The Storyteller (6 page)

Or “Geek!”

“Dweeb!”

“Renob!”

Yep. You heard it right. Renob. It's
boner
spelled backward. Don't ask me. It's something kids say.

Now, of course, I'm not going to jump up on one of the tables in the cafeteria and declare, “I love school!” What kind of maniac do you think I am, Stella?

Stella? Where the hell did that come from?

Ha. I think I just named you! Stella.

Stella! Stella! Stella!

I heard someone yelling that in a movie once, and now, diary, you are officially known as Stella. People name their diaries all the time, so I'm doing it too. Just so you know, I don't plan on being polite. I won't be starting each entry with a
Dearest Stella
or
My Good Friend Stella
or whatever. I'm going to be emotional sometimes. I'm going to be honest. On occasion, I'll be overwhelmed and I might even say awful things that I don't mean.

Screw you, Stella.

Up yours, Stella.

Kill yourself, Stella.

Actually, that last one is not a bad idea, Stella. If you ever decided to throw yourself off a bridge, no one would ever read you. And that'd be a good thing. Because the danger of writing something like this is the possibility of someone reading it. Someone like Phaedra Moreau, who would find it and start telling people, “Not only does Keri Cleary love school, but she loves Mandy Druger! Odds are that every school has a lesbo, and now we're lucky to have two. Oh, and how about Keri's brother, Alistair? What a pathetic dope. It'll be a shame when they strap a straitjacket on him and ship him off to the loony bin.”

Not that I can't handle Phaedra Moreau. Everyone knows Phaedra talks crap because she is crap. For instance, this morning she was hanging out on the front steps, sucking on a candy cane and whispering numbers to girls as they walked into school. Six. Eight. Three. Nine. And so on.

Weird? Not for Phaedra. Simply more of her crap. I heard later from Mandy that she was rating girls' outfits on a one to ten scale.

I got a five. Simply spectacular.

Okay, I've gotten off topic. I blame you, Stella.

The point I was trying to make is that I could live in school and be happy, even with weasels like Phaedra there. Or happier. Sitting at a desk or in the cafeteria. Standing at my locker and watching people walk up and down the hall. Listening to Mr. Geary blab on and on about the formula for the volume of a cone and how that's going to be important to know if I ever want to go to college and not be a homeless person. It's all better than thinking about the fact that your brother is delusional, that he speaks of strange things with strange people in strange places, all in an attempt to distract you from the only truth, which is the worst truth.

Your brother shoots people with a gun he dug up next to the river.

 

W
EDNESDAY
, 11/29/1989

AFTERNOON

On the walk to school, I still had the tape for Jenny Colvin. I guess I should have given it to Mom, Ms. Kern, or the police. But it's too late for that now. I didn't want the thing around anymore, and since I strive to keep promises, I kept this one. I dropped it in the mailbox outside school. Messages, even cuckoo crazy ones, deserve to reach their destinations.

Besides, the very existence of Alistair's tape inspired me to send my own message. I wrote a letter last night when I couldn't sleep, when all I seemed to hear were Alistair's footsteps in the hall like every night for the last few days. It was a short letter, and I addressed it to Glen Maple.

Remember him? My secret admirer from last year?

The letter read:
Meet me behind the maintenance shed. Today after last bell. Sincerely, Your Secret Admirer.

I delivered it between classes. I pretended to bump into Glen's locker and I slipped it through the air vents.

It felt awesome. It felt awful. It felt completely like something I would never do, but I needed to do it, Stella, because you deserve to hear about something other than my brother. You deserve stories of kids being kids, of romance and regular stuff.

The afternoon was drizzly and cold—no surprise, this is Thessaly—but the shed has an overhanging roof that kept me dry while I waited. It was at least fifteen minutes before he showed up.

“Thank heavens to murgatroid,” he said when he poked his head around and saw me.

Yep.
Murgatroid.
It's a word, I guess. From a cartoon, if I'm not mistaken.

“Don't say things like that,” I told him.

“Sorry,” he said. “I'm just relieved you're not Wart Woman.”

An awful nickname some kids called Kendra Tolliver, a nice enough girl in the seventh grade. “Don't say things like that either,” I replied.

“Sorry.” He hung his head low, so low that I knew he wasn't really sorry. He was frowning, but it was a smiling variety of frown. The edges of his lips still curled upward.

“You didn't know who wrote the letter?” I asked. “But you came anyway?”

“I was hoping it was you,” he said as he looked at me in every place except my eyes.

“It's me,” I said with a shrug. “So what's next?”

“Ummm,” was all he could say.

“You're not kissing me,” I told him.

“Ummm.”

“And I'm not telling you anything about my brother.”

“Sure. He's so, like, not…” He pretended his mouth had a zipper and he zipped it shut.

Then we stood there silently for a few seconds until I said, “So you're my boyfriend now. If that's okay with you.”

“Super okay,” he replied.

“You don't tell anyone yet, though. Let me do that.”

“Sure.”

“Sit with me at lunch tomorrow,” I told him. “People will know by then.”

“Bitchin',” he said, and I realized at that moment that he said stupid things like that not because he thought they were funny, but because he actually thought it made him sound cool.

“Until then,” I said, and I ducked out from the overhang, opened my umbrella, and hurried home.

EVENING

The family is in a holding pattern. Waiting for the next thing to happen. In the movies, everything happens so fast. Someone is shot. Someone is arrested. Someone goes to court. Someone goes home or someone goes to jail.

In real life, there are negotiations. There are late-evening phone calls, there are early-morning meetings. Then there is nothing. Delays. There is sitting around having dinner and watching TV.

I skipped TV tonight. Because of you, Stella.

Damn you, Stella, always begging me to write stories in you. Moronic stories. Stories without endings. If you don't share your stories with other people, do they even count? If you don't share your stories, do they even need an ending? I know, it's that stupid
if a tree falls in the forest
sort of question, but I mean it.

So I'm back to the wombat. That's a story with an ending. A beginning too, but I still have to write the thing. I can't get the images out of my head. I think about them when my mind wanders in class. I dream about them, for crying out loud. Now's as good a time as ever to finally get the story down on paper.

Right, Stella? Are you ready for it? Will you protect it?

 

THE PHOSPHORESCENT WOMBAT

In a place where the pines were thick, along a country road with dandelions sprouting from the cracks, a wombat wobbled under the weight of a sign that hung around her neck.

PERFECTLY FINE WOMBAT
, the sign read.

It was raining, the drops coming down hard, massaging the wombat's head and back. It was a warm day, so the rain wasn't a bad thing. It was quite pleasant, actually. A lovely sort of rain.

Sprinting through the forest and down the road, with plastic tubs of wild black raspberries they'd picked, a girl named Rosie and her younger brother named Hamish came upon the wombat. “Well, look at that,” Rosie said.

“Ugliest puppy I've ever seen,” Hamish said.

“It isn't a puppy,” Rosie said. “That there is a wombat.”

“A womwhat?”

“Wombat. From Australia. Like a koala that can't climb. Or a kangaroo that can't jump.”

Hamish got down on all fours for a closer look. Water dripped from his floppy bangs. “Then what does he do?” he asked.

Rosie didn't need to get on all fours to answer. “First off, he's a she. Notice the lack of dangly bits. And why does she have to do anything?”

Hamish leaned in closer, until the wombat showed her teeth. He pulled back, pushed his bangs up, and said, “Everything needs a purpose. Guess hers is to be mean and ugly.”

“You're mean and ugly,” Rosie said, a comment that made the wombat smile. At least it looked like a smile. Maybe it was gas.

Whatever the case, Rosie whistled a welcoming whistle and the wombat waddled over to her, stood up on her hind legs, and swayed because of the weight of the sign around her neck. Rosie bent down and picked the wombat up.

“Show-off,” Hamish said.

“Perfectly fine wombat,” Rosie said, bobbing her chin at the sign because she needed both hands to hold the slippery beast. “Means she's fine and perfect and I'm taking her home.”

“Means she's perfectly
fine
,” Hamish said. “That's entirely different. Might as well be
spectacularly regular
.”

Rosie stuck out her tongue and set off down the road with the wombat under her arm. When Rosie was only twenty feet or so away, Hamish could barely see her, on account of all the rain. But he could see a faint glow.

Yes, that perfectly fine wombat was glowing.

*   *   *

They took the wombat home. Well, to their summer home, a small cabin on the rocky coast of an island in the Atlantic. Their parents asked the standard questions:

What are you going to feed it?

Where will it sleep?

Who's going to clean up after it?

Rosie gave three answers:

Table scraps.

In my bed.

Hamish.

Hamish didn't object. He knew Rosie could convince their parents of just about anything, and if he was forced to live with this wombat, then he'd rather clean up her poop than have her sleep in his bed, especially since she glowed.

“It'll be like having a night-light pressed against your face while you sleep,” he told Rosie. “No thank you.”

“Oh, come on, she doesn't glow that much,” she replied. And she was right. At first. But, like a dimmer on a lamp slowly turned up, the wombat was getting brighter day by day. They didn't notice the brightening during those first few weeks, but they did decide to name her Luna, on account of the fact that in the nighttime, she resembled the moon.

Rosie gave Luna showers every day, hoping to wash off whatever it was that made her fur glow. Luna adored the showers, but no matter what or how much soap Rosie used, the glow remained.

“Do you think she's sick?” Hamish asked one afternoon. Though he'd been resistant to Luna initially, the boy had come to truly care for her.

“Dr. Hoover will know,” Rosie replied.

Dr. Hoover was a veterinarian who lived on the island with a menagerie of animals—dogs, cats, goats, parrots, ferrets, snakes, and other things. She had years of experience with all sorts of beasts, even a wombat or two. However, Dr. Hoover had no idea what was wrong with Luna.

Standing back from the examining table where Luna sat and munched on a radish, Dr. Hoover cocked her head and shrugged. “Seems perfectly healthy. She's small. A juvenile. Maybe she'll grow out of it. Or maybe it's some sort of genetic mutation.”

“Cooool,” Hamish said, because all the genetic mutations he knew about were from comic books and resulted in superpowers.

It was hard to say whether Luna's glow counted as a superpower, but it certainly got her plenty of attention. Rosie and Hamish would walk her on a leash along the roads of the island, where cars and bikes would stop and people would gawk.

“She's a wonder, isn't she?” Rosie said to a man who slowed down his convertible to have a look one afternoon.

“She most certainly is,” the man replied, and he handed Rosie a business card.

Rosie read the writing aloud. “Hal Hawson, Hollywood Producer.”

“I'm heading back to LA tomorrow, but call the number on the back. That … whatever that thing is … needs to be on TV. And I've got the perfect project in mind. It might mean your parents can quit their jobs.”

Before Rosie could flip the card over to read the phone number, the convertible was speeding away.

*   *   *

A week later, their family was in California. Luna was fitted for a tuxedo and scheduled to appear on
Pocketful of Hullabaloo
, a daytime variety show popular with folks who thought women in leotards juggling chain saws was the height of human achievement. Luna's job there was a simple one: sit at the back of the stage, tuxedoed and atop a Grecian pillar. And glow. That was it.

It became a regular gig. There was a promise of paychecks that Hal Hawson honored with a wink and a smile. And for one hour a day, Luna wasn't Luna. She was a wombat lamp known as Mr. Nickelsworth.

Sometimes, one of the performers would turn to Luna and say, “What do you think about that, Mr. Nickelsworth?”

Luna, being a wombat and all, couldn't reply, so she simply sat there on the pillar glowing, and the performer would invariably make some joke like, “Well, you're very bright, Nickelsworth, but you aren't very bright.”

The studio audience found these jokes hilarious every time.

The family bought a house near the TV studio, and Rosie ferried Luna to work in the basket of her bike. Every other Tuesday, they'd stop to deposit Luna's sizable paycheck in the family account at the Sunfirst Bank, where Rosie always told the teller, “Soon as this wombat can talk, we'll cut her in on the dough.”