Because You'll Never Meet Me (9 page)

“You think it's wicked.”

“Yep.” Liz frowned. “So you're the Amish cabin kid. I thought you'd be grosser. Have crooked teeth and a hunchback. You know, like your mom's married to your uncle or something. Not that I'm judging you, if that's the case. You can't control who your parents were.”

She was giving me whiplash. “Wha …?”

“Hey!” She stood close, too close. “You're injured, right? So how about we go back to your place to clean you up.” Her eyes sparkled. “No one will believe me when I say I went to your house! Mikayla will tell me I'm bullshitting her again.”

Although Auburn-Stache had the strange habit of hissing “Pissing Nora!” whenever he dropped something, Mom never cussed. I made a conscious effort to close my mouth.

(Oh, man. Mom had to be wondering where I was. I'd run out on her while she was drawing water for a bath. She must be raiding the nearby woods by now, or in the long grass of the backyard, standing on tiptoe and shielding her eyes from the sun and calling my name.)

“Well?”

I blinked. “Maybe … maybe not. No. Don't.”

She snorted. “Did I get it right?
Is
your uncle your daddy?”

“That's not it.” I stared at my feet. Things like this weren't allowed to happen to me. I couldn't just have conversations with normal kids in the woods.

Liz was crouched over my fishbowl, sniffing it. Poking it, for whatever reason. She may have licked the glass.

Well,
abnormal
kids in the woods, even.

“You're the first kid I've ever talked to,” I said.

“No way.” She rubbed her chin, smearing juice along it. “Wanna come back to my uncle's place? He's got gauze. Or toilet paper, at least. And he definitely isn't my daddy, so don't worry about that.”

I looked back at the driveway, at my bike lying on its side. I could probably make it to the bike before she could grab me. Then again, she looked pretty spry and she'd already caught me off guard once.
She seemed just as likely to tackle me to the ground as the power line was. I looked back at her. Behind her the tassels on the silver cable wriggled in my direction, teasing me.

You haven't won this one yet
.

Finally I nodded.

Liz hefted my bike upright and began to push it into the woods for me. “Come on,” she called over her shoulder. “We can follow the deer trails.”

I followed her, Mo.

Dream-walking.

It was a short hike through the forest to Junkyard Joe's, and the afternoon sky was visible above the pines. Even so, the path was mottled with shadows, and it wasn't a path I was used to taking, so I should have been watching my beaten Timberlands and trying hard not to trip in front of her again or drop the fishbowl. But I kept watching the way she moved.

People all have different ways of moving around. This is something you definitely notice when you've only ever seen a few people. Auburn-Stache is twitchy, Mom is careful and deliberate, and Liz … well, she moved like she had springs on the bottom of her feet. I kept waiting for her to jump into the sky and just keep going, like an astronaut in zero gravity.

Liz clambered noisily over logs I chose to walk around. She was dragging the bike along the leafy ground as if she didn't even remember she was holding it, stopping every now and then to pick berries from bushes or acorns from the ground and shove them down into her apparently ocean-deep pockets. Other times she would stop and point out random plants or rocks or marks in the
forest, with exclamations like “No way! A pudding stone!” and “There's probably salamanders under that log.” She hefted the log up and, sure enough, there amid little writhing centipedes sat a yellow-spotted salamander, trying to bury itself and hide from her.

I could relate a bit. I was nearly scurrying away up a tree anyhow, because centipedes aren't my favorite things. (If you've ever had one bite you, you'll understand.)

Liz leaned forward and plucked the salamander from the ground as easily as she'd picked all those berries, as easily as she'd crept up on me. I thought she was going to shove it in her pocket with all the rest and I winced. No creature deserves death by overalls.

But Liz just lifted it up to her face and stared it in the eyes. It wriggled at first, whippet tail smacking against her wrist. It must have grown bored, or else it couldn't handle that stare of hers any better than I could, because it stopped and looked back at her instead.

I wanted to tell her that holding a salamander is pretty much the worst thing you can do for one, since they breathe through pores in their skin and the oils on human hands are damaging enough to them without the additional grime from the juice of unwashed blackberries. But all I did was watch her like that salamander did.

She put it back down exactly where she'd found it and set the log down on top of it, gentle as anything. She didn't say a word about it; we just started walking again.

Are you starting to see it, Mo? A little, at least?

When I could see the outlines of Joe's trailer and garage, the ghostly silhouettes of busted cars, Liz stopped suddenly in front of me. I nearly ran into her back. She grabbed me by the sleeve and pointed
to a strange dent in the forest floor beneath the boughs of a jack pine.

“Wow!” She was whispering. “Have you seen these before? It's a bed for a white-tailed doe and her babies, probably. Let's not go in. We'll scare them away if they're around here somewhere and they smell us. But look—you can see where they curl up and sleep, because the pine needles are all crushed. And you can see hoof-prints here, so you know that's what it is.”

“And you can smell the urine.”

Liz didn't reply. She let me go and started going forward again. I wished I'd kept my mouth shut.

“Welcome to Junkyard Joe's!” Liz said, and held her arms out to the car graveyard.

It had gotten some new additions since I'd last been there—between the silver trailer's wooden porch and the garage were a decrepit pontoon boat with only one pontoon, someone's parked motor home in storage, a battered dirt bike without handlebars.

I tried to pretend I'd never seen the place before. She kicked at the grass as we stepped between lanes of pickups rusted straight through, disembodied truck beds, the remains of station wagons picked clean.

“Uncle Joe won't be home from the shop yet.”

I stopped in my tracks. “You're allowed to be out here by yourself?”

“I'm
twelve
.”

We stood in front of Joe's trailer.

“I should go …”

“Look, Uncle Joe won't care that you're here. But lemme warn
you, it's really messy inside. And Uncle Joe's got lots of stuffed animals in his trailer.”

“Um … teddy bears?”

“No, dead ones.”

“Dead teddy bears?”

At least her exasperated expression was familiar. I got that from Mom every time I asked about the laboratory. But I didn't want to think about that, because thinking about Mom reminded me that I shouldn't have left her alone to worry.

“No, I mean like he shoots things with his rifle and then goes down to Bob's on East Higgins Road, and Bob fills the dead things with polyester and coats them in formaldehyde or whatever, and gives them marbles for eyes, and then Uncle Joe hangs the dead things on his walls.”

“You mean taxidermy. You should have said.”

Her cheeks twitched, just shy of dimpling. “No, I shouldn't have, you dork. Now, come on. I promise there aren't dead teddy bears waiting for us. Or dead real bears, actually. It seems like Uncle Joe just shoots a lot of rabbits and squirrels and deer.”

“Death unto all things cuddly!” I was still mumbling, but she heard me.

I could hear the wind whistling through all the automobile skeletons around us, could feel it drying the sweat on my forehead and blood on my chin while she stared at me. Then she laughed. You might have thought she'd bark, but instead, her laughter was much softer than she was—like a shock of faintly cold air when you open a chimney flue after wintertime.

“Come on.”

She leaned my bike against the porch railing and trudged up the
steps. This was the same porch I'd stared at previously, when she was a little girl with a laptop and I didn't know her yet.

But I didn't even reach the first step before I felt my stomach turning over. I could see faint colors bleeding out through the crevices between the porch floorboards. Joe probably had a generator under there. Or it could have been a phone line. That the wisps of color were greenish made me think the latter. It didn't matter what it was, really.

“I'll wait out here.”

“What, you're worried about your allergies?”

I nodded.

“Well, lemme go in first. I'll unplug the TV and the radio and the microwave, even.”

I shook my head. “That won't be enough.”

“Fine, I'll unplug the fridge, too. But the pop won't taste good if it's warm.”

“There are power sockets. Wires in the walls.” I shuffled my feet. “I better just go home.”

Liz grabbed my arm as I turned away, smearing warm blackberry juice along my forearm.

“You're serious? It's that bad for you?”

“Why would I lie about it?”

“Man, that sucks,” she said. “Look, hold these.” She emptied pockets full of berries into my fishbowl. “I'll get the goods. Toilet paper works just as well outside as it does inside.”

She ran inside, easy as anything, and those little bleeds of color didn't even sway in her passing. Or, if they did, they just gently caressed her, friendly to her like they never were to me. A few of them seemed to be itching to prick me, stretching toward me and
away again. She kicked off her sandals on the welcome mat. The screen door slammed shut behind her.

Birds chirped in the branches overhead. The berries leaked purple into the bowl in my hands, hot in the sun. I took a deep breath. What if she was just going to leave me here?

Oh god. What if she wants to just leave me here looking stupid with a fishbowl of berries?

What else could she want from me?

I was thinking about making a break for it again, but she was already back, holding a can of red pop in each hand. I wondered where the promised toilet paper was for maybe a millisecond before I resigned myself to seeing her whip it out of one of her mystical pockets in a minute or so.

I remembered the last time I'd stood out there staring at the porch. The time when I'd seen her staring so intently at a computer screen.

This time, she was staring at me.

Liz brushed away some pine needles so we could sit on the roof of an old green minivan that she referred to as the “Ghettomobile.” I've never asked about its namesake. Again, let's leave some mysteries in my life.

“It looked like you bled a lot, but at least you aren't a swooner. Some of my mom's clients are swooners. She isn't supposed to say so, because she isn't supposed to talk about her clients at all. But some of those schizophrenics and stuff have narcolepsy brought on by cato—catoplexiglas or something.”

“So your mom tells you secrets?”

Liz shrugged. “If I bug her enough.”

Liz was a needler, too. Maybe she could give me some tips.

It was late afternoon now, almost evening, and mosquitoes were nipping at our legs and alighting on my bloodied shirt. I was holding a big tangle of t.p. under my nose, but the blood had long since dried; my nose had stopped spewing even before we came across that pudding stone on the trail. I felt a little light-headed, and I wasn't sure it was from only blood loss.

We'd been sitting there for an hour while Liz told me all about her parents and her mom trying to stop this one guy from committing suicide by hanging himself from Christmas lights, and about a nameless teenager with borderline personality disorder who was convinced she didn't need any treatment so long as she drank a mixture of mouthwash and Tabasco sauce every morning before school. About some alcoholic who drank the antiseptic hand sanitizer right from the wall.

Man, Liz was proud of her parents. She thought they were superheroes or something. She could have been talking about anything, though. I was so desperate to hear a new voice.

“What were you doing out there, wearing a fishbowl on your head?”

“Oh. Well … I wanted out. I was trying to find something that I can wear. Something that'll stop it.”

Liz scratched her chin again.

“Why don't you try running really, really fast? Just kind of long-jumping to the other side? Don't give it time to toss you!”

“I don't think that would work. If anything, it would throw me back farther. And … never mind.”

“What?” She stopped kicking her feet against the luggage rack.

“Even if I got to the other side, I maybe couldn't cross back again. And I want to be able to go back home.”

“Why? Don't you get bored out here?”

“My mom. I need to stay here.”

“Man,” said Liz, “if I ran off, I think it would take my mom a few weeks to notice.” I couldn't tell whether she was joking or not.

“Um …”

Liz sighed. “But this is just too weird. I mean, everyone knows that supposedly there's some homeschooled kid out here in the woods because everyone knows your mom and sees her grocery shopping and whatnot. No one asks her about you. Everyone thinks you're Amish.”

“Oh.”

“
Are
you Amish?”

“No. I'm not religious.”

“But Amish people live on farms. With no electricity. You could join them! Run away and live a normal life.”

“A normal life of milking goats?”

“Don't be so picky.”

I coughed. “Anyhow, I couldn't. Electricity really is everywhere. Power lines are always around even when you can't see them. And cell phone towers. This is kind of a safe zone because it's right near the state park and there aren't many lines around.”