That Dancy Meadows and John Cleary met in the first place had been Clementine's fault. Dancy Meadows managed the T-Shurt Yurt down along the strip and, knowing this, when Clementine was fourteen she lied about her age in order to get a job at the Yurt. She planned to befriend Dancy, who was just out of high school herself. This turned out not to be as easy as getting the job had been, but even before John Cleary made his entrance, Clementine had managed to steal a picture of Cabell out of Dancy's wallet. And once Dancy mentioned with loathing her brother's habit of sleeping in the nude and how, during a sleepover in seventh grade, she'd charged her friends ten bucks each for the chance to sneak into his bedroom in the middle of the night to see, by the light of the full moon, for themselves.
Clementine's uncle, who had already married one girl straight out of high school, came into the Yurt on a Thursday afternoon looking for a gag gift for Clementine's grandfather's eighty-first birthday. Finding Clementine behind the counter, he used this as an excuse to spend the rest of the day in the T-Shurt Yurt, telling jokes and flirting with Dancy. Some of the jokes were pretty funny. Even Clementine had to admit that much.
And she could tell that the flirting was working, too, because Dancy began to act as if she and Clementine were very best friends, even when John Cleary wasn't around. Dancy told Clementine the story about Cabell's evil first girlfriend, and how Cabell had cried for three days when she dumped him just before Valentine's Day and then kept the diamond pendant anyway, and then how he'd cried for a whole week when their dad had accidentally stepped on Buffy (his pet tarantula), getting out of the shower.
Dancy showed Clementine how the senior girls put on eyeliner. And explained what boys liked. Clementine didn't believe all of it, but some of what Dancy said must have been true because by Christmas Dancy was pregnant, and Clementine's aunt was divorcing John Cleary and moving down to Charleston. Out of the frying pan and into the next frying pan, Clementine's mother said.
By this point, Clementine wasn't quite sure how she felt about Dancy. She was Cabell's sister, which was a point in her favor. They had the same eyes. She seemed to know every one of Cabell's secrets, too. Clementine kept a file on her computer in which she put down every single thing Dancy said, with annotations where she felt Dancy was being unfair. Once Dancy and Uncle John were engaged, Clementine spent some sleepless nights thinking about the fact that she was going to be Dancy's niece. It might be awkward if she ended up being Dancy's sister-in-law as well. And if she was Dancy's niece, then what would Cabell be? An uncle-in-law? Some sort of second cousin? There wasn't really anyone that she could ask for advice, either, because she'd stopped talking to her two best friends. That was because of Cabell.
Cabell had visited Clementine's tenth-grade biology class in May. He'd been tracking black bears along the Blue Ridge Trail over Chapel Hill's spring break, part of an independent study. Clementine went up to say hey before class started, while Cabell was setting up his slides. She'd wondered, sometimes, where Cabell would have sat in Mr. Kurtz's biology class. Stupid, stupid. Her heart was somewhere down at the bottom of her stomach, but she said, "Hey, Cabell. Remember me?"
Mr. Kurtz said, "Clementine? Did you have a question for Mr. Meadows?"
Cabell squinted. He said, "The sleepswimmer? No way!" He said she'd changed a lot, which was true. She had. It turned out, no surprise, that Cabell was an excellent public speaker. Clementine smiled whenever he looked in her direction. He finished by telling Clementine's class a story about a girl in California who went and had her hair permed and then, the same day, went hiking and got knocked unconscious.
"When she woke up," Cabell said, "she was way out in the middle of the woods, off the path and under a tree, and she put her hand up on her hair, and it was all wet and foamy." That seemed to be the end of the story. He grinned out at the class. Clementine smiled back until her face hurt.
Madeline, who lived down the street from Clementine and had wet the bed until they were both in fifth grade, raised her hand. Mr. Kurtz said, "Yes, Madeline?"
Madeline said, "I don't understand. What happened to her? Why was her hair wet?"
Cabell said, "Oops. Sorry. I guess I left that part out. It was a bear? It was attracted by the smell of the chemicals in her perm? So it hit her over the head, knocked her unconscious, dragged her off the path and into the woods. Then it licked all the perm out of her hair."
"That's disgusting!" Madeline said. Other kids were laughing. Someone said, "It liked the taste of the sperm in her hair?" It worried Clementine, because it wasn't clear whom they were laughing at: Madeline, Cabell, or the girl with the perm.
"She was lucky," Cabell said. "Not that it licked her head," he explained, in case Clementine's class was particularly stupid. Which, in Clementine's opinion, they were. "Lucky that it didn't eat her."
After all of that, Clementine couldn't even manage to ask any questions. Even though she'd spent the whole night before coming up with questions that Cabell might be impressed by. At lunch she said, "So he's pretty amazing, isn't he?" She couldn't keep it in any longer.
Madeline and Grace, who was going through an awkward phase, according to Clementine's mother—although this was just being kind; Grace had been awkward since the second grade— just stared at her. Finally Madeline said, "Who?" Madeline was annoying that way. You had to explain everything to her.
"Cabell," Clementine said. Madeline and Grace continued to stare at her as if she had something in her teeth. "Cabell Meadows?"
"Very funny," Grace said. "You're joking, right?"
They looked at Clementine and saw that she was not joking. Clementine saw that they were astonished. Cabell Meadows, she said to herself. Cabell Meadows.
"Cabell Meadows doesn't wear deodorant," Madeline said.
"That's because of bears." It was like the perm. Bears were sensitive to manmade smells that way. Clementine said this, hoping to reason with them. They were best friends. They liked the same movies. They borrowed each other's clothes. When they went out for pizza, they never ordered pizza with onions because Grace hated onions.
"Let's put it this way," Madeline, former bedwetter, said. "Even if he did wear deodorant, he could wear all the deodorant in the world and I still wouldn't lick him. Anywhere. His eyes are close together. He has weird hands. They're all veiny, Clementine! And his hair! Even when he was still in school here, he wasn't exactly prime real estate, okay? He was a smelly hippie. And it's worse now! Much, much worse!"
She stopped speaking in order to wipe the spit away from the corners of her mouth. Madeline was a sprayer when she got excited. Most likely, Clementine thought, Madeline still wet the bed sometimes, too. Leaky, squeaky Madeline.
Grace took over, as if she and Madeline were training for the Olympics in the freestyle unsolicited advice relay. She said, "It's kind of romantic, Clementine. I mean, you must have been in love with him for a long time? I remember how you used to talk about him when we were just little kids. But you've grown up, Clementine, and he hasn't, okay? At a certain age, for guys, it comes down to robots or girls. Superheroes in tights or girls. Online porn or real girls. Bears or girls . . . although that's not one I've run into before. The point is that this guy has already made the choice, Clementine. If you were all hairy and ran around in the forest maybe you'd have a chance, but you're not and you don't. If Cabell Meadows is the big secret crush you've been hiding all of these years, God help you. Because I sure can't."
Madeline said, "I agree with everything she just said."
No big surprise there. Madeline and Grace were both big fans of personality quizzes and advice columns and self-help books. They could spend hours agreeing with each other about what some boy had meant when he walked by at lunch and said, "Ladies."
Clementine thought about stabbing Madeline with a spork. The only thing stopping her, really, was that she knew Grace and Madeline would get a lot of mileage out of analyzing that, too. Like how it was a cry for help because what else could you ever hope to achie
ve by attacking someone with a plastic utensil? The reasons they had plastic utensils was because kids did that sometimes. Once someone had stabbed a teacher in the arm. Lawyers had claimed it was the hormones in the hamburger meat. Cabell was a vegetarian. Clementine had learned that in Mr. Kurtz's class. She thought about what her mother would say when Clementine came home and said she was a vegetarian, too. Maybe she could sell it as a diet. Or a school project.
Clementine realized that she was still gripping her spork defensively. She put it down and saw that Madeline and Grace were once again staring at her. Clementine had been somewhere else, and now they knew who that somewhere else was.
Clementine said, "He saved my life."
"Let me save you from the biggest mistake of your life," Madeline said. Her voice took on a thrilling intensity, as if she was about to impart the secrets of the universe to Clementine. Madeline's father was a preacher. He was a spitter, too. Nobody liked to sit in the first pew. "Cabell Meadows is not hot. Cabell Meadows is at least six years older than you and he still doesn't know that tube socks are not a good look with Birkenstocks. Cabell Meadows voluntarily came to a high-school biology class to talk about how he spent his spring break shooting bears in the butt with tranquilizer darts. Cabell Meadows is an epic, epic loser."
Clementine put down her spork. She got up and left the table, and for the rest of the year she avoided Grace and Madeline whenever possible. When they began to go out with boys, she would have liked to say something to them about standards and hypocrisy and losers. But what was the point? It was clearly just the way the world worked when it came to friends and love and sex and self-help books and boys. First you're an expert and then you go out into the field with your tranquilizer guns to get some practical experience.
Clementine found Cabell's LiveJournal, "TrueBaloo," after some research online. He had about two hundred friends, mostly girls with names like ElectricKittyEyes and FurElise who went to Chapel Hill, too, and came from San Francisco and D.C. and Cleveland and lots of other places that Clementine had never been to. She got a LiveJournal account and friended Cabell. She sent an e-mail that said "Remember me, the dumb girl u saved from drowning? Just, thanx 4 that & 4 coming to talk about bears. ;)" Cabell friended her back. Asked how school was going and then never wrote again, even after Dancy broke up Clementine's uncle's marriage, and even after Clementine wrote and said everybody had missed him at the engagement party. Which was okay, because Cabell was probably busy with classes, or maybe he was off watching bears again. Or maybe he thought Clementine was upset about the whole thing with Dancy. So Clementine wasn't all that bothered. What mattered was that he'd friended her back. It was a bit like him and the bears, like she and Cabell had tagged each other.
Clementine loaded up her iPod with all the music that Cabell had ever mentioned online. One day they might get a chance to talk about music.
Most Chapel Hill students came back for parties, or to do laundry once in a while, but not Cabell. Not for Christmas, not for spring break (which was understandable, Clementine knew: if you grew up an hour away from Myrtle Beach, you'd officially had all the spring break you'd ever need). He'd shown up to talk about bears, but he didn't show up at Dancy's engagement party, not even to denounce John Cleary for being a sleazy, cradle-robbing son of a bitch. Which he was. Even Clementine's grandfather said so. Ex–star quarterback, which was all that anyone needed to say, really.
Clementine had to be grateful about her uncle and Dancy— except for the wedding, who knew when Cabell would have come home.
Dancy had talked John Cleary into getting married down on the beach, near enough to Headless Point that it felt like a good omen to Clementine. She went running along the beach at Headless Point some mornings, remembering how she and Cabell had walked back through the dunes when everyone else in the world who cared about Clementine had thought she was dead. Drowned. Only Cabell and she had known otherwise.
She begged out of being one of Dancy's bridesmaids because she wasn't going to be wearing discount lemon-custard chiffon when Cabell saw her for the first time in a year. Instead she spent three hundred dollars of T-Shurt Yurt paychecks in a boutique down in Myrtle Beach for a sea-green dress with rhinestone straps. She found a pair of worn-once designer pumps with stiletto heels on eBay and only paid eight bucks for them. Dancy's maid of honor, who'd been an infamous slut back in high school, swore up and down that Clementine looked at least eighteen.
Two weeks before the wedding, Clementine went to Myrtle Beach with her youth choir; on the bus ride home, she sat in the last row and made out with a boy named Alistair. She'd read enough romance novels and spent enough time talking to Dancy to have some general idea of what you were supposed to do, but nothing substitutes for experience in the field.
Having achieved limited success under difficult circumstances (wrong boy, wrong mouth, sticky bus floor, lingering aroma of someone's forgotten banana, two girls—Miranda and Amy—not even bothering to pretend not to watch over the back of the next seat), Clementine felt adequately prepared for the real thing.
L
"Are we there yet?" It's Parci who's asking. Just as if this is a family vacation and not an Ordeal. She's taken off her blindfold at some point in the last few minutes, but that's okay because they're off the highway now and bumping along the rutted road that winds up the mountain. It's all gloomy thick stands of pine trees and fir trees and under them the remains of old stone walls. Once, a long time ago, there was a French settlement. Farms and orchards. Archeologists arrive every summer, to camp and have romances and dig. Lee's aunt, Dodo, says that it's nice to have some company besides her goats, and the relationship dramas are better than anything on television.
Czigany is either still sleeping, or else pretending. Bad and Nikki are singing along with the radio at the top of their lungs, so most likely it's the latter. Maureen is texting some new boyfriend. Judging by how fast and hard her thumbs are hitting the keys, it's a fight.
"Don't be surprised when you lose your signal," Lee tells Maureen. "There aren't a lot of cell towers up here."
"To be continued," Maureen says, and bites her lip. "Oh, yeah."
Here is the turnoff, and here, another mile down, is Dodo's secret kingdom. Lee directs Bad down the dirt road into a meadow surrounded by mountains, a stream running through it. A two-story farmhouse that Dodo has painted Pepto-Bismol pink. (Paint rescued from some Dumpster. The trim is canary yellow for no good reason.) Only the barn looks the way a barn should: red and white and with a weathervane; a nanny goat standing upon a wheel of cheese. Only when you get closer do you see that instead of painting the barn, Dodo has cut open and tacked up hundreds and hundreds of Coca-Cola cans to the wooden boards.
Peaceable Kingdom was never much of a tourist attraction. There was a snack stand, a petting zoo, a go-cart track, a carousel, and a smallish Ferris wheel. The go-cart track is overgrown with grass and the beginnings of a bamboo thatch that Dodo's goats keep close-cropped. Goats play king of the hill on the collapsed wooden platform of the carousel, whose roof blew away years ago. Dodo, who purchased Peaceable Kingdom in its declining years, long ago sold off the carousel horses, one by one, to buy her goats.
Over the years, Peaceable Kingdom's Ferris wheel has peaceably sunk into the marshy ground of the goat meadow. Lightning strikes it when there are storms, and at least once every summer there is the morning when Dodo discovers, going out to milk the goats, a broken-hearted archeologist crumpled in sleep after a night of solitary drinking, in the bottommost chair where the mice build their nests. Lee herself likes to sit and read and rock gently in the cracked, lime-green vinyl bucket seat where a Pygmy goat now stands sentinel, front legs propped up on the rusty safety bar, listening to Bad honk the horn in delight at what she is seeing.
Goats are eating the green sea of grass and the creeping trumpet vine that would otherwise pull down the tilted wheel. Others kneel or perch upon the boulders jutting out of the scrubby pasture.
"Your
aunt lives here?" Maureen says. Nikki is taking pictures with her cell phone.
Dodo is Lee's mother's older sister. She's a former anarchist who served nine years in a high-security women's prison. Now she makes cheese instead of bombs. When she set up her herd at Peaceable Kingdom, she invested in six Toggenburgs. Over time she's swapped, bartered, adopted, and bought increasingly more esoteric breeds. The current herd numbers somewhere around thirty goats, including Booted Goats, Nubian Blacks, Nigerian Dwarfs, Pygmy Goats, and four Tennessee Fainting Goats. Dodo spent her years in prison doing coursework in animal husbandry. Goats, she likes to say, are the ultimate anarchists.
Bad parks beside the pink farmhouse. "Let me guess," Maureen says. "I bet there's a composting toilet."
"It's an outhouse, actually," Lee tells her, even as Dodo appears on the front porch where three goats loiter, hoping, no doubt, to get into the house where there are interesting things to chew. She's wearing pink camouflage waders that come halfway up to her hips. Her hair, too, has been colored to match the house.
"Nice boots," Bad says. The others are still gaping at Dodo, the pink house, the shining Coca-Cola barn, the goats, the Ferris wheel. Even Czigany's posture has changed subtly, as if, still pretending to sleep, she is listening very, very hard.
"Take off the blindfold," Lee tells Nikki. "And her handcuffs." And then, to everyone, "I told you my aunt was eccentric. And her feelings get hurt kind of easy. When you try the cheese, pretend you like it even if you don't. Okay?"
"Czigany," Parci shouts. She bounces on the seat. "Wake up! Your Ordeal is about to begin!"
Czigany sits up. She yawns hugely and fakely. "Hey, guys. Sorry about that. I had a late night last night."
"Boy, did we," Parci says.
When the blindfold is off, Czigany's big eyes get bigger. "Where are we?"
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Three Page 69