by Joey Comeau
Michelle rolls her eyes at Alex and says, “You should donate any money you get from them to a charity of your choice. The important thing is that mothers who care will read them to their children.”
Maggie leafs through the book.
“I know people who work at a queer summer camp,” she says. “I can arrange to get copies to each of the kids there. And I’m gonna steal a copy for my girlfriend Jesse. She would love this. She’s working on a book too.”
“Are you and Jesse, uh, exclusive?” Alex asks. She’s playing with her hair again. “Have you ever gone out with a revolutionary?” she says. “Maybe you need to be overthrown.”
In the car Richard kisses me. He tastes like mint. We drive to the next store, and Richard and I wait outside. We make out in the car for the next three bookstores too. It’s nice to just make out, to kiss and touch his chest and not move right to sex. It drives me insane and it calms me down.
While we drive around, Alex goes on and on about the girl from Venus Envy. “She’s going to see me on the news one night,” she says, “and then what will her girlfriend have on me? I’m doing something. I’m going to save the world. We all are,” she adds, grinning around at us. “We’re going to save the world, aren’t we?”
“One child at a time,” I tell her.
After the last bookstore, I climb into the driver’s seat and Michelle says, “Where to now? Food?”
“We’ve got one more stop,” I say.
“That was the last of the books,” Michelle says. Alex and Richard are sitting in the back seat, quietly. They still haven’t spoken.
“We aren’t dropping off,” I say. “We’re picking up.” I remember the address, and it takes us twenty minutes to drive across town. I fix my tie and turn the car into the driveway of the school.
“I’ll just be one second,” I say. “Keep the engine running.”
It’s a huge, gothic-looking building. The most expensive and exclusive private school in the city. It houses grades primary right through high school. The money that these parents pay for tuition isn’t even a real number. I don’t feel jealous about money at all these days. It seems like part of a make-believe world that people create for themselves. A TV that costs $1,800 just sits in some straight person’s home, waiting for me to steal it.
It takes me five minutes to find the head office. I smile as wide as I can, and I say, “I’m here from Dr. Verge’s office. Sorry to trouble you again.”
After that I walk casually out of the school, holding David’s hand. We get to the car and Michelle is staring at me, confused. Alex and Richard don’t look up until I pull open the back door on Richard’s side and tell David to climb into the middle.
“Everyone,” I say. “This is David. Say hello, David.”
He’s silent.
“I told them I was one of Dr. Verge’s assistants,” I say, sitting behind the wheel. Nobody else says anything. “I said that we needed David here for another televised save-the-family rally.”
In the back seat, David sits looking straight ahead. I wonder if his father has given him instructions not to speak to the help. I wonder how he’s going to like being a little girl.
“Children are too important to leave to their parents,” I say.
Alex is grinning.
“His dad is that anti-gay-marriage guy?”
I nod, and then focus on driving.
Michelle turns to face the boy in the back seat.
“Have you ever worn a dress?” she says.
In a thrift store, I buy two dresses, one in my size and one in David’s, because I think if he sees me in the dress he won’t feel as weird about wearing one himself. Mine is nice, a simple black dress that I drape a chrome-spiked belt over. My boots are covered in mud, and with the stubble I have a confusing look that I find appealing. I have a small clutch that I keep the lockpick set in.
Out in the car, I pass the dress to David.
“Put this on,” I say.
He unfolds it and holds it up.
“This is for a girl,” he says.
“I’m not a girl,” I say. “I’m wearing a dress.”
“You’re probably a gay,” David says. There’s an edge to his voice, a tone that he’s gotten from his father. “You wear dresses in parades. You think you’re a girl anyway. I’m not gay.”
“How old are you?” Richard says.
“Eight years old,” David says. He folds the dress carefully and hands it back to me.
“Put it on,” Alex says. “Or we’ll make you put it on.”
Michelle turns to look at her, but Richard speaks first.
“Right,” he says. “We’ll just hold him down and pull his clothes off. Then we’ll force him to dress up like a girl. I’m sure that on top of kidnapping it won’t make that much difference if we forcibly remove his clothes.”
“I have a knife,” David says. He pulls out a little Swiss army knife. And carefully forces the blade out with his fingernails.
It’s Alex’s idea to refuse to feed him until he puts the dress on. At the truck stop I keep the doors locked while Michelle runs inside and buys us some food. The hamburgers are greasy and I leave mine half-eaten in the bag.
“This is good,” Alex says, and she forces herself to smile. “Mmmmm.”
Michelle and Richard eat quietly.
David stares out the window.
When we’re back on the highway, he says, “Where are we going? Where’s my dad?” and Alex sticks out her hand to shake.
“I’m Bert,” she says. She points to Michelle. “That’s Ernie.”
“Bert and Ernie are puppets,” David says.
Richard offers his hand too. “I’m Wonder Woman,” he says. “Don’t laugh.”
I meet David’s eyes in the mirror. “I’m Velma,” I say.
We drive for hours, and I push the car too fast, wind coming in the window and slipping up my dress. I can feel every hair. The material waves and flaps. I hate driving. On the radio they’re playing country music. I have no idea if they’re talking about us on the news or not. I don’t care.
I meet David’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
“You don’t like dresses?” I say. “Why, because boys don’t wear dresses?” I say. “You only do what your father says you can do. What do you like? Race cars?” I press my foot down, and the car goes even faster. “Did you know that I’m a race-car driver?”
“You are not,” he says. He looks sullen.
There’s a car ahead of me, in the right lane, and I speed toward it. At the last minute, I swerve out to pass and my stomach lurches to the right. We pass the car and I swerve back in front.
“I used to race at Daytona,” I say. “I had a car with those rims that keep spinning after the car stops. I think they would have kept spinning anyway. I never found out. Do you know why?” I say, and I lurch the car to the left again, passing an SUV. “Because I never stopped.”
We drive all day and into the night. It’s Michelle who sees it first. “Hey, stop the car,” she says. “What the fuck is that?”
“What?” Richard says, leaning into the front and trying to see what she’s pointing at.
“It’s gone.”
“What was it?”
“Just stop the car,” she says, and I pull over to the side of the road. We all climb out, even David, who hasn’t spoken in hours. Michelle stands looking up at the dark night sky, with its slowly drifting clouds. “There!” she says, and she points.
There’s a cut in the darkness of the sky, an incision, with light shining out of it. It’s a green that’s too bright to be natural. It looks like the trail of an airplane, but lit up and too perfect.
“Is it a comet?” Richard says.
The line is broken in two now. It’s still as straight as an incision, but there’s a gap. Then it fills in.
“What the fuck,” Richard says. “It’s so green.”
“It’s a laser,” David says. “It’s a laser beam.”
“Lasers are red,” Richard says, and David shakes his head.
“There are green lasers too,” he says. “Look how straight it is.” A cloud drifts into the beam above us. “It’s behind these trees,” he says.
“Weird,” Alex says. “Can we get out of here? It’s creeping me out. It looks like something out of a science-fiction movie.”
“Let’s go and find it!” David says.
“I’m sure it’s past your bedtime,” Alex says. “Let’s get back in the car and go find a hotel. Come on.” She grabs Richard by the arm, and it’s the first time they’ve touched today.
He looks startled and then turns to me.
“Yeah, let’s get going,” he says.
I can’t stop staring at the laser beam. I can’t see the whole beam, just streaks where it hits cloud or mist in the air. It’s obvious that it’s a laser now, but for a brief moment I really did think there was a tear in the sky. When the end comes, I hope it’s as strange as that. I hope that the sky tears open and the world is washed with colours that we’ve never seen before.
David is looking at me.
“Can we go and see it?” he says.
I look back at the car. Alex and Richard are already inside, and Michelle has her door open. She’s standing and watching us.
“You guys try and find a hotel,” I say. “Grab Richard’s cellphone for me.” Michelle leans into the car and says something. I see Richard pass her the phone. “Just give us a call when you find a place to stay tonight,” I say. “We’re gonna go find this laser.”
Michelle hands me the phone and looks me up and down. “In that dress?” she says. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. You’re going to get the shit kicked out of you in front of a little kid.”
“I’ll be fine,” I say. I turn and look up again. The laser is gone, and for a moment I feel sick with disappointment. Then it slices into view again. “Hey, David,” I say. “You’ve got your knife, right?”
“Yeah,” he says.
“See?” I say to Michelle. “David will protect me.” I put the cellphone into the clutch I’m carrying.
Chapter 9
David is trying to tell me about lasers as we make our way through the woods. He says, “No, that’s not what I said. I said ‘coherent light.’ I have a book. It means that the light waves are in phase with each other.”
“They’re what?”
“They’re lined up!” he says.
It’s hard to hear him, because he’s walking a few feet ahead of me and he won’t turn around when he talks. My dress gets caught on a bramble again, and this time it tears. The trees block out the sky, but every once in a while I can catch a glimpse of the laser’s light through the branches. It looks like it’s getting closer. I can see the beam all the time now, not just when it’s touching a cloud. It looks like a strand of mint dental floss, pulled tight across the sky.
“You know an awful lot for an eight-year-old,” I say. “Are you some sort of scientist?”
“I’m going to be a physicist,” he says. He climbs up on a rock. “Like Richard Feynman. I’m going to learn how to do everything. I have books on mathematics and chemistry, and maybe if we make another atomic bomb I can work on that too. I’m going to learn to pick locks and pick up women like he talks about in his books.” He jumps down from the rock and turns to grin at me.
“I can teach you how to pick locks,” I say, and he laughs.
“Richard Feynman won the Nobel prize,” he says. “He was smart like Einstein, but he was funnier. You probably work at a hair salon, or with computers. You probably work at Kentucky Fried Chicken,” David says. “How would you know how to pick locks?”
“I taught myself,” I say. We come to the edge of the woods. “Picking locks is a way of making sense of the world on your own, without people explaining what things are for,” I say. “Picking locks is like wearing a dress if you’re a boy.”
This is someone’s backyard, and above their satellite dish and chimney the laser is brighter than ever. As a cloud drifts over it, a point of brilliant green appears, wavering up and down with the shape of the cloud.
“It looks closer now,” I say.
“What will we do when we get there?” David says.
“It’s probably up on someone’s roof. Maybe they’ll let us inside to see it.”
We walk in silence for a while, David running ahead, across people’s lawns, but never too far ahead. He must know by now that something weird is going on. I don’t think he understands that we’re kidnapping him. My anger has worn off. I’m not thinking about saving him, about opening his mind to the knowledge that it’s okay to be different, for boys to dress like girls. I’m not thinking about reversing the damage his father has done to him. All I’m thinking about is finding the laser. I don’t know what I’ll do afterward, but right now he and I are going to find that laser together.
On our right there are a few men sitting out on their porch. They’re leaning back in their lawn chairs, and as we approach I can hear them talking. The first words I can make out are “What the fuck?”
“Don’t pay any attention to them,” I say to David, before the first of them even begins catcalling. “Just keep walking until we get to the corner.”
“Hey, faggot, isn’t he a little young for you?” a voice yells. “That’s a nice dress.”
“Yeah,” says another. “Is that your wedding dress? Are you going to try and marry him? I don’t think they’ve made pedophile marriages legal yet, have they?”
There are three of them, and I have to force myself to keep walking. I want to turn around and rush them. I want to bloody my elbows and my knees with them. I don’t want to hurt anyone in front of David though.
“Hey, kid, is that guy bothering you?”
“Leave us alone,” David yells, and he starts walking faster. We get around the corner, and I can see that his face is flushed. “Why are you wearing that?” he says. “They wouldn’t have yelled if you weren’t dressed up like a gaylord.”
“They yelled because they were assholes,” I say.
“They yelled because you’re dressed up like a girl. You’re a faggot,” David says, and I want to slap his face. Instead I grab his wrist, hard, and pull him up a lawn and into the backyard of the house on the corner. We cut through backyards until we’re behind the house with the drunken assholes. I can hear them out front, laughing to one another.
“They don’t let pedophiles get married too, do they?” one says, and they all laugh, reliving their moment of glory.
I open my clutch and pull out the lockpick set.
“What’s that?” David whispers. I lead him to their back door, and I get down on one knee. “Is that a lockpick?” He watches, fascinated, as I slide one of the picks into the lock, using my other hand to work the tension wrench. “You really can pick locks,” he says.
“We can’t talk when we get inside,” I say. “We have to be very quiet. We’re just going to sneak in and then sneak out, okay?”
“What are we doing?”
“We’re going to steal a toaster,” I say. “They made fun of us and said we were getting married. Well, people always give toasters at weddings. We’re going to collect our wedding present.”
“I’ve never stolen anything,” David whispers.
“Well, I won’t tell if you don’t.”
The lock moves, and I let out a sigh of relief. I push the door open a fraction of an inch, sliding the picks back into their case, and the case back into my purse. We have no flashlight, and so we move very slowly, waiting for our eyes to adjust.
David runs across the kitchen to grab a toaster, and he pulls the cord from the wall.
“Got it!” he says.
The lights come on, and a man steps into the kitchen heavily. It’s one of the men from the front lawn.
“What the fuck?” he says. He pushes David to the side and grabs the front of my dress. “How the fuck did you get in my house?”
David’s watching
, his eyes wide, and there has to be a way out of this without violence. He’s eight years old. I shouldn’t have brought him into this house. Fucking Christ.
“Listen,” I say. “He’s only eight. We’ll just leave, all right? We’ll forget this ever happened.” He has my chest hair through the dress, and I want to bring my knee up and into his crotch. He isn’t that much bigger than me. I wonder what he’d tell his friends if he got stomped by a faggot.
He shoves me against the wall and grabs the toaster out of David’s hands. He starts wrapping the cord around his fist. My own hands are fists now, and all I can think to say is “David, close your eyes.” This fucker has a punch in the throat coming. But before he can step forward, and before my fist can come up, he drops the toaster and staggers to the side, his hand on his back. His hand comes back with blood on it.
“What the fuck?” he says.
David is staring at him in shock, his little knife still in his hand. There is something smeared on the blade. I grab David’s wrist and we’re out the door and into the neighbours’ backyard before I can even start thinking. I can’t believe he stabbed the guy. Eight years old. I’m the most irresponsible kidnapper ever.
From the front yard we can hear yelling. I slow down to see if I can hear what they’re doing, but David shoves me from behind.
“Run!” David says, pushing past me.
We run. Above us, the laser slices through the clouds. I can’t stop looking up. David is looking up while he runs too.
“It’s close,” I say. “It’s way closer than before. It can’t be more than a few blocks from here.”
And then we aren’t running from anything anymore. We’re running toward the laser. We’re pushing through bushes from one backyard into the next, our eyes on the clouds and that beacon in the sky.
Chapter 10
We stop on a street that’s all dark, some new suburb with skeleton houses and dirt everywhere. The laser looks thick in the sky now. I can see it all. David sits down on the curb and cries. He’s still holding the little knife in his hand. He ran all this way with an open knife. I didn’t even notice.
“We’re almost to the laser!” I say, but David just cries harder. “Don’t you want to see?” He shakes his head, and all my excitement is gone. I can’t pretend anymore. I’m glad he’s not wearing a dress right now. What if that fucker back at the house had turned on David first? What if he’d done something before I could react?
