All-Season Edie

by Annabel Lyon

  I wonder if I will go insane, like Dexter, once I’m thirteen. I wonder how much will have changed by then, two years from now. I start to wonder whether Grandpa will even—but then I have to shut that thought down quickly because it makes my chest hurt too much. Grandpa will always be Grandpa, and right now what I need is to find him the perfect present. That’s all.

  “Hurry up,” Dexter says now because I’ve slowed down to watch the train while I think. I still like the train a little, even though I’m too big to ride on it. It has a silver bell and wooden benches to sit on. I’m hoping one of the elf girls will see me standing there forlornly (I try to look forlorn) and offer me a free ride, but none does. A boy going past on the caboose makes a face at me and says, “Nah-nah,” and calls me a name, and then I hurry to catch up with Dexter. Christmas Castle has changed; it’s not as good as it used to be.

  An angel flops past over my head, beating big flashing wings, but when I look up, it’s vanished. Now that’s strange.

  I find Dexter in the card shop, picking through a shelf of boxed Christmas cards with two other ladies. There are upside-down cards, spilled boxes and boxes on the floor. It looks like a hurricane hit the cards. The other ladies are talking loudly and moving in on Dexter’s space as if she just isn’t there. She looks grim.

  “I saw an angel,” I tell her. I feel kind of hot and woozy.

  Dexter gives me a box to hold. It shows a man angel with curly yellow hair and a trumpet and a tree branch and under his feet a big fancy letter G in a gold box, followed by a bunch of tiny letters.

  “In the atrium,” I say, which is the name for the glass ceiling in the mall. “What does it say?”

  “Gloria in Excelsis Deo.”

  “Eggshells?” I say. Dexter snatches the box back. “Find one with cats,” I suggest.

  “Oh, go away,” Dexter says, stamping her foot.

  I wander through the card shop, looking at the posters and mugs and stuffed animals and stickers that fill all the spaces where there aren’t cards. My head hurts. Everything seems very bright, even the stuffed animals, which normally I would enjoy petting. There’s a little gray elephant that seems to be staring at me in a creepy way. The fluorescent lights buzz loud and dangerous as bees. I hurry out of the store.

  There are too many people in the mall. That’s the problem. A few less people and I’d be able to concentrate much better. A few less people and no more angels flopping by like big pterodactyls. I whip my head back, thinking I’ve seen another out of the corner of my eye, but it’s only flashing lights from the giant metallic Christmas ornaments that hang from the glass panes in the ceiling. Still, I could swear I heard flapping— air beaten by huge wings. I decide to go back to the doors where we came in and wait for Mom there. I’ll tell Mom about the angels, and Mom will be interested, and together we’ll watch the miniature train go round and round for as long as we want, and she’ll help me think of the perfect thing for Grandpa.

  Because I’m not exactly sure where the main doors are, I waste some time following a man and a woman who are carrying handfuls of bags from all different stores. Surely they’re leaving. But the woman keeps saying, “Bruce, honey, just in here, honey. Brucie? Bruce? I’m just nipping in here, honey.” She just nips in the candle store or the shampoo store or the joke underwear store while the man stands outside, his arms pulled straight by the weight of his bags. He stares at the floor until she comes out with one more bag. His preoccupied look reminds me of the Greek god Zeus staring down from Olympus at the little Greek people below, trying to decide who to zap with a bolt of lightning. Zeus has a wife named Hera.

  “Zeussie?” Hera says, emerging from the joke underwear store waving a pair of Rudolph socks with a little red lightbulb on the big toe that lights up when she presses the heel. “Aren’t these darling?” No wonder Zeus is so gloomy and destructive. Still, it might be wiser to get out of his way. I’m backing slowly toward Ralph’s Shoe Repair U Nixem We Fixem when I’m knocked off my feet and sent flying toward the fountain.

  “Are you okay?” a voice says.

  At first all I can see of the voice is a pair of running shoes. No, that’s not true. At first all I can see are little lit matches, winking and blinking in circles like fireflies, making dizzying patterns between my brain and normal vision. Once they’ve gone out, reluctantly it seems, one by one, all I can see is a pair of running shoes. I’ve never seen another pair like them. “Where did you get those cool running shoes?” is more a Dexter line than an Edie line, especially when addressed to a boy closer to Dexter’s age than mine, but I try to say it anyway. That’s how extraordinary these shoes are. But because I’m still recovering from my collision with the floor, and sitting up has started me coughing again, it comes out in a series of jerky, spluttering and totally incomprehensible syllables.

  I use my coughing time to study the shoes more closely. They look like the fastest shoes ever made: they’re sleek and sparkling, blue and gold, with a white wing design on each side. I’m not very good at brands (that’s Dex’s territory), but I could swear I’ve never seen a pair like them and neither has anyone else. They seem to glow slightly, especially the soles, as though a spotlight shines on them from beneath the floor. They seem to hum or buzz, faintly but distinctly, above the workaday buzz and hum of shoppers cruising around the crowded mall. They even seem (though I can’t be quite sure about this) to radiate heat. I’m just reaching out to touch them with my fingertips when their owner grasps me by the armpits, awkwardly but not roughly, and hauls me to my feet.

  “Are you okay?” the boy says again. “I’m really sorry about that. I was, ah, delivering this message and I just didn’t see you.” He’s even a little older than Dexter, and his concern for me, I can see, is rapidly cooling as he realizes I’m going to be fine and somebody his own age might see him talking to me. He’s a cool kid. Well obviously, in those shoes. Those shoes!

  “Delivering a message?” I say thickly. Messages, winged shoes—

  “Uh, yeah.” The boy glances nervously over his shoulder. “Look. The thing is, if you’re okay, I’ve gotta go. I’ve gotta catch up with this guy and—”

  “Hey, Mark!” A boy standing at the top of the stairway to the mall’s upper level is calling down to the boy with the shoes. “Did you make a new friend?”

  “I’m gonna get you!” he calls back, shaking his fist. “I hope you’re hungry! I’m gonna make you eat this!”

  “You and what posse?” the upstairs boy calls down. He’s even jumping up and down a little, doing a kind of victory dance, and waggling his fingers rudely.

  “What’s a posse?” I ask.

  “His friends,” the boy says grimly, never taking his eyes off his enemy, as though the word “friends” means “extremely hideous, stinky and contemptible sewer rats.” “Look, I gotta go,” he says again, probably only hesitating because I’m still swaying a little.

  “Hi, Mark,” another voice says from somewhere behind me.

  The effect of this second voice is both astonishing and hilarious. The boy spins around as though someone has pulled him on a string. His face turns pink.

  “Hi, Vee,” he says, and then he squirms and looks at his feet as though he’s just done something mortifying, like pee his pants.

  I turn too and see a girl about Dexter’s age who is—is it possible? it evidently is, though I’ve never seen it before—prettier than Dexter. She has curly yellow hair to Dexter’s straight, and her brown eyes are as big as—not a rabbit’s, and not a doe’s, though they have something of both, something soft and warm and appealing. She wears a red skirt and a white T-shirt with a big pink heart on it, which is pretty corny but suits her perfectly. There’s something strange about her, something I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s not just her effect on the boy with the cool shoes, who has turned a few shades pinker and is evidently trying to engage in casual conversation. I’ve tuned this part of the scene out while I study the girl, and decide to tune back in, if only
for the entertainment value. I’ve seen boys doing this with my sister, and the results are usually a cross between cringingly embarrassing and extremely hilarious.

  “How’s it going?” the boy says. He’s trying to make his voice go deep but it still has a little squeak of nervousness in it. I repeat his words under my breath just to reassure myself that my flu-voice is deeper than his normal voice. It is.

  “I’m shopping,” the girl says. Her voice has the same velvety satisfaction as Dexter’s when she says phrases like this, anything to do with “mall” or “shopping” or “clothes.” “Is that Perry up there? Perry’s cool.”

  “You think everybody’s cool,” the boy named Mark says. His face goes from pink to red, and he starts to look mad again.

  “I have to go,” the girl says.

  Stammering, the boy offers to buy her a drink at the food court, but she just laughs and flips her hair—a move I’ve seen Dexter practicing in the mirror—and bounces away. Her hair bounces perfectly and she seems to be walking on balloons. Just before I lose sight of her, I realize what the girl reminds me of and what makes her so strange. She’s like a cartoon. Everything about her is perfect and slightly larger than life, but she’s too smooth and clear, without any edges. Her skirt has no wrinkles and her hair looks like someone has drawn it with a yellow felt-tip so that no curl will ever be out of place and frizziness is out of the question. Her eyes are too big, like cute animals in Disney movies, and her colors—yellow hair, brown eyes, pink lips, white T-shirt, red skirt—are too even and flawless to be believable. I wonder, if you had a big enough eraser, whether you could just rub her out.

  When I turn back to confirm my suspicions with the boy with the cool shoes, he’s gone, and so is the boy upstairs. I imagine them zipping after each other so fast they’ll leave lines in the air behind them; if one of them ever catches up with the other and bops him on the head, the air above him will explode with little stars and number signs and the word “BANG,” written all in capitals.

  Something wings past my head, almost brushing my cheek, and I snap around to see what it is, but it’s gone. Sometimes pigeons get inside the mall and circle round and round the skylights in the atrium, flapping and pooping and looking for a way out, but I think this was bigger than a pigeon, and it got away too fast. I still haven’t found Grandpa’s gift, the gift that will wake him up again, turn him back into old Grandpa. Socks that light up? Fast shoes? A pet bird to whiz around his head? I think about being asleep and being awake and the eerie half-place in between, where Grandpa seems to be stuck. I think again of gods and angels, zipping back and forth between their world and ours, which reminds me of Dexter’s Christmas cards, which reminds me of Dexter and Mom. I’d better make another effort to find them before I fall asleep standing up and wake up in the wrong world myself.

  Even though I’m not hungry, I decide to try the food court. I know how to get there because it’s right in the middle of the mall, and all the different starfish arms and legs of the mall eventually lead back to it. Also, you can simply follow the smell of French fries. Mom and Dex like to stop everything, right in the middle of shopping, and sit down in the food court and have a drink, just when you’re finally starting to get things accomplished and know that within another half hour you will be done and be able to get back home to your room and your books. This is enormously aggravating, but it’s also where Mom and Dexter start to resemble each other very much. Inevitably I go along with them, after only a token protest, just so I can watch this strange phenomenon. Mom will buy a coffee from the gourmet coffee place, and she’ll let Dexter buy a special kind of coffee that’s mostly milk. I’ll get a strawberry Julius from Orange Julius, which is the juice-place-with-hotdogs. I suspect that when Mom and Dexter are alone, they sit in the uncomfortable fancy iron garden chairs at a little round marble table, like a dinner plate on a stick, right inside the gourmet coffee shop itself. But when we’re all together we aren’t allowed, Mom explained, because my Julius was an Outside Drink. That means we have to sit on the molded plastic seating in the middle of the food court at a table where someone has always left the remains of a greasy, salty, ketchuppy lunch. Mom and Dexter will fuss away at the table, cleaning it with dinky paper napkins. Then we’ll all sit down together and they’ll load their shopping bags on the table and pull out their purchases and exclaim over them, reassuring each other that they’ve picked the perfect color or type or size.

  “Perfect,” Mom will say.

  “Totally, like, perfect,” Dex will say.

  “I love it,” Mom will say.

  “Totally,” Dex will say. “Love it, totally. Shut up, Edie.”

  “Edie, be nice,” Mom will say. “Aren’t these socks perfect?”

  “Totally, like, perfect,” Dex will say. It’s like when the CD player gets stuck and you listen to the same little blip over and over again, trapped forever, so annoying it’s kind of fascinating.

  Finally they’ll put the things away again and sip their drinks and noodle on about other things they want to buy when they’ve saved enough money. With Dexter it’s usually clothes; with Mom it’s usually something for the house: a toaster or a new coffee table. These conversations are incredibly endless and boring, and the two of them listen to each other with such rapt attention that I’m always mesmerized. I can picture them now, chatting away, having completely forgotten about me since they’re so wrapped up in their coffees and their talk. This makes me feel pretty sorry for myself—a little weepy, almost—even though at the back of my mind I know they’re doing no such thing because they’ll be looking for me too.

  I find myself following a man walking a dog. The dog walks a little in front of the man and has a fancy harness, and the man walks very tall and straight, without seeming to look around him very much. I can see the dog has a long snout and pointy ears and is very clean. Pets aren’t allowed in the mall; that’s a rule. I wonder if the dog is not really a dog at all but something more like the Egyptian god Anubis, a being that’s only part dog and can get up and walk around on its hind legs and think and talk like a person if he chooses to. Again, in the part of my mind that has stayed cool despite my fever, where I can see my worried mother and sister scouring the mall for me, I also know the dog is a seeing-eye dog and the man holding the harness is blind. Maybe a dog for Grandpa, to help guide him around when he gets mixed up? An extra-powerful god-dog? Everything is getting swirly and mixed up in my mind. It’s easy to imagine that there are ancient gods walking through the mall just like they walk across the pages of my social studies book at school. It doesn’t help when the stores suddenly all swoon sideways and I abruptly lose my balance and stagger to my left. I bump into someone who says angrily, “Watch where you’re going!” and stomps away before my eyes can focus and I can explain that I’m really not feeling very well. I’m only trying to find my Mom, for Pete’s sake, already. Give me a break.

  The food court is stuffed with moms and dads and teens and squirts of kids and shoppers of all stripes. They’re either crowding all the tables with their lunches or clogging up the pathways between the tables and the fast-food kiosks with empty trays, circling like gulls, trying to decide what they want. On the rare occasions when Mom and Dexter and I have lunch here, we always get the same thing: California rolls for Dex, kappa maki for me and dynamite rolls for Mom, all from the sushi place, because Mom believes sushi is more nutritious than fried anything. Almost everything else the food court has to offer is fried something. I’m always powerfully interested in the bento boxes, with their little compartments of rice and salad and teriyaki and tempura and noodles and fruit, but Mom always says that’s just Too Much Food.

  Too much food. Everywhere I look there’s food: food heaped high on trays and in paper boxes, food on tables, food that’s fallen to the floor and is getting trampled underfoot. Everywhere people are chewing with bulging cheeks and laughing with their mouths open and licking their fingers and feeding their babies and picking what they don’t w
ant out of their lunches and dropping it—pickle slices, onions, tomatoes. The overpowering smells and hideousness of it all makes me feel queasy.

  In desperation, I head for the one place in the entire food court where I think I might truly find my mother and sister: the gourmet coffee store. I can’t see it clearly from where I’m standing, and I fight my way through the crowds until I can see into the entire shop. There’s a long lineup at the counter of people buying bags of coffee beans and painted mugs and gift baskets. But farther back, where the tables are, the chaos gives way to calm. People sit at the little tables in quiet pairs, sipping their drinks, eating nothing, talking quietly, probably about how lucky they are to have found seats inside and how unpleasant it would be to have to sit anywhere else. I have to walk right into the store to see all the way to the back. This makes me feel a little shy since I don’t intend to buy anything, but no one seems to be paying any attention to me, and it’s such a relief to get away from all that chewing. Right at the back of the shop, at the very last table—Dex’s favorite, as it happens, the most secluded, the one behind the palm plant, under the poster of the Eiffel Tower in Paris—sits the largest man I’ve ever seen. He’s taken both chairs from the table and put them side by side so he’ll be able to sit properly; that’s how big he is. He’s sipping from a tiny coffee cup that looks the size of a thimble in his huge hand, and he’s laughing quietly to himself, his big face creased, his eyes almost vanished with amusement. In a vase on the table in front of him stands a single white flower, and I know I’ve found the Buddha.

  “Excuse me,” I say, because surely he’ll know what to get for Grandpa, something perfect and simple and beautiful and calming, to bring him gently back into the world.

  My voice is too soft, or the noise from the lineup at the cash register combined with the shop’s jazzy music is too loud, and he doesn’t seem to notice me at all. He turns the page of the magazine lying flat on the table in front of him (I hadn’t noticed it at first) and laughs again at something he reads there.