by Carrie Ryan
It growls at me and I growl back. I move on toward the big oak, the center of the universe, if the universe was this field.
The big oak is a maple tree, but what did we know? What did anybody know? Back then kids could overlook strange throat noises for the sake of playing house. I stop at the base of the enormous tree and look up. What remains of my only good summer is a trembling sheet of green-gray clapboard and dangling two-by-fours, working their way loose with the pressure from raindrops. I think about being eight in the tree fort with a strange girl whose name I don’t remember. We played house and I was her good growly dog, protecting our fort from the sixth graders who probably built it.
They were scared of me.
Stop! My mother would scream whenever I got loud in public. You’re scaring everyone! You’re driving me crazy!
That tree fort girl—I thought she growled inside too. I told her so.
“No, I don’t,” she said, growling.
“You do,” I said in my kindest growl, not quite a purr.
“I can’t hear it.” She folded her arms over her chest. “Nobody else can see me, you know.”
I was sorry about that for her, but not for me. “I can see you and hear you. That’s better than not.”
Then she went away. I guarded the fort for a while. A few days. But she never came back, and I quit going to the tree fort to wait for my master because it was just too hard, sitting there alone.
Bad dog, whispers the clapboard.
Ever since that summer, I’ve wanted so much for her to be bad like me. She is the one in my dream.
I wiggle the bottom step with my foot—a rotting two-by-four. It has three rusty nail heads, like eyes and a nose, silent without a mouth. But other steps with more nails hiss against my growl, denying the girl’s existence to my face.
I hang my head, knowing they are right.
A wave of longing ripples through my stomach, down to my private parts, and I stand frozen. Pain wrenches past my evil shield and seeps into my bloodstream, making everything hurt. All I can do is reach out and grip the tree, scraping the hell out of my arms, but at least that feels like something I can control. I close my eyes and press my body into the trunk, my cheek on its wrinkled bark, my chest and groin aching against it.
The old tree groans and ticks in the wind. I growl and groan and tick with it until my face is not my face—it is the tree, and the tree is the girl, and the girl is the antidote for the venom of the stinger on the bee that touched the flower, which grew from the dust of the bones of the angriest man.
But it’s all in my rotten head.
I leave the tree behind and slog through the other half of the knee-high grass to where the field ends, at the railroad tracks, a place where pennies die and no one comes back for them. They glare at me with contempt, abandoned.
I roar. It’s not my fault. I pick dead coins up and throw them into the ditch that runs parallel to the tracks, but I can still feel those copper eyes on me. I cannot cross overtop of them, so I must go around to the road. I walk on the track toward Sixteenth Street, kicking every sad, angry penny into the ditch as hard as I can, because of my destiny.
When I cross at the road, I ignore the jeers from the ditch and the pneumatic exhale from the door of the school bus, which stops at the tracks for a moment to despise me.
The growl leads me on a long walk out of this town and into the next, past businesses and houses, schools and trees. On a different day I would be lost. But because this is my final destination, I am not lost at all.
My shoulder blades ache.
Finally, when my growl grows louder, I wind my way down a shady road and I am close, almost where I need to be. I leave the busy street behind and enter the quiet place of stone and grass and funeral flowers.
The cemetery is lush and green from the nutrient-rich soil. Rotting flesh liquefies and seeps through cracked caskets under the ground. Souls tunnel away under rows of boxes and roads, reaching out, tangling up with all the others; an enormous spirit ant farm beneath my feet. All the while bones lie in the coffins where the flesh has left them. Some of them are angry bones, but none so angry as the bones of the angriest man. Now I must find him. Bad begets bad; anger, anger. It’s time.
I picture the underground cemetery world as I walk along under the cover of stretching maples. I listen deeply and my growl guides me over the paths.
There is a grove of small trees where I guess Jesus must be buried, in a grave under his own statue. Eleven disciples’ stones surround him, along with some bushes. My feet stop me, so I stand and stare into the statue’s eyes and think about my mother, how she always made me apologize to Jesus for being so bad. I growl, but the statue remains silent.
I stand so still that a bird flits into view and perches on stone Jesus’s head. I close my eyes but hear nothing—just the sound of my own growl. I look up again and push onward, making a church with my fingers and pressing out, cracking my bad, angry bones as I walk.
The growl becomes a roar.
I am nearly there.
The hair on my arms sizzles and my skull and spine ache. The road slopes steeply down into a hell-like hollow, where little kids on bikes fall and are swallowed up. I travel the road, roaring, to the very bottom of hell’s pit, to the moldy, cracked gravestone overcome with roots and weeds. A single flower chokes its way up from the crack in the stone, and the etched name of the angriest man is covered with swarming ants, unable to be read. But I know it is him. His bones have magnetized mine. I stumble to it and fall down on the grave, my skeleton searing inside me, my skin turning red. I lie on my back, six feet above the place where he was, where he is, his dust claiming mine. I scream to the sky, cursing my mother, cursing the bee, cursing the bones of the angriest man, but I am still bad. Bad to the bone. Words said can’t be unsaid, and now I have to pay. The noise in my throat is my badness welling up from deep inside my marrow. I never had a chance to be good.
As I lie here, heating up, ants find their way over my body but they are nothing to me. They are not bees.
I stare at the angriest man’s flower hanging above my face. An uninvited ghost emerges from its center, and I’m afraid. It stretches out, screams and roars, coming down to meet me.
It is the girl.
On her shoulder is a raw red sting, and from her throat comes a growl. Clutched in her hand, her own dead bee. She looks at me, and when we come together, my welt returns. She touches my cheek and kisses my melting lips, my first kiss. My last. My skin wrinkles like paper and ignites.
I am triumphant in my last breath.
The ghost girl, the one like me, disappears into my chest, absorbed inside of me, soaking up my liquefying flesh, my blood that boils out. The fire leaps and burns, licking a body I no longer feel. Then, slowly, the flames die.
When nothing more remains than wind sliding through evil bones, the ghost girl slips away, back into the flower, and my scorching skeleton becomes ash and explodes. The tiniest bits shoot high into the air in all directions, and then fall like evil snow in the trees, like angry pollen on the grass, like growly dust on the statue and the stones of eleven plus one. The powdery remains of the baddest boy’s bones take hold where they land and curse the world … if this cemetery were the world.
When night falls, the last of the graveyard’s creatures and bones turn bad, and all nature growls in unison. I melt away to find the girl who was sucked into the flower that sprang from the grave that held the dust of the bones of the angriest man. I go at last to the place where no bones, where no bees, can find me.
Out of the Blue
MEG CABOT
Interview of Dr. John R. Hall
RESTRICTED ACCESS: EYES ONLY
Well, I can’t say I wasn’t expecting you. I’ve been watching it on the news all morning.
I assumed someone from the base would be stopping by, so I got out their files. Patient-doctor privilege doesn’t exactly apply in a case like this, I take it? No, I guessed as much.
The last time I saw them—besides today on TV, of course—was the day after their sixth birthday.
Not coincidentally, that’s the day I quit practicing medicine.
“I’m sure it’s nothing.” That’s what their father, Colonel Conrad, said to me that day.
If I had a nickel for every time a parent has said I’m sure it’s nothing when I’ve walked into an exam room, I’d have retired to Palm Springs instead of here in Peachtree County.
Tell you the truth, with kids, it usually is nothing.
Of course, with the Conrads, it turned out not to be nothing, didn’t it?
“Let me take a look,” I said. “Right arm, is it?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Conrad said. She seemed about to cry. Her husband was upset, too, but not for the same reasons as his wife. “And it’s not nothing. It’s the exact same spot, on each of them. I thought at first maybe they’d been playing with Magic Markers, but then the spots wouldn’t come off, even with nail polish remover. And they’ve been talking all morning about this spaceship—”
“There wasn’t any damned spaceship,” Colonel Conrad said, exasperated. “These kids will say anything to stay out of trouble. Yesterday Kaleigh said the one hundred and one dalmatians stole her sweater, when she actually left it at school. Now it’s a spaceship, for crying out loud.”
Alarm bells should have gone off then. But they didn’t. Because I was sure I knew what I was dealing with. Ninety-nine out of a hundred other doctors would have been, too.
But no one’s ever dealt with anything like the Conrads, have they?
Anyway, I examined both kids closely, then had them roll down their sleeves.
“Well,” I said. “I can tell you exactly what those marks are, Colonel and Mrs. Conrad, and neither Magic Markers nor spaceships are responsible. They’re moles.”
Mrs. Conrad looked shocked. “But,” she cried, “they’re blue!”
“They are indeed,” I said. “They’re called a blue nevus.” Interesting thing about the blue nevus, I explained to her. It’s a fairly rare but harmless cutaneous condition, occurring in only about one to two percent of the general population.
Of course Mrs. Conrad wanted to be reassured they weren’t cancer, especially since she was quite sure she’d never noticed them before that morning.
I told her blue nevi can appear at any time during a child’s first ten to fifteen years. True fact. And unless they show signs of malignancy—and nevi generally don’t—I always advise leaving them alone. Removing them tends to leave a nasty scar.
For both the Conrad children to have a blue nevus, I said, and in the exact same spot—especially considering that they’re fraternal, not identical, twins—is extremely unusual, but not unheard of.
That’s when Kyle Conrad piped up. “That must be what he meant, Kaleigh,” he said to his sister. “About our being destined for greatness.”
Of course I asked, “What who meant, Kyle?”
Colonel Conrad answered before the little boy could say another word. “Kyle and Kaleigh claim that a spaceship landed in the field next door to our house last night, while they were camping in the backyard in the tent they got for their birthday.”
“They say a man came out of the ship,” Mrs. Conrad added, looking much more worried than her husband. “And that he’s the one who gave them the marks—”
“Which we now know isn’t true,” Colonel Conrad said. “Right, kids? And what happens when we don’t tell the truth?”
Kaleigh and Kyle exchanged glances. “We get a timeout,” they sang in unison.
“I just don’t understand,” Mrs. Conrad said, looking perplexed, “why they would make up something like that?”
“Because they didn’t follow instructions,” the colonel said. “And they knew they were going to get in trouble. I told them to wake me up if the weather got bad and they wanted to come inside. This morning when I woke up, I found the two of them snoring away in their beds, and the tent that I paid over two hundred dollars for blown halfway down the street, along with the sleeping bags, which were another sixty dollars each. Which is why,” he added, narrowing his eyes at the kids, “they’re not getting their camping equipment back until they’ve shown they’re mature enough to handle the responsibility.”
I’ll tell you the truth: I’ve always thought Colonel Conrad was a little hard on those kids. They’d only just turned six, after all.
But I understood his frustration. I’ve heard a lot of whoppers come out of kids’ mouths over the years.
And a spaceship landing in the backyard sounded exactly like something my sons would have come up with in order to get out of having to put away their camping equipment.
Still, I had to ask.
“Your father’s right, children,” I said to the twins. “It’s never good to lie. We all know that spaceships are imaginary. So, when you were camping in the backyard last night, did you really see a man?”
They looked at one another in that way that twins do sometimes—like they’re communicating telepathically—and seemed to come to some kind of silent agreement. Finally, Kaleigh spoke.
“Yes,” she said solemnly. “We saw a man. He said what Kyle said.”
Her mother and I exchanged glances. “That you were destined for greatness?”
“Yes,” Kaleigh said. “He said that’s why we’d been selected.”
“Selected for what?” I asked.
Kyle answered brightly, “To do great things, of course. That’s why he gave us these!” He held up his arm with a big grin, showing off the nevus on his bicep. “Pretty cool, right?”
Colonel Conrad rolled his eyes and muttered, “I can’t believe I just wasted the whole morning on this. You take them home, Alecia. I need to get back to the base. We’re testing those C-5s today.”
It was Mrs. Conrad who, after her husband was gone, demanded that I remove her children’s nevi, even though I explained to her that they weren’t a cosmetic problem and there was little chance they’d ever become malignant.
But she insisted. Mrs. Conrad is every bit as stubborn as the colonel, in her own way.
I’ve never been fully able to explain what happened after that. All I can say is that Kyle and Kaleigh Conrad were the last patients I ever saw. I closed up my practice the second they walked out the door, and have spent the past ten years sitting in this house, afraid that my mind was slipping away … until this morning when my wife called me downstairs to show me what’s been playing over and over again on every single news channel on TV.
Now I know I didn’t imagine what happened in my office that day. So I hope you’ll excuse me, but I don’t have time for talking. I’ve got ten years of living to make up for.
Interview of KC Conrad
RESTRICTED ACCESS: EYES ONLY
Look, I may only be sixteen years old, but I’m not stupid, okay? I have the highest grade point average in my class. So I’m just going to say it one more time: I invoke my right to counsel.
And even though my brother probably didn’t say it out loud, he invokes his right to counsel, too.
So … you guys are just going to ignore that?
Fine, whatever. You want to waste my time, I’ll waste yours. I’m not going to tell you anything except what you already know. My name is KC Conrad. And no, I’m not going to tell you what the initials stand for. Like you don’t already know.
Just like I’m sure you already know that I’m a former member of the Pritchard High School girls’ softball team, right? And current editor of the school paper? And vice president of the Volunteer Literacy Program? And secre
tary to the Science Olympiads?
I bet you even know I’m founder of the Pritchard High School Recycling Awareness Program? Impressive, right?
Well, not around here.
I used to think that was completely unfair, you know? People like us—I’m including you, because let’s face it, in those suits, you might as well be on the Science Olympiads with me—we work our butts off trying to leave the world a better place than we found it, and does anyone even notice?
No, because the only thing anyone cares about around here is sports. Seriously, all my brother Kyle has to do is walk into a room, and everyone’s like, “Oh my God! It’s Kyle Conrad, the first person in the history of Peachtree County to be named to the national high school all-American baseball team (as a junior, no less), star first baseman of the Pritchard Wolves!”
And the sad thing is, I totally could have had all that.
But I have a little something called ethics. Which is why I had to quit the girls’ softball team when that cow Amber Johnson got elected captain. That’s why I was home last night blogging—yeah, I know, pathetic, right? Blogging, on the eve of my sixteenth birthday? Not that anyone even reads my blog except my best friend Radha—while everyone else in our class was out celebrating my birthday at the lake. Okay, Kyle’s birthday. Whatever. Everyone except Radha because she works at the Regal Cinema over at the mall on Friday nights, and, of course, me, because I’ve been a social pariah ever since I quit the team.
I just kept thinking about how different things were when we were little—you know, in kindergarten? I’m sure you guys don’t think about stuff like that because you’re too busy watching Top Shot.