“Hey, I’m just repeating what I heard,” Sam says, bumping a shoulder against me. “I have to say, you didn’t strike me as a complete freak.”
“What are the qualifications, exactly? Is there an application form?”
Sam presses her lips together like she’d rather be too cool to laugh, but one bubbles out anyway.
“What I’m trying to tell you,” she says, pulling me toward the courtyard in the center of the school, “is that you seem okay to me, and you carry a sketchbook. You don’t seem like someone who’s given up art.”
After the press of the hallways, the courtyard’s plank benches and evergreen shrubs seem like a miniature forest.
When I’m painting, even if it’s just in art class, I feel as if the brush could take over my whole self. As if I’m someone else, someone I don’t even know yet. The most frustrating thing about living on the grow is not having access to art books or websites or after-school classes. I struggle along by myself most of the time. But giving up painting isn’t an option.
If I explain all that, I really will sound like a freak.
“I stick to myself,” I say.
“And perfect your art in solitude, so you’ll become famous after your death?”
“Exactly.” It’s not the worst life plan.
When we sit on one of the benches, she twists to face me. Her knee touches my thigh, though she doesn’t seem to notice.
I notice.
“So you’re not a freak, Zac.”
“No.” Maybe.
“But you quit painting.”
“I didn’t quit. Mr. Pires entered me in a contest without me knowing, and I won. But I didn’t accept the prize.”
“How come?”
“Is this an interrogation?”
She laughs again. “Are you avoiding the question?”
“The prize was to have my painting printed in a magazine. Their writer was going to visit me and do a profile. But I was busy. My grandpa was sick.”
That’s not why I couldn’t have the canvas published. I’d painted our cabin. Our front stoop with the weathered logs above, the hemlocks standing guard and the mountain peak rising over it all. Anyone around here — anyone who hiked, at least — could look at that peak and figure out approximately where our cabin lay.
I was an idiot to ever paint that scene.
“One magazine interview doesn’t seem like a big commitment,” Sam says.
She has no idea.
“Maybe my art isn’t meant for magazines.”
“What’s it meant for, then?”
Which is a ridiculous question. “It’s meant to exist.”
She furrows her eyebrows.
“The ways trees exist,” I say.
“You’re a strange dude, Zac Mawson.” She shakes her head. “But I like you anyway.”
I like you, too. I like the way you throw everything into the open.
I only manage these words inside my head. Though she’s shifted her knee away from my leg, I can still feel a circle of heat on my skin.
The bell rings. For the first time, I notice a gaggle of girls pressed against the glass of the courtyard, watching us. They’re Sam’s friends, waiting and giggling.
I have class.
“Do you want to…” How can this feel so awkward? “Do you want to get lunch together?”
Sam’s shiny lips curl into a pout. “Can’t. We’re doing a drama skit this afternoon and we have to practice.” She nods toward her groupies.
Of course she’s the drama type. I should have known.
“Tomorrow?” she asks.
“Okay.”
She pops from the bench and bounces over to her friends, leaving me in a cloud of bubblegum pink.
•
My truck rumbles along the ruts in the dirt road that cuts through the orchard toward my sister’s place. This is where I usually spend my lunch hour.
Judith lives in a converted old school bus that my dad bought for cheap. It still has the traditional yellow paint job, but the original owners turned the emergency exit at the back into a real door. Inside, it’s like a small RV, with wooden cabinets and orange upholstery. There’s a loft bed above the driver’s seat, a table that folds down into a second sleeping space and even a miniature bathroom. The bus is parked in a perfect spot under the apple trees, on a lot Dad owns a few minutes from town. He’s even rigged electrical and water hook-ups.
Today there’s a flashy blue Mazda on the grass between the bus and Judith’s beat-up Honda. Then I spot the guy who matches the car, standing on the plastic stool that serves as Judith’s front step. Judith’s in the doorway, one hand playing with the hair at the nape of his neck.
He’s a decent-looking guy, though short. He’s wearing a golf shirt and dark jeans that seem as though they may have been ironed.
As I climb from my truck, he steps onto the grass, reaching out a handshake.
“Hey,” I say, keeping my voice neutral.
“Garrett, this is my brother, Isaac,” Judith calls from the doorway.
We shake. He uses too much cologne and there’s something weasel-like about him. The longer I look, the less I like him.
“Garrett’s on his way to work,” Judith says.
“Called in sick this morning,” he says. Then he winks at me.
I cringe.
He looks back at Judith. “I’ll see you later.”
“I might be busy,” she says with a flirty smile I’ve never seen before.
“You’re working tomorrow, aren’t you? I’ll come by the bar.”
Without waiting for her answer, he heads for his car.
“See ya, bud,” he says as he passes.
As he backs around my truck and then quickly down the drive, Judith turns inside. She emerges a moment later with her hands wrapped around a giant coffee mug. Then she leans back in one of the old lawn chairs at the side of her bus.
“Hey, handsome,” she says as I flop into the chair next to hers. The vinyl creaks under my weight, but it holds.
Even in her sweatpants with her hair unbrushed, my sister is drop-dead gorgeous. When she was in tenth grade, a talent scout spotted her in the crowd at the Blossom Festival parade and gave her a card for a modeling school in Vancouver.
You can imagine what Dad and Walt said about that. The words “devil’s work” were used multiple times.
I don’t think Judith really wanted to go anyway. She’s like me. Solitude’s in her bones. She has to work at the crowded bar, but other than that she spends her days here in the orchard. Monday evenings she takes a couple of first-year psychology classes at the community college.
“I brought you home a cheeseburger last night. It’s in the toaster oven,” she says.
That’s a perk of her hotel work.
“What about you?” I ask.
“I’ll have something later.”
The door’s propped open, but I smell him anyway as soon as I walk in. Sex, plus whatever crap they put in men’s perfume, plus a trace of cigarette smoke. It almost makes me gag.
I grab the burger, shake the burn off my fingers and head back outside.
“Rough night?” I ask.
Judith has her head tipped against the lawn chair, eyes closed in the sun.
“A good night,” she says.
“Oh, yeah? How good?”
When she doesn’t answer, I reach over to give her shoulder a shove.
“Spill,” I say, around a giant bite of burger. I may as well figure out what I’m dealing with. Get to know the enemy.
“He works at the brewery, but not on the line. Some office job. I met him in the bar a couple of weeks ago.”
Maybe it’s evolutionary brother-instinct that makes me distrust the guy. I mean, I’m in favor of Judith having fun. But no
t with Garrett from the brewery. She deserves better.
She pokes my arm. “Stop making that face. He’s a good guy.”
She deserves great.
“I might have met someone, too,” I tell her. I say it mostly to change the subject, but then I find I can’t look at her. I have to stare at my burger, picking the last few sesame seeds off the bun.
“Oooh!” She immediately swivels toward me, tucking her feet up on her chair. “Tell me more.”
“You’d like her.” And suddenly, the stink of that guy is gone in the pleasure of telling Judith about Sam. I tell her everything. She howls when I get to the part about Hazel. She almost falls off her chair.
“Why can’t we just be normal?” she asks, once she can breathe. “Why do we have to protect our future dates from rampaging bears?”
I shake my head.
“Do you know people can actually be scared to death by bears? It happens if too much cortisol gets into their blood,” she says. “Happened to a kid in Vermont. I read about it in one of my psych articles.”
“Sam didn’t die,” I say.
“You didn’t introduce her to Dad, obviously.”
“I told him there was a hiker.”
“But not that the hiker was hot.” My sister grins.
“I may have neglected to mention that.”
“Bring her by sometime. Soon! I want to meet her.”
“I will,” I promise. Then it’s time to get back. I give Judith a quick hug before I climb into my truck. With my arm over the back of the seat, reversing down the long driveway, dodging apple trees, I’m grinning again.
I’ve never smiled this much before.
•
When Judith was thirteen, she launched a massive campaign to stop homeschooling and attend real high school. Creston has a few tiny elementary schools which all feed into one central high, grades eight through twelve. Judith wanted in on the action, even if it meant hiking down the mountain and riding the puke-scented lake-road school bus each morning.
She won that battle, and I followed in her footsteps when I hit eighth grade. But every time the subject came up, Dad reminded us we were in school on one condition.
“Keep your head down.”
I’ve followed that rule religiously. I’m the guy no one’s going to recognize in the yearbook.
So I’m a little surprised when I walk through the double doors of the school after lunch and one of the guys from the basketball team shouts, “Isaac — you the man!” and raises his hand in what turns out to be a high-five, though I don’t realize this until awkwardly late.
He doesn’t hang around to explain himself.
On my way down the hall, two girls stop talking, watch me pass, then resume talking twice as fast.
There’s a hole ripping through my gut, like I’ve been sucker-punched.
As I’m dumping my stuff in my locker, Lucas shows up at the locker beside mine.
I wouldn’t exactly say Lucas and I are friends. It’s more that we’re alphabetically close. We’ve shared hallway space for the past few years. Thanks to a lapse in judgment when I was thirteen, and the need to buy some protection for my awkward homeschooled ass, I sell him pot.
He’s abnormally tall, with cropped brown hair and wire glasses. He wears jeans and striped T-shirt variations every day, along with a butt-ugly green track jacket.
“Is something going on this afternoon?” I ask. If there is, Lucas will know. The guy’s a mechanical genius, so he spends plenty of time in the school shop. But he’s aiming for med school, too. He’s a strange sort of social chameleon.
“Not for thirty-eight more days,” he says.
“What happens in thirty-eight days?”
“Graduation, man.” He raises his palms, as if clouds are parting and the heavens opening. Then he narrows his eyes. “Why do you ask?”
“Somebody high-fived me on the way into school.”
At that moment, another group of guys walks by.
“Hey, it’s Grizzly Adams,” one calls.
I have no idea what that means, but I swear he’s looking straight at me.
“See?” I ask Lucas once they’ve passed.
“Odd,” he concedes.
All the head-over-heels puppy-love feeling has leaked out of me. Still, it’s too early to jump to conclusions. That’s what I tell myself. I’ll wait until after school. I’ll wait until I talk to her.
Once the bell rings, I spend an hour in English, thinking about Julius Caesar. Then I drip paint in art.
If it weren’t for art, I’m not sure I would bother with high school. It’s not as if Julius Caesar is going to prove wildly applicable to my grow-op career. But art — the class is a complete escape. An hour goes by like a minute, and I’ve thought of nothing except color and texture. This particular canvas already has greens running diagonally down the bottom half. Today I add shades of mountain blue at the top. I plop dollops of paint, then choose just the right angle and watch gravity do the work.
“Impressive,” Mr. Pires says.
Though he lives in town, Mr. Pires looks as if he could run his own grow. He has bark-brown skin and thick, curly black hair that he wears in a ponytail. He dresses in classic rock T-shirts with lab-coat smocks over top.
Once he moves on, I add a couple of smaller dots of purple and let them run as well.
They run farther than I intend.
Because when I say I’ve been thinking about Julius Caesar and acrylic paints all afternoon, that’s a lie. I’ve been thinking of these things against background images of Sam Ko.
As soon as the bell rings, I scan the hallway for her.
A couple of girls find me first.
“I can’t believe what you did,” one gushes, linking an arm through mine.
“Are you, like, some sort of animal whisperer?” her friend asks.
These girls are both blonde. I’ve seen them around, but I can’t find their names inside my brain. Possibly my mind has been flooded with pheromones.
“Was it a black bear or a grizzly?” the first one asks.
There it is. I can’t deny it any longer. My feet stop moving. My gut clenches up, then my chest, then my throat.
The girl drops my arms. “What did I say?”
That’s when I spot Sam, finally, in a pink slouch hat that matches her bubblegum lips. I glare at her.
When she sees me, her eyes widen.
“I can explain,” she says.
The blonde girls melt away as Sam grabs my arm and pulls me toward the courtyard.
I shake off her hand. “You told everyone?”
I have to talk through clenched teeth or I’m not sure what will come out of me. I try to remember that to a normal person, this is probably no big deal. She doesn’t know that Hazel’s like family. She doesn’t know that I live on a grow-op. How would she even imagine that either of those things could be true?
So I try. I try to be normal and let her know that I’m unhappy without going all backwoods about it. But I can’t remember ever feeling this pulsing, can’t-think-straight fury that wants to explode from me.
She can obviously read it on my face.
“I told two friends,” she says. “And they’re both completely trustworthy. Wouldn’t tell a soul. But then we were talking about it in the foyer at lunch and someone overheard, and then I had to repeat the whole story, and…”
What pops into my mind, ridiculously, is Et tu, Brute?
I can’t say that.
“They won’t tell anyone else,” Sam says. “I’ll make sure.”
This isn’t her fault. That’s the worst part. I could have foreseen it the minute I spotted her on the trail and chose not to scare her away.
I did this.
My teeth still clenched, I suck in a deep breath.
“I’m glad you got home safe on the weekend,” I tell Sam.
Then I walk away.
What did I think was going to happen? Did I think I could have two separate lives, one full of bubblegum and milkshakes and the other laced with THC?
I did think that, temporarily, which makes all the words Walt has ever spit at me uncomfortably true.
Sam calls my name as I leave the courtyard, but I don’t turn back.
4
Dad’s cleaning the Winchester 94 while he talks to Mom. As I take off my jacket, the word “druid” catches my attention.
I make myself a sandwich, then lean against the counter to listen.
It seems that when the attendees of the druid convention packed up their mushrooms and their robes, one stayed behind. In a tree. Mom ran into him on her most recent herb-picking expedition.
“The campground attendant must think he’s harmless,” she says, shrugging.
“How the hell did he get a treehouse built?” Dad asks.
“Most of it looks old. He’ll be lucky if he doesn’t crash through the floorboards in the middle of the night.”
Dad doesn’t say it out loud — that would hardly be Christian — but I can tell what he’s thinking. We’ll be lucky if the druid does crash through the floorboards.
“I only talked to him for a few minutes. He said he was communing with the spirits of the forest.”
“Fucking prick,” Walt adds from the corner.
Dad has the Winchester back together. He sets it in place on the rack above the .30-06 Springfield, a moose-hunting rifle also ideal for scaring the pants off ganja thieves. And possibly druids.
My parents let the conversation drop, but we all know how the issue will end. Dad will drop a hunk of meat at the base of the druid’s tree in the middle of the night and leave Big Bugger and another bear or two to scare him straight down the highway.
That’s how we keep things balanced in the woods.
It would be good if life was as clear in the outside world.
•
As far as I can see, high school was never meant to be fun. It’s full of cinder-block walls, tired wardens and inmates who would rather be anywhere else. If you gave them a chance to escape into the woods and not come back, half these kids might make a run for it.
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