100 Sideways Miles

by Andrew Smith

  Here I come, Caballito!

  One hundred sideways miles, Finn, and splat!

  Was it a horse?

  Everything waved lazily, the fluttering fingers of sea anemones fanned by back-and-forth warm-water currents.

  It was all so beautiful, and in a moment none of it had a name.

  If you could feel every atom in your body simultaneously release its grip on its neighbors, expand outward so that each particle becomes a new center in the universe, it would feel exactly like this.

  Twenty miles per second, twenty miles per second.

  GOING HOME

  Later, when I came back together, Julia told me that I had blanked out for about eighty-four-thousand miles—seventy minutes or so.

  It was a long and quiet trip.

  Somehow I’d ended up on my back, because I found myself staring straight up at all the junk floating in the sky.

  Here is another thing about my seizures: Coming back hurts. It hurts a hell of a lot.

  As usual, I was very mad.

  Look: I lay there, eyes fixed open on the net above me, wondering what it was, marveling at the beautiful honeycomb pattern of narrow lines. It looked like I was staring into the compound lens on the eye of an insect. The sideways horse no longer floated above me—it could not have been there in the first place—but I still didn’t have words for the things I saw suspended in the air beneath the third tier.

  Words come back so slowly. It is always like that.

  Julia and Cade kneeled over me. Cade pressed something soft against the side of my head. It stung.

  “Get the fuck off me,” I said.

  I was never very nice at times like this.

  Laika had curled up between my hand and my hip, waiting for me to come back, like she always did when I blanked out.

  Laika was a very patient dog.

  “Where the fuck did you go?” I said.

  Cade shook his head. “Where did you go? There’s no signal in here. I tried to call your dad.”

  “Stupid. Don’t do that.”

  Cade Hernandez shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, dude. No signal.”

  “Uh.”

  I stared and stared. Desk. Chair. Pants. Paper.

  Two shadow puppets: The boy on my baseball team and my girlfriend.

  Cade Hernandez. Left-handed pitcher.

  Julia Bishop.

  Twenty miles.

  Twenty miles.

  Everything hurt so much. My head pounded, and all down my spine it felt as though my bones had been churned to broken shards of glass.

  I said, “I’m okay.”

  Slowly, I became aware that I had legs, feet, hands. They shook, just like you would shiver if you were submerged in icy water, but I knew it wasn’t cold.

  I wondered if I pissed myself.

  I couldn’t move my hand to check if my shorts were wet. My arms were not connected yet. But I was thinly comforted by the foggy memory of having pissed into an old concrete toilet with Cade Hernandez in what looked like a demolished locker room.

  Was any of it real?

  I stared at Julia. I tried to see if there was something she could tell me with her eyes—if I was okay, or if I’d pissed myself again, or maybe I was lying there with a goddamned hard-on pitching a circus big top in my shorts. I could see Julia Bishop was scared about something.

  Cade pressed and pressed his hand against the side of my head.

  “You cut your head,” he said.

  “Fuck that.”

  I felt my fingers rake through the greasy spines of Laika’s fur.

  “Is it bad?” I asked.

  Cade pulled his fingers away and leaned in closer. He said, “I don’t know. You probably need stitches.”

  I watched a bead of sweat roll downward from Cade’s armpit and turn along the curve of his chest. It was Cade’s own shirt he used to press against the cut, which was just at the base of my skull behind my right ear. I could tell it was Cade’s shirt; I could smell his atoms on it.

  “No fucking way am I going to get stitches,” I said.

  I swore an awful lot after seizures.

  I was always so rebellious whenever I came back from my trips. Nobody likes coming back from vacation, right? But I didn’t want my father to find out, which is what would happen if I ended up in some emergency room getting my head sewn shut.

  Then I said, “Where the fuck are we, Cade?”

  Cade Hernandez turned away from me. I could hear him spit a big stream of tobacco juice down onto the dirty concrete.

  Splat!

  I shivered and shivered.

  • • •

  After a seizure, I usually need to sleep for twelve hours or so, just to give my atoms a chance to settle in and hold hands again like good neighbors.

  It wasn’t going to happen this time.

  Cade examined the cut on my head one more time. He said, “It looks like it stopped bleeding.”

  “Sorry about your shirt.”

  “No worries,” Cade said. He winked at me.

  Cade Hernandez stood up and then kicked his way through the garbage on the floor, down the corridor toward the toilets.

  “Toilet paper,” Cade said. “Got to find stuff to use for toilet paper. Pooing without toilet paper is fucking ridiculous.”

  Cade Hernandez was gone for about fifteen minutes—eighteen-thousand miles.

  And we heard him scream.

  Clearly, it was a case of Cade being Cade.

  By the time he came back, Julia had helped me sit up with my back propped against a cell door. I was groggy.

  “It sounded like you were dying in there,” I said.

  “Dude, it was like having twins. Ridiculous.”

  That was Cade Hernandez.

  We had to get back to Burnt Mill Creek. Cade was scheduled to work that night at Flat Face Pizza.

  • • •

  The walk back was slow and difficult for me, but I wouldn’t say anything about it to Cade and Julia.

  We had torn a square of fabric out of Cade’s T-shirt, and I kept my hand pressed against it until the blood dried and the cloth bandage stuck to my head. It was going to be a real bitch getting that thing off.

  Before we left, Cade Hernandez threw what was left of his bloody shirt down in the trash at Aberdeen Lake State Penitentiary. Who wants to wear a shirt soaked in some other kid’s blood?

  I offered to give him my own T-shirt, but he said no because he couldn’t think up anything new to name my emoticon scar.

  I conceded that two names in one day would be expecting a little too much, even from a left-handed artistic genius like Cade Hernandez.

  He let Julia and me sit together in the backseat for the ride home to Burnt Mill Creek, and told me I should take a shower at his house so my mom and dad wouldn’t—in his words—think I looked like such a fucking bloody mess.

  “Thanks, Cade,” I said. “Maybe I will hang out with you at Flat Face tonight.”

  I didn’t want to go home.

  I thought I’d be able to sleep in the car, but all the words that had come back swirled with nervous worry inside me. Everything was changing; I was afraid to make the wrong decision about choices in the miles ahead of me. It was like Cade Hernandez’s roller-coaster waiting line: Here I was at the front, uncertain about whether or not I’d get on board. I leaned my head against Julia Bishop’s perfect shoulder.

  As we wound south through the canyon toward Julia’s house, the sun dipped down and the shadows of the mountains stretched their cloaks across the snaking roadway.

  And Julia Bishop said this: “I am not going back to school next month.”

  “What?”

  Cade said, “Are you dropping out?”

  She said, “I’m going back home.”

  “Yeah,” Cade answered, “it’s about four miles that way.”

  “What?” I said again.

  “I didn’t know when to tell you,” Julia said. “My parents want me to come home. Back to Chicago.”
/>
  If I was ever the kind of guy who punched things, I would have put my fist through something—anything—maybe Cade’s window. But I’m not the kind of guy who punches things. I’m the kind of guy who sucks all his shitty life inside his personal black hole and pretends everything is perfectly fine.

  Twenty miles.

  Twenty miles.

  I wanted to say something, but I was afraid my voice would crack like a little kid who just had his milk money swiped by some asshole like Blake Grunwald.

  Twenty miles.

  And I asked her, “What do you want to do?”

  And it wasn’t me, it was Julia Bishop, who began to cry. She leaned her forehead against the side window. She squeezed my hand in her lap.

  “I don’t know, Finn. I miss my mom and dad. My home.”

  I said, “Oh.”

  There’s no balancing shit like that. Part of me knew what was right for Julia. Part of me allowed myself to feel cheated, like I was being robbed again—and look out, kid, here comes another fucking falling horse.

  Julia Bishop said, “I have to leave Tuesday.”

  And Cade Hernandez told us, “What a pair of fucking downers you two are.”

  PART 3

  THE PLANET OF HUMANS AND DOGS

  THE SLOWPOKE MOON

  The planet of humans and dogs spins and sails, spins and sails. There is nothing I can do about it. Things keep moving. The knackery never shuts down.

  Julia Bishop left Burnt Mill Creek.

  • • •

  Laika and I crossed the dry creekbed of San Francisquito Canyon to say good-bye to her on the morning her aunt and uncle drove Julia to the airport in Los Angeles.

  “You look nice,” I said when she appeared, dreamy and floating like she always seemed, framed within the front door.

  “Thank you,” Julia said. “I don’t think you’ve ever told me that before.”

  “I’m sorry for not saying it sooner than now.”

  My voice cracked. I felt terrible.

  Then I said, “Julia Bishop, you are without a doubt the most beautiful girl I have ever seen in the eleven billion miles of my life, and will ever see, no matter how many billions of miles I have to go before the knackery takes me back too.”

  Julia smiled and looked down at my feet. I was wearing the socks with the sharks on them.

  “I have to leave in twenty minutes,” she said.

  I calculated the distance.

  “Want to take a walk for, like, twenty-four-thousand miles or so?”

  Julia sighed. “What am I going to do without you, Finn?”

  “How can I answer that? I won’t be able to ever know what you are going to do without me, Julia, because we are going in different directions.”

  She held my hand. We walked through the rock garden where we sat together on the night of the perigee moon, and out into the canyon bed as the sun peeked over the rim.

  Laika, no doubt sensing something was about to die, stayed at my feet.

  On summer mornings at sunup, San Francisquito Canyon is one of the most perfect places on the planet of humans and dogs.

  Look: In my father’s novel, The Lazarus Door, incomers named Earth the planet of humans and dogs because they liked keeping dogs as pets, but they liked human beings as entrees.

  “I wish we could go twenty-four thousand miles away,” I said.

  “Where would that be?”

  “One-tenth the distance to the slowpoke moon.”

  “Probably not a good idea if we plan on breathing and stuff.”

  “Probably not.”

  Julia sighed. “Finn, we’ll still be—”

  She didn’t know what to say.

  “We will still be, Julia.”

  Across the creek from Julia’s house, where the old washed-out road lay in crumbled chunks, stood a concrete abutment that once served as an overpass to the floodwaters of winter and spring.

  “This canyon is nothing but a knackery, and now it is pulling us apart too. It never shuts down, does it?”

  “What can I say, Finn? It’s time for me to go home.”

  We kissed. I held Julia’s face in my hands and wiped the wet at the corners of her eyes with my thumbs.

  I said, “In books—sometimes the corny ones—it’s always love conquers all, and waiting faithfully forever, but that kind of stuff is stupid when you know you’re just going to have to go on and do what you’re going to do. Because we will still be, won’t we? But it would be a good book to be stuck in, I think.”

  “Everyone likes those kinds of endings, don’t they? We’ll see each other again. I know we will,” Julia said. “We will always remember this. How could you forget me?”

  “You need to tell me how it ends—if I can ever get out of the book.”

  “I don’t know the ending. It’s something you have to write for yourself. Don’t you get it? You have to open the doors. There’s nobody else who’s going to do it for you.”

  “Sure thing.”

  I couldn’t say anything else.

  We walked back to her house.

  I thought I would cry; I was afraid I’d act like a baby in front of Julia and her family, but in the end I held it in perfectly and walked back home and shut myself inside my room.

  I was alone again.

  • • •

  Look: The incomers—the real aliens, not me—in my father’s book had the ability to produce vibrational waves that targeted a specific region inside the brains of their human victims. This part of the brain, called Wernicke’s area, is the part that “hears” and decodes language. When it gets stimulated, there is no difference between actually hearing language and only imagining you’re hearing it, which is why so many starry-eyed religious human beings believed the fallen angel–cannibal aliens were actually messengers from God, as opposed to hungry freeloaders.

  Imagine that.

  It’s a very long book. It also made some people insane with anger.

  I mean, what if messengers from God actually did want to eat you? Most people would be okay with that; I mean, those famished angels being sent from God and all.

  So when the incomers stimulated all those Wernicke’s areas, people heard all sorts of nutty things and assumed it was the actual Voice of God delivering absurd orders that eventually got recorded as unarguable law in holy books like the Bible—things like: Don’t wear clothes made from more than one kind of fabric, and If a man has sex with a woman during her period, they must be quarantined from the people until you burn a turtledove or a pigeon, and If you are wounded in the testicles, your penis should be cut off.

  That last one was terrifying to me.

  I also wondered how—or why—you would set a poor bird on fire.

  But my favorite message from God in Dad’s science fiction novel was this: Lie down and let me eat you.

  Amen.

  • • •

  Everyone knew something was wrong with me. When Julia went home to Chicago, I stopped trying to fool people with my pretense of being okay.

  I was filled with a winter storm of sorrow and rage, and I needed someone to blame.

  After she left, I stayed in my room for about four million miles—two days—with the shades drawn and my phone turned off. I didn’t want to see anything; didn’t want to talk to anybody. I’d even listen at the door to make sure I could sneak out of my room to take a piss and drink some faucet water once in a while and not have to look at anyone else in my family. I’d pretend to be asleep whenever Mom called up the stairs, telling me to come to dinner.

  I was pathetic.

  But my misery wasn’t a secret to anyone; there was no mystery to be solved at all. The epileptic boy had a broken heart, and it was no big deal to anyone else on the planet of humans and dogs.

  At least, not until Dad got tired of my behavior.

  On Thursday morning at eleven o’clock, he came into my room.

  Hello, gasoline! said Mr. Lit Match.

  I was still in bed, a mess.
I hadn’t showered or put on clean clothes in the millions of miles since I said good-bye to Julia Bishop.

  Dad went straight to my window, pulled the blinds back, and opened it.

  It was like I’d been unearthed from a coal mine after being trapped for days and days.

  “It stinks in here.”

  There was a definite edge to my father’s voice.

  “Sorry.”

  Dad put his hand on my shoulder and shook me.

  “You need to get up, Finn. I’m not going to let you stay in here like this any longer. Cade’s waiting downstairs, and I exhausted all possible topics of conversation with him back when he was about twelve years old.”

  Cade Hernandez and I were supposed to leave for our college trip on Friday, the next day. That was the plan.

  Not feeling any particular need to be nice to anyone, I said, “Why do you hate him?”

  Dad said, “Because he is exactly everything I do not want you to be.”

  Then he pulled the covers off me. The only thing I had on was a pair of briefs—the free ones we got from Governor Altvatter after Cade Hernandez fixed Burnt Mill Creek High School’s BEST Test scores.

  We were the smartest junior class in the galaxy!

  Cade Hernandez was a god, and I owed him my underwear.

  I sat up and hung my feet over the edge of the upper bunk.

  “Oh. What do you want me to be, Dad? Why don’t you just map it out for everyone to see in your next book, and that will be me?”

  I caught my dad’s eyes. He looked like I’d punched him. It was the meanest thing I’d ever said to my father in my life, but I wasn’t about to stop myself from going a step farther. I told him this: “Why don’t you leave me the fuck alone?”

  It felt like I’d been holding in twelve billion gallons behind the sutures of my Lazarus Door scar. It was time to set them free.

  I hadn’t noticed Tracy—Mom—was standing in the doorway, listening to us. She carried a tray with breakfast for me.

  She said, “You should be ashamed of yourself, Finn.”

  I was.

  Dad had a sickened expression, as though he’d finally lost what he couldn’t stand to lose. He went to my door and told Mom to go, that he wanted to talk to me alone. Then he shut my door.