What is Real (28 page)

Tanis comes down the stairs.

“I've changed my mind,” I say. “About New York.”

“It's too late,” she says. “I can hear sirens.” She is crying. “Don't change your mind, Dex.”

“It isn't,” I say. “It is not too late.”

I start moving. I am moving so fast I can hardly make out my own movements. I have never moved so fast. Nothing has ever mattered as much as this matters now.

“I haven't changed
my
mind,” she says.

“It's different,” I say.

My dad says, “It's too late. I probably deserve it, right?”

“No,” I say. My hands are tearing out plants, and Tanis and I are moving impossibly fast around my dad, sitting on the pink bed, his new shoes flat on the floor.

I run outside to the back shed and grab the red gas can.
Danger
, it says on the side.
Highly flammable
. Tanis has the plants in the pit and my dad is still inside on the pink bed yelling, “Dex, for Christ's sake, come and get me. DEX!”

The gasoline glugs out of the can, splashing my shoes and my jeans.

I step back and Tanis jumps forward. She has a long match, like we used at the lake in the summer to light the hibachi. I back away. The flame is huge, it leaps up like a wave and for a second she vanishes behind it, and then I can see her again, wavering like an apparition.

Tanis is real. I did not make her up. My knee buckles. For a second I think I'm going to fall into the fire or be sucked into it.

I go into the basement and I pick my dad up and carry him outside. I put him a safe distance from the flame. Safe enough. And we watch it burn and time is running out and the smell is thick and heavy and we are going to suffocate, I think. But of course, we aren't.

This is not selectively edited.

This part is the truth.

It's possible that I can't tell the truth. I don't know what it is anymore. Or maybe I do know and I can't tell it because it is
too
real. Maybe I never did.

When you start to lie, it's easy to lose track of what is what. Sometimes it's impossible to know when you start. You think it's just that one wall, with the door and the tunnel and then suddenly it's a whole house, a whole city of tunnels and lies and none of it matters. You can't keep track because it's not trackable. The tunnels don't lead anywhere that you remember because you are busy remembering the lie.

That's how it is.

I think I started when I was five, riding my bike down the street, a book taped to the handlebars.

Fiction was the first lie that made more sense to me than real life.

Maybe that's when it started.

Something flaps loose in my chest and I cough and cough. I can't stop coughing. Tears stream down my cheeks. They aren't tears. I'm coughing.

They are tears. How much goddamn crying can I still have left to do?

“It's okay,” Dad says. “Whatever happens, happens.” The air is red and white and blue. Except it isn't. It's the lights. The sirens suddenly fill my ears too full and I want to clamp my hands over them, but I don't. The flames lick the blackberries and that's when I realize what I have to do. I don't know if I have time. I grab the gas can and start splashing the shrubs closest to me. I throw the match just as Lundstrom rounds the bend. I can tell he's smelling the air. The smell of the blackberries burning is so similar to the smell of pot that maybe…

Maybe.

My heart is pounding like crazy when the bush takes the flame and there's a
whoosh
so intense that I have to jump back. The blaze sighs and then recedes, and I look at my dad. He nods.

“What's going on here?” Lundstrom asks.

“Just doing some burning,” Dad says, like he's shooting the shit about the weather, completely ignoring the fact that he's sitting half-slumped on the ground. The bottoms of his shoes are black, melted. “Damn blackberries. Only thing to do is burn 'em out.”

“Blackberries,” repeats Lundstrom.

“Anything else we can do for you?” Dad says, like this is normal. Seven cop cars. A fire twenty feet high. The smoke turns toward us and envelops us in a black hug. I can't breathe.

I can.

I am okay.

I am not okay.

“Guess not,” says Lundstrom. “Unless you lose control of this thing. Hate for you to lose your house.”

“We have control,” says Dad.

“Yeah,” says Lundstrom. “Speaking of your house, mind if I go in and look around?”

“You got a search warrant?” Dad says.

“Go ahead,” I say quickly. I know what he 'll see. The empty pots, the fresh dirt, the grow lights.

The tomatoes on the pink bed.

“I don't need to look,” he says. “No search warrant, kid. Your dad's right.”

“See you at the game,” says Lundstrom. “Big game tonight, huh?”

“You bet,” I say. “I'm not playing though. Knee injury.” I roll up my pants and show him, and my knee is purple and livid.

“Shit,” he says. “What the hell happened?”

And then Tanis is there and she looks like a kid, too young for this, for anything. She says, “Can I talk to you?”

Lundstrom is confused. “What?” he says.

And I can see Tanis getting braver. And maybe part of this is going to end the way it is supposed to end, after all. I can't hear what she's saying, but as she talks, I can see her getting lighter and lighter. And then she's floating above the ground.

No.

She's taking Lundstrom inside. Then he is coming out of the house with the box. The box. And she holds up her hand and waves a bit. And I really want for it not to be goodbye, but I say it anyway. I say, “Bye.” And that's it. It's not a good movie ending, is it? There needs to be a UFO, hovering overhead. A hail of bullets. Someone, maybe me, dying slumped over the fire.

But me and Dad just sit there, watching the fire until the smell starts to make me feel sick, and then what we do is we drive into town and get some Chinese food. If this was a movie, that would be some kind of fucked-up ending, right?

Roll credits.

chapter 35
october 2, this year.

I get the camera from under the stairs. The battery is still alive and I don't know how that's possible, but it's true. Sometimes true things are harder to believe than lies. A good liar doesn't make things too complicated. He just takes simple ingredients and layers them together to make an interesting story. Take, for example, some corn.

Add a maze.

And an alien abduction.

A pretty girl.

Two pretty girls.

I take the camera outside and I press
Record
. It's as familiar to me as anything, but not quite, like when you're in the shower and washing your hair for the first time after a haircut and it doesn't feel like yours somehow.

I don't know what I'm recording. The smoldering remains of our fire. The corn, waving in the cool autumn wind. The clouds tracking across the sky like nothing happened and maybe nothing did.

Speed it up.

Slow it down.

Add a soundtrack.

A murder of crows.

Film inside the house. Inside the dollhouse. Go closer and closer. Zoom in until all you can see are the crumbs of what is left.

Dust.

Nothing is real.

The table is not real and the tiny yellow house is not real and my dad is not real and Tanis is not real and Olivia is not real and aliens are not real and I press the black mark on my arm and remind myself that I am not real either.

Poof.

Make it all a dream.

chapter 36
now.

You are clean when you decide to stop.

I am deciding to stop.

I am sitting in my psychiatrist's office, which is above a gas station just outside of town. He has boxes of Kleenex scattered around the room. Dozens of them. Like a patient should never be more than an arm's reach away from a box of Kleenex. I can smell gasoline. I never cry in his office. His name is Dr. Gleason. His office smells—apart from the gas—like nose spray and the dust that burns on old slide projectors, moth wings burning.

I show Dr. Gleason a film. It's a documentary. I'm going to call it
What Is Real
. It is about me and Tanis, Kate and T-dot. A drawing, perfectly to scale. A map with instructions. The way we held the boards and the corn fell in front of us like it was there the whole time, just waiting to become art.

It's going to be about how you have to be careful when you contrive an ending because nothing ever goes the way you think it will, unless it's fiction. I used to like fiction.

When I was a kid.

Dr. Gleason asks, “What now, Dex?”

I start to laugh. “I don't know,” I say. I'm not lying.

I laugh more. The office fills up with those brown birds, hopping. I can't stop laughing. But sometimes laughing like that can make you cry.

Crying is a different kind of bird. Crying is crows calling. Crying is the blackness of water in the lake. Crying is in the needle.

No. Crying is in the bubbles, rising to the surface.

But you just have to follow them. And once you get there, you don't have to go back. You can start again.

And then.

chapter 37

CUT TO:
INT.—OFFICE OF MAIN STREET SCHOOL

Show Dex Pratt arriving late to school. He's not hurrying
because he can't, his injury slows him down enough that
rushing isn't an option. Show how he isn't hurrying. Zoom
in on his knee. Use CGI to make it seem like the camera
goes through the fabric. That way it's still real, it's just
reality amped up.

Show Dex half hopping, half limping into the office.
He's late, but he's always late. Show Dex picking up a bright
pink piece of paper from a tray. Dex flicks the paper. Show
how the sound fills up the empty room for a split second so
he feels like he's not alone.

DEX
Stacey? You here?

Show how he's not alone. In a chair, in the corner behind
him, there's a girl with a crooked smile. She clears her throat.

Karen Rivers
is the author of fourteen novels, mostly for young adults. Her books have been nominated for a number of awards, including the Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Award and the Silver Birch Award. Karen lives, reads and writes in a yellow house near the beach in Victoria, British Columbia, and can almost always be found online at karenrivers.com.