Everything Breaks (12 page)

I shook my head and threw out my arms. “What business is it of
hers,
Bud?” I took a few angry paces across the room and back. “You've done plenty for her already! Now we need to get on the road home and let her hitch a different ride.”

He said nothing, so I said, more quietly, “Okay, how about this, Bud. I'll go get the car and bring it closer while you finish getting ready. I think I can drive through the wheat right up to the porch. Okay with that?”

“Yeah, yeah, good plan,” he murmured.

On my way out of that sad room I spotted a small patch of wallpaper that must have been protected for many decades by a dresser or something. I crouched beside it for a few seconds, running my fingers over the pattern—bright blue, yellow, and red wildflowers blooming against a violet sky. So beautiful and eternal, all hope and innocence.

A new wave of anger and frustration rolled through me and I was stumbling over my own feet by the time I made it back down the rotted stairs and through the desolate kitchen. Why did nothing last? What was the point of all that innocent hope in that wallpaper? Who could answer me, huh?
Huh?

I was shaking all over by the time I got out of the house. I stood on the porch and looked around trying to settle down and breathe right. No sign of the dog. The car looked like a toy some child had lost in the blowing wheat.

I had to get a grip, and I knew a run through sun and wind would help more than anything. Just hiking up the hill to the house had been excruciating, though. My legs were tight and hurt worse than ever today. There was nothing mental I could do to block this much pain, so I gritted my teeth and launched myself down the porch stairs and into the wheat, moving at a pace that was faster than I could have forced myself to move without the downhill slope bouncing me painfully and helplessly along.

I was halfway back to the car when I remembered that the weird hitchhiker girl had stolen the keys! But how hard could it be to grab her pack, fish them out, and pocket them again? I just hoped I could locate her in all this wheat.

That proved to be easy. She'd returned to her circle of flattened wheat, not far from the Olds. She was lying on her back with her lumpy green pack beneath her head like a pillow and the ankle of one cowboy boot casually jiggling on the opposite bare knee. She was thumbing through a magazine and chewing a wad of gum. Three or four more of those magazines were scattered around her, their pages rippling in the wind.

She rolled to her side when she heard me charge up, propping her head with her hand.

“How do you like my hair, Tucker Graysten?” she called out cheerfully. “No, wait, wait! Don't answer yet!” She sat up and scratched her flaming pink hair into random spikes. “There,
now
you can answer.”

All my anger at her finally boiled over. “Do you think this whole thing is a
joke
?” I yelled against the wind. “Okay, so you somehow learned a lethal type of hypnosis, hooray for you. And you go around reading people's minds without any respect for their privacy, and drive them to places they never wanted to go, and then you steal their keys, and then you . . . you have the nerve to ask for an opinion about
hair
choices?”

She knit her brows, looking truly confused. “No,” she said, simply. “Only a joke is a joke.” She held up her magazine and turned it toward me. “Look at this, Tucker, chocolate cake with chocolate fudge icing! Have you ever heard of chocolate cake?”

I gawked at her for a few seconds. “Everybody's heard of chocolate cake,” I muttered, rubbing my face with my hands and shaking my head. What was the use? My anger drained—why cling to it? She was just a total airhead. Hating her was impossible and useless. It would have been like hating a tree, or a shoe.

She began carefully tearing the cake picture from her magazine.

“Oh, come closer and
look,
Tucker!” She held the picture up so I could see. “On the back there's a photo of that airplane that crashed last month! You can even see the teensy people inside!”

She turned the airplane photo toward me and my blood went cold. Those magazines scattered around her makeshift lounge were
my
magazines from the school library!

I dropped to a crouch, laced my fingers behind my neck, and stared straight down at the ground so I could pretend for a few minutes that she didn't exist. I could hear the swish of her gathering those magazines into a stack, though. Then she cleared her throat like someone giving an important speech and began reading the covers out loud.

“
Time Magazine,
October 22,
PROPERTY OF CLEVESDALE HIGH SCHOOL
,
CLEVESDALE
,
OKLAHOMA
,” she announced. “
Newsweek
magazine and here in the bottom corner it's stamped
PROPERTY OF CLEVESDALE HIGH SCHOOL
,
CLEVESDALE
,
OKLAHOMA
. This one is
Smithsonian
and it's for the month of September and it's stamped
PROPERTY OF CLEVESDALE HIGH SCHOOL
,
CLEVESDALE
,
OKLAHOMA
.
National Geographic
and up in the corner, kind of light like the library's stamp needs inking, is
PROPERTY OF CLEVESDALE HIGH SCHOOL, CLEVESDALE, OKLAHOMA
. And the one that had the yummy cake picture,
American Life,
PROPERTY OF CLEVESDALE HIGH SCHOOL, CLEVESDALE, OKLAHOMA
.”

When she was through, I raised my head and stared at her, hoping I could send anger her way that would melt her or something. She merely leaned closer to me, wide-eyed.

“So, did you
steal
all these magazines from your school library, Tucker Graysten?”

“Shouldn't that question be did
you
steal them from my
backpack
?” I spat out.

“Guilty!” She held up her hands, laughing. “You caught me red-handed!”

Her palms oozed and dripped with something thick, shiny, and very, very red.

I felt things getting black around the edges so I panted, trying to get more air.

“What's the matter, Tuck?” She turned her wrists to look at her palms, then wrinkled her nose. “Ick, I see what you mean. Is this
blood
on my hands?”

She laughed that crazy laugh again and turned her palms back toward me. Now they were just the dry hot pink of her hair dye.

“That wasn't funny.” That came out in a whimper. I tried again. “That. Wasn't—”

“It was a cool trick, though, wasn't it?” she interrupted. “Caught red-handed, get it?”

“Why can't you just express your opinions like a normal person?” I moaned. “Why do you always have to act like a—”

“Street magician? Tucker Graysten, tell me the honest truth, do you think if I went to a big city, say, Chicago, that I could make a living as a street magician?”

I looked down at the ground again and pushed out, under my breath, “If you think I have blood on my hands, why can't you just . . .
say
so.”

At first she said nothing. I assumed she hadn't heard me. It would have been almost impossible for her to have heard me. But then she asked, “Why would I think
that
?”

I jumped to my feet, took a couple of angry and painful strides toward her, and yelled, “Because I bailed out of the Mustang before that wicked curve, of course! You
know
that from invading my memories. You're accusing me of
abandoning
my best friends!”

She sighed. “Tucker Graysten, everything in this world is not about
you,
you know. I was just practicing a new trick with that blood-on-my-hands thing. And also for your information, I am
not
in the business of judging people, thank you very much. My job is hard enough without my having to be some kind of judge or jury or . . . or
dictator
or something in my spare time, of which I don't even
have
any!”

The idea of this weird girl holding down a job was outrageous. And hadn't she said earlier that she and the dog were, what . . . co-workers? That proved it. She was a psycho, just totally nuts. I had to remember that and not let her get to me like she'd been doing.

I sat down in the wheat, pulled up my legs, and planted my elbows on my knees. “So, okay, where do you work?” I asked with a weary snort. “A fast-food restaurant?”

“I'm a laborer,” she said. “See my calluses?” She held her hands toward me again, palms out in a butterfly shape. “I get blisters you wouldn't believe, Tucker Graysten.”

Her palms were a mess, all right. All oozing blisters and leathery gray calluses, just like she'd described. But then again, after witnessing that last trick, I had to assume she could make her hands be just about any way she wanted them to be.

“That's why I asked you if you thought I could be a street performer,” she said in a wistful way. “I'm always dreaming of a different job, though even if I found something, I don't know if I could quit the job I've got. I mean, I've had it like forever and ever.”

“You can quit any job,” I muttered, not because I knew what I was talking about but because I was exhausted and it's what people
always
said. “If your job sucks, just quit.”

“You don't know my boss.” She shivered and stood. “Here, I'm done with these.”

She threw the stack of magazines toward me, and they spread their pages and flew in slow motion like five gaudy parrots. They stopped in midair and fell straight to the ground in front of me as though some invisible hunter had shot them through their hearts.

I stared, openmouthed, at where they formed a quivering line between me and the crazy hitchhiker. Each magazine had fallen open to the picture I stole it for.

She stood up and strolled over to squat beside the
American Life.
She tucked the cake picture back into it and I watched the rip where she'd torn it out close like a sutured wound. Then the cake page turned all on its own to reveal that falling airplane.

“A plane falling from the sky,” she whispered. “You wanted to see the expressions on those faces, didn't you, Tucker Graysten?
That's
what fascinated you. Don't you think I know why you collected these pictures? Death is the last frontier, and you think you can learn its terrain, its language, and its customs without ever leaving your cozy home.”

When I felt her breath on my neck, I realized she had somehow moved to stand right behind me. In fact, suddenly she was looking at those pictures from over my shoulder.

She smelled like . . . what
was
that smell? Plants? No, she smelled like dirt.

XII

THE WIN
D CAME UP
and rustled all five magazines closed.

“There's a surer way to learn what you want to know, Tucker Graysten,” she breathed into my ear. “Give me what you have in your right back pocket and presto, you'll know.”

She snaked one of her hands under my arm. It loomed there in front of me, cobra-like, asking for something, needing me to feed it with something, a callused and creased hand so very old, ancient even, thin and in fact almost . . . skeletal.

My ears rang as I scrambled sideways like a crab, getting away from her.

“You don't even
know
what I've got in my right back pocket!” I crouched there, shaking all over, my hands shielding my face on each side so that I wouldn't make the mistake of turning and looking directly at those spiral eyes of hers. “And even if you did know, why would you even
want
it?”

“How many times do I have to tell you? It's mine,
that's
why I want it!”

I shook my head, fast and hard. “No, you're wrong. A teacher gave it to me just . . . yesterday. It's only an old coin she had, sort of a good luck charm, of no value at all beyond that.”

The wind began to spiral. The magazines were taken up into that dark spin and carried far off toward the vanishing point of the horizon. I watched the bright shreds of them being spit into the sky in all directions.

She stepped in front of where I huddled. The last thing I wanted was to look up at her, but my will wasn't strong enough to resist her. It ached, like the rest of me.

“Tucker Graysten?” she said quietly. “My coin, if you please?”

I braced myself and shook my head, trying frantically to remember what Mrs. Beetlebaum had said about that coin, that obolus. You put one in the mouth of the newly dead, wasn't that it? It was the fare to the underworld, the payment you had to make to the guy who rowed the boat from the land of the living to the land of the dead.

I opened my eyes to a slit and carefully looked at her, expecting anything.

She was just herself. “Oh, fine, then.” She sulked, twirling a spike of hair around one finger. “If you're too selfish to part with that worthless coin, then let's get back to playing our game.
Trade
me something for this green Bic. . . .” She stopped, frowning.

I gave a quick, hysterical laugh. “You haven't got the lighter now, remember?”

She rolled her eyes. “Cherry Berry likes you,” she grumbled. She stomped to her pack and began rooting around in it. “And for your information, I've got too much work to do to be playing stupid games anyhow, Tucker Graysten.”

She maneuvered a huge notebook from the overstuffed pack's murky depths, and I caught enough of a look at it to know it was one of those silly razzle-dazzle three-ring shiny deals you can buy at any discount store. It had a bright lime green cover labeled
Dream Journal
in elaborate glitter script. There was a unicorn sticker in the corner and in the center was a holographic picture of some female movie star or singer, some dark-haired diva that I couldn't identify and wasn't the least bit interested in anyhow.

She unclipped a pen from the spiral and went to sit on the ground beside Bud's car, leaning back against a fender. “I gotta record this pickup,” she called to me in a pouty voice, flipping impatiently through the pages. “My boss'll have a
fit
if I forget.”

She found the page she wanted, took the pen from her teeth, and bent to work.

Her pack was a bit closer to me than to her. I sidled over to it as quickly and quietly as I could, then sank to my knees beside it. A glance told me she was wrapped up in whatever it was she was doing, so I began moving her messy stuff around, searching for the car keys. A baseball-sized knot of grape bubble gum wrappers was one of many things clogging my view. I pushed the sticky mess aside and heard a sharp hiss.

A small snake looked angrily up at me from its gum-paper nest, rattling its tail.

I jumped to my feet and hustled backward. My hands were shaking, so I stuck them under my armpits and tried to act calm. “Do you . . . do you know you have a . . .”

“There.” She closed her notebook with a satisfied nod and looked over at me. “Since there are 701,843 trails in the world, it takes a while to find the right one. Once I find it, all I have to do is put a checkmark beside it, but first I have to find it and that takes—”

I couldn't bring myself to pretend interest in her imaginary job. “Do you know that you . . . you have a baby rattlesnake living in the grunge at the bottom of your pack?”

“Actually, it's a fully grown pygmy rattler.” She stood, stretched, then slipped her pen back into the spiral of her tacky Kmart notebook. She sashayed toward me, her notebook against her chest and her arms crossed over it. “I'm thinking about collecting pygmy rattlers. To be honest, Tucker Graysten, even though I know you love my hair this color, I would absolutely
adore
having hair like
hers.
”

She shoved the notebook under my nose and pointed to the diva on the front.

She was one of those Greek goddesses, the really, really nasty one with snakes for hair who could turn people to stone with her fierce ugliness. And this picture wasn't just a hologram, either. The goddess was actually moving, or at least the snakes growing from her head were moving, writhing and hissing, spitting and coiling. . . .

“Medusa just has the best hair ever,” the hitchhiker girl breathed, stepping even closer to me so she was right beneath my chin, mere inches away. “Do you think I might be able to get hair implants or something? I mean, if I had the snakes?”

My head was filling with her smell of cold dirt and grape bubble gum. I could feel an icy chill coming off her, right through her thick motorcycle jacket. She was nuts, just nuts, coiled to strike just like that pet snake of hers was coiled in its gum wrapper nest, and I would
not
look directly at her spiral eyes again no matter what.

“Nobody could—could know exactly how many trails there are in the world,” I stammered, buying time. Bud would surely get out here any minute and
he
would get her to hand over the keys. Nobody played games with Bud. “And even if you did have some weird job of recording trails, you couldn't record 701,843 of
anything
in that cheap little notebook of yours.”

She drew in a hurt breath and her hand went to her mouth. “Cheap?” she whispered.

“You might as well back off,” I told her quietly. “Nothing you say, nothing you do is going to make me look you in the eye again.”

For a while, she said nothing. She even backed away from me a couple of steps. I could think a little better as that wicked dirt-grape smell emptied from my head.

“Okay, I'm sorry for being such a know-it-all, Tucker,” she finally said, her voice small and humble.

Out the corner of my right eye, I could see her tapping the toe of one boot, then scuffing it back and forth in a way that might possibly be apologetic.

“I was just showing off when I told you there were exactly 701,843 trails. That was silly. Of
course
no one can know how many trails there are at any one second. Not when new ones come into existence all the time.”

I shrugged, keeping my eyes glued to my own feet as I turned my back to her. “I'm going to the house to try to get Bud to hustle,” I said gruffly. “Why don't you give me back the car keys so I can drive up and he doesn't have to walk so far?”

“There are trails over land, but also under every ocean,” she continued as though I hadn't spoken. “And there are trails right through the air, like the one the Mustang blazed when it sailed off that bluff like a great red flying fish. A sweet trail, that one, fun while it lasted. Your friends thought so. They were laughing. Or . . . I could be wrong. Maybe they were actually . . . screaming?”

My heart slammed, hard, and I felt dizzy with grief and anger. I wheeled back around and focused all that hot emotion on her smug face, wishing I could melt her.

She shrugged, innocent as a statue. “Bud's dying, you know,” she said in a small, little-girl voice, shifting her weight from foot to foot. “I give him twenty-nine minutes, thirty-two seconds, using your human measurements. And when he dies, that'll be that, you'll stay or I'll take you. But if you stay with that poison splinter still embedded, I guarantee you'll be putting out another call to me, pronto. And the next time, I won't be so nice. It'll just be ‘Get into the boat and give me the money. Too bad you didn't tell yourself what you needed to know when I gave you a chance the
first
time, buster.'”

“Tell
me
what
I
need to know?” I shook my head. “You're crazy! None of what you're saying makes sense! Bud's tough. He'll probably outlive us all. And anyhow, nobody jokes about an old person's death. That's just . . . tasteless and cruel!”

“What're we doing here anyhow, Tucker Graysten?” she asked, this time sadly shaking her head. “You called me with your infected legs and your game of squatting by the TV to see what you'd look like without a head and your horrific magazine picture collection and the threats you made to an innocent ant that was walking up your window
and
your out-of-control driving. This is not to mention the paranoid fantasy you've taken up where your best friend visits your dreams with sarcastic comments. So just man up and yank that teensy splinter of nasty truth from your heart so we can see if you bleed out from it. There's a teensy chance you
may
actually live, so don't you think it's worth the effort? If you find out you
can't
live with it, you save me the trouble of a return trip by taking a seat with Bud and me when we hit the road in twenty-eight minutes and five seconds, using your human measurements. And
I
collect the coin, of course. And in answer to what you were thinking before, no, I can't take it,
you
have to hand it over.”

She rubbed her fingers together greedily, and for just the space of an eyeblink, she turned into something ancient and withered. I let out a sharp burst of sound, maybe it was a scream, and backed farther away from her.

She laughed and crossed her arms. “When I was fairly new to this job, I had a pickup I've never forgotten. Old guy, weird name. Socrates. Most people have a few little things to say on the trip, but boy, this guy was a
talker.
Gab, gab, gab. I forget most of it, but this one thing has stuck in my head all these years. ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.' You got the idea he'd said that before to various audiences, and of course he was exaggerating for effect. Still, it's something to think about, right, Tucker Graysten? To me, and this is my professional take on things, to
me
it seems pretty likely that the unexamined life will slip right through your fingers.”

She gave her thumbnail a chew, then wiped it on her skirt.

“Take druggies, for instance. Usually they're asleep when I come—in a coma, that is. They keep telling me that same thing
you
keep telling me, that they didn't give me a pickup call. Still, they
did,
right? By opening that prescription bottle or snorting that line or filling that syringe? Whoa, those are some of the loudest calls I get! I mean, the instant you hear any of those things, you're on standby to roll! I'm just saying. Bud's dying, so
you've
got twenty-seven minutes and twelve seconds left to do some deeper examining. That is, according to your human measurement. To me, it's maybe half a second.”

Her weirdness was enough to break your mind, but something even weirder had started to happen to the landscape right behind her. The sky had almost instantly gone from being cloudless and blue to being a leaden shade of dark purple, with lightning clawing through it like skeletal hands. Then over her shoulder I watched in horror as a huge, green wedge came barreling toward us through the wheat, cutting a swath that must have been a couple of city blocks wide. Within mere seconds it had moved from the distant horizon to so close to us that the roar of its approach drowned out what the weird hitchhiker girl was saying.

“It's a
flash flood
!” I yelled, my voice a shriek of disbelief. “Quick, give me the keys! If the car gets submerged, we'll never get it started again!”

She flopped a hand, dismissing my worries. “Nah, the car'll be fine,” she yelled back. “Trail number 11,404 does this all the time. There was a river right where we're standing a century and a half ago, but over the decades it changed course. When your dimension and ours overlap, trail number 11,404 sometimes comes unhinged in time. I mean, it gets unpredictable, sometimes wet like it was in 1850, sometimes dry enough to build a house on like it was in 1910 when Bud's parents built this one. This river, the one that once flowed here and is back for a visit, was actually a point of no return on trail number 11,404, better known to you mortals as the Oregon Trail. Interesting, huh, Tucker Graysten? Once you got a wagon filled with heavy stuff across it, you would
so
not want to change your mind and go back.”

“Back?” My ears were ringing.

She rolled her eyes. “Back
home,
silly. Everybody on every trail comes from home. They're going everywhere, but they all start from the same place. Home.”

While she'd been chatting, the water had swept through where we were standing. It was up to the top pockets of her motorcycle jacket. With a little grunt, she hefted her pack up onto her head and used both hands to balance it teetering there.

I felt the cold murk reach my own waist and I stuck a protective hand into the water and over my back jeans pocket, the one holding Mrs. Beetlebaum's coin.
Tucker, put it in your pocket and keep it there!
The weirder this got, the more I wished I'd asked Mrs. B. more questions, or listened harder, or something.