Because You'll Never Meet Me

by Leah Thomas

  I could relate a bit. I was nearly scurrying away up a tree anyhow, because centipedes aren’t my favorite things. (If you’ve ever had one bite you, you’ll understand.)

  Liz leaned forward and plucked the salamander from the ground as easily as she’d picked all those berries, as easily as she’d crept up on me. I thought she was going to shove it in her pocket with all the rest and I winced. No creature deserves death by overalls.

  But Liz just lifted it up to her face and stared it in the eyes. It wriggled at first, whippet tail smacking against her wrist. It must have grown bored, or else it couldn’t handle that stare of hers any better than I could, because it stopped and looked back at her instead.

  I wanted to tell her that holding a salamander is pretty much the worst thing you can do for one, since they breathe through pores in their skin and the oils on human hands are damaging enough to them without the additional grime from the juice of unwashed blackberries. But all I did was watch her like that salamander did.

  She put it back down exactly where she’d found it and set the log down on top of it, gentle as anything. She didn’t say a word about it; we just started walking again.

  Are you starting to see it, Mo? A little, at least?

  When I could see the outlines of Joe’s trailer and garage, the ghostly silhouettes of busted cars, Liz stopped suddenly in front of me. I nearly ran into her back. She grabbed me by the sleeve and pointed to a strange dent in the forest floor beneath the boughs of a jack pine.

  “Wow!” She was whispering. “Have you seen these before? It’s a bed for a white-tailed doe and her babies, probably. Let’s not go in. We’ll scare them away if they’re around here somewhere and they smell us. But look—you can see where they curl up and sleep, because the pine needles are all crushed. And you can see hoof-prints here, so you know that’s what it is.”

  “And you can smell the urine.”

  Liz didn’t reply. She let me go and started going forward again. I wished I’d kept my mouth shut.

  “Welcome to Junkyard Joe’s!” Liz said, and held her arms out to the car graveyard.

  It had gotten some new additions since I’d last been there—between the silver trailer’s wooden porch and the garage were a decrepit pontoon boat with only one pontoon, someone’s parked motor home in storage, a battered dirt bike without handlebars.

  I tried to pretend I’d never seen the place before. She kicked at the grass as we stepped between lanes of pickups rusted straight through, disembodied truck beds, the remains of station wagons picked clean.

  “Uncle Joe won’t be home from the shop yet.”

  I stopped in my tracks. “You’re allowed to be out here by yourself?”

  “I’m twelve.”

  We stood in front of Joe’s trailer.

  “I should go …”

  “Look, Uncle Joe won’t care that you’re here. But lemme warn you, it’s really messy inside. And Uncle Joe’s got lots of stuffed animals in his trailer.”

  “Um … teddy bears?”

  “No, dead ones.”

  “Dead teddy bears?”

  At least her exasperated expression was familiar. I got that from Mom every time I asked about the laboratory. But I didn’t want to think about that, because thinking about Mom reminded me that I shouldn’t have left her alone to worry.

  “No, I mean like he shoots things with his rifle and then goes down to Bob’s on East Higgins Road, and Bob fills the dead things with polyester and coats them in formaldehyde or whatever, and gives them marbles for eyes, and then Uncle Joe hangs the dead things on his walls.”

  “You mean taxidermy. You should have said.”

  Her cheeks twitched, just shy of dimpling. “No, I shouldn’t have, you dork. Now, come on. I promise there aren’t dead teddy bears waiting for us. Or dead real bears, actually. It seems like Uncle Joe just shoots a lot of rabbits and squirrels and deer.”

  “Death unto all things cuddly!” I was still mumbling, but she heard me.

  I could hear the wind whistling through all the automobile skeletons around us, could feel it drying the sweat on my forehead and blood on my chin while she stared at me. Then she laughed. You might have thought she’d bark, but instead, her laughter was much softer than she was—like a shock of faintly cold air when you open a chimney flue after wintertime.

  “Come on.”

  She leaned my bike against the porch railing and trudged up the steps. This was the same porch I’d stared at previously, when she was a little girl with a laptop and I didn’t know her yet.

  But I didn’t even reach the first step before I felt my stomach turning over. I could see faint colors bleeding out through the crevices between the porch floorboards. Joe probably had a generator under there. Or it could have been a phone line. That the wisps of color were greenish made me think the latter. It didn’t matter what it was, really.

  “I’ll wait out here.”

  “What, you’re worried about your allergies?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, lemme go in first. I’ll unplug the TV and the radio and the microwave, even.”

  I shook my head. “That won’t be enough.”

  “Fine, I’ll unplug the fridge, too. But the pop won’t taste good if it’s warm.”

  “There are power sockets. Wires in the walls.” I shuffled my feet. “I better just go home.”

  Liz grabbed my arm as I turned away, smearing warm blackberry juice along my forearm.

  “You’re serious? It’s that bad for you?”

  “Why would I lie about it?”

  “Man, that sucks,” she said. “Look, hold these.” She emptied pockets full of berries into my fishbowl. “I’ll get the goods. Toilet paper works just as well outside as it does inside.”

  She ran inside, easy as anything, and those little bleeds of color didn’t even sway in her passing. Or, if they did, they just gently caressed her, friendly to her like they never were to me. A few of them seemed to be itching to prick me, stretching toward me and away again. She kicked off her sandals on the welcome mat. The screen door slammed shut behind her.

  Birds chirped in the branches overhead. The berries leaked purple into the bowl in my hands, hot in the sun. I took a deep breath. What if she was just going to leave me here?

  Oh god. What if she wants to just leave me here looking stupid with a fishbowl of berries?

  What else could she want from me?

  I was thinking about making a break for it again, but she was already back, holding a can of red pop in each hand. I wondered where the promised toilet paper was for maybe a millisecond before I resigned myself to seeing her whip it out of one of her mystical pockets in a minute or so.

  I remembered the last time I’d stood out there staring at the porch. The time when I’d seen her staring so intently at a computer screen.

  This time, she was staring at me.

  Liz brushed away some pine needles so we could sit on the roof of an old green minivan that she referred to as the “Ghettomobile.” I’ve never asked about its namesake. Again, let’s leave some mysteries in my life.

  “It looked like you bled a lot, but at least you aren’t a swooner. Some of my mom’s clients are swooners. She isn’t supposed to say so, because she isn’t supposed to talk about her clients at all. But some of those schizophrenics and stuff have narcolepsy brought on by cato—catoplexiglas or something.”

  “So your mom tells you secrets?”

  Liz shrugged. “If I bug her enough.”

  Liz was a needler, too. Maybe she could give me some tips.

  It was late afternoon now, almost evening, and mosquitoes were nipping at our legs and alighting on my bloodied shirt. I was holding a big tangle of t.p. under my nose, but the blood had long since dried; my nose had stopped spewing even before we came across that pudding stone on the trail. I felt a little light-headed, and I wasn’t sure it was from only blood loss.

  We’d been sitting there for an hour while Liz told me all about her p
arents and her mom trying to stop this one guy from committing suicide by hanging himself from Christmas lights, and about a nameless teenager with borderline personality disorder who was convinced she didn’t need any treatment so long as she drank a mixture of mouthwash and Tabasco sauce every morning before school. About some alcoholic who drank the antiseptic hand sanitizer right from the wall.

  Man, Liz was proud of her parents. She thought they were superheroes or something. She could have been talking about anything, though. I was so desperate to hear a new voice.

  “What were you doing out there, wearing a fishbowl on your head?”

  “Oh. Well … I wanted out. I was trying to find something that I can wear. Something that’ll stop it.”

  Liz scratched her chin again.

  “Why don’t you try running really, really fast? Just kind of long-jumping to the other side? Don’t give it time to toss you!”

  “I don’t think that would work. If anything, it would throw me back farther. And … never mind.”

  “What?” She stopped kicking her feet against the luggage rack.

  “Even if I got to the other side, I maybe couldn’t cross back again. And I want to be able to go back home.”

  “Why? Don’t you get bored out here?”

  “My mom. I need to stay here.”

  “Man,” said Liz, “if I ran off, I think it would take my mom a few weeks to notice.” I couldn’t tell whether she was joking or not.

  “Um …”

  Liz sighed. “But this is just too weird. I mean, everyone knows that supposedly there’s some homeschooled kid out here in the woods because everyone knows your mom and sees her grocery shopping and whatnot. No one asks her about you. Everyone thinks you’re Amish.”

  “Oh.”

  “Are you Amish?”

  “No. I’m not religious.”

  “But Amish people live on farms. With no electricity. You could join them! Run away and live a normal life.”

  “A normal life of milking goats?”

  “Don’t be so picky.”

  I coughed. “Anyhow, I couldn’t. Electricity really is everywhere. Power lines are always around even when you can’t see them. And cell phone towers. This is kind of a safe zone because it’s right near the state park and there aren’t many lines around.”

  “Is that why no one texts me back out here? I figured it was because everyone has more important things to do than text Liz Becker.”

  She pulled a device out of one of her back pockets; it was black and rectangular, and there was a little charm of a Japanese lucky cat hanging from it. The phone was infused with enough of a tiny turquoise glow that I almost winced my way right off the edge of the Ghettomobile.

  “Whoa, Ollie. It’s dead. The battery’s dead. Look.”

  She held it aloft again. Now that I looked at it properly, it really was only the lightest shadow of teal mist.

  I inched back onto the roof.

  Her forehead wrinkled. “Maybe you can try holding it? Come on. It’s a dead battery. Bet it’s hardly electric at all. It won’t bite you.”

  I shook my head.

  She dangled it by its charm. “Face your fears, Oliver! How else will you get better?”

  And she pushed it against my hand, and it nipped me.

  “No!” I stood up. “It’s not something I can get better from. If you want to be good at helping people like your parents are, you shouldn’t be so—so domineering!”

  “Oh.” She tucked the phone into her pocket again.

  “Sorry. Please—I’m sorry. I don’t really … I don’t know how to talk to people.” I swallowed. “Sorry.”

  She stood up suddenly and craned her neck as if looking over the horizon, into the trees. I couldn’t see her face. “So you live at the end of the driveway, right? I’ve never been all the way down. Can I come visit you?”

  “You really want to?”

  “Yep.”

  I couldn’t stop myself from grinning like an idiot. “You’ll be disappointed, though. It’s not very horrific. We don’t even have dead teddy bears.”

  “You know, people have called me bossy before. People don’t always like me. I’m a know-it-all. But no one’s ever called me domineering. That sounds way cooler.” She snickered. “You’re pretty funny, Ollie Ollie UpandFree.”

  “My last name is Paulot….”

  “Don’t you know the children’s rhyme? ‘Olly Olly Oxen Free’?”

  “No. What does it mean?”

  “You know,” she said, “I don’t know. It’s just something kids say. When I was in elementary school we had all sorts of rhymes.”

  “Do you have rhymes in, um … middling school?”

  “Middle school.” She frowned. “Not really. None that anyone tells me about.” Her face brightened. “But we used to have all sorts on the playground. Like ‘Miss Susie’s Tugboat’ and the K-I-S-S-I-N-G rhyme.”

  “I don’t know those, either.”

  She laughed again. “Well, maybe I can teach you all the basics. I’m here until Memorial Day weekend’s over. No one would miss me if I stayed a little longer. I’ll come by tomorrow afternoon to begin your education!”

  She hopped down to the ground.

  “I’m going in. See you tomorrow. Tell your mom I’m coming, okay?”

  “Wh—oh—okay! I will!” I was trying hard not to bite my tongue.

  And she, toting the fishbowl of berries inside with her, left me standing there.

  A visitor. Someone wanted to visit me. What would Mom say?

  Oh no. Mom.

  I dragged my bike back through the woods, stumbling through bracken as twilight arrived. It was almost too dark to ride my bike by the time I got back to the driveway, so I dropped it there on the path and began sprinting as fast as my legs could carry me.

  How many hours had I been gone for?

  Four? Seven?

  Oh no, oh no.

  The sky was heavy with dusk by the time the familiar silhouette of our triangular cabin appeared before me. There were no lanterns in the windows and when I ran into the breezeway, my footsteps echoed.

  “Mom? I’m home!”

  The lanterns hadn’t been lit since the previous evening. It felt unusually cold in the hallway. I tiptoed into the kitchen to find it in disarray. All the bowls were torn from the shelves, cutlery was on the floor. In the living room all the couch cushions were scattered about as if a tornado had whipped them around. Books were splayed open all over the room, their spines abused. The hand-carved coffee table was overturned. I knew that my bedroom would be in a similar state of chaos, so I didn’t bother going upstairs to check.

  I used to wonder why she looks everywhere, even in all the places I could never be.

  I went out the back door and into the long grass. The crickets were screeching something awful. I stood on the edge of the overgrown clearing that separates our house from the allergenic garage. Mom can’t be the hermit that I am. Sometimes she needs to call for appointments. She needs somewhere to park her truck, and maybe to hide from me, Moritz.

  Even though the garage is insulated, it glows softly crimson some evenings and at sunset the solar panels on the roof gleam silver. The generator near the rear is hidden by a hundred hues. This evening I could see the silver blush of the fluorescent bulbs inside it through the sole window near the top of the concrete-block building, and I nearly collapsed with relief.

  At least she wasn’t driving around town this time, hollering my name in the neighborhoods. At least this time it wouldn’t be the police bringing her home. At least she was here.

  I waited outside for a long time for her to come out. Once or twice I tried to get closer to the garage, but the crimson light was strong enough that it made my skin feel prickly even from this far away. The closer I got, the more the long grass against my shins felt sharp enough to cut me.

  I thought about calling for her. But what could I say when “sorry” couldn’t be enough? It’s not as though this was
the first time. It’s not as though I did not know better.

  And something else, something small and sharp: I was afraid to see her face. Afraid of what her eyes might look like.

  “I’m sorry,” I told my knees.

  After the night started getting cold and the stars painted everything in white and the crickets’ songs were accompanied by the rustling of night animals and the cooing of things in the dark, I was roused from uneasy sleep.

  Dr. Auburn-Stache, crouched beside me, was nudging me with his elbow. His profile was cast in orange light and black shadows when he held the lantern up to get a good look at my face.

  I wondered when she’d called him. How quickly did he drive to get here? Usually Auburn-Stache came by only every other weekend. Did he leave another patient waiting on a table just so he could tend to the woodland invalid again?

  “Ollie, sometimes you are an idiot.”

  “It was only a few hours.”

  He sighed. “Ah. But try to think about it from her perspective, kiddo.”

  I put my head on my arms. “Can you please go get her?”

  “I can try. What the blazes happened to your nose?”

  “I met a girl.”

  “Mm. Sounds about right, actually.”

  “She’s coming over tomorrow.” I wiped my eyes on my forearm.

  “Then you’d better get some beauty rest, Prince Charming. Up you get.” He prodded me with his red leather oxfords. “I’ll talk to your mum.”

  “What if she won’t come out?”

  He squeezed my shoulder. “Shush, you. Go inside and go to bed.”

  I watched him scurry to the garage, the orange bobbing light of his lantern tracing the long grass of the field. A brief burst of red electricity and yellow light seeped out into the night before he closed the door behind him.

  Those crickets just wouldn’t shut up. I could still hear them even after hours of lying in the wreckage of my bedroom on the broken wings of a model airplane or four.