Read Between the Lines (18 page)

A head blocks my view.

It is a man’s head and he is peering down at me with curiosity, as if I am some sort of roadkill he’s never seen before.

Me, a rare bird.

Not Nobody.

I blink.

He blinks.

“Wha — ?” I start to say.

“You’re OK,” he answers.

He has brown eyes and a beard. Trimmed. Odd. With a little patch under his bottom lip.

A goatee gone wrong. I’ve seen it before. At school.

The janitor
, I think.

And then Nate’s words,
soul patch
, and I think how funny that sounds, too. A patch of soul.

I tell myself I need to remember this. The details.

So I can tell the police in case I die.

I laugh, realizing if I die I won’t be able to tell them anything.

The janitor keeps pacing back and forth, not taking his eyes off me.

The broken plastic crunches under his feet, and he swears with each step.

Shit
, he mutters.

Shit, shit, shit.

He stops and stands over me again.

His head sways above me. I can’t tell if he is actually swaying or if I am just dizzy.

“Am I OK?” I ask him.

You’re just a deer
, he says quietly.

“Huh?”

Shit.

He walks away.

The car door creaks shut.

Tires turn close to my face.

I squeeze my eyes closed, waiting for him to finish the job.

Nothing happens.

I blink again as the pain I knew was on its way hits.

Hard.

It starts with the stinging on my face.

Then a strange sharpness in my legs that I’ve never felt before.

I don’t move, just let the pain spread through my body.

There was a car.

And it hit me.

There was a man with an annoying beard.

The janitor from school.

But he took off.

The side of my face is on the asphalt.

No. Pavement.

I might be dead.

No. If I was dead, I wouldn’t be thinking,
I’m dead.
Or be able to feel this . . . pain.

There’s a stinging from my palm to my elbow. It scrapes against the pavement as I try to roll over.

I stop trying.

“Are you all right?”

I try to turn my head toward the voice.

Someone is leaning over me again.

A girl this time.

With the sun behind her, I mostly just see her silhouette.

The sunlight behind her is like a halo.

And now I do wonder if I’m dead.

The angel bends down.

“Jesus. That’s gotta hurt.”

Would an angel say
Jesus
?

“Can you move?”

She touches my shoulder. It is the only thing that doesn’t sting or stab.

She reaches out her hands to help me sit up. They feel tiny in mine. Like a little kid’s.

But now that I can see her face, I know she is not one.

She is Claire Harris from school.

The object of countless discussions between me and Nate.

I can hear Nate’s voice in my head now.

Dude, Claire Harris just touched you.

I wait for the new pain to settle down again.

And think of Nate and his broken middle finger.

And how he’s Finger Boy now.

But I am still Nobody.

Except that I’m the one staring at Claire Harris.

A small dog sniffs my elbow.

This has to be a dream.

She is like Dorothy from
The Wizard of Oz.

With Toto.

I look down, expecting to see a yellow brick road.

Maybe I’m dead after all.

Claire helps me stand.

This must mean I didn’t break every bone in my legs.

Also, not dead.

The little dog dances anxiously around us.

“I’m just gonna walk home now,” I say shakily.

“Are you sure you’re OK?” Claire asks.

I jerk my head down the street. “Yeah. It’s not far.”

“We’ll walk with you. Just in case.”

The dog yips.

Just in case what?

I test my cardboard legs.

They work.

We walk.

“How bad does it hurt?” She gestures toward my scraped-up arms.

I imagine one of those ridiculous face charts the doctor gives you.

“Cry face,” I say.

Claire laughs. “My doctor uses those charts too.”

“Mine always doubts me,” I say. “She thinks I’m a wimp.”

“Well, I think today would be an exception.”

She gestures to the small rivulets of blood running down my arm.

Not gushing, but enough to make me look tough.

I wish Sapphie could see me.

Tough like this.

Like her.

“Are you sure you’re OK?” Claire asks. “Maybe we should call your parents?”

That is the last thing I want to do.

They will want to take me to the hospital.

And my grandfather will want to come.

It will all be very dramatic in the way that nothing normally is in our house.

They will ask questions.

They will fuss.

And my grandfather will start to cry.

And that will make my parents cry.

Because he’s so old and sad.

Claire smiles at me.

“I have some tissues in my bag. We should mop up some of that blood.”

We stop walking and face each other.

I wonder who she sees.

The real me?

Or some stage version of me.

The little dog sniffs my leg.

“This is Oliver,” Claire says.

Instead of a collar, he has a pink belt tied around his neck. It’s attached to a yellow belt to make a leash.

“I just got him today.”

He wags his stump of a tail.

“Hi,” I say.

Claire reaches into her bag and scrounges around, then pulls out a mini tissue pack and a bottle of water.

“You have a lot of stuff in there,” I tell her.

“I like to be prepared,” she says.

For what?

She opens the bottle and pours a few drops of water onto the tissue.

She dabs it gently against the scrape that runs all they way up my arm.

It stings and tickles at the same time.

I try not to flinch.

I try to enjoy this moment.

Claire Harris touching me,
nursing
me.

What would Finger Boy say?

She finishes cleaning me up, and we start walking again.

Oliver trots in front of us, his pink-yellow belt-leash swinging back and forth.

It feels natural.

As if we’ve always done this.

I try to imagine Sapphie here, by my side.

Whatyoulookinat?
she’d ask.

You.

But then what?

Would we share a cigarette?

Go hang out with the actors?

What if all we ever had was
Whatyoulookinat?

And the finger?

“You’re bleeding again.” Claire gestures toward my arm. “And you’re limping. C’mon.”

She takes my arm very gently and leads me to the steps of an apartment building.

For the first time, I feel the cold November air around us.

Claire gets out her water and tissues again.

“You’re going to have to go to the hospital, I think.”

“No, it’ll stop bleeding.” I press more tissues against my cuts and hope I’m right.

Oliver watches, his ears perked up at us.

My neck has started to ache.

My head, too.

And my legs.

Then I feel like I’m going to throw up.

I get up too fast and almost fall down. Cardboard legs again.

“Going. To be. Sick,” I say, trying to steady myself.

I rush down the steps to some low bushes and lose the contents of my stomach.

I cringe at the sounds I make.

I can barely stand up, I’m so dizzy.

Finally I drop to my knees and hang on to a branch.

“Oh my God,” Claire says. “You must have a concussion!”

“No,” I say.

“I should call someone.” She pulls out her phone.

“No,” I say again. “Please. My parents —”

But what?

My parents what?

Will overreact.

Baby me.

Freak out.

Worry.

And my grandfather will cry.

“I’ll call my mom. She’ll know what to do. She used to be a nurse.”

She helps me back over to the steps, and I sip from the water bottle.

It’s almost empty.

Claire walks away from me to make the call.

Claire Harris just saw me puke my guts out.

Finger Boy would laugh. I wouldn’t blame him.

“My mom’s coming to get us,” Claire says as she walks back over to me and sits down again.

“Today has been a crazy day,” she says.

I nod.

But then I wonder if she means for her or me.

“First, I ditch school for the first time.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I’m a very boring person, it turns out.”

Really?

“Then I kind of inherit Oliver from a homeless woman.”

Oliver barks.

“Then I find you, hit by a car!”

She shakes her head. “Crazy.”

“So you said.”

“Because it is.”

I can’t argue.

Claire glances down the street, then lifts her face to the setting sun.

She breathes in the cool air as if it’s something to taste.

As if this whole situation is something to drink in.

Then she looks at me and smiles.

Not like the girl on the wall.

Not with a jutted-out chin.

Not like I don’t belong.

Or shouldn’t get too close.

Just natural. Not romantic. But like a friend.

Like someone true. It feels like she is seeing the real me, and I am seeing the real her.

Not
Claire Harris.

Just Claire Harris.

And by seeing each other that way, we’re seeing our own true selves, too.

All the stinging, all the aching, all the dizziness, seems to melt away.

Just for a moment.

This is me
, I think. And I swear I can hear her think the same thing.

“It feels like this was meant to happen, don’t you think?” she asks.

The funny thing is,

I do.

MY BACKPACK FEELS HEAVY AGAINST MY LEGS AS WE
drive through the city. It feels heavier than it ever has, even though I’ve been carrying this thing for days. I know it probably seems crazy that I’m carrying a brick around. It doesn’t even make all that much sense to me. But once I stole it, I felt different. Like suddenly I was armed. Just in case I needed it. Until today, I had no idea what that would even mean.

It’s not really a brick. It’s a paver. You know, the gray cement kind that’s supposed to look like a stone that you line a garden bed with? Or a driveway? I stole it from our neighbors. They hate me. All summer they’re on me about our lawn and me getting around to mowing it. And all fall they’re on me about how I need to rake the leaves. The only time I get any sort of break is a few months during the winter if we’re lucky enough to get some snow to cover up the mess. It’s rare. And we all know what’s underneath.

My neighbors are what my friends would call douches. Both the dad and the son. I haven’t decided which of them is worse. The son is sort of like a bigger, grosser, meaner version of his dad. He is an ape. Everything his dad says, he says. His dad calls me a lazy ass; he calls me a lazy ass. His dad calls me a little bitch; he calls me a little bitch. What does that even mean? Do they think I’m gay? A pussy? What?

My mom tells me to ignore them. She tells me there is more to life than a tidy yard. Her famous saying to her friends is “Love me, love my mess.” She doesn’t have many friends, but she has a brilliant mess.

My mom likes messes. Whenever we travel, which is almost never these days, she says she has to mess up the hotel room in order to be able to sleep. She always leaves housekeeping a twenty when we check out. I don’t think it’s enough.

When I was little, I never realized that not everyone couldn’t see their living-room floor. Or didn’t know the original color of the tile on the bathroom wall. When my dad left and never came back, I was too young to realize why. But now I have a pretty good guess.

When my sister, Sammy, and I figured out we were different, we also figured out how to cope. Mainly we didn’t invite anyone over. We taught ourselves how to do laundry and how to keep our mom out of our rooms, as best we could. We learned to make sure to eat all the takeout so there are absolutely no leftovers. Leftovers end up in the stuffed, stinking refrigerator. No one is allowed to throw anything away that’s in there unless it is completely empty. Sometimes when she’s not home, we sneak stuff out. But we have to be careful, or she’ll notice and get upset. Panic. Yell.