Because You'll Never Meet Me

by Leah Thomas

  I hope that will suffice.

  Gott in Himmel, I am uneasy. And not only because of the Diskothek.

  Lenz Monk returned to school this week. In some part of my heart, perhaps in the weak left ventricle, I had prayed he would not be returning to Bernholdt-Regen at all. But this morning in the courtyard I sensed him there, clearly visible in the resounding waves of the rainfall. He cracked his knuckles. I could hear it from meters away.

  He quieted when I passed. His eyes followed me all the way into the school. The stare of someone who would not hesitate to shove me off a bridge. Would not hesitate to pummel a boy as small as Owen into nothingness. Would the threat of expulsion spare me his attentions?

  Fieke said his father held some sort of sway. Lenz’s father and Headmaster Haydn were old friends, or so she’d heard. That was why Lenz was not locked away in a juvenile detention center.

  I broke into the iciest of sweats once inside. My pacemaker labored. My chest twinged. I nearly shrieked when Fieke leapt down from the banister in front of me.

  “You look uglier than usual.”

  “Lenz has returned.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen, pussycat.”

  “Because of the school assembly.”

  She sighed. Tobacco breath wafted into my nostrils.

  “Because I won’t let him fluffing touch anyone here. He won’t hurt anyone again.”

  “Did he hurt you as well, Fieke?”

  It took half a glare to silence me.

  Last Friday, while I was fulfilling my duties in the Bibliothek, Frau Pruwitt handed me a many-paged, stapled document.

  “Must I read this?” I clicked in apprehension.

  “You don’t have to. But you’d be a fool not to.”

  I listened well. “‘Application … Application for Gymnasium Transfer.’ Wait.”

  She nodded.

  “But it can’t be allowed.”

  “And why not? You accepted no accommodations for your visual impairment during the placement assessment, correct?”

  “That’s not why I failed. I didn’t even take the test.”

  “And why not, Moritz?”

  I took a deep breath. Only to bite my tongue. “The timing was terrible. There were other, ah, distractions. And …”

  Nice schools are for nicer people, Oliver.

  “But you’re willing to transfer now that your head’s on straight, yes?” Of course her eyebrow slipped upward.

  I stared at the books lining the shelves on either side of us. Books I once thought I could never read. Until I spent time in the Bibliothek, books were something I had never considered myself worthy of enjoying. Being who and what I am. Coming from the place I came from.

  There are many things I never allowed myself, Ollie.

  But you’ve told me to be brave.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I am willing.”

  “Good. Because I told them that you didn’t apply because you were disgruntled by their lack of accommodations.”

  “But—”

  She raised a hand. I winced. She rested it on my shoulder. “You belong in a slightly classier hellhole than this. Fill out the forms. Show up for the test.”

  “I’ll need references.”

  “You’ve got them. Fear not. Herr Haydn still owes me for the dinner party fiasco of twenty-eleven. And I happen to know something nefarious about Frau Melmann and her online gambling.”

  I had to clear my throat. “Thank you.”

  “I don’t want your thanks. I want you to read War and Peace. Every last word.”

  “Right.”

  For a brief instant, that application was the best thing I’d ever read, Oliver. Even better than The Catcher in the Rye. Even better than Fahrenheit 451.

  I cannot speak for fireworks. Rain increases my vision more than you can imagine, in concentric rings of sound. But snow is silent. Difficult for me to see at all. Yet I can always feel it on my nose and cheeks. It is cold but soft. To me it smells like salt. Understand that even when I lecture you, even when I am cold, I am trying to be soft as well.

  I should write more. But it is Friday at last. Fieke is knocking her fists against the door of my apartment. Scaring the living organs out of Father. I have some sense of what you felt when Liz came to your door. Fieke is more likely to be caked in cigarette smoke than muck. But she is another person who makes me human.

  You were first, Ollie.

  I wish I could phone you. I’m not teasing you for what you cannot have. I’m trying to express my deepening concern.

  Anxiously yours,

  Moritz

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Fence

  I don’t even know what you want from me anymore.

  First we agree to be honest with each other and ourselves, or whatever, and then you tell me not to tell you things that will be upsetting! Well, guess what? Sometimes things are really damn upsetting. Make up your mind. You told me not to pretend to be happy.

  It’s not like I’ve stopped wondering about you, you know. You wanted me to stop asking about you. I can’t believe you never told me about your parents. All I know about my dad is that he was a nice guy and a scientist, and my mom is either smiling or crying whenever she thinks about him, but I still talk about him sometimes. But I didn’t even realize that you were adopted! So can you blame me for filling in the blanks myself?

  Would being my brother really be so terrible?

  But that’s not why I’m angry. Why’d you spit all over the best memory I have? You’re so determined to think the worst of Liz! Didn’t I tell you that she didn’t do anything wrong?

  Maybe I should wait to write this. Maybe I should wait until Auburn-Stache drags Mom out of the garage for the first time in a week. But now I’ve got a pen and now I’ve got time (I’ve always got time, right? I don’t go on adventures to Diskotheks), so I’m writing anyhow.

  Because you’re wrong. I need to talk to you about this, even if it hurts.

  I don’t think I can handle it on my own anymore. Sometimes I stare at the window and I punch the wall and I pinch the skin at my wrists, and it doesn’t feel like anything.

  Even if you are an abyss that can’t make its mind up, even if you think I don’t give a shit about you anymore (hit yourself, damn it!), I’m going to tell you, finally, why Liz won’t come to visit me.

  It started with a camping trip.

  It happened around a year after that thirteenth birthday party, a few months before I started talking to you, but who’s counting. Junkyard Joe had a deer blind—sort of like a tree house for game hunters—a few miles into the forest, near Marl Lake. The weekend of my fourteenth birthday was a good time to set up his gear for the upcoming hunting season, which begins in November. Besides, he just about spit out his beer when I told him I had never actually seen the lake in our woods, the lake that borders the forest and constitutes the state park.

  “You ain’t seen Marl?”

  “Well, it’s just a lot of water, right? I’ve seen water before….”

  “Jegus, boy.”

  When Liz asked me to come along, we were in my bedroom passing the book light back and forth.

  “I don’t know if Mom would like it. A few days isn’t the same as a few hours.”

  I tossed the light back to her before my hands went numb. Liz caught it; she had cut her hair short the previous month after she started high school, and it bobbed when she swung her arms out. “Just tell her you’re staying at the junkyard again. Camping in the Ghettomobile, like old times.”

  “Why don’t we do that anymore?” I was only half joking.

  “We might be too old for the Ghettomobile.”

  “Blasphemy!” I snickered, and caught the light again, but it wasn’t my hands that were aching this time.

  Things were getting weird between us. Liz still came over all the time, but we didn’t seem to laugh as much. Sometimes we’d both go quiet, and it got really hard to look her in the eyes without coughing on those
imaginary frog bits again.

  “Why don’t you ask Tommy and Mikayla to come, too?”

  She looked at her feet. “I’m sure they’re busy with other things.”

  I nearly dropped the light. “So you only asked me?”

  She nodded. Didn’t say anything snarky. Just nodded and held out her hands to catch the light again.

  I tossed it back, and I felt like it weighed more all of a sudden.

  “Well, yeah, I’ll come,” I said. “Sounds like shenanigans.”

  She smirked; some of the aching went away. Maybe I was imagining it to begin with. Maybe Liz asked me not as a last resort but as something else.

  Maybe it was a good thing that things were changing.

  “Yeah.”

  We left early on a Thursday morning. We’d packed up some basic camping gear—two tents and hiking backpacks full of venison jerky and s’more-making materials—as well as a cooler full of hot dogs to eat that evening. Junkyard Joe’s backpack was this giant green lump of, well, junk. Cooking utensils like tongs and pokers dangled from his back; rope was all but wrapped around his neck.

  “Shame we can’t bring a fridge with us,” he said as we laced up our boots. “Keep the drinks cold.”

  “My bad,” I mumbled.

  Liz rolled her eyes. “Um, I don’t know about you guys, but I wouldn’t want to strap a fridge to my back anyhow.”

  Joe grinned, revealing more gaps than teeth. “You ain’t wrong, Beth. You sure ain’t wrong.”

  It took us ages to get our act together enough to set out. After a few hours of scrabbling around looking for stray socks and pie pans, we were finally trudging out into a warm October afternoon. The leaves underfoot were hardly damp at all and crunched enough to be satisfying. The air had that awesome scent of decay. If only all dead things smelled like musty autumn.

  “So you brought an oil lantern, right?” Liz asked me.

  “Yes, yes. It’s tucked alongside my monocle and collapsible velocipede, Jekyll.”

  “Oh, ha-ha, Hyde. I don’t care if we’re living in the past, so long as you don’t expect me to manage without toilet paper. I’m a modern lady.”

  For some reason, I did not laugh. I blushed and dragged my feet.

  “You kids,” said Joe from behind us. “Wait up for your packhorse.”

  “I can carry more—”

  “Shut yer yap, Birthday Boy, and keep marching. Who wants to sing the first camp song?”

  “Oh, man, we have to go back. You need glock accompaniment!”

  Liz prodded me in the back. “Don’t encourage him, Ollie.”

  And balance was restored. Why was it suddenly hard to be ourselves?

  After an hour of hiking, we arrived at the fence that surrounds Mom’s property. I’d never actually seen the fence before, though I’d known it existed.

  I stopped walking the moment I sensed it: a twinge in my temples, a blade in my nostrils.

  “Pick it up, Slowpo—Ollie?!”

  I blinked. “This …”

  “Your nose is bleeding!”

  “What is this?”

  Up ahead I could see a band of tangerine light bulging and shrinking in orange humps, not dissimilar to the tendrils of the power line. But these strings of electricity were a bit narrower, and they rose and fell in pulses, like looping vines jutting from the ferns at waist level, almost like loose stitches in fabric. When they were present, they were downright intimidating: the orange strands outlined the entire length of the horizon, visible as far left and as far right as I could see, spitting and retreating between the branches and the trees. There was no way around it. I felt like I was reddening, like I was sunburnt from head to toe in an instant.

  My head felt like two heads, three, splitting in all directions. I gritted my teeth before speaking: “There’s something … I need to sit down. Mind if I … pop a squat?”

  And my legs folded under me. Good thing I have experience with collapsing or I might have smacked my head.

  “Ollie!” God, I hated seeing her look like that, like she didn’t know what to do with me. Like I wasn’t even a salamander she could study.

  “Whoa there. What’s up with your boy?”

  “Did you bring your damn walkie-talkies, Uncle Joe?!”

  “Heh. Walkies.” My speech was slurred, tongue heavy. “Walkies, talkies.”

  I could feel the beginnings of the pre-seizure aura fogging up my vision. I thought I could smell cinnamon, which is something that sometimes happens beforehand. At least it isn’t sulfur for me.

  “Hell, he’s havin’ a reaction?”

  I decided at that moment to put all my fingers in my mouth.

  “No, he always tries to cannibalize himself! Yes, he’s having a reaction! What’s causing it?”

  “Well, obviously it’s the property line.”

  Liz was pulling me to my feet, yanking me back the way we’d come. I was biting my lip, trying to stall the seizure that was creeping into me as she dragged me away.

  “His family property line. It’s an electric fence, like most folks put up to keep deer out of gardens. Didn’t you know?”

  The sudden chill in my chest helped clear my head. I tried to take some of my weight off Liz’s shoulders.

  “She put up an electric fence,” I said. “But she promised him.”

  “What?”

  I felt like something from a zoo, Mo.

  “She promised my dad. She tries to keep me at home, but one day … let me leave … so why—?”

  “Ollie … maybe we should go camping at the Ghettomobile after all.” That look was still on her face. I could see it clearly now that I had one head again. “Or a little ways back, even. I mean, the lake’s just water, like you said.”

  “Yeah, I s’pose s’mores would taste just as good there. I can check on the site next week instead,” Joe added.

  “No. No, I want to see the water. The lake of water.” I shook off Liz’s grasp. “I can ask Mom about it later. I can needle later.”

  “But you can’t cross it—”

  “It’s pulsing. I can try!” But even as I spoke, even as I strode forward, Moritz, my vision was getting cloudy. I know I told you that we should aim for superheroism, but maybe you’re right. Maybe we have to aim for normalcy first. Too bad normalcy is an impossible thing.

  “Sheesh, you kids are dramatic.” Joe was peeling his hiking boots and socks from his feet. He dumped his massive backpack into my arms, and I nearly fell over again. “Let me deal with this, eh? Hold my purse, Barbra Streisand.”

  “Who?”

  “An actress. I’m sayin’ you’re a dramatic woman.”

  And here’s what Junkyard Joe did: he strolled barefoot right up to the single electrified wire buried in the light—right into what I could only see as swooping arcs of orange, could feel as sizzling warmth on my neck and ears especially—and slammed a boot down on top of it, pinning it to the leafy ground. He wedged the other one beside it lengthwise, so that the electric current was entirely blocked.

  The pressure lessened at my temples.

  Half the fence went out. On the left, the pulses kept bursting out, but beyond the boot to the right the fence was no more than a silver wire, suspended almost invisibly in the air at waist height. I wondered if that silver wire wound entirely around the property. I wondered whether she would have put one around our house if she thought that would keep me in better than the padlocks.

  Placing a hand on the toe of one boot, Joe pressed the wire into the leaves on the muted side. “How’s it looking, Oliver? Rubber boots. They don’t conduct electricity.”

  “It’s genius, Joe. You made a gate for me.”

  “Why does ever’one assume that all rednecks are idiots?”

  “Maybe it’s the inbreeding.” I tried to smile.

  “Hey, I’m the one who makes the inbreeding jokes, Amish,” said Liz. But I didn’t want to look at her.

  “Don’t thank me, Streisand.” Joe reclaimed his pack. �
�Just hurry up and get to leaping.”

  I turned and eyed the tendrils still dancing on the left side of the boots.

  “Ready or not, here I come.” I sprinted forward.

  I leapt the wire near the low part where he had pinned it down. For the briefest moment while I was in the air, I thought I felt those tendrils bowing out sideways to net me, but I was already past them.

  I landed in the leaves beyond the electric fence, and in doing so left my family property for the first time in a decade or longer.

  The air was fine, but I wondered whether the air back home wasn’t as fresh. I looked back. Joe was giving me a dorky thumbs-up and grin, but Liz …

  Liz watched me from a distance.

  Not far beyond the fence, the forest switched from new growth to old growth. Suddenly the trees were towering beasts, century-old pines and beeches that loomed overhead like dinosaurs. The forest paths below became clearer but darker; the foliage overhead was thick enough to block the light and discourage even ferns from growing at the foot of the trees.

  “I can’t believe I’ve never seen this before.” I was leaning back so far that I thought my head would scrape the ground. Joe was leading the way. Liz lagged behind us. I could feel her eyes on my back.

  “Well, now you have. And wait till we get to the lake. You almost always see deer drinking along the east side, so long as fudgies haven’t spooked them all.”

  “Fudgies?”

  “Tourists. Flatlanders. They come north for the trees and the chocolate fudge.”

  I leapt a puddle in his wake. The ground was moister here, a bit colder.

  “I’ve never had fudge.”

  “How on earth d’you live?”

  “I wonder about that, too,” said Liz quietly.

  This wasn’t nearly as fun as my last birthday, Mo.

  Joe scratched his chin. “Well, it’s October, so there shouldn’t be too many tourists around, apart from a few prospective game hunters like meself. But they tend to stay near the plains on the east banks. Just how sensitive are you, Ollie? Will you start twitchin’ and biting your toes if they’ve got their RVs parked along the opposite side of the lake?”