Bonechiller

by Graham McNamee

  His tattoo is becoming clear as Pike wipes away the inky mess.

  I squint at it. Looks sort of like a number eight, only lying on its side like it fell over.

  “What is that?” Ash asks.

  “This is the symbol for infinity,” Howie says.

  “Why infinity?” I ask.

  Howie touches the tender red skin around the mark. It’s little, only a half inch long.

  “Because it means ‘no limits.’ It goes on forever. Never-ending. Never forgotten.” He gives a little shrug. “Just seems right.”

  “Howie did mine.” Pike rolls up his sleeve, showing his left shoulder. There’s the freshly inked infinity loop, and right above it another new tattoo.

  “What’s that other one?” I ask. “Looks like a candle.”

  “It’s a stick of dynamite. See, with the fuse lit. We just gotta ink in TNT on it.”

  “Dad’s gonna love that.” Howie shakes his head. He looks at me and Ash. “So how about it, guys? You know, Indians and Africans used to get tattoos that showed what tribes they were in, and what battles and wars they’d won. That was some weird and wild battle we fought. So let’s do something to remember it.”

  “Like I’m going to forget?” I say. “I’m still having nightmares.”

  Tribes, Howie said. He wants to be part of something. Guess I do too. We did the impossible—killing the unkillable. Something to remember.

  “Okay, I’m in,” Ash says.

  Howie turns to me. “What do you say?”

  I turn it over in my head. It’s crazy, but I kind of like it. And what’s a few little needle pricks after what we went through?

  “Is it gonna hurt?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “Like getting stung by a bee. Or a swarm of bees.”

  “Great! Well, you’re doing mine, Howie. No way I’m letting Pike poke holes in me.”

  I go first. If I have to watch Ash get hers before me, I might chicken out.

  Howie gives me an ice cube to numb the spot. Pike fires up his lighter and heats the tip of a new needle to sterilize it.

  Suddenly this seems like the worst idea ever.

  But I sit down on the stool and show Howie exactly where I want mine. He cleans the spot with an antibiotic wipe.

  “This is how they do jailhouse tattoos,” he tells me. “I read how to do it on the Internet.” He uses a pen to outline the symbol on my skin. “Perfect.”

  Howie grabs a bottle of black India ink and pours some out onto a face towel. While he’s doing this, Pike sticks a bandage on Howie’s shoulder, covering the tattoo still dribbling blood.

  “I might need someone to hold me steady,” I say. “Don’t want a blurry tattoo.”

  “I got you.” Ash comes up behind me and reaches around to grip my arm.

  “Ready?” Howie asks.

  “No. But do it!”

  I shut my eyes and brace.

  EPILOGUE

  The ice age is over.

  I swat away a swarm of mosquitoes as I break from the trees onto the pebbly beach. Sunlight flashes off the calm waves of the lake. The deep blue-green of the water looks like liquid heaven, calling out for me to take a dip. Stones crunching underfoot, I stagger to a stop and bend over with my hands on my knees to catch my breath. A bumblebee glides lazily by, newly woken from its winter sleep, stunned like I am by the warm sun and the green smell of spring in the air.

  I’m running the trails with Ash. No way I can keep up with her. She’s running laps around me. But she shouts encouragement when she passes me by.

  Stuff like: “Move it, pussy!” and “Hustle, Whitey!”

  Very encouraging.

  I collapse on the beach and squint at the glitter off the lake. The spring thaw came late, with winter giving up slow and stubborn.

  My blood still runs a little colder. Right now, after chasing Ash for the last hour, I’m feeling like an ice cube in a furnace.

  Ash has her sights set on the junior provincial bouts in Toronto. The next step on her path to world domination.

  She’s back there somewhere, running like the Devil’s chasing her.

  I know that feeling.

  The water looks so deliciously cool, I can’t resist. Kicking off my sneakers, I stuff my socks in them, strip off my T-shirt and wade in waist-deep. The lake never loses its frosty bite. Never forgets it started out as a chunk of glacier.

  I splash my face, wetting back my hair.

  Straight ahead is the orange buoy me and Ash raced to over the ice, months ago. She let me win that time. I like it when she lets me win. We’ve been meeting up here ever since. This beach is our place, too rocky and out of the way for anybody else to want it.

  I’m thinking of going along with Ash when she fights in the city. I can stay with my aunt. Maybe go out to see Mom’s grave and tell her where I’ve been, what I’ve been up to. Tell her everything.

  I told Ash about visiting the grave to say all this stuff. She gave me a puzzled look.

  “What makes you think she’s there? I mean, stuck in the ground. When you die you go free, right?”

  “Is that an Indian thing?”

  “Not really. Just how I see it. Seriously, why does she have to be there, and not here? Wherever you are.”

  I like that idea. You die, you go free. So Mom could be wherever. Everywhere I am.

  Even here, waist-deep in the lake.

  The sound of rocks crunching underfoot wakes me from my sun-dazzled daydream. Ash is standing by the waterline. Her natural tan is a shade redder, and a little dusty from the trails. Her face is shiny with sweat.

  “Slacker. You owe me a mile.”

  I splash at her. “Come on in and try to collect.”

  She tosses her shoes and socks beside mine, wading into the lake in her shorts and her Stalk and Kill T-shirt.

  When she comes up next to me, she dunks her head under and whips it back, spraying an arc of water into the air. Her slicked hair is the same midnight dark as her eyes. Blinking drops away, she spouts a mouthful of lake water in my face.

  “Thanks,” I splutter.

  “No problem. So, hey, uh … Did you talk to your dad? What’s the word? You staying?”

  Me and Dad had a blowout fight when I told him I didn’t want to go on running from place to place. Told him I wanted to stay, right here in this nowhere town. Long enough to catch my breath, anyway. Long enough to see what this thing is between me and Ash.

  It would have been an even bigger blowout if Dad hadn’t already been softened up some by Andrea. She’s dragged him out the last couple months—to the movies, the Speedway, even over to her place for some home-cooked. He’s still playing hard to get. But not as hard as he used to. She’s like a dog on a bone, and the bone never wins that fight.

  “It got kind of ugly,” I tell Ash. “You know, so much stuff we never talked about. But he came around. I think he’s as tired of running as I am. The marina owner says he can use Dad’s help through the summer. So Dad’s taking him up on it.”

  Ash reaches over and gets me in a headlock. “Knew I had you hooked. Once you go native you never go back.”

  I give her a bite on the biceps to break free.

  “Hey, don’t go all Windigo on me.” Ash lets go.

  She gives me a tsunami splash, soaking my head. Squinting the water from my eyes, I see the spot where I nibbled her. Right near her small black tattoo.

  I got mine on the back of my right hand, with the blue dot from the beast’s sting caught in the eye of the infinity loop. Sometimes I feel this ghost pain there, like a splinter of ice under the skin. I have to rub it till it melts away.

  “Quit thinking so hard,” Ash says, flicking water at me. “You’re gonna hurt yourself.”

  I look over at her, and at the scar on her lower lip. Right. Less thinking. She’s reading my mind, pulling me in close.

  This will never end. This moment. This kiss.

  I know, nothing lasts forever. But right now I feel infinite.

 
About the Author

  Graham McNamee won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Acceleration, which was also an ALA–YALSA Best Book for Young Adults and a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age, and won the Arthur Ellis Award for mystery writing. He received the first PEN/Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Working Writer Fellowship.

  Cool to the touch, Graham has been frostbitten and frozen more times than he can remember. He lives in Canada, where he spends the long northern winter nights dreaming of summer.