Because You'll Never Meet Me Page 9

  She wanted me to write so that I could work through what happened, but it’s a lot of work.

  Let me write a little longer about happy things, okay?

  The day after I met Liz at the power line, the sky spat giant dollops of rainwater down onto the trees and rooftop. Mom was pale when she brought me toast and marmalade, and she had this sort of fake grin on her face. She came into my room, set down the tray, and started picking up all the things she’d thrown on the floor.

  I couldn’t meet her eyes.

  “So Greg told me you went out and met a girlfriend.”

  My stomach felt so tangled up that I wondered if she had stashed a battery in my toast. “Not a girlfriend. And his name’s Auburn-Stache. Don’t be weird.”

  “Was it Joe’s niece? I heard she was visiting for the holiday. She’s about your age, you know.”

  “Mm.”

  “Whatever happened to my loquacious brat?” Mom forced a chuckle. She was holding the broken wing of a model Boeing 747, squeezing it too tightly. “Don’t you want to talk to me?”

  I choked down my toast.

  Ugh. That morning, Mo.

  After we’d put the house back together and dusted all the surfaces we could think of, I kept picking up books to read and slamming them shut again after staring at paragraphs without digesting them. I had pages lying all over the bedroom floor—I’d persuaded Mom to pick up gentlemen’s clothing magazines years ago, when she told me that paisley was an Auburn-Stache thing, not an Everyman thing. She told me not to wear a suit, but I did it anyway.

  “It says a host dresses to impress. And there’s nothing so classy as a suit and tails,” I said, straightening my fedora. “I don’t wanna blow it.”

  “You look like you’re dressed for a Mafia funeral,” said Mom. “Should I be looking for concrete blocks and skeletons in the fishpond?”

  She herself was wearing a nice floral-print dress she usually saved for going to town. I might have called her a hypocrite, except for the fact that every time I spoke I sounded like I was gagging on dismembered frog bits.

  I changed my outfits three more times and ended up in corduroys before Liz arrived. I wondered if other kids did things like this, or if this sort of habit was specific to cabin-dwelling electro-sensitive hermits. I even spiked my rooster hair up a little.

  “Not a freak,” I told the mirror. My nose was bruised a bit purple near my eyes. “Wicked.”

  Mom couldn’t sit still. She kept getting up from the table and walking over to the kitchen window to pull back the curtains and look at the rain-drenched lawn, only to close them again, and then sit down and repeat the whole cycle after seven minutes. She definitely hadn’t slept enough. She was doing this thing she does where she plucks the hairs from her eyebrows without realizing it.

  “I hope she likes mashed potatoes,” I said. A shepherd’s pie was in the oven. “What if she hates mashed potaters with a deep, loathing passion?”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Mom, biting her lip. “Every child likes mashed potatoes. Every child ever.”

  “Is that written down somewhere?”

  “Some laws of the universe go unspoken.” Suddenly she pulled the curtain open and closed again and gasped. She turned her back to the window, hands splayed behind her on the pinewood counter.

  “What? What is it? Is the sky falling?”

  She shook her head. “Someone’s here. Ollie. Should I chase her away? I have a rolling pin. A variety of rolling pins.”

  “Mom.”

  We don’t have a doorbell. We never really have any callers except Auburn-Stache, who just waltzes in. All the same, I felt as though I was waiting for a bell to ring. A death knell. I’d been reading John Donne and, before that, Macbeth. Not the world’s best idea.

  “You’ll be fine.” Mom’s smile was pasted on. “We’ll be fine.”

  “I’m sorry about yesterday,” I blurted.

  Mom blinked. Her smile slipped a little. But she nodded.

  “Don’t make a fuss. I’m happy for you.”

  I tried to smile. Milliseconds later, it became a grimace as I stared down at the brown corduroy nightmare I had resigned myself to.

  What the hell was I wearing?

  I tried to run upstairs to change once more, but Mom grabbed my arm and held it.

  “This time I’m the kickstand, then.”

  I think my hair deflated.

  I couldn’t help but think that it would be better if one day in the junkyard was all Liz and I ever had, you know, Mo? I’d already almost blown it; surely if I spent more time with her I’d end up revealing my total lameness as a human being.

  “Ollie Ollie UpandFree?” I jolted back from the door. “Non-Amish boy? Hellllllooooo.”

  “Just answer it!”

  At last I opened it and gaped at what appeared before me.

  A dirt-colored monster, all pointed teeth and shining black eyes, was looming on the steps. From head to foot it was an absence of color. It dripped sludge from elbow tips and braid ends, from chin and nose.

  “Hey,” said Liz. The shining coat of grime that covered her obscured her freckles. “I’ve been puddle-hopping.” Her teeth glowed like stars in the mucky ether. “Wanna join me?”

  Mom, behind me, laughed out loud like a crazed thing. Like what I imagine a hyena must sound like, or the Joker from Batman.

  “Mom?!”

  “Go.” She shooed me forward. “Puddle-hopping!” She wiped her eyes on her hands. “Honestly—I don’t know why I was so worried. Go!”

  She didn’t even make me change out of my cords. She just shoved me out the door, umbrella-less.

  Are you starting to see it, Mo? Why it’s Liz, why even then it was Liz?

  I’d seen puddles pooling in the driveway my whole life and never thought to go out and jump in them.

  By the time we got back inside, Mom had a soapy bath and hot chocolate waiting. Once we were clean, we sat at the kitchen table and blew on the surface of our mugs, warmed by the stove that housed the shepherd’s pie.

  “Man, your mom really looks after you.”

  I nodded guiltily. Mom was probably scrubbing the bathtub even as we sat there.

  Liz stretched her arms across the table and sighed. “I haven’t had a bath in years.”

  “Well, that explains the awful odor.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” She elbowed me. “But we only have a shower at my place.”

  “What, your parents didn’t have money to buy the whole tub?” I joked.

  Liz scooted her chair back and glared daggers at me. “Oh, yeah, because that’s hilarious. Social workers don’t actually get paid all that well, you know. Especially when they get laid off like Dad was.”

  Once again I was blowing it. “Why are you getting angry with me?”

  “You’re terrible!”

  “I am?”

  “You shouldn’t make jokes like that!”

  “Why not? I wasn’t trying to be rude. I didn’t know that you didn’t have money.”

  “Are you serious?!” She was standing up now. “You didn’t know. Yeah, right.”

  “I’m serious! How was I supposed to know anything like that? Am I breaking another stupid real-world rule? Is that something I’m supposed to care about when I meet someone? How much money you have?”

  “Yes, you’re supposed to care about that,” she said. “Most people definitely care about that.”

  And she gave me the biggest smile.

  Never ask me for advice on girls, Mo.

  She was quiet for maybe three seconds. “Welp, enough sitting around. What do you do indoors all day, without a computer?”

  “My parents love cripples. Weirdos, too,” Liz informed me. We were playing with building blocks in my room. I kept dropping pieces.

  We were sticking turrets onto ships, constructing floating castles. Liz couldn’t move without causing a fuss. When she came in my room, she knocked over three stacks of books and a pile of scrolls, and stepped on a mode
l airplane. She prodded my model skeleton with her shoe, tapped my glockenspiel with her fingernails.

  “Why do you play the xylophone?”

  “It’s a glockenspiel. And why not?”

  She shrugged. “I feel like you should play the piano or something. Something cooler. More dramatic.”

  “If you think that playing ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ on the glock isn’t dramatic, you don’t know what you’re missing.”

  “Weirdo.”

  You imagine that I’m loud? Whenever she called me “weirdo,” she did it at something that felt like ten thousand decibels.

  “Weirdo?” My pirate stabbed her tower. It fell into her frigate’s sail. “Is that a real word, even?”

  Liz twirled the sail between her fingers. “Hey, I’ve been called worse. But you’re the biggest weirdo I’ve ever met. You say whatever you’re thinking. You don’t go to school. You’ve never used the Internet.”

  “But I can’t.”

  “You’re hopeless, when I think about it. You’ve never texted anyone. You’ve never seen … I dunno. Bathroom hand dryers or a vending machine—”

  “But—I told you! I can’t!” I dropped my pirate.

  Blowing it, blowing it.

  “Hopeless. You’ve never seen a movie or a train, or heard music or—”

  “Shut up!” I kicked her frigate over. “I know music! I play the glockenspiel!”

  Liz terrified me with her smile again. “You didn’t say ‘I can’t!’ that time. That means I can help you.”

  Her social worker parents had really done a number on her.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You’ll see,” she said. “Next time I come over.”

  “There’s going to be a next time? You really want to come back over sometime?”

  “There you go again, saying whatever you’re thinking right when you think it. Yes, if that’s okay with you. I had fun. More fun than at home, for sure.”

  “Or at school?”

  “People aren’t like you at school. They don’t listen to me.”

  “What? I didn’t hear you.”

  Liz didn’t laugh. “But you did.”

  It didn’t matter that the sky was dark outside, that we needed four lanterns to see by.

  She was lighting up the room for me.

  It’s kind of strange to be talking about how things used to be, knowing that they’re so different now. I thought at first it was because of the weather. There’s so much snow outside and on the house, on the branches, that it feels like the weight of it all is pushing our cabin slowly into the ground. The window in this room—when the frost creeps across it, it may as well not exist, Moritz.

  There are a few more golden moments to tell you about before I get to the meat of what went so wrong between me and the girl I fell in lovesickness over.

  Man, you wanted me to stop faking the happy, but even writing about the happier times has started to feel kind of unhappy. Maybe you should stop getting to know me right now. Before it becomes a shitshow.

  Then again, I don’t even notice what day of the week it is anymore! So it really shouldn’t bother me when Wednesday passes. No matter what, I lie in bed a lot and I never get up in the afternoon to go stand in the driveway nowadays. Maybe I’m getting better, Moritz.

  Mom keeps staring at me. She doesn’t look exasperated anymore. She looks really tired.

  Moritz, tell me some good news. Would that be okay?

  Sincerely,

  Oliver

  Chapter Twelve

  The Books

  I think this is the first time you did not needle me about the lab. This, more than anything, tells me how unhappy you must be.

  I am the one who told you to be honest with yourself. Never feel as though I do not wish to hear about it. Between the two of us, perhaps we can spread the misery a bit thinner. You need no masks with me, Ollie.

  I hear loud and clear your plea for good news. I can oblige. It does not do to dwell on things that upset us. Dwelling can make things fester. It is better to bury dark thoughts.

  Let me tell you a wondrous story. For once, let me be the shining one. It is springtime. Birds are noisiest now. I can almost see the shape of the sky.

  Bernholdt-Regen offers basic courses in all major subject areas, but the school is heavily focused on home economics. Finance. Safety courses. Courses that will be most useful for students destined for jobs that demand no university degrees.

  Because I love literature and my school does not, I despise Literatur with Frau Melmann. Frau Melmann is a woman whose nostrils are eternally flaring. Whose eyes are forever narrowed as if she is sucking the bitterest of pills. And she is—she chose a career that she both loathes and is terrible at. Bitterness makes sense. When she reads the works of great poets, words turn to fire and brimstone on her scorching breath. Even when we are not reading Dante.

  I sit beside the window in the second desk from the back of her classroom. As far from her cheek-sucking as possible. I told Frau Melmann on my first day in her class that being closer to the board would not facilitate my “learning disabilities.” I told her my frequent “blind panic attacks” would distract my peers from paying attention to her melodic voice. Melodic as phlegm.

  I spend silent reading hour with my headphones on, listening to audiobooks that the other students move their lips to in paper format. Before my suspension, we were reading Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. God knows why. Concepts of self-actualization are beyond most of my classmates. They are too busy with concerns about who may be romancing their girlfriends. Or how soon they can read a summary of Siddhartha on the Internet.

  Headphones shrink my world. When sound waves are pressed directly against my head, my field of vision is restricted. I can see only the insides of my ears. The outline of my skeleton. The hazy buzz of whatever leaks through the soundproofing. This can be very therapeutic—I sit in my so-called Literaturkurs with the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique strapped to my head, seeing nothing but a field of numbing, finite sound.

  Having officially declared blindness after my suspension, I saw no reason for this routine to change. I entered the classroom on my second day back to the static hush that was becoming familiar. It had followed me from the courtyard to my locker, from my locker to the classroom on the second floor. Followed me alongside the footsteps of that Goth girl. I tapped my cane when I walked to my desk. Scuffed my shoe against a bookshelf for effect.

  Frau Melmann entered the classroom after I sat down. She looked disheveled, as if she had just been engaging in fisticuffs with a gale. Her eyes homed in on me like one of your laser beams.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Are you speaking to me, Frau Melmann?”

  “Yes.” My classmates did not look at me. “Why are you here?”

  I cleared my throat. “You need to be more specific.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Why am I here, in this classroom? Or why am I here on this miserable planet? Why are any of us here, for that matter? What’s the point of our poisonous species?”

  “You’ll be completing your Literaturkurs in the Bibliothek from now on.”

  “My headphones are just as effective here.” I tapped them to demonstrate.

  In the echoes of someone’s snigger, I saw her show her teeth. Was that why she was always unhappy? Because she could not smile properly? “There are more resources for the visually handicapped there.”

  “How nice. But I am not handicapped.” Again, my impulses are too fast, Oliver. I did not mean to refute being blind. I meant to express my loathing of the term handicapped. “Behindert,” as it reads in German.

  “There’s no sense denying it, dear,” she said. Then I really was grateful to leave, Oliver. Before I succumbed to thwapping someone—this time, a teacher—with my cane.

  I deposited my headphones in my satchel. Walked to the front of the classroom, dragging that useless stick behind me.

  This story will beco
me a happy one soon. At least by my low standards.

  The Bibliothek, or library, of Bernholdt-Regen is a spacious room. A smattering of shelves in front of very large windows. The Bibliothek is forever in a state of disrepair. God only knows when anyone last checked out a book for leisure. Yet despite the decrepit state of the library’s visitors, the library’s contents are meticulously maintained.

  “Guten Morgen, Frau Pruwitt,” I told her. She loomed behind the checkout counter. Standing as straight as you please. Watching me tap my way halfheartedly down the threadbare stairs into the main reading room. “I am here for the wondrous array of materials for behindert students.”

  Frau Pruwitt raised an eyebrow. Exhaled loudly enough to illuminate her wrinkles. “Don’t say ‘behindert.’ It’s a hideous word.”

  She and your Liz are the ones who may be related, Ollie.

  “You know that I am.” I tilted my head away. “You pulled me from Athletics. You saw what is beneath my goggles. Or rather, what isn’t.”

  Pruwitt the Impenetrable raised that eyebrow once more at the cane I was tapping against the foot of the checkout counter.

  “You don’t need this.” She tore it from my fingers.

  You recall, Ollie, how MBV enables my reflexes? Even so, I doubt I could have stopped Frau Pruwitt from taking that cane from me. Even if I’d had hours to prepare. Titanium indeed.

  “As far as I see it, Mr. Farber, this cane is no more than a toy. This isn’t kindergarten. We don’t bring toys to school. If you would like your plaything back in the future, and you would not like me to snap it in two over my knee, please take your seat.”

  “My seat?”

  She gestured to a revolving chair behind the counter. I sat cautiously. That eyebrow of hers was impressive. How could she hold it so high for so long?

  “There will be no headphones permitted in here,” she told me as I yanked them free of my satchel.

  “But—I truly can’t read—”

  “You’re illiterate?”

  I bristled. “Not in the least.”

  “Then learn to learn more, Mr. Farber.”

  Frau Pruwitt handed me a book from among the pile on her desk. Of course, it looked blank to me, apart from the embossed cover. I struggle to read even that sort of thing; letters become so jumbled inside my head.