by Vicki Grove
Nobody answered him. We seldom got around to skiing, not in October with the lake all ours and the water so cold and the boat so fast with no other boats in its way.
“It’s getting colder, guys,” he repeated, and turned around to Trey and me with his blond hair wind-wrecked and wild. “It’s getting a lot . . . colder.”
Steve raised one sunburned hand to shove his hair back and beneath it was . . . nothing. Where his handsome face should have been there was only black nothingness.
Zero gave his hyena laugh again and when he turned toward us, his long tangled braids blew across nothingness as hollow and infinite as Steve’s nothingness had been.
And then, Trey called my name and I had no choice, I had to turn to him. . . .
I came awake in a cold sweat and drew in a quick breath. It took me a good ten hammering heartbeats to figure out I was still in the backseat of Bud’s car, only now the big windows framed trapezoids of silver light. It was morning, around dawn.
The gold diamond-patterned ceiling of the Olds looked like a coffin lid above me, and I jerked to a sit and rubbed my face, hard, with both hands. My legs came awake and sent raw pain sizzling through me. When I saw I was alone in the car, I let out a couple of good, long groans before settling in to focus on mentally blocking some of that pain. The hitchhiker must have driven to where she was going and then vamoosed, leaving Bud to drive on. But where had we ended up, and where was Bud?
I unlatched the door and shoved my shoulder hard against it. When it rocked open, my ears filled with the coyote howl of hard, straight wind. I swung my legs slowly and painfully out of the car and lifted myself into tall grass, hip high.
But no, it wasn’t grass, it was wheat, lots and lots of wheat, like they grow by the mile in states like Kansas. I slogged out a few feet and turned in a slow circle with my hands on my head. I saw nothing but a vast ocean of wildly blowing grain— no utility lines, no people, no nothing for what must have been miles and miles around. There wasn’t even a road we could have driven in on, just the car and me.
It could have been two hundred years ago. Or it could have been two hundred years in the future and I was the last person left after global warming had taken its best shot.
And then, right at the end of my full-circle tour, I saw the house. It was a two-story ruin perched on a small hill. It had an attic with a round window that gave me the creepy feeling that I was being stared at. The house seemed to drift on this ocean of wheat like a rattletrap ship riding the crest of a golden wave.
Bud had to be inside. There was nowhere else he could be.
I grabbed my pack from the floor of the car. The keys were still hanging from the ignition switch and I pocketed them. I took off at a fast lope toward the house. My legs protested in the most extreme way at first, but just like yesterday, the pain became a slight bit easier to deal with when I’d hit my stride and it pulsed in time with my pace.
“Bud!” I called when I figured I was near enough for him to hear above the wind. “Bud, you in there? Bud! Wake up and get out here, we gotta get home!”
“Tell me the honest truth, Tucker Graysten. Do I look good with blue hair or is it too harsh for my delicate features? Do you think I should go with, say, raspberry?”
I stopped in my tracks, every nerve in my body gone taut with dread. Sometimes you believe what you want to believe, and I’d believed she was gone, that she’d reached her destination or left the car to get another ride or take a bus or hoof it or something.
But no such luck. I turned in the direction of her voice. She was over to my left maybe twenty feet, sitting on the ground with only her fluorescent hair, heart-shaped face, and skinny white neck visible above the wheat. I doubt I’d have seen her at all if she hadn’t called out to me. But then I realized she hadn’t called out, and that’s why my skin was suddenly crawling. Her words had been a frustrated, mumbled gripe about her hair like girls are always making when they want you to tell them they look really good just the way they are.
So why had I heard her above the banshee howl of the wind?
I took some skulking strides in her direction, leaving myself plenty of escape room in case she tried to play some weird mind game with me like she had in the car last night. She was sitting in a circle of flattened wheat, a tiny version of Steve’s English crop circle. She was rummaging wildly through that overstuffed pack of hers, and as I watched, she eased out a mirror the size of a dinner plate and began frowning at herself in it, pulling up handfuls of her hair for her own inspection and wrinkling her nose at her reflection.
I turned quietly back toward the house, hoping she was so absorbed with her crazy appearance that she’d forgotten all about me. Maybe I even tiptoed, lame as that sounds. I remember I harbored a slight, idiotic hope that now she’d just wander away and be gone on down the road by the time I woke Bud and got him into the car.
“What’re we doing here anyhow, Tucker Graysten?” she grumbled to my back.
An overwhelming sense of doom shot through me like a virus. I reminded myself that she’d been the one at the wheel last night, not me. But her stupid question had somehow given me the weird feeling that I did know more than I knew that I knew.
I forced myself to turn and face her. “I have no clue what you’re doing here,” I called. “I mean, I don’t know why you were sitting in the middle of the road last night. But Bud and I were headed back to Oklahoma after a Chiefs game when you got in the car. Janet, my stepmother, Bud’s daughter, probably called the police when we didn’t make it home last night. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the cops pull up at any time.”
Let her be the jittery one for a change. Hitchhiking on the interstate was illegal.
But she just smirked. “That’s not what I meant and you know it, Tucker Graysten.”
That’s not what I meant and you know it. How could she expect me to even know what I knew? I couldn’t get anything straight when everything she said was so crazy.
The wind suddenly snatched her by her spiky hair and pulled her to the side so roughly she had to dig in hard with the heels of her cowboy boots to keep from being blown away. She was so small, bird-boned, and she looked very childlike with her white, knobby knees. I’d have to say she was pretty, but in a sharp-edged, willful way.
“What’s so funny?” she yelled, glowering at me as she struggled to regain her balance.
I didn’t think I’d laughed, and even if I had, it was just a nervous reaction. The last time I’d authentically laughed was when Steve and Zero and I were dancing around to Trey’s drumbeat on the Mustang hood ornament at the zinc mine fields last Saturday.
The memory was like a stomach punch. “Nothing’s funny,” I barely managed to get out. My guts had suddenly clenched into a raw knot, and there she sat staring with wide-eyed interest at me like I was some science experiment she was conducting. Yes, conducting—I would have sworn that sickening memory had been a little gift from her, just like the nightmare dream in the car last night had been.
I ordered myself to get a grip. The canvas smell of her pack had triggered that dream, not her personally. I noticed that gob of grape gum still stuck like a fungus behind her left ear. It was more than I could handle, and I doubled over and retched.
“Poor baby, maybe you’re dying?” She giggled and shrugged, then began fishing ruthlessly through the pockets of her motorcycle jacket, chewing her bottom lip in concentration. She finally came up with half a crushed cigarette and held it between two bitten-to-the-quick purple fingernails as she fished with her other hand, probably for a match, all the while bracing herself against the wind with her heels dug in deep.
I took Trey’s green lighter from my pocket and threw it across to her. “I’m going inside to wake Bud,” I muttered, but I didn’t move to do that.
She snatched the lighter from the air, looking surprised. “You’d part with this?”
I’d meant to lend it to her again like I had last night in the car. I wanted it back, of course I d
id, but for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to say so.
She grinned that jack-o’-lantern grin of hers that was too wide for her small, sharp face. “You want it back,” she accused. “I’ll tell you what. Let’s play a game! I’ll trade you something for it.”
I shook my head. “All I’ve got are Bud’s keys, and you’re not getting those.”
She held the lighter out in front of her. “Nine,” she announced. She clicked it one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight times. Fwoom!—on the ninth, it lit.
I was surprised the lighter had fired in this wind, let alone on her count. The way she could predict its flare was eerily like what I had tried to do after Trey had seemed so sarcastic in my hoop house dream. But I was getting used to her cheap tricks and outrageous predictions. And even if she could somehow manipulate the information in my dreams and memories, that also could have some gimmick to it, like when those TV psychics appear to know everything about people’s love lives, their dead dogs, et cetera.
Still, there was something more intense I had trouble explaining to myself. It was the sense of danger I felt when she got quiet, like right then, smoking. It was as if something big was silently rolling toward me and I couldn’t run from its invisible path.
“I’m going inside to wake Bud,” I repeated, and again, I didn’t move a muscle. This time, though, it felt more like I couldn’t move.
“You can’t go inside until we play our game, Tucker!” She pushed her bottom lip into a pout. “You have to give me something in exchange for this lighter!”
Her skin was as pale as her cigarette smoke. She seemed made from the dawn mist that was suddenly rising from the wheat, making everything clammy and cold.
“I told you,” I repeated, “you’re not getting Bud’s keys.”
“You don’t even have Bud’s keys, I’ve got them,” she mentioned as she crushed her cigarette butt with her heel. “You have got something else, though. In the back right pocket of your jeans? Give me that and I’ll give you the lighter.”
I suddenly felt a small circle of heat in the pocket she’d mentioned. It was that obolus thing Mrs. Beetlebaum had given me. I’d forgotten all about it.
My throat went dry. “You couldn’t have Bud’s keys.” I thrust cold fingers deep into the pocket where I’d dumped them not fifteen minutes before. Empty.
“Tucker? Yoohoo!” she sang out. “Oh, Tucker.”
She had Bud’s key ring around her left index finger and was casually twirling it while she frowned into her big mirror again. “Tell me the truth. Blue? Or raspberry.”
“Give me back those keys.” I wanted the heat of my righteous anger to burn through the layer of fear that coated my throat, but that wasn’t working. The fear was thickening instead, becoming suffocating so my voice was a squawk. “Bud gave those keys to me.”
Without those keys we could be here forever. She’d probably seen the outline of the obolus in my pocket and now lusted after the cigs she thought it would help her buy. I was tempted to hold up the coin and tell her I’d trade her, but not for the Bic, for the keys. Then I remembered how Mrs. Beetlebaum had gone on and on, warning me not to take it from my pocket. That must mean it was valuable, old as it was, and it wasn’t mine to lose. Mrs. B. had just lent it to me for some teachery reason I hadn’t gotten straight.
I wanted so much to taunt the vain and crazy hitchhiker right then, to ask her why she didn’t just use her flimsy amateur magic to take what was in my back pocket, like she’d taken the keys. Didn’t the rules of this criminal game of hers allow you to steal more than one thing from an innocent bystander at a time?
I didn’t do that, though. You don’t poke a stick at a scorpion.
“Just like you say,” she suddenly admitted with a sigh, “Bud gave these keys to you, right after the funeral. Uh, funerals. But you gave them back to him, remember? That is, you left them behind when you sneaked out of the house at the crack of dawn the next morning. That was a good call, though, leaving them behind like that. You’re right, you shouldn’t be driving, Tucker Graysten. You almost ran over me last night, remember? Talk about white-knuckle, last-second braking! Yeeow! And you have no idea how awful you look.”
She tossed the keys into her pack, then sailed her mirror like a Frisbee across to me. I tried to sidestep and let it sail on by, but from some childhood instinct my hand reached and caught it. I let it dangle from my fingers, though, unused and unwelcome.
“Take a good look,” she said, and her voice suddenly seemed much lower, the voice not of a flighty young girl but of . . . something else, something not to be disobeyed.
XI
I watched my hand hold up the mirror. Three deep cuts from the vents of Trey’s locker ran clear across my forehead, and blood from those was matted in my hair and crusted on the stubbly skin of my unshaven face. My eyebrows were singed to a frizz in places. My eyelashes were mostly gone, and the lids beneath where they’d grown were now angry red. Purple hollows had set in under my cheekbones, my lips were cracked, and my eyes were shot with red and had a strange, haunted look about them.
Someone I didn’t even know had crawled in and taken up residence in me.
“And beneath those jeans your legs are an absolute mess,” she pointed out, rolling her eyes. “As recently as fifty years ago people routinely died of blood poisoning from open wounds like that. Antibiotics are wonderful things, Tucker Graysten. Get a clue!”
“How did you . . . how could you . . .” Even Bud didn’t know how bad my legs were.
She took the time to chew off a ragged bit of thumbnail, then gave a sigh of disgust with herself as she shook her hand in the air. “How’d I know about the legs? I read you, that’s how. Last night, right before I got in your car? I know your whole story, Tucker. Trey picking you up at the curb last Saturday afternoon like he’d done probably a thousand times before, the borrowed ID, your first two beers and then the one Zero gave you, bailing out of the Mustang, puking in the ditch, sliding down the bluff, and everything that’s happened to you since, at school and at home and at the funeral. I even know you were the careful one among those friends of yours, the guy who took care of everybody else, the cook and the lookout and the person who kept track of Trey’s lost stuff, but I still don’t know what we’re doing here, which means you’re hiding some detail, Tucker. Some sliver of truth is too far embedded in your soul for you to reach it.”
I took some deep breaths and tried to concentrate on the pain in my legs so I could block her insanity. Maybe Bud had told her a bunch of that stuff she knew. Or maybe I’d talked in my sleep. Who cared how she’d got her information? She was just plain nuts, and the important thing was for us to get far away from her.
“I’m going inside to wake Bud,” I said for the third time. My teeth were chattering so hard I tasted blood. “We’re not going your way. You should go back to the main road and try for another ride.”
I started toward the house again, but after a couple of steps, my legs just locked.
I whirled to face her and found I could move just fine, but only in her direction.
“What . . . are you doing to me?”
She gave me a puzzled look. “I’m not doing anything to you, Tucker Graysten. I just need you to tell me why we’re here. You called me last night, and I have to admit I came in a hurry because I could smell money on you, which is sooo rare these days. I mean, it’s absolutely thrilling when I get paid. Trust me, I’d love to just grab the money, throw you into the car, and get back behind the wheel to take you where your infected legs and your weirdness the past few days and your horrible driving last night tell me you want to go. But there’s something missing from your story, some little poison detail. I always want my pickups to be able to state in clear terms their own reasons for calling me, especially when they’re only seventeen. It’s not that you won’t tell me why you called, it’s that you won’t tell you.”
Her voice was coming from far away, echoing in my head.
&nb
sp; “I . . . I didn’t call you . . .” I pushed out. “You just . . . appeared there on the exit ramp when Bud and I were on our way back to Oklahoma from—”
“There oughta be one of those iron water pumps around here someplace,” she murmured. She got to her feet and began squinting toward the house. “Yes! There it is, over on that old well curb by the kitchen garden.”
“And whuh . . . what do you mean embedded?”
She whipped around quick as a snake and fastened me with her eyes, which suddenly were awful. Had her pupils become spirals? Could you buy contact lenses that did that?
“Embedded, Tucker,” she whispered. “Buried so deep that recalling that little detail will be like pulling a knife from your heart. You’ll bleed, maybe even to death. But whether you know it or not, you called me and then you picked me up, so find that piece of the story you’ve embedded in your soul, pull it out, let it bleed, and whatever happens, happens. I mean, I’m here now, so you’re wasting my valuable time until you do that.”
I stumbled backward, desperate to get away from her. “I . . . didn’t pick you up. Bud . . . Bud was the one who picked you up. I wanted to leave you.”
“You both picked me up.” She yawned and stretched, then scratched her hair into lopsided tufts. “If anybody knows himself, it’s Bud. So if you’re not ready to know yourself, then I’m getting started coloring this hair.”
She threw Trey’s lighter into her pack, then eased a hot pink squeeze bottle out of it. She turned to trek toward the old iron water pump that was framed like a hook-necked animal against the distant sky.
The wheat seemed to open a path for her. I rubbed my eyes, and when I looked at her again, she’d stopped and turned back toward me with her hand on her hip.
“I almost forgot,” she called. “If you’re bound and determined to see Bud, I gotta call Cherry Berry. Bud is at the point where . . . well, let’s just say he’s being guarded.”
She tucked the bottle under her arm, put her two pinkie fingers between her lips, and produced the sort of piercing whistle I’m pretty sure can break glass.
