Because You'll Never Meet Me (21 page)

It's also cool that you've found friends and more in Kreiszig. And now I have some idea about why you didn't want to talk romance. Owen means a
lot
to you, doesn't he? I get it. Are you guys really planning on beating up Lenz? I'm glad you're feeling more heroic, but … well, that seems like a weird thing to bond over. Then again, it's been nosebleeds all along.

I really could use a friend out here in the woods. I wish I could meet you. Really. Mom's back in the house again today, but she's
white as snow. Did you know her hair's been falling out? I've seen it on the floor, on couch cushions—strands of blond that catch the light and look almost like electricity. Before, I thought she wore hand-woven wigs for fun….

I keep thinking about the medical bills that arrive at the mailbox. Her trips to the pharmacy. Maybe I've been ignoring it all this time. It's been here all along, her being sick. But somehow it's getting deeper and darker in the woods.

I wrote the remainder of our camping trip. I'm sending it to you today.

Maybe it'll explain why I've been so haphazard and stupid up until now. Or maybe not.

Is it really summer already? I should go write in the living room, where it's warmer, but I can hear Mom wheezing down there. It's quieter up here.

Here's the last part of my autobiography, Moritz.

Here's what Mom wanted to distract me from.

“Do you know what some kids at school started calling me when I first moved out here?”

I shook my head. I felt paralyzed after that face-mashing session. My half-frozen foot was resting on a warm stone by the campfire, my sock and boot drying out beside it. Liz sat across from me, eyes shining in the dark.

“White trash.”

“I don't get it. You're not even pale. And yeah, sometimes you're muddy. But that's not the same as being garbage.”

“Oh, Ollie. Sometimes I think it's awesome that you don't know about things like this. Other times I think …”

“You think what?”

But right then we both almost jumped out of our skins when a huge
crack!
broke the night air.

“Maybe they're lighting off fireworks across the lake?”

“That was only one sound.”

“Someone's started hunting season early? Hope they've got a license.”

Liz frowned in the firelight. “It's too dark to be hunting. I mean, sometimes hunters wear night-vision goggles because deer get pretty active early in the morning. But it's not morning.”

“Maybe Uncle Joe is trying to get a lead on the competition. That's
his
venison, damn it.”

“Maybe …” She pulled up the hood on her sweatshirt. “I'm going to go ask him if he heard it. Hand me that lantern.”

“My foot isn't dry yet.”

“Wait here, then.”

But I was already hopping along behind her with one boot on, wincing when I stepped on acorns and pinecones barefoot. The blind felt a lot farther away in the dark. Fog had crept off the lake to curl around trees, around our waists. I huddled near Liz as she walked, still really aware of how close she was. Every few steps or so, something on the forest side of us scurried along the ground, crackling on leaves and brushing through undergrowth. Probably only squirrels, but we picked up our pace. The water seemed too dull, somehow. It wasn't reflecting the moon.

By the time we turned down the trail toward the deer blind, we were jogging.

“Man, he's going to laugh at us—”

The moment we burst into the clearing beneath the blind, Liz
put her hand over her mouth. It's a good thing we'd learned our lesson years ago about buying sturdy lanterns; it didn't break when she dropped it. Liz rushed forward in the dark. When I scrabbled to lift the lantern up again, I saw why.

Junkyard Joe was sprawled at the foot of the tree like a dead thing.

I think you're the only one I could talk to about this, Moritz. I can't even describe how it felt. If my handwriting's worse, it's because my hands are shaking. And it's hard not to smear the ink. Sorry.

“Oh god, oh god.”

Liz was shaking him. In her panic, she was rattling him so much that it almost looked like
he
was seizing.

“Don't shake him. If he's hurt, don't shake him. That's … um …” I couldn't think, I couldn't think. “Bad for his anatomy.”

“Uncle Joe? Oh god. Uncle Joe?”

“He was shot? Has he been shot? Who shot him? Was he shot?”

“I don't know! I can't see anything! I can't really see without a damn flashlight, can I?!”

Some part of my brain registered that there wasn't any blood; I looked up the ladder to the blind. It was hard to be sure in the lantern light, but what we'd heard was the sound of one of the rotten plywood floorboards falling through. It looked like he had fallen twenty feet to the ground.

“He fell. He just fell, Liz. You can see it. You can see the boards gave out. He just fell.”

“
Just?
He's not moving! I can't tell if he's breathing! Oh god, oh god!”

“He may have broken, um, broken his spine?”

“Oh god. Ollie, we need help. You need to go get help. Call someone.”

I just kept shaking my head. “I can't call someone. Phones. I can't.”

She was tearing at her hair, snot running out of her nose. God, I was breathing so loud! And when I blinked, I almost heard the sound of my eyelids in my ears. Almost like you. But this was nothing out of a comic book. This made no narrative sense. This was a freak accident that already I could see did nothing for any of us, didn't allow any of us—not Liz, not me, not Joe (poor motionless Joe)—to develop as characters. This was—

“Go get help! My phone!”

I don't know how I had time to be hurt, but I did. “You brought your phone?”

“Go get it! You could hold the book light, so you can hold a damn phone! In the tent! Run!”

“Let me check first. Whether he's got a pul—”

“
Go
, Oliver!”

Maybe she should have gone, but how could I ask her to leave him? How could I say anything when I couldn't think?

I couldn't think, Mo.

It felt like I was dream-walking again. Like the day I met her. But I was running instead, and it was dark and cold and I couldn't feel my foot, and when I got to the campfire, I nearly tripped and fell right into it. This was nightmare-walking?

I tore open Liz's tent, heart thumping against my ribs, grabbed her backpack, and took it out by the fire so that I could see what
was inside, and then tore through her clothes and past her toiletry bag and through the pack's lining and finally something stung my hand:

The phone had been wrapped up in two Ziploc bags, rolled inside her bathing suit, but it was glowing just enough to make me nauseous. Gagging, fighting the tremors, I tried to grab it.

But I was way too hyped up, too
charged
, and when I reached for the phone it spun away from my hand and smacked against the circle of stones around the fire pit.

“Shit!” I scampered after it again, but it was repelled again, almost into the coals.

I upended the bag of extra tent poles and pulled it over my shaking hand like a glove. It made the slightest difference, and I was able to pick up the phone. I could feel the veins in my hand popping, but I held tight. After a second, it buzzed against my palm, and I squeezed tighter. After that, it didn't sting quite so much.

I ran. I ran, but I already knew.

I'd known when I first saw him there. The way his torso was twisted. The way his body was breaking so many basic anatomical rules, there was no way he wouldn't be paralyzed at the very least, no way he would walk or sit on the porch and fake bird-watching—

And I ran anyhow.

Nothing had changed at the clearing. Liz was still shaking him, still pressing her ear to his chest. Joe's eyes were closed; his face was pale, very still. And I knew again.

His spine was broken.

I was biting my tongue so hard that I was piercing flesh, and the arm that held the phone was numb all the way up to my shoulder. Dry heaves racked my chest, but all I could really think about was how I should tell her, but I couldn't tell her—

Liz looked at me with wild, hopeful eyes when I burst out of the foliage; if she realized, she was pretending she didn't. I held the phone up and felt my head clear a bit when I handed it over.

“Here! But I thought there was no signal out here—”

“That was years ago!”

She pressed a button on its side and tapped the screen. I waited for the phone to reflect her, but the screen buzzed to white for only a second before hissing back to black, to nothingness.

“It's not working—what the hell? What's wrong with it?”

She tapped ineffectually at the screen.

“Oh no.” I pressed the heels of my palms into my temples, but it wasn't enough. “No no no no no NO!”

“What—did you drop it?!”

“I didn't. I swear I didn't. It just … I couldn't touch it.”

“What's wrong with it?”

The screen was empty. I took a step back, then another.

“Electromagnetism.”

“Oh god. You shorted it? He's dying and you—! Anyone else here and this wouldn't have—couldn't have—but no, I brought
you
!”

I know she was beyond upset. I know she was devastated. But I can't forget the way her face looked when she said that.

“
You
could have gone for the phone, if I'm so predictably terrible!”

Then she was standing, holding it out in front of her, up to my
face. I winced and shook my head, shook my head. Blank screen, but I still felt tiny needles pricking my skin.

“What are we supposed to do?” Her face was collapsing in on itself, an imploding star. “What are we …”

She pushed the phone closer to me.

I put my hand in front of my eyes, but I shouldn't have. I shouldn't have, because with the sight of her and the almost-corpse of him and the volume of my breathing in my ears and everything else, of course I felt bee stings in my fingertips and suddenly I had repelled it again.

The phone smacked her in the mouth with enough force to tilt her head back slightly, enough to knock against her teeth before it fell to the forest floor. She whimpered and covered her mouth and stared at me like I was …

“Liz—” I reached for her, and she withdrew, eyes wide.

“Go. Get away from me!”

“Liz—I'm so sorry,” I mumbled. “The campers. I'll go get the other campers. Maybe …”

“Anyone else and this couldn't happen.” She was so quiet. But there was no way I'd miss a word of it, even as I backed away from that look in her eyes. “Anyone in the whole world, and instead it was you.”

I stumbled alone in the dark, heading in the vague direction of the other campground across the lake, falling over logs and my own feet and almost falling into the water again, scraping my arms on branches and brambles all but invisible in the dark. Away from the clearing, away from the lantern, away from Joe, away from Liz.

I followed foggy gray trails of electric smog to the opposite side of the lake, trails that became tinged with color the longer I
stumbled along them. I kept falling, kept eating dirt, and I couldn't figure out why, because I didn't notice that I had sliced my foot open until hours later, maybe after midnight or maybe close to dawn, what felt like eons after I left the clearing where Liz and Junkyard Joe—dead, he
must
have been dead—

—
you don't know that. She wouldn't let you check his pulse. She didn't even want you to touch him, freak
.

Freak, freak, freak.

All I could see the whole time I was wandering through the dark were the same stupid images spinning through my head: Liz's face when she told me to go, the stillness of Joe, the kiss, her face, the terrible kiss, the dark. Her face.

Firelight filled my eyes, but I didn't realize I had arrived at the campground until I walked right into some man who wore a fluorescent-orange vest.

“Help?”

“Jesus, kid, where did you come from? Aren't you freezing?”

“He's vomited all over himself—”

Fire and light and noise and, yes, lines and clouds of electric colors that were stretching out to greet me. The smog of their trucks, the buzz of their lamps, all stretching out fingers to hold me. I would be happy to meet them, happy for them to shut me off.

“I don't need help; Joe does. Except if he's dead, he doesn't need help and maybe he's dead, but he's over there, and you should go … go … help him because I'm a freak and I can't do it, okay. I can't do it and I can't do phones and I
can't
.”

“Here, son,” said one of the men.

He held up something that was buzzing blue and sizzling goldfuzzing light, and wrapped it around my shoulders.

And with the weight of the electric heating blanket on my shoulders, I was gone, gone, gone.

She was right, you know.

If it had been anyone else, it wouldn't have happened that way.

~ O

Moritz, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. If that's what it takes, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I was an idiot, I'm always an idiot.

Why did you stop writing me?

Please. You have to talk to me. Please. I know you aren't ether. I know you feel, you think. I know you care. I never thought you were a void.

Where are you? What's happened in the weeks since we last spoke? What should I do? What would you do if you were me? How can I ever expect Liz to come hang out after all that?

I don't think I can answer any questions without your help anymore. I can't focus enough to think of answers, and if this is a laser beam, then it's getting wide enough to swallow the world or something, and that doesn't even make sense and I'm sorry for that, too.