by Ned Vizzini
“Anna? Pe. Re. Grine. Nurse. We talk. Good?”
“What?”
Get ahold of yourself, I think. I picture Ada watching me, telling me not to be a perv. I picture her: blue hair, long fingers, body made of wind. My eyes migrate to Anna’s face. They stay there. That’s better.
“Can you talk to me like a normal person now?”
“Yeah, sorry, this music. Distracting! So, did we talk earlier today?”
“Uh … Perry, right?”
“Peregrine, if you don’t mind.”
“Whatever. You don’t remember if we talked or not?”
“I think we did, I just wanted to make sure—”
“We did. I guess I left a big impression on you.”
“No, no, you did! I just went through a lot of crap since then.”
“Crap like amnesia?”
“Just … adventures.”
She sips her punch. “The first day of camp is complicated. You have to work out your scene, try and figure who your friends are....”
“Avoid celates, escape from jail …”
“What?”
“You two! No funny business!” Miss K says. Behind her/him, I see through the kitchen door into the dark innards of the dining hall. I imagine what it will be like tomorrow at breakfast—hissing, clanking, cooks running around.... My brain is working again now that I’m looking at Anna’s face. I remember Ada’s advice: don’t talk about Creatures & Caverns.
“How’s your knitting going? Still working on the mittens?”
“Of course! I told you it taught you patience. How would it teach you patience if I was already doing something else?”
“Sorry.”
“You seriously apologize too much, Perry. Peregrine. Whatever.”
“Okay, let’s try something. Let’s try me not apologizing to you anymore in this conversation.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. If I say sorry again, it’s over.”
“Deal.”
Something weighs on my mind. I have to clear it up. It violates Ada’s advice, but not precisely. “Earlier, when we were talking, Anna, did I … uh … mention a ‘role-playing game’ called Creatures and Caverns? I’m not mentioning it now, I’m just asking if I mentioned it then.”
“No. I’d remember that, and I probably wouldn’t be talking to you now.” She laughs. I make myself laugh with her.
“What did we talk about, then?”
“Knitting. The fight you were in. Ryu. Did he come after you yet?”
“We had some words.”
“You better watch your back. Where you from, anyway?”
“New York. Born in Manhattan, but after my parents got divorced, I moved around a lot between there and Brooklyn.”
“You rich?”
“We’re—I don’t know, I thought we were normal. But maybe we are rich. Rich people never say they’re rich.”
“Why’d your parents send you here?”
“I think it was an experiment. To see how I deal with the real world. Help me be a man. You know.”
“Not really.”
This isn’t what I expected. I figured I would either like Anna and find it easy to kiss her, or hate her and find kissing her repugnant. I didn’t expect this middle ground, where some of what she says is okay, but some of it makes me feel like an idiot. I ask, “Where are you from?”
“Spring Creek. Brooklyn.”
“That near Flatlands?”
“Yeah! You know it?”
“I have a friend from Flatlands. Well, kinda. He’s here. He lent me these clothes.”
She eyes my outfit. “I’m not sure he’s your friend.”
“He is! He’s been acting weird, though. Avoiding me.”
“People do that. What, he was your friend at home, but now he’s treating you bad? Girls do that the worst.”
“How do you handle it?”
“Just be straightforward about what you want. Don’t waste time with knuckleheads. Say what’s on your mind.”
“You know what’s on my mind?”
“Do I want to?”
Compliment her. “Your posture. You have great posture. How’d you get it?”
“My mother.” Anna laughs. “She always told me, ‘Stand up straight, you don’t know when you’re gonna meet the president.’”
“My mother’s lawyer sent me to classes for ballroom dance once.”
“Her lawyer?”
“Uh, her, I mean. Her.”
“Uh-huh. And that’s relevant because …”
“I just figured, I don’t know, weird things our moms made us do. I didn’t want to go. But the ballroom dance classes gave me increased leg strength, I now realize, which may have enabled me to survive when I was … anyway. Did you ever get to meet the president?”
“Not yet.”
“You will. You have that look about you. You look important. You are important. I know that for a fact.”
“You need to move away from the punch bowl so other people can get punch!” Miss K orders.
“Right, sorry.” I reach out to pull Anna aside, but she’s gone. She’s off on the dance floor on her own.
55
“WAIT!” I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE PROBLEM is. I thought things were going well!
“No,” Anna says. “You said you weren’t going to apologize anymore.”
“I wasn’t apologizing to you. I was apologizing to … them!” I point at Miss K.
“It doesn’t matter.” Anna looks at her watch. “I think you’re a very nice person.” I get the impression she’s delivered this speech before. “If we had unlimited time, I could talk to you about Caves and Creatures or whatever and posture and ballroom dance. But tonight is one of the only times that I’m going to get a chance to talk to the men at this camp, okay? And I want to talk to the ones who are going to act like men, as opposed to little boys.”
I thought it hurt when Ryu punched me. I thought it hurt when Ada spurned me as I tried to kiss her. Nothing compares to how I feel as Anna nods bye and joins her glittering friends to dance. Then she doesn’t even stay with them: she keeps going across the floor to Dale Blaswell and says hi to him, like they’re old friends, and he says something that makes her laugh, and she nods at me like, Isn’t it weird to have him as a camper? and he nods like, Yes.
So many times, in movies and books about growing up, I’ve been told that it’s silly to fear rejection. Rejection is all in your head, right? You have to be brave, to act without fear, to push rejection aside; in the rare cases where it happens, it isn’t ugly or debilitating so much as world-weary and funny. Right?
Not for me. First, Anna’s rejection isn’t only in my head—it’s paramount in the World of the Other Normals, where now the princess is going to remain firmly in the clutches of Ophisa. More importantly, it’s based on a false assumption: I’m not a man? Excuse me?
Anna has no idea about the things I’ve done. She doesn’t know I’m practically a hero. A whirlwind of pain and action-spurring psychosis cycles through me. I know I shouldn’t do what I do next, but I do it.
I clench my fists and yell, “Anna!” She turns from her conversation with Dale. She looks at me as if I’m a homeless guy trying to get money from her, and that makes me even more insane.
“I am a man! See?” I unbutton my pants. They drop in one swift motion; they’re big enough to fall off like a robe. I tug down my tighty-whities. Anna gasps. Dale flares his nostrils. I stand ten feet from them with the disco ball shedding its square-inflected light on my lone pubic hair. “That’s new today! That’s for real!”
Anna covers her face with both hands. Another girl sees me and shrieks. Another laughs. The music stops. DJ Cowboy Pete looks at me openmouthed and says into his mic, “Ah, I think one of our li’l partners is having trouble. Counselor, please?” Miss K screams, “Pull your pants up, what’s wrong with you!” Ken strides toward me. The inspector counselor from the parking lot, Travis, raises his arms at me across the room like
, What? Sam looks at a wall so he won’t have to look at me. Ryu points and chortles. Dale Blaswell screams, “Put that away!”
The world, which froze for a moment to allow me to collect all these observations as my heart plummeted into my pelvis, snaps back into action. I pull up my pants and run.
56
I BARREL OUT OF THE DINING HALL AND speed across the parking lot. My various injuries hurt, but it’s nothing compared to the shame that beats through me. I’m truly worthless now; my life is over. I’ve heard people say “my life is over” after doing something socially horrific, but they probably didn’t expose themselves in the middle of a dance floor on the first day of summer camp. The dining-hall door bangs open behind me. I steal a glance: Dale.
“Get back here! Peregrine! You’ve made a mockery of Oasis Village! I’ll kill you! You can’t avoid the consequences of an action like this!”
Like hell I can’t. I know exactly how to avoid all the consequences of an action exactly like this. In front of me are the dark woods, which I’d have been scared of yesterday, but now I understand that the things that really undo a person aren’t in the woods; they wear dresses and dance with their friends.
I look back at the dining hall as I take off my shoes. Dale runs after me; Ken appears behind him, talking to Sam, who looks like he’s trying to explain that I haven’t been myself lately. I throw my shoes at Dale. He bats them away. I take off toward the woods with bare feet.
Crack! I try to step on roots and rocks, but sometimes a branch looks like a root. I don’t worry about it. I only have so much time. If Dale catches me, I’ll be taken to a psychiatrist, who will order me sent home and put into special exhibitionist therapy. Indecent exposure—isn’t that a crime? I picture myself in jail. I’ve already been in jail, but that doesn’t make human jail any more appetizing. My ankle burns. I grit my teeth. What I did back there was wrong; what I am doing now is pure and right.
The noises of nighttime birds and bugs are overtaken by my huffing breath. South of the dining hall is the nurse’s office. I get there in five minutes, although time seems to mean something different when the world consists of me and my footsteps and my breath in the forest. I find a branch that I snapped to demarcate the path back to the mushroom patch. See, Anna? See, Ada? See, everybody, anybody, how competent I am?
I follow the trail I left in the woods. At each tree with a broken branch, I stop and spy the next. I move with clarity and purpose, checking over my shoulder for pursuers. I hear noises—someone is clomping around after me; from the heavy tread it sounds like Dale, but whoever it is, they’re far away. It doesn’t take me long to find the patch of mushrooms and the Logo Spermatikoi battery.
I take off Sam’s clothes and leave them daintily folded at the side of the tree. I unscrew the caps on the battery and touch the lead marked negative. This is like an escape hatch from a bad dream. How does it work? You go toward what you’re picturing in your head. So if I picture the thakerak chamber I arrived at before, I might pop back into a room with Officer Tendrile and his men trying to kill me. Maybe I can picture a person—Ada. Wherever she is, that’s where I want to be. I can explain to her what I did, and maybe she’ll understand. I try my best not to picture her—her pointed ears and sparkling nails—so of course I do. There’s still pain, but this time, while the halos move up my legs and the trees explode in light, my dominant emotion is relief as I speed back into
THE
WORLD
OF THE
OTHER
NORMALS
57
I REAPPEAR IN A DARK ROOM—THE ONLY light comes from the sparking thakerak on the floor. I stumble away as the itching roars into my body. I reach a wall. It’s curved, so if I feel along it, I should find … there. A springy sack on a shelf.
I hold the hepatode bag to my chest. It sucks all the itching out of me. I groan in relief, throw it aside, and grab a getma off another shelf.
“Hello?” No one. I’m still in near-total darkness. I don’t think I’m in the same thakerak chamber as before; in addition to there being no light, there aren’t any signs of a struggle, no splintered wood on the floor, no Ryu.... I feel along the wall until I find a door. I push it open.
A bare corridor stretches in front of me, with another door at the end. Light and voices leak through the bottom of it. The light looks lively, chromed … sunlight? Am I above ground? The walls are wood, not rock, so maybe. What a relief. I head toward the door. I hope Ada’s on the other side. It’d be cool if she had been in the chamber waiting for me, but of course she has better things to do. Maybe the way it works is that you come out of the thakerak closest to the person you’re picturing. I reach the end of the corridor, push the door open, and enter my first bar.
58
I THINK IT’S WHAT YOU CALL A DIVE BAR. The windows have cracked shutters that support sedimentary deposits of dirt. The sunlight that gets in illuminates dancing filth that circulates up from the floor, which is covered with sawdust. The tables and chairs are mismatched and of widely disparate size. The clientele is a sparse and depressed-looking collection of other normals. At some tables, ferrous ones who look like Mortin sit next to okapicentaurs who lie on the ground like horses, sipping from giant beer steins. At others, attenuates who look like Ada huddle over glasses. The space is huge; the bar that runs across the front is as long as the ticket counters in airports. There’s only one person behind it: an other normal like Mortin, with long yellow hair and red skin, chatting with a faun.
“Who’s that?”
“Human in the bar!”
“What are you doing here?”
I stammer and gesticulate. This doesn’t look good.
“Ah … Ada Ember?” I manage, and then the front door slams open and Gamary rushes in.
He has Ada on his back. He has Mortin on his back! I’m so happy to see them that I forget everything and run to them. I fling my arms first around Gamary’s hairy torso; then Ada and Mortin hop off and I hug them, too, tight, clapping their backs, crying a little because they are real and they are friends.
“Whoa, whoa!” Mortin says. “How’d you get here, buddy?”
“Who is he?” a faun at the bar calls out.
“Don’t worry about him, he’s with me, okay? He’s part of a correspondence experiment fully approved by the Appointees; he has just as much right to be here as you.”
“Mortin! I thought you were in jail! Where are we?”
“Shhh. You’re in a bar called the Monard. Keep quiet.” He has sweat and dirt on his face. A black eye, too, just like the one I would have gotten from Ryu if I hadn’t been given an ice pack. I remember how when I came over before, I caught him putting on what I thought was sunscreen under his eye.
“Did you just break out of prison?”
“Yes, and if you don’t keep quiet, I’m going right back in. Let’s get a drink.”
“Why are we getting a drink if you just—”
“Haven’t you ever heard of hiding in plain sight?”
I put on a straight face. We approach the bar. The bartender with the long hair cleans out a glass with a rag and eyes us suspiciously.
“Leidan!” Mortin says. “How’s it going? Can you do a round on the house for your brother?”
59
AS SOON AS HE SAYS IT, I SEE THE resemblance. The bartender, Leidan, has the same small ears and Hollywood button nose as Mortin. His eyes sparkle with similar grievances, but Leidan’s are hidden behind a glassy film. He moves slowly, like he knows it’s his bar and couldn’t care less. “I hear you’re in trouble again,” he says, wiping his mouth.
“Everything’s fine.”
“You mean that door isn’t gonna fling open with officers looking for you?”
Mortin shrugs. “That’s always a possibility.”
“You got a reward on you?”
“Hey, Bro.” Mortin grabs Leidan’s hair. “I’ve just been in Granger and I come to the one place I think might be safe, and you’re alrea
dy trying to turn me in?”
“Off the hair, please.” Leidan steps back. The drinkers watch us. One spits on the floor, and the sawdust soaks it up. I wonder if all bars are this tense and depressing and, if so, why anybody goes.
“Why haven’t you tried to see me?” Mortin asks.
“Been working.”
“Been drinking, more like.”
“Least I haven’t been smoking earthpebbles like you. You gonna introduce me to your new friend, or does he just like to hang back and spy on conversations?”
“Sorry, I’m … ah …”
“Don’t worry. I know. You’re a traveler.”
I nod.
“Leidan Enaw,” the bartender says. As we shake, he smiles. It’s the kind of natural smile that glossy magazines like. He nods to Ada. “And who’s this, your girlfriend?”
“No!” I say, like it’s an accusation.
“Why not?” He leans in. I smell liquor on his breath. “Ada’s a real catch. Not that I think that way.”
“Of course you think that way, Leidan,” she says. “You have more girlfriends than customers.”
“I don’t like to think in terms of numbers. Gamary, how you holding up?”
Gamary indicates the bandages around his midsection. “I’ve been better.”
“Hey!” a centaur yells. He’s sitting down the bar with a red-skinned female other normal. “Some service here?”
“Hold your horse.”
Leidan slowly pours beers for Mortin and Gamary. He gives me and Ada water. After he takes the centaur’s order, he concocts an alchemical mix of liquids from five bottles and tops it off with a dash of clumped white dairy product. He serves the drink in a bowl; the centaur and his date take turns lapping it up like dogs.
“So what are you doing back?” Ada whispers. “Did you kiss Anna?”
“He didn’t kiss Anna,” Mortin says. “If he kissed Anna, the princess would be free, everyone here would be celebrating, and we’d have our much-promised return to normalcy. He didn’t kiss anybody.”
