Freaks Like Us

by Susan Vaught

  “Find her yet? Anybody hear from her? Did she leave a note or something? Are people out looking?” His words flood the room, full of sound and feeling and everything I have inside and can’t show because of my alphabet, but that’s okay because Drip has enough feeling for everybody, even me.

  Chief Smith gets up to make room for Ms. Taylor, who’s long and tall like Drip and pretty like somebody on television, especially when she wears tailored pantsuits, which she nearly always does. Today, her outfit looks like brown silk, soft and no wrinkles anywhere, and she’s got a bloodred scarf at the neck, and the color absorbs me because it’s so bright.

  Blood, blood, blood, freak, freak, freak, freak…

  For a few seconds, as the colonel and Ms. Franks and Ms. Taylor talk to each other, there’s no room in the universe for Drip and me and Dad and Chief Smith. We’re as much on the edge as the silent not-witch who’s just watching, and this, at least, seems normal. I don’t care how much I read about men and women being the same. Sometimes they just aren’t, and sometimes when women talk, there’s no space for men or boys or anything that’s not something they’re choosing to include.

  “Lisa, I can’t believe she just didn’t come home—”

  “We’ll find her, don’t you worry—”

  “Right here for you, honey, and we’re not going anywhere—”

  Lisa. It always surprises me to hear somebody call the colonel anything but Colonel—or Mom, which I haven’t done in a long time, because… well, it’s just hard for the colonel to feel like a mom most of the time. Lisa Jones Milwaukee. It’s weird, remembering that colonels have first names. Derrick’s mom has a first name, too. It’s Denise, because his family tends to do D names, even where nicknames are concerned.

  “You look in our place?” Drip asks me so quiet his voice barely gets through the voices of the women and the voices in my head.

  “Not yet,” I tell him, and then I feel stupid because I should have thought to go down by the river to our sitting spot.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid, blood, blood, blood, freak, freak, freak…

  It’s hard not to imagine Drip’s mom with her throat cut, because my brain does that to me sometimes, shows me awful things I’d never do and never want, like nightmares, only I’m awake. If I don’t stop thinking about blood, I’ll start seeing it, then everything will get one hundred times more awful.

  I haven’t looked anywhere for Sunshine. I just came here with Dad. I’m as bad as the not-witch, just trotting along behind the people in uniforms. What’s wrong with me? I haven’t even gone to Sunshine’s room.

  She might be in there. Maybe she’s just hiding under the bed or in the closet or she’s really in the corner, pretending she’s invisible so hard she’s actually invisible and nobody can see her but me and—

  Did you ever want to be invisible Sunshine asks and we’re ten and everything’s easy because it’s summer and we’re ten and we’re in our sitting spot Sunshine and me and we’re sitting and the sun glitters off her locket and Drip’s splashing through the river and the world doesn’t exist it’s just us and I say yeah I’ve wanted to be invisible lots of times and she says close your eyes and I’ll close mine and I do it because I always do what Sunshine wants and she laughs and she says we’re invisible now at least until we open our eyes and then she sounds a little sad when she says maybe that’ll be good enough and maybe it will be and I want it to be so she’ll be happy like this every day all day and forever and

  —Chief Smith is adding a name to his flip pages as Drip recounts the same day I told him about and I see Mr. Watson get a header.

  Why?

  Did Drip make him seem meaner than I did? Because Mr. Watson isn’t mean. He’s just pushy sometimes, especially with Sunshine, but Ms. Franks is probably right. That’s his job.

  “May I go to her room?” I ask, interrupting whoever’s talking and I don’t even know who is, but everybody looks at me.

  For some reason, I only want to look at Ms. Franks. “I just want to see—to be sure—”

  My voice drops to nothing, just a chicken whisper, a silly rasp, but tears fill up her eyes and she says, “Of course you can.”

  Chief Smith says, “That’s not a good idea. I don’t want anything disturbed.”

  “I’ll go with him to be sure he doesn’t touch anything,” the colonel says in her army voice, that hard don’t-argue tone, and she’s smiling, but it’s not really a smile, and along the left-hand wall of the town house, the not-witch comes to attention.

  “He needs this, I think,” the colonel adds, and then Chief Smith looks embarrassed, and he apologizes, and he waves one hand toward Sunshine’s room like, okay, if that’s how to handle freaks, far be it for me to get in the way.

  I don’t look at Drip or Ms. Taylor as I launch myself out of the chair, and I’m away from the room and all the people and down the hall before anybody can decide differently.

  Even before I get to her door, I smell it, the whispery scent of honeysuckle creeping around the apple smell of the place, gently moving it aside to make room for Sunshine.

  The door’s open, and there’s a light on like she’s in there, and my heart pounds hard and then harder as I slow, then stop at the threshold and look inside.

  Dark hardwood floors gleam beneath cream-colored throw rugs. Her bedspread is satin and green and thick, and I know it’s soft. Her bed’s full size, with a brass headboard, and her furniture—two dressers, one chest of drawers, a big mirror on a stand, a night table and a rocker, it’s all a creamy old white with little flecks of color. Her phone’s lying on her desk but her bag and books and notebooks aren’t here and that’s good because wherever she is she’s got paper and pencils and pens to write poems with and she’s got something to read even if it’s just stupid school stuff.

  My eyes travel to the bookshelves lining every spare inch of wall space, all stuffed with romance novels and fantasy novels and teen novels and literary New York Times stuff nobody I know but Sunshine reads. Everything is spotless like it got cleaned top to bottom just minutes before I showed up, and it’s all motionless and empty like a photo because she’s not here. I know without going in, without looking under the bed or in the closet or in the corner, I know Sunshine’s not anywhere in the room, and this part may be like the movies because I know it because I don’t feel her. I should feel her here, and I don’t.

  Let’s go in here Jason because it’s my space and I need it to be mine again I need to make it mine and right now it’s private and that’s important because I have to tell you something and she’s got tears in her eyes and I want to lift my thumbs and wipe the tears away and when I do she lets me and then she’s got her face against my chest crying and I hold her and I want her to stop stop stop crying but I don’t know how to help her until she tells me what she wants and I still don’t know how to do it but I’ll try and I’ll do my best because it’s Sunshine and I’d do anything for her even give up all my own books and games and movies I’d do anything for her even die I’d do anything for her

  I’m seeing black clouds. Spinning. Swirly. The clouds where last Saturday should be. Pain pokes at my temples and I stop because I have to stop trying to remember because I promised and once I promised so hard the clouds came and now I think it might put knives through my brain if I quit forgetting. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m remembering instead of dreaming or dreaming instead of remembering but if I could make my dreams real, I’d dream Sunshine sitting on the edge of her bed, gazing up at me like everything’s going to be okay. I’m in the room now, and I don’t know how I got in here. The last thing I remember, I was at the door. Now I’m at the desk. I’m staring down at her phone. At the empty space beside the phone where a note should be: Dear Jason and Derrick and the colonel and everybody, I went to the mall—something. Anything but the blank white wood.

  Can letters be invisible?

  “Don’t touch the desk, honey.” The colonel’s voice startles me enough to turn around, an
d she’s standing in the door like I was a few seconds ago. She looks worried. Captain Evans is right behind her. The not-witch doesn’t look worried, but her expression is intense and she’s so on guard that if this were a battle game, I’d be pulling weapons and spinning in circles to see where the monsters are.

  “She’s not in here,” I say, and I hate it but my voice sounds like a shaky baby-cry thing, and—

  Stupid baby, stupid freak, row, row, row the freak, who’s the freak, where’s the freak, where’s Sunshine, where’s the freak, it’s all your fault.

  —The colonel’s beside me the next second, like she blinked herself from the door into the room, and she gathers me up in her arms. She smells like the colonel, all leather and dirt and battle, but she feels like Mom as she holds me and tells me, “I’m sorry.”

  She doesn’t say it’s probably nothing, that it’ll be okay, that we’ll find her. The colonel isn’t given to making promises she can’t keep, and really, that’s fine by me. I don’t want to hear any of that right this second, because I wouldn’t believe it and it wouldn’t help.

  Sunshine’s not here. She’s gone. She’s really gone.

  “That phone,” Captain Evans says from behind us. “It’s like she didn’t want to be found—or someone didn’t want us to be able to track her. I think it’s time we call the FBI. It may not be an abduction, but they’ll send a team if we put in a word.”

  “Do it,” the colonel says, and she gets tense, fast and sudden, like she knows she’s saying the right thing but worrying about it all at the same time.

  Not-witch vanishes from the doorway, or maybe she just walks away. I can’t tell. Time’s skipping a little on me right now.

  The colonel pulls back and stares into my face, into my eyes, like she’s trying to find Sunshine hiding inside my forehead or maybe sneaking back and forth between my ears. “Do you need something extra to stay calm? Because I think that’s very important right now.”

  Something extra. She means “PRN” pills. I used to think that stood for “per RN,” as in a nurse gets to decide when a patient needs extra pills—because that’s sure what it means in the hospital. I looked it up once, though. It stands for pro re nata, which is Latin for “as the circumstance arises.” Freaks like me, people with alphabets, sometimes need PRN medication to keep our heads from exploding in stressful situations.

  This would definitely be a stressful situation, but—

  “No,” I tell her. “I can’t think if I take extra pills.” Then, before she can argue, I add, “I need to be able to think for Sunshine.”

  The colonel gives this a second or two. She doesn’t like it, but she nods, and people start talking louder out in the living room and I hear the not-witch explaining about how the FBI has a Child Abduction Rapid Deployment—CARD—with teams trained to find missing children, and how with a special request they might get involved right now.

  “Don’t push it with your inside agitation,” the colonel tells me. She lets me go, still watching me like I might suddenly grab everything in the room and put my fingerprints all over it. “I know you hold it together well on the outside, but on the inside—if you start falling apart, tell me and I’ll go to the house and get you something. And Jason, when the CARD team gets here, I want you to be careful what you say.”

  This makes me stare back at her like she might be the one about to fingerprint everything in Sunshine’s room. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean keep shut up unless they ask you questions, and when they do ask, answer—but don’t go too far off track.” The colonel frowns. She glances toward the living room, where everything’s gone quiet, probably because the not-witch is phoning in the request for CARD to get involved.

  “The FBI isn’t like Chief Smith,” the colonel says. “They might be fast-paced and pushy. They might be sharp with you and get you upset.”

  And she’s worried about this—why? Her reputation? Dad’s? Or for Sunshine’s sake? It’s hard to tell. I don’t like the idea of talking to a bunch of pushy strangers, but—

  But—

  “Can they find Sunshine?” I ask the colonel.

  She answers with an abrupt “Yes.”

  “Good enough,” I tell her, and we leave Sunshine’s room, which isn’t as hard as I thought it would be, even though part of my heart stays behind.

  THREE HOURS

  The old dusty clocks on the old dusty walls of the VFW seem to tick louder than my own voices mumble. They’re old-fashioned with hands and numbers instead of glowing digital lines and they all tell me how long Sunshine’s been gone.

  Three hours.

  Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. There’s no tock. There’s no alarm. It never stops. Tick-tick-tick-tick, and swish-swish-swish-swish as I sweep because I’m sweeping with an ancient broom, the kind with old jaggedy straws on the end because everything here is out of date. Everything here is old and stupid and it’s been three hours and I’m sweeping for the FBI and the FBI never comes to towns like this. We’re a speck on the map. We’re a freckle on the speck, maybe that tiny crumb you dropped last week—we’re nothing and nowhere.

  The nearest anything to us is the military base, Fort Able with its famed 85th Airborne Division, twenty miles north. That’s where the colonel works, and it’s huge, covering the corners of three different states and hosting around thirty thousand soldiers plus their families and all the support staff it takes to feed, clothe, house, and train that many men and women. It’s where most everybody works if they don’t farm, slog in the paper mill, teach at the schools, or man the shops and stores.

  The FBI probably never even heard of where we live until they got the call from some uppity-muck friend of the colonel’s at Fort Able, pulling in favors and asking for help. The colonel tells us the team is already in the air and on the way. They’ll have lodging at Fort Able, but we’ll need to find a good hub of operations for them to set up their equipment. Chief Smith talked to local folks and veterans, and the largest building in town not counting the schools—the old brown brick-and-stone VFW hall on the hill—got the nod. It’s close to the school and where we all live, and it’s halfway between the police station and the fire station, overlooking the town like some run-down sentinel that can’t keep us safe anymore. It’s strong but it’s old and it’s dirty and I’m sweeping and three hours turns into four hours.

  Four hours.

  And four hours, that turns into five hours.

  And the clocks keep ticking and I’m thinking I should go look in Sunshine’s room or on the bus or all along where the bus drove or maybe at the school but the police have already done that and Sunshine’s brother, Eli, has done that and they’re probably doing it all over again so I can’t help there and I can help here with the sweeping but it’s been five hours, and it’s more than five hours now.

  With the half-moon hanging like a broken Christmas ornament in the night sky, Dad and Drip and Chief Smith and I finish sweeping the VFW. We’ve got the windows open to air everything out, and we’ve set up tables and chairs in all the rooms like the colonel ordered. There’s the big main area where the VFW does dinners and stuff, a kitchen, two bathrooms (one for each gender), then twelve smaller rooms—offices, storage, empty—each one has a table and at least four chairs now. The whole place smells like Pine-Sol, and everything’s too quiet because nobody’s talking. From the other rooms off the main area, the scuff and clatter of shoes and brooms on brown tile and ancient concrete sounds like demented Morse code.

  S-O-S.

  When I was little, I thought that meant Save Our Sh—well, you know, because I heard the colonel say it once. The FBI is coming to do that, only it’s Save Our Sunshine. I’m glad, but I’m also scared—not because I have anything to worry about, but because the colonel was scared. I could tell when she told me to watch what I say. The colonel gets freaked out by my crazy voices sometimes, but she’d protect me to her last drop of blood if anything came after me.

  Why would she think she has to pro
tect me from the FBI agents? If they’re really coming here to find Sunshine, I’ll do whatever I can to help them.

  She thinks you did it because you’re a freak. Idiot. I can’t believe you’re such an idiot. Fool on the hill, fool on the hill, fool on the hill. Did what? Did who? Did where?

  I realize I’m standing in front of the closet in the main area, broom in my hand, frozen as I listen to the voices. I hate it when I do that.

  “Maybe nobody did anything,” I mutter back to the noises in my head. I hate it when I do that, too.

  But Sunshine could have run away or gotten lost. Everybody’s saying that and it might be true. Maybe nobody snatched her. Maybe nobody hurt her.

  Somebody was hurting her. She told me that, didn’t she? Last Saturday—

  The swirly clouds clot across my eyes and pain jabs into both sides of my head. My fingers curl into fists, and there’s a roar and it’s all my voices at once and they’re all saying promised promised promised but this is bad, it’s an emergency and I need to know but I can’t know because I promised and if I break a promise to her I’ll die because that’s what should happen.

  Do I know something I should be telling people?

  You’re just a freak. You’re just a stupid freak. Freaks don’t speak. Freaks shouldn’t speak. Don’t talk out of your head or the swirly clouds will eat you because sometimes clouds have teeth.

  I don’t know for sure. Keeping your mouth closed is rarely a bad idea, according to another Dad-ism. I might be remembering alphabet voices and alphabet pictures and that’s not something I need to tell Chief Smith or the FBI. Please don’t let anybody be hurting Sunshine. Please don’t let anybody hurt her ever. Does the colonel think something happened to Sunshine? Does she think I had something to do with it?

  How could she think that?

  “Because you’re a freak,” I say with my voices, and I really, really hate it when I do that.

  The clouds go away and the pain in my head eases and I put my broom back in the closet. None of this feels real to me, and I can’t believe it’s dark and the stars and moon are out, glowing and twinkling through the dark-paned windows, but Sunshine isn’t home. Her mom and Ms. Taylor are still at Sunshine’s place, waiting for Mr. Franks to get home and hanging by the telephone because Chief Smith told them to stay there in case Sunshine tries to call or comes home. Drip’s brothers are out driving the roads. Sunshine’s brother, Eli, is walking the neighborhoods around Sunshine’s town house again, even though the police have done it three times now. I can imagine his hands balled into fists, PAIN and HOPE flashing from his fingers with each step he takes.