“No.”
“Then why’d you come here?”
“I didn’t find what I wanted in fifteen minutes.” I smiled. “Next time.”
He zeroed in on my face. “Next time, bring your driver’s license.”
“I promise I will,” I told him.
But I knew very well that there wouldn’t be a next time.
11
I never thought I’d find the mustiness and the dustiness of upstairs Hawthorne Library so inviting, but it was wonderful to be in a place that was dark and slightly disheveled. It looked like a library and it felt normal. It took me awhile to find Zeke and Joy, and when I did they were deep in conversation. Zeke was the first one to notice me. His eyes went from my face to Ozzy’s then back to me. They were sitting at a table next to a window that looked out on the park square. In all honesty it appeared the same as it always had—green and lovely and filled with flowers—but now to me everything was skewed and lopsided.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” Joy answered back. “What’s going on?”
We sat down. Ozzy said, “We think the best way to do this…paper is for Kaida and me to do the research first. We can meet up later. How about at eight tonight?”
“Where? I don’t drive,” Zeke told him.
“I do,” Ozzy said. “So let’s meet at your house, Anderson.”
“I don’t drive, either,” Joy said.
“I’ll pick up Kaida and then pick you up on the way over, okay?”
“Sounds good.” Joy was still wearing a sweater even though it was warm inside. I wondered about the condition of her arm.
“See you all later.” Ozzy guided me out of the library.
“Where’s your car?” I asked him.
“I said I drive,” he told me. “I didn’t say I have a car. I’ve got to go wrangle one up for tonight.”
We walked in fresh air and warm sunshine, and it felt remarkably good. A wonderful spring day, but it was hard to enjoy it fully. I felt like I was living in different worlds—one where there were doctors and hospitals, and another where they’d disappeared—or at least had gone into hiding. What other shocking things were in store for me? I didn’t want to think about it. “Where are we going?”
“You’ll see. Are you hungry?”
“A little.”
“What about pizza?”
“Sure.” I sighed. “Whatever.”
“I could get something else.”
“I love pizza, but at the moment, I’m doubtful about my stomach’s ability to digest anything.”
Ozzy stopped walking and so did I. “Try to relax.” A pause. “I know as soon as someone tells you to relax, you can’t. But if there’s something you can do to just…”
I inhaled deeply through my nose to the count of four, and then I exhaled to the count of four.
“Yoga breathing,” he said. “That’s good.” He took out his cell phone. “Anything you like on your pie?”
“Mushrooms and pineapple.”
“That is one strange combination.”
If I had been living in my former life, I would have given him a playful slap or something stupid like that. Now I simply didn’t have the energy. “Ozzy, I don’t have any cash on me.”
He raised his eyebrows. “I’ll pay for this one and only charge you ten percent interest.” His smile was delicious. He was great to look at, but my mind wasn’t on boys. The levity in his face faded. “Anything else, Kaida? I’m getting pasta salad, too.”
I shrugged. He placed the order and we walked a few minutes in silence.
“Your mom’s not into cooking, huh?” It was a contrast from my mother. She tried to raise us on home-cooked meals, but when Jace reached the wonderful age of teenagerhood, the Chinese take-out era began. Suddenly take-out food tasted far better than the tired dishes that Mom cooked over and over. But that was just us. Whenever we had company for dinner, our friends would rave about Mom’s culinary skills.
We walked a little bit more.
I once read about this neurological phenomenon that allowed the gifted few to see music in colors. I often felt that I had the opposite wiring, that I saw colors as music. If the surroundings and the sidewalks were music genres, in this area of town they would be opera. The environs were loud and dramatic with bold graffiti markings, colors, and designs.
Without emotion, Ozzy said, “My mom’s sick.”
All the blood in my body traveled to my cheeks. I said nothing and glanced at him. His eyes were cast downward, definitely not in the moment. I touched his arm and he gave me a glazed smile. But then I realized something that overrode my embarrassment.
“You said the word,” I offered quietly.
We stopped walking. We had entered a residential area with small, clean bungalow houses lined up like soldiers.
“What word?” he asked.
“Sick.” By now, I knew enough to whisper. “You said the word sick. You and Zeke and Joy are the only people who have said that word.”
Sometimes when you’re in a situation that you know is important, you take note of all the details around you without even realizing it. Twisting my index finger into one of my pigtails, I decided I needed a haircut really, really badly. I saw that the sky was the faintest blue, like a blue not bothering to be blue. Ozzy had freckles and was wearing Keds. And I could hear utensils clattering in the background, so someone must have been eating lunch.
“I knew it!” His smile was ever so faint. “I knew it from the beginning…when you were talking to Maria, telling her to take a sick day off.”
“Why were you eavesdropping on our conversation?”
He looked around him. “Let’s go to my house.” He picked up the pace and I followed him. We walked for another two blocks until Ozzy bounced up three steps onto a stoop of a little yellow house with white trim. The place was pretty and cozy but was more compact than my own home. This area was not as expensive as where I lived and a lot less expensive than where Zeke’s house was.
“Home sweet home.” Ozzy turned a key into the door and twisted the knob for a few seconds until the door finally opened.
When you step into a teenager’s room, you can clearly tell it’s a teenager’s room. The floor is usually littered with socks, magazines, and food wrappers. There are posters on the walls, and the whole place smells a little stale.
That was Ozzy’s living room. The entire house looked like Hurricane Hormone. It put Jace’s room to shame.
I could only imagine his bedroom.
“My mother has been sick for a while.” He pushed some papers onto the floor and sat on a couch that looked so soft it might have dissolved underneath his weight. “We have to be quiet. She’s sleeping.”
I sat down next to him and rested my elbows on my knees.
His voice was sad. “This place is a dump. Sorry.”
I smiled a little. “Hey, you should see my room before my mother makes me clean it.”
“I should take better care of things.”
“You can’t do everything. Does your father live with you?”
“He’s dead.”
That was positively the last time I was going to open my mouth.
He drummed his fingers on his thigh and bit his lower lip. “When Mom first got sick, I was twelve.” He paused. “Let me rephrase that. When I was twelve, Mom got really sick. It wasn’t her first time being sick, because everyone gets sick more than once, right?”
I nodded hesitantly.
“I mean, everyone knows what sick is, but no one will do anything about it.”
“But why?”
“Why?”
“Yes, why. Why don’t you do anything about it?”
He evaluated my addled expression. “You know. Darwinism: The weak die out, leaving the strong to live and propagate.”
“Ozzy, that explains evolution. It has nothing to do with our day-to-day living as human beings.”
He stared at me as if I was from another planet. And perh
aps I was. I certainly wasn’t in a familiar place and it was getting stranger day by day. I felt muddled—as if I was having a very realistic dream that I couldn’t wake up from. “Ozzy, I’m confused. Explain it to me. Like I was just dropped onto the face of the earth.”
“Okay…” He drummed his fingers. “Okay, I will.”
“Good.”
“There’s this fear,” he whispered. “This pervasive fear…that if you tamper with the order of things…it’s like we are all made a certain way…given a certain time…and that’s it. You don’t screw around with nature.”
This definitely was not the world I came from, but I was too wary to confide in him. As far as I knew, I could be entering headlong into a trap. Until I understood the parameters, I figured the best offense was to keep quiet and keep him talking. “So why do you acknowledge sickness?”
“Because I don’t believe that being sick means you should automatically die. I mean, everyone dies, but surely there is something we could do…should do about it. I mean, everyone knows that coffee will help you stay awake…right?”
I was not sure whether I should agree or not. So I gave him a small nod.
Ozzy’s leg was jumping up and down. Boys do that when they are nervous. “If you’re sleepy and you drink coffee to help you stay awake, why can’t you do other things to help you feel better?”
“It sounds logical to me.”
We sat in silence. He said, “I’ve never seen you at the archives before. Was it your first time?”
I swallowed, then nodded.
“Do you know what’s in the folders?”
“Tell me,” I said.
“They’re testimonials, diaries, journals, writings…from people who looked like us, talked like us, acted like us, but were not us. They had somehow come from different worlds…aliens from parallel universes. These writings were left behind after they died. They’d had a totally different view—an alien view of sickness. Iona Boyd has made it her life work to study the writings of these aliens. She…” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t say anymore.” He stared at me. “Because I really don’t know who you are.”
I knew who I was and I knew where I had come from. The nightmare that Zeke, Joy, and I all shared seemed more and more real. Was it possible that we actually fell through the cave and suddenly plunged into the new but strange world? Were we like the aliens he was talking about? If so, what happened to me in my previous world? Did I suddenly disappear from that? Were my old parents looking for me? My heart was beating so fast I could barely contain it in my chest.
Should I trust him or not?
It wasn’t a matter of choice. It was a matter of necessity. If I were to continue to survive in this world, I had to know the rules.
“What would you say”—I swallowed hard—“if I told you, I might…” I couldn’t say it aloud. “If I might know one of those aliens?”
He stared at me. “I would tell you that I need to meet her and the sooner the better.”
“How do you know it’s a she?”
“Because I’m looking at her.” He leaned over until our faces were inches apart. I could feel his breath. “Tell me about your world,” he begged me. “Please! I have to know.”
“You go first,” I told him.
We were at a standstill, but I wasn’t going to budge.
At last he nodded. “When my mom got sick, I couldn’t really accept that nothing could be done…that all I could do was watch her die. So I did some research on my own at the local libraries and on the internet. Know what I found?”
I shook my head.
He connected his index finger to his thumb to form an O. “Nothing. A big fat zero! Okay, so you don’t interfere with the natural order, but at least there must be a single piece of information that could tell me why she couldn’t get out of bed, right?”
“I would think so.”
“But you’d be wrong. There was nothing! No one would tell me why she couldn’t see straight.” He rubbed the side of his head. “Or why she had trouble in the bathroom. Or why she was so…tired and sad all the time.”
“If you’re sick all the time, you get sad, Ozzy.”
“But why is she sick?”
How did I start explaining health to him? “It could be a lot of things. You can’t ask anyone about it?”
“Too much curiosity about sickness marks you as a deviant. You can get written up, and that’ll land you in jail.”
My eyes grew wide.
“Crazy, huh, but it’s true. But there are crazy things everywhere. A person once told me the aliens have laws where natural things like marijuana can land you in jail. Is that true?”
I still didn’t want to divulge too much. I was the alien, not he. “Well, I’ve heard that some people think that marijuana can be dangerous.”
“That’s crazy! It’s one of the few things people can use here to feel better.”
“Uh, I think that in the other world that you were referring to…uh, I think there are better things than marijuana for things like pain. Things like aspirin or Tylenol or even stronger medicine if you need it.”
“Medicine…oh my God, you said the word!” He got really excited. “That’s the stuff that makes you feel better, right?’
“Right.”
“So it really does exist.”
“I think so.” At the moment, I wasn’t sure of anything.
“But the medicines are not natural, right?”
“Well, medicines don’t grow on trees, if that’s what you mean. But they’re safe to use…if you use them correctly.” My eyes met his. This wasn’t the time or place to notice, but I couldn’t help myself. He really was hot. “What did you do when you didn’t find anything in the library or on the internet?”
“I tried to be discreet and ask a few people. No one was willing to help and I didn’t want to bring too much attention to what I was doing. Still, I just couldn’t sit with the fact that people get sick and then drop off the planet.” He shuddered. “You know, the cleanup crew.”
I wasn’t looking directly at Ozzy, but I could sense his stinging eyes in my peripheral vision.
“Mom became weaker and weaker,” he went on. “I didn’t want what happened to Dad to happen to her. I couldn’t really get my mind around the fact that she was doomed. So I started doing my own investigation.”
“Hence the archives.”
“No, we’re not there yet.”
“Sorry.”
The doorbell rang. It was the pizza delivery man.
“Hold on.” Ozzy got up, opened the door, and paid the guy. He took the hot box and placed it between us on the couch. Then he went to his kitchen and fetched napkins and plastic forks. “I’m real formal, as you can see.”
“This is perfect.” I took a wedge of pineapple and mushroom pie and ate just to show him I was okay. But I really wasn’t hungry. I wanted him to finish up the story. After he polished off two slices, he attacked the pasta salad.
“Want some?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“How about something to drink?”
“Water is fine.”
He got up and came back with two bottles. “You never drink from the tap unless you boil it. You know that.”
My mouth dropped open. I’d been drinking tap water all week. “No chlorination?”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s stuff that makes the water safe.” Where I come from, I added in my head. “It’s okay to boil water here?”
“Boiling is natural.” He looked at my plate. “You hardly ate. You know what they say around here.”
“What?”
“If you don’t eat, that’s a bad sign.”
I wonder what this world would think of my world’s anorexia. “No, I’m fine. Honestly. I’m just…intrigued with what you’re telling me.”
He nodded and wiped his mouth. “Yeah, I started investigating….” His expression became faraway. “I began wandering around the city hop
ing that maybe there was something I didn’t know about. I would sleep until about two, three in the morning and then get up and explore other areas of the city. Maybe there were some hidden secrets in the shadows.” His eyes softened. “Please eat something, Kaida.”
“I picked another piece of pineapple off the pizza. “Go on.”
“I found places. Not the best places, but welcoming. I felt like I had a family again.”
“What kind of places?”
“Places where you can learn about weird stuff…the kind of things that adults don’t tell you about. The kind of weird stuff that I later read about in the archives. Medicine!” Ozzy steadied himself. “James was one of the first guys I met in the streets. After we got to talking, he sat me down on the sidewalk one night, and said, ‘Okay, Oz, you’re pretty smart and you seem trustworthy. I’m gonna let you in on four secrets.’”
Apparently James had a Brooklyn accent.
“‘One,’” Ozzy-as-James continued, “‘not everything that’s allowed here is allowed somewhere else. Two, not everything allowed somewhere else is allowed here. Three, the people allowing things and stopping things here don’t know shit. Four, the people going against the people in charge are the smart ones.’”
Ozzy broke into a dazzling smile.
“‘Oh, there’s a five,’ James told me. ‘We’re those smart people.’” His voice became so soft I could barely hear him. “James told me about spills, Kaida. He’s a spill dealer.” There was a long pause. “I’m a spill dealer!”
Spills, I thought. My brother had used that word. “That’s illegal, right?”
“Completely illegal. Like you-can-be-arrested-and-thrown-into-jail-without-a-trial illegal. The saying goes, ‘Spills kill,’ but that’s not true. They can kill, but if you use them right, they can help. I know they can help. They’ve helped my mom, especially with her pain. But they’re not allowed, because they go against the Naturalist Doctrine.”
“I get it.” Well, I sort of got it. It appeared that Ozzy was like some sort of a “good” drug dealer. I wondered if that’s how he supported his mother and himself.
Prism Page 9
