This Isn't What It Looks Like (2 page)

“Are you deaf? I’m trying to help….”

The boy’s shirt—little more than a rag—had caught on a branch. As soon as the girl started to untangle him, the boy jumped
in fright—and almost fell out of the tree.

She gripped him tight. “Careful—”

He screamed, “Goat! Goat!”

At least that’s what it sounded like.

“Calm down—you’re OK.”

She gave him a pat of reassurance, but his cries only grew louder and more hysterical.

“I’ll get you down, no problem.”

Expertly, she tied the rope to the tree. A
Buntline Hitch Knot
, she remembered the knot was called. But she didn’t remember how she knew the name.

She tugged on the boy’s shirt collar. He clung to the tree branch, refusing to move.

“Goat! Goat!”

“Is there a goat down there? Is that what’s
scaring you? Don’t worry, it won’t hurt you. Goats don’t eat people. Tin cans, tennis balls, maybe—but not little boys. Not
usually, anyways.” She smiled to show she was joking, but he didn’t smile back.

Eventually, she coaxed him down by gently placing his hands on the rope—then forcibly pushing him off the branch.

“Pretend it’s a fire pole!” she called after him.

He slid down the rope, a look of terror on his face.

As soon as his feet hit the ground, the boy bolted.

“You’re welcome,” said the girl under her breath.

In the distance, a man—presumably the boy’s father—waited. He wore a plumed hat, dark vest, and big, billowing sleeves. He
looked like a musketeer.

He must be an actor, thought the girl. Maybe there is a theater nearby.

The boy was still crying about the goat as he jumped into his father’s arms.

The girl waved. But the man didn’t acknowledge her.

Gee, people are really friendly around here, thought the girl.

Shaking her head, she returned to the road—and stepped right into a puddle.

She grunted in annoyance.

As she shook water off her foot, she looked curiously at the puddle. The muddy water reflected blue sky and silver clouds
and a flock of birds passing by.

But there was one reflection she could not see: her own.

Not
goat
, she thought.

Ghost.

M
ax-Ernest arrived at the hospital at exactly 7:59 p.m.

A nurse waved cheerily from behind the front desk. “Hi, Max-Ernest! Just in time, as usual.”

Visiting hours ended at eight. If he got there any later, he wouldn’t be let in since he wasn’t part of the patient’s family.
At least not the way the hospital defined it.

Max-Ernest waved back halfheartedly.

“C’mon, honey—let’s see you turn that frown upside down. Don’t forget—”

The nurse pointed over her shoulder to a poster of a puppy wearing a red clown nose.
L
AUGHTER IS THE BEST MEDICINE
!

Max-Ernest gritted his teeth and forced himself to smile.

That doesn’t make any sense, he almost said. How can laughter always be the
best
medicine? What if there’s a medicine that would save your life—like penicillin? Wouldn’t that be the best? And what if you
have a broken rib? Or lung cancer? Or asthma? Laughter would make it worse, not better. And
whose
laughter are we talking about, anyway? Your own or somebody else’s? What if somebody is laughing
at
you instead of
with
you—is it still medicine then?
^*
How ’bout that? Oh, and by the way, dogs don’t laugh. Some scientists think that gorillas and chimpanzees laugh. But not
dogs. Not even puppies with clown noses…!

But, and this will surprise you if you know anything about him, Max-Ernest didn’t say a word. He just kept gritting his teeth
and headed for the third elevator on the right.

The one marked
PICU
.

Every time Max-Ernest saw those four letters, he made up new meanings for them…
Primates Invade Curious Universe… Penguins, Icelandic, Carry Umbrellas… Pick Icky Cuticle Up… Purple Insect Crawls Underground…
Principals In Colorful Underwear… People I Can’t Understand…
and so on. But the word-play
was simply an old habit, a mental tic, rather than a way of amusing himself. Not even the thought of principals in colorful
underwear could make him laugh now, whether laughter was the best medicine or not.

He knew too well what the letters stood for.

PICU: Pediatric Intensive Care Unit.

Perhaps the least funny place on the planet.

Max-Ernest had a lot of experience with hospitals.

His childhood had been one long battery of medical tests. Skin tests. Bone tests. Eye tests. Hearing tests. DNA tests. IQ
tests. (Too much ability, they said, is a disability.) Rorschach tests. Psychological evaluations. Neurological evaluations.
Cardiological evaluations. X-rays and CAT scans. They’d tested all his reflexes and tested him for all the complexes. They’d
watched him eat and listened to him sleep. They’d measured his dexterity and quantified his creativity. He’d given blood samples
and urine samples and even once (though he’d like to forget it) a
stool
sample.
^*

That Max-Ernest had a condition, everybody was certain; but what the condition was, nobody knew. The only thing the experts
agreed on was that the main symptom was his ceaseless talking. Of course, it didn’t take an expert to tell you that.

A funny thing had happened recently, however. Funny
weird
, that is. Not
funny
funny.
^*

Max-Ernest, the talker, had stopped talking. Not entirely. But almost. Most of the words he uttered now were single syllables—like
yes
or
no
—and they came out in little grunts, hardly recognizable as language.

It wasn’t so much that he
couldn’t
talk. There were still plenty of words in his head, and he could still push air out of his lungs and move his lips and tongue.
It was just that talking had become a tremendous effort. Even more of an effort than it used to be for him
not
to talk. Words used to come out of his mouth in a nonstop torrent; shutting them off was like trying to dam a river. Now,
suddenly, the river had switched direction, and talking was like trying to swim upstream when it was all he could do to swim
in place.

This new condition, this unwilled silence, had fallen over him ten days ago. The day Cass had gone into the hospital. The
day she had fallen into a coma.

“Not a coma like you’re thinking,” the doctor had hastily explained when she saw Cass’s mother react to the news, almost falling
into a coma herself. “Not a coma like you see in the movies. Cass’s brain
is very active. And she seems to be going in and out of REM cycles. She’s simply… asleep. In all likelihood, she’ll wake up
very soon.”

Still, Max-Ernest knew, a coma was a coma. Even if it wasn’t a
coma
coma. Even if you called it sleep. After all, sleep was
not
not a coma. Max-Ernest had looked up the word in a dictionary:
coma
meant “deep sleep” in Greek.

His silence was very frustrating for the people around him. Especially for Cass’s mother and for the doctors and nurses who
were trying to figure out what had happened to Cass. Max-Ernest admitted he’d been with Cass when
it
had happened, but whenever anybody asked him just what exactly
it
was, he would shrug or look off into the distance.

Without her coming right out and saying so, it was clear Cass’s mom thought he was hiding something. “Why is it Cass is always
with you whenever—?” she started to ask at one point, but she didn’t finish her question. “Are you sure you didn’t—?” she
started to ask another time, but she didn’t finish that question, either.

She hadn’t wanted to allow Max-Ernest in the hospital room, but Cass’s grandfathers had intervened and reminded her that Max-Ernest
was Cass’s best friend.

“Cass would want him here—you know that,” said Grandpa Larry. “And the poor boy feels bad enough as it is—look at him.”

“Besides,” said Grandpa Wayne, “maybe the sound of his voice will wake her up.”

If only it were that simple! thought Max-Ernest. Then he would force himself to start talking again, no matter how hard it
was. If he thought it would help, he would never stop talking. Not even to eat or sleep. Not even to breathe. He would take
his old condition back a thousand times over if it meant curing Cass’s. He wanted his friend back more desperately than he’d
ever wanted anything in his life.

Tonight, Cass’s mother was leaving early. Everyone at the hospital agreed it was time for her to get some sleep.

When she passed Max-Ernest in the hallway, she grabbed his wrist. Her eyes were red with tiredness.

“Max-Ernest, please, when are you going to…?”

Then she let go, as if she didn’t have the strength to ask the question. She walked away, shaking her head.

Max-Ernest opened his mouth for a second, then closed it without saying anything.

Cass’s mother was right; he
was
hiding something. But even if he’d been at liberty to speak, even if he hadn’t taken a sacred vow of secrecy, even if he’d
risked all and told his story, nobody would have believed him. The truth was so incredible, so outlandish, so utterly bizarre,
he would be branded as a liar, or delusional at best. So what was the point?

It was better not to say anything at all.

There was a vending machine next to Cass’s room.

Max-Ernest fumblingly fed a dollar into it and selected the largest and plainest chocolate bar available. He proceeded to
eat the bar so fast, a passerby might have thought it was his first meal in weeks.

“Hmmgh…”

As he ate, he made a peculiar sound—part hum, part groan—that he made only when he was eating chocolate. A sound he couldn’t
control any more than his urge to eat chocolate in the first place.

“Hmmgh… hmmmgh… hmmmmgh…”

Hardly hesitating, Max-Ernest bought three more chocolate bars and wolfed them down in as many bites. Then he bought a fifth
bar and put it in his pocket for later. He looked into the machine, considering a sixth bar, but the machine was alarmingly
empty-looking. At this rate it would run out of chocolate bars in less than a day.

The thought filled him with a sense of panic. Ever since he’d discovered he wasn’t allergic, Max-Ernest
had been feasting on chocolate in quantities that would have astonished all but the most voracious chocolate eaters. Ten bars
a day on average, if you had to count (and if you know Max-Ernest, you know he
always
had to count). What would he do, he worried now, if the hospital’s chocolate supply was not replenished?

How could he continue to visit Cass without the rich, ripe, dark, deep, zippy, zesty, wicked, wonderful, delicious, delightful,
delectable, and even electable (if he could vote), vibrant, vivacious, seductive, addictive, oh-so-very-attractive, nourishing,
flourishing, rather ravishing, beautiful, buttery, sometimes bittersweet but never bitter, gorgeous and worth gorging on,
berry-ish, cherry-ish, meaty yet fruity, elemental yet complex, mellow yet electric, soothing yet energizing, earthy yet heavenly,
melt-in-your-mouth pleasure of chocolate?
^*

He would have to plan ahead and carry chocolate with him—that was the answer to this particular dilemma—but the thought did
nothing to reassure him. Normally, Cass was the plan-ahead person. Whenever they went on a mission for their secret organization,
the Terces Society, Max-Ernest could count on Cass to pack her famous “super chip” trail mix, which contained a portion of
chocolate chips so generous that the trail mix invariably melted into a
big chocolaty clump. Alas, he had never tasted the trail mix because of his supposed allergies. It was something he’d been
looking forward to. But now…? His panic was replaced by a wave of sadness.

Would his survivalist friend survive? Cass had spent her entire life preparing for disasters of one kind or another. Earthquakes.
Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Not to mention the extinction-level events. Giant meteors. Global warming. Nuclear war. And here she
was, done in by such a piddling thing? A mere trifle—indeed, a mere truffle. Had she trained all those years for toxic sludge
only to succumb to toxic fudge?
^*