace to match my own. He got in front of me.

  “You really should have stayed in the woods.”

  I tried to think of your face, but her face, her face when she was dead, openmouthed and blank-eyed in bed, came to the front. Her face in the kitchen when she told me that she wanted to keep me. Her face when I was concussed from a bike crash and she told me not to run away again. Her, sobbing outside my door, lying on the floorboards with her wig slipping.

  When I shoved Wharton out of the way, he didn’t resist. Green sparks obscured my vision. I raised my hands, took hold of the waves, and thrust them away from me. Screens sparked and popped on either side of me; speakers caught fire.

  Wharton looked up at the lights and laughed.

  You told me to be careful, but I was drowning anyhow.

  The automatic doors stayed stuck open for me, and his car was parked near the front of the lot, but I kept walking right past it, to the far edge of the parking lot, the edge of the visible world. But there was no getting away from this. This was a shopping plaza. The more places I went, the more places I would ruin. The more people I’d meet.

  I crouched down in an empty space and closed my eyes and fought to remember you. />
  “Ready or not.” I breathed through my nose. “Ready or not.”

  I was kneeling in an icy pothole puddle, and that brought back something else: the day Liz appeared on our front step, coated in mud. And Mom laughed and shoved me out the door without my coat on, tears in her eyes as she sent me to play in the rain.

  Honestly, I don’t know why I was so worried, she’d said.

  I know now. Do I ever know. Moritz, tell me you didn’t. Tell me you didn’t know.

  Wharton’s footsteps crunched cold gravel. Far from us, on the other end of the parking lot, people fled the Megamart.

  “Sorry, not sorry. I had to see if that was still a trigger. And it is. If we’re going to move forward, Kilimanjaro, you need to accept the facts.”

  “In a public place? If I’m . . . radioactive.” Oh god, Moritz. “People could die.” Oh god.

  “Come on, Ollie.” He shook his head. “People have died already. And so what? Say what you want, but I know it’s worth it. I’m putting up with the burns because science is worth it.”

  “Science? Oh god. You’re nuts.”

  “No. I’m an entrepreneur. And you’re what careers are made of.”

  That gleam in his eyes, that snaggletooth.

  “Get away from me.”

  “Yeah? Where are you going to go? You’ll be deadly anywhere you end up, without my help. I’m your shot at controlling this, Ollie. Don’t forget.”

  I watched him go to his car. The Fiat, not the Morgoth monster.

  I took a numb, horrible breath. I followed, feeling nothing at all. (Help, Moritz. Help.)

  I didn’t get in the car. He rolled down the window.

  He tossed my hat at me. I caught it and held it tight. “Get in the car, why don’t you.”

  She knitted that, Moritz, because she hoped I might leave the woods. But I am the woods.

  “Just get in the—”

  I let the light smog of his vehicle creep up onto me. I lifted my hand, let the smog lick my fingertips and wind around them, and closed my fist on the threads.

  If I had your ears, Moritz, I’d have heard him swearing when the engine popped.

  I walked. I knew Fayton landmarks now. I could walk back just fine. I knew exactly which gray house was Brian and Ms. Arana’s gray house, which gray house was Bridget’s gray house.