by Leah Thomas
Bridget’s heartbeat helped me sleep, and I remembered a dream for the first time since Mom died. I know human beings dream every single night. But I couldn’t remember any until I dreamed about wrapping my arm in a bedsheet and woke up in the tent getting pricked by green electricity—nothing too terrible, but enough to make me wish I’d taped my hat back on after my bath, because it was caught somewhere under my sleeping bag.
I sat up in bed, head sliding against the nylon.
Auburn-Stache was sitting, too, holding his phone against his ear, speaking in a whisper.
“What—?” I sneezed a sneeze so large I half expected the tent to blow free of its posts.
Auburn-Stache crawled outside. I could see the green bobbing light of his phone through the tent walls. He was repeating the same words over and over:“I don’t know. Oh god. I don’t know. Oh god. I don’t know.”
I put my hands on the warm fishbowl. I couldn’t sleep after that.
Auburn-Stache shook me from grogginess at the crack of dawn.
Does waking up at 4:00 am make you feel sick? Like you weren’t finished digesting your last potato chips and the shards of them are still poking your stomach lining, but you have to get up and walk around anyhow?
On top of that, Ohio’s first snow of the season had fallen. I woke sniffling on the smell of cold and stayed halfway tucked in my sleeping bag even when I dragged myself to the campfire to chew stale granola. Auburn-Stache didn’t eat, just coughed a lot while he rolled his sleeping bag away. (If it weren’t for me, he could stay in hotels. He wouldn’t have to rub his hands together like that.)
He had this furrowed-brow thing going on and seemed even twitchier than usual. Twice he walked away from the campsite, scurrying around the circular gravel driveway like a lab rat in a maze.
“Looking for cheese?” I asked him.
“Pardon?”
“Who called last night?” I rubbed sleep gunk from my eyes. “Got a secret paramour, ’Stache?”
“Of course not,” he snapped. “Ollie, you would do well to think before you speak.”
My eyes probably bulged to Clamp manga proportions.
See, I can count on two hands and one foot the number of times that Auburn-Stache has been that short with me. This felt like getting slapped with a wet fish. And then another wet fish, because he took one look at my face, made a beeline for me and put his hands on my shoulders.
“Ollie, I’m sorry. That was rude. I’m sorry.”
“Holy guacamole, Auburn-Stache. No biggie.”
His face sort of twisted, and he put one hand over his mouth, trying to hold a sob captive.
“What is it?” Beds with tubes, bodies under deer blinds?
Auburn-Stache pulled me into an awkward, one-armed hug.
“Don’t worry yourself, Oliver.” He let go and started pacing the drive again. When he made it back around, he looked almost like himself. He puffed air up at the frosted oaks. “Plans have changed. We’re leaving Ohio this morning. Bridget needs to take her heart back.”
“What? You think she’ll be over suicide overnight?”
“We have elsewhere to be, Oliver.”
“Where elsewhere?”
He didn’t answer. Of course he didn’t, Moritz. Auburn-Stache and his stash of never-ending, pointless secrets.
I pulled Bridget’s heart from the fishbowl and wrapped my hands around it inside my front pocket, but it didn’t touch the chill in my chest. Why is it so hard to be honest? Moritz, what’s wrong with everyone?
I couldn’t ask. I didn’t know where to start.
“Back in your hometown,” I said, “did people get lost in the mines?”
He wouldn’t even answer that. God, I wish he would have answered something. Just one question and maybe things wouldn’t have gone so wrong, maybe I could have trusted him.
Instead: “Ollie, help me pull the tent posts up.”
He coughed again. In the soft campfire light, I saw a glimmer of moisture in his eyes. The last thing I wanted was another freaky sobbing hug. I kicked at the tent posts.
The streetlights outside Bridget’s place made those shards in my stomach twist. The faint glow of the sleeping houses, all that electricity lying in wait, pulsing in walls and ready to burst out when anyone flipped light switches. The electricities looked more discolored than ever, blurred by the white sheen of frost.
“We’re just gonna leave it in her mailbox after all?”
He didn’t laugh. “If we must.”
“No way. Not unless she pinkie-promises not to do herself in or something.”
“She won’t do herself in,” he said, though he looked agitated. “She never does.”
“What if this time she’s not crying wolf?” He didn’t meet my eyes. “Hey! ’Stache! What if Bridget finally—”
“Ollie, as much as I appreciate your input, you don’t know Bridget.”
“Appreciate my input. Tch.” I shoved my hands into my pockets, to rest against Bridget’s heart. “You can’t even answer a damn question. You can’t even trust me. Hey. Would you have told Bridget about the phone call? I bet you would have, right?”
“Ollie.” All warning tone. “Let it go.”
“I just want to help! That’s why I’m here!”
“That’s not why you’re here.”
I gaped. “Yeah, it is! I’m here to help the kids who—”
“Enough, Ollie. Enough of this . . . this delusion! The reason you’re on this trip isn’t because you’ve made it your mission.” Auburn-Stache stared out the window, raising his voice. “I simply couldn’t leave you alone in that house after your mother died, all right? Your behavior is so erratic that—you think I worried what Bridget would do? I worried what you might do. Understand? Does that answer a question or ten?”
I can’t tell you what I looked like, Moritz. But I can tell you this: if my emotions leaked like yours do, I’d have flooded the Impala right then.
“Ollie?” He closed his eyes. “Don’t look so—bollocks.”
Not drowning, laughing: “Well, you sure got me, Auburn-Stache. Gee, I thought you were treating me like a person for once! Good one, man!”
“I didn’t mean to speak so—”
His phone rang in bursts of green light. I hiccuped.
“It’s a phone, not one of my questions, so answering should be fine.”
“Don’t move.” Auburn-Stache stepped out of the car and closed the door behind him. He put his hand over his eyes two seconds later. More awesome secret news, I guess. He wandered along the road like he wasn’t really seeing it. I watched him reach a curb several driveways away.
I climbed into brisk air.
I popped my rest-area letter to you in Bridget’s mailbox and lifted the flag. And I started walking. Just . . . away.
Can you see little puffs of air from people’s mouths on cold days, Moritz? I slip-slid over the icy sidewalk, maybe in the same direction I’d run the other day. Who could tell in the suburbs? I’m not sure I was angry. Just feeling the old powerlessness pangs again.
In the gray light of dawn, the streetlights glowed double-bright, porch lights made me cringe. I jumped when an engine switched on in a driveway. Deer in headlights would have mocked me. I stared at my feet after that.
I missed the smell of emptiness and sap, Moritz.
I nearly ran into my apprehender.
Maybe he wanted me to run into him, this angry wall-guy with pumpkiny hair. It was him—that kid I’d shouted at. The Stop-sign loomer!
“Whoa, there. Who are you again? Byron? No, Brian, right?”
“Shut up. I know what’s in your pocket.” Brian shoved me in the chest.
I was too surprised to react.
“Hand over what’s in your pocket!”
“Calm down, Gollum.” I held up my hands. “I don’t even know you!”
Brian flimsy-shoved me again. “You think you’re the first person she tried to give it to?”
I held up a finger. “
Wait, wait. Here’s what’s in my pocket.” I pulled a BIC pen from my jeans and poised it over my palm. “You seem to know Bridget pretty well. Care to tell me her stor—”
This time when he shoved, I shoved back.
Brian clenched his fists and his uneven teeth in unison, looking like one seriously pissed-off fox. “It’s not yours to screw with.”
“The pen?” Her heart pumped away. “You want me to sign something for you?”
I guess Brian of the Almighty Ginger Rage was done talking, because he sprang forward, made a grab for the prize.
Moritz, you may have inhumanly quick reflexes, but I’ve never even played fisticuffs. The only things that ever pushed me before were electrical.
Lucky for me, Brian definitely hadn’t been in many fights, either. He bounced back and forth like an angry weasel, swatting his hands at me, trying to grab my sleeve with one hand and reach my pocket with the other. I kept up a good fight. Slapping him away, basically.
You can see how this might escalate into war.
We must have looked AWESOME, scrabbling at each other, tugging on ears, aiming knees at stomachs and missing. We drifted into the ice-coated street and I swear “Carmina Burana” (glockenspiel arrangement) chimed in my ears. Dogs in nearby yards started yipping, almost like laughter.
I couldn’t blame them.
In my pocket, the heart rate quickened; I guessed that Bridget had started running to school. Would she come this way? No time to wonder.
Brian sucked at squabbling but went for it with gusto, a flurry of clothes tugging and cussing.
I had an advantage—he couldn’t get any purchase on my clothes and the slippery body suit underneath.
But I slipped up. I got so worried about the freakin’ heart leaving my pocket that I totally forgot about my beanie until he tried to pull it off.
“What the fluff!” he cried.
I winced as some of the duct tape pulled away, but the hat didn’t go far before I took advantage of his momentary surprise.
I smacked the palms of my hands against the sides of Brian’s head. I’ve seen that work pretty well in comics, and it didn’t disappoint.
Brian screeched and let go of my beanie and put his hands against his red ears and slipped on the icy road and fell to his knees, face puckered into an asterisk as I jogged away.
After twenty paces, I turned around and saw him kneeling in the road, clutching his skull.
Maybe I hit him too hard. I mean, I felt like a shit bag for smacking him in the ears when I didn’t know him. What would happen if someone did something like that to you, Moritz?
So like a complete doofus, I found myself walking right back to him, saying, “Sorry, sorry. Was that a low blow?”
“No.”
Brian grabbed my ankle and pulled as hard as he could, and the tight bodysuit didn’t let me catch myself, and the next thing I knew, I lay on my back on the frigid ground, gasping for breath, shoulder blades on ice, head on fire.
Holy crap, Moritz. Getting the wind knocked out of you really freakin’ hurts! Smacking the back of your head against pavement isn’t awesome, either.
I saw stars, and I guess the ice ensured I slipped well and good, and now that I think back on it, I’m even more grateful for Mom’s beanie and the rubber tubing, because it probably stopped me from hitting my head even harder and ending up good and truly knocked out or worse.
(Then again, if I had gotten knocked out, my hands might not be shaking as I write this.)
I couldn’t tell if the lights in my eyes were from inside my head or outside, since neighbors were waking up to see why the dogs were flipping shit, and as they woke up they turned on all their stupid electricity, and it started clogging up my eyes, the numbing tingle of a seizure aura (no, never again, please).
The back of my head sprouted gory branches.
I realized that Brian was looming over me, reaching for my pocket.
And it reminded me of you reaching to help me up in my dreams, and Liz trying to help me up at the Halloween dance, and that was the night I found Mom full of tubes and dying in the garage and that just made me so angry and the potential seizure on the fringes of my mind and the numbing of my tongue, the “please not this, not here” made the rage burn so much brighter.
In all that scary brightness, I didn’t worry about my actions.
I just acted.
Even through the sparks in my eyes, I saw Brian pull her heart from my pocket and away, and it was like he was taking something from me, like he was unplugging my mother, leaving me Mutterseelenallein.
I swung my foot upward as hard as I could, catching him between the legs with all the force my hermit ass could muster.
Brian yelped and keeled over.
I would cite this whole experience as a perfect example of how I live inside a shit-com (two nut-kicks in two days?), except no one laughed, least of all me.
I sat up with frost melting damp into my jeans and rubbed my skull, peering through unfocused eyes at my palm to check for blood, and I gasped for air and saw lights in all directions around me, while Brian moaned on the road next to me and I just fumed at the seizure taunting me, the electricity teasing me with death, so angry that my heart beat twice as hard as Bridget’s, and, Moritz, I saw lights in all directions at once, which might be what it’s like to be caught in a comet.
Light in all directions except one, Moritz.
When I aimed crossed eyes down the road, I saw a monstrous black cloud of electric smog headed straight for us, and I didn’t think about how or if we could get away, and all my instincts screamed that the lights and smog had to stop, or I would seize again, seize like I always have in the face of electricity, sick and not worth taking seriously, the sort of person you take into the world only because you can’t leave him home alone.
It happened again, Moritz. Just like at the museum, but this time Arthur wasn’t here to save me from myself. Maybe Lois Lane was in peril, or maybe I need to stop expecting other people to take bullets for me.
It doesn’t matter whether the lights were real or just my broken head talking.
What matters is I wanted to tear off my hat again, and this time that’s exactly what I did, rubber tubing peeling away from skin.
I want to blame the concussion.
I’m not sure I can.
That’s what scares me, Moritz. I did it without knowing why, and the consequences were so immense and unforgivable, and Mom was right to lock me up for years, and I’ve been trying not to think about this or write about this, but now that we’ve finally gotten here, I’d better write about how I freaked out and, in one stupid act, I hurt people. Honestly.
The moment the tubing peeled away, that intense buildup of incredible pressure collected at my temples, and this wasn’t a typical seizure, nothing tonic-clonic about it.
Electricity from all those identical houses with their identical rainbow-churning power boxes tacked to their sides drilled into my skull, popped a hole, a hole that somehow my inexplicably bright rage shot through with a familiar tch. I’ve painted laser beams, but I’ve never felt like one before: like every piece of me was concentrated into one horrible point in my head and then just pulled out of me in a single instant, somehow, impossibly.
Going full-blown electromagnetic was so much easier than it had been at the Halloween dance. Too easy.
When the pressure burst from me, every colorful patch of electric haze within sight evaporated; I watched the world go monochrome. The density jar, poured down a drain.
The streetlights on either side of us shattered, raining glass down from above, and Brian had the sense to pull his hands from his smarting crotch to cover his head, and I noticed he shielded Bridget’s heart with his torso, too, and the lights all down the street flickered out and the power boxes sparked and burst into flame in a few places.
And this is important, Moritz: the ball of black smog speeding straight for us sputtered, and suddenly with the cloud dissipating, what rolled tow
ard us?
An enormous vehicle that shone yellow through the gray and skidded like mad on the ice as the driver hit the brakes, as his engine died but momentum didn’t. The vehicle slid and twisted in the road while I clutched my beanie in one hand and my swelling skull in the other, and blood burned a trail from my nose all the way down my chin.
The school bus slid and, before long, turned totally perpendicular and tilted off its tires, blocking both sides of the road when it ground closer, shrieking like a demon as the remaining tires lost purchase and the entire vehicle tipped onto its side and kept going—
Its tail end struck a car parked along the road with a sound like screaming—
And then it leaned toward both of us, about to flatten us into two-dimensional people-shaped nothings—
In that second, I saw people squirming beyond the windows, people I’d never meet—
A hand grabbed my hood and yanked me away, yanked Brian away—
—and our knuckles scraped sidewalk.
Bridget stood tall, her arms folded across her empty chest, and watched the bus slow. The screeching of steel shaving pavement didn’t seem to bother her.
By the time it stopped screeching, the school bus lay at a precarious angle maybe only three yards away from the safety Bridget had pulled us to, its nose wedged against a leafless tree, its rear resting on someone’s crushed Oldsmobile.
Hot steam gushed toward us. My teeth ached from clenching, and maybe this is the concussion talking again, but the steam seemed to curl around Bridget, framing her like a hero in a comic spread.
And then I heard crying from inside the bus, shouting and tearslaughter. I saw hands pressing the insides of windows facing sky.
I hadn’t seen hands that small since I was that small, looking at my own.
There was nothing electric in the area left to knock me out even if I didn’t want to hear the screams, and without the electric hazes, the neighborhood felt really too real and a broken arm was hanging out of one of bus windows on the bottom and—oh god I did that I did this Mom I did that—and god someone could be dead in there—
“Bridget.” Brian wasn’t clutching his ears now, just holding Bridget’s heart close. “Jesus. What even just even happened. Jesus.”
