by Cary Fagan
I could hear Mom knocking on another door and Heather telling her to go away. And then George stomping down the hallway singing, “We’re going on a ’venture, we’re going on a ’venture…”
Even after I got dressed and had breakfast, my parents wouldn’t say where we were going. Only in the car did Mom announce that we were going to hike Leaning Bear. Leaning Bear is actually a giant rock that leans from the edge of a cliff over a lake. The trail begins down below and zigzags its way to the top. Maybe my parents hadn’t told us because the hike was Jackson’s favorite. He had always run up ahead of the rest of us. No matter how hard I tried, I could never keep up.
“I’m no shrink,” Heather said, “but this is a weird choice for a family outing.”
“We understand that,” Dad said. “But there are lots of things we’ve been avoiding because of Jackson, and it’s about time we did more of the things that we used to enjoy. Maybe it’ll be like having Jackson with us in spirit.”
“If you say so,” she said doubtfully.
There’s a small parking lot near the start of the trail. We got out, put on our backpacks with water bottles and snacks in them, and started up through the trees. In the past, I’d always gotten tired pretty quickly. But now I was older and determined to forge ahead the way Jackson would have.
After twenty minutes, my mom passed me.
After another ten minutes, my dad passed me.
A while after that, Heather passed me.
Okay, so I was still no athlete. My legs ached. My lungs ached. All I wanted to do was lie down. But I didn’t complain. George did, though, and Dad carried him on his back. When he got too tired, Mom took a turn. Even Heather carried him for a bit. Too bad there was nobody to carry me.
About three-quarters of the way up, I pulled out my water bottle again. But when I put it to my lips and tipped it back, nothing came out. It was empty. I’d drunk it too fast and now I was going to think about nothing except how thirsty I was. I might even die of dehydration!
Did I mention that I am occasionally prone to hysterics?
At last we reached the top. There was a rope fence preventing climbers from going all the way to the edge. A hundred years ago people used to go right up to the edge and some of them fell off. And then I remembered the last time we had come up. Jackson had got here first as always and had ducked under the rope to creep along the stone. When my parents arrived, they started to scream at him to come back. Jackson ignored them, going right up to the very edge to stand with his arms extended. My parents held their breath. Heather and I looked at each other in terror. And then Jackson took a careful step backward, turned, and skipped back over the rope. All he could do was talk about how amazing the view was. My parents’ faces had gone white. They didn’t say a word to him—it was as if they’d lost their voices.
This time none of us went beyond the rope. We stood together looking at the view, which was good enough from here as far as I was concerned. We opened our backpacks and took out the sandwiches my parents had prepared. We chewed. We talked a little.
And then we went back down.
Down was much easier, of course, but still I felt exhausted by the time we were back in the car. At home, my parents went to take a nap. Heather locked the bathroom door for an hour-long bubble bath. George went into his room to play with his plastic zoo set and his toy soldiers. He liked to have battles between the soldiers and the animals.
In the kitchen, I dumped some chocolate powder into a glass, poured in the milk, and stirred. I had nothing better to do than try to give myself a good milk moustache. When I finished, I looked in the mirror.
Yup, pretty good.
What next? On any Saturday before Jackson ran away, I would have gone over to Zack Mirani’s house. We would have shot hoops in his driveway. We were both terrible, which made it fun. Or we’d have sat in his backyard eating popcorn and talking about whether aliens existed and other interesting things. Then we would have ridden our bikes over to my house and gone into my room to play the ukulele and bongo drums while singing words that we made up on the spot. And when we had enough of that, Zack would have told me stories about Camp Birch Bark, where he went for two weeks every August. Zack waited all year for those two weeks. He wanted me to ask my parents if I could go too.
But I wasn’t going to go to Zack’s house. I hoped that he didn’t have a good time at Camp Birch Bark this year. I hoped that he had a rotten time.
I went outside. It was late afternoon and the light was growing softer. I started to walk down the sidewalk, even though I didn’t have anywhere to go.
I passed a man in a hat reading the newspaper on a bench.
I passed a woman with two kids waiting at a bus stop.
This might, I thought, turn out to be the most boring Saturday afternoon of my entire life.
And then I saw it. The card.
I didn’t just see the card. I also saw the person who made the card. I saw g.o.!
At least, I saw a girl stop her skateboard, reach into her courier bag, and take out a card. It sure looked like a card. She wedged it between the trunk and a branch of a maple tree. Then she dropped her board and took off down the slope.
I guessed that she was older than me by a year or two. Short blue (yes, blue) hair with bangs. Chinese heritage maybe, I wasn’t sure. Round wire-framed glasses. Plaid shirt, army shorts, sneakers.
I did something weird. I ran after her.
Even as I ran, I snatched the card out of the tree. Then I kept going, down the slope and turning right at the intersection the way she had. I was already winded but I ran to the next block.
There she was, looking into her backpack.
“Hey!” I shouted.
She turned to look at me. Then she took off again. I ran a couple more steps but it was useless, so I gave up.
I stood there, trying to catch my breath. I patted the card in my pocket and started to walk home.
10
g.o.
She was a scrounger by nature, somebody who liked to poke around in junk stores, recycling bins, garage sales. But this time she couldn’t believe her luck.
A book. A medical clinic had left it in a box by the curb along with a bunch of junky old magazines. It was called A History of Anatomical Reference Drawings and in it were dozens and dozens of illustrations. Skeletons. Organs. The circulatory system. Most of them were engravings. She wasn’t exactly sure what engravings were, only that they were made up of really fine lines and they looked old.
She slipped the book into her backpack, pushed the blue bangs from her forehead, and pushed off on her skateboard. It was a good twenty blocks to home, but when she was on her board, she never cared how far she had to go. She wasn’t interested in skateboard tricks. For her, a board was pure transportation.
Her house was a bungalow in a row of identical little houses, but hers was easy to spot because of the yellow door. She had painted the door herself, hadn’t even asked her father for permission. But that was how they ran things since the accident, more like roommates than father and daughter. She flipped up her board, caught it, and went inside.
As always, the curtains were drawn. The cat lay on the back of the old sofa, staring at her with only his striped tail moving.
“What’s up, Tiger?”
She knew better than to pet him. Tiger was a rescued stray and wary of people. That makes two of us, she thought.
“Dad?”
No answer, which meant that he was working in the basement. She went into the kitchen, grabbed a chocolate chip cookie from the jar (the cheap kind, with hardly any chips), and opened the basement door. She turned her head to listen.
“…that’s right, ma’am, for only twenty-five dollars a month our alarm company will be on call to protect you and your loved ones…”
Yesterday it was insurance and the day before, magazine subscriptions. Her fathe
r jokingly called himself a “self-employed communications specialist,” but he was really a call-service operator. The difference was that the company let him work from home. He sat down there at a desk with a headset on, talking up strangers for eight or ten hours a day. She thought it would drive her crazy, but her dad was a lot happier now than during the year when he’d been unemployed.
She went back into the kitchen, running her hands along the oak cupboards. Her dad had built them himself, back when he was still a carpenter. And then on his last job a load of wood had come down on him, injuring his spine. Now he used a wheelchair. To get into the basement, he had to wheel himself to the backyard and go down the ramp built by some of his old house-building friends.
For a person in a wheelchair, she thought, whose wife had ditched him and left him the kid, he was a pretty cheerful guy.
She went down the hall, past the bathroom, her dad’s bedroom, to her own.
Then she pulled out the book from her backpack and sat down at the long table. It always felt good to be here. It felt like she had some control over her life. She opened the book to the picture she already knew she wanted to use.
A human brain.
With her good pair of scissors, she carefully cut it out. Some people thought that cutting up books was a sacrilege, but to her it was material for her own self-expression.
For this one she decided on a black background and pulled out a sheet of construction paper. She used a metal ruler and a knife to cut it the same size as the card, then stuck it down with a glue stick. The brain went on top of that.
Not quite right. It looked like the brain was floating in space. She wanted it to look safe, like an egg in a nest or a baby in a crib. Flowers. That’s what she needed.
She considered finding some old images but chose to make them herself. She used that nice wrapping paper she had saved for the grass and construction paper for the flowers. She made tulips, her dad’s favorite, and pasted them around the brain.
Better.
Now for the words. She sort of knew what she wanted to say—it had come to her as soon as she had seen the picture of the brain. That was how art worked for her; she would see something and an idea would spark in her head.
Against the short wall of her room was a beat-up metal desk with a giant battleship-gray IBM Selectric typewriter on it. It weighed about a hundred pounds, or felt like it. The typewriter had been used for years and years in a dentist’s office, one of the last places that her dad had renovated. They were getting rid of it and he asked if he could take it for her. Then he left it on her table with a big red bow on it. That was her dad, always thinking about her. And of course she, who liked old things that other people thought were useless, had instantly fallen for the clunky machine.
She rolled in a sheet of paper. Turned it on. A reassuring hum began. She started to type.
today i sneezed
When she finished, she pulled out the sheet and took it back to the worktable to cut out the words with the scissors. She laid them out on the card, taking a step back to see how they looked before shifting them a little. Then came the glue stick.
One last thing. She rubber-stamped her initials and the number of the card, cut them out, and stuck them down.
“Gretch?”
Her father was calling. Quickly she slipped the card into a folder and put the folder in her backpack. When she found him, her father had just wheeled around the house and back in through the front door. He had to use the back door to get in and out of the basement because the stairs inside the house were too steep for a ramp.
Even though he worked at home he wore an ironed shirt and a tie. His hair was a little long but neat and his cute-but-dopey moustache was trimmed.
He smiled at her. “Let’s have a special dinner tonight.”
“Are we celebrating something?”
“Well, let me see. You’re here on a Saturday. I’ll make chicken wings.”
“I’ve gone vegan, remember?”
“Oh, right. We’ll have raw carrots.”
“Very funny. I’ll make us a stir-fry. But I’ve got something to do first. Be back in an hour.”
“Okay, Gretch. But keep on the sidewalk. No skateboarding on the road.”
“Sorry!” she said, tapping his shoulder as she went past him and out the door. “Can’t hear you!”
The copy shop was only three blocks away, on the other side of the wide street that separated them from the main part of Whirton. It was in a small building between a variety store and a Laundromat. The guy behind the counter knew her by now but he still didn’t say hello.
“Can I use the color copier?”
“I’m supposed to operate that one for you.”
“I used it myself last time.”
“Fine. Just don’t break it.”
“Do my best.”
She went to the shelves of paper and counted out fifteen rectangles of thick cardstock. Fifteen was all she could afford. She put them in the machine’s paper tray and then took out the card and placed it face down on the glass. The machine spat out the copies and she took them over to a small table to cut them out with a ruler and knife.
“How many?” asked the guy, reluctantly looking away from his phone. She gave him a twenty-dollar bill and he gave her back change. Then she stacked up the fifteen cards and put them in the pocket of her hoodie.
Her first stop was the Laundromat next door. Inside there was a shelf where people left flyers for dog walking and yoga classes. She pulled a card out of her pocket and put it on the shelf.
Outside again, she skated a couple of blocks before leaving another card on top of a newspaper box.
She put one between the slats of a fence.
Another tucked partway behind a community meeting poster on a telephone pole.
One on a bike rack.
Would anybody find them? And if they did, would they bother to look at them? Or would they use them to pick their teeth, fold their chewing gum into, or just toss into the trash? Maybe they’d get knocked to the ground and stepped on over and over.
But maybe a few people, or even just one person would look at her card. Maybe that one person was having a crummy day, or was worried about something, and would look at the card and have a little moment of enjoyment. Maybe the person would look at the words and understand them or think they were nonsense, but they would think and feel something.
At least she hoped so.
She could see her own high school now. She didn’t like school, or anyone who went there, and didn’t really want some kid she knew to find one. So she stopped where she was and pulled out a card and reached up to wedge it into the branches of a tree.
Well, that was done.
She turned and saw a kid down the block. Staring at her. She didn’t like being stared at, even if she did have blue hair, and she jumped onto her skateboard and went back down the sloping street, turning at the corner. She stopped again to properly put on her backpack, which she had thrown onto one shoulder.
“Hey!”
It was that kid. Why was he calling to her? Was he following her? Her instinct was to get away so she pushed off on her board and didn’t look back.
11
The Metal Box
I walked back home, the card safe in my back pocket. Mom and Dad were still napping, Heather was turning into a prune in the tub, and George was in his room talking to himself as the soldiers and the animals did battle.
“Take that, giraffe, you long-necked freak!”
“And you’re a hairless human dork! I’m going to send in the zebras!”
I went into my room, turned on the desk lamp, and lay down the card.
I did just as the card told me to. I thought about my brain.
It creeped me out.
I had to shake myself to get rid of the feeling. Then I
looked at the card again. It wasn’t exactly like the others. No evil corporations or anything like that. It was just about being alive. It was saying, Try this, fellow human.
Pretty cool, actually.
And then I thought about my brain thinking it was cool, and then thinking that it was thinking it was cool, and I got creeped out all over again.
I was about to put the card away when I decided that an envelope wasn’t safe enough. I needed something solid. So I went down to the basement—a finished basement, as my parents always said with pride, as if it were equivalent to the basement of the Taj Mahal. I went past the Ping-Pong table and some plastic containers of winter clothes and old toys to a wall of shelves. The shelves were crammed with all kinds of junk. And somewhere in that junk was—
Found it.
A metal recipe box.
I opened the hinged top. There was nothing inside except a dead spider and a penny. Back in my room, I wiped it out with a T-shirt and put all three cards into it. Then I closed the top.
Nice.
I opened it again, took out the cards, and laid them on the bed. And noticed something.
“Oh no!”
I guess I said it out loud, because my sister answered from the hallway.
“What’s wrong, Hartley? Just realized how dumb you are?”
“That’s some razor wit you’ve got, sis.”
I waited for the sound of her door to close. Then I looked at the cards again. The new card had a number 4 on it. That meant I had 1, 2, and 4.
I was missing number 3.
I didn’t know why it bugged me so much that I was missing one, but it did. I needed to find that card.
12
Get Out of Jail Free
On Monday, Ms. Gorham gave us thirty minutes to work on our final projects.
Simon Asch opened a book about the history of baseball.
Lauren Engerer took out a file of dog pictures cut from magazines.