by Vicki Grant
There was no way I was going to stop until we were miles away from all those people and that reporter’s flashing camera.
I didn’t even slow down when Bitsie started biting my ear.
54 The guy was an egomaniac. You’d think if they could put a man on the moon, someone would be able to invent latex that wasn’t so full of itself.
41
SOMETHING TO REMEMBER.
“You only have $78.37 here.” The guy at the bus station wasn’t going to let us go to Bousfield because we were sixty-three cents short. I couldn’t believe it!
Normally, I would have just apologized for wasting his time and walked away. I mean, I was hardly the type to argue with people. I was hardly the type to even talk to people.
But this time was different. Maybe it was because I was desperate. Or maybe it was because I was disguised. Wearing those pink glasses of Bitsie’s and that stupid kerchief, I didn’t look like me anymore.55 I guess I didn’t feel like me anymore either.
I said, “I know we’re short. I mean, I’m short. But I did have enough money—honest. It’s just that I fell when I was running to get here. See?”
I lifted my leg way up to the counter so he could see the hole in my pants and my bloody knee.
“And I was bleeding really badly so I had to use some of my bus money for Band-Aids.”
By now, he wasn’t even looking at me. He was busy filling out some form and I thought, How rude! But I didn’t let it show.
I just kept going. “I had to use the whole box. It was that bad! I was even getting a little light in the head. Probably because I lost so much blood. Or maybe just because it was so gross. It really was terrible.”
He looked at me and sighed and pushed the form he’d been filling out across the counter.
“One round-trip ticket to Bousfield. That’ll be $78.37.
I’ll take the sixty-three cents out of my donut money.”
“Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!” I started squealing like I’d just guessed how much the do-it-yourself face-lift kit cost on The Price is Right.
“No, thank you,” he said, patting his belly and smiling for the first time. “It’ll do me good to have one less sour-cream old-fashioned. Next!”
Giving up a donut for a complete stranger! People are so nice. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that.
55 And I was hoping that none of those people who had been running after us would think so either.
42
NOW SHOWING AT A
BRAIN NEAR YOU.
We spent the night in the bus station. I was tired and hungry and scared. The donut man had gone home for the night. Everyone still there looked mean or crazy or both. The fact that I thought the donut man was mean at first too didn’t make me feel any better at three in the morning. I wouldn’t have had a wink of sleep except that Bitsie was desperate to keep me happy. He was worried I was going to take him back to the studio. I’m sure that’s the only reason he volunteered to stand guard.
Or rather lie guard. I put my knapsack on the bench so Bitsie could see out the hole at the top. Then I put my head on the knapsack and fell asleep.
It’s funny how you say “fall asleep,” because that’s not usually what happens. How often do you “fall”? Usually you just sort of float asleep. Like you’re on an air mattress or something, just drifting. One minute you’re in the shallow waters of Wakey-Wakey Beach; then, without even knowing it, you’ve floated out into the wide-open seas of the Slumber Strait. 56
But that night I fell asleep, and I must have knocked myself out when I hit bottom because I didn’t move again until 6:55 when this really loud announcement came on.
“All passengers should now be on board for the 7:03 bus to Neewack, Goldrink, New Cumberland, Bousfield and Lower Shinimicas.”
I unstuck my tongue from the roof of my mouth, grabbed my knapsack and stumbled onto the bus half-awake. I was sort of glad I was feeling so terrible. When you need a toothbrush as badly as I did, it’s easy to keep your mind off your other problems. The back of the bus was empty so I put the knapsack against the armrest and stretched out over three seats. I was hoping to just fall asleep again. Hard—the way I did before—so that nothing could start worming around in my brain until I woke up in Bousfield.
Like Bitsie was going to let that happen.
He started yammering away about all the things he and Arnold’s puppets were going to do together. It was going to be so much fun after being cooped up with those foam-heads all these years. I couldn’t blame him for being excited, but that doesn’t mean I had to listen to him. The less I thought about what we were doing, the better. I closed the top of the knapsack to shut out his voice and tried to go to sleep.
He pulled open the side pocket and started talking about how he hoped they had cable up in Bousfield so he and the boys (as he called his soon-to-be new friends) could get the Sports Channel.
I stuffed the fake braids on my kerchief into my ears and rolled over and tried again. But it was too late. I wasn’t going to be able to fall asleep anymore. I lay there staring at the grey-carpeted ceiling of the bus and tried not to listen as my “pillow” yakked on and on about puppet movie theaters and puppet bowling alleys and puppet malls and all the wonderful things he was pretty sure he’d find in beautiful downtown Bousfield.
I didn’t know how I was going to survive a six-hour bus trip with old Motormouth blabbing away.
Then my head went all quiet inside, and Bitsie’s voice disappeared. I hadn’t zoned out like that in a long time. Not since Bess stole that bus back in Beach Meadows and it looked like we’d all end up in a ditch or Mexico or something.
Do you know what the funny thing was this time? When I wanted to blank out all the scary things that were happening right then, guess what I thought of.
Bess—stealing the bus. Suddenly, it didn’t seem so terrible.
It seemed kind of, I don’t know, “charming,” as my mother would say. I thought about Bess gunning down Sow’s Ear Road just the way it happened, but without feeling afraid of crashing or afraid of what the Mounties were going to do or afraid of the look on my mother’s face when we finally stopped. I thought about Bess singing that stupid song, which didn’t seem so stupid anymore, and her making Alyssa feel like a star just because of her bright pink throw-up.
For the next six hours I was glued to my own little mental movie, “Me and My Crazy Sister,” starring the zany but loveable Bess Mercer. The stealing, the lying, the broken windows all started to seem like the good old days.
Maybe that’s part of growing up. Have you noticed old people always think that way? Everything that happened before—no matter how horrible it must have been at the time—is better than whatever’s happening right now. That’s why Grammie gets all dreamy-eyed talking about the war,
I guess. Or why Kathleen loves telling stories about being poor as a kid and eating secondhand Queenburgers and having the heat so low that she had to wear her snowsuit to bed every night. You’d almost think someone forced her to give it all up for a fancy condo, expensive clothes and Apricot-Kiwi Emulsion.
I wasn’t thinking all that, of course. I was just enjoying the movie. Every so often a little thought would creep in that didn’t fit. Mum crying, say. Or Dad looking out the window at nothing. Or the sound of the social worker dropping Bess’s big, fat file on the kitchen table. When that happened the movie would click right off as if someone—probably Bess—had switched the channel to some gross thing like I Want You Dead or Abdominal Surgery or even one of those ads about starving babies. It’s hard to pretend life’s just grand when you’re watching a kid die or someone get their liver yanked out.
But I’d just grab the remote back—not the real remote, but you know what I mean—and start watching the Bess movie again. I chuckled when she locked the principal out of his office and sang dirty songs over the PA system until the janitor knocked the door down. I smiled at her giving me a shirt for Christmas that just so happened to be her size,
not mine. I even had one of those little happy cries over the beautiful Remembrance Day speech she gave about our grandfather’s heroic war service, and this time it didn’t bother me a bit that our grandfather had flat feet and never went to war.
It didn’t matter. The stories did what they had to.
They got me to Bousfield without thinking how stupid I was for ruining my life.
56 Okay, I admit it. That wasn’t my idea. I stole it from “Bytesie Goes Beddy-bye.” It was as stupid as most of the episodes, but I thought Audrey had a point about that falling asleep thing.
43
THE GREAT VAN GURP.
The man at the gas station gave us directions to Arnold van Gurp’s and said we couldn’t miss it. At first I thought that was because Bousfield was so small. The correct word for it, I think, is puny. Just the Petrocan where the bus dropped us, a video store that also sells pizza and picks up your dry-cleaning, and a bunch of houses.
But the way the gas station guy laughed when he said, “You can’t miss it!” and the way the lady getting her tank filled laughed even louder got me worried. I can’t say exactly why, but it did. They say you’re supposed to follow your instincts, and my instincts right then were saying, “Stop. Go home. It’s not too late to turn around.”
But the puppet in my knapsack was saying, “Would you hurry up?” and poking me really hard in the ribs, and that voice in my head was sobbing, “I get saddled with Dodo’s kid,” so what could I do? I started walking to Arnold van Gurp’s.
I turned down Bousfield’s one and only side street and headed for the very end. Along the way, there were two old people sitting on one of those big wooden swings, but otherwise the road was deserted.57 I started whispering into the knapsack. I reminded Bitsie that he was supposed to play dumb and let me do the talking until I figured out what kind of guy this Arnold was. I made it sound like I was doing it for Bitsie—like I just wanted to make sure I was giving him to a good home—but who was I kidding? I was doing it for me. I didn’t want Arnold to think I was nuts until I knew that he was nuts too. I wanted his puppets to talk first.
The houses seemed to end, and I was starting to think the gas station guy had laughed because he was playing a joke on me, when I saw something pink peeking through the trees. As I got closer, I caught glimpses of bright yellow and blue too, and bit by bit I began to realize there was a house back there.
A cartoon house.
A kind of shabby run-down cartoon house.
It looked like someone let a five-year-old design it. It was sort of skinny at the bottom and fat at the top. The roof was orange and curled up at the sides. The chimney leaned over one way and the front door leaned over the other way. The windows had those big black crosses in the middle just like they do in little kids’ drawings. And in case I had any doubt if I had the right place, there was a giant red cartoon mailbox with the yellow words “van gurp.”
I guess the gas station guy was right. You couldn’t miss it.
I rang the big purple doorbell, and this loud rinky-dink version of “The Lollipop Song” started to play. Bitsie groaned—he hates that kind of stuff—and I was just shushing him when the door opened and Arnold van Gurp said, “Yes??”
He looked odd. Not as odd as his house but pretty darn weird. He was about five foot nothing. His yellow hair was all slicked down perfectly and his teeth stuck out over his bottom lip even when his mouth was closed. He was dressed in a business suit, just like my dad would wear, only Arnold’s was bright orange and his shirt was green and his tie was pink-and-yellow striped. I figured he must have really liked hot dogs too, because over the three weeks he must have been wearing those same clothes he’d collected quite a large number of ketchup stains.
It was a pretty weird outfit for anyone, let alone a guy as old as Mel.
Not that I could talk. I was still wearing that lame disguise—Bitsie’s pink glasses and the kerchief with the fake braids—so I must have looked kind of strange myself.
Maybe that’s why Arnold seemed to like me right away. I mean, it looked like we were related—or at least shopped at the same stores.
“Now, who might you be, and what’s brought you here to Chateau van Gurp?” he said, all cheery like he was hosting a game show or something. Everything about the guy made me think he’d spent way too much time in kids’ TV.
“Hi. I’m…”
I had to stop right there. Somehow it didn’t seem like a good idea to give my real name.
“I’m...well, I’m a budding puppeteer!”
“You don’t say! And so you’ve made the long and treacherous pilgrimage to far-off Bousfield to visit the Great van Gurp. Well, I’m flattered! Come in! Come in!”
He pulled the door open and bowed, and I stepped into a living room that was exactly what you’d expect after seeing the outside of the house. I was still sort of hoping to see a room full of puppets, all watching TV or playing video games or just doing stuff to bug each other. I was still hoping that this would turn out to be the home Bitsie always wanted.
And there were puppets everywhere, but they weren’t what you’d call a very lively bunch. They were just draped over the big lopsided furniture like rag dolls. I tried not to jump to conclusions. I wasn’t letting Arnold see the real Bitsie yet.
Why should he let me see the real side of his puppets?
I understood that—but I couldn’t let him stall forever. I wanted to catch the 8 p.m bus back to Toronto so I could enjoy my last day of freedom before I was sent to jail for the rest of my life.
I decided to give Arnold a chance to feel comfortable with me before I popped the question. I said, “What a lovely home. So are your puppets alive or aren’t they?” which didn’t come out as smoothly as I hoped it would.
“Oh! So word has gotten out!” he said. He tried to look all modest and everything, but I could tell he was thrilled.
“Why, yes, every van Gurp creation comes with a free gift.
The gift of life!!!!!” He threw his arms up in the air like he was a gymnast who’d just won gold at the Oddball Olympics or something, and I guess I should have clapped, but I just stood there staring at him until he put his arms back down, all casual, like he’d just been having a little stretch or something and said, “Would you like to meet my puppet friends?
Stay for tea and cookies, perhaps?”
Cookies! I was so hungry. I said I’d love to.
He led me into the kitchen and introduced me to the three puppets sitting at the big green table. Mingo the Monkey: Caleb the Cowboy and Princess Peachy.
I’d like to say that they all jumped up to shake my hand, but they didn’t. They just sat there with their big heads kind of hanging over the back of their chairs and their mouths open.
This didn’t seem to bother Arnold at all. He said, “Oh, they’re playing shy again! Sometimes they get that way with strangers.”
He told me to sit down, and then he crawled around on the floor until he was kneeling behind the puppets.
He put one arm around Mingo’s shoulder and whispered to him, “It’s okay. I know for a fact this young lady loves monkeys!” Arnold made a big show of kissing Mingo’s cheek and patting his fuzzy head. I guess he was hoping I wouldn’t notice his other hand trying to wiggle its way up the back of Caleb’s shirt.
That’s all I had to see to know the guy was a fake. Fake as the plastic cookies he had sitting on the table for tea.58
I put one of those “how cute!” smiles on my face and started looking for the right time to say “It’s been lovely meeting you, but I really must dash.”
“Caleb” was just saying, “Why, heck, Mingo, you ole flea-bitten varmint! Don’t you like your new lady friend?”
Mingo didn’t have a chance to answer.
“Ah, forget about her!” Bitsy yelled as he wiggled out of my knapsack. “You’re going to love me!”
57 All out picking up their dry-cleaning at the video store, I guess.
58 Boy was that a heart breaker.
I kind of always suspected Arnold, but I at least figured I’d get real cookies.
44
YOU’D THINK HE’D HAVE NOTICED.
“Hey! Don’t look so shocked!” Bitsie was saying to Mingo and Princess Peachy. I guess the blank expression on their faces could look like surprise if you really wanted it to. “You think you’re the only living puppets around?…Ha! Think again, folks!” He loved knowing stuff other people didn’t.
Bitsie did a little cha-cha-cha dance on top of the table. I should have just grabbed him and stuffed him back into my knapsack and hoped that Arnold was thinking about something else and hadn’t noticed anything unusual. But I didn’t. I was still trying to get my brain in gear.
Arnold, by this time, had, like, staggered back up onto his feet. His face was white and Caleb was still hanging upside down off one hand. Arnold gawked at Bitsie, closed his eyes, shook his head, then gawked at him again. It didn’t help. The puppet was still dancing and talking all by itself.
Arnold looked at me all crazy-eyed and went, “How do you do that?”
Bitsie, I guess, thought Arnold was talking to him. “The cha-cha?” he said. “Oh, please! It’s easy! It’s just one-two-cha-cha-cha. One-two-cha-cha-cha! C’mon! Just follow old Bitsie! That’s it! Right foot first, then left. Atta-boy! Put some hip movement into it, Arnie! Yeah!”
It was probably just because he was so shocked, but Arnold actually started following Bitsie’s cha-cha steps. He wasn’t bad either. He even seemed to catch on pretty fast to the turns and arm movements Bitsie’d thrown in. But I could tell by Arnold’s wide-open mouth and shifty eyes that he was still thinking of something else.
Bitsie, of course, didn’t notice anything. He was in puppet heaven!
“C’mon, you guys! Isn’t anyone else here going to dance?”
Bitsie gave Princess Peachy a friendly little nudge with his foot and she fell out of her chair and landed flat on her face.
