The Other Normals (6 page)

“Sorry.” I put the fire extinguisher back. “I guess I could try and play it off like I was trying to be funny, but that was actually the best thing I could think to say.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Perry; pleased to meet you.” I stick out my hand.

“Are you the guy who got in the fight with Ryu?”

“How’d you know that?”

“I hear he knocked you out with one punch.”

“Word travels fast.”

I leave my hand out. She looks at it. I have gone beyond the point where I can pretend that I was sticking it out for any other reason than a failed handshake. I grit my teeth and look at my palm. Will. Not. Fail.

“Do you want me to shake that?”

“Yes.”

She shakes it with the tiny mitten she’s working on.

“I’m Anna.”

I laugh at the mitten. It’s soft. “Who’s that for?”

“My sister.”

“But it’s summer.”

“By the time I’m done, it’ll be fall. Knitting teaches you patience.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be on the other side of the lake?”

“I’ve been here before. I have something I leave in the nurse’s office every year and I’m here to get it before I get settled.”

“Is it weird to shake hands?”

“No, it’s formal. It’s normal, I think.”

“Cool! I mean, cool. So … are you gonna be at the square dance tonight?”

“If I decide to make an appearance.” She narrows her dark eyes. “Will you?”

“I was … sort of … planning on leaving the whole camp. But now I—”

“How old are you?”

Late bloomer.
Inside those two words are all the questions of childhood.

“Fifteen.”

“You just turned fifteen?”

I blink. When did I turn fifteen? Basic mathematical machinery is breaking down. Under Anna’s influence, time hiccups between moments and I cannot speak—

“I hear fourteen to fifteen is big for boys. Fifteen to sixteen
is big for girls. And twelve to thirteen.”

“Nine months ago,” I blurt.

“O-kay …”

“And it’s not big. Fourteen to fifteen. It’s not a big deal. It’s cool.”

“So you still feel like you did when you were fourteen?”

“No, I feel bigger.”

She gives me a look like,
You used to be smaller?
How is she painting me into these corners?

“When’s
your
birthday?” I ask. That’s it. Turn it back on her. Take the offensive.

“January twenty-sixth.”

“Aquarius.” Now we’re in my territory. “The Water Bearer.”

“I was never into signs.”

“Aquarius! The only human. All the other signs, animals; but Aquarius, a simple man. Human. Man-slash-woman, you know.”

“What about Gemini? That’s two humans.”

“They’re demigods.”

“I always thought it was dumb that there wasn’t a sign that was, like, a car.”

“The ancient Romans didn’t have cars.”

“They could have a chariot or something, no? I gotta see the nurse. See you, Perry.”

She nods. I notice how full her lips are. She walks past me, but I don’t want her to go. I want to say something to keep her here. Anything.

“Anna?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s because I play Creatures and Caverns. That’s why I know so much astrology and why I got into the fight with Ryu.” I grab the fire extinguisher to represent Ryu. “He tried to steal this pewter miniature my mom gave me. So I swung it at him, and …”

I trail off. There’s nothing else I can do, watching her face. Her smile has evaporated. In its place is disbelief and pity.

“Oh. You’re one of
those
guys.”

“Sorry. What? No. What do you mean?”

She opens the door to the nurse’s office.

“Didn’t you know I was one of those guys when I came up to you with a fire extinguisher? Hello?”

Even from behind, something about her radiates newfound disgust with and dismissal toward me. The door to the nurse’s office swings back and forth on its two-way hinge, giving me strobe-like vision of her from behind as she speaks with the nurse: “Is Dale here?”

Behind me, a rough voice says, “
Idiot!
”

I SPIN AROUND AND LOOK DOWN THE hallway, but there’s no one, just a watercooler and a poster about Lyme disease.

“Hello?”

I have the same feeling I had in Phantom Galaxy Comics and at school—the feeling I’m being watched. Only this time, whoever it is got too close. Down the hall, a door slams. The bathroom.

I run to it. The room is clean and orderly, ready for a summer of use. There’s no one in either of the stalls, but above the second one, a small window is open, letting in a light breeze. I climb up onto the toilet—

And see a ferrule running across a field away from me.

I blink. Then I squint very hard, but when I open my eyes, the person still looks the same: bright red skin, yellow hair, and a tail. Just like the ferrules in the
Other Normal Edition
—and just like Pekker Cland! His tail sticks out of the back of his pants; maybe he’s wearing them backward. It’s red with a bushy orange tuft at the end. Something is attached to it—something wooden like a wrist-mounted crossbow.

“Hey!” I yell. The ferrule turns. I get a glimpse of a sharp red face—like the devil, but I never pictured the devil looking scared. He keeps running.

I can’t say I’m unprepared for this moment. I have been praying for this moment. A lot of people probably would stop at this point and doubt themselves or wonder what they were
really
seeing or come up with some alternate explanation for a red man with a tail running away from them, but not me. I hoist myself into the bathroom window.

“Hey!”
I try to get through, cursing my Strength 2, but the truth is, if I were larger I probably wouldn’t have made it. I scrape my shoulders across the windowsill. The ferrule is almost at the trees across the field. I squeeze forward, grunting—

And fall out the window. I flip in the air and land on my ankle.
“Agh!”
It twists on the grass. Pain like fire shoots up me. I try to stand. “Hey! Please! Stop! My ankle—”

On the word
ankle
, he stops. He turns and comes back to me, running as fast as he was running the other way. I don’t want him running at me like that. I back toward the nurse’s office, on my butt on the ground, streaking grass against my pants, the way I would if I were trying to keep away from a ferocious animal—

He arrives. He doesn’t attack me. He looks me over. I focus on his face: small ears, rounded nose, all red. Yellow, messy hair. Not blond—yellow like a highlighter. He does wear jeans—backward—and a black T-shirt. I look around: no one else in the field. No witnesses. A hallucination?

“Of course it’s gotta be the ankle,” he says.

A hallucination with visual and audio components?

He sweeps me up in his thick, stubby red arms.

A hallucination with visual, audio, and somatic components?

“What are you doing? Put me down!”

“Shh.”
He tosses me over his shoulder. For a minute, I think both of us actually don’t know what to say to each other.

I HUG THE FERRULE’S BACK. HE SMELLS like iron. His body is stocky and barrelesque. By the time we get to the trees, I’m squeezing him tight, pressing my cheek against him and grinning.

“Stop that! Off!”

I shake my head, feeling his shirt bunch against my cheek. I look at his tail with the wooden trellis attached to the end. “You’re real!” It’s the iron smell that convinces me. No hallucination could smell like that. “I mean, look, I can be practical about this. A real ferrule here at camp. But you gotta give me like five minutes to just
appreciate
you or whatever—”

“Off!” He kneels. I hiss as my foot touches the forest floor. I hop to a tree. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, just be reasonable! How’s your ankle?”

I pull off my sneaker and peel down my sock. My right ankle is swollen fat and round.

“Not good. Who are you, sir?” I ask.

“We’ll get to that. First, I want you to think: if you hadn’t heard me call you an idiot—which you shouldn’t have—and followed me—which you shouldn’t have—and climbed out
that window—which you
know
was a bad idea—is it possible that you could have injured your ankle some other way today? It’s important for me to know how out of the ordinary this is for you.”

“Meeting ferrules is
very
out of the ordinary.”

“Don’t call me that. And don’t be smart. That’s how you lost Anna.”

“How do you know about Anna? Who are you? Are you the real Pekker Cland?”

“You made up Pekker Cland. My name is Mortin Enaw.”

“Mortin Enaw? You’re the guy who did special consulting on the
Other Normal Edition
!”

“Pfff.
Those guys put me in that as a joke. Don’t read into it too much.”

“Are you from the real world of Enthral Moor? Do you have a scimitar?”

“Stop.”
He goes silent. I hear the birds and bugs around us. The dirt parking lot and nurse’s office and Ryu and Anna seem very far away, and I miss my brother—briefly, in a flash, his shaggy hair and teeth. Fear creeps into the air between me and Mortin Enaw.

“I know it’s hard for you to believe, but I have my own problems.” He reaches into his backward jeans and pulls out a pipe. It has an inverted U in the middle; it looks as if it was carved from a single piece of black stone. He picks up a few pebbles from the ground—just ordinary pebbles—and puts them into the pipe. He pinches it in his mouth and scrapes
his tail against the ground. The back of the tail flares up. The thing attached to it is a
lighter
, I see, and after it strikes, a lick of flame burns steadily as he waves it over his pipe. He inhales, holds it in, and blows out … pebble dust, I guess.

“
Ahhh,
that’s the stuff.” He closes his eyes in a quick reverie and then turns to me with utmost seriousness.

“We’re working on an information discrepancy,” he says. “I know more about the multiverse than you do, so naturally you look at me with wonder, and you don’t think to yourself,
Hey, this guy might have problems too.
But I do. And my problems center around
you
, Perry Eckert. What I need you to do, the sooner the better, is find a way to have a decent romantic kiss with Anna, who you met back there.”

“Why? Is this a TV show?”

“No!”

“Is it part of a live-action role-playing game?”

“No! Do I look like a player? I’m a professional. I’m a consultant. And I’m telling you that if you can kiss Anna, just one decent romantic kiss,
you’re going to save an entire world from certain destruction
!”

“What world?
The
world?”

Mortin puffs. “My world.”

“Is your world … Enthral Moor? The world I’ve been playing with Sam?”

“Come with me. It’s easier to show you.”

“Where?”

He taps out his pipe and offers me a walking stick. “To an
inconvenient place, to go and to say. It has a name that can’t be conceptualized by human thought. You remember how Prince changed his name to a symbol?”

“The musician?”

“Right, and you know how he changed his name for a while to a symbol you can’t pronounce?”

“No.”

“He did. And my home is like that. The name can’t be pronounced, written, or conceptualized by the human brain.”

I remember Dale Blaswell’s words turning into silence as they streamed out of his head. I remember all the small times in life when I have heard things wrong, or turned around because someone called my name but no one was there, or woken up with a strange bruise.... It’s all standard, right? There are ragged edges around everyone’s life, things that can’t be remembered or explained. Even the most normal people see ghosts, hear voices....

“What am I supposed to call your home?” I ask.

“People have called it different things over the years. I grew up calling Earth the World of the Other Normals, because you people here are sort of normal, but you’re a bit ridiculous. So you can call my home the World of the Other Normals and it’ll be fair.”

“Okay.”

“And you can call me Mortin Enaw, or just Mortin, correspondence consultant. I’m based out of Subbenia, with the Sulice Corporation.”

“And I’m Perry. Which you seem to know. I’m a student … ah … based out of Manhattan or Brooklyn, depending on whether I’m with my dad or my mom, with no corporation. And no friends. I had one friend, Sam, but he doesn’t seem to like me anymore.”

“Don’t say that. I’m your friend.”

“Really?”

“Yes, and don’t complain to me. You have nothing to complain about, with your mind and your rich parents.”

“My parents aren’t rich!”

“No? What are they?”