by Peter Rock
“You don’t,” I said. “I wouldn’t.”
Audra closed the refrigerator. She took a long knife from a drawer, looked at its shining blade, then put it back.
“What was that?” I said.
“The knife?”
“That newspaper in your pocket.”
When Audra came back, close to me, her voice was softer.
“It’s about the girl,” she said. “She lived for four years in the forest, never in a house. Growing things, hiding, reading books. We’ll go see her; she’ll tell us things.”
“When?” I said.
“Soon.” Audra folded the newspaper and put it back in her pocket, then glanced behind her, toward the stairs. “Is Dad still here?”
“I think so.”
“I’m taking a shower.”
Once she was gone, upstairs, I twisted the tops from my bottles and swallowed my three pills, each a different size and color. Blue, green, yellow. I twisted the lids back on, then drank my milk, then my orange juice.
I took a lot of pills, but no one really understood what was wrong with me. Not the doctors, not my parents, not me. “Becoming agitated” was what they called it, and they wanted me to learn to recognize it, so I could be in control of it and not let it be in control of me.
At school, people gave me space. They flinched sometimes when I came close, or held up an arm like they were going to block me from hitting them. I never hit anyone. The nickname they had for me was “Vivian Ritalin”—but that wasn’t even a pill I took anymore. The girls only said things like that when they were in groups and even then they never got too close.
At school I was allowed to carry my backpack with me. In it I kept an old zippered sweatshirt that was too small. If I started feeling like I was becoming agitated, I put it on and zipped it up tight, so it held me and calmed me down.
I was a sophomore, and Audra was a senior. I hardly saw her at school, so she couldn’t protect me. The closer she came to graduating, the less often she went to school at all.
It had been easier, we were closer, when we were in different schools. At night, we would sneak across the hallway, sleep in the same bed, whisper all night. She had a black BMX bike with foot pegs, and I’d stand on them, behind her with my hands on her shoulders, and we’d ride through the neighborhood. I could smell her hair. I leaned when she leaned. I saw everything over the top of her head. We would coast along, sisters, and people would see us together, and no one would be moving at the same speed, in the same direction.
THREE
It was a week or so after the bird flew into the window, another one of those nights when Audra went out and didn’t come back until the next day. There were new locks on the outside of her bedroom door, on her window, but that didn’t stop her.
I was sitting at the desk in my bedroom, doing homework. The window reflected back, it was night, so I could see myself with my social studies book open, my hand taking notes with a pencil. All about Martin Luther King, and how different people should have the same kind of chances, even if they are different. And then I ran out of paper.
In my bookcase, a yellow notebook was caught tight between my world atlas and an encyclopedia about mammals. It wasn’t a new notebook—it had my name on the cover, written by me. By the curliness of my signature, and the color—yellow was my favorite then—I could tell that it was from seventh grade, or eighth. Now, finding it, I pulled the thin white paper snakes from the metal spiral, left behind when the pages were torn out. I balled them up and put them in my pocket.
It had half its paper left, maybe, and I opened the cover. The first page was blank, but I could see writing through it, behind it. I carried the notebook back to the desk and set it down, under the lamp. I opened it again, and turned that first blank page.
The writing was not easy to read. It was not my writing, I didn’t know whose it was, and I’d never heard of what the words were saying. The words were cursive. They didn’t follow the lines, but slanted across them.
There is in fact coming and going, bending
and breaking. One single bolt or screw
holds the blades of a scissors together, into
one tool that can cut paper or leather
or steel or meat. If you take that screw
or break that bolt, the scissors become
two things. Two knives. Eyes can cut, too,
back and forth. Eyes can turn outward or
inward.
When I read those words, I didn’t know the way I was feeling, didn’t exactly recognize it. I stood up from my desk and opened my closet and took out my orange life jacket from its hanger. I put it on over my clothes, and hooked the buckles and pulled the straps as tight as I could around me, holding me. Then I slipped down in the space between my bed and the wall, where I could hardly fit with the life jacket on, where I was squeezed and could close my eyes and breathe slowly.
The trembling did not come for me; I was not agitated. It was something else.
I stood up again, walked across my bedroom. I leaned my head against the cold window, so I could see past, through the reflection. Outside, our yard was empty. The shadowy trees blew around in the rain.
I sat down at my desk. I read the words in the notebook again, slower this time. The scissors and the knives, the eyes. And then I turned the page where it had been blank before and now there were more words in that same handwriting, like they’d been written while I was between the bed and the wall.
These words were different, and kind of the same.
A girl is the sweetest, sharpest thing. For
how many years are they at their most
dangerous? They can drift beyond, and they
can home right in. Or is it hone? To hone
is to sharpen. To think only of sharpness is
a mistake, of course, as girls are also soft,
and that is part of their power. Electrical
storms become all snarled up in soft clouds.
Some of us were once girls, some were never
girls. Hello! We’re all mixed together now,
coming and going, ebbing and flowing, and
we do appreciate girls. We need them like
a cat with its eyes dialed down to see in a
darkness. Have you ever pressed your hand
flat to a girl’s bare back?
I closed the yellow cover of the notebook and carried it across the hall to Audra’s room. I wanted to show it to her. I didn’t know yet that she’d gone out, that she’d be gone all night, so I was surprised that her room was empty.
I turned on the light, stepped inside. On the wall above her bed, two hands were outlined, where she’d traced hers in black marker. Waving, or saying “Stay Back.” On her bed was a round gray roll of duct tape, a coil of rope.
Audra’s favorite books were still there, the ones she always read. Swiss Family Robinson and Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Journey to the Center of the Earth, A Wizard of Earthsea. And next to them, books I had never seen before. All about surviving in the woods, wilderness medicine, trapping animals with snares. They weren’t library books, and they were scuffed, the covers scratched and the titles on the spines impossible to read. I pulled one out, opened it up. The page was smeared with dirt, and one passage was underlined in blue ink:
Animals, like humans, make in life
the mistakes that will ultimately
lead to their death, either physically
or on a spiritual and emotional
level. People and animals that
stay on the same paths in life will
eventually wear themselves into ruts.
Soon the ruts become so deep that
the people can no longer see over
the sides. They see neither danger,
nor beauty, only the path before
them because they fear losing their
security and are afraid to enter the
land of the unknown.
The book was wr
itten by a man named Tom Brown, Jr. Farther in, I saw drawings and diagrams of different ways of walking, how to walk without making a sound. The Scout Walk. The Fox Walk.
When I slid the book back among the others, I saw myself, my reflection in the window. I thought how someone outside could see me. Even Audra could see me, as she came home, see me reading her books, standing in her room. I switched off the light, then stepped to the window and looked out. Over our front yard, past the swing, the black street shiny and wet. No one was out there. The only sound was a creak, overhead, as an antenna shifted and turned. That meant Dad was in the basement, trying to find one of his friends, somewhere else in the world.
Light shone from the door of my parents’ bedroom, where my mom was sitting at the computer. Their bedroom is at the end of the hall, then mine, then Audra’s, across from mine and closest to the stairs.
I went downstairs, into the kitchen, where the light was on, the dinner dishes clean in the drying rack next to the sink. The notebook was still in my hand and I set it on the counter. I poured myself a glass of water and drank it. I took an apple from the refrigerator, but I didn’t know if I wanted to eat it. Scissors, cats, lightning, the way girls were powerful and how I was a girl—that was what I was thinking about.
I could hear Dad’s voice downstairs, in the basement. He cleared his throat. I heard a hiss as he twisted the cap from one of his two-liter bottles of soda, then the crinkly plastic sound of the bottle as he squeezed it, as he took a drink. I picked up the notebook again and started down, into the basement.
At first he didn’t notice me. I sat on the stairs, two or three steps from the bottom, and watched as he turned knobs, as the sharp red needles jerked back and forth in the tiny, lighted windows. His hair had gotten bushy, messy, his beard growing out. He is an accountant, and his work’s about counting numbers that are other people’s money. Some parts of the year he’s really busy, but he spends a lot of time in the basement, talking to people who use names that might not be their real names, people who even used numbers instead of names.
“Vivian,” Dad said, turning in his swivel chair, noticing me. “You been there a long time?”
“Not really,” I said.
“What’s up?” He looked worried, kicking with his feet to roll closer to me. Instead of shoes, he wore the ragged gray felt liners from winter boots. He also wore his old ski jacket, with stripes down the arms and holes in the front, where one time he’d carried a car battery.
Now he pulled the headset down, around his neck. “Everything all right? Nothing’s wrong, bothering you, is there?”
“Not really,” I said, and then I realized that I was still wearing the orange life jacket, that’s what he was looking at. I loosened the straps, smiled back at him. I shifted the notebook behind me; perhaps I had been going to show it to Dad, but suddenly in that moment I knew that I did not want to share it, that I wasn’t supposed to.
“Who are you talking to?” I said.
“Some people,” he said. “A lady in Iceland I know, a new person in Thailand.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The weather, mostly. I mean, just talking. They’re pretty lonely, I guess. Sometimes I just listen to conversations other people are having.”
“Without them knowing?” I said. “Is that okay?”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s how it works. They can listen in on me, if they want to.”
Sitting there, watching as my dad put his headset back on, as he flipped switches and turned dials, I think then I understood how lonely, or how dissatisfied, he was—how he was trying to reach, to talk to people who were not in our house, not in our family. And upstairs, my mom was at her computer, looking somewhere else, too. Audra had always talked to me, and I had talked to her, but now even Audra had someone else, somewhere else, this person who knew more than I did, this girl who knew things, who knew how to live out in the woods.
Dad turned around; he lifted the headset from one ear. “What are Audra and your mom up to?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Mom’s in the bedroom with the computer, I think. Audra, I don’t know. I should do my homework.”
“Good girl,” he said.
I turned and climbed back up into the kitchen, through it and up the stairs toward my bedroom. At the top, outside Audra’s door, is where the floor creaks. If you know how to step there, your feet wide, right where the floor meets the wall, you can still do it silently.
Back in my room, I took off my life jacket, hung it in the closet, then set the yellow notebook on my desk. I opened it, read through those words again.
To think only of sharpness is a mistake,
of course, as girls are also soft, and that
is part of their power. Electrical storms
become all snarled up in soft clouds.
That was about me. I liked that these words were being sent to me, only for me. I was a girl with a snarl inside. A snarl is a knot, a tangle, and it can also be a sound.
FOUR
I waited until lunchtime. Then I walked right across the sports fields, past groups of kids who were talking on their cell phones, not paying attention to anything around them. Still, I kept expecting someone to call out or come after me. I didn’t turn back to look at the windows of the school where some teacher might be watching, wondering where I was going.
And once I was out of sight, turning the corner and down the street, Audra was standing there, right where she said she’d be. She just looked up and waited, and then we walked along without saying anything, past the QFC supermarket, past Beverly Cleary Elementary, down toward the highway and the MAX train station. I looked back, once. No one was following.
We crossed a parking lot, then the bridge above the train tracks. We could already hear the train coming, so we ran down the stairs to the platform.
On the train we swung our backpacks around and set them on the floor. Audra smiled at me, reached out and touched my shoulder. There was ink all over her right hand, the words too smeared to read. She is left-handed.
“This girl knows a lot,” Audra said. “She taught herself with books instead of going to school, grew her own food. She was hiding all the time, invisible—no one could find her.”
“So we’re going to the woods?”
“No,” Audra said. “They caught her, finally, moved her to another place, said she had to go to school.”
“You said no one could catch her.”
“It was an accident, getting caught. It wasn’t her fault. Still, there’s a lot of things she can teach us.”
The ring where Audra’s nose had been pierced was gone. Her ears were covered by her hair swinging down, but her hair wasn’t snagging on her earrings like it usually did.
“Like what?” I said.
“What?” Audra said.
“What’s she going to teach us? How to be like her?”
“No,” Audra said. “How to be like ourselves.”
“Okay,” I said, not sure what she meant. I felt the wheels clacking through the floor, through the soles of my sneakers. The train went around a curve, the middle part bending like an accordion.
“I mean, what do you think’s going to happen to me?” Audra said. “I’m supposed to go to college, then meet some guy and probably marry him and then every day we both wake up and drive to work where we sit in cubicles and there probably aren’t even any windows or anything?”
Her voice was loud enough that people were looking over at us. I unzipped my pack and touched my too-small sweatshirt, but then I looked at Audra and the feeling passed.
“That’s pretending to be a different person than who you are,” she said.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“There’s nothing worse than living that way,” she said. “Like your life jacket, or that sweatshirt—do you think you’d need that, really, if you stopped taking those pills they make you swallow?”
“I don’t know what I’d do,” I said.
>
“But sometimes it still happens—like you still grab me, even when you’ve taken the pills, right? So maybe you don’t need the pills at all.”
“If I didn’t take them,” I said, “Mom and Dad would know. Mom counts them every night.”
The train was starting over the river, across the bridge. Down below, there were only a couple of small boats. It wasn’t raining, but it looked like it could start.
“Whatever,” Audra said. “Just think about how you feel—just feel how it all is. It doesn’t make sense the way it is, or the way it’s been. I mean, Mom and Dad? Do we want to end up like them, all boring and sad? In front of a computer or a radio? Attached to a cell phone?”
The train slid into Pioneer Square, the center of Portland. Groups of kids stood out there, close together, kicking hacky-sacks, smoking. One got on the train, his short hair yellow, a dirty Band-Aid on his cheek. His black pants had straps and buckles all over them, and he’d brought his bicycle, a really tiny one, onto the train. He stood there as the doors slid closed and then Audra got up and walked over to him. They were talking, but I couldn’t hear them. She asked him a question; he shook his head. She pointed at his bike; he pointed up in the air, down at the floor. He looked at her and smiled.
Audra turned and came back and sat next to me just as the train went into the tunnel. I could see us both in the black window, how our faces looked kind of the same. Audra’s was sharper, the shadows darker in her eyes.
“You know that guy?” I said.
“Not really,” she said.
“What were you talking about?”
“He said he’s going to race that little bike all the way down the hills from the zoo, back to Pioneer Square. Some friend of his is timing him on a watch.”
“Why aren’t they in school?” I said, but Audra didn’t answer.
The train slid to a stop at the underground station beneath the zoo. It was lit like a cave, and the boy got off. We could see him standing at the elevator, spinning the bike on its front wheel, holding the handlebars, and then he stepped into the elevator and the doors closed behind him.
