Because You'll Never Meet Me (33 page)

My glove wrapped around her arm. She pulled away. “The heck?”

“Hey.” Martin Mulligan squinted at me, half smiling. “Who's this? Brian? Great costume, man!”

I unclenched my other fist and pushed Liz's corsage and music player into her hand. I'd cleaned the blood and water off. She frowned at it. Then her eyes looked straight into my goggles.

“Ollie?”

“Liz!” I spoke as loudly as I could. The heat was excruciating. I pointed at the DJ. “Electronica?”

“Ollie, what—how—?” Through the haze I think I saw her eyes widen.

“No … biggie.” My legs gave out.

Martin Mulligan caught me with cardboard arms. “Man, you're hyperventilating. Take that thing off!”

“I … can't.”

Martin misunderstood. He thought he was helping me. That was the worst thing—knowing that he really
was
a decent guy. Maybe I would have liked him after all, the bastard.

“No!” cried Liz.

“Here,” said Martin Mulligan, and he yanked my gas mask off.

My head exploded. A barrage of malevolent electricities stabbed me in the eye sockets. It was beyond pain—it was concentrated anguish at the base of my neck, expanding and searing as I waited for my brains to splatter onto my shoes.

I screamed as blood vessels in my eyes burst, as my hands started flapping. I screamed twice as loud as I ever had until the sound reverberated up to the gymnasium rafters. And when I fell to the floor, I screamed even louder, and my skull threw itself against the wood.

I screamed.

The world ended.

And I
wanted
it to end.

Because it was finally too much. And I mean all of it was too much, all of it was swirling through my skeleton and nerves until it was imploding inside me in this twisted spiral of pain or something so much worse, and I swear that lights switched over in my eyes and then I saw more than Liz beside me, horrified in the gym.

I saw my dad tripping over his untied laces, but all the wriggling feelers stretching out of incubators were ready to catch him. I saw daylilies sprouting from dilapidated birthday cake no one ever ate. I saw the fishbowl in shards painted redder than blackberry juice. Liz's hand getting sucked back into the cardboard television. Joe flying right back up into his tree. The automobile bones in the junkyard creaking and standing up on huge metal stilts with feet at the ends. I saw Dorian Gray lit with electricity and I saw us wearing layers of mud puddles as thick as winter coats and I saw planes go down because I sneezed and I saw, I saw, I saw all sorts of things I could never see and the weight of it all was pulling me under and I could have happily fallen back into the feelers of the things in incubators, too, right? That seemed easiest.

But then I saw you. You were in the deer blind again, Moritz. I saw you, smiling with holes in your face, reaching down into the collapsing chamber of things that held me, saying only “It was never your fault!” and pulling me up and out and closer to you.

It was almost like I met you, Mo.

And the thought of that was enough to send all of the imploding mass of horror spinning out of me ALL AT ONCE in a roaring scream that no one heard, that no words, no ALL CAPS, could capture.

So the world only ended for the DJ. All his speakers blew out in the exact instant that his laptop died. The lights above sputtered, went out. Phones sparked and people dropped them. All that was electric died with my scream.

I made the world convulse instead.

I was on my back. The sound of stampeding, costumed teenagers shouting in the dark shook me to the bones.

“Is he okay?” Martin Mulligan, my knight? Screw that. “I'll get—get help.” His footsteps joined those of the exiting, hollering masses.

I opened my eyes. Liz was leaning over me. I could see her face in the glow of her skeleton dress, although it hurt to stare through the red haze of broken blood vessels.

“I brought the … house down,” I said, all stumbling tongue.

“You're crazy.” Her relief was almost tangible, like another color.

I didn't look away. “You wanna dance?”

“You didn't bring your glockenspiel.” She laughed, or maybe choked.

I could see her eyes, just barely. She didn't look bored. I thought her freckles were piercing through the makeup. And when she hugged me in the emptying gym, a current passed between us.

She held out her hand.

“Do you wanna stand, Ollie?” A hint of that old grin. “Or do you wanna lie there and bleed some more?”

I stood.

Liz and I kicked balloons and untangled orange and black streamers from our shoes. We stepped out of the school through a fire exit.

I was riding some kind of high, face open to the air, dragging my gas mask behind me. I was still grinning like an idiot as she
pulled me away from the school, despite the blood cooling on my face. The streetlamps overhead burst as I passed under them. When the first bulb shattered, Liz yelped and I ended up dragging her too, but the air was cool and fresh and new, and there was blacktop under my feet for the first time ever, and I wanted to think only of this moment.

But she stopped halfway across the large parking lot to catch her breath and we were alone, and I didn't even know what to say. I looked at her and peeled my womble farther down from my face. We walked slowly across the remainder of the lot. It just felt like we should keep moving or I would have to stop and think, and I did not want to.

“So you beat the power line,” she said. There was pumpkin-shaped confetti in her hair.

“I had help.”

“But hey, maybe you can start coming to school here now.”

Overhead, another streetlight went out. I felt the slightest release of pressure in my temple as the colors faded, but nothing more.

“I'm not sure that's the best idea.”

“Who needs computers if you've got origami?” She was beaming. “It'll work.”

We'd stopped walking, standing behind the lone vehicle in the back lot, an old minivan that made me nostalgic. When I stood near it, my stomach clenched and its black smog vanished. Maybe we were going to kiss again.

But …

“I've got a better idea!”

“I know that look,” she said, but I didn't want to think about
why she was frowning or why maybe I should be frowning, too, so I grabbed her hand and pulled her forward, toward the road that ran behind the school.

“We could go anywhere! Where do you think we should go, Liz? Where's a good place to eat? Maybe a sushi joint, because I'd probably take out ovens if I got too close. And after that, how do you feel about Kreiszig? I don't know whether I could get on a plane.” I chortled, yanking her forward, walking down the yellow lines in the road. I forgot that roads
had
such a thing. Genius!

“Ollie!” Liz cowered as another bulb burst overhead. “Can't you shut it off?”

“I mean, maybe if I got in a plane it would crash, but maybe not. Maybe I could rein it in a bit. Or we could get a skiff. Either way I'll see the ocean. The
ocean
, Liz! I bet confessions are even bigger at ocean sunsets! Stands to reason.”

Liz pulled her hand away. I couldn't see her expression beneath the makeup, but her teeth were showing. “You're manic again!”

“No, no, I'm not.” I showed my teeth, too. “Just excited!”

“What's happened?”

Man, she knows me well, Moritz. My smile slipped. And as it did, I felt queasy. The electric aura from the next streetlight suddenly seemed stronger than I was and I took a step back.

“Nothing's happened,” I said. “I just don't want to go home.”

“Ollie?” she said. “Calm down. Breathe.” She put her hands on my shoulders. Since when was I crouching? “Is it your mom?”

I didn't answer. She helped me up and started walking me back toward the school, back across the parking lot. That womble was so heavy. My feet were so heavy.

“Come on. Pull on your mask. Let's go.”

“Auburn-Stache … he isn't coming back until ten PM.”

“I'll drive. I wasn't lying about driver's training.”

It didn't end there, Moritz. But the moments I have left with Mom are running out, and right now I'd rather be at her bedside than writing you.

Thanks for the womble. Send me more hope?

Ollie, I would pull you from every darkness, if I ever met you.

Bernholdt-Regen did not welcome our merry band back with willing arms. But it seemed Lenz's father truly had influence. I had feared he would want to pursue further punishment for me. Facing him in the hospital had been even harder than facing Lenz. The way he'd stared at me with bags beneath his eyes. Cracking his dry knuckles. But he'd said, “My son has been known to ask for trouble. I told the authorities he fell from the bridge. I told them not to trace the emergency call. I told them he is clumsy, like me.”

“He … fell.”

“I know some of what he's done to you. To the other boy who frightened him.”

Frightened him?

“Goodness knows he's hospitalized a classmate before. Goodness knows I did, in my day. Like father, like son.” He tried to chuckle. It didn't reach his eyes. “Clumsy, like me.” He sighed a deep sigh that seemed to reach the bottom of him. “I did not mean to raise him like me.”

“I'm as …
clumsy
as he is.”

I felt his eyes crinkle up. “You were also raised by someone. We follow examples. I … I have been a bad example since his mother passed. I shooed you from my bakery, years ago. What was I teaching him?”

“But it has to be more than following examples,” I told him. “I have to be more than that.”

“Maybe you are. Some of us never get there.” I heard his bones creak. His knuckles tightened on his knees. “It is very hard, to be human.”

I clutched my shoulders. “It really is.”

He held out one cracked hand. With a burning throat, I shook it. His palm was as warm as mine.

Fieke and Owen awaited my arrival in the courtyard at school. My heart leapt, Ollie, but this was not a sign of breathlessness or fear. I didn't pay much attention to what the other students were doing. It was enough that the Abends were chattering away, sending their own waves back to me. Not in color but in vivid detail. Owen laughed and wiggled his fingers. He's trying to teach me sign language. It is as difficult as reading!

Pruwitt demands I keep up with reading. She handed me a stack of manga the other day, which must please you, Ollie.

As we walked, Fieke said she might actually attend class for once. Her teacher will wonder when Siouxsie Sioux registered for his course! Ha!

We shared lunch together. I spoke. Owen spoke in his way, holding my hand beneath the table. I doubt you will mind, Oliver. Despite your kind words about meetings under power lines.

This is not science fiction. But I almost feel I am in a fantasy world.

Except when I think of you. This is not fantasy. In a fantasy world, your mother would not be in such pain. And neither would you. If I could tell you this in person, you could hear the truth in my voice.

But perhaps one day I shall meet you, now that you have the womble. After all, you overcame the power line. Perhaps one day you'll be able to find the happy medium between your polarities—between rejecting electricity and it rejecting you.

I am not afraid that you will hurt me. If you do, the scars won't last for eternity. People hurt each other all the time. Especially when they care for each other.

Lately I have been dwelling. I asked Father where the laboratory that made us is. I had no idea whether it was still operational. Whether it still smelled of antiseptic and windowlessness. My father wrote the latitude and longitude down.

“I never thought you'd ask for this,” he said as he wrote.

“Neither did I,” I said. “But …”

He nodded.
“Vergangenheitsbewältigung.”