Outside In

by Sarah Ellis

  Lynn felt her voice rising. Was this what everyone would think of the Underlanders? That they needed help? Maybe unless you’d been there, you would assume Blossom’s life was dangerous or bad.

  “Oh.” Celia was looking down at the friendship bracelet in her lap.

  What was she doing getting mad at Celia?

  “Look. Celia. Remember the Borrowers?”

  “The book?”

  “Yeah. Remember how they lived on what humans threw away or lost? That’s what the Underlanders are like. They’re smart and brave. They make do.”

  “I loved that book. Except it’s so sad at the end when Mrs. Thingy calls the rat-catchers and the Borrowers disappear and that boy feels so bad. I cried when Miss Gilpin read that to us.”

  “It’s like that. Like when the top gets ripped off their world. Where are they? Did they get found out? Are they safe? Did they get to stay together?”

  “Okay,” said Kas. “We need answers. We obviously need to find this Blossom.”

  “I don’t know,” said Lynn. “If she decides to be invisible we won’t be able to find her. Remember when we tried that before?”

  “Negative thinking,” said Kas. “All we had before was a kilt. This time we’ve got lots of leads. You spent all this time with her. You went places with them. They know people. Somebody’s got to know where they are.”

  Celia took a small notebook out of her bag. “Time for a list.”

  By the time the list was complete, the bungee cord that had been around Lynn’s chest had dissolved, and she felt hungry for the first time in a week. They relocated to the food court where everything smelled delicious. They consumed waffle fries and triple taco threats and Shangri-La smoothies and made a plan.

  Step one could happen the very next day.

  When Lynn arrived home, next-door Aileen was attacking the weeds in the sidewalk cracks with a blowtorch.

  She bellowed over the whoosh of the flame. “Hey, Lynn! I’m going to do your front path next. Once I get this thing fired up I like to keep going.”

  Lynn stopped and watched the dandelions melt to black.

  Her front path? Not actually. Clive’s front path. Clive’s front path and house and car.

  Shakti was sitting at the table peering at the laptop.

  “Oh, Lynn, thank goodness. Can you give me a hand here? I’ve got my resume all set to go but the program keeps indenting everything.”

  Lynn reached over and sorted it out.

  “Oh, thank you, you’re a genius. Jean sent me this lead on a great job in the non-profit sector. So I’m just going to send this off.”

  “Shakti. Where are we going to live when Clive gets back?”

  Shakti took off her glasses and smiled.

  “I’m not sure, but it’s a wonderful opportunity to try something different, a new way of being. I mean, look at your friends. They just stepped off the track of conventional ideas about housing.”

  Rage whooshed up in Lynn like the blowtorch.

  “That’s your plan?” Her voice did a weird octave leap. “What a good idea. We can just take over the place under the reservoir? The place that is so conveniently vacant?”

  “Oh, Lynn, I understand that you’re angry. What happened to your friends is very upsetting.”

  “Shut up about what you understand. I am not interested. And, anyway, it didn’t just happen to my friends. It’s your fault. Get it?”

  The words hung in the air and then started to wisp away like skywriting.

  The mash-up of waffle fries and tacos started to seem like a bad idea.

  Shakti ran her hands through her hair and then closed her eyes for one long moment.

  “Yes, you’re right. I get it. I’m sorry.”

  Lynn waited for the other shoe to drop. With Shakti there was always a But, and some excuse that ended up with her, somehow, being the one to feel sorry for, how upset she was, how she wasn’t sleeping, how difficult it all was for her.

  Any minute now she was going to start doing yoga.

  “I betrayed your trust and I endangered your friends. I know.”

  Lynn grabbed her anger as it started to slip away.

  “And I admire you for speaking your mind. You’ve got guts. You’ve always been brave. I guess you’ve had to be.”

  So. Same old leopard. But …

  Lynn looked beyond her mother into the dining room. The crystals were back on the chandelier. The light caught them and danced little prisms onto the wall. It was actually quite beautiful.

  Bam! Bam! There was a no-nonsense knock at the door.

  Shakti stood up. “Can you make sure I’ve saved that?”

  It was Aileen, hefting her propane tank.

  “Hey, Shakti. I could do your flagstones at the back. Cremate all that moss. Waddaya say?”

  “Oh. Sure,” said Shakti. “That would be great, Aileen. Thanks.”

  She shut the door and turned back to Lynn.

  “Why did I just say yes to that? I like that moss.”

  “You’re scared of her.”

  “Yes! You’re absolutely right. Aileen is terrifying. It’s all that energetic tidiness.”

  “Plus the fact that she’s armed with enough propane to blow up the block.”

  Shakti grinned. “Yes, well, there’s that, too.”

  “Mom?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think I’ll go back to school tomorrow.”

  “Good choice.”

  Lynn headed for the stairs as the smell of burning moss drifted in the window.

  EIGHTEEN

  Carts of Darkness

  Monday lunchtime the program of finding Blossom clicked into gear. Finding Dreadlocks from the base jump night was as easy as plunking down in the cafeteria. There he was, across the invisible line that divided the people that you could talk to from the people that you couldn’t. Dreads, ring in the eyebrow, attitude. Eating noodles.

  All she had to do was go over and talk to him.

  All.

  “That’s the guy?” said Kas.

  “Yes, you know him?”

  “Yeah, Wolf Skapski. He hangs out with my cousin Mark.”

  “So. I just need to go over there and talk to him. No big deal, right?”

  “Right.”

  “It’s just a simple question, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Hey, Kas, since you know him, why don’t you do it?”

  “I don’t know him. I’ve just seen him around with Mark.”

  “Look. I’ll do it.” Celia’s voice was wobbly but she started to stand up.

  “Oh, Celia, sit down.” Lynn reached out and grabbed Celia’s sleeve.

  Without even planning the script, Lynn stood up and walked across the room, aware of eyes shifting toward her. How far was it? Twelve steps? Several hundred kilometers?

  When she arrived at the dangerous-guy table, courtesy seemed the way to go.

  “Wolf, I don’t want to interrupt your lunch, but when you’re done, if you have a minute, can I talk to you?”

  Complete silence. She could tell from their dazed expressions that it was as though the recycling bin had suddenly begun to sing the national anthem.

  Wolf said simply, “Sure.”

  “Thanks,” said Lynn. “I’ll be right outside the door.”

  Kas and Celia greeted her as though she had just returned from a space mission. Splash-down at Cafeteria Table #6!

  “What did you say to him?”

  “I asked him to meet me after lunch.”

  It was bold. It was hopeful. It was even fun.

  But it came to nothing.

  “I don’t know where he is. Haven’t heard anything about new jumps. I guess he just took off.”

  Then the cafeteria doors exploded
open with the boys from the dangerous-boys table, and Wolf was carried away. Lynn watched them retreat, an amoeba-like mass of testosterone.

  The following week all the strategies on Celia’s list led to dead ends.

  The folks at the garden hadn’t seen Blossom and Larch.

  The Diode went with Lynn to a Thursday night stakeout at Clara the dentist’s. It was quite hard to do a stakeout on a regular city street. You couldn’t just stand there in front of somebody’s house.

  “No wonder PI’s need cars,” said Kas.

  There was no sign of dog or dog walker.

  On Saturday Lynn and Celia went to the north shore farmers’ market. No tubeworlds. No leads.

  They placed another I Saw You ad and netted a bunch of replies from a whole different set of creeps.

  One garbage pick-up morning, Lynn woke up to the sound of bottles clanking. She jumped out of bed and stuck her head out the window. It was an elderly Chinese woman delicately sorting through the recycling.

  This wasn’t their patch. It never had been.

  Finally, the only lead left was a place she dreaded going to. Kas and Celia had offered to go with her to any of the locations they had figured out. But for this one Lynn knew she would have to be alone.

  ≈≈≈

  Most places looked better on a sunny day. Not the Return-It depot. Lynn stood across the street and watched the comings and goings, remembering the day she had been there with the Underlanders. It had been a dark day, a sky of big black clouds and a weirdly cold breeze, fridge-open cold. Lynn had met them at the fountain — Fossick, Tron and Blossom, each steering a grocery cart full of neatly organized bottles and cans. Fossick was proclaiming, as usual — “I never saw the heavens so dim by day.”

  As they paused at the top of the hill, Tron jumped on the back of his cart, gave a big push and rode it down the long slope, heading straight for a busy intersection. Lynn watched in horror, but Fossick and Blossom seemed unconcerned. At the very last minute, he stuck out one foot and braked.

  “It’s what they do up on the steep mountain roads,” Blossom explained. “It’s kind of like the Olympics. They call themselves Carts of Darkness.”

  As the slower party reached the bottom of the hill, it began to hail. Fossick pulled four garbage bags from a roll attached to his cart, and Tron pulled out a knife. In a second they had ponchos. Soon the hail was bouncing on the streets and popping into the ponchos. Each hailstone was a small attack. It was almost painful. Lynn’s feet began to slip on the pavement, like walking on ball bearings.

  “Circle the wagons,” said Fossick, laughing with the craziness of it.

  The hailstones popped off the plastic and pinged off the bottles. Cars stopped wherever they were on the road, the world whitened and the stones got bigger. Lynn, hiding under her poncho, couldn’t see and couldn’t hear. It was all about the cold smell of the wind and the small micro-attacks of hailstones.

  Then, abruptly, it stopped. The cars started up and the Underlanders peered out from under their ponchos and set off again.

  The depot was alive with energy. In the parking lot, carts of every sort milled, some still decorated with hailstones. Inside the warehouse, men stood at long tables accepting bottles, counting and calculating, handing out bits of paper. There was a lineup at the cash wicket.

  Everybody knew the Underlanders. They called out greetings and jokes. “How’s it going?” “My business is picking up every day, ha ha.” A woman with hair polished like mahogany, called out, “Hey, Fossick! Not dead yet?” and laughed a raspy laugh. Blossom astonished Lynn by having a long conversation in sign language with one of the cashiers.

  The people glanced at Lynn, neither friendly nor unfriendly, not very curious.

  After they cashed in their bottles, they stopped off at a van at the corner of the parking lot. Coffee: fifty cents. Fossick offered Lynn a cup. “On us.”

  Lynn hated coffee. She thought it tasted like bitter mud. She didn’t like coffee or coffee ice cream or mocha anything. She didn’t even like the smell of coffee, which everybody else seemed to go nuts for.

  But here was Fossick, newly rich and treating.

  “Sure! Thanks!”

  Lynn put in as much whitener and sugar as she could fit into the paper cup. She tried to sip without inhaling, which was harder than it looked. It was a struggle, but she made it, getting totally caffeine-hyped in the process.

  Lynn crossed the street. That other time people had been covered in coats and garbage-bag ponchos. Now they were exposed, somehow seeming either too thin or too fat. Before, on the hail day, it seemed like a human place. This time it seemed like an animal place with everyone looking the same, shuffling and gray-faced. Even though it was dry outside, the concrete floor of the warehouse was wet, and it felt to Lynn as though the liquid was going to eat through the soles of her shoes.

  The smell was breathe-through-your-mouth terrible. Not just unwashed bodies but something metallic, medicinal, almost toxic. That other time the noise seemed like the noise of work, of a factory or a big machine. Now it was just yelling and the sound of breaking glass. A couple of guys took half-hearted swipes at each other in the cash-wicket lineup. The few dogs looked mangy and mean. A young woman danced a high-stepping dance to her own internal music.

  Lynn knew she stood out. She had no cart to hide behind, no Underlanders. She felt the stares of people willing her to go away.

  Everything in her was pushing her to run back to the world that threw bottles away, far from the world that collected them.

  But then she saw the woman with the mahogany hair dumping soft drink cans onto a table.

  Lynn walked over and took a big breath.

  “Excuse me. Have you seen Fossick?”

  It was as if she hadn’t spoken at all. She raised her voice. “Do you know where Fossick is?”

  The woman crashed the cans onto the metal table. “I hear you. I couldn’t tell you.”

  Couldn’t? Wouldn’t? Didn’t know? Hostility came off the woman like a chill.

  A cart nudged Lynn in the bum. She spun around. A skinny guy grinned and looked her up and down. The tattoos on his arms looked like creeping mold.

  “You’re in the way, darlin’. What are you here for? Feeding time?”

  The habit of politeness was all that Lynn had.

  “Sorry.”

  The moldy guy gave a sharp, knowing laugh.

  It was no good. The courage it had taken to come here was all used up. She was nothing here. Nobody.

  She strode across the warehouse, keeping her pace just below a run, dodging carts and people. Rounding the corner at the exit her foot hit a slippery patch and she went down in a slide that probably had some fancy name in figure skating. The shoe-dissolving sludge was all over her hands. She could feel it infecting her scabs.

  Get up. Get away. Just get up. Don’t look at anybody. Don’t make a sound.

  “Hey.”

  She looked up. It was a woman in a wheelchair, white-haired and not one place on her face that was not a wrinkle. Bright black eyes.

  “You looking for Fossick?”

  Lynn nodded.

  “I heard they was at Rainey’s.”

  Lynn picked herself up. “Do you know where that is?”

  “No. That’s all I heard.” The wheelchair began to turn.

  “Thank you.”

  Rainey. Just-in-case Rainey. It was a start.

  She saw the bus approaching half a block away. If she sprinted. If the light turned red against the bus.

  She did. It did. She sank into the seat, feeling raw. To be so disliked by people you didn’t even know. Anything she could have said, like, “But they’re my friends,” or “I’m not a citizen like that,” would have been impossible, canceled out by her new-to-her clothes, her clean fingernails, her just-shampooed hair, her manne
rs, her full stomach.

  “But you don’t even know me.” Another thing she could not have said.

  And what did that man mean by “feeding time”? It wasn’t like the Return-It was a soup kitchen.

  Oh.

  A hot jet of embarrassment washed over Lynn. Feeding time at the zoo. Like she had gone to stare at the animals.

  That was so unfair! Stupid and mean and ignorant and … true. It had been like an animal place today, a wild place full of creatures without names. Creatures who were not like her.

  The sun beat through the dusty bus window, too bright. Lynn scraped at her hands with the edge of her bus transfer, scraping away the dirt, sanding away the smell of what she had just seen in herself.

  NINETEEN

  The Air Most Sweet

  Three weeks passed. Exams happened. Alexis continued to play the tragic heroine for all she was worth. The countdown to summer holidays began. Clive took an extension on his time in Ghana. Shakti got a second interview call for a job. City council approved the casino development.

  Rainey. Rainy. Ray Ni. Reni. Renee, René. There were too many hits and too few. Just-in-case Rainey was a start that quickly became a finish.

  Not everybody was on the Internet.

  The beginning of the last week of school, Lynn, Celia and Kas washed up at the bottom of the school steps, stuck together with the force of afternoon inertia. An unconvincing rain was falling, and they were huddled under the roof of three umbrellas, discussing summer volunteer hours.

  “Essential for our resumes,” said Kas.

  Celia was having mother issues.

  “She won’t let me volunteer anywhere dangerous or, you know, unpleasant.”

  Kas and Lynn weren’t surprised. Celia’s mother, according to Celia’s daily bulletins, was very worried about drugs, cults, boys (unless they were members of a designated and supervised “youth group”), gangs, smoking, sexualized fashions (which might be anything other than a nun’s habit or a burqa), abduction and the erosion of good manners. She tried to keep Celia very busy.