The Green Man

by Ellen Datlow

  It’s a really good temporary, though.

  How can you do something so crappy to your kid as to move her to a new school in spring of junior year? I guess the Marines don’t exactly ask first, but wasn’t there an aunt she could have stayed with?

  Naturally, Ms. G. stood her up in front of the class and introduced her, as if this were third grade. I don’t remember her name—I was too busy feeling sorry for her, and being mad at myself for wasting time feeling sorry for her.

  She looked like David Bowie dressed up like Audrey Hep-burn. Little black sheath dress, bangle bracelets, big sunglasses pushed up into her hair, which was white-blonde and short and stuck up. Fishnet stockings (tramp!) and Converse hi-tops (weirdo!). She looked out over the rest of us with these huge round brown eyes, like a deer who has no idea that that thing in your hands is a shotgun.

  Sure enough, when the bell rang, Randy Nesterhoff sauntered up to where New Girl was stuffing her books into the biggest purse in the world. “Man, you don’t have any tits at all, do you?” he said. His buddies snickered behind him.

  She looked up and kind of blinked her eyes wider—it’s not easy to describe. “Neither do you,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, I’m a guy.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “You are?” She shouldered the monster purse and walked out. Randy’s crew laughed and Randy turned purple.

  Me, I was revising my opinions about deer.

  The second incident, at lunch, was even more interesting. Amber and Piper had set up the ballot box for Junior Formal king and queen at the end of the cafeteria line, so there was no dodging it.

  “Did you vote yet, Beth?” Amber cooed as I went by with my tray. The way she asked made it a joke. Only not funny.

  “You should vote for yourself,” Piper added. “Then at least you’d get a vote.”

  Somebody behind me said, “What was your name again? Piper?”

  I had to turn and look. It was New Girl.

  Piper opened her mouth, but New Girl finished, “No, I must have misheard. I mean, you’re a girl, not a light plane.”

  For a second, I adored New Girl. Then she turned to me and said, “And you don’t look like a Beth.”

  It’s one thing to step into the searchlight yourself. Dragging someone else in with you is rude. “My parents couldn’t spell ‘Goddess,’” I said, and bolted for the table where Janelle and Barb were sitting.

  They asked me about New Girl. God knows, they couldn’t help but notice her. I just said she was in my English class.

  But I thought about it for a long time. New Girl is an equal-opportunity insulter: Randy the townie and Piper the officer’s brat both got a faceful. She doesn’t care if she sticks out like the proverbial thumb, and she has no clue about the class structure.

  Obviously, Dead Chick Walking.

  I don’t know how to tell this. I don’t even know if it happened. But if it didn’t happen, what did?

  I’m really careful about what I drink at a rave. Beer out of a bottle, watch it being opened, then don’t let the bottle out of my sight. Keg beer, watch the cup all the way from the tap to my hand, and then don’t let the cup out of my sight. Never hard liquor, because the bottle stays open too long. What did I say earlier about only being selectively stupid? You never know when somebody’ll decide to spring enlightenment on you unannounced.

  I have to cover that because that’s the first thing you’d think—it’s still what I think, except I know it can’t be true. Unless I drank so much that I don’t remember being stupid—eating a brownie or drinking out of someone’s canteen. But I wouldn’t do that. I’m always careful.

  Okay, this is making me cry. And the tears really sting, which makes me feel sorry for myself, so I want to cry even more. Stupid, stupid, stupid. But I feel like I was abducted by aliens or something, as if there was a piece of my life when I lay bare-assed under a big light and everyone stared at me only I can’t remember it. Instead there’s this thing I do remember that can’t have happened.

  Must not be crying next time Mom comes in.

  Mom stayed home from work to take care of me. She hasn’t done that since I was in third grade. She’s taking the emergency room nurse’s instructions pretty seriously. She pops in to check the Gatorade level in my glass, and no matter how much I’ve drunk, she makes me drink more, and then she refills it. You’d think I’d be peeing like a horse. Shows how dried-out I am.

  She came in when I was writing. I told her this was homework. That was the first time she sounded pissed off since it happened. She said, “The school won’t expect you to do your damn homework with your brains cooked out.” I remember it exactly because I liked the image. My skull like a busted pressure cooker, and all my nutritious brains coming out like steam.

  I wouldn’t hurt as much if I’d lie still, but if I don’t write this, I think it instead, and it goes round and round until it’s a little brain tornado. At least if I write it down, it seems like it goes in a straight line. And on one of these Gatorade runs, Mom will tell me to quit or else, so I want to do as much as I can before then.

  She was so scared in the emergency room.

  It was a great party Until. Riding there with my arms around Bob’s waist—I feel stupid about it now, but I thought, Tonight he’ll see me dancing, and he’ll be really into me. We’ll dance together like Belle and the Beast, alone in the desert and as the sun comes up he’ll kiss me. It makes me feel crappy just to write it, but I have to.

  We got to the last set of coordinates, which turned out to be an alley between two long rockpiles, and followed the line of tiki torches stuck in the rock cracks over our heads. At the end of the alley I could feel the space open up, as if there wasn’t anything for my body’s sonar to ping off of. The sky was like a black sequined dress—no moon, but all the stars in the universe, gathered to watch.

  The party was marked off by a huge circle of torches ten feet high. Outside the circle, I couldn’t see a thing. I knew there was a lot of there out in the dark, but I couldn’t tell if the desert went up or down on either side, or just lay flat forever. The DJ stand was at one end of the circle, with its red work lights and secret movements—not whole people, just parts moving in and out of the light. There must have been a hundred people in the circle, being restless and noisy.

  We stepped out of the alley and an organ chord swelled up from everywhere. The whole circle went dead quiet. It was like the party had been waiting for us.

  Bob went to find the beer. I wanted to follow him, but that chord began to throb, right in time to my heart. I ran toward the torches. The chord turned into the intro to an old Prince song, with the DJ scratching it so it had a new rhythm. Then he let the song go.

  I let me go. I was sweating like a hog in about a minute, when he started cross-fading between Prince and the Ramones. Someone near me started to laugh, as if they’d got a joke.

  He spun up some Moby after that, and I danced till my legs felt wobbly. Then I found the kegs and got a big red plastic cup of beer. It was thin and acidy, but it was like cold lemonade after dancing. I chugged it.

  I like remembering the beginning of the night. I just want to write about dancing and getting my buzz on, and the cool things I saw in the circle. I did see cool things, like the woman who’d glued rhinestones to her arms and chest and face in patterns until she was one shining diagram, and the guy who’d smeared the stuff inside the Cyalume Light Sticks on his hands and was drawing patterns in the dark as he danced. There were a bunch of people in masks made of leaves and feathers, dancing together, and when the torchlight shone in their eyes, it was like seeing a coyote watching you through the bushes. They were cool enough that I figured they’d come in from L.A.

  I danced and drank until I didn’t feel either cool or uncool. The point wasn’t see-and-be-seen. The point was to be there, part of this mob in the dark. I felt as if I had to be there, or there’d be a break in the circuit, that the juice wouldn’t flow. If I stopped dancing, there’d be a rolli
ng blackout. If I stopped dancing, even the DJ wouldn’t be able to mix. I was invisible, unnoticed, but connected and necessary.

  But I did stop dancing, didn’t I?

  I went for beer—and there was Bob. He was shiny in the torchlight, and his shirt was unbuttoned. He looked like a big, sweaty romance novel cover. “Beth,” he said. “You look way hot.”

  I pretty much stopped breathing. “So do you.”

  “Yeah.” He grinned and flapped his shirt. He meant temperature-hot. I replayed the conversation—okay, then so did I.

  “You know, I really like you,” he added.

  I was drinking beer. It slopped over my upper lip, down my chin, and onto my tank top. “I like you, too,” I got out past the back of my hand as I wiped my face.

  “I like that shirt. You should wear more clothes like that.”

  It was just a tank top. I wanted him to like me, not my clothes.

  “You should wear it without a bra, though. If you wore tight clothes, guys would notice you more.”

  Okay, he’d found the Ecstasy. Sure he liked me—right then, he liked everyone. But maybe he liked me a little bit more…?

  “Hello, Goddess,” said a voice off to my right. It was New Girl.

  “Huh-uh,” Bob said. “This is Beth.”

  New Girl shook her head. She looked even more deerlike in the dark, with her eyes black and shining. She’d stuck a line of sparkly bindi down her cheek below one eye, like tears. Her hair in the torches made her head look like a little moon. She had on a black sleeveless T-shirt with a glitter snake on it.

  “You can’t be a Beth. What’s your real name?” she asked. She didn’t look at Bob.

  “Tabetha,” I said.

  “Excellent! The Goddess Tab, who dances in the desert to bring secrets to the surface!”

  “Ooo-kay. Way too much X.” I turned to get away and drink my beer. Inside my head I was yelling “Follow me!” at Bob. Instead, New Girl followed, and Bob trailed after.

  “No X. I don’t do that stuff. It’s too embarrassing afterward,” said New Girl. “It makes me tell people I can’t stand that they’re wonderful human beings.”

  My sentiments exactly, but I wasn’t going to tell her so. “What the hell is your name?” I asked.

  “Alice. The female incarnation of the Hanged Man from the tarot. A woman on a perilous quest of self-discovery down the rabbit hole of life.”

  I actually opened my mouth to blow her off when I realized that I was hearing the kind of thing that I think but never say. “Is it really Alice?”

  “Uh-huh. Is it really Tabetha?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, then we know each other’s true names. And you know what that means.”

  And I actually did. Jesus, nobody else in town would, but I did. All those years of reading weird shit, and it finally seemed as if it had a point.

  That’s when Bob said, “You talk really strange. Either of you give blow jobs?”

  I don’t know what I was about to say or do before Bob’s little conversation starter, but suddenly I was scared of whatever it was. Real terror, like I’d almost walked in front of a speeding car and barely jumped back in time. I don’t remember what I said, but I chugged my beer and headed straight for the center of the circle where it was darkest.

  Even that was no good. If something got slipped into my beer, it must have been before that, because suddenly I didn’t feel safe. The whole mob was watching me, waiting for me to do something I wasn’t supposed to. But what was I supposed to? No matter how loud the music was, every noise I made was louder. When I moved, I was in someone’s face. I wasn’t connected anymore. And “darkest” wasn’t dark enough to hide in. I had to get away.

  I shoved out of the dancers, past the torches, and stumbled over rocks and tufts of grass. Then I just kept going. After a minute my eyes adjusted to the starlight, as much as they ever would.

  Everything was horrible. Bob wasn’t going to kiss me under the sunrise. I was the slut with beer on her shirt who’d maybe do him because it wasn’t as if guys liked me. And Alice New Girl had seen the whole thing.

  That’s when I put my foot in a hole, twisted my ankle, and fell down. Another wake-up call. I just sat there and cried like a jerk.

  I had to go back to the circle. To being who I’m supposed to be—too stupid to bruise, too dumb to imagine, hard and happy and in hiding. I’m the tortoise, pulling my body parts back under cover, saying, Who, me? Oh, I’m just a rock.

  Of course, I couldn’t find the circle.

  They’d made it hard to find, because if you could see it from anywhere, then so could the rangers. But I couldn’t hear it, either. I’d gone a lot further than I thought.

  I got scared. That’s what screws you when you’re lost in the desert. I should have stayed where I was till morning. I could have been right next to a park road. Instead I went stumbling through the dark.

  I remember the sun coming up. I was in the middle of a plain, and the plain had Joshua trees all over it, spaced out like an orchard without rows. Real trees, maybe thirty or forty feet high, not like the crummy little tree behind Mike’s garage. Every one had a big crown of twisty branches, but there was no shade. When the wind blew, it hissed through the leathery knife-blade leaves, but nothing moved.

  Rock piles stuck up around the plain. I couldn’t tell how far away they were. No road, no trails. Not even footprints.

  I just kept walking. I didn’t know what else to do. Little lizards slid off rocks when my shadow fell on them. Ravens flew over, making ugly laughing sounds. A rabbit with black ear tips crossed in front of me and didn’t even look at me. A coyote sat and scratched his ear with a hind leg, then trotted off between the rocks. It got hotter and hotter. I remember noticing I wasn’t sweating anymore.

  Now comes the part I remember that didn’t happen. I don’t know when, except that there was still enough light to see by.

  I thought it was a tree. I saw its feet first, and they were twisted and dry and dark like juniper roots. Its legs were like the trunks of the big Joshua trees, corky-looking bark where the old leaves have fallen away. Above that, dry leaves hung on it like brown daggers overlapping. Only its head and hands were green. Knobs of green sword leaves like the ends of the Joshua tree branches. Mistletoe was scattered around its head, the dark red strands like tiny bones. It had a face, but it was made of leaves, so I almost had to imagine it, like seeing pictures in clouds. That bent leaf in the middle is the nose, that line of leaf-ends there, that’s the mouth. And those deep pits between the leaves are where its eyes would be.

  Inside my head I was flailing and screaming, but my body wasn’t doing anything. I think I was either passed out or close to it. It was like having a bad dream—you want it to go away, but it doesn’t occur to you that you can do anything about it.

  It bent over as if it was trying to look into my face. I guess I must have been sitting or lying down. Maybe. It had to bend practically in half. Then it picked up a rock and cut its hand open.

  That sounds nasty, but it was just interesting at the time. It cut a long gash in the bark of its palm. Water, or maybe sap, oozed up out of the cut and filled its cupped hand. It stuck its hand out under my nose.

  Now I understand about animals being able to sniff out water. The water smelled like being alive. Everything else in the world was dying, in different ways and at different speeds, but that water was alive forever.

  So I drank it. I was so thirsty I’d stopped feeling it, but all of a sudden I couldn’t get enough to drink. (So much for Miss I’m-careful-what-I-swallow. But since it couldn’t have happened, does that time count?)

  And that’s it. I don’t remember anything else, even in little confetti bits like I remember the rest. There’s just nothing between that and when I woke up in the morning at the edge of the park where the all-terrain vehicle freaks go to play. Some vroom-vroomer saw me sit up on my sand dune and nine-one-oned.

  I have a hideous sunburn (blisters
in places) and I’m massively dehydrated. But I overheard the doctor tell the nurse he thought I was lying about being out there for two nights and a day. I wasn’t messed up enough. And for sure I was lying either about where I started or about being on foot, because it was twenty miles from there to the place I was found.

  Sure, whatever. I’m lying. That works for me.

  Our dog died when I was eleven/twelve. Oh, boo hoo, right? Well, yeah—he was a great dog, and I’d grown up with him. But what was important, because I hadn’t expected it, was the way it changed things between Mom and me. We did a lot of talking in between the crying, about important stuff. I don’t know why grief made us feel as if it was safe to take the lids off. But it turned a crappy experience into a pretty good one, and for a while, we were closer than we’d been since I was tiny.

  My point is, sometimes truly crappy experiences have a crowbar effect on the rest of your life. Everything shakes loose. Then you can let it go back to the way it was, or you can step in and make something happen, something that might be permanent.

  Janelle, Nina, and Barb came over yesterday after school. You’d think I had cancer. Lots of hushed voices and sentences trailing off. Of course, me being lost in the desert is about the most interesting thing that’s happened to any of us for years, so I understand that they’d want to get some mileage out of it. It made me feel like a museum exhibit.

  Then Barb and Nina had to go babysit Nina’s brothers. So I told Janelle about Bob at the rave.

  “So did you do it?” Janelle asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Blow him. You didn’t?” She squeaked that last bit. “Beth, I thought you were into him!”

  I couldn’t think of a thing to say. No joke, no verbal shrug, no cover story, nothing.

  “Oh, god.” Janelle looked disgusted. “He was supposed to say, 1 love you. I’ve always loved you.’ Right?”

  “Of course not!” Well, yes. Was that wrong? If it wasn’t wrong, why had I denied it?

  “Hel-lo! Guys have to know there’s something in it for them. It’s just, you know, biology. You love them before the blow job, and they love you after.”