Nowhere Near You

  To all the friends I left behind:

  you deserved better.

  To all the friends who won’t let me go:

  I don’t deserve you.

  To all the friends I haven’t met:

  What’s it like being you?

  Also by Leah Thomas

  Because You’ll Never Meet Me

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Acknowledgments

  chapter one

  THE BILLBOARDS

  Moritz, you know me.

  You know that usually I’d be the first person to say I’m awesome.

  Behold! The Teenage Lord of Glockenspieling! I’ve got the astronomical charts for the next six months memorized, at least for the small patch of sky that hangs over northern Michigan. Did you know a comet’s going to be soaring over my cabin in seventeen weeks? The Teenage Lord of Glockenspieling knows.

  Keep on beholding, though! Because thanks to all the letters we’ve written this year, when it comes to getting epistolary, I am basically motherfluffin’ Alexander Hamilton.

  But here’s my slice of humble pie: I’ve never been all that awesome at patience.

  How did I handle the suspense of knowing I was actually on my way to meet other experimental kids like us, Moritz? With hazmat pants full of proverbial ants.

  And how did I handle riding in a car out of the woods into real-life society for the first time?

  Basically, I smeared my gas-masked face against the window for hours while Auburn-Stache chauffeured me down the freeway. He wouldn’t let me turn on the radio (as if I could figure out the buttons!) and slapped my hand away whenever I reached across him to point at things.

  “Whoa! Those windmills! They’re moving! I can see them moving!”

  “Glad I packed tranquilizers,” murmured Auburn-Stache, but his goatee twitched.

  “I thought windmills were little wooden houses with wings! Nobody told me they’d be white and electric and look like, like gargantuan futuristic spaceship flowers, ’Stache!”

  “Ollie, I’m going deaf in my right ear. Spare me.”

  Although my allergies are still my ultimate kryptonite and electricity loves clouding my eyes with puffy swatches of color, I’ve gotten better at seeing past the swatches to what’s underneath. I do this sort of squinting thing and scrunch my nose up in a way that might make Liz want to dump me for real. Then I can actually see almost like normal people do. The modified hazmat suit, the womble, absorbs the worst of the electricity, so these days I’m mostly only sneezing in the face of glowing screens. Sneezing beats seizing, so I’ll take it.

  And, Moritz, I have to tell you how outclassed my old power line nemesis was. For years I thought of the cable halfway down my driveway as actual Voldemort, burning orange in my aura, but that thing was only the lowest level of Death Eater (think Wormtail). Now I’ve seen power grids! They light up every horizon. I can’t get over the towers that support those fiery lines in almost every direction. During that drive, to me they looked like stick people holding out cable jump ropes made of lava, and those lava ropes could have caught the world on fire if those other tower-people didn’t help out and lift those ropes away from the fields—

  Squinting too hard made me hiccup.

  Auburn-Stache put a firm hand on my shoulder and shoved me back down into my seat.

  “Ollie, I’m not daft enough to ask you to sit still. But sitting down would be a start.”

  “I’m just appreciating the beautiful things in life, you kook. Hey, do you think the kids we’re going to meet will mind if I’m unfocused? Because I can’t help being unfocused, but I don’t want them to realize I’m less than cool. I have my hermit pride.”

  “Cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  “I want to seem suave. I should try to be aloof like Moritz.” I sat up straight. “If I’m documenting their lives, they have to take me seriously. Right?”

  Moritz, I’m on a storytelling mission. I figure being raised a woodland weirdo without even electric-coffeemaker experience to my name means I’ll never be a good applicant for, you know, office jobs. But you told me I’m a good storyteller, and plenty of writers are antisocial! Some of them go off to live in cabins on purpose and do crap like stare at ponds for weeks. If you really think about it, my whole life’s been a writing retreat. The TLoG is very qualified in this area.

  So I’m going to conduct interviews. I’m going to write authoritative accounts of the lives of our fellow weirdos, the kids created in the laboratory and then scattered around the world. I’m going to meet them and tell their stories, and tell them right.

  I like them all already. And I know it shouldn’t matter, but I’ve always been a halfway-friendless electro-sensitive hermit, so I also want them to like me back.

  “Do you think they’ll tell me what it’s like being them, Auburn-Stache?”

  “Ollie. Wait and see.”

  “But—”

  “Ollie. Please. You’re doing my head in.”

  He really won’t say much about the kids we’re going to meet, Moritz, which is typical in an obnoxious sort of way, since that’s the whole reason I’m on this trip. Aren’t we all done with secrets already?

  I guess old habits are vampires, immortal and hungry to exist. Because yeah, Auburn-Stache is like the dad I never had, but he’s the kind of dad who spent a decade and a half of my life lying to me about basically everything important. I don’t know. Maybe all dads do that, Moritz? Maybe if you cut anyone open, secrets wriggle out? (At least you and me are way past that!)

  Right now it doesn’t matter. Right now there’s a whole world falling open in front of me instead, making me queasy in all the brightest ways. If I were serious and aloof like you, I’d sit still and let it wash over me.

  My shoulder blades hit the passenger seat for maybe the first time.

  But two milliseconds later, I rested my head on the dashboard, trying to angle the womble gas mask so I could get a good squint at the overpasses we kept driving under. The smog of cars flowed over the sides of bridges in gunpowder waterfalls, but for moments after we drove through them, the clear air underneath made me feel like we were floating in hidden caves.

  “Spelunking!”

  “Ollie! Seat belt!”

  “How can anyone see anything with a seat belt on?” I twisted to look out the rear window.

  “Not everyone is so thrilled by the panoramic views of a freeway commute.”

  “Holy
crap! Is that a motorcycle?”

  “What else would it be, Ollie?!”

  Heck, it could have been anything. I didn’t have time to focus on whatever lay beyond the electric clouds. All I saw was what looked like a severed head, speeding by on top of a black smog-horse.

  “Can I get one? I shall name it Brom Bones, and it will strike fear in the hearts of mopeds!”

  “Pissing Nora, no! Sit. Down. Before you overheat.”

  “I’m not an engine.” I made a huffing noise through the filter of my gas mask.

  He smirked. “The little engine that could.”

  I tried to ignore the doomed, unrequited desire to wipe sweat from my forehead. I considered napping, but that seemed risky.

  What if I missed something miraculous?

  Moritz, basically everything in the world is miraculous.

  The countless colors invading my aura started mimicking autumn: those power lines draping orange curtains, planes miles (or kilometers, Mo) above trailing wisps of bronze through the clouds, blackened RVs and HOLY CRAP SEMITRUCKS roaring next to us with their twenty-something wheels and magma-colored diesel engines. Puffs of umber bled through the cracks in the pavement—dissipating as cars tore through them—especially as the scenery shifted from woodsy to industrial.

  Northern Michigan has pine trees and lakes, but downstate is no great beauteous shakes. The farther south we got in Auburn-Stache’s Impala, the flatter the roads, the grayer the scenery, the more overpowering the vomity bouts of electric color stabbing my pupils became. Glowing signs on massive posts told me that restaurants are a pretty big deal, but the signs became distorted when they merged with electricities: fast-food restaurants in yellow turned to sulfur in my corneas; green gas-station signs browned like dying leaves. Again, kind of vomity.

  Actually, after a while just about everything felt vomity.

  I put my hand on my stomach, and when I squinted at the next billboard, an advertisement for the Detroit Zoo, my hiccup tasted like . . . you get the idea.

  “I have a pickle for you, Auburn-Stache,” I said, voice muffled by the gas mask. “You know how you told me to stop writing Moritz while you were driving, and how I wasn’t allowed to read or paint or glock in the car because I might get carsick?”

  “Ollie, you’re noisy enough without glockenspiel accompaniment.” He was tapping his fingers on the wheel with one hand, biting his nails with the other. (And he gets mad at me for fidgeting!)

  “Well”—I shut my eyes—”turns out the carsickness doesn’t think those qualifications matter. Maybe you should stop the car.”

  “I can’t simply stop the car, Ollie.” Why was he sweating? He wasn’t the one encased in layers of rubber.

  “Sorry. What’s the phrase for nonhermit car people? Oh. Pull over, pretty please.” We overtook a minivan. It reminded me of Liz and the Ghettomobile and leaving home; the reminder made me queasier. “I’m gonna be sick.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “There are too many cars around.”

  “Look, I’ll whip the mask off and do my sticky business and whip it back on in a flash. It won’t even take long enough for me to seize.” I tried to laugh but burped again, and I really didn’t have time to talk about this. “I’ll be just dandy!”

  “I’m sorry, Ollie.” He glanced at the wing mirrors, at the line of cars behind us. “We’re half a mile from a rest area. Hang in there for one minute. Just one minute. To avoid any accidents.”

  I wanted to shout at him that I was about to have an accident right here in his car, but when I opened my mouth, something sicker than words came out and splattered onto my own face, and I realized the accident had already happened and this suit was never going to smell the same, and it hadn’t smelled like lilies to begin with.

  “Ollie!” cried Auburn-Stache. “Ollie, breathe. Chin up.” He signaled left.

  “Fluff you,” I mumbled through burbling spit, nostrils burning. I tried clawing the mask away from my face. He grabbed my hand and held it tight.

  “You can’t, Ollie. You’re wound up enough that you might short us out. Not just my car but the batteries in the cars on either side of us. The cars behind us. Do you know how disastrous that could be? If even just one car stopped without warning?”

  I swallowed a teaspoon of vomit and coughed, and I couldn’t reply because, aside from my disgust and my anger and my scorching throat, what tasted worse was knowing he was right.

  Moritz, if I’m not careful nowadays, I could send out a pulse just like I did during the Halloween dance. Like how I blew out all the gymnasium lights and people’s phones and ruined the evening for the DJ. This is what happens when you’re an electromagnetic loser and you don’t have any say in the way you impact the world.

  This is why Mom wanted me to never leave the woods.

  I gasped again, a hot sob that came from nowhere or from the dark inside me.

  “Ollie, we’re almost there.” His hand on my chest wasn’t restrictive anymore, but more like he was trying to hold me in one piece.

  But then I was thinking of her, and I don’t think I would have been breathing right even if I weren’t dealing with a mask full of puke. This felt like a brand-new kind of seizure.

  Did she die, Moritz? It seems as unbelievable as giant stick people draped in cables. As impossible as four lanes of steel machines surrounding me in parallel lines, machines moving fast enough to bend metal and pulverize bones during collision.

  Moritz, if things as deadly as cars can be part of the world, why can’t I?

  “You’ll be all right,” Auburn-Stache said as he turned onto an exit ramp and toward a brown flat-roofed rest area. He parked the car while I breathed hot acid through my nose.

  No one was around to see him drag me out into the parking lot and across a narrow strip of grass, into the line of trees beyond a few picnic tables. No one but a scarred old man, leaning on his truck and chewing jerky, who blinked at us like he’d seen much stranger things in his life than a goateed doctor tearing a dripping gas mask off a sobbing teenage loser.

  “Ollie, Ollie. Now, stop that, kiddo.”

  “Why did you . . . let me leave?” I gasped, stomach rolling, eyes streaming. “If you’re so afraid I’m going to wreck the world, why did you agree to take me on this . . . trip?”

  Auburn-Stache didn’t reply until he’d caught his breath. I guess dragging me out of the car was a bit hard on him. He’s older than ever and I’m taller than ever, and my legs felt like lumps of dead weight, even to me.

  “Neither your mother nor father would have wanted you to spend your youth with only ghosts for company.”

  “Me and my dead parents.” I wiped my mouth on my sleeve and stared up at the darkening sky. “Someone should write a book about an orphan named Oliver.”

  “Enough, Ollie,” he said gently.

  “The bright side, ’Stache: a lot of superheroes are orphans.” I laughed weakly. “Maybe I’m just fulfilling an epic destiny.”

  “There’s that fabled optimism.” He patted my back.

  “Hey. Do you think the kids we’re going to meet will mind me smelling like damp compost?” And then, all hoarse: “Do you think they’ll mind me?”

  Liar-Dad’s detailed, heartfelt answer? “Wait here. I’ll go clean your mask.”

  I winced. “Do I have to wear it again?”

  “I’m afraid so. For now.”

  Auburn-Stache soon returned with the mask and more: my toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, a warm bottled water, and a washcloth. I rinsed out my mouth, brushed bits from my teeth, and washed my face. Auburn-Stache helped me wrap the damp cloth around my nose and mouth inside the mask, but that thing still reeked enough to knock approximately seventeen skunks unconscious when I shoved it back on. In the parking lot, we found the old man sitting in his truck, trying to start his engine. Is that called revving?

  Revving and revving, but it wouldn’t start. That was almost definitely my fault.

  So was his dead phone, probably,
and his semifried hearing aid. Where before I’d seen the usual smattering of electric shades, now there was nothing. And his bumper sticker said he was a veteran and everything.

  Go, me.

  While we waited for someone to come along and jump our batteries (because of course I’d shorted out the Impala, too), I sat in my stinking womble at the picnic table on the edge of the narrow line of fake woods, holding my knees and staring at the litter underfoot.

  Moritz, I know you get it: there have to be dark parts in origin stories.

  I just hope the other kids like us will get it, too.

  Once or twice while Auburn-Stache laughed with the old man about how bizarre a coincidence it was that both of their car batteries died in the same parking lot, the old man craned his neck to peer at me and my suspicious radiation suit. You hardly ever see superheroes wearing suspicious radiation suits.

  When we finally left the rest area, the sunny first day of our road trip had given way to an amethyst November evening; I wish electricity got darker with everything else. Instead, all the colors only seemed brighter, and nausea caught me again.

  Auburn-Stache took his hand from the wheel and placed it above the womble goggles, the approximate area of my forehead.

  “Bet you regret this already,” I murmured. “This insane road trip.”

  “I won’t if you don’t.”

  “Fair deal, Auburn-Stache.”

  I’m still impatient, Moritz. Even if I’m finally getting a little taste of how terrifying strangers can be and a bigger appreciation of what it is to be you, alone in a crowd of people. This must be what it’s like to go out without your goggles on.

  I told Liz I wanted to take this trip to figure myself out, but it’s not easy. My electromagnetism might always freak me out. Maybe I can’t control my life if I can’t control my own body. Maybe I really will short you and your pacemaker out, and I don’t think it’s as easy to jump a person’s batteries as it is to restart a car.

  Even knowing that, I still wish more than anything you were here to talk to. You said you’re not worried about me hurting you, but honestly, Moritz? Maybe you should be. Because I might be willing to hurt you a little if it meant I’d get to meet you!