Because You'll Never Meet Me (17 page)

I will imagine that you asked about me in your last letter. Wrote a passage such as this:

I hope you enjoy your totally wacky trip to the Diskothek with Fieke! I think you made her swoon with your amazing rapping skillz. It sounds like she might maybe somehow be the right kind of girl to whip your goofy, pompous head into the proper shape! You realize this trip is probably a date, don'tcha?!

How kind of you to ask.

I don't know how to dress for a
Diskothek
in general, let alone how to dress when meeting a boy under strange circumstances at a
Diskothek
. Under the watchful eye of his imposing sister. And her equally imposing boots.

“Who gives a crap how you dress,” Fieke said. “You're still pretending to be blind, right? Wear a fluffing tutu. It's not like you usually dress well anyhow.”

“Beg
pardon
.”

“Well, you're color-blind. It shows. Puce pants and a mustard-yellow shirt? Please, Moritz. Have you ever considered that people don't avoid you just because of your goggles?”

It was the weekend. We were at the
Kneipe
again. I am half convinced Fieke lives there. The only time she doesn't look irritated is when she is listening to the local performers reading their poetry. Singing their songs. Performing their irksome scatting. That's the only time she doesn't jingle and spit. She is quiet then, apart from the slight wheeze in her chest.

She accompanies me home some evenings, however, so she must not live there. We both live in Ostzig. The watchful eye she's been keeping on me is peculiar. She must not entirely hate my company. I would say we were friends. She would snort derisively and stomp away from me if I said anything of the sort.

“Well, won't you help me pick something out? Something that isn't a tutu?”

“
Fff
. No. I didn't even dress my Barbies as a kid.”

“Your Barbies were nude?”

“I tattooed them with permanent markers. They weren't nude. They were
art
.”

That was unhelpful. I resigned myself to asking Frau Pruwitt for her advice. Pruwitt seemed intent on actually giving me work to do in the library, now that I could read all the book titles.

“What can you tell me about the customs of
Diskothek
attire?” I hazarded.

“I can tell you that it's irrelevant to alphabetizing self-help guides, Moritz.”

“Ah.”

She sniffed down at me from up on the footstool. “Did someone ask you to go?”

“Not precisely. But …”

“Well, don't let your newfound love life interfere with your studies.”

She climbed down. Shoved the step over one meter.

“Why should my studies matter here? It's Bernholdt-Regen.”

“They matter if you ever want to get out of here.”

I had no intention of asking Frau Melmann.

I recalled your tale of dressing for Liz. There are no fedoras in my house. Father owns only two ties; usually he wears his workman's clothes, suitable for welding. Although I have heard that some
Diskotheken
favor industrial music, I doubt I could pull off a full-body jumpsuit. Even if it was color-coordinated.

I decided to match Fieke. Yesterday I purchased an outfit
from the secondhand shop. The salesclerk assured me it was entirely black. Black pants. Black shirt. Black boots for the rain.

I hope that will suffice.

Gott in Himmel
, I am uneasy. And not only because of the
Diskothek
.

Lenz Monk returned to school this week. In some part of my heart, perhaps in the weak left ventricle, I had prayed he would not be returning to Bernholdt-Regen at all. But this morning in the courtyard I sensed him there, clearly visible in the resounding waves of the rainfall. He cracked his knuckles. I could hear it from meters away.

He quieted when I passed. His eyes followed me all the way into the school. The stare of someone who would not hesitate to shove me off a bridge. Would not hesitate to pummel a boy as small as Owen into nothingness. Would the threat of expulsion spare me his attentions?

Fieke said his father held some sort of sway. Lenz's father and Headmaster Haydn were old friends, or so she'd heard. That was why Lenz was not locked away in a juvenile detention center.

I broke into the iciest of sweats once inside. My pacemaker labored. My chest twinged. I nearly shrieked when Fieke leapt down from the banister in front of me.

“You look uglier than usual.”

“Lenz has returned.”

“Nothing's going to happen, pussycat.”

“Because of the school assembly.”

She sighed. Tobacco breath wafted into my nostrils.

“Because I won't let him fluffing touch anyone here. He won't hurt anyone again.”

“Did he hurt you as well, Fieke?”

It took half a glare to silence me.

Last Friday, while I was fulfilling my duties in the
Bibliothek
, Frau Pruwitt handed me a many-paged, stapled document.

“Must I read this?” I clicked in apprehension.

“You don't have to. But you'd be a fool not to.”

I listened well. “‘Application … Application for
Gymnasium
Transfer.' Wait.”

She nodded.

“But it
can't
be allowed.”

“And why not? You accepted no accommodations for your visual impairment during the placement assessment, correct?”

“That's not why I failed. I didn't even take the test.”

“And why not, Moritz?”

I took a deep breath. Only to bite my tongue. “The timing was terrible. There were other, ah, distractions. And …”

Nice schools are for nicer people, Oliver
.

“But you're willing to transfer now that your head's on straight, yes?” Of course her eyebrow slipped upward.

I stared at the books lining the shelves on either side of us. Books I once thought I could never read. Until I spent time in the
Bibliothek
, books were something I had never considered myself worthy of enjoying. Being who and what I am. Coming from the place I came from.

There are many things I never allowed myself, Ollie.

But you've told me to be brave.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I am willing.”

“Good. Because I told them that you didn't apply because you were disgruntled by their lack of accommodations.”

“But—”

She raised a hand. I winced. She rested it on my shoulder. “You belong in a slightly classier hellhole than this. Fill out the forms. Show up for the test.”

“I'll need references.”

“You've got them. Fear not. Herr Haydn still owes me for the dinner party fiasco of twenty-eleven. And I happen to know something nefarious about Frau Melmann and her online gambling.”

I had to clear my throat. “Thank you.”

“I don't want your thanks. I want you to read
War and Peace
. Every last word.”

“Right.”

For a brief instant, that application was the best thing I'd ever read, Oliver. Even better than
The Catcher in the Rye
. Even better than
Fahrenheit 451
.

I cannot speak for fireworks. Rain increases my vision more than you can imagine, in concentric rings of sound. But snow is silent. Difficult for me to see at all. Yet I can always feel it on my nose and cheeks. It is cold but soft. To me it smells like salt. Understand that even when I lecture you, even when I am cold, I am trying to be soft as well.

I should write more. But it is Friday at last. Fieke is
knocking her fists against the door of my apartment. Scaring the living organs out of Father. I have some sense of what you felt when Liz came to your door. Fieke is more likely to be caked in cigarette smoke than muck. But she is another person who makes me human.

You were first, Ollie.

I wish I could phone you. I'm not teasing you for what you cannot have. I'm trying to express my deepening concern.

Anxiously yours,

Moritz

I don't even know what you want from me anymore.

First we agree to be honest with each other and ourselves, or whatever, and then you tell me not to tell you things that will be upsetting! Well, guess what? Sometimes things are really damn upsetting. Make up your mind. You told me not to pretend to be happy.

It's not like I've stopped wondering about you, you know. You wanted me to
stop
asking about you. I can't believe you never told me about your parents. All I know about my dad is that he was a nice guy and a scientist, and my mom is either smiling or crying whenever she thinks about him, but I still talk about him sometimes. But I didn't even realize that you were adopted! So can you blame me for filling in the blanks myself?

Would being my brother really be so terrible?

But that's not why I'm angry. Why'd you spit all over the best memory I have? You're so determined to think the worst of Liz! Didn't I tell you that she didn't do anything wrong?

Maybe I should wait to write this. Maybe I should wait until Auburn-Stache drags Mom out of the garage for the first time in a week. But now I've got a pen and now I've got time (I've always got time, right? I don't go on adventures to
Diskotheks
), so I'm writing anyhow.

Because you're wrong. I need to talk to you about this, even if it hurts.

I don't think I can handle it on my own anymore. Sometimes I stare at the window and I punch the wall and I pinch the skin at my wrists, and it doesn't feel like anything.

Even if you are an abyss that can't make its mind up, even if you think I don't give a shit about you anymore (hit yourself, damn it!), I'm going to tell you, finally, why Liz won't come to visit me.

It started with a camping trip.

It happened around a year after that thirteenth birthday party, a few months before I started talking to you, but who's counting. Junkyard Joe had a deer blind—sort of like a tree house for game hunters—a few miles into the forest, near Marl Lake. The weekend of my fourteenth birthday was a good time to set up his gear for the upcoming hunting season, which begins in November. Besides, he just about spit out his beer when I told him I had never actually seen the lake in our woods, the lake that borders the forest and constitutes the state park.

“You ain't seen Marl?”

“Well, it's just a lot of water, right? I've seen water before….”

“Jegus, boy.”

When Liz asked me to come along, we were in my bedroom passing the book light back and forth.

“I don't know if Mom would like it. A few days isn't the same as a few hours.”

I tossed the light back to her before my hands went numb. Liz caught it; she had cut her hair short the previous month after she started high school, and it bobbed when she swung her arms out. “Just tell her you're staying at the junkyard again. Camping in the Ghettomobile, like old times.”

“Why don't we do that anymore?” I was only half joking.

“We might be too old for the Ghettomobile.”

“Blasphemy!” I snickered, and caught the light again, but it wasn't my hands that were aching this time.

Things were getting weird between us. Liz still came over all the time, but we didn't seem to laugh as much. Sometimes we'd both go quiet, and it got really hard to look her in the eyes without coughing on those imaginary frog bits again.

“Why don't you ask Tommy and Mikayla to come, too?”

She looked at her feet. “I'm sure they're busy with other things.”

I nearly dropped the light. “So you only asked me?”

She nodded. Didn't say anything snarky. Just nodded and held out her hands to catch the light again.

I tossed it back, and I felt like it weighed more all of a sudden.

“Well, yeah, I'll come,” I said. “Sounds like shenanigans.”

She smirked; some of the aching went away. Maybe I was imagining it to begin with. Maybe Liz asked me not as a last resort but as something else.

Maybe it was a good thing that things were changing.

“Yeah.”

We left early on a Thursday morning. We'd packed up some basic camping gear—two tents and hiking backpacks full of venison jerky and s'more-making materials—as well as a cooler full of hot dogs to eat that evening. Junkyard Joe's backpack was this giant green lump of, well, junk. Cooking utensils like tongs and pokers dangled from his back; rope was all but wrapped around his neck.

“Shame we can't bring a fridge with us,” he said as we laced up our boots. “Keep the drinks cold.”

“My bad,” I mumbled.

Liz rolled her eyes. “Um, I don't know about you guys, but I wouldn't want to strap a fridge to my back anyhow.”

Joe grinned, revealing more gaps than teeth. “You ain't wrong, Beth. You sure ain't wrong.”

It took us ages to get our act together enough to set out. After a few hours of scrabbling around looking for stray socks and pie pans, we were finally trudging out into a warm October afternoon. The leaves underfoot were hardly damp at all and crunched enough to be satisfying. The air had that awesome scent of decay. If only all dead things smelled like musty autumn.