by Nikki Loftin
“Are you sure?” I had to ask. “Maybe you won’t have any side effects at all. My mom always says to hope for the best.” Of course, I hated it when she said that.
She shrugged. “Late effects. And to be honest? Hoping for the best is what I’m doing. I mean, I might not be able to tie my own shoes at all, right? I knew a boy at MD Anderson that happened to. Fine motor skills are one of the first things to go. Not that Mom would ever tell me about that. No, I had to find out on the freaking Internet.”
“Your mom hasn’t talked to you about the . . . late-effects thing?”
“Well, if you mean lied? Yeah, sure. She said it would be minor, a few months of transitioning back, blah, blah. Like last time.” She stopped and cleared her throat. “But when she fought the doctors so I could come to camp, I overheard her on the phone. And then after, I saw what her friends have been telling her, what she knows is going to happen. . . . I guess she didn’t want me to find out. Maybe she’s right.”
“Right? No.” I shivered. “It’s always better to know.”
“Are you certain of that?” Annie sounded clinical. “I mean, if you had a disease that meant you had to get something amputated, would you rather know going in? You’d have all that time to worry, to freak out. Sort of like I’m doing right now.” She laughed softly. “Or would it be better to just wake up missing your limb . . . or the use of part of your brain?”
I thought, and clouds passed overhead. Neither one of us spoke. Finally I answered her. “Better to know. Definitely.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “That’s why I’m sneaking. Can’t trust my mom to tell me what’s ahead. Of course, she’s probably figured out that if I had any say in it . . . well, at least I’d still be who I am, for as long as I . . . ” She trailed off, and I wondered what she meant. I thought I knew.
Annie would choose not to do the radiation at all.
Would she choose to just . . . die? Really?
I felt sick. I didn’t want to think about what that meant, really didn’t want to talk about it.
That would make me just like her mom. So I took a breath, wondering how to put this, wondering if there was any way I could not make it worse.
But I didn’t have time to say anything. Annie stood up, wiped her hands off, and pulled me up, too. “We need art supplies. Let’s go deeper into the valley and see what we find. I think I’d like to do something that takes a lot of hand-eye coordination.”
“Are you . . . okay?” A seriously dumb question.
“I’m fine now. Just needed to talk that out.” She forced happiness into her voice and rolled down her sleeves to cover the bruises. I wanted to ask her to stop. No matter how much we had to lie to people to get away, no matter how much we had to fake it—me faking who I was to make my dad happy, her faking how she felt about being treated like an actual leper, about being forced into a treatment no one would tell her about—down here, in the valley, honesty seemed like the only way to go.
Like it was important to be true down here. To each other and to ourselves. Even if we couldn’t be true anywhere else.
Especially because of that.
Chapter 18
Two hours later, I’d climbed more trees than I’d ever imagined and stripped more dead grapevines down than I had thought could exist.
“We’re making a spider web,” Annie informed me when I finally had the breath to ask why we’d gathered a ten-foot-wide, three-foot-high pile of grapevines.
“A spider web?” I echoed. I wanted to ask how that was art, but thought better of it.
“Well, not today,” she said. “You’ll see tomorrow.”
I looked up when a shadow fell. Dark gray clouds were stacking up on the rim of the valley. Rain, probably soon. It was time to go. Past time, maybe. “We’d better run, Annie, or we’re going to be soaked.”
If Mom saw my wet clothes, I would be in huge trouble. I heard a rumble of thunder from far off, like the sky was agreeing with me.
“Yeah, let’s get back,” Annie said. “I think I lost track of time.” She slipped out her camera and took a quick picture of the grapevine pile.
We ran back up the hill, Annie stopping a couple of times to hold her head. I guessed her headaches were back. At the top, she waved—“See you tomorrow!”—and darted off.
I saw the figure on the hillside again before I turned to run. It was closer—and it was definitely the Colonel’s wife. She was working around some trees. It almost looked like she was cutting grapevines down. Had she been spying on Annie and me? Maybe she was lonely. Maybe she wanted us to invite her to make grapevine spider webs.
“Sorry, lady, this valley isn’t big enough for all three of us,” I murmured into the wind.
A few seconds later, the Colonel’s wife looked up, and I heard her yell, “I reckon it is. Now go home before I get it to sic the bees on ya!” The breeze rang with her laughter.
Whoa. I took a step back. How could she have heard me? And did she mean she could talk to the valley?
“Sorry,” I mumbled, and the wind caught that, too. The Colonel’s wife made a motion with one arm, like she was brushing me off, and turned back to her cutting.
I turned, too, and ran home, hoping I’d get there before my parents did.
Even though Mom always said it was best to hope, she was wrong in this case. It would have been much, much better to stay in the valley.
Mom had come home early. She was waiting at the kitchen table, right inside the front door, when I walked in. I sort of understood her worrying about me. It was raining harder than I’d ever seen it—the drops had felt more like hail than rain as I’d crossed the yard—and I was soaked.
Mom had tear tracks on her face and a wad of tissues on the table in front of her. Had she been crying about me? I wanted to apologize, but she didn’t give me a chance. She just started in on the yelling.
“What has gotten into you, Peter Edward Stone? What could you have been thinking? Running off, in an unfamiliar place, without telling anyone where you were going? Worse, lying about where you were?” In her hand was the crumpled-up note I’d left for Laura: Sleeping, don’t wake me up. This time, I’d thought to put it on my door. Unfortunately, I hadn’t done much more planning beyond that, figuring that Laura wouldn’t have checked on me anyway.
“Did you even stop to consider what your sister would have done up here in this godforsaken wilderness if something had happened to you?”
Godforsaken wilderness? It was the first time I’d heard Mom talk about our new home in anything other than positive terms.
“If you had gotten hurt, you could have died. We’re forty miles of rough road away from the closest hospital, the phone lines were out for hours today for some reason, and our cell phones don’t even work out here, for crying out loud.” She shook her cell phone at me like this was my fault.
“I’m okay, Mom,” I tried. I should have stayed quiet. It set her off again.
“It doesn’t matter that you’re okay this time. What about next time? Laura was worried sick about you. When she finally got a call through to me, I had to come home from work and miss two very important meetings, and for what? So you could go wandering on the hillside? Spending all that time alone—you were alone, weren’t you?”
I had to tell her about Annie. Maybe she would understand. Maybe she would even help me figure out how to talk to Annie about her cancer. “No, I have a friend. . . . ” But Mom didn’t even let me finish.
“Don’t even think about lying to me! Laura told me what those boys said—that you haven’t been hanging out at all. You didn’t even go to their house.”
I couldn’t believe it. Why had Laura picked today to tattle on me again?
“Well?” Mom shouted, practically in my face. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
I wasn’t sure she was even asking me a question. I sort of sh
rugged just in case she was. I had no idea what the right answer might be.
“That’s it, no more,” she said. She pulled out a stack of pamphlets—brochures, it looked like—and waved them in my face. “You’re too old for daycare, or trust me, I would have you in with Carlie in a red-hot minute. So it’s camp for you.”
“Camp?” The brochures in her hand were for summer camps?
“Yes, camp. Time with other kids, arts and crafts, soccer and football, camp songs. All that stuff you say you hate. I say you haven’t given it a shot.”
“I don’t want to go.” I felt my jaw hardening, clenching so tight it felt like my teeth would break. I couldn’t imagine a worse summer than what she was planning for me. School was bad enough. This summer was the only time I’d ever gotten to be alone, be who I was, instead of trying to be like the rest of the world all the time.
“I’m sorry you don’t want to go, but it’s not negotiable. Your dad and I have been talking about this for a while. We don’t have enough money for sleep-away camp, but there are plenty of day camps nearby, and heaven knows your father has enough time to drive you back and forth.”
They had been talking . . . for a while? About sending me away? It sounded like something Dad would like; he’d made it pretty clear from the time I was four that I needed “fixing.” Needed to be more like him. But I thought Mom . . . no. Those pamphlets had taken a while to collect. I felt my jaw click even harder. This wasn’t just about today.
“You can pick which camp, but I’m done letting you waste your life. You’ll end up a loner, an outcast—”
My stomach churned, but I had to speak up. “Maybe I like being a loner,” I interrupted. “Maybe I’m supposed to be an outcast.”
I really had to learn to keep my mouth shut.
“Maybe you could put some effort into understanding why this is so important to us! We’re worried about you! And you don’t even seem to care. Running off? Running away? After what you wrote last year in your journal?”
“I told you, that was just a story,” I reminded her. “You said we didn’t have to talk about it.”
Mom’s eyes filled with tears. “You wrote a story about a kid who ran away and . . . and . . . ”
I stood up, and my chair fell over backward. “I told you, it was just a story. You shouldn’t have been reading my stuff anyway.” I was almost yelling. The sound made my head hurt, but at least it stopped Mom’s rant.
“Peter,” Mom said, her voice soft now, breaking. I couldn’t stand it; it was worse than her yelling. “You know how upset that made me—all of us. We thought it was because of those boys. That’s why we’re here, Peter. For you. But you’ve been getting more and more withdrawn since we moved.”
I hadn’t, I wanted to tell her. Not with Annie, not when I was in the valley. It was just at home. But I couldn’t tell her that. Camp. She was sending me to camp. If there had ever been a sign that Mom didn’t understand who I was, didn’t care, this was it.
“What’s wrong, Peter? Do you even know?” The rain on the roof picked up speed, and the pounding overhead matched the pounding of my heart. I had to get out of there. I could feel myself collapsing, like every word she said was pummeling me like rain, like hail, and soon I would be gone.
“What’s wrong?” she repeated, and the two words she didn’t say were as loud as the rest: What’s wrong with you?
I stood there, the papers in my hand feeling like a jail sentence, with Mom as my judge. She was waiting for an answer, and I knew she didn’t want the truth. She wouldn’t get it.
I knew exactly what was wrong. I said it, quiet but clear, before I went to my room to stay there, tearing the pamphlets into confetti-sized pieces for the rest of the night.
“I guess I was born into the wrong family.”
Chapter 19
The rain kept me up that night. I think it was the rain, anyway. I heard Mom and Dad fighting again, and I woke up to what sounded like crying—Mom’s. But maybe it was only rain.
The next morning, Laura was already hogging the bathroom. But she’d left a plate of cookies outside my door with a note: Sorry. I threw the cookies away. Sorry wasn’t going to fix this.
At breakfast, Dad asked me if I’d chosen a camp.
I didn’t even answer. I’d decided any words I used on my parents were just wasted. Just . . . mouth sounds. They obviously didn’t have any meaning once they left my lips, anyway. Might as well stop talking altogether.
Dad asked again. I shook my head.
“Well, let’s choose now. Where are the brochures?” I went to my room, gathered the pile of confetti, and returned to the kitchen. When I scattered it on the kitchen table, Dad didn’t even blink.
“Fine,” he said. “I get it. You’re mad. But you’re going anyway. Your mom and I will choose.” He smiled at his coffee. “Horseback-riding camp, maybe. I always wanted to ride a horse.”
I don’t, I wanted to say.
Carlie was the only one who seemed to notice I wasn’t speaking. She kept yelling, “Peep! Peep!” I actually whispered a few words to her when she started to get really distressed, whimpering, “Peep!” in a broken voice that tore at my heart. But I made sure no one else was near enough to see or hear me.
And I was being watched, that was for sure.
Laura, for one thing, couldn’t keep away. I think she felt guilty. “I’m really sorry, Pete,” she said, looking up from the computer when I walked past. “I didn’t know they’d get so mental. But it’s weird, you know? We moved out here to get you away from those jerks. And it wouldn’t be that hard to make new friends and get Mom and Dad off your back. There are those two boys who want to be your friends. You’ve just got to learn to reach out.”
I did break the silence then. “You want me to have friends who steal guns from their dad and aim them at me to scare me? Actually shoot them at me, in fact? You want me to die?”
Her jaw dropped, and she stopping tapping away at the keyboard. “Oh my gosh, are you serious? Pete, wait!” she yelled, but I was in my room with the door shut by the time she got to it. She could knock all day. I had no use for her. Carlie was the only one I cared about.
Well, and Annie. The rain had kept up, so I figured she wouldn’t be in the valley the next day. But the day after, Friday, I was still stuck inside, Dad watching me with his patented “I don’t understand Peter” expression on his face. Annie was there, I knew it, and I wasn’t.
The next day was Saturday, and Mom was home. No hope.
Annie was only at camp for one more week. It wasn’t fair. There was no way to get out, no way to help her make the last days before her treatment meaningful, and no one who cared enough to listen to me about why I needed to leave the house. Mom had figured out I was giving them all the silent treatment, and she told me the only words she wanted to hear were an apology for being disrespectful.
I wasn’t ever going to apologize. I started dreaming about running away—not like Annie and I had been talking about, but really running away—when the doorbell rang.
Mom answered it, and I was surprised when I recognized the visitor’s voice. It was the Colonel’s wife. She and Mom chatted for a while, introducing themselves, and then she said, “Is that young man Peter here? Your son? I have a job for him, if he wants to earn a little money, and if you can spare him. My hands aren’t as good as they used to be. Arthritis.”
My mom hesitated. “Well, he’s grounded.”
“Ha! Grounded from helping an old lady with some grapevines? I promise you, whatever punishment you have devised for him here, I can top it. One day with me, and he’ll honestly regret—what was it he did?”
“Running off without permission. And you’re right, work sounds perfect,” Mom said. “And he’ll do it for free. We are neighbors, after all.”
She sounded positively giddy. Probably delighted to get rid of me.
I was happy enough to go, even when the Colonel’s wife handed me work gloves, a pair of wicked-looking clippers, and a water bottle the size of a milk jug. “You’ll need this today, boy. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.” We both hopped into her go-kart. I ignored Mom and Dad, who were watching me with worried expressions. I think the go-kart had caught them off guard. Or maybe it was the helmets painted with flames.
“Never fear!” the Colonel’s wife yelled as she backed out of the gravel driveway fast enough to make rocks spatter the side of the house. “I’ll have him back by dinner. Maybe even with all his fingers!” She cackled as she drove off, ignoring my mom’s startled “Wait!” that I could hear even above the engine’s roar.
The Colonel’s wife—whose real name was Mrs. Empson, she told me—wasn’t lying about having work for me to do. She drove me up to the top of her hill, about a quarter mile from her house, handed me a stack of trash bags, and said, “I need you to cut every vine that isn’t a grapevine. All that Virginia creeper and those sticker vines. Watch out for their thorns, they’re sharp as knives—you cut them off at the base. I’d say dig out the roots, but that’s no use. They’re holding on to the limestone in the soil harder than a baby does her bottle.”
I stared down at the clippers in my gloved hand, then at the triangular peak of her house in the distance. “All the way?”
She laughed. “Yep, all the way. Just leave the bags as they fill—I’ll come by later to pick ’em up. Don’t forget to drink water. I’d say watch out for snakes, but I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant by that. Was she referring to my boots? Or something else? But she was gone on the go-kart before I could ask. I got busy cutting. Bagging up the cut pieces was the hardest part of the job. Mrs. Empson was right about the sticker vines. They had thorns that stuck into the bags, making it almost impossible to shove them in. I ended up with scratches on my arms from trying to wrestle in the longest ones.