His Majesty's Elephant (21 page)

For once in the history of the universe, none of the usual suspects was answering their phone. I barricaded myself in my room and went laptop surfing instead.

I surfed for horse stuff and beach stuff and turtle stuff. Nothing whatsoever to do with Egypt. Who cared about sand and terrorists and old dead mummies? The only sand I wanted was right underneath me in Florida.

When my phone whinnied at me, I almost didn't bother to answer it. After all, nobody could be bothered to answer me.

But the whinny was Cat, and she had an excuse. She'd been driving her kid brothers home from soccer.

Crisis?
she texted.

Big time. But with the phone in my hand and the screen staring at me, I couldn't manage to fit it all into 160 characters.
Tell u tonight,
I said.
Still on for ice-cream run?

8:30,
she answered.
Rick too. Kelly's got a date.

Normal me would have squeed and wanted to know all about it. Crisis me punched
OK. See u then,
and threw the phone on the bed.

Mom was still home. I could hear her rattling around in the kitchen. Then the TV came on, rumbling away in the background.

That was weird. I almost went to find out why she wasn't going back to work, but my mad was still too new. If she thought she was going to wait me out, she could just keep thinking it.

The computer beeped at me. The phone was lighting up with messages.
Now
everybody wanted to talk-text-email. All I felt like doing was crawling inside a book and pulling the cover over my head.

I tried every book in my to-be-read file, and even in my favorite-dead-tree-rereads pile, but my eyes kept slipping away from the words. Finally I opened my laptop instead, but I shut off the wi-fi.

It felt weird. Kind of guilty. Like telling the whole world to eff off.

What I needed was my own words, or words that came to me. Words that weren't about here or now. I needed to go away, really far away, deep inside myself where everything was different. Where I wasn't even me.

I've always told myself stories. I started writing them down as soon as I knew how. When I got my first computer that was all my own, I'd found the place where I could always go.

I wasn't always safe there. Stories aren't about being safe. On the screen, where the words were, I was home—more than I was anywhere except in the barn or in my own house.

A year ago, when the cancer came in, it was scary, but then there was the remission and I told myself that was it, we'd go on and nothing would change. Mom wouldn't get sick again.

But the world was different. I couldn't trust it any more.

The only world I could trust was the one I made for myself. The only light was on the screen, pale like moonlight, black like the sky between the stars. Outside it was a steaming hot Florida afternoon, with the sun beating down and the thunderheads piling up. In here, it was as cold as the truth I'd had to face, the day Mom came home from the doctor and sat me down and told me she was going to die.

Today wasn't anything like that. She was just dumping me for the summer—same as Dad used to do, till he stopped even bothering to show up. Just like Dad, she thought it was great. Romance! Adventure! All the things she'd never had time to do, so I got to do them instead.

I closed my eyes and made myself go away. Skip over. Ignore. Forget. Be somewhere else. Be someone else—someone as different as it was possible to be.

This wasn't really a new story. Pieces of it had been in me for as long as I could remember, fragments of words, images, half-remembered dreams, but now it was all there: solid, whole, and so real I could taste it.

Really, I could. It was bitter and salty, like a mouthful of ocean, or too many tears. When I opened my eyes, I was somewhere completely different.

I was inside the story. Instead of me telling it, it was telling me.

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