Bat Summer (2 page)

“Boo!”

I almost drop the kite frame. I turn around and face
the monster shadow of Rico looming over me. “Got ya,” he says and plunks himself next to me. “What are you fools up to?” Lucy won't even look at him.

“We're making a kite,” I say.

“Out of that stupid wrapping paper?” He gets up, puts his foot on the wrapping paper and rolls it under his foot.

Lucy sighs.

“Why are you such a Moran, Rico?” she asks.

“What's that supposed to mean?” He takes his foot off the wrapping paper and Lucy grabs it away from him.

“It means go pick on somebody your own size. We're busy.” Rico is quiet for a few seconds. Then he says, “Hey, Ter, you want to play some tetherball?”

The glue isn't dry on the kite frame yet. Lucy is busy with her other stuff.

“Maybe later,” I say.

“What? You too busy helping Loser with her stupid kite?”

I look down at the kite, like it's the most fascinating thing I've ever seen, and pray for some cool thing to say to pop into my head.

“Can't you see we're busy here?” Lucy says. Rico looks at me, shrugs and goes to talk to the lifeguard at the wading pool. Rico calls her Boobacious, for two extremely obvious reasons. Only now I can't remember her real name, so I'm afraid to talk to
her in case Boobacious slips out.

“I bet he thinks she'll be his girlfriend or something,” Lucy says. “She's way too old for him. He is so deluded. He couldn't see a fly if it were sitting on his eyeball.”

I feel like I have to stick up for Rico.

“And you are all-seeing, right? You have x-ray vision or something?”

“No. Sonar,” she says. She tucks her hair back behind her ear. She's drawn birds by her eyes today. Blue on the left and purple on the right.

“What are you supposed to be in that outfit, anyway?” I say.

“I'm not supposed to be anything. I
am
a bat,” she says. “If you weren't so blind you'd see that right off. Or maybe you'd see it better if you were blind. Some things you see better with your eyes closed.”

“Aren't you a little old to play pretend?” I say, but I'm already thinking about how she really could be a bat. It's like my cousin Elys says. If you believe it, it's not a lie.

“I'm old enough to do what I like.” Lucy looks me straight in the eye. I'm not used to that. I don't know if I like it or not. When Tom talks, I look at his hands. His fingernails are always dirty, man.

“And you like being a bat,” I say. She is way off. She's outside the universe, she's that far out.

“I am a bat. It's not really a thing you choose. It
chooses you.” She's looking straight in my eyes. I look down at the kite again. She goes on in that growl of hers that you can't help listening to. “You know, in Finland, there are people who believe that their souls come out of their bodies when they are sleeping and fly around as bats.” I imagine my soul flying out of my body and bashing into my bedroom window. Then I wonder if souls are naked and I guess I smirk because I hear Lucy growl, “You wouldn't understand, so just forget it. All right?” She looks pretty fierce. She can go on being a bat if she likes. It doesn't hurt me any.

“All right,” I say. She makes me hold the frame as she loops string around the notched ends of the sticks. She ties the notches shut with smaller pieces of string.

“Okay. Now we have to put it on the paper,” she says. She's barely looking at me the whole time. I hold the kite frame down and she cuts around it. We glue the flaps over the string and she pulls out the kite book to look at instructions. I still want to see that picture of Moran.

I look over her shoulder at the book. We just have to make the bridle and the tail now. We could be flying this thing in half an hour. I can't wait to see all those beady-eyed Santas staring down at me from the clouds.

“Oh, shoot,” says Lucy.

“What?” Then I hear it. Daphne, Lucy's big sister, is hollering for Lucy.

“Just ignore it,” she says. It's hard to ignore someone hollering “Lucy Goosey.” Lucy bites her lip and starts putting her stuff back in her knapsack. “She's never around except when I don't want her to be.”

I look over at Daphne. It's like she's allergic to coming right into the park to get her sister. It's like those five extra steps are too much work for her.

“Okay, I gotta go. We'll fly it tomorrow in the ravine.” Lucy isn't asking me. She's telling me. I nod and watch her carry the kite out of the park. As soon as she sees Lucy is coming, Daphne turns and starts walking. Lucy turns to wave at me and then runs after her.

I guess we're friends now.

I wonder why Daphne doesn't actually come into the park when she comes to get Lucy. She must like hollering.

I've seen Daphne flipping burgers behind the counter at Fatso's. She looks kind of like what Lucy should have looked like if God had gotten her face right. Lucy's nose is all long and sharp and her forehead goes up too high. Daphne's face looks like it's had those pointy bits sanded down. Her hair is darker, more brown than red. It hangs straight and moves in one long shining piece when she walks. Lucy looks like she's got a red porcupine sitting on
her head. Daphne's almost perfect. She's got that big birthmark by her eye, but it looks like it belongs there. Her voice is round and smooth.

I like to hear her hollering for Lucy. Sometimes I wish I had a dog, just so I could lose it and holler for it. I'm completely serious about that.

On my way home I think about what Lucy said about bats and seeing with your eyes closed. I think I know what she means. I see all sorts of things. I see gaps in the way things happen, the huge stretches in time with nothing and no one to carry you to the next real moment. Like this big long one now between making kites and dinner time. Nothing to do again. If Tom were here we could play some cards. If Rico wasn't talking at Boobacious, I'd let him beat me at tetherball.

I guess I'll go home and watch TV.

I wonder what a bat does at home?

I get home and my cousin Elys is there staring at an open fridge.

“Spying on Mr. Mustard?” I say. I swear, she spends more time looking in our fridge than I spend watching television. She hangs around our place a lot. Elys's mom took off to France when Elys was seven, so she sort of adopted my mom and now she practically lives here half the time. I guess she's supposed to be keeping an eye on me. Mom's always working late or doing dinner with this guy Farley.

“You got any cheese?” Elys asks. She leans into the fridge and pokes a couple of jars like they might be full of pickled spiders or something. The labels are all worn off and Elys has to squint to read them.

She has had the same pair of pink-rimmed glasses since forever. The problem is her head has grown a lot in the past few years and now her glasses make her eyes look like pinholes. The arms of the glasses cut into the side of her head. She spends a lot of time rubbing the side of her head and getting her fingers caught in that mess of curly mophead she has.

Elys graduated from the University of Toronto last year and hasn't been able to get a single job. She even applied to be a house painter. She almost applied to McDonald's, but my mom said Elys's job search attitude was pathetic and she ripped up the application.

I grab a banana and head for the TV. Mom never gets home before 8:30. The cable channel says it's only 4:48. See what I mean by gaps?

I can guess the ending to every single show on the tube. I can't remember the last time I made a bad prediction.

You would think it was satisfying to be right about the endings of things all the time. It's not. Knowing how everything is going to turn out — it's the worst thing I can think of.

Lucy has new kites flying out the sides of her eyes today. One is orange and the other is green. You'd think she'd make them match, at least.

We're going to fly the kite in the ravine behind St. Clair West subway station. It's pretty close to the park, but it feels like it's far away because I never walk that way.

“You ready?” Lucy says when I get there. Rico is standing beside her holding the kite. It's got a tail on it with pieces of black garbage bag tied to it.

“Yeah, you ready to see if this loser kite flies?” says Rico.

“He brought a spool of kite line with him, so I said I'd let him watch. He's not allowed to fly it, though.” Lucy does not look happy.

“Fly? There's no way this loser kite is going anywhere but down,” Rico grins. “And I plan to be right there when it crashes and burns.”

“Where'd you get the kite line?” I ask.

“What's the difference? I got it, didn't I? Loser thought she could fly a kite with wool. Ha!”

As we climb down the hill beside the subway station, Lucy points out the bridge that spans the ravine.

“Bats live under bridges,” she says. “They like it where it's dark and they won't be disturbed by human beings. It's not hard to disturb a bat. Bats can hear bugs walk. Humans can wreck a bat's hibernation by just walking in a cave. How would you like it if someone came into your house and scared you out of a deep sleep? Never mind that it takes you forever to get back to sleep again and you might not have enough body mass to make it through the whole winter anymore because some stupid human made you waste it all on being freaked out. Humans don't care about bats. They don't even know when they're killing them.”

She's on about the bat junk again. Still, I wonder if there are any bats living under the bridge.

Where does Lucy get all this information anyway? I want to ask her about it but not with Rico around. He has a way of making every conversation be about him. Even the kite is about him now.

The ravine is all overgrown and wild. The grass comes up to my knees in some places and there's all these little purple flowers around. There's never anybody down here. It has this feeling about it, like it's been forgotten by the rest of the city.

When we get to the middle of a clearing in the ravine, Lucy licks her finger and holds it up to see which way the wind is blowing. Pretty soon we're
all holding spitty fingers up in the air. Then Rico licks his whole forearm to get a more accurate reading.

“I can't feel nothing,” he says and waves his arms around. “Wait! I feel the wind beneath my wings. Arrrooooo!” He circles us, flapping his arms like a madman. What a goof. Why couldn't it have been Daphne who found the kite line?

“Where's your sister?” I ask Lucy.

“Why?”

“Isn't she supposed to take care of you?”

“Yeah. Right. Where's
your
sister then?”

“I don't have one.”

“Lucky you. I'm gonna choke if I have to eat one more Fatso burger for dinner. I must be a vegetarian bat.”

I'm about to ask her more about the bat thing, but Rico is in our face flapping his arms.

“Do you want to fly this kite or not?” Lucy asks, and Rico quits his bird impersonation.

It's Lucy's bat cape that proves conclusively which way the wind is coming. The stupid costume turns out to be useful.

Rico takes the kite and runs around, pumps his arms for speed, but mostly looks like a scared chicken.

“Stand still a sec,” Lucy yells at him.

The kite keeps slamming Rico in the back of the
head. He won't stop running even though he's getting slammed in the back of the head and is sweating down the back of his shirt.

“Rico,” Lucy hollers. Rico isn't listening. You can tell from the way he isn't looking at us that he is determined to get that kite in the air before Lucy has a better idea of how to do it. If Tom were here he would holler at him to quit being such a running-around-like-a-scared-chicken dork.

“Hey, Rico,” I holler. But I don't holler loud enough and Rico's still running. I open my mouth to holler again, but this time Lucy takes the cue and we yell out together, “Hey, Ricoooooo.”

Finally he stops. Lucy grins at me.

“I can't get any wind under it,” he says between breaths. “I knew that thing wouldn't fly, man.” He bends over to catch his breath, and I take the kite from him. I look at Lucy's cape to see which way the wind is blowing. I lift the kite above my head and angle it into the wind. I can feel the wind pulling it out of my hands. I stand on my toes and let the kite slip out of my grip and into the sky. Lucy gets busy trying to control the spool.

“Get out of town,” Rico says. “I don't believe it. No way.” He falls over onto his back and sticks a piece of grass in his mouth.

“No problemo,” I say and go to help Lucy with the line.

We all take turns holding the line. The kite looks cool when it's in the air. There's something about flying things and the way they seem to find invisible paths in the sky. Flying a kite, even a dorky Christmas wrapping-paper kite, is as close to flying as you can get. You can feel the sky pulling you up. You can feel yourself nearly get swallowed by the sky.

Rico is lying on the ground eating grass and watching the kite. He looks a little disappointed. The thing goes higher and higher. For sure it's going to reach a cloud. I want it to poke the edge of a cloud and make it start raining. I want it to rain on Rico's head. It could happen. You never know.

The kite line strains through my hands.

“The line cuts into your hands,” I say to Lucy. She wraps her bat cape around her hands and takes the line from me. “Thanks,” I say. Now that we've got the thing up, it's never coming down. It's like it's a bird and we're holding its tail and it's trying to get away from us by flying to the stratosphere. No way are we letting go. No way is Lucy letting go. No escape for that bird, man.

We can't get the thing to reel in, it wants to get away so bad. You can feel the line stretching, and, since it's our only line, we don't want it to break by forcing it too much. I'm secretly rooting for the kite. I want it to get away, to take off forever into the world of wind.