Bone Gap (28 page)

The juggling man dropped his bowling pins and grinned with graying teeth. “You will never find her.”

Finn shoved the juggler off the unicycle and snatched up one of his swords. He pointed the sword at the juggler. “Tell me where she is.”

The juggler only grinned wider. “You should be more careful when you handle snakes.”

The sword in Finn's hands writhed and he dropped it to the ground, where it twitched like a cornstalk in the wind and slithered into a nearby tent. Finn dove into the tent after it, landing on his elbows, pain ringing up to his shoulders. Inside the tent it was dark and hushed. He rose up onto his knees and found himself face-to-face with a young man with black hair.

“Who are you?” Finn said.

The young man said, “Don't you know?”

Finn scrambled to his feet. It didn't matter who the young man was. He passed the young man and was cut off again by another young man, also with black hair.

“Get out of my way!” Finn said.

“Get out of your own way,” said this young man.

Finn shouldered the young man aside but slipped when his shoulder hit not flesh, but a slick surface, and he spilled to the dirt. He reached up and touched glass. The young man in front of him also put up a hand.

A mirror.

“The House of Mirrors,” said Finn. “Cute.”

His reflection laughed at him. “Who the hell are you supposed to be?”

“Shut up,” said Finn, hauling himself back to his feet. He kept his eyes on the ground, searching for the snake, and not on the dozens of young men appearing in mirror after mirror
after mirror, the young men who would not shut up, whose voices washed over him like the voices of the people of Bone Gap, except they all had the same voice, his voice, the voice inside his head that chattered at him and would never let him sleep.

“You are a joke.”

“You are a freak.”

“Your mother left you.”

“Your brother hates you.”

“Petey doesn't trust you.”

“Nobody believes you.”

“You couldn't save Roza.”

“You can't save her now.”

“You couldn't recognize her . . .”

“ . . . if her life depended on it.”

“. . . and it does,

it does,

it does . . .”

Finn lowered his head and crashed into the next mirror, knocking it over, sending it into the mirror behind, and the next, like a series of dominoes, the last mirror ripping a hole in the tent on one side. He scooped up a shard of mirror and held it in his palm like a knife. He stepped through the tear in the tent, once again carried along by a current of people.

“You won't find her,” said a little girl with ice cream melting all over her hand.

“You'll never find her,” said a little boy with a giant stuffed bear.

“You'll never find her,” said a woman with a bright pink mohawk.

“I bet I can,” Finn said. “Do you hear me, wherever you are? I bet I can see her better than you can!”

The crowd stopped moving, turned toward him in unison. His hand tightened around the makeshift knife until he felt the edges bite into his skin. Warm blood dripped.

A voice hummed in his ear. “Put that away before the people get hungry.”

“What?'

The man, the Scare Crow, tall and still, stood beside him. Without thinking, Finn thrust the mirror shard at him, but the Scare Crow didn't move; he was that still, that fearless, that invincible. “You're only hurting yourself. Besides, the citizens like blood, don't they? They smell it.”

The familiar rage rattled Finn's bones, but rage would not help him now. He slipped the glass into his back pocket, wiped his palm on his jeans. “I bet I can find her.”

“Interesting,” said the man. “I've never understood why people choose to do the things that are hardest for them. You've heard of the Tilt-A-Whirl?”

Finn didn't even have time to say “Yes” when the world around him began to spin, faces blurring one into the next, the tents and trucks and people tilting on an axis until the ground
and the sky switched places: the earth above him, white cloud beneath. Worse than the spinning, the nauseating flip of earth and sky, was what happened to the people. They now hung all around him, unseeing, unconscious, as if their feet were stuck fast to the ground over his head, arms and hair dangling, bodies swaying like animals hooked in a slaughterhouse before their throats were cut.

Finn's stomach lurched, and he fought to keep from getting sick. The world stopped spinning, but earth and sky were still flipped, the bodies still dangling. “Put them back!”

“They don't mind.”

“If I find her, then you have to let her go.”

“Do I?”

“Yes.”

“Hmmm. Perhaps you're right. I'll accept your wager. But tell me, what do you want with her? You can't even see yourself. You'll never be able to appreciate beauty like hers.”

“What would you know about beauty?”

“This story won't end the way you expect it to.”

“Maybe it won't end the way you expect it to, either.”

“You'd best begin. There are a lot of people here. This could take a while. Maybe forever.” The Scare Crow backed away from Finn, vanishing into the tangle of bodies like an eel retreats into a bed of river weed.

Finn slowly turned in a circle, taking in the immensity of his task. How could he do this? He couldn't even recognize himself
right side up. How was he to recognize anyone else upside down?

He dug his fingernails into his wounded hand. No. He would do this. He had to. But they all looked the same. Or did they? Bees looked the same, and he had picked out the queen not because of her special stripes or even her size but because of the purposeful way she moved. She might be the only one fighting. But maybe Roza wouldn't be able to move either, maybe she was as docile and unknowing as the rest. He closed his eyes and tried to picture her, but her features jumbled in his head, everyone's and no one's. He opened his eyes and let his vision go slack and loose the way he had back at Petey's house. He walked slowly, carefully among the dangling bodies, touching one after the other, observing the pitch and sway of their arms and hair and hands, saying,
I'm sorry, I'm sorry
as he did so, because it was his fault, because he
was
sorry, and because this could take forever, and forever was a very long time.

IN HER FAVORITE NOVEL, A BROKENHEARTED BOY BURNS
everything his ex-girlfriend ever gave him, including a photo of her as a child. But Petey had no childhood pictures to burn. All she had were the images burned on her brain and the sensations burned into her skin, and how did you erase those? Stuff yourself in the freezer? Move to the Arctic? Turn yourself inside out and scrub them off in the shower?

She pulled out a folded piece of paper she was using as a bookmark, unfolded it, smoothed it on the bed. It was a poem called “Essay.”

Describe the shorts that changed your life.

Moonlight on skin, warm under fingers.

The color red: why or why not?

Not. Her eyes are black as stingers.

Her mother peeked into Petey's doorway. “You're awfully mopey this morning. What's up?”

Petey crumpled the paper, closed the novel. “Nothing.”

“Didn't Finn visit last night? I thought he was here every night.”

Images burned in her brain, a flush burned in her cheeks. “How did you know?”

Her mother smiled. “I look stupid to you?”

“No,” Petey said.

“I hope the two of you are being careful.”

The flush turned nuclear, scorching her flesh. “There's no such thing as careful.”

Her mother frowned, took a step into the room. “Petey, do you have something you want to tell me?”

Write a story that includes a new pair of loafers, the Washington Monument, and a spork.

I'd rather tell you about a new horse, a forest of glass, and a long good night.

Petey plucked at the old blanket on the end of her bed, the one that she'd brought outside and laid by the fire, the one on
which she and Finn had been together. She loved this blanket. She hated this blanket. “I'm not pregnant or diseased or anything like that, if that's what you're asking.”

“I wasn't,” her mother said. “What I'm asking is, are you all right?”

Was she? She had been so sure. Sure that Finn was face blind and that it explained everything, including his feelings for her. Sure that it meant that his feelings were broken somehow, the way his ability to recognize faces was broken. She had read that it was incurable, but what if, one day, they learned how to fix it? What if Finn saw her and saw how hideous she was? He knew already what other people thought of her. He'd heard what they said. And he'd changed his mind about being seen with her in public, he'd wanted to tuck her in the back of the café like a dirty secret. So, what if he started looking at her the way so many other people did, with a mixture of fascination and confusion and repulsion? She wouldn't be able to stand it.

But she couldn't stand this, either. Maybe she should burn the blanket. Maybe she should make a dress out of it and wear it for the rest of her life.

“Petey?” said her mother.

“I'll be fine.”

Her mother took a great lungful of air, let it out, as if she were settling into a particularly challenging yoga pose. “If you want to talk about it—”

“I don't.”

Her mother tucked her hair behind her ear and nodded, worry creasing the skin around her eyes. “I love you, you know.”

An ache gathered at the back of Petey's throat, and she was afraid she would burst into tears. “Did you need me for something?”

“Oh. Well. If you refuse to confide your deepest, darkest secrets to your very receptive and very cool mom, and if you're not doing anything else, you can bring Darla at the café some more honey and cookies.”

“I can do that,” Petey said, grateful enough to have some kind of task, something to take her out of her house, away from the beeyard and the hum of the bees and the soft trickle of the stream and the smell of the grass and everything that was telling her that maybe she'd made a mistake. She and her mother hooked the wagon onto the back of the battered moped, loaded the wagon with the honey and cookies. Petey jumped on the moped and drove past the Dog That Sleeps in the Lane, who didn't bother lifting his head. She stopped at the intersection of the lane and the main road, waiting for a truck to pass before she turned. Her feelings shifted from gratitude to amazement that honey would still have to be delivered and dogs would still sleep in lanes and people would go about their business after a girl had ripped out her own heart and crushed it under her boots. It seemed as if there should be a ceremony to mark such an occasion, a day of mourning, maybe even a week or two during which no one would eat or
rest or work, and instead sit sadly wearing black and pondering all the ways that people annihilate themselves.

Describe someone who has had the biggest impact on your life using only adverbs.

Furiously, smoothly, ferociously, surprisingly, deliciously, quickly, slowly.

But instead of finding sad and mournful people pondering all the ways that others annihilate themselves, Petey found the Rude boys lurking around the front of the café. Then Petey found herself pondering the ways in which she might annihilate other people and get away with it.

Frank Rude started in on her as soon as he saw her. “Where's your boyfriend, Petey?”

“Where's yours?” said Petey.

Frank flushed and made a sort of jerking motion forward, then fell back, like a dog that suddenly remembered his choke collar.

His brother Derek shoved Frank aside. “Don't mind him. He's an ignorant dumbass. You let us know if you need something, okay?”

Petey said, “Huh?”

“It's not cool, that's all I'm saying. Right? It's not cool.” All his brothers except Frank nodded. And Frank nodded when Derek elbowed him in the ribs.

“What's not cool?” Petey said.

“Stupid Moonface. Doing, you know. What he did.”

Petey's stomach roiled, as if she could feel any worse. “You mean Finn O'Sullivan? What did he do?”

Derek jammed his hands in his pockets so hard they threatened to burst through the fabric. “It's just not cool, that's all. And I . . .” He looked as if he wanted to say something and that it was choking him. “I feel bad.”

“You feel bad,” Petey said.

“You want help with that box?”

Petey looked down at the box she was holding; she didn't remember hauling it from the wagon. “No, I'm fine.”

“I'm just saying, is all,” said Derek, saying very little that Petey understood.

“Okay,” said Petey.

“Okay,” said Derek. He and his brothers walked away, but not before Frank tossed one last glare over his shoulder.

Petey watched them go, each of them as bowlegged and as strangely endearing as a toddler. Now, what was that about? And what was she turning into, thinking that the Rude boys were endearing?

Explain a moment that changed your worldview, written in recipe format.

Two graham crackers, one square of chocolate, a marshmallow, a jar of honey.
Roast marshmallow over a fire, press between crackers, dip into honey, take a bite.

She backed into the door of the café and carried the box of honey and cookies to the counter. Darla stopped chatting with Jonas Apple and hurried over to her.

“Priscilla! Oh, that's too heavy! You should have asked for some help!”

“But I always bring the box in myself.”

“It's too heavy,” Darla insisted.

“For who?”