Love Over Matter (15 page)

See, the thing about the raccoon is
that he’s not your everyday garden pest; he’s a reminder of
George’s chivalry, good-heartedness, and love. And his appearance
now, when I’m in the midst of contacting another boy—George’s
identical twin, no less—with a belly full of butterflies, tells me
that my love is disappointed, hurt, upset over the feelings
starting to brew for his brother.

And he’s right. Any
relationship between me and
that
boy
would be doomed by kismet, not to
mention a serious ick factor owing to the doppelganger effect. Best
to leave the whole hornets’ nest be.

I jimmy the window open and
hiss, my pulse banging in my ears, my mouth as parched as the
Kalahari. But the beast just—okay, this might be my imagination
working overtime here—
laughs
at me. Snidely. And, oh, keeps gnawing away at
that juicy to
mah
to.

I shake my head and mutter, “Whatever.
Stupid jerk.” With a sigh, I force the window shut and yank the
shade down. Of course, the thing only springs back up as if
possessed by a sarcastic boomerang. “You win,” I tell the
raccoon.

Speaking of demonic possession,
though . . .

When I shimmy back onto the bed, I
notice that—egads!!!—the computer has, all on its own, shipped that
message off to Aleks, meaning I am SO TOTALLY DEAD.

* * *

The original Raccoon Incident occurred
at a lovely park (read: remote and woodsy, but amazingly tranquil)
on the Vermont/New York border, to which George’s parents had
whisked us for an early-autumn hike when I was twelve and George
was fourteen.

Looking back, it seems odd
that my parents allowed such an out-of-town adventure between
two—shall I say?—
curious
buddies of the opposite sex. Though, to be fair,
it wasn’t long after Mom’s heart attack so, as the saying goes,
they had bigger fish to fry.

“
What do you think?” Mr.
Brooks asked with a broad grin, waving at the dense tree line, the
birches starting to yellow and shed their leaves. He whistled a
breath through his nose. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Not to be mean, but Mr. Brooks is sort
of homely, his sagging cheeks, liver-spotted forearms, and
awkwardly trimmed toupee no match for his wife’s high-maintenance,
nipped and tucked exterior.

George locked eyes with me, a hopeful
expression flashing across his face. “See. I told you it was
awesome.”

I never doubted him. “Definitely,” I
said with a nod. I scanned the parking lot for a place to pee. “Is
there a bathroom around here somewhere?”

Mrs. Brooks was the one to respond.
“That’s the worst of it,” she told me with a faint grimace, her
Botox-infused face giving her the look of a spooked china doll. She
pointed a dagger-nailed finger at the far end of the lot.
“Outhouses.”

George popped his shoulders into an
apologetic shrug and started for the bathrooms, while his father
fiddled with a pole-mounted box, into which we were supposed to
deposit three dollars apiece in park-entry fees.

A few coins clanged into the box as I
wiggled along, struggling to keep pace with George, my legs locked
together at the knees. Ten feet ahead of me, he flung the women’s
room open and held the door. “Thanks,” I said, taking the grimy
handle, my stomach lurching from the stench.

The things we do for
love,
I thought. Because even though I
wasn’t ready to admit it, I had gone swoony for the boy next
door.

Less than a minute passed before I
burst out of the stall, my cheeks puffed full of the breath I’d
been holding. “Geez, that was brutal,” I muttered, not realizing
George was AWOL, his camouflage-patterned tennis shoes flipped
upside down in the grass, his ubiquitous hoodie draped over the top
of a pitch-stained picnic table. “George?”

“
You’ve gotta see this,”
his disembodied voice said from somewhere in the trees.

“
What?” I called. “What is
it?”

“
Just . . . come
here.”

I got an ominous feeling but ignored
it. “I don’t know . . .” I said, traipsing blindly
into the woods, using his trail of clothing as a compass. Soon I
was staring dead at a shirtless George Brooks, his dark hair
glistening in the afternoon sun, his lean legs dangling over the
side of a boulder and making intermittent contact with a sparkling
. . . waterfall?

When he heard me crunching around, he
shot a glorious smile over his shoulder and waved me
ahead.

I pulled up short beside him,
terrified but awestruck by the gymnastic way the water was leaping
at the rocky ravine below. “Wow. This is . . . You
knew this was here?”

He fought an eye roll.
“Uh,
yeah
. I
wanted it to be a surprise.” He patted the boulder, as if I should
sit down.

“
It’s really loud,” I said,
standing my ground. (Who knew rushing water could compete with a
jet plane lifting off?)

“
Isn’t it
relaxing?”

I hadn’t noticed until just then, but
George was right: something about him had let go, uncoiled. His
arms gave it away, mostly, the way they hung there, loose and
carefree. I blinked a couple of times, feeling as if I was in a
dream that was about to end. “What about your parents?”

“
Hmm?”

“
Won’t they be looking for
us?” Any excuse to observe this wonder from afar was fine by
me.

“
You worry too much,” he
said. “They’re not like that. They give me space.”

Again, he spoke the truth. Unlike my
parents, who could fly off the handle over a missed homework
assignment or turn to mush over a scraped knee, Mr. and Mrs. Brooks
kept George at arm’s length, treated child rearing like an odious
science experiment.

I finally gave in to his begging eyes.
The boulder was damp and slick looking, but I found a spot which,
once I brushed a few stray leaves aside, served nicely as a seating
area. “What’s this place called?”

He didn’t seem to have heard me, his
expression spacey and distracted. His fingers wandered in my
direction, playing chicken with the leg seam of my jeans. “What do
you think happens when you die?” he asked from nowhere.

The question was too big. “I dunno.”
Silence fell over us. “Maybe when you die, you get things you
didn’t have in life,” I proposed eventually.

“
Like what?”

“
Well, I think
. . . I think maybe you understand everything that
happened in your life and everything that ever happened in the
world. But you don’t judge it. Or analyze it. Or even have feelings
about it. You just know it and accept it.”

He leaned back on his palms, tilted
his face to the sun. “Do you think there’s a heaven?”

I wanted to believe in life after
death, in whatever form it might take. But somehow the notion of a
happy place in the sky where all the good folks live on forever
never quite added up to me. “Maybe everyone has it wrong,” I
settled on saying. “Maybe heaven’s not a place at all, but more
like a way to describe what happens to your soul when you
die.”

A grin crept across his lips. “Oh,
yeah?”

No sense stopping now, I figured. “I
mean, think of it like this: you know how the Earth’s core is
molten rock, so hot we can only imagine it, but never experience
it?”

He shut his eyes against the light.
“Okay.”

“
And everything that
touches the core gets absorbed by it, destroyed and remade? I think
that’s what it’s like to die: you stop being yourself and become
part of something bigger. Your soul melts into the spiritual
core.”

“
Deep,” he said, chuckling.
“I should have expected as much from you, though, huh?”

I wasn’t sure what he meant, exactly,
since I’d never considered myself a serious thinker. “I
guess.”

He shifted gears. “You know what we
should do?”

How could I? “No. What?” I said,
praying he wasn’t about to suggest skinny dipping in the pool at
the bottom of the cliff.

“
Feed the
squirrels.”

“
You’re joking.”

“
Uh-uh,” he said
matter-of-factly. “You’ll love it. For sure.”

What was that supposed to mean? He
thought I was a natural-born rodent chef? “Do we even have any
. . . squirrel food?”

Way too fast, he hopped to
his feet and offered me a hand, which I gratefully took. “There’s
some snacks in the trunk,” he said. “There’s gotta be
something
in there
they’ll eat.”

I hadn’t let go of his hand. It was
warm and tingly, and I liked it. “So should
we . . . ?” I asked, giving him a tug in the
right direction.

We collected his discarded clothes as
if they were sparkly bits of sea glass, then moseyed back to the
car (a Toyota Camry, for the record, which Mr. Brooks was quick to
inform any poor soul within earshot was “the most popular car in
America”). Even though we’d been gone awhile, I was surprised to
find that George’s parents had deserted us.

He read the concern on my face and
told me, “We can do whatever we want.” He opened the driver’s-side
door and popped the trunk latch, making the hatch lift up. After
shuffling through the trunk’s contents a bit, we located a box of
saltine crackers. “Perfect,” he declared, thrusting them at my
chest.

He led the way out of the parking lot,
down the embankment of a deserted road nearby and into a patch of
woods he seemed to recognize. “How come we’re the only ones
around?” I asked as he dipped into his pocket for a small orange
spray bottle.

“
Here’s good,” he said,
nodding at a felled pine. He uncapped the bottle and doused himself
with bug repellant, then told me, “Cover your face and I’ll do you.
Oh, and hold your breath. This stuff is forty percent DEET. Wicked
toxic.”

Even though my mouth was shielded, I
managed to end up with a nasty chemical taste on my lips when the
spray down was complete. “You weren’t kidding about that stuff,” I
said, gesturing at the bottle. “It’s disgusting.” I set the
crackers on the ground and hocked a poison loogie in the opposite
direction. Surveying the small clearing, I asked, “So where are
these squirrels you speak of?”

“
They’ll be here,” he told
me. “Guaranteed.” He straddled the downed tree. “Care to join
me?”

Again, he offered his hand.
And again I took it
. Luckily, I was smart
enough to wear jeans,
I thought.
Otherwise, I’d be in for a brutal thigh burn from
this tree bark.

We were now facing each other, knees
touching, the trunk supporting us. George leaned over for the
crackers, opened the box and peeled a few from their plastic
sleeve. With a gentle flex of his fingers, he smashed them to bits,
then scattered them about the earth below.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. Like he’d
promised, an army of furry rodents (mostly squirrels, with a few
chipmunks and a stray woodchuck thrown in to keep things
interesting) rose up from the forest floor to feed like bubbling
trout in a kiddie pool. “Quick,” I said, reaching for the crackers.
“Gimme some.”

He passed me a stack and I crumpled
and tossed them into the clearing, the animals sucking them up like
a troop of hungry vacuum cleaners.

“
You might wanna slow
down,” he told me after a couple of minutes. “We’re gonna run out
fast at this rate.” Hypocritically, he chucked a whole cracker at a
tree stump. It skidded to a lazy stop before being nabbed by a pair
of bushy-tailed squirrels, which began a tug-of-war over
it.

“
If you say so, Mr. Big
Spender,” I joked. I waved a cracker-filled hand over the
menagerie, our forest friends closing in on us. “They’re pretty
bold, aren’t they?” As if to prove my point, a skinny juvenile
squirrel did a flying leap at my hand, missing by a
mile.

I bent down, offering my remaining
crackers to the politest rodents of the bunch, which had somehow
figured out how to form a line and wait their turns. Their manners
were quite entrancing, really, explaining my level of distraction
when . . .

“
Cass,” George said, calmly
at first. Then: “Cass! Look out!” He snapped his fingers, made a
grab for my leg.

But it was too late.

I didn’t know what had hit me,
literally, until I smacked to the ground, my head landing on a
pillow of newly fallen leaves (thank God!), my shoulder crunching
beneath me. “Ow!” I gasped. I rubbed at my eyes, the stupidest
thing ever developing into view: a crazy-looking, wiseass raccoon,
which had apparently—I’m spitballing here—taken me down from behind
like an NFL linebacker.

And the dummy was still hanging
around, inches from my face, that little bandito mask taunting
me.

George scrambled to his feet, let
loose a string of expletives and chased the degenerate off—albeit
slowly, since the raccoon seemed suddenly comatose—with a series of
deliberately misplaced air kicks; meanwhile, I picked myself up off
the ground and dusted my jeans.