Chasing Orion (20 page)

“That thing you just said anatomy is.”

“Destiny. It just means that some people think that if you are born with a penis”— I tried not to look surprised but I had never in my life heard this word spoken out loud —“that you can do certain things, get paid more, be a soldier. Do what is thought of as man kind of things, and if you are born with a vagina”— holy smoke! I could not believe this —“that you stay home, have kids, and cook. But it’s not true, of course, because my mother is a doctor and she has a —” At that moment, the whistle blew for the end of recess. But as we got up to leave, Evelyn took the stick and bent over so that one or two of the ants crawled on to it. “See what I mean?” I prayed she wouldn’t say the
v
or the
p
word again, because once a day was enough for me. “See this ant. He’s a soldier. It’s because he has huge jaws — sharp, too. They call them mandibles.”

Mandibles,
I thought. That’s such a nice, decent-sounding word, unlike you-know-what and you-know-what.

“Would you have taken Evelyn and me to the drive-in if Phyllis hadn’t pressured you, Emmett?”

“What are you talking about?” We had just dropped Evelyn off at her house. It was a Friday afternoon, and Emmett had agreed to take us after school to a drive-in restaurant for a hamburger and a Coke.

“Well, would you have taken us if Phyllis hadn’t asked you to?”

“That’s not fair, Georgie. Phyllis doesn’t pressure me to do anything.”

“Hmmm.” That was all I said, but he looked at me real funny.

There was a pretty long silence, and then Emmett said, “Look, Georgie, I think you should butt out of Phyllis’s and my business.”

“What business?” I said.

“Georgie! I just told you to butt out, for Christ’s sake.”

“You shouldn’t use swears. Especially Jesus ones. Grandma would be very mad at you.”

“Grandma is not here. Besides, I thought you didn’t believe in God.”

“Does Phyllis believe in God?” I suddenly asked.

“That’s a non sequitur,” Emmett said.

“What’s a non seckyturd?” I giggled.

“The word is
non sequitur.
And it’s Latin for ‘does not follow logically,’ and it’s not nice for little girls to talk about turds.”

This ticked me off. “I don’t know Latin. Remember I’m just in the sixth grade, Mr. Smarty-Big-Guy-Center. And I wasn’t talking about turds, and besides, in my opinion, talking about turds is less evil than saying Jesus-swears.”

“Are you finished?”

“Yep.”

“Is this any way to treat your brother who has just so kindly agreed to take you and your very strange friend Evelyn Sinkler to a drive-in for a hamburger?”

“Winkler. The name is Winkler.”

“Whatever. As I was saying — who so kindly agreed to take you to the drive-in on a Friday afternoon.”

“I know you’re embarrassed to be seen in our company. We’re little twerps, and everybody there is a big-deal teenager — cheerleaders, basketball players, football players.”

“I didn’t say you were twerps. Yes, you are shorter than high-school kids. But I didn’t say you were twerps.”

“You said Evelyn was weird.”

“Well, she is.”

“Not when you get to know her.”

“I guess I could say the same thing about Phyllis,” he replied.

“What, she’s not weird once you get to know her?” I asked.

“Not exactly. But she doesn’t pressure me at all, and if you really knew her, you would understand that.”

I just shut up.

“Do stars make noise, Emmett?” Phyllis asked one evening. I was sitting not more than five feet away, but I might as well have been five hundred feet away for all the notice they took of me.

“No, not in space.”

“Not even when they’re born and when they die, like you were explaining about all that fire and explosion, the popping and the sizzling?”

“It’s a vacuum out there,” I piped up. But no one paid any attention to me.

“Sound needs air to transmit it.”

“That’s what I just said! It’s a vacuum. No air, no sound.” Still no response.

Phyllis waited awhile before she said anything. Then she smiled. “Well, you know how easy it is for me to see colors; I think I can hear stars — music.”

“Star music?” Emmett asked. Both he and I were completely bewildered.

“Yeah, think of it like whales singing.”

“Whales singing? I don’t get it,” Emmett said.

“They say whales sing, you know,” Phyllis replied.

“Well, water transmits.”

“But no one ever thought they did until someone listened with whatever they use to listen with underwater.”

“Hmmm,” Emmett said. “It’s the old tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it.”

“Not exactly.” The mirrors flashed now, and the only reflections were those of Phyllis and my brother. “I am there to hear it in my place. Our beautiful place.”

A strange conversation. One that made me feel not simply excluded but a little scared. Why did she have to say
our.
But this actually was the way it had been for a while now, ever since an evening a few days before school started when they were looking at the colors in Cygnus — the Rumpelstiltskin gold — and started talking about the Beautiful Place. I sensed that Emmett and Phyllis had crossed some invisible line. They were someplace else. If I asked him a question about Phyllis, he’d just snap sometimes as if it were not just a simple question but more like an invasion. I was invading that precious space, crossing into some forbidden zone.

With Phyllis it was a little different. She never snapped at me, and she never seemed to mind me being there. In fact, she seemed hardly aware of my presence. So when I was there, I began to watch Phyllis very closely.

More and more I had that feeling that they were speaking in some kind of code. What started out as a simple conversation that I thought I understood on one particular night in late September turned into one of their coded ones. I felt left out, but this didn’t really bother me as much as it usually would have. What really bothered me was that Emmett seemed to be completely drawn into the Beautiful Place and that it was part of their code. Phyllis, Emmett, and I were still like night pilgrims as we followed the trails of the constellations across the sky, but Phyllis and Emmett were wandering into a different night, and I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to follow them.

One day when I came over, Phyllis and Emmett stopped talking as soon as I came into the room. They looked guilty, as if I had caught them up to something. But I knew they hadn’t been doing anything except talking — talking about their Beautiful Place. I just knew it. It was in that moment that I knew for certain that the Beautiful Place was a very dangerous place. It had been over a month since I had that dream, the terrible one when the hunter was the hunted one, where Orion, not yet blind, was being chased through the forests. But I thought of it now. I slid my eyes toward Emmett. His eyes were so still, so . . . so unseeing, I thought, and panic seized me.
He is as paralyzed as she is!
He suddenly looked completely helpless, and yet he didn’t even know it. It seemed impossible. This was like watching a collision about to happen in slow motion, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

That same night I took out my diary again.

I stopped writing for a moment. I remembered that the night I had that very bad dream, I had left Emmett and Phyllis in a huff, mad that they had somehow invaded my small world, the Ray Bradbury one of the ancient city in
The Martian Chronicles,
the Beautiful Place. I had felt that something had been trespassed, abused. They had hijacked my small world and turned it on its end. Turned it into something it was never supposed to have been and in the process made a sham of it. Now I felt a sense of violation again. This time it was different. This time I felt that Emmett had in some way been violated as well.

It would be several days before I saw Phyllis again. The last time I had been there, I had been so afraid that I hadn’t wanted to go back. But I kept reading over and over again what I had written in my diary, and it was like when you say a name or a word over and over. It begins to lose its meaning and just becomes a jumble of nonsense sounds. The same thing had happened with the words in my diary. They became a little less believable each time I read them. So by the end of almost two weeks, I was thinking,
There’s something wrong with me. Phyllis isn’t dangerous. This beautiful world doesn’t exist in real life. It’s just some sort of joke between Phyllis and Emmett.
So I went over to visit her to prove this to myself. I honestly thought that it would be like waking up after a bad dream and turning the lights on. Everything would be all comfy and make sense.

“Hi, Georgie. Where’ve you been?” She was reading a book in “the Phyllis.”

“Oh, just around.”

“Busy with school, huh?”

I caught a glimpse of the cover. It looked like
The Martian Chronicles.
My whole gut lurched. The Beautiful Place again! I felt ambushed. All of the old terrors, the ones I had talked myself out of the last two weeks stormed in. I wanted to run. But I didn’t. It was like being in a bad dream where your feet won’t move. You just stand there, frozen.

“Yeah, busy with school,” I lied. I hated myself for lying. Phyllis was trying to catch me in the mirrors, but I just couldn’t look into them. So I looked toward Sally, who was massaging Phyllis’s leg through the sealed port. It was then that I caught sight of the ribbon, a velvet ribbon, the kind old-fashioned girls sometimes wore around their necks with a locket on it. Except Phyllis didn’t wear it around her neck. She wore it around Ralph, the muscle in her thigh. There were little windows beside the portholes, and when I first saw the bright blue velvet ribbon, I thought it was on Phyllis’s arm. It was the first time I had seen her legs since the weaning, and now that one leg seemed even more shocking with the bright blue ribbon tied to her so-called thigh.

“Toothpicks, huh?” She laughed as she saw the shock on my face.

“Oh, I think they’ve beefed up a bit, Phyllis,” Sally said. Phyllis just rolled her eyes.

“What’s that thing around your leg?” The consonants were slipping away from me, the words left dangling.

“Your brother gave it to me — locket on a velvet ribbon. Isn’t it pretty?”

I had been standing by the side of the iron lung, and it was almost as if
my
legs had turned to toothpicks. Or maybe noodles, I thought as they began to feel limp. How could I have ever thought that Phyllis was anything but fragile, that she could have any kind of power over Emmett? How could I have written those things in my diary?