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Authors: Blythe Woolston

The Freak Observer (19 page)

BOOK: The Freak Observer
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Today the first girl talks about being an insulin-dependent diabetic. She has good, clear diagrams and seems to understand the way her body has failed her really well. She pulls out an orange and says a nurse taught her how to give herself shots when she was eleven. Now she passes the lesson on to us. It seems like she is finished, but then she picks up another syringe and says, “Just saline.” She points it at the ceiling, flicks it, presses the plunger, and looks at it. She is looking for bubbles. Bubbles are bad. She pulls up her sweater and exposes her side. Her face doesn't even twitch when she sticks herself with the needle.

. . .

The next girl has dimly green hair—it looks like a bad Kool-Aid dye job—and she looks nervous. That's understandable. Unless she is going to give us tasty snacks, it is going to be hard to make us stop thinking about that needle, that needle, that needle. And she doesn't appear to have snacks.

She leans a stack of big foam-core posters against the whiteboard. She isn't showing them to us yet. That's smart. She's going for the big reveal.

Then she puts a little bundle of cloth on the table at the front of the room, takes a deep breath, and looks to the teacher. The teacher nods.

The lime-haired girl turns over her first poster.

It's The Bony Guy.

He's wearing a suit of armor, but it's him.

She flips over to the second poster.

This time, he's dressed in a brown robe, like the monks in the bone-decorated room, and it says “Saturn” by his feet instead of “Death,” but it's him.

The shock is wearing off, and I'm starting to hear the words of her speech. These are Tarot cards; they are used to provide answers and guidance. She learned to read them from someone call Nonna, who is her grandmother, I gather. She collects different decks—the way some people collect manga—and she is going to explain how they work.

Now that my brain is turned back on, it is in defensivesnark mode. It doesn't pay to soak your head in Kool-Aid—I can recognize the bright red star of Aldebaran in Taurus, but I don't think it has any influence on my day. I could do my speech about astrology and include the experiment where everyone gets a random fortune, and then they have to decide if it is “correct” or not, and then everybody realizes they are fools. I am so not being a respectful audience.

Now the speaker has unwrapped a deck of cards. They are so big, it looks like she is holding a paperback—but it's a paperback where you can shuffle the pages.

She sets the shuffled cards down carefully and points to the posters again. She talks about the traditional images of death. He often carries a scythe, she says, turning over another poster to reveal a full-frontal Bony Guy dressed in Little Red Riding Hood's cape.

She says people tend to freak out when the Death card appears as part of the answer to their question. They assume it's a very bad thing. But it isn't that simple. Some decks don't even have a Death card. And a card's meaning always depends on the question and its position relative to other cards. When Death is right side up, it usually means there is some sort of change happening—a new beginning. She flips Red-Riding-Hood Death on his head. Now the card might mean that you're stuck in a rut or hanging onto old ideas that aren't working. She makes death sound like a variable.

There are all kinds of tarot decks, that's what the collector-girl with the greenish hair said.

. . .

Nobody else is home this afternoon, so I pull out my manila folder and spill out the postcards and stuff. My deck, I think.

Bony Guy-Death Card-De Dood lands upside down.

“Stuck in a rut,” says gravity-defying De Dood.

Jack's business card is almost covered up by De Dood. I can see part of the bird squiggle, like it's trying to fly up and away. I'm not freaking out. There's more to reading the cards than just dumping them out. There's a system to it. I don't remember all the details, but it's about position and relationship. The answer isn't in the data; it's in the analysis.

My deck, I think, so my deal. I can shift the variables in the equation. I lift De Dood and turn him right side up and put him off to the side. Now I can read Jack's card: “raku ducks, web design, undiscovered talents.”

“New beginnings,” says De Dood from his new place out of the center.

What about the other cards? What is the significance of the four of pink-nipple piggies? The ace of hammers? Is that the king of after-dinner science? I didn't even know I was looking at an orrery when I first saw that card. The machine in the painting looked so different from Mr. Banecek's, the one I'd nudged a little to keep the planets moving.

I turn it over and read,

So that's how the sun works. Who knew?
Love,
Corey

Turning it again, I notice that the lamp meant to be the sun can't even be seen. It is revealed only because it reveals other things, like the observers studying the model galaxy. The faces of the observers shine like phases of the moon. Some are full, others only a crescent of light, one in total eclipse. Do they imagine themselves on the marble-size Earth while it ticks around its clockwork orbit? When the demonstration is finished and the observers walk out under the night sky, will they see the constellations—or will they imagine other observers beyond the reach of human eyes?

. . .

I turn the card over again and touch the words that Corey wrote.

If I hadn't had practice decoding his useless sloppy marks when we were debate partners, I wouldn't be able to read the words at all.

So that's how the sun works. Who knew? Love, Corey

. . .

Who knew?

. . .

I never told Corey that I used to have a little sister. I never told him about my bad dreams. I didn't want him to know I was crazy—because, if he didn't know, then I could be something completely different when I was with him. He isn't mocking me with The Bony Guy because he doesn't know—he doesn't know. He doesn't know that Esther was a brave pig-whacking girl and now she is dead. He doesn't know I saw her die.

He just sent me a postcard, “Wish you were here.”

I read something else, written in lines that were much too dark and much too sharp. Corey never joined those dark things into constellations—I did that.

He's not a vindictive monster. He's not trying to ruin my life. When he posted those pictures on the net, it was about him, not about me. I'm just “girl with ginormous thighs on a pool table.” I have no face in those pictures. I am in eclipse. It's his face that shines in the dark. His name is in the tags. Maybe he wanted someone to see those pictures and think that was what he was doing in Europe. Maybe he was just trying to confront his own enemy in his own bad dream.

He may not know about my nightmares, but I don't know his either. All those nights in the dark, close enough to feel the energy of his body, close enough to hear the sounds of his pulse if I didn't mistake it for the echo of my own—but that's the problem. I did, somehow, mistake Corey for an echo of me. I was so focused on my reflection in his eyes, on the way he let me see myself, that I never saw him at all.

So when the postcards came, I never got them, not really. I was too busy being hurt. I was too busy hurting myself. Now I'm finally getting the messages that he sent me.

He's drinking absinthe in Prague and feeling a little sympathy for me because I'm not. He's wandering through museums and seeing amazing things he wants to share with me: a chandelier made of bones, a scowling face in a painting that looks a little like me. He's just trying to keep in touch—to touch. He couldn't text me. He knows I don't have a phone—no computer, no e-mail, no social networking. He got past all those barriers. He sneaked around them in an old-timey way. He sent me postcards. He knew I was hurt, and the postcards weren't apologies, exactly; they were little gestures that kept things open and made it possible, maybe, for us to someday be friends.

. . .

I'm in Santa Cruz wading in the ocean. I can't hear anything. There isn't any wind. I look up at the sky, and I realize I'm deep underwater. The sunlight is flickering down in little beams and sparks. I panic and my heart jerks faster, but then I look around. There are all kinds of strange things in the water. I don't know what they are, they are just floating or swimming or hovering. It is hard to see them because the light is so undependable, but what I see is unbelievably beautiful. It makes me cry, the unpredictable hovering beauty. When I start to cry, I can feel my lungs fill up with water. It feels natural. I can breathe underwater, I just never knew it before.

This is just another universe. And I'm its observer.

Acknowledgments

To Andrew Karre, my editor: In the beginning, there was chaos. Your ability to see a book in there is a little freakish.

To the book builders of Carolrhoda—including visionary production editor Julie Harman, careful reader Delores Barton, book designer Danielle Carnito, and publicist Lindsay Matvick: thank you all.

To Kate McAlpine (a.k.a. Alpinekat) and to the community-at-large of science writers: You wade out into the lagoons of science and bring back the most amazing things. I appreciate it.

To my household, both Bedlam Central and the Martian Outpost: You are interesting people. I love you.

BOOK: The Freak Observer
7.85Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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