Because You'll Never Meet Me (6 page)

Focus.

I'm puffing on my bubble pipe, Watson.

2. Junkyard Joe

Mom put up “No Trespassing” signs everywhere around our property. You know. The kind that said, “VIOLATORS will be SHOT.” Which I don't think is legal, but made for a decent threat. The reason that signs like these were even necessary had a lot to do with open season.

Do people hunt in Germany, Moritz? When I try to imagine it, I think of men in pantaloons prancing around chasing stags, like on Mom's tapestries.

Anyhow, open season here is a big deal. There are a lot of white-tailed deer in the forests, and every November people travel here with beer bottles and rifles and tarps in tow. They say they're after ten-point bucks, but it's really more about getting drunk with your buddies and sitting in trees, Auburn-Stache says. He's not the hunting type. Too British or something.

The last thing Mom wanted was a hunter stumbling near our cabin. Most moms would be worried about drunks carrying guns. She was more worried about drunks carrying flashlights.

Well, sure enough, when I was seven or so, some man wearing camouflage walked onto our property with a rifle over his shoulder.

Mom was teaching me how to bike-ride. I still had training wheels on the back, but I was getting really into pedaling as fast as I could and then braking hard enough to leave deep gouges of tire tracks in the dirt driveway. Mom jogged along behind me, always watchful.

On an autumn day, when the leaves smelled wet and rich and they were browning in the driveway, I pedaled slowly to put her at ease.

“I hear a woodpecker, Mom.”

She kicked at the leaves. “Really? I don't hear a thing.”

“Listen!”

“Nah, I'd rather smell. Smell that air.” She closed her eyes.

And when she opened them, I was pedaling away as fast as possible. She shouted my name. I hadn't gotten all that far ahead when the hunter in orange appeared right in front of me, stepping out from between the pines. His eyes widened. I could see that something electric was glowing limelike in his pockets, so I slammed on the brakes and spun out, and the next thing I knew I was being carried and my head hurt, and I'd scraped my face along the dirt.

“This ain't your property,” said the man who held me. Not the hunter, but someone else. I was too spaced out to recognize him. “Go on, before I report you. Police in this town are always lookin' to fine idiot flatlanders, you know.”

I could see the treetops and a scraggly chin overhead. I don't know if the hunter—the flatlander—vamoosed or not.

“Waf gongan?” I said. It could have been right then, or it could have been minutes later. Sparks were in my eyes, rattling my teeth in my ears.

“Got yourself a nice concussion. And here comes your mom, lookin' likely to give you another one.”

I heard her call my name, and the next thing I knew, I was in her arms instead, out on the porch and woozy still. And leaning over her shoulder was all the rest of the scraggle-chin: Junkyard Joe.

Joe, a bearded mechanic who perpetually wore a baseball cap, was our only “neighbor,” although his trailer and junkyard are a mile away. He didn't mind Mom's signs. Last thing he wanted was more hunters on his turf. As far as he was concerned, all that deer meat was his. He used to stop by to drop off Tupperware containers full of chewy venison stew.

“Rise and shine, sonny jim,” he said, showing off his missing teeth.

I blinked.

“Can you hear me?” Mom's voice was so loud, this close to me.

I nodded, but it felt like half my face had been torn to shreds.

“Just look at you. Now people'll think we're abusing you.” She pulled me closer. “If you ever run away like that again, I don't know what I'll do. So don't. Never again.”

This might have been when Mom started putting padlocks on the door, Mo.

Eventually Mom tucked me into bed, but it was early afternoon and I wasn't sleepy. Mom and Joe were on the back porch. My window was open. It was a warm day and the wind was blowing leaves against the screen and Mom was right—they smelled pretty great.

“Thanks for your help, Joe.”

“Just lookin' out for my neighbors. Keep an eye on your boy.”

“I'm trying. If I don't, he'll vanish. Gone before I know him.”

“Aw, it won' happen like that. He gettin' any better?”

Mom must have shaken her head. I shied away from the window.

“Maybe I'll have him meet my niece sometime. She's around his age. Name's Elizabeth.”

“Yes,” said Mom, after a second. “Maybe.”

Okay, so next I was going to tell you a story about the one time I had a babysitter and it was a big disaster, but I've changed my mind. Because the Elizabeth who Joe mentioned was the Liz I'm always going on about, so jumping right ahead to the day I met her is still more or less being linear. And I have to clear her name! I have to tell you what she means to me. I have to tell you why I wait at the end of the driveway every Wednesday.

3. The Girl

Playing huntsman in the woods is a lot less fun when your mother's sneaking along behind you, lurking beneath trees with all the grace of a drunken amputee. But if I was in my bedroom, Mom checked on me almost every seven minutes. Sometimes she brought warm macaroni from the woodstove or cold milk from the garage.

I told you she has hobbies. She's got a brain like mine, a brain that wants to be busy all the time. She knits, sews, paints, crafts model train layouts, collects flowers and presses them, makes mobiles and pottery, and binds books. But her favorite hobby is watching me, I think.

She watched me from my bed while I studied or folded or drew at my desk. Occasionally she spoke. More often, she only peered at me with fingers on her lips, that expression (you know which one) on her face.

“Can you go do something else?”

“
Can
is a fun word,” she answered. “But if I
can
put up with you, you can put up with me.”

She told me once, when I asked about Dad, that she'd promised not to trap me. Whether my dad wanted what was best or worst for me, I don't know. He died and left us enough money to live on, but with one condition: if I ever decided to go, Mom must let me. He put it in his will. Mom can't just keep me here forever.

She
promised
him.

But the way Mom looked at me, I didn't think she could keep that promise.

Maybe that's why I was always trying to leave.

I was almost eleven when Mom finally let me take the training wheels off my bicycle.

She and I played mechanic. Mom used to be a lot more playful. She lay down on her back on the grass with the bike frame over her nose while I watched, suck-chewing a banana.

“Screwdriver!” she cried.

“Don't you need a wrench first?” I passed her my banana peel and she didn't flinch. Just dropped it and held her hand out again.

“Scalpel!”

“But you're not a doctor.” I held out the socket wrench. “Doctors have goatees. 'Staches of auburn.”

Her fingertips were cold when she took it, because even in those days her circulation wasn't great. The rusty bolts ground when she twisted them.

“Ollie, does Dr. Auburn-Stache talk to you about the past?”

“I wish. He's too scared of you to answer my ‘lab!' attacks.”

“
Tch
. He'd better be.” It was a murmur, but I could hear it under the clicking of the tool in her hand.

“Isn't he your friend, Mom?”

“Not exactly, Ollie.”

“Then … what are friends like? Do you think I'll ever have any?”

I was smiling, but Mom dropped the wrench. She frowned at me through the wheel axle. “I wish that … well, for now you have me, Ollie. Better than nothing?”

“S'pose.” I grinned wide to scrunch up my eyes because for some reason they were damp and I didn't want her to see that. “S'pose you'll do. Tell me about Dad?”

Needling immunity! Mom inched out from under the bike frame and stood up to look at it. “There. But you have to be careful. If you kick up the kickstand now, the bike will just fall over.”

“That's okay. Mom?”

She was wiping her eyes, just staring at that bike. I felt like if I climbed on it she'd push me right off it again, or she was fighting a powerful urge to reattach the training wheels or cement the whole frame to the ground.

I let myself fall to lean against her—she put a foot out to her left to catch herself.

“I'll be your kickstand.”

She snorted and rested her elbow (
articulatio cubiti
) in my hair. The bone was sharp. “Nah. You're my armrest. You aren't going anywhere.”

Mom means well. But do you see why I couldn't buy her promises, Moritz?

I'm a lousy kickstand.

A few days later, I stole the keys from their most recent hiding place on the second oak bookshelf (I
always
find them), burst out onto the lawn, and pulled the bike from the tangled hoses in the shed. I pedaled down the driveway that led out of the woods. Tree roots jutted into the path. They looked a lot like outstretched hands. Every time I ran one over, I thought I was running over someone's fingers.

It wasn't just about escaping Mom. I was chasing after humidifiers, semitrucks, and cash registers. Stereos and movie theaters and tablets and tennis shoes with lights in them. I wanted to see the things everyone else saw, even if it was just from a distance. I wanted the world.

That power line halfway down the driveway all but blew me off my bike. Orange electrical tendrils dangled from the overhanging cable, probably draping from the wire like your Goth bangs drape across your forehead, Mo. The moment I neared them, my stomach clenched up. Definitely we had opposing charges, that power line and me.

A spasm went through my right foot; it slipped from the pedal. It was like the tendrils had grabbed me, had wrapped hot wires around my cranium and squeezed. The roots on the path had done nothing, but that silver cable in the sky threw me sidelong into the ferns.

But just as there had been something hypnotic about the laptop, there was something about those billowing, tangerine tendrils that made me determined to cross them, even if their licks left me twitching.

“This isn't over,” I told the power line. And so began our legendary rivalry.

When I returned to the break in the pines, I rode one-handed with an old fishbowl lodged under my other arm. (Dorian Gray had shown the beta fish it once held a proper burial inside his stomach.) I dismounted, let the bike fall, and shoved the bowl over my head. It caught on my ears. I fought it down. Soon my breath was fogging up my vision. Trying not to tremble beneath my makeshift helmet, I approached the tangerine agitators that swung from the power line.

I'd read pamphlets about hazmat and NBC suits, about scientifically insulated clothes (although Mom always told me they just weren't worth the risk—whatever). I'd also read that glass doesn't conduct electricity.

Besides—glass seemed to work for spacemen, right?

Liz must have been laughing at me. She lived in town, but her father loved blackberry pie and there are lots of berry patches near our driveway. Picking berries wasn't really what other kids did on the weekends, but Liz wasn't other kids, Mo. I didn't see her standing in the ferns, watching me; I assumed that no one was around because no one ever was.

Liz crept up beside me while I was craning my neck to stare at my ropy nemesis. She could have taught Mom something about being quiet, or else the glass muffled sound pretty well, because I didn't even notice her until she pressed her face close to the fishbowl and hollered:

“GOING DEEP-SEA DIVING?”

The sound echoed in my ears. I fell backward into the leaves.

“What the heck are you wearing?”

I wiped pine needles from my palms and raised my eyes to her. Through the distorted glass, she could have been anyone, anything. I pulled the bowl off my head.

She was the girl I'd seen with the laptop. Her dark hair was tied back in a ponytail. Her tanned face was freckled, completely at odds with my pasty complexion. She was wearing short overalls with pockets full of blackberries that were staining the jean fabric purple. One dirty kneecap had a wet leaf stuck to it.

“Oh no.” Her expression softened. “You aren't developmentally disabled, are you? Do you maybe suffer from a mental impairment?”

“No …”

“Oh. Well, my parents are both social workers; my mom works crisis calls, which means she stops people from killing themselves.” Liz smiled. I'm sure she thought it was reassuring, but it was such a wide smile. “If you have a mental illness, I'm totally cool with it. I could probably even help you with it.”

“I'm not mental!” My ears were burning.

“And you are—?”

“I'm sick. Um, allergic to electricity.”

Liz raised her eyebrows. “So you are crazy.”